In the world of political punditry, there is nothing more annoying than the person who is so fixated on one subject, that he or she manages to turn every question on any other topic back to that particular obsession.
Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about?? Well try this hypothetical example:
Wingnutter: “Obama’s a socialist who was born in Kenya!!! He must be IMPEACHED!!!!”
Viewer: “Oh, that’s all fine and good…but what’s your position on raising the debt ceiling??”
Wingnutter: “Gee, Paul, I’m all for it, as long as we get rid of all this unnecessary big government spending and all these job-killin’ taxes…but seriously, we first gotta get rid of that socialist President who wasn’t even born here!! Why don’t you ask him to reveal his birth certificate and prove he’s a citizen??”
Viewer: “Ahhhh….hasn’t President Obama already done that, like, twice?? And what does that have to do with the deficit ceiling?”
Wingnutter: “What are ‘ya, some kind of liberal?? That wasn’t a REAL birth certificate, and we can prove it!! Next question, please?”
New viewer: “OK, so what do you think about the FAMiLY LEADER pledge on marriage and other vows of fidelity to conservative social policies…and would you be willing to sign on to it?”
Wingnutter: “But, of course, absolutely, I’d sign in a heartbeat!!!.I believe in strong conservative family values..which is why we MUST get the truth about that socialist Obama and his Kenyan citizenship!!”
Yeah, now you get the picture.
Some people have so ridden their one-trick ponies so far to the ground that they don’t even know how to address other issues without ultimately boomeranging back to their obsession.
And then, there is the special breed of wingnutter, who is so obsessed with his pet cause that he can’t help but take even the most unrelated events and somehow connect them to his pet myopia.
Or, in the continuing case of antiporn “feminist” hit woman Professor Gail Dines, her pet cause.
As you all know, Gail has a hard-on for pornography. Obviously, it’s not the traditional kind of hard-on, it’s more like porn is her special obsession, her chew toy, the center of her universe, and the alpha and omega of her activism as an antiporn activist. To Professor Dines, porn is simply the root of male evil, the reason that men get erections and exist fo abuse, dominate, degrade, and ultimately, rape women; and there is no social ill on earth that she can’t attempt to connect to the prevailence of it. No matter how tangentally unrelated a particular issue may be, you may rest assured that Gail will find some way to connect that issue to the evil prevailence of the “porn culture”.
And today, at the CounterPunch website, Professor Dines manages to meet if not exceed her high standards of deflection and reductive reasoning in blaming porn and “porn culture” for current events.
In this case, the issue is the ongoing saga of former International Monetary Fund chairman Dominique Strauss Kahn, potential candidate for president of France, who has been embroiled in a particularly heated sex scandal. If you will remember, around a month or two ago an African woman who was at one time DSK’s maid dropped some very disturbing charges on him, basically claiming that he had physically and sexually abused her while working for him. The case claimed global notoriety (that’s what happens when billionaires and global leaders are involved in scandals), but ultimately resulted in nothing, because the French prosecutors ended up having to drop the case, claiming both a lack of physical evidence and major inconsistencies in the woman’s charges. It didn’t help matters either that major newspapers in France and around the world put out stories explicitly attacking the character of the woman accuser, all but calling her out as a prostitute and a golddigger merely setting a “honey trap” in order to blackmail DSK in order to both hurt his election chances against incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and to get paid.
Naturally, in such a media environment, the woman accuser has gotten some support (both moral and financial) from people who feel that once again, a woman who makes an accusation of sexual assault upon a wealthy man is getting the shaft (no pun intended) and having her accusations not only dismissed offhand, but also treated with the usual amount of derision and slut-shaming and denial that all women making such charges are demonized with.
And, it should be noted that Strauss Kahn faces another round of rape accusations from another woman, which are still pending.
Now, this may play to the themes of how women are taken seriously or not when it comes to charges of rape, or how wealth and privilege have disjointed the criminal justice system to the point that those with money and power and the ability to set the media to their side can manipulate the system to their benefit, at the expense of the less privileged.
And if Gail Dines had attempted to analyze that aspect of the case, then there would be no issue.
