Only Children

[mistersloane]

Well, they were honest questions... I understand Poetix was explicating Lourde's work, but I don't think what she believes passes a cursory "is this similar to Heideggerian crypto-fascism?" test... which is a problem for me. I strongly disagree with what I've read so far of Lourde's worldview, or any worldview centered on a version of "authentic selfhood". I think these kinds of ideas are politically very sinister, when you scratch through the veneer of moralism and grandiloquence.

I think her writing style reminds me of bell hooks or Toni Morrison, so I can see how you'd like her for that.

Yeah, I'd defend her poetry; what works on the personal doesn't necessarily transfer out of that. We liked her jus cos she was such a fucking goth, which is where she'd differ I think from hooks or Morrison. I mean, bell didn't get out the house much but she did actually go out occasionally; you know Audre spent 6 hours doing her hair and then rang off being able to come out with some lame excuse.

 

[nomadthethird]

Yeah, I'd defend her poetry; what works on the personal doesn't necessarily transfer out of that. We liked her jus cos she was such a fucking goth, which is where she'd differ I think from hooks or Morrison. I mean, bell didn't get out the house much but she did actually go out occasionally; you know Audre spent 6 hours doing her hair and then rang off being able to come out with some lame excuse.

haha! I wouldn't have guessed from that but yes I will read some of her poetry. bell hooks is an interesting case--she has her twee new ageisms and moments of metaphysical grandiosity that sort of repulse me, but as far as understanding culture goes, I think she's aces. She's really good at balancing the dual factors of race and class (as in hip-hop) without forgetting one or overemphasizing the other. Also good at using theory without excessive jargonizing. There's some good stuff on youtube.

Uggghh, gotta force myself to study for exams (already! two of them and two quizzes this week...)

 

[mistersloane]

haha! I wouldn't have guessed from that but yes I will read some of her poetry. bell hooks is an interesting case--she has her twee new ageisms and moments of metaphysical grandiosity that sort of repulse me, but as far as understanding culture goes, I think she's aces. She's really good at balancing the dual factors of race and class (as in hip-hop) without forgetting one or overemphasizing the other. Also good at using theory without excessive jargonizing. There's some good stuff on youtube.

Uggghh, gotta force myself to study for exams (already! two of them and two quizzes this week...)

I had Christmas with bell once, in England, it was lovely. You're bang on the money about the assimilation of theory without resort to jargon
'intelligence is the ability to communicate'.
Give them hell with the exams

 

[poetix]

People are talking about the fact that in a vast network or system of exchange, women exist as full sexual subject and agents, to the same extent that men do.

This is not in dispute, but it is difficult to make sense of. What is a sexual subject? (What, especially, is a "full" sexual subject?). We have the beginnings of an answer here:

Women are desiring producers to exactly the same extent that men are. They are workers in the same desire factory men work in.

but this metaphysics of desire - and it is a metaphysics - doesn't do a lot of explaining for me. "Desire factory"? I mean, I know how this kind of language works in D&G, it just seems utterly fanciful to me as a description of social reality.

"Paleo"-feminism has a theory of female agency, but it also has a theory of what stifles, disrupts, misdirects and exploits female agency. That is, there's a structure/agency dialectic at work, and a corresponding "pessimism of the intellect" (which scans structures) and "optimism of the will" (which demands their revolutionary transformation by some political subject). It's not possible, politically, to sustain this kind of extreme division for very long, because "optimism of the will" can't by itself orientate the political subject it calls for. What happened, I think, to 2nd-wave feminism was that it fell captive to a reactionary subjectivity of its own making: optimism of the intellect (agency is everywhere, reality is just one big desire factory), pessimism of the will (universal suspicion of any egalitarian political subject, or any conception of political truth).

It's useless, finally, to try to resuscitate the 2nd-wave feminists' frenzy and outrage, as admirable as it was. I like those contemporary feminists who remain ferocious and intransigent in their militant opposition to "sexist shit", a lot more than I like those who think that pole-dancing can usefully be theorised as an expression of female sexual agency. But their ferocity nowadays doesn't count for all that much; at most, it serves as an outward and visible sign of what the 2nd-wave feminists always believed in, which was that the political agency of women under patriarchy exists and manifests itself as rebellion against reactionaries. To say that they "denied" female subjectivity is baffling, really: what they denied about it was not that it existed - they embodied it, in action - but that it was identical with the expressions of female selfhood sanctioned by patriarchy and upheld by the state.

