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

ather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove memad, I gave away the only possession we are born into theworld with— our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter,an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made meforeswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptiblewits and talents. "$T . E. Lawrence attempted to exorcise this experience by repeatingit: by having himself flagellated by a younger man whom he paid,he himself controlling his own humiliation and physical torment.This only emphasizes the riveting trauma of losing “the onlypossession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity”;and the male option of finding the means to control sexual reality,however devastating that reality has been.It must also be noted that glorious ancient Greece, so often citedas the ideal male homosexual society, that is, a society in which sexamong men and boys was entirely acceptable, operated in accordancewith these same principles: male sexual aggression againstboys and among men was highly regulated by custom and inpractice; sexual relations between men and boys expressed a rigidhierarchy of male power; the youth used was feminized vis-i-visolder men; sex was not consensual, that is, among peers (in fact, onCrete and in other parts of Greece, boys were kidnapped into sexualapprenticeship); the boy became the man, changed status, hisreward at the end of an apprenticeship; populations of women andslaves, neither of which had any rights of citizenship, absorbed thebrunt of male sexual aggression. Male homosexuality in malesupremacistsocieties has always been contained and controlled bymen as a class, though the strategies of containment have differed,to protect men from rape by other men, to order male sexuality sothat it is, with reference to males, predictable and safe. Females anddevalued males who participate in the low status of women arelogically the preferred victims, since male sexuality as it exists inmale-supremacist contexts requires victims, not fully presentequals, in order to realize itself. T he devalued males can oftenchange status, escape; women and girls cannot. And the devalued