Problem is, for Gail, everything must ultimately point back to porn…and her essay attempts, in her own cracked style of snark and sarcasm, to finger the “porn culture” for enabling DSK — and by extension, all porn using men, to get away with rape.
Buckle up, Clones…it may get a bit bumpy.
I have a great idea for a movie. Here’s the pitch: A poor, slutty immigrant takes a job as a chambermaid so she can have great sex with the hotel guests. One day she hits the jackpot. She walks into a room only to be met by an irresistible stud old enough to be her father. Known in his home country as “The Seducer” he offers her a full view of his impressive manhood.
Overcome with lust, she falls to her knees and the two have great consensual sex. But being a woman and all, she is a lying, scheming whore and accuses the seducer of rape. The poor seducer becomes one more victim of “sex offender hysteria,” as one caller to National Public Radio named it, and now he must defend his good name.
Where to pitch this? I could go to the usual adolescent boy filmmakers such as Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler, since they specialize in making movies about manipulative predators who are really good guys underneath. But wait. I have a better place. The porn website Maid Bangers seems tailor-made for this story. The teaser on the website reads: “Tom and Steve are on a Mission … They conquer hotel after hotel. When they are in town, not one maid is safe! “ (Emphasis Theirs).
On the site, free teasers lure in the viewer. Take “Luna” for example. According to the text, “Luna was spotted by Steve in the hallway and he immediately went after her. He came up with some lame excuse to get her back to the room, and it worked great. Once in the room, she couldn’t resist the boy’s charm.” Sound familiar? “Maya” has a similar experience. “Tom and Steve invited her in and before she could really understand what happened, she had a cock up her ass & one in her mouth.” Just in case this sounds like a rape to you, don’t worry — the pictures surrounding the text show Maya having hot, orgasmic sex.
You get the point, do you?? Because we all know that all men are so alike in their mission to impale and rape women through porn sites like Maid Bangers. Hell, DSK, when not spending his time screwing whole countries with “Shock Therapy” economic policies, probably was kicking up a six pack of Perrier and Jouet watching MILF Hunter videos seeking the best approach on how to conquer his next female victims. Of course, how a French billionaire and public politician would happen to get his hands on such porn to begin with, or why DSK just didn’t go the Arnold Schwarenegger/Nicolas Sarkozy route and simply cheat with a hawt female celebrity or bed his own maid willingly, didn’t enter Gail’s hive mind when she was writing this claptrap.
And, as always with Gail, there is the disbelief that any woman would have enough sexual desires of their own to seduce men and women on her own merits merely because she can or because she actually likes sex. That’s just The Big Lie imposed by “The Pornographers”, you know….we all know that “our sexuality” is much better than that….right??
And no, Gail or Clones thereof, that is not an excuse for rape…that simply says that women are capable on their own of inducing sex without the need for men’s approval or any injections of testosterone or reading up of bad XXX vignette videos.
Addedum: I actually decided on a lark to browse through the Maid Bangers site (WARNING: link definitely NSFW for explicit sexual content)….and lo and behold, it is basically nothing more than a Bang Bus clone where somewhat professional porn performers act out their sex scenes under the plot and setting of playing “hotel maids”. All of the performers are under contract and model releases, right down to the 2257 forms, and the sex they do is very much consensual, open, freely sought, and well compensated. Hardly the virtual rape and “sexual slavery” that Gail pretends it to be…and nowhere close to any relation to the Strauss Kahn maid’s real life plight.
Also…Dines is a bit lacking in her research this time, because it seems like she got her information about the “Luna” scene straight from the guest preview page, rather than actually viewing the video (which requires a paid $29.95 per month membership), though if Gail really was up to it, she could have simply gotten the two-day $1 trial and gotten access to the actual video, or simply viewed the free trailer that was available.
Finally….how nice of Gail to focus attention on “Luna” as an example of an “oppressed” woman of color allegedly abused and gang raped by White men. It’s especially nice when the other women featured in the Maid Bangers preview, “Crystal”, “Missy”, and “Deseiree”, are all White women. (There is one other Latina, “Maya”, who is featured, but somehow Dines managed to miss her.) Errrrrrrr…oopsie???