 

[nomadthethird]

This is not in dispute

It was, and it often seems that (at this rate, esp) it will be forever.

but this metaphysics of desire - and it is a metaphysics - doesn't do a lot of explaining for me. "Desire factory"? I mean, I know how this kind of language works in D&G, it just seems utterly fanciful to me as a description of social reality.

It's just a metaphor that works. I tried explaining what I meant without recourse to this sort of explanation, but that wasn't good enough for you. I don't think that this language is any more or less fanciful than talking about "authentic" "selves" who are in "union" with "whatever" who are full of "integrity" or something, anyway.

It's useless, finally, to try to resuscitate the 2nd-wave feminists' frenzy and outrage, as admirable as it was. I like those contemporary feminists who remain ferocious and intransigent in their militant opposition to "sexist shit", a lot more than I like those who think that pole-dancing can usefully be theorised as an expression of female sexual agency. But their ferocity nowadays doesn't count for all that much; at most, it serves as an outward and visible sign of what the 2nd-wave feminists always believed in, which was that the political agency of women under patriarchy exists and manifests itself as rebellion against reactionaries.

Finally, something we can agree on.

To say that they "denied" female subjectivity is baffling, really: what they denied about it was not that it existed - they embodied it, in action - but that it was identical with the expressions of female selfhood sanctioned by patriarchy and upheld by the state.

Hmm...I didn't say they denied female subjectivity, though--which is different than sexual power, I'd think. "Subjectivity" is a rationalist abstraction, sexual power is more like unconscious bedrock in the Id, which of course remains opaque to rational discourse.

I would say that what the 2nd wave failed to account for was the extent to which they had themselves internalized patriarchical imperatives and "sexist shit", so that they didn't realize when they were going around echoing it, and thus reinstating phallic discursive biases and oppression. Critical discourse and negotiation of what things like subjectivity, agency, and such get to mean given all sorts of constraints (like capitalism, etc.) are obviously progressive and important and I wish there were more of both. But reflexive tribalism doesn't get us anywhere, and is almost always based on some kind of unavowed, unconscious internalized imperative from the dominant culture.

 

[nomadthethird]

I had Christmas with bell once, in England, it was lovely. You're bang on the money about the assimilation of theory without resort to jargon
'intelligence is the ability to communicate'.
Give them hell with the exams

Wow Christmas, that's fun...(thnx btw).

 

[grizzleb]

are you serious man? you're far less likely to be attacked, especially to be the victim of rape or spousal abuse. there are numerous professions you'll find it relatively easier to go into, & you're more likely to be better paid once you do. you're also far less likely to suffer from sexual harassment at work. I could go on, but what's the point? it's true that the patriarchy isn't as clear cut in the modern world as it likely would be in a society being studied by an anthropologist but it's pretty laughable nonsense to say it don't exist or that it have enormous impact. come on now.

Where I'm from, men are far more likely to be victims of violence and murder than women, many times over. But is that OK because it's not sexual violence? Also, I know guys who've been abused by their female partner, I've had impetinent sexual comments made about me in my workplace before and nobody gives a fuck, cause I'm a guy it's not important or real. Plus if I have a child with a woman she has far more rights over custody than I do. It's not clear cut at all, and men draw the short straw just as much. In this case should men fight 'matriarchy' and 'reassert their hidden nurturing instincts'?

 

[nomadthethird]

Where I'm from, men are far more likely to be victims of violence and murder than women, many times over. But is that OK because it's not sexual violence? Also, I know guys who've been abused by their female partner, I've had impetinent sexual comments made about me in my workplace before and nobody gives a fuck, cause I'm a guy it's not important or real. Plus if I have a child with a woman she has far more rights over custody than I do. It's not clear cut at all, and men draw the short straw just as much. In this case should men fight 'matriarchy' and 'reassert their hidden nurturing instincts'?

