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

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

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The intense and obsessive use of person as object is seen as thesolution to man’s alienation—not as the source of it nor as one of itsmost numbing manifestations.Not only does “love. . . increase [the] self <strong>by</strong> means of theobject”; but the fact of objectification—this diminished capacity toperceive and respond to life—is viewed as a key and dynamicelement of individuality. Since men characteristically respond onlyto sexual fragments, bits and pieces, slivers of flesh costumed thisway or that, this very incapacity is consistently transformed intoone of love’s defining virtues. Krafft-Ebing, a pioneering sexologistcurrently out of fashion (unlike Kinsey and Ellis) because his goalwas to move sexual deviation out of the realm of the criminal intothe realm of the medical (not into the realm of the normal),enunciated a still-current appraisal of the value of objectification:In the considerations concerning the psychology of thenormal sexual life in the first chapter of this work it was shownthat, within psychological limits, the pronounced preferencefor a certain portion of the body of persons of the opposite sex,particularly for a certain form of this part, may attain greatpsychosexual importance. Indeed, the especial power of attractionpossessed <strong>by</strong> certain forms and peculiarities for manymen—in fact, the majority—may be regarded as the realprinciple of individualism in love. 42The automatic, predetermined, fixed, intransigent response to aparticular form or part of the body is supposed to be a manifestationof individuality rather than a paralyzation of individuality. Themale’s individuality, in effect, can be reckoned <strong>by</strong> how little heresponds to, how little he perceives, how little he values. Sexualmyopia, then, becomes the paradigm for individuality.Sexologist C. A. Tripp very much in fashion, considers malesexual objectification an evolutionary high point:. . the selectionof a particular partner whose smallest details may be so investedwith meaning as to bring a person’s [sic] sexual response to feverpitch—represents more than a culmination of individual develop­

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