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

adult, impervious to the ambivalences of youth still contaminatedby female eroticism in which the penis has no intrinsic significance.A commitment to money as such follows as an obvious and publiccommitment to the display of masculinity as an aggressive and anaggrandizing drive. While poor or deprived men struggle for moneyto survive, all men, including poor or deprived men, struggle formoney because it expresses masculinity, power over and againstwomen. Having less money than a woman in one’s field ofperception is shameful: it means that one has less masculinity thanshe. Other male powers, such as the power of terror (violence) orthe power of naming (defamation), must be called on to compensate.Seventh, men have the power of sex. They assert the opposite:that this power resides in women, whom they view as synonymouswith sex. The carnality of women, even when experienced asmonstrous, is held to be the defining quality of women. Reduced toits most explicit and absurd detail by its most sexually explicitproponents, the argument is that women have sexual power becauseerection is involuntary; a woman is the presumed cause; therefore,the man is helpless, the woman is powerful. The male reacts to astimulation for which he is not responsible; it is his very nature todo so; whatever he does he does because of a provocation thatinheres in the female. Even on this most reductive level—she causespenile erection, therefore she is sexually powerful—the argument iswillfully naive and self-serving. The male, through each and everyone of his institutions, forces the female to conform to hissupremely ridiculous definition of her as sexual object. He fetishizesher body as a whole and in its parts. He exiles her from every realmof expression outside the strictly male-defined sexual or maledefinedmaternal. He forces her to become that thing that causeserection, then holds himself helpless and powerless when he isaroused by her. His fury when she is not that thing, when she iseither more or less than that thing, is intense and punishing.More coherently defined—that is, defined outside the boundariesof male experience—the power of sex manifested in action, attitude,culture, and attribute is the exclusive province of the male, his