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Cómo hacer cosas con pornografía
Cómo hacer cosas con pornografía, entre una monografía y una colección de ensayos, es un intento de escribir sobre la pornografía, la cosificación de la mujer, la cultura hook-up y otros asuntos relacionados, no solo como contribución a los estudios feministas de género, sino con afán de discutir el modo en que los filósofos abordan la filosofía: como un producto de "genios" o como buscadores de la verdad. Para Bauer, la filosofía debe atraer a la gente para que reflexione sobre la manera de percibir y entender el mundo, en lugar de perpetuar la inevitable tropa sexista de «genios» y buscadores. Parafraseando en el título la teoría de los actos de habla del filósofo John Austin y de su obra Cómo hacer cosas con palabras, Bauer presenta una revolucionaria concepción de lo que los filósofos pueden hacer con sus palabras en el mundo.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 15, 2022
I'm giving this book two stars not because it is particularly bad or anything, but it is quite dense and kind of all over the place in terms of topic (if you asked me to summarize the book, I don't think I'd be able to do so in a succinct or satisfying way). But, there are some good thoughts in here that would perhaps be better served if written specifically as a collection of essays instead.
"It's rather odd, however, that Nussbaum should take this view, since she is a major advocate of the idea that, in unjust social circumstances, people adapt their preferences to the shriveled space of possibilities in which they are operating...Rather, her point is that when frank social inequalities exist, people may shrink their expectations and desires to fit within the resulting constraints. What this means is that it's not obvious that mutuality of desire, respect, and consent is enough to ensure that a woman is not subject to sexual objectification of the noxious kind."
"So there is pleasure in pleasuring guys, and this pleasure is real. And yet it is not unadulterated. For the stories the girls I've been discussing tell themselves about strength and power and pleasure do not, at the end of the day, cohere...They tell you that the pleasures of hooking up, like the pleasures of getting really, really drunk - pleasures that often, it turns out - go hand in hand - don't last. There's fallout. There's what I've taking to calling the hookup hangover. You give the boy your cell number, but he doesn't text you later, which means that, unless he's suddenly gone celibate, it turns out that he's not interested in seconds, which means, at the very least, that your power to please him isn't unique...You worry that maybe he was one guy too many for you, that maybe in the eyes of the world, your world, you may have slid irrevocably over the line, which is as sharp and fateful as ever, from babe-hood into slut-dom. Then you might wonder whether exchanging a nice dinner for a nice blow job constitutes a fair trade, or why the players are usually guys and the sluts usually girls, or how some sexual Gestalt shift will actually come to pass, post-law school, so that guys will suddenly settle happily ever after for just one girl. Even if a girl never comes to suspect that the playing field may not be even, I am suggesting, she does not always experience her sexual way of being in the world as of a piece with her worldly 'postfeminists' ambitions...In other words, they are interested not so much in claiming that the dualistic picture is true as they are in drawing our attention to the fact that our experience is one of dualism or, more precisely, of a tension between our drive to transcend ourselves and our drive to cement our identities in ways that we and others will find ceaselessly praiseworthy."
"A feminist therefore cannot afford to commit herself, consciously or mindlessly, to a form of writing that systematically fails to constitute genuine, and genuinely efficacious, cultural criticism. This means that feminist philosophers cannot afford to write in the way the profession encourages, that is to say, as though our authority as thinkers were somehow identical with our cultural authority, as though the sheer rationality of our ideas and argumentation ought to be enough to effect change. Crudely put, the attitude - the unexamined, unexpressed attitude - that feminists must consciously reject is this: if rationality can be shown to dwell beyond doubt on the side of a certain viewpoint, then all rational creatures ought to be won over to that viewpoint; those people who resist it are, regrettably, either deficient in their cognitive powers, stubbornly incoherent, or otherwise beyond the reach of reason."
"Unlike her male counterparts in narrative film, who are makers of the law and masters of language, she is an object controlled and manipulated by these symbolic systems, something to be punished, devalued, ignored, or lusted after. Of courses...the film industry does not have a monopoly on promoting the idea that women are objects there for the taking. However, what's insidious about narrative film is that it ensures that our helpless objectification of the women it depicts is reinforced by our continuously experiencing pleasure as we look at them. This pleasure is itself a function of our helplessly identifying ourselves with male filmic characters, that is, with the masters that men invariable become on film - and by 'our' here, Mulvey means all film viewers, regardless of their gender. Because narrative film manipulates us in this way, we are morally obliged to pay attention to what becomes of women on film and thereby to destroy our pleasure in watching them, or what Mulvey calls our 'scopophilia.' Can there be any doubt that there is something correct in what Mulvey is saying? Certainly, the idea that women on film routinely become sex objects, present simply to be looked at, regardless of what is going on in the diegesis, is confirmed by - to cite one of the most obvious examples - the sheer number of gratuitous boob shots in virtually every mainstream Hollywood film and TV show these days, even the edgiest and most respectable ones." I will die on this hill
"It's rather odd, however, that Nussbaum should take this view, since she is a major advocate of the idea that, in unjust social circumstances, people adapt their preferences to the shriveled space of possibilities in which they are operating...Rather, her point is that when frank social inequalities exist, people may shrink their expectations and desires to fit within the resulting constraints. What this means is that it's not obvious that mutuality of desire, respect, and consent is enough to ensure that a woman is not subject to sexual objectification of the noxious kind."
