Okay, so I finally have some time to begin thoroughly reading Jensen’s Getting off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, which Dan and I have been posting about here and here and here and here.
In the introduction, Jensen, well, introduces, and credits two mentors, Andrea Dworkin and Jim Koplin.
On what Dworkin wants from men, Jensen quotes her directly: “ . . . one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old.” Jensen then follows, “Her request was powerful because of its grim simplicity; it forced us to recognize that we are light-years away from being able to imagine a day without rape.” I am just deathly allergic to such statements. A day without rape? How about if we start with a day without mass slaughter, without corporate malfeasance, without a million different global injustices? This is the kind of hyperbole that alienates all but the most cultish adherents away – it’s worse than preaching to the converted, it’s preaching to the other preachers.
Jensen continues, again quoting Dworkin: “Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.” He sees this as Dworkin asserting that women wanted “to help men transcend masculinity . . . fueled by a love and compassion that went deeper than I have ever seen in a public political person.” Jensen’s goal, in life, and in the book, is to begin men’s transcendence, which men must do for themselves. Again, he quotes Dworkin: “We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore.” Fair enough.
Writing about his other mentor, feminist and anti-porn activist Jim Koplin, Jensen quotes Koplin warning him about the risk (for men) of falling into being the “heroic man in a new, pseudo-feminist context.” (a trap I feel Hugo Schyzer often comes awfully close to falling in). “You have to be here to save your own life,” Jensen quotes Koplin again as saying, which he interprets as understanding that “the same system of male dominance that hurt so many women also made it impossible for men to be fully human, Andrea and Jim made it clear to me: I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to be a human being. . . . Andrea and Jim made it clear to me: It was worth it to struggle . . . because it was the only way to save myself.”
Again, I’m with him, and then I read “to save myself.”
Jensen concludes the introduction: “I am sure that no matter how difficult it is to look at what pornography tells us about ourselves, we have to look. Can we bear to look? Can we afford not to?”
Everything Jensen writes makes sense to me, challenges me in good, tricky ways, but the dogmatic language makes me want to fight him at every turn. He and so many other activists speak with that absoluteness of religious zealots, which Jensen compounds with a wicked messianic streak.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe, eavesdropping on two women in their mid-forties sitting next to me. Their conversation is almost solely about men, their men. Husbands, ex-husbands, two adult living-at-home stepsons who a husband won’t discipline, an ex-husband with a drinking and drug problem who one of the women has had to issue a restraining order against and take child custody from. All of their complaints seem legitimate and all-too emblematic of the lesser evils (than rape and mass murder, say) that men do, and yet I find myself unable to fully sympathize. Is it because all they have to say about the men around them is negative?
In two hours, I’ve heard no positive words about any of the men in their lives, and one of the women is in a committed long-term relationship with the man she rails against. At the risk of sounding like one of those men’s advocacy guys I absolutely despise, these women sound whiney, sound man-hating, like the women those angry men describe who sap their confidence, who keep them down. And yet these women, at least based on what I’ve heard, have every reason to be angry.
Is my resistance to these women’s pain a sign that I have just begun in earnest the struggle that Jensen writes of, finally shedding the cover of my own feminist guilt and confronting my male anger, or, conversely, have I just finally decided to struggle less, to be one more angry, bitter man? Is it a masculine (masculist?) backlash in me that I haven’t experienced before? The problem with questions like this is their polarity, either one is one thing, or the other, struggling to be free, or a macho fuck.
One thing I certainly agree with Jensen on: we have to look. But while we as men have to look, and inarguably have a whole lot more to look at than do women, we all, as humans, have to look at ourselves and, as many of my college freshman would write, “in this fast-paced modern world” so few of us take the time to do so. Jensen looks hard. Onward to chapter one!
