A reader of this blog pointed out to me that a good many of the comments to my posts have been verbally abusive in nature. She raises a good point and I thought it would be worth sharing with you some of the forms of verbal abuse that have been demonstrated in the comments. These definitions come from a website entitled www.verbalabuse.com and are similar to the definitions used by Patricia Evans. I highly recommend her book, “The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to recognize it and how to respond”. Her excellent definition of power-over forms the basis of much of my work on the relationship between militarism and violence against women.
And just to be clear about the impact of the relationship between militarism and abusive behavior towards women, a story broke this weekend in the neverending saga of how the military is not taking action to end sexual abuse in the military. The gist of it is that they have decided not to discipline those in charge of the Air Force Academy during the period when the sexual assault scandal took place. It would seem, not surprisingly, that there is still a bit of an attitude problem about ending sexual abuse in the military.
At any rate, here are the types of verbal abuse that have been usedin the comments to this blog to justify pornography. I will leave it to you dear readers to go back and find the specifics. They are there, I just don’t choose to repeat them here.
“DENIAL
Denial at it’s most basic is saying something hasn’t happened. It is extremely sick, and extremely powerful. It is the way that we can commit abuse and still live with ourselves. It allows us to continue being abusive by staying in the sick place, and by allowing us to hide our sickness from others so that we can maintain the abusive situation for a longer period of time.
We lie to others, and most devastatingly, we lie to ourselves.The major tactics we use in maintaining our denial are minimizing, rationalizing, and justifying. The effect of these tactics is to redefine what happened, what is acceptable, and what is harmful in such a way that ultimately any act, no matter how hideous, can be carried out.
MINIMIZING
Minimizing distances us from the damage we caused by claiming that the damage wasn’t as bad as it actually was. “I didn’t beat her up, I just pushed her.” By minimizing the damage we have caused, we can then blame the victim for “exaggerating” the abuse or accuse the victim of simply making the whole thing up, depending on the nature of the evidence we face. If there is enough evidence to prove that we have done something wrong, we can use partial repentance: “I’ll accept the responsibility of anything you can prove I did, and nothing more.”
RATIONALIZING
Rationalizing is lying to oneself about what was done to make it seem acceptable — telling ourselves rational (sounding) lies if you will. “She’s lucky I only hit her once. Anybody else would have beaten the crap out of her.” This lying becomes more and more practiced until we can convince ourselves of anything — particularly when the pain of admitting the truth of what we’ve done becomes larger and harder to deal with.
JUSTIFYING
Justifying is explaining why it was okay to do what was done. “It was okay for me to tell her that I would kill her (justifying) because she was becoming so upset and she had to shut up before she disturbed the neighbors (rationalizing) and I didn’t really mean it anyway (minimizing). She knows I could never hurt her.””
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Robert Jensen once again offers some useful insights into some of the comments on this blog in an article entitled, “Sexuality, masculinity and men’s choices“.
“But the feminist critique inspires an apoplectic reaction from pornography’s defenders that, to me, has always seemed over the top. The political debate that the critique set off, both within feminism and in the wider culture, seems unusually intense. From my experience of writing and speaking publicly, I can be fairly certain that what little I have written here so far will cause some readers to condemn me as a sexual fascist or a prude.
One obvious reason for the strength of these denunciations is that pornographers make money, hence there is a profit motive in moving quickly with maximal force to marginalize or eliminate criticism of the industry. But the more important reason, I believe, is that at some level everyone knows that the feminist critique of pornography is about more than pornography. It encompasses a critique of the way “normal” men in this culture have learned to experience sexual pleasure — and the ways in which women and children learn to accommodate that and/or suffer its consequences. That critique is not just a threat to the pornography industry or to the personal collections that men have stashed in their closets, but to everyone. The feminist critique asks a simple but devastating question of men: “Why is this sexually pleasurable to you, and what kind of person does that make you?” And because heterosexual women live with men and men’s sexual desire, those women can’t escape the question — either in terms of the desire of their boyfriends, partners, and husbands, or the way they have come to experience sexuality. That takes us way beyond magazines, movies, and computer screens, to the heart of who we are and how we live sexually and emotionally. That scares people. It probably should scare us. It has always scared me. ”
He goes on later in the article to offer some very good thoughts of how men can make changes:
“We can stop glorifying violence and we can reject its socially sanctioned forms, primarily in the military and the sports world. We can make peace heroic. We can find ways to use and enjoy our bodies in play without watching each other crumble to the ground in pain after a “great hit.”
We can stop providing the profits for activities that deny our own humanity, hurt other people, and make sexual justice impossible: pornography, strip bars, prostitution, sex tourism. There is no justice in a world in which some bodies can be bought and sold.
We can take seriously the feminist critique of sexual violence, not just by agreeing that rape and battering are bad, but by holding each other accountable and not looking the other way when our friends do it. And, just as important, we can ask ourselves how the sexual ethic of male dominance plays out in our own intimate relationships, and then ask our partners how it looks to them. ”
Lastly, many thanks to Wild Rider for a fine job of responding to the query about gay porn and I don’t have anything of substance to add to that.
I am however going to address an earlier comment regarding the difference between erotic art and literature and porn that is fantasy rather than reality based. First, a disclaimer of sorts. In addition to writing, I am a visual artist. Among many other things, I have done considerable work addressing female imagery and have had work in several erotic art exhibitions. I have absolutely no objection to graphically or verbally explicit discussion of human sexuality. I do object to it when it is racist, sexist, homophobic, or exploitive in any manner. While I am opposed to censorship, as Mary Kay Blakely pointed out years ago in “Red, White and Oh So Blue”, sometimes there just aren’t 2 sides to an issue and there is no obligation to give print space, air space, etc. to that which causes harm.
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