But let’s get to the heart of the matter, shall we?? Quoteh Dines with the money graph:
The Strauss-Kahn story belongs in the world of porn. It is here that all sex is consensual, no matter how manipulative and violent, and all women are whores who need a man to release their inner slut. In porn, women don’t do unskilled, low-paid work to feed themselves and their children. No, they work because this is where you go to get laid. Sites such as Fuck the Nanny, Nurse Hardcore, Naughty Bookworm, and Secretary Porn all tell the Strauss-Kahn story. Women don’t need a living wage, health care, safe housing, child care, or a career. They just need monster loads of “jizz” to make them happy.
Oh, so let’s see here. Fantasy skits like the vignette series mentioned above are, according to Professor Dines, not merely just fantasies to fuel the lusts of horny guys (and girls) seeking a quick means of getting themselves off and getting through the grind and boredom of the day. Nor, are they enterprises where the performers simply use such costume fantasies (now known and celebrated as “costume play” or “cosplay”) to act out their horniness and get paid a decent sum for that scene. Nope…according to Gail, they are the embodiment of corruption of real life nurses, secretaries, maids, teachers, and students who suffer the full and unadulterated effects of sexual harassment, coercion, degradation, and even rape, because impressionable men who view these scenes inevitably — actual experience with real live women who work these professions be damned — believe and act on the belief that ALL women in the universe should be their own personal sex toys and concubines, to be used and abused for life.
Course, that thesis fails to explain how such series can coexist with other vignette series such as My Friend’s Hot Mom and Naughty Office (Naughty America) and Big Tits Boss (Bang Brothers), not to mention all those MILF and Cougar flicks, where the WOMAN is explicitly placed as the aggressor seeking the men to seduce, or where the WOMAN is the one with all the power who goes after the unsuspecting man (or woman) for a passionate sex session or two. But, I’m sure that Gail will have a talking point ready for that, as she usually does.
Oh, and Professor?? It is not necessarily inconsistent for someone to call for a livable wage, better workplace conditions, equitable pay for comparable work, safe and adequate housing, and universal health care, and still enjoy consensual cosplay featuring enthusiastically busty and horny women roleplaying. It really isn’t. Heck, you can even do all that and believe that coerced sex and rape is bad, bad, bad. Honest and for true.
Only in a porn culture could we take seriously the idea that what transpired between Strauss-Kahn and the unnamed woman was consensual. Only here could we actually spin a story of a single mother risking her livelihood to have Strauss-Kahn’s penis rammed down her throat. And only here could we focus on the credibility of the woman while making light of the history of a man who was well known for his predatory behavior.
Riiiiight, Gail…because only in a “porn culture” could a prosecutorial panel investigating the case find not enough or conflicting evidence such that there wasn’t enough to warrant indictment. In Dines’ perfect world not affected by “porn culture” or male privilege, a man accused of what Strauss Kahn was accused of would simply be declared guilty by acclamation, and sent to the nearest Swedish Model camp for “reeducation” on how women should be treated…right after the castration and lengthy jail sentence.
Now, the brutality of the media attacks on the woman accuser certainly is problematic, as much so as the media attacks on the woman who filed those rape charges at Wikileaks mastermind Jullian Assange (Funny, but Dines had very little to say about that firestorm when that came down….not even a reference to the Pornwikileaks drama.) But, how is that any different from the most recent and still ongoing pilleraging now being bestowed on Carlee Anthony, the young woman who recently was acquitted of murdering her young child in a very nasty public trial? Oh, wait…Carlee Anthony is female, and upper middle class, and White…not quite exploitable material for antiporn “feminist” analysis. Plus, even porn’s rejected her (in fact, most porn folk I know are as convinced of her guilt as Dines is of DSK’s). When Gail starts digging into Nancy Grace as much as she digs into DSK, then maybe we may have something interesting.
And besides…there’s always the wrongful death suits and the media offers for book deals, which I figure will probably set the accuser up for life. Unless, working-class Black women aren’t seen as marketable as middle-class White girls.
