“In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off….” ??? Naomi Wolfe.
“ Naomi Wolfe makes the case that porn has subverted the traditional power of the woman which is sex.From a cynical male’s point of view, Wolfe appears to be lamenting the good old days when men were at the mercy of women for sexual gratification. It sounds nicer when she says it, though she cannot help but draw the same economic analogies that I will. Because it is a market, and the issue is supply and demand.
That is why it is good for Wolfe, that “When [she] came of age…There were more young men who wanted to e with naked women than there were naked women on the market.”
But here she makes explicit her model of sex: an economic transaction, replete with buyer and seller. (Implicitly throughout the article, men are buyers, women the sellers).Wolfe herself speaks in marxist terms about the vagina – and not merely to make sense of today’s hypersexualized dystopia: according to her, vaginas have always had an exchange value. My question : why the scare quotes? I think the gist of the article is summed by one sentence: For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted the [the power and allure] of real naked women.”Sorry, Wolf, but I agree with you. Today, it is a buyers’ market. But the solution is not a regression to a romantic middle eastern cabin, set with candles and draped with embroideries, a “pre-market” sexual space: such a space has never existed.” By masonk on 03/04/2008 at 9:00 am
I agree with Masonk here that it isn’t a matter of regressing to the romantic and that such a space probably never existed, what then is the ‘solution’? So what next then and how? I wonder…
Rolling 