The Soft Hand of the State

[Steelhead]

Another would be psych major is heard from in Chris Stoltz's recent
posting. Stoltz resides in Canada, one of the most heavily censored corners
of the globe. Perhaps he is innured to the problem. Perhaps he *likes* it,
the soft hand of the State guiding his reading habits, jolting him when
strays into the realms of the forbidden.

I used to edit a magazine, WFR, that had hundreds of Canadian subscribers.
Each issue sent to Canada was reviewed for its "political" content. Write a
story that goes after some of Stoltz's endearing corporations up there,
such as Noranda or Hydro-Quebec or MacMillan-Bloedel, or write a story that
talks about the strange sexual and drug habits of the Prime Minister and it
may well be redacted. And you as a writer may be blacklisted, each article
under your by-line scrutinized for unknown offenses by the government.

I didn't make a strawman argument. In her series of posts, DYB established
a framework for censorship, though she is far too self-conscience of her
position to actually advocate it publicly. Better to leave that particular
task to the likes of lawyer Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea "She-Ra"
Dworkin, who argue (in court and in the NY Review of Books) that men
writing about rape are actually committing rape! Dworkin--I
believe--contends that even censusual heterosexual intercourse is rape. To
support her argument, DYB invoked an admitted CIA asset, who has informed
on people because the "opinions" they held were considered dangerous to the
ruling elites. Apparently, one of DYB's favorite musicians is a man who
believes that people can--and should--be executed for what they have
*written.*

It happens, of course, that Canada was quick to endorse the
MacKinnon/Dworkin Censorship Standards to which DYB gives "intellectual"
credence. These standards have been used to keep my writings and that of
friends such as Alex Cockburn, the late Andy Kopkind, Katha Pollit, Martin
Amis, Katherine Dunn, and others off Canadian bookshelves. Am I hostile
about this? You bet. People like DYB write these absurd tracts for their
own amusement, or to get published in some obscure academic rag in order to
get tenure, so that it will be next to impossible to give them the boot
when the academic tide in this country finally turns. (Thank God for
schools such as Evergreen College that have abandoned the tenure
structure!) We write to put bread on the table. Censorship standards--which
seem so pure in the Romper Rooms of the academy--are in fact a threat to
our livelihood.

I remember being entranced by S. Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex back in
the mid-70s, outstanding for the crunching logic of its argument and its
astonishing conclusions. Firestone, being something of a neo-Marxist,
argued that ultimately childbearing was the greatest inhibition to
equality. She ended up advocating test-tube conceptions and the development
of a weird kind of cyber-gestation gismo. Men--or really the entire concept
of gender--were entirely disposable. Sounds strange, but Firestone didn't
end up all that far removed from Herbert Marcuse's vision outlined in the
final chapters of Eros and Civilization. Marcuse was a techno-optimist who
believed computers and robotics would allow us to stop working and enjoy a
living flashback to those infantile days of polymorphous perversity, when
each square centimeter of flesh was its own G-spot and everything was a
turn on.

Steelhead