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

other century. There are only the old values, women there for thetaking, the means of taking determined by the male. It is ancientand it is modern; it is feudal, capitalist, socialist; it is caveman andastronaut, agricultural and industrial, urban and rural. For men,the right to abuse women is elemental, the first principle, with nobeginning unless one is willing to trace origins back to God andwith no end plausibly in sight. For men, their right to control andabuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in aworld rigged to blow up but they do not know when.In pornography, men express the tenets of their unchangingfaith, what they must believe is true of women and of themselves tosustain themselves as they are, to ward off recognition that acommitment to masculinity is a double-edged commitment to bothsuicide and genocide. In life, the objects are fighting back,rebelling, demanding that every breath be reckoned with as thebreath of a living person, not a viper trapped under a rock, but anauthentic, willful, living being. In pornography, the object is slut,sticking daggers up her vagina and smiling. A bible piling up itscode for centuries, a secret corpus gone public, a private corpusgone political, pornography is the male’s sacred stronghold, amonastic retreat for manhood on the verge of its own destruction.As one goes through the pictures of the tortured and maimed, readsthe stories of gang rape and bondage, what emerges most clearly is aportrait of men who need to believe in their own absolute,unchangeable, omnipresent, eternal, limitless power over others.Every image reveals not the so-called object in it but the man whoneeds it: to keep his prick big when every bomb dwarfs it; to keephis sense of masculine self intact when the world of his own creationhas made that masculine self a useless and rather silly anachronism;to keep women the enemy even though men will destroy him andhe by being faithful to them will be responsible for that destruction;to sustain his belief in the righteousness of his real abuses of womenwhen, in fact, they would be insupportable and unbearable if hedared to experience them as what they are—the bullying brutalitiesof a coward too afraid of other men to betray or abandon them.Pornography is the holy corpus of men who would rather die than