"So there is pleasure in pleasuring guys, and this pleasure is real. And yet it is not unadulterated. For the stories the girls I've been discussing tell themselves about strength and power and pleasure do not, at the end of the day, cohere...They tell you that the pleasures of hooking up, like the pleasures of getting really, really drunk - pleasures that often, it turns out - go hand in hand - don't last. There's fallout. There's what I've taking to calling the hookup hangover. You give the boy your cell number, but he doesn't text you later, which means that, unless he's suddenly gone celibate, it turns out that he's not interested in seconds, which means, at the very least, that your power to please him isn't unique...You worry that maybe he was one guy too many for you, that maybe in the eyes of the world, your world, you may have slid irrevocably over the line, which is as sharp and fateful as ever, from babe-hood into slut-dom. Then you might wonder whether exchanging a nice dinner for a nice blow job constitutes a fair trade, or why the players are usually guys and the sluts usually girls, or how some sexual Gestalt shift will actually come to pass, post-law school, so that guys will suddenly settle happily ever after for just one girl. Even if a girl never comes to suspect that the playing field may not be even, I am suggesting, she does not always experience her sexual way of being in the world as of a piece with her worldly 'postfeminists' ambitions...In other words, they are interested not so much in claiming that the dualistic picture is true as they are in drawing our attention to the fact that our experience is one of dualism or, more precisely, of a tension between our drive to transcend ourselves and our drive to cement our identities in ways that we and others will find ceaselessly praiseworthy."
"A feminist therefore cannot afford to commit herself, consciously or mindlessly, to a form of writing that systematically fails to constitute genuine, and genuinely efficacious, cultural criticism. This means that feminist philosophers cannot afford to write in the way the profession encourages, that is to say, as though our authority as thinkers were somehow identical with our cultural authority, as though the sheer rationality of our ideas and argumentation ought to be enough to effect change. Crudely put, the attitude - the unexamined, unexpressed attitude - that feminists must consciously reject is this: if rationality can be shown to dwell beyond doubt on the side of a certain viewpoint, then all rational creatures ought to be won over to that viewpoint; those people who resist it are, regrettably, either deficient in their cognitive powers, stubbornly incoherent, or otherwise beyond the reach of reason."
"Unlike her male counterparts in narrative film, who are makers of the law and masters of language, she is an object controlled and manipulated by these symbolic systems, something to be punished, devalued, ignored, or lusted after. Of courses...the film industry does not have a monopoly on promoting the idea that women are objects there for the taking. However, what's insidious about narrative film is that it ensures that our helpless objectification of the women it depicts is reinforced by our continuously experiencing pleasure as we look at them. This pleasure is itself a function of our helplessly identifying ourselves with male filmic characters, that is, with the masters that men invariable become on film - and by 'our' here, Mulvey means all film viewers, regardless of their gender. Because narrative film manipulates us in this way, we are morally obliged to pay attention to what becomes of women on film and thereby to destroy our pleasure in watching them, or what Mulvey calls our 'scopophilia.' Can there be any doubt that there is something correct in what Mulvey is saying? Certainly, the idea that women on film routinely become sex objects, present simply to be looked at, regardless of what is going on in the diegesis, is confirmed by - to cite one of the most obvious examples - the sheer number of gratuitous boob shots in virtually every mainstream Hollywood film and TV show these days, even the edgiest and most respectable ones." I will die on this hill
March 21, 2016
The titular essay gets 5 stars, but the rest feels very random and cobbled together. In other words, just read the essay "How to Do Things with Pornography"
July 20, 2015
Heavy philosophy with a light touch. There's a lot to think about in here.
June 16, 2019
This anthology is really clickbait-ey in its title (even though there is an essay of this name in the work). Honestly, the best essay isn't even the one from which the book takes its name's sake.
August 16, 2023
A thought-provoking, incredible intellectual, and rather easily readable book about quite a number of things, pornography being the least of them, and the least discussed and analyzed. So anyone looking to this book for prurience disguised as scholarship may want to reconsider. The book's title, I discovered, is a play on a philosophy book by John L. Austin titled "How to Do Things With Words". A brief investigation into that tome will give you a much better idea what Bauer is doing with her essays than any attempt to extrapolate from her title or even from reading the provided summary. I loved this book. Bauer is obviously seriously intelligent and intelligently serious. If you tend to look askance at philosophy or semiotics or language-as-study then this book will be a challenge. I would suggest taking up that challenge. The writing is accessible, something Bauer believes philosophic writing is not, mostly, and the topics are academic but real world applicable, necessary even. If anything, reading this will make you reconsider and re-evaluate Simone De Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex', likely seeing it as significantly more valuable and insightful than before. Bauer's essays are linked - as in "connected", not "presented as web addresses" - so reading from start to finish arguably leads to a more complete understanding and appreciation.
January 17, 2017
I read only the titular essay, as someone in the comments recommended, for its discussion on objectification in hopes that it would clear up some thinking I've been doing on the topic. It didn't accomplish very much on that front. I did however enjoy this closing reminder –
"..it is possible to look at something very familiar – ordinary words, in his case – in a new way, one that shows the perversity of our history of imagining that words bespeak themselves and stolidly wear their truth conditions (and nothing else) on their proverbial sleeves."
"..it is possible to look at something very familiar – ordinary words, in his case – in a new way, one that shows the perversity of our history of imagining that words bespeak themselves and stolidly wear their truth conditions (and nothing else) on their proverbial sleeves."
March 16, 2024
Yes, Bauer. Pornography does have an influence on society. It influences the ways in which men and women interact; the ways they view each other and themselves. It influences our social consciousness about sex and gender. It influences -- for many of us, even moulds! -- the ways in which we get it on 'privately' and 'in the bedroom'. In many ways, it renounces the privacy about sex. And more than that, it involves real people with real bodies, minds, and consciousnesses about how who they are and and what they do in the moments they are in front of that camera, do not belong to them but to our eyes. Simply look around you, and you will find pornography speaks volumes.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews