Harper Valley PTA Report

[Diana York Blaine]

In response to your devil's advocacy Chris, I'll say yes of course "every
fantasy about the opposite sex" involves objectification, but pornography
is an industry, not an abstraction or a private mental construct. And, as
an industry, it involves male control of female sexuality--not the other
way around.  This plays into centuries of historically-contextualized male
control of female sexuality, so I'm hard-pressed to generalize about it as
an accident of human sexuality.  The "somebody viewing the image" is
almost always male or at least let's say the production of pornography is
geared towards masculine spectacle.  While both Cosby's son and JeanBenet
Ramsay are featured in the evening news, for example, the image of the
little girl has been shown hundreds of times and is on nearly every
magazine cover in America.  Where's Ennis Cosby?  The image of a slain
black man working on a PhD in special ed. simply doesn't fit into any
masculine pornographic fantasy like a beautiful dead little girl does so
we're just as likely to see his father's image featured as his.
Bottom line? These things are not gender-neutral.

As for the attempt to silence this discussion (which is of course only one
of hundreds on the list not directly related to TRP) by depicting it as
"PTA" gibberish--we feminists are quite used to being told what we say is
irrelevant, unimportant, untrue, unrealistic, uninteresting or
inappropriate.  You'll have to do better than that. 

Diana