And here’s where Professor Dines goes off the cliff, because she attempts to mine another sex scandal of foreyear.
And don’t let’s forget that this is a black woman. We know that black women have the tendency to be “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” If they could smear squeaky clean Anita Hill, a conservative Christian who spent her early career demonstrating her allegiance to the white Republican establishment, then every woman is fair game. David Brock, a former research fellow with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, recalls in his book, Blinded by the Right, how he set about destroying Anita Hill by taking a “a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix. Hill was an ambitious incompetent passed over by Thomas for a promotion. She was “kooky.” She was a man-hater. She had a “perverse desire for male attention.” She had a “love-hate” complex with Thomas. She made “bizarre” sexual comments to students and coworkers. She sprinkled pubic hairs into her law students’ term paper.” He now says that what he did was disgusting, but it worked, and Anita Hill became one more victim of a misogynist culture that protects its own at any cost.
Nice try, Gail, but some facts get in the way of your assault.
First off…all that and more were lobbed at Anita Hill when she made her historic sexual harassment charges at Clarence Thomas during his SCOTUS confirmation hearings. Mostly, though, they were made by fundamentalist Right wingnuts in an attempt to smear her charges and grease the wheels for Thomas’ ultimate confirmation vote. It was politics, not male sexual aggression, and definitly NOT porn, that motivated the smear attacks on Professor Hill.
Secondly, blindsiding David Brock as the premier hit man for the smears on Anita Hill without mentioning the fact that he didn’t just repudiate those tactics as “disgusting”, but openly and unabashedly backed up his “come to Jesus” vow by founding Media Matters For America to right that grievous wrong and openly oppose right-wing propaganda spinning, is a bit disingenious on Gail’s part. Kinda like the Right quoting former West Virginia US Senator Robert Byrd’s historic KKK membership to smear all Democrats as innate racists, forgetting that Byrd long since repudiated such bigotry and has backed it up with his votes….all the while covering up and whitewashing the Republican Right’s far more obvious and current racial bigotry.
And speaking of hypocrisy…here is the most delicious irony of all this smack from Dines’ piehole. Clarence Thomas, for all his Long Dong Silver fetishes and “pubic hair in Coke cans” lore, has been more or less the most consistent and fervent SCOTUS justice when it comes to advocating outlawing pornography from the face of the earth. In other words, he is far more on Gail Dines’ side of the debate, though not necessarily on the feminist wing. ‘Ya’d think that Gail probably knows that from all those meetings she has had with Pat Trueman’s Pornography Harms group or the money she probably gets from Morality in Media. But, I guess that when you are writing for a putatively lefty rag like CounterPunch, such facts get lost in the ether. (And, neither Nick Sarkozy nor even DSK himself are exactly political sex-positives on the issue, either.)
Leave it to Gail, of course, to close her rantage by getting back to the “porn determines real life” meme.
Next on the chopping block is French Journalist Tristane Banon, the goddaughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife who claims she was attacked by Strauss-Kahn. I was going to pitch this story, too, to the porn industry but it turns out someone beat me to it. The porn movie, Goddaughter 3, tells the tale of “a beautiful temptress who uses her alluring erotic skills to climb ‘the family’s’ ladder of power. She does anything with anyone to reach the top …. The danger, mystery, intrigue and hot, sultry sex are back!”
Ho, ho….very funny. Ha, ha….it is to laugh.
Besides that, isn’t that the tale of almost every recent mainstream TV drama series?? I mean, wasn’t that the theme of every single Jackie Collins novel?? (Remember the Lucky/Boss/Lady Boss series??) Why should porn get all the blame when Lifetime, FX, and the Big Four channels get to swaddle all over in the theme of “woman sleeps her way to the top” without any penalty?
Why?? Because Gail Dines is a crackpot pretending to be a “left feminist” riding a one-trick pony called “porn culture”. The sooner progressives realize her act and start listening to genuine progressive sex workers not so inclined, the better for all of us.
Memo to CounterPunch: Time to call in Nina Hartley again to repudiate this bullshit. I hear she’s available again.
