--Catharine MacKinnon, in Feminism Unmodified

So. I got a bit of sleep on Wednesday night. I got up fairly early on Thursday morning. I proceeded to spend all day working on my part of the Feminist Views on Pornography paper.

(Alas, this meant that attending my nephew's bris was out, but that's life, I guess. If only he hadn't been so impatient, and been born when he was supposed to, I could've been there... <g>)

Anyway. I reviewed the assignment one more time before beginning, and realized that I was in trouble.

See, it's like this. The feminist viewpoints on pornography can be roughly divided into three groups, which I've mentioned here in entries past, but never really explained:

Anti-porn feminists.

Porn is bad. Porn subordinates women. Porn presents nothing but images of men dominating women, and causes women to be seen as objects to be fucked. Porn isn't speech, porn is rape; women are raped to produce it, it indirectly creates a society in which women are raped by men, and it directly causes men who view it to rape women.

Anti-anti-porn feminists.

Porn doesn't rape people; people rape people. Admittedly, pornography doesn't help the way women are perceived in today's society, but it's only a small part of a much larger problem, which extends to sex being used to sell every product under the sun, not to mention half the stuff on TV and film. Banning the stuff isn't the solution. Censorship is bad. Let's start some dialogue instead, and work on the real problems.

Pro-porn feminists.

Admittedly, there's a lot of bad porn out there, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way, nor that there's only one possible way of reacting to what's currently out there. Rather than banning the stuff, let's work to make good porn; porn that will show real women acting in realistic ways, and not as objects. Rather than keeping sex taboo, or leaving it in the hands of people who'd exploit it, let's use the tools we have to create healthier attitudes and empower ourselves.

(These are, of course, really broad descriptions, with holes in them one could drive a Mack truck through. 'Twill serve for our immediate purposes, though.)

As it happens, I'm firmly in the anti-anti- camp. I'm sympathetic to the pro- position, but I can't quite say I'm sold on it myself. But the side I really don't get along with is the anti- side, which is one reason I took this course. I was hoping for a bit of insight into how on Earth that position could be held and defended.

Now that the dust has settled, I still don't think it's a tenable position, but I at least have a better idea of where its proponents are coming from. Reading much of Feminism Unmodified, by Catherine MacKinnon, helped a lot in that regard.

But I digress.

For the final project, I and my two partners in porn were supposed to write a collaborative essay. We decided early on that we were going to split up along the lines of the three positions, with each of us taking one of them, and tracing it back through some of the earlier readings we'd done on ideology and culture.

Then we got the actual assignment.

<2> Drawing on the texts you have read in your case study, explain how... pornography could be said to succeed ideologically; that is, explain how... pornography could be said to produce apparently self-evident and natural ideas.

<3> Then, explain how... pornography could be said to fail ideologically; that is, explain how... pornography could be said to produce unintended effects that undermine its ideological elements.

At the time that we got this assignment, I was a bit taken aback, but okay, I figured I could hack it. As it happened, at the time, I thought I was going to be writing the anti-porn section of the paper, and I could see how the that part of the essay could be handled.

But somewhere along the way, one of my other partners turned out to prefer taking the anti- position himself, and, feeling pretty darn familiar with all sides of the argument, I switched to the anti-anti- side.

It wasn't until I was ready to actually write my part of the essay that I realized that it was impossible to follow the rules when covering my turf.

See, for the anti- side, or the pro- side, the assignment makes perfect sense. Both sides believe that pornography has an effect on society in general. The difference is that the anti-porn side feels that it can have only one possible effect, and that that effect is dangerous, so it all needs to be banned; while the pro-porn side feels that it can have a number of possible effects, some of them good, so we should work to produce the good sort.

The anti-anti- side doesn't really care what effect it has. The anti-anti- side is just concerned with defending free speech, no matter what the content is. It's the anti-anti- people in the ACLU, for instance, who went ahead and successfully defended the right of pro-porn feminists to display some really graphic pornographic images in public, so that the public could see how horrific they were, and they could get it all banned. Us liberals are funny that way. :-)

That being the case... given that the anti-anti- side isn't concerned with the content of pornography, or the ideas it perpetuates... well, there wasn't any way of answering the questions posed by the assignment.

Which I realized pretty quickly, on Thursday morning. With the 7-10 page paper due at 5:00 PM.

My Really Big Notepad came with 50 sheets of 18"x24" newsprint, of which I've used roughly 25 sheets in the two or three years since I bought it. There are times when nothing less will do. So I sketched out a rough outline of how I wanted to organize the paper, spending two pages quickly setting out what the anti-anti-porn position is, then going on to root it in Kant's viewpoint, while showing some significant differences between the two, drawing a few other connections to some of the opinions we'd read on hate speech, and then finally going on to show how the anti-anti- porn approach itself was ideological, to a great extent, and possibly show how that liberal ideology could be said to succeed or fail.

I never quite got that far. In point of fact, I ended up spending the first six pages doing the summary of the position that I'd expected to spend two pages on, and then rambled on aimlessly for the last four pages.

Adding to the fun was that I didn't quite get it done in time. I left a message on the professor's voice mail at 5 PM, and then called back every 10-15 minutes, until I finally finished the thing at 7 PM, working at my apartment, at which point I left another message to tell him that I was coming over with the thing.

I had a bit of trouble sliding the paper under his office door, as instructed, it being blocked with a bunch of other papers, so it was pretty clear that I'd gotten it in on time, at least.

So, in short, the page length was right, the grammar was okay, and there was more or less no argument. But who's being picky? <wry smile>

(Wanna see for yourself? Why not. I've taken it down from the Web, but the morbidly curious can still get it -- in Rich Text Format -- by asking politely.)