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

Mother, whore, beauty, abomination, nature or ornament, she isthe thing in contradistinction to which the male is human. Withouther as fetish—the charmed object—the male, including the malehomosexual, would be unable to experience his own selfhood, hisown power, his own penile presence and sexual superiority. Malehomosexual culture consistently uses the symbolic female—themale in drag, effeminacy as a style, the various accoutrements thatdenote female subjection—as part of its indigenous environment, asa touchstone against which masculinity can be experienced asmeaningful and sublime. Male homosexuals, especially in the artsand in fashion, conspire with male heterosexuals to enforce themale-supremacist rule that the female must be that made thingagainst which the male acts to experience himself as male. Womanis not born; she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed.She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth,slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it isforbidden for her to do so. No act of hers can overturn the way inwhich she is consistently perceived: as some sort of thing. No senseof her own purpose can supercede, finally, the male’s sense of herpurpose: to be that thing that enables him to experience raw phallicpower. In pornography, his sense of purpose is fully realized. She isthe pinup, the centerfold, the poster, the postcard, the dirtypicture, naked, half-dressed, laid out, legs spread, breasts or assprotruding. She is the thing she is supposed to be: the thing thatmakes him erect. In literary and cinematic pornography, she istaught to be that thing: raped, beaten, bound, used, until sherecognizes her true nature and purpose and complies—happily,greedily, begging for more. She is used until she knows only thatshe is a thing to be used. This knowledge is her authentic eroticsensibility: her erotic destiny. The more she is a thing, the more sheprovokes erection; the more she is a thing, the more she fulfills herpurpose; her purpose is to be the thing that provokes erection. Shestarts out searching for love or in love with love. She finds love asmen understand it in being the thing men use. As Mario, the mastereroticist in the film Emmanuelle, says to the heroine after he has hadher repeatedly raped and used: “Real love is the erection, not theorgasm. ” As Adrienne Rich wrote: “No one has imagined us. ”60