Don't even try to trot out these lame Bill O'Reillyisms here because they won't work.

The fact that men kill each other is not an excuse for their killing of women. Your logic is spurious. These are separate issues, but both are ultimately related to patriarchy and its structural tendency toward violence predicated on power structures/imbalances related to income gaps and so forth.

It's just as illegal for women to sexually harass men as it is for men to harrass women at work, and if you have been harassed, you have every right to sue. You're much more likely to win your suit than a woman is, though. As you are in a criminal rape case with a male perp, btw.

Women do not have "more" custody rights, they simply often have fewer hours at work, and make less money, so they often get longer stays in custody battles because the father would be more likely to be "absent" and at work during critical points in the child's day.

 

[grizzleb]

I just don't accept it as ultimatley lying at the foot of men. And I don't really see much difference in terms of the word between 'men' and 'patriarchy'. They both basically signify the same thing, albeit in a roundabout way. The world works this way not because men are dicks but because there's a tendency of everything towards an element of harshness and unfairness. Women don't really have an easier time than men, or a more difficult one. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

 

[nomadthethird]

Patriarchy does not just equal men. Everyone is implicated in patriarchy. It's no one individual or group's fault. It's a tradition that can be traced back centuries. We all need to participate in change, for the mutual benefit of everyone. It certainly will benefit men as well as women to do this, fwiw--because men ARE objectified in this culture as well as women, and expected to live up to a bunch of stupid stereotypes and gender role prescriptions and so forth...I'll give you that.

 

[grizzleb]

Ah cool so we basically agree then. Dunno why patriarchy is relevant as a term then tho. Might as well say capitalism or whatnot. I always felt the implication whenever that word was used that it was something I had some interest in which fucked me off.

BTW - my arguments there weren't to show that guys get a worse time or whatever but that this 'I'm more downtrodden than you' attitude is part of the problem. Some people like being the persecuted cause it gives them the moral high ground (an easy place to occupy).

We're all complicit.

Also - gender roles make things easy for alot of people. Agree of disagree? Obviously they are daft but you can see why they have proliferated from a social perspective.

 

[Mr. Tea]

are you serious man? you're far less likely to be attacked, especially to be the victim of rape or spousal abuse. there are numerous professions you'll find it relatively easier to go into, & you're more likely to be better paid once you do. you're also far less likely to suffer from sexual harassment at work. I could go on, but what's the point? it's true that the patriarchy isn't as clear cut in the modern world as it likely would be in a society being studied by an anthropologist but it's pretty laughable nonsense to say it don't exist or that it have enormous impact. come on now.

This is all true. But it's also true that men are more likely to suffer depression or other mental illness, abuse drink or drugs and kill themselves. Boys do less well than girls at school in almost every subject and the fact that men commit the majority of crime and make up almost the entire prison population is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. So it's not really the case that Western society exclusively benefits men at the expense of women.

Edit: partial x-post with grizzleb.

 

[poetix]

Hmm...I didn't say they denied female subjectivity, though--which is different than sexual power, I'd think. "Subjectivity" is a rationalist abstraction, sexual power is more like unconscious bedrock in the Id, which of course remains opaque to rational discourse.

In what sense, then, can an "unconscious bedrock in the Id" be parlayed into power?

Lorde has an account where eros supports the construction of an agentic selfhood, knitting together something that can know itself and exercise agency, by convolving elements of experience that would otherwise remain separate and compartmentalised (life of the senses over here, life of the mind over here). Her account is strongly conditioned by organicist assumptions, so that the end-point of this process of construction is a "whole" and "authentic" self; and I'd want to inflect that in the direction of a more truth-procedural account, in which the coming into being of the erotic subject isn't a repair job done on a broken whole but the unfolding of something novel and slightly monstrous.

However, I would think of this unfolding as a coming to truth (as the coming into being of a truth) rather than a coming to power (the actuation of a latent force, "sexual power" as a form of energy stored in the id and waiting to be released). Libidinal bricolage is not a power among earthly powers, a force capable of acting on or against the forces that shape our social world. Its strength lies in its ability to bind together an integral being that is not plastic to those forces, not readily reshaped by power, without the integrity of that being depending on its relationship to any ground or unifying principle (it hangs together somewhat like a poem, or a theorem).

