This Just In, Men Like Women
link Is pornography driving men crazy? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.
Boy, this is good party chit chat. Naomi Wolf is a self styled ‘third wave feminist’, whatever that means, who has written a number of books on the state of women. So expert is Wolf on women that she was a paid consultant to Bill Clinton and Al Gore on how to get their votes during their respective campaigns. In the rareified air of the New York intelligentsia, her utterances are met with rapturous acceptance by the limosine liberal set who think that anything offered in pretentious english must be sage prose. Here is her descripton of beauty as taken from her famous book, The Beauty Myth:
“…”beauty” as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony…”
?? Who speaks in such babble? Anyway, her point is that society (which means men ) dictates what is attractive when it comes to women, a condition she finds abhorrent. Interestingly enough, in another commentary on the attire required of women in middle eastern countries, she says:
“…The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I traveled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channeling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home…”
Only liberals can fail to see the comic contradictions in these two opinions, from the same person. In Western societies, women are free to dress any way they wish, anywhere they want. Despite Wolf’s contention that the manner of dress reflects men’s oppression, the only oppression stems from the fact that women’s fashions are predominantly a reflection of the tastes of gay men. Very few straight men have much control over the vagaries of women’s fashions. In the case of Middle Eastern women, appropriate channelling or not, their attire is exclusively dictated by that patriarchal society. In fact, this is exactly the circumstance described in her Beauty Myth. Somehow, in the middle east, this is noble.
What does this have to do with the proliferation of pornography? Only that men are men and most men like women. The implication from her article is that men in the west have become more dysfunctional in the wake of unfettered access to porno. I suppose that this same argument can be applied to dope smoking, but I digress. What I can say with confidence is that if men in the middle east were provided access to the unfettered supply of porno that’s available in the West, they’d be just as dysfunctional. Maybe it’s just me, but to mandate that the women in your society be enshrouded completely from head to toe in the latest burlap chic already seems just a bit dysfunctional. It’s a very tenuous link to ascribe rampant pornography to bad behaviour of men. In the west at least, both men and women are free to decide what’s attractive. In middle eastern societies, that choice is not afforded to women. It’s a laughable stretch to say that men are more ‘functional’ there. If we are going to draw tenuous links, I suggest that men in the west are more likely driven to strange behaviour by being exposed to images of women such as Rosie O’Donnell or Joy Behar.
News for Wolf, men like women; and they like them in all shapes and sizes. They’re funny that way. Society has little to do with it. They’ve been behaving badly long before the explosion of accessible pornography. She may get more traction for her argument in a society that wraps up their women like aliens in garbage bags.