Is the entire concept that someone would create commentary art on the topic of pornography by making an image that first attracts and then, upon examination, foregrounds the ugly and repulsive aspects of porn completely beyond you? Are you really totally unfamiliar with the idea that part of what makes art ‘art’ is complexity and ambiguity of interpretation?

Taking what is usually subtext and unconscious in porn and making it obivous and conscious is precisely what this image is about. It may or may not still be porn, but it is not ‘just’ porn.

Except that I’m talking to Delphyne, so all porn is just porn and all of it just the same as the rest.

Amanda: More sane people that are anti-porn should be cringing to read this, since it is evidence that there is a certain kind of literalism to anti-porn attitudes that I used to think was a strawman.

This is why I was saying that I thought Delphyne was a troll for a while over at Pandagon. I, too, had previously assumed that people like her only existed in the fever dreams of the real patriarchy foot-soldiers..

evil_fizz: Damnit! I have been waiting through 70+ comments to make a terrible pun about porn and the word fallacious.

Is it comonly assumed that a witch’s broom is some sort of Freudian symbol or compensation, but this is, of course, a fallacy.

But I think it probably is legitimate to ask if Playboy is using Pandagon, and if there should have been a stronger negative response. I am a little “disappointed,” just because I would have loved to have seen Amanda really slag Playboy’s readers. I think it would have been great fun to read (but then I’m a bit of an a-hole).

But of course to Amanda’s credit she did subsequently dedicate the song to Playboy, which was her way of giving them the finger.

FWIW I was completely unprepared for the personal attacks on Amanda, not least because my own blog readers are also for the most part Pandagon readers and there’s never been an anti-Amanda vibe at my place. In retrospect I should have realized that would happen, but obviously I’m an idiot.

I continue to hold out the hope that we’ll be able to discuss these issues intelligently with each other. I mean, shit, I read both Amanda and Twisty regularly, and like both and occasionally disagree with both. No reason it has to turn into a fucking bloodbath.

I’m not “pro-porn” by any stretch–not with the way things are right now. The so-called sex-pos folks don’t like me at all. And I still had a good laugh at Playboy’s expense when I followed the links. The only thing I thought when I saw that post was “What a bunch of fucking morons.” Not, “Oh! Amanda and Pam endorse pornography, fucking sellouts!”

Hmm…I think we have the answer to that now, based on the responses to Amanda. I would say that her critics labor under a lack of recognition of economic reality, an inappropriate sense of ownership, and a weird sense of entitlement.

Don’t get into tautological arguments

Damnit! I have been waiting through 70+ comments to make a terrible pun about porn and the word fallacious.

I know it’s a little late for me to be jumping on this thread, but–I think the critiques of Pandagon may be raising some valid points, but it’s too bad they got mixed up in, or even overshadowed by, personal attacks. It does seem to me valid and fair to ask if Playboy is using Pandagon as a fig leaf, so to speak, so they can continue the posture of championing an “enlightened” attitude towards sex, rather than just being a purveyor of banal, middlebrow misogyny. The figleaf theory is supported by Playboy’s depiction of Pandagon as a scourge of “humorless moralists.”

I think this is blowing the mention of my website in their magazine out of propotion. Really, I think it’s best to think about how Playboy the entity probably has little bearing on this list—I will bet $20 it’s just one writer on staff who put it together. At this point, they use the fig leaf manuever in their sleep, as it were. But the amount of examination that’s been brought to this makes it sound like I posed naked for them or got a column for them, instead of a single mention in a list that 75% of their readers will ignore.

we aren’t being distracted by society, we are distracting ourselves with this. no wonder women are still beaten to death every day in the US, we can’t stop attacking each other long enough to unite and make some positive change.

I have much sympathy with this viewpoint, right up until the part where I remember that (1) actually, some of the participants in this discussion ARE also working to make “some positive change” and (2) men only have, what, a several-millenia-or-more headstart on the whole unified front business? Do you suppose they were born with that? Patriarchy wasn’t built in a day and an egalitarian society won’t be, either. One only hopes it will look radically different from what we have now when it’s done.

And then there’s the purely catty part of me that can’t help loving all the people who jump into discussions of what they condemn as trivial bullshit, purely for the purpose of condemning it as trivial bullshit. What was that train you just missed? Was that the northbound Positive Change Express?