Status Updates From Take Back the Night: Women ...

This is probably going to take me quite a while to get through... both because of the subject matter, and because of the way I have to grit my teeth at the style of writing employed by (mostly) white feminists in the 1970s...

"Thus, Feshbach and Malamuth state that 'one exposure to violence in pornography an significantly influence erotic reactions to the portrayal of rape.' "

"The catharsis mode, when applied to pornography, assumes that the ore you see the less you do. In contrast, the imitation model states that the more you see the more you do."

"...and that open display of pornography promotes a climate in which acts of sexual hostility are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged."

"Take, for example, the classic case of Donald Fearn, who abducted seventeen-year old Alice Porter... Fearn... tied her up on wires and an awl, mutilated her while she still lived in ways so horrible that they have never been publically reported, beat her to death with a hammer, and threw her broken body down a well. After his arrest..."Ever since I was a young boy I have wanted to torture a beautiful young girl."

"Every few seconds in America a woman or girl is slapped, slugged, punched, chopped, slashed, choked, kicked, raped, sodomized, mutilated, or murdered. she loses an eye, a kidney, a baby, a life. That's a face. And if the statistics are anywhere near right, at least one of every four women reading this paragraph will feel that fact through firsthand experience."

"Because such dehumanized ideas about women are so widely accepted, pornography is often not recognized as a system of propaganda designed to exploit and misrepresent the sexual differences between men and women."

Interesting.

"In his book Techniques of Persuasion, J.A.C. Brown lists eight techniques which are universally employed in propaganda campaigns. They are:

1. Use of Stereotypes
2. Name Substitution
3. Selection
4. Lying
5. Repetition
6. Assertion
7. Pinpointing the Enemy
8. Appeal to authority."

"The easiest way to accomplish these ends is to convince people that they are being threatened in some way by a scapegoat group. The propagandist must create or augment this mood of fearful dissatisfaction in order for his ideas to be readily absorbed."

"If there were really to be a catharsis experienced regarding sexual violence toward women, the need for that violence would disappear or if it reappeared, be only a shadow of itself and renamed, linked to its source, its origin."

"Advertisers in the last decades have spent millions of dollars to create associations between their products and sexual pleasure in order to fabricate a need for those products."

"It has obscured the perfectly obvious; that to put any two images together is to create an association. That to put violence and women's bodies together, to associate sexuality and violence fabricates a need."

"Catharsis, Catharsis, it is grimly implied, is the true role of pornography."