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

evident, the favorite conceit of male culture is that experience canbe fractured, literally its bones split, and that one can examine thesplinters as if they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if itwere not part of the body. This conceit replicates in its values andmethodology the sexual reductionism of the male and is derivedfrom it. Everything is split apart: intellect from feeling and/orimagination; act from consequence; symbol from reality; mind frombody. Some part substitutes for the whole and the whole issacrificed to the part. So the scientist can work on bomb or virus,the artist on poem, the photographer on picture, with no appreciationof its meaning outside itself; and even reduce each of thesethings to an abstract element that is part of its composition andfocus on that abstract element and nothing else—literally attributemeaning to or discover meaning in nothing else. In the midtwentiethcentury, the post-Holocaust world, it is common for mento find meaning in nothing: nothing has meaning; Nothing ismeaning. In prerevolutionary Russia, men strained to be nihilists; ittook enormous effort. In this world, here and now, after Auschwitz,after Hiroshima, after Vietnam, after Jonestown, men neednot strain. Nihilism, like gravity, is a law of nature, male nature.T he men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting period ofextermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with newmethods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probableextinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look atthe whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account,perceive the intricate connections between the world they make andthemselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of painand torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoidtaking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Maledissociation from life is not new or particularly modern, but thescale and intensity of this disaffection are new. And in the midst ofthis Brave New W orld, how comforting and familiar it is to exercisepassionate cruelty on women. T he old-fashioned values still obtain.T he world may end tomorrow, but tonight there is rape— a kiss, afuck, a pat on the ass, a fist in the face. In the intimate world of menand women, there is no mid-twentieth century distinct from any