@misogyny

Sleepless Nights, Rain Showers and Owls

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

It’s 8:30 in the morning but I’ve been awake and up sporadically since 2 AM. That’s a typical scenario for me the day after my chemotherapy session at the hospital on Thursday mornings. It’s the dexamethasone (a corticosteroid) that keeps me awake. The other meds just make me feel ill generally.

Being awake at 2 AM until 7 or so when Carolyn gets up has its perks. The rain showers were amazing last night. The rain just pounds on the steel roof above the bedroom and the harder it rains the more intense the sound becomes. The first one started at around 3 AM but only lasted for twenty minutes or so. The one at 4 AM was much more intense and lasted much longer. The rain will be steady today, and probably tomorrow and the day after. The Weather Network predicts that we might just see the sun again by Tuesday. We’ll see about that.

At around 4:20, just before sunrise, I heard a great horned owl shouting its call at the back of the property. The owls like to perch in the tall conifers at the back of the property and in the forest behind our back fence. They usually sound off earlier in the year as the mating season gets into full swing. This owl may just have been a little late getting itself going, like many plants in the yard. The wisteria is just starting to sprout and the honey-locust is still yawning its opposition to getting up and at it. The ferns, though, are as happy as pigs in a wallow. They like the cooler, rainy weather and they show it.

So, at 2 AM, wide awake, what could I do? Well, I could just lay there and stew, or I could pick up my Kindle and start reading. Of course, as soon as I start reading, the cat decides it’s time for me to pay attention to her so she walks right in front of my face, sticks her tail up my nose and generally makes a pest of herself. Notwithstanding the feline interruptions I often read novels that are on the humorous side from authors like Thomas King, Kurt Vonnegut and Christopher Moore. But I also read a range of books on ‘more serious’ topics like sex, misogyny and patriarchy.

Last night I continued reading a book I picked up recently by David Friedman entitled A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (2001) that had been referenced in another book I just finished on a related topic: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha (2013). Like Sex at Dawn, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis is a must read if you want to understand how the social and cultural relations we’ve built around sex is so out of line with our biology. After outlining some of the most egregious sexual cultural practices in the Middle Ages in Europe around sex and later witchcraft along with a compendium of culturally weird sexual practices all over the world and since recorded history, Ryan and Jetha get into some very interesting musings on the United States and its perverse official political views and practices around sexuality, many driven by religion and the drive for power by mostly white, Protestant men of a certain age. After outlining the horrendous treatment of Black people by powerful white folk and their less wealthy followers, their base in current language, during pretty much the whole of American history starting with the arrival of slaves from Africa to work in Southern plantations, they get into some more current issues, including the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. [He is a year younger than me] His appointment was very controversial for a number of reasons, the most important one being that he was (is) black. This is a long quotation, but it demonstrates clearly the issues at hand and the players that are still involved in government, including Joe Biden. It’s important to note here that Thomas had been accused by a fellow attorney Anita Hill of sexual harassment but he dodged that one. He had been nominated by George H.W. Bush. According to Wikipedia he’s widely considered the most conservative and ‘originalist’ of the Supreme Court justices. It appears that he hasn’t changed his tune at all since 1991. His views are anathema to me.

From Friedman:

“Six decades later, another black American faced a committee of white men agitated about his penis. For hours those white men listened, many of them visibly appalled, to complaints from a woman about the black man’s lewd behavior toward her, all of it, she said, unwelcome and unsolicited. They heard how he bragged about the size of his organ, comparing it to a supernaturally endowed porn star named Long Dong Silver. Now that same black man faced the same committee. Unlike Claude Neal, however, he was not dangling from a rope. Except, he said, metaphorically. “From my standpoint as a black American,” Judge Clarence Thomas told the senators considering his nomination to the United States Supreme Court, “[this] is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who … deign to think for themselves … and it is a message that unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.” (from “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis” by David M. Friedman, page 129 Kindle edition)

and

“The exchange between Senator Hatch and Judge Thomas about racial stereotyping ensured that no lynching would occur, high-tech or otherwise. If nothing else, the all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were determined to show this was 1991, not 1891. At 10:34 P.M., on October 11, when Senator Biden recessed the hearings for the day, the verdict was clear. The nominee, so close to political extinction, had come roaring back to life. When Senator Hatch left the hearing room, he was stopped by Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio. “Senator, you just saved his ass,” she told Hatch. “No, Nina,” said the Utah Republican. “He just saved his own ass.” What both probably knew, but neither could say, was that it was another part of Thomas’s body that had really been at stake all along.” (page 139 kindle edition)

I’m about half way through Friedman’s book, but so far it’s making for compelling reading. It was clear to me back in 2010 before I retired that as I was teaching a course on Love and Sex, that women had been subject to an intense misogyny for as long as recorded history and probably for as long as our species started walking upright on the African savannah. Actually, I was aware of misogyny long before 2010 but that’s when I began a more intense focus on its deconstruction. The focus of Friedman’s book, the penis, is a literary means of shifting the conversation about sex and procreation from the biological to the cultural realm. So far, I think that he’s done an excellent job of it. His analysis of Freud’s penis envy as a metaphor for the way women have been disenfranchised and generally kept out of the highest positions of business and government is particularly good and one I hadn’t considered before, at least not in the kind of detail Friedman goes into.

