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Old 11-25-2007, 11:04 PM   #121
Xenphor
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Old 11-26-2007, 02:18 PM   #122
DeviousJ
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Originally Posted by Xenphor
very nice... any more?
Totally

Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets
First published Wed Feb 18, 2004; substantive revision Fri Jul 13, 2007

Sex markets have been a concern to feminists because, historically, the “skin trade” has relied predominantly on female service providers and male consumers. Feminist theorists are divided on the question of whether markets in pornographic materials and sexual services pose a threat to women in all contexts. Some feminist theorists argue that when one is paid for sex, a person contracts to give away her freedom and sexuality. Others argue that selling sex harms women only because the work carries a stigma generated from double standards of sexual morality and negative attitudes to sex, which need to be challenged. The debate over sex commerce extends to a number of social practices, including pornography, prostitution, escort services, erotic dancing and strip shows, phonesex and cybersex, and s/m parlors and swing clubs. Feminist philosophers have primarily focused on the issues of pornography and prostitution, and have subsumed the other practices under one of these broad categories.

* 1. Pornography
o 1.1 Violence Against Women
o 1.2 Causal Properties
o 1.3 Sexual Objectification
o 1.4 Legal Suppression
* 2. Prostitution
o 2.1 Origins
o 2.2 Harms to Women
o 2.3 Legal Status
* 3. New Directions
* Bibliography
o Works Cited
o Other Important Works
* Other Internet Resources
* Related Entries

1. Pornography
1.1 Violence Against Women

Pornography emerged in Europe as a distinct cultural genre with the development of mass print culture in the nineteenth century (Hunt 1996, 10). Historians of Europe tell us that pornographic works appeared and flourished at a time when modern democratic states and industrial-capitalist economies were being formed. Pornographic literature and engravings were often vehicles for promoting new political and scientific ideas. (Hunt 1996). Today, sexually graphic publications occasionally have a political aim, but the majority of such materials are marketed for sexual titillation, entertainment, and instruction. Religious and secular moralists have frequently condemned pornography for its harmful impact on sexual mores, children, and public order and decency. As a result, pornography has been regulated in a variety of ways; in the U.S., pornographic materials can violate obscenity statutes if they appeal to “prurient interests,” are offensive to the “average person,” and lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (Miller v. California 1973).

Pornography became a focus of feminist activism as second-wave feminists began to challenge various forms of culturally entrenched violence against women, especially rape and domestic violence. Many feminists allege that pornographic films and magazines eroticize the sexual assault, torture, and exploitation of women. Feminists have debated whether pornography is merely a reflection of a sexist culture or a significant causal factor in the pervasive sexual violence against women. In the 1980s, feminist philosophers and legal theorists argued that pornographic works could precipitate sexual assaults against women because they endorse or recommend the violation and degradation of women (Longino 1980, 43). Helen Longino claims that pornography shows men and women taking pleasure in activities that objectify women and treat women as less than human. By depicting female subjects as dehumanized objects, pornography encourages the idea that women can be treated without moral regard — i.e., raped and tortured. Longino writes, “What's wrong with pornography, then, is its degrading and dehumanizing portrayal of women (and not its sexual content). Pornography, by its very nature, requires that women be subordinate to men and mere instruments for the fulfillment of male fantasies” (Longino 1980, 45).

Some years later, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin defined pornography, in their model ordinance, as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women” (MacKinnon 1993, 121, n. 32). The ordinance captured the developing feminist view that pornography is a form of defamatory speech against women and can precipitate invidious forms of discrimination against women. MacKinnon writes, “Women who charge men with sexual abuse are not believed. The pornographic view of them is: they want it; they all want it” (MacKinnon 1987, 191). In other words, by undermining women's ability to seek justice for sexual assaults and harassment, the production and dissemination of pornography promotes gender-based discrimination and oppression. Moreover, MacKinnon argues that “Specific pornography does directly cause some assaults. Some rapes are performed by men with paperback books in their pockets” (MacKinnon 1987, 184). MacKinnon claims both that pornography is used by men “to train women to sexual submission” (MacKinnon 1987, 188), and that “pornography conditions male orgasm to female subordination” (MacKinnon 1987, 190). In other words, pornography shapes both female and male sexual desire into victim/abuser roles that are then treated as natural forms of sexual and gender expression. Furthermore, pornography promotes rights violations not only of the female partners, friends, acquaintances, and relatives of the men who consume pornography, but also of the women who participate in its production, according to MacKinnon. This is because the acts caught on film in much pornography are allegedly coerced through intimidation and money. In MacKinnon's words, pornography represents “sex forced on real women so that it can be sold at a profit to be forced on other real women; women's bodies trussed and maimed and raped and made into things to be hurt and obtained and accessed, and this presented as the nature of women; the coercion that is visible and the coercion that has become invisible — this and more bothers feminists about pornography … pornography causes attitudes and behaviors of violence and discrimination that define the treatment and status of half of the population” (MacKinnon 1987, 147). In short, a number of feminists conclude that pornography is not simply a reflection of sexism and male domination, but that it “nourishes sexism” (Longino 1980, 54) by being a key component of the mechanism for producing and maintaining male domination.

Longino, MacKinnon, and others argue that pornography should not be given the same legal protection as other expressive materials, and recommend that pornography be strictly regulated. However, they advocate the legal regulation of pornography, not as a form of obscene expression, but as a practice that causes injuries to women, individually and as a group. Longino argues that liberal toleration for pornography constitutes toleration for civil and sexual harms against women (Longino 1980, 48). MacKinnon and Dworkin emphasize that, because women possess vastly unequal social power compared to men, women's participation in the production of pornography should not be considered fully consensual (MacKinnon 1987, 128, 148-49; Dworkin 1979, 201). Pornography, on their view, involves the coercive exploitation and public humiliation of vulnerable and disempowered citizens, and it encourages further abuse. For MacKinnon and Dworkin, pornography serves as a critical weapon in maintaining women's second-class social status, for it perpetuates a climate in which women are both defined as sexual objects and constantly threatened with violence, making it impossible for them to exercise whatever formal rights they have won. MacKinnon and Dworkin's model ordinance proposes to make “pornography actionable as a civil rights violation” so that women could seek legal redress when pornographic materials interfered with the exercise of their rights or caused personal harms (MacKinnon 1993, 22, 121, n. 32). They argue that, by protecting the speech of pornographers and shielding them from liability, the state fails to protect women's equality and freedom. MacKinnon writes, “The First Amendment essentially presumes some level of social equality among people … The First Amendment also presumes that for the mind to be free to fulfill itself, speech