I would say that what the 2nd wave failed to account for was the extent to which they had themselves internalized patriarchical imperatives and "sexist shit", so that they didn't realize when they were going around echoing it, and thus reinstating phallic discursive biases and oppression.

One important insight of the 2nd wave was that the real battle was not between a sexual mainstream and this or that sexual counterculture - that the countercultures and the mainstream were already in a symbiotic relationship, and shared many of the same constraints and assumptions - but between female intelligence and misogynist stupidity. They forcibly shattered the constraints of tribal loyalty that bound them to stupid misogynists in the peace movement, on "the left", and in radical circles generally. They stopped agreeing that it was as cool to be fucked by those guys as those guys thought it was.

The retort this disloyalty earned them was that they'd gone over to the other side, become stuffy moralists and "strange bedfellows" with the Right, stopped being true radicals or whatever because of their hostile, unnatural, probably "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" habit of valuing their own intelligence and trying to use it to its fullest extent. This was always a pretty shabby accusation, but it's been useful over the years in helping to enlist countercultural intellectuals to an anti-feminist backlash. A lot of the milieu in which 3rd-wave feminism (such as it has been) took form was shaped by this backlash; which is one of the reasons I think why there is so little real understanding of the context and import of 2nd-wave feminist thought, and so much polemical misprision along the lines of "Andrea Dworkin said all heterosexual intercourse was rape".

 

[nomadthethird]

Grizzle, yes, gender roles reelly used to benefit people a long time ago, when we lived a different way, in pre-history, about 100,000 years ago. Now, not so much.

In what sense, then, can an "unconscious bedrock in the Id" be parlayed into power?

In what sense does a postively charged proton get "parlayed" into power? It doesn't. I don't really understand what you're asking, but I also don't believe power "gets parlayed" on the level of the unconscious. I don't believe it's eternal either--it's unstable and moves around a lot and we don't really understand it yet, sort of like particles on the quantum level.

You're assuming power is only an effect of rationalist subjectivation. I strongly disagree with this assumption.

Lorde has an account where eros supports the construction of an agentic selfhood, knitting together something that can know itself and exercise agency, by convolving elements of experience that would otherwise remain separate and compartmentalised (life of the senses over here, life of the mind over here). Her account is strongly conditioned by organicist assumptions, so that the end-point of this process of construction is a "whole" and "authentic" self; and I'd want to inflect that in the direction of a more truth-procedural account, in which the coming into being of the erotic subject isn't a repair job done on a broken whole but the unfolding of something novel and slightly monstrous.

However, I would think of this unfolding as a coming to truth (as the coming into being of a truth) rather than a coming to power (the actuation of a latent force, "sexual power" as a form of energy stored in the id and waiting to be released). Libidinal bricolage is not a power among earthly powers, a force capable of acting on or against the forces that shape our social world. Its strength lies in its ability to bind together an integral being that is not plastic to those forces, not readily reshaped by power, without the integrity of that being depending on its relationship to any ground or unifying principle (it hangs together somewhat like a poem, or a theorem).

Weren't you just the one blowing your referee whistle over fanciful metaphysical language? There's nothing in the world more frivolous than this mumbo-jumbo about "truth procedures", especially when you, as you are doing here, try to somehow smuggle "libido" (which you've already claimed you didn't believe in) into the mix through the backdoor, and in probably the most peculiar, convoluted manner imaginable. What is "libidinal bricolage", anyway? I've never heard this term before. If libido has no power, how does it "bind" anything? What you're saying seems pretty incoherent. Poems don't "hang together" in any meaningful sense, either. This is very typical of you, though--resort to great big metaphors where you can't explain something so they can do all the work for you.

One important insight of the 2nd wave was that the real battle was not between a sexual mainstream and this or that sexual counterculture - that the countercultures and the mainstream were already in a symbiotic relationship, and shared many of the same constraints and assumptions - but between female intelligence and misogynist stupidity. They forcibly shattered the constraints of tribal loyalty that bound them to stupid misogynists in the peace movement, on "the left", and in radical circles generally. They stopped agreeing that it was as cool to be fucked by those guys as those guys thought it was.