More on this later…as I read the second part of Friedman’s book and tie it into other books I’ve been reading, including one by Christopher Moore.

Remembrances 2: Pornography

~ Roger JG Albert

I’ve just finished reading a book by Julia Shaw (Dr. Julia Shaw) who studied psychology at UBC. Her book is called EVIL: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side. (Doubleday in Canada, 2019). Her basic premise in that book is that evil is entirely subjective and we all have evil tendencies within us and the potential to act on them. For Shaw, murderers and torturers, even Hitler, are human. They may have committed atrocities at times, but not 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. For Shaw, no one is objectively evil, not Ted Bundy, not Jeffrey Dahmer, not Paul Bernardo. Not even Hitler. She asks, provocatively, would you have killed baby Adolf if you had been given the chance? Her answer is, probably not because there would have been no way to predict how Hitler would end up on the basis of what he was as a one year old boy. For Shaw, evil is situational a great deal of the time and one person’s evil is another person’s glory. Ernest Becker declares in his book Escape From Evil that the twin pillars of evil are death and disease. He doesn’t objectify people as inherently evil. In essence, he argues, we have a deep-seated cultural aversion to death and disease and we have created a plethora of institutions dedicated to the denial of death and disease (including hospitals, I might add). Those institutions may be at loggerheads with one another as part of the ideologies of competing groups as they go about vilifying each other. But I digress somewhat.

Shaw deals with many instances of evil in the world, including pornography. Like all other themes in her book, Shaw doesn’t condemn people for watching porn, (and she doesn’t even consider it evil). She insists that people who watch porn are not evil, and are in fact, normal. This is true particularly considering that she argues from a 2007 study by Pamela Paul elaborated in her book Pornified (New York: Times Books) that “66 percent of men and 41 percent of women consume porn on at least a monthly basis.”1 When I taught a course in 2010 and 2011 at North Island College called Love and Sex and I did research on porn for the course, I learned that at that time 37% of the income derived online was from pornography. Of course there’s no way of pinning down a reliable statistic on the valuation of pornography, but it’s big business, there’s no doubt about that. Still, as Shaw argues, there is a gloss of shame and moral terpitude that accompanies pornography. Shaw is entirely correct here. In fact, I challenge you to admit yourself to viewing porn, or to have someone else you know admit to viewing porn. I wrote above that I researched porn for a course I taught at NIC in 2010-11. In doing that research, I viewed a lot of porn.

As people got to know that I was doing research on porn I got a lot of: “See any good porn lately, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.” That kind of comment was absolutely uncalled for with veiled suggestions that what I was doing was somehow immoral, but sex is such a powerful subject in our less-than-open society that even doing research on a taboo subject in any way associated with sex was liable to unleash opprobrium and displeasure. As part of my responsibility around this research, I notified the college that I was doing this kind of research and that they should be aware of that because it may show up on my computer. Shaw notes in her book that:

“When attempts at empathy and understanding are made, there is often a particularly vicious utterance that is used to shut them down; the implication that some people should be empathized with, lest we imply that we too are evil. Want to discuss paedophilia? That must mean you are a paedophile.” (p.8)

What I was especially interested in as I investigated porn was the way that women are portrayed by the purveyors of porn. I’m assuming that porn hasn’t changed much in the last ten or twelve years since I conducted my research, but I do know that there is a movement among some women to transform porn.2 In my research I noted that it was very common for women to be referred to as dirty, sluts, etcetera. Actually, I take it back. Porn has changed a lot in the last ten years. Just a quick scan of one porn site and it’s obvious that there’s a lot more DIY porn out there. It’s now common for young women to set up chats or performances of various sorts for money, and incidentally for the pleasure of men,I suppose. And, somehow, tokens have become part of the porn scene. I wasn’t going to get into how that works. Much on the DIY porn is ‘porn-lite’ but there’s still a lot of violent and nasty stuff out there with much denigration of women. It’s hard for me to relate to misogyny given that I had a mother, I have a spouse, many sisters, two daughters, and granddaughters. However, I know about the origins of misogyny in the Biblical story of creation and in many other cultural institutions and myths, and I see misogyny glorified in politics, education, movies, and popular programs like Game of Thrones, among many others.

Actually, porn is no different than many mainstream views on sex as dirty. Why the association of sex with dirt? Well, dirt, death. I’ll not go into this here to any extent. See this post I wrote from March, 2018 for a discussion: https://rogerjgalbert.com/2018/03/27/why-do-some-people-refer-to-sex-as-dirty/ Interesting that I seem to come back over and over again to these themes.

_____________________________________________

1page 145 in Shaw’s book.

2see especially After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters by Anne G. Sabo, a book I just ordered. (After I read Sabo’s book I’ll get back to you about how women are transforming porn.)