Actually, I stumbled mistakenly, unhurriedly, and lazily onto this thread, prematurely confusing it for one about the Tarkovsky film, where - invertedly and oddly enough - Stalkers [within the film's diagetic narrative] are "adventurous individuals" who, for an "appropriate" payment, guide tourists to the Zone and to the mysterious Room at the central void of the Zone where your deepest desires are allegedly granted or fulfilled [perhaps a stalker's
objet petit a, the sublime object cause of their stalk-laden desire, serves the same purpose: seeking what is in them - the stalked - more than themselves in order to have their deepest desires granted ... only to encounter the Void].
I'm not quite sure what you mean, Hundredmillion. But I'm hoping you're indicating that you partially understand my annoyance here.
I hope so too ...
The central reductionist fallacy I hear severely heteronormatively straight males cite over and over is that sexuality is all biological and somehow "above" or "below" the influence of psycho-social factors in its formation.
Well yes, its hilarious witnessing their self-righteous insistence on demanding - as an absolute ontological imperative - the impossible, on having direct, unmediated access to the [imaginary] real of the biological [fusion], disavowedly oblivious to the cultural scripts from which all such notions of masculinity and femininity are constructed. Sexual fundamentalism, with all the consequences of the other kinds.
They will insist that something like, say, breast implants work because men just can't help loving big breasts because biologically men are "wired" to be hopelessly attracted to the biggest, most unnaturally large-looking breasts imaginable.
Pre-lapsarian longings, "remembering" an uninhibited infant time when the biggest object in the world, the whole world as such, was ... The Big Tit ...
Dworkin thought porn's increasing availability would turn all men into rapists, but this woman points out that the opposite has happened--men have retreated more and more into fantasy and masturbatory sexuality and that they're not seeking out actual sex as much.
Terrible, ain't it
?
The post-modern sexual narcissist has no need for genuine, real women, what with all their "inconvenient", distracting and "hysterical"
demands ... So its Consumerist Pharmacology and [robotic] Prostetics to the rescue: Viagra and a Blow-Up Doll ... [Of course, not forgetting that it works both ways].
"As if one could discuss pornography, even now, without mentioning Andrea Dworkin. The conventional gesture is one of dismissal and disavowal: whatever we are going to say about porn, it will not be what Dworkin said! But it turns out that what we above all do not want to say - for example, that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, and that pornography is the cause of rape and should therefore be forbidden -
is not exactly what Dworkin said. There is something suspicious about this situation: what is it about what Dworkin said that we so want to be rid of, but can’t even reproduce accurately when we claim to be refuting it? What was the schibboleth that she pronounced, and we cannot?
The immediate object of Dworkin’s polemics on pornography and intercourse is, necessarily, the hippy glorification of free love and of pornography as the articulation of a wholly novel erotic freedom. In the hippy fantasy of sexual freedom, pornography stands for frankness versus hypocrisy, explicitness versus repression; the pornographer appears as swashbuckling auteur and champion of free speech. Fucking and shooting up are alike posited as paths to transcendence, but the experience sought is in fact one of narcissism without limit, a perpetual immurement in the ineluctably thermodynamic One God Universe of the cosmic self.
Pornography specifically presents a world of unhampered access to perpetually willing and compliant sexual objects, a world in which there is no such word as “no”. In this world, domination achieves its objective but loses its rationale: what is the use of power without resistance? Behind the ever-depreciating erotic valuation of the image, libidinal vacancy: what is the point of desiring someone who cannot fail to desire me back (or whose desire, or lack of it, is as simply besides the point as mine is)?
For Dworkin, pornography was a cover story for domination, a fable in the service of male power, but it was also decipherable as a record of nihilism, the board books of a centuries-old scam: “if the first one is a fake, you can’t underwrite a shithouse”. She chose to call what happens to women (and even men) in pornography “dehumanisation”, but we should not therefore define pornography as the pollution or degradation of a vital human essence by some exterior, death-dealing agency; rather, we should understand pornography as
anthropomorphising, as positing an anthropology - an image of human animals doing what is only
human - from which the ability to bear the inhuman has been excised. “Of course,” Dworkin wrote, “no biological determinist has yet found the bug, fish, fowl, or even baboon who had managed to write Middlemarch. Humans create culture; even women create culture”. Is an “erotic fiction” possible in which managing to write Middlemarch would not be unthinkable?" --From
here.
THT wrote: ... and how useful is it to pathologise them? if heteronormative forms (and unfortunately that entails almost all the experiences related in this thread) are seen as deviant then clearly the implicating (subject exempt) structure of psychopathology fails.
Yeah, I was specifically referring to the
fetish, not to the entire world of sexuality, of whatever orientation, where the jury is most definitely still out