The retort this disloyalty earned them was that they'd gone over to the other side, become stuffy moralists and "strange bedfellows" with the Right, stopped being true radicals or whatever because of their hostile, unnatural, probably "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" habit of valuing their own intelligence and trying to use it to its fullest extent. This was always a pretty shabby accusation, but it's been useful over the years in helping to enlist countercultural intellectuals to an anti-feminist backlash. A lot of the milieu in which 3rd-wave feminism (such as it has been) took form was shaped by this backlash; which is one of the reasons I think why there is so little real understanding of the context and import of 2nd-wave feminist thought, and so much polemical misprision along the lines of "Andrea Dworkin said all heterosexual intercourse was rape".

Errr...no. Not even close. Which country are you talking about here? Not the U.S. Nobody accused the second wave of being bedfellows with the right at the time when their wave coalesced, and in fact they quickly ascended to become the power structure within the movement--in fact, they remained there for a good 20 years. Once they'd reached the top, they shouted down any viewpoint that didn't serve their interests, they actively worked to keep minorities out (because these women tended to disagree with them on key issues like sex work and porn), and they have a long history of being anti-trans bigots. You have no clue what you're talking about here, but it's a nice effort.

People say Andrea Dworkin said terrible things (including, on several occasions, telling people to their faces that, if they were in heterosexual relationships and having penetrative sex, that they were "rapists or whores") who knew her personally, Poetix. I went to a college where half the faculty had known her to some degree, been friends with her, or worked with her in some capacity for years. She said and did some really mindbogglingly weird things, including becoming a cheerleader for different brands of colonialists, in her later years. Many people within the movement actually thought she'd gone certifiably insane at a certain point in her life. Which is sad, especially because she did initially have some good points to make. I mean, I know you like her, but come on, how blind can you be to the faults in her logic...

 

[nomadthethird]

Some of the first books to go when Canada passed the MacKinnon/Dworkin legislation on obscenity/porn were ... you guessed it ... Dworkin's books themselves.

Beyond those, guess who the main targets were of these new laws? Gay and lesbian book distributors. Not mainstream porn outlets. Not mainstream porn distributors. Gay BOOK distributors.

This is exactly what MacKinnon's opponents in the U.S. predicted would happen.

Did rape rates go down in Canada since this legislation passed? Did violent crime go down? Did *anything* change? Nope! In fact, some of the numbers have gone up.

But now you can't buy Dworkin's books*, and if you're gay, you can't buy a book of erotic photos. Or sell it.

*This may have changed by now...not sure.

 

[nomadthethird]

Oh how I wish I had a copy of Intercourse so I could post a list of the choicest quotes from it. Here are a few of her best in general:

"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women..."

O it is is it? Chuckle.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

Lulzzzz.

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

Speak for yourself.

You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.

With on the first part but then...Erm...okkaayy.

Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.

This is a flat out lie, and she's too smart not to know it is. In all kinds of cultures, women not only had access to pornography, it was plastered and stuccoed out in the wide open for everyone to see. Pompei anyone? Greek urns anyone? Cave paintings anyone? Far more graphic than what's on our supermarket shelves.

A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

Downright scary.

Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.

WTF. I mean, yeah, gender is constructed but...umm...dead?

Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.

Ha, well...

 

[grizzleb]

I don't mean that people in general benefit from gender roles, but that they make things simpler for people in the sense that people have a few fixed ways they are supposed to act etc. If you are gay you act camp, that's not something that's 100,000 years old - I'd say thats pretty modern. I'm not saying it's good or whatever, and it extents beyond simple gender or sexuality. If you are this class you act this way etc.

BTW I'm not stereotyping - all gay guys don't act camp. But lots do.

 

[nomadthethird]

I don't mean that people in general benefit from gender roles, but that they make things simpler for people in the sense that people have a few fixed ways they are supposed to act etc. If you are gay you act camp, that's not something that's 100,000 years old - I'd say thats pretty modern. I'm not saying it's good or whatever, and it extents beyond simple gender or sexuality. If you are this class you act this way etc.

