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

Jews were both subhum an and intensely sexual in the racistsense— the men rapists, the women whores. T he questionsnow really are: why is pornography credible in our society: 'how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhum anwould women have to be for the pornography to be true?To the men who use pornography, how subhum an arewomen? If men believe the pornography because it makesthem come— them , not the women— what is sex to menand how will women survive it?This book—written from 1977 through 1980, publishedin 1981 after two separate publishers reneged on contractualagreem ents to publish it (and a dozen m ore refusedoutright), out of print in the United States for the lastseveral years— takes power, sadism, and dehum anizationseriously. I am one o f those serious women. This book askshow power, sadism, and dehum anization work in pornography—againstwomen, for m en— to establish the sexualand social subordination o f women to men. This book isdistinguished from most other books on pornography byits bedrock conviction that the power is real, the cruelty isreal, the sadism is real, the subordination is real: the politicalcrime against women is real. This book says thatpower used to destroy women is atrocity. Pornography. MenPossessing Women is not, and was never intended to be, aneffete intellectual exercise. I want real change, an end tothe social power o f men over women; m ore starkly, hisboot off my neck. In this book, I wanted to dissect maledominance; do an autopsy on it, but it wasn’t dead. Instead,there were artifacts— films, photographs, books— an archiveof evidence and docum entation of crimes againstwomen. This was a living archive, commercially alive, carnivorousin its use of women, saturating the environm entof daily life, explosive and expanding, vital because it wassynonymous with sex for the men who made it and themen who used it— men so arrogant in their power over usthat they published the pictures o f what they did to us,how they used us, expecting submission from us, compliance;we were supposed to follow the orders implicit in