12.11.2001

Alas, I have to post something quickly or risk a blank Blog. Horrors!

On the train this morning, I read an excellent article from the latest Re:Generation Quarterly by Read Mercer Schuchardt on the cultural victory of Hugh Hefner. I agree that Christians do too little to combat porn and its attendant philosophy. As a woman, I'm disheartened to see the ways in which femininity is disdained for a kind of new perverse masculine womanhood. Porn culture has done a lot to help that along. Here's a quote that I think is right-on:
In Hugh Hefner's world, meanwhile, equality for females has come to mean synonymity with males. Unisex clothing is male. Equal pay for equal work is: male (inasmuch it assumes the irrelevance of childbirth, and certainly of childbearing). Thanks largely to Hefner's pioneering spirit, men have won every battle in the modern war of the sexes. Where women are free to be equal, they are free to be equal to men. Just go shopping at the Gap. [I can't! My body is too womanly instead of boyish! --LWG] Or pick up any woman's magazine published in the last few decades. In it you will find an article, essay or questionnaire demonstrating or demanding that women should have more sex than they are currently having. Is there an escape, a way out, a means by which a woman can choose not to have her social norms and sexual drives dictated by porn culture?
Here's another kicker..."Porn culture demands of women precisely what real women don't need or want: skinny bodies, huge fake breasts, no babies and men who are unwilling to commit to anything more than a quick shag."

What I'd like to see is a new feminism that doesn't try to turn women into men. Anyone with me?

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