BTW I'm not stereotyping - all gay guys don't act camp. But lots do.

Sure, of course.

See, gender stereotyping was something the 2nd wave hadn't learned to turn the dialectic on entirely yet. They had a couple of pet peeves when it came to basic stereotypes of women as unintelligent or docile, but a statement like Dworkin's about seduction is telling: "Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine."

What's happening here is she's bought into a whole bunch of really heinous stereotypes based on phallic male-power or "androcentric" thinking regarding sexuality, where the assumption is that only men can seduce women, women are always the passive recipients of male sexual interest, men are sexual agents and women are not, women have no interest in sex and cannot actively participate in the seduction ritual, etc. In reality, women seduce men all of the time...hell, some of them even pay for the bottle of wine (or the jug of Crystal Palace, or whatever). The rites and rituals of seduction have very little to do with male power, as any biologist will tell you, and rely almost exclusively on the position of the female (of almost every species) as sexual "chooser". I would argue that where rape is occuring or has occured, the word "seduction" has no place, and does not apply, to the sort of tactics employed.

On top of that, she's conflated the act of sex upon being seduced, if a woman should choose to have sex with her seducer, with the act of being raped. This is a logical fallacy called "equivocation", i.e. sliding from one definition of a term to another mid-argument.

Of course, date rape exists, and it is important to point out the fact that many date rapists come across, on the surface, at first, as "nice guys" who buy flowers and do and say all the "right things." But it's important to examine the ways in which certain feminists completely bought into the idea that men were all-powerful.

It's funny. Dworkin often gets accused of being a foaming-at-the-mouth misandrist. But really, it's women Dworkin dislikes--she hates the fact that they aren't the male power double, and that many of them are disinterested in becoming just like men, some kind of "default" "human" "subject" who gets to rule over a domain.

 

[poetix]

Charles Olson on how poems hang together: "Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge".

Much of the anti-Dworkin stuff recited by Nomad here is familiar and at best half-true; the quotations are massively out of context (and assumed, erroneously, to be bald assertions of fact rather than witty expressions of saeva indignatio - Dworkin without hyperbole would not be Dworkin, but you do have to know how to read it), and the business with Canada's obscenity laws has a lot less to do with Dworkin and MacKinnon's framing of the Minneapolis Ordinances on pornography than opponents of the latter would like you to believe (they weren't great laws, but they included no provision for the impounding of books for suspected obscene content).

 

[nomadthethird]

Charles Olson on how poems hang together: "Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge".

Much of the anti-Dworkin stuff recited by Nomad here is familiar and at best half-true; the quotations are massively out of context (and assumed, erroneously, to be bald assertions of fact rather than witty expressions of saeva indignatio - Dworkin without hyperbole would not be Dworkin, but you do have to know how to read it), and the business with Canada's obscenity laws has a lot less to do with Dworkin and MacKinnon's framing of the Minneapolis Ordinances on pornography than opponents of the latter would like you to believe (they weren't great laws, but they included no provision for the impounding of books for suspected obscene content).

Oh jeez...if Charles Olson says it, it must be true!

First, I don't care what context you put those quotations in, they're still a bunch of garbage. Second, Dorthy Parker is witty. Oscar Wilde is witty. Andrea Dworkin makes weak arguments that come from weak standpoints and attempts to make them seem "important" and "politically vital" by chocking them full of loaded language. I can think of some famous orators of the 20th century who used the same techniques. It doesn't make me all that persuaded that what they had to say was worthwhile or interesting. It was just loud with lots of fricatives.

As for the MacKinnon laws...they're basically textbook crap legislation at this point. They're given as a example, at every stage in the process (from drumming up public interest to drafting to lobbying to finally passing and enforcing) of what not to do if you really want a law to succeed instead of fail at its stated goals. It doesn't matter that these laws made no provision for the impounding of books--this was the actual result of passing the law, because the legal establishment/gov, when given this sort of leway, uses it to persecute minority groups, not the mainstream. And porn is mainstream.