Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

in the realm of female beauty, the final value of the object isprecisely to be found in its cruel or deadly destruction.Female knowledge of objectification usually stops at a necessarybut superficial understanding: beauty is rewarded and lack ofbeauty is punished. The punishments are understood as personalmisfortune; they are not seen as systematic, institutional, orhistorical. Women do not understand that they are also punishedthrough sexual use for being beautiful; and women do not understandthe lengths to which men go to protect themselves and theirsociety from contamination by ugly women who do not induce alustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage topunish, violate, or destroy these women anyway. The Goncourtbrothers, honored as authorities both on women and on eighteenthcenturyFrance, praised the eighteenth-century convent as “a refugerather than a prison, ” benign because it kept women scarred bysmallpox out of the sight of men:[The convent] is above all the haven of broken lives, the almostobligatory asylum of women suffering from small-pox, amalady all but forgotten to-day, but one which disfigured agood quarter of the women of that time. Society, with everyargument at its command, and the family, with every conceivableexhortation, urged the victim of this scourge towardthe obscurity of the cloister. Even her mother consented, out oflove, to surrender her luckless child, whose unsightlinessexcluded her from society and who ended by submitting to thepitiless precept of the time—“An ill-favored woman is a beingwithout state in Nature or place in the world. ” 35According to the Goncourts, two hundred thousand women ormore, called laiderons (“foul faces”), were locked up in eighteenthcenturyFrench convents. The ostracism and exclusion of womenwho are not perceived as beautiful enough to be desirable fromwork and social participation is the modem equivalent of segregatingthe laiderons; instead of being locked in, the modern laideron islocked out.Since the value of the object is finally in its violation or