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fandomhigh2013-04-05 04:05 am
thefearwasreal) wrote in fandomhigh2013-04-05 04:05 am
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Pop Culture: Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learnt From... [Thurs, 1st Period]
The windows in the classroom were cracked open today, hopefully that would help with the warmth. "Right," Oz said, leaning against his desk. "Today we're going to be talking about pornography."
"Now for those of you who've been living under a rock until now, porn is sexually explicit media created for the purpose of arousal and gratification. It's been around a very long time, and it's taken pretty much any form you can think of, dirty cave drawings and murals, paintings, photos, movies, games, limericks, plays, novels, the whole enchilada. And because people and society's attitudes towards sex itself tend to be messy at best, naturally, porn ends up being a subject of a lot of controversy, for a bunch of reasons, but the one we're going to look at today is feminism."
"The glib answer on the issue of porn and feminism, is that they're against it because women don't like porn, which is wrong and an attitude which eventually leads to badly written Dusk fanfiction ending up on best-seller lists. The reality is a bit more complex, and ties into that whole multiple waves of feminism thing that came up at the start of semester. Now, the suffragettes, what we might call first-wave feminism, were a bit too concerned with that attempting to gain basic human rights thing to really care about porn, the first real critiques, came up with second-wave feminists. While some of them took their arguments to an extreme, hence the eventual branch off into radical feminism, they were based in real concerns about the exploitation of women involved in the production of porn, and a more general objectification of women, since the current porn industry is heavily focused on the idea of the majority of its audience being straight men."
"But then, around about the late-seventies, early eighties, you got the Sex Wars, where the tension between anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists reached a head over a number of issues, including pornography, where a number of very complex viewpoints from the sex-positive feminists can be boiled down to the idea that the pornography itself is not the issue, porn can be used as a means of sexual agency for women, but problems arise from sexism within the industry, and that the solution to bad porn isn't to get rid of it altogether but to make better porn."
"Which eventually leads us to third wave feminism which tends to take a more nuanced view, that some porn is empowering and a lot can be exploitative, that the industry has a lot of institutionalised sexism, but that feminist porn is possible, that kind of thing."
"So, what are your thoughts on porn?"
[All the links are to wikipedia, but let's just assume they're NSFW.]
"Now for those of you who've been living under a rock until now, porn is sexually explicit media created for the purpose of arousal and gratification. It's been around a very long time, and it's taken pretty much any form you can think of, dirty cave drawings and murals, paintings, photos, movies, games, limericks, plays, novels, the whole enchilada. And because people and society's attitudes towards sex itself tend to be messy at best, naturally, porn ends up being a subject of a lot of controversy, for a bunch of reasons, but the one we're going to look at today is feminism."
"The glib answer on the issue of porn and feminism, is that they're against it because women don't like porn, which is wrong and an attitude which eventually leads to badly written Dusk fanfiction ending up on best-seller lists. The reality is a bit more complex, and ties into that whole multiple waves of feminism thing that came up at the start of semester. Now, the suffragettes, what we might call first-wave feminism, were a bit too concerned with that attempting to gain basic human rights thing to really care about porn, the first real critiques, came up with second-wave feminists. While some of them took their arguments to an extreme, hence the eventual branch off into radical feminism, they were based in real concerns about the exploitation of women involved in the production of porn, and a more general objectification of women, since the current porn industry is heavily focused on the idea of the majority of its audience being straight men."
"But then, around about the late-seventies, early eighties, you got the Sex Wars, where the tension between anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists reached a head over a number of issues, including pornography, where a number of very complex viewpoints from the sex-positive feminists can be boiled down to the idea that the pornography itself is not the issue, porn can be used as a means of sexual agency for women, but problems arise from sexism within the industry, and that the solution to bad porn isn't to get rid of it altogether but to make better porn."
"Which eventually leads us to third wave feminism which tends to take a more nuanced view, that some porn is empowering and a lot can be exploitative, that the industry has a lot of institutionalised sexism, but that feminist porn is possible, that kind of thing."
"So, what are your thoughts on porn?"
[All the links are to wikipedia, but let's just assume they're NSFW.]
Re: Class Discussion - Pop Culture [12]