Six Ways said:
Wow. What a ridiculous strawman.
No-one said he was designed so straight men would be sexually attracted to him.
including failing to recognize that Kratos and his costume is a MALE sexual self-image fantasy.
1. This assumes that men have any sexual attraction to Kratos either through wanting to be him or be like him. Attraction is attraction. They may not want to have sex with Kratos, but that is not the point. The point is through some mechanism that you've created in your head, men have some sexual fantasy involving Kratos because all men apparently want to be him.
It's asinine. It's idiotic. It serves only to exonerate women from being sexually attracted to physical form. It's blatantly sexist as it seeks to enshrine an inequality in male and female sexuality.
2. This is the internet. It is not a formal debate location. Utilization of formal fallacies to dismiss informal discussion is rather moot.
So, you're using:
A) a poll which puts muscular torso as number 10 in attractiveness, and slimness at 3, and explicitly states that muscular arms didn't even make the top 10
And the point just sails right over your head. It's not the placement that matters. It's the fact that women look for these traits at all. It's not where they rank. If they exist at all then they give us a basis upon which to say that women are just as sexually attracted to muscular men as you apparently say men are.
B) an article which never mentions musculature once
Yes, the pictures of muscular or lean men are just there because it makes men sexually attracted because men want to be that!
And please stop using strawmen. I never said women don't 'crave' physical traits in men. Just that Kratos was not designed for them.
Which is where you are wrong. Kratos is designed to appeal to a mass audience and the quickest way to appeal to a mass audience is to target women and men of all orientations. Throw in some sexy girls here, put in a muscular guy there, give him some big fantastic power moves, and you have a game that can appeal to a broad group.
Of course, that is unless you think women are above being sexually attracted to men based on physical appearance. Then you hold this view that such horrible, brutish things could never be "for women!" Anything to once again pretend that women are above such horrible things as being sexually attracted to men because of their bodies.
And for the last time:
This is a message forum. It is not a formal location of debate or philosophical exploration. Stop using formal fallacies as some magic wand to elevate you above someone else. They do not work in that manner.
If you want to follow the rules of formal debate, these arguments are completely invalid as they are circular (males cause patriarchy which oppresses women in the patriarchy that men create that oppresses women) and poorly structured (men are attracted to physical bodies, women are attracted to physical bodies, therefore physical bodies are for men.)
evilthecat said:
Correction: You should make the effort to sound like you've read Dworkin when you talk about her.
evilthecat said:
That is a fairly good summary...
I'll need you to pick one of these two. You're sending entirely too many signals.
But let's handle the chief issues. The first is the sheer weight of these two facts you posted:
She at the time identified as a lesbian and seems uninterested in the whole concept of "sexual behaviour" with men at all.
Her book is titled 'intercourse' because it's about the act of intercourse. The act of penis going in vagina.
I don't know why you thought these two sentences belonged together in any context. "Oh, she was disinterested in men, so she wrote a book about sex with men."
And it's titled Intercourse because she talks about sex. The crux of the book is that sex is a misogynistic institutional behavior wherein men exercise their power over women. She frames this with selected works that she feels illustrates that well.
Now, let's cover some quotations, shall we? http://www.feminish.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Intercourse-Andrea-Dworkin-pdf.pdf
Equality means physical wholeness, virginity--for the woman, equality requires not ever having been reduced to that object of sensuality in order to be used as a tool of men's desire and satiation in sex. What is lost for the woman when she becomes a sexual object, and when she is confirmed in that status by being fucked, is not recoverable. Just as the man is depraved, that is, an exploiter, so too the woman is depraved, that is, an object p.20
This is in analysis of The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy which is actually an argument for abstinence and Tolstoy's own exploration of rage. However, Dworkin takes it further as a sign of open revulsion and near hedonistic disregard shown by men in the advance of women.
Tolstoy himself wanted to give up wealth and power--his estates, his monies from his books, eating meet, his position in society; he wanted to be simple, nonviolent, and poor. In this renunciation of power he included sexual intercourse in principle though not in practice. In The Kreuter Sonata he knew, as artists often do, more than he was willing to act on in real life especially about how women (and one woman in particular) were part of the wealth he owned; and especially about how intercourse was implicitly violent, predicated as it was on exploitation and objectification...the penis itself as a weapon in intercourse with the social inferior. pg 24
The internal landscape [of sex] is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable; not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing way of vitality in the numbness finally of habit of compulsion or the loneliness of separation p 25.
Whereas Dworkin rarely slips outside of the narrative of the stories she's "analyzing" the tale is often the same: men are debased in their sexual need against the superior woman who bears power in herself but lacks power in society. This sex, Dworkin writes, is a stigma or mark left heavy on those who have it, even noting
Being stigmatized by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible. p.58
Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her--over her and inside her--is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes over her. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him;l he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her. p 79
That one speaks for itself, doesn't it? It is here where the old accusation "all sex is rape" is often seen because this sounds like a woman cannot give consent. In every way, the man is dominating the woman no matter what. She must, at all times, relent. Dworkin liked to frame her work as just analyzing texts, but we know better than that in a post-modern world. She was giving her opinion of sex along with her deconstruction through the radical sex-negative feminist lens.
Now, you can argue all you want that Dworkin did not share these views, but we know that Dworkin was very much an sex-negative feminist. She campaigned, heavily, against pornography as a sign of the patriarchy.
In Our Blood, Dworkin wrote as a fix to this:
I suggest to you that the transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and "love" begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; and it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male--clitoral touch and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the body (which needn't--and shouldn't--be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect, and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread--that is, a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and behin to make love as women do together. I am saying that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively "male." No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.
So men will have to no longer have erections, start having sex like "women do" which is apparently rubbing the clitoris, and then completely give up anything and everything that is considered masculine and just embrace what makes them feminine. The reason man must renounce all of this?
No part of the male sexual model can possibly apply [for absolute transformation of human sexuality]
Yeah, she's definitely been misrepresented and treated poorly and unfairly. Good thing I've never read her work, right? Maybe Ms. Dworkin earned her reputation through her works which presented radical sex-negative ideas that are paradoxically called the views of a small group of feminists at the same time that the chief thrust of feminism right now is examinations of sexual representations of women as signs of misogyny and patriarchy.
