Friday, October 05, 2007

With apologies to mrobvious, but this woman was overpromoted when she came out with her first idiotic books because she was passably good-looking. Here was a cute-for-a-writer chick writing about how oppressive Western standards of beauty were, despite the fact that, you know, minus her passably decent looks she wouldn't have been heavily promoted. The irony was lost on her.

But anyway: Now that her looks have been marred by a steady diet of hatred, paranoia, and McRib sandwiches, do we have to continue pretending she ever had a goddamn thing to say?

She's just Glenn Greenwald with a gunt.

I guess I do apologize for this, the fourth unnecessary attack on a woman's looks in three days. But honestly. I'm weary of these screeching yentas. It was borderline acceptable when you were halfway cute, because, let's face it, anything is borderline acceptable coming from a halfway cute woman.

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

[...]

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?