Pandemic Misogyny: A Sick Fantasy

Gracious! What with the furor on Sexism over at Edward's, Deborah's response to it, and now this treatise on pornography from Jamie, it seems to be Gender Issues Week in Pretty Lady's neck of the woods. She is terribly sorry to see that some gentlemen appear to be jumping on the bandwagon of Victim Hyperbole:

Not one to pull his punches, Jensen dives right in with the story of how he gave a three hour workshop on pornography to 40 women at a “center that serves battered women and rape survivors” and how much it hurt them to hear of the hate behind the images. His conclusion: “Even these women, who have found ways to cope with the injuries from male violence in other places, struggle with that pornographic reality. It is one thing to deal with acts, even extremely violent acts. It is another to know the thoughts, ideas, and fantasies that lie behind those acts.”

Am I misreading here, or is Jensen saying that porn not only leads to violence against women, it’s worse than violence against women? Women, how do you feel about that? Fellas, do you think your fantasies are worse than rape? I must admit, I used to really beat myself up over my fantasies, but I never thought I was worse than a rapist.

Now, what leapt right out at Pretty Lady was--what kind of misogynistic sadist gives a three-hour workshop on violent pornography to a group of battered women? It strikes her as a distinctly unhelpful activity to engage in. A person whose boundaries have been severely violated needs to feel more safe and protected, not less so. Rubbing a person's nose in this alleged violent hatred of her person is not the way to accomplish this.

The fact is, Pretty Lady thinks that this whole business about 'men hating women' is vastly overblown. There are, she grants you, a few men hither and yon who project the damage within their personal psyches onto anything female in their general vicinity, but they are grossly outnumbered by the perfectly decent ones who think that most women are rather nice.

Moreover, society in general persists in conflating modes of arousal with actual emotion, no matter how often experience indicates that the two are largely unrelated, particularly in the male psyche. As pointless as it is to attempt to legislate emotion, it is even more pointles to attempt to control the part of the human psyche which hasn't yet achieved the level of sophistication required to produce emotions. Fantasy, which is sharply delineated as such, strikes her as an eminently responsible way of managing the lizard-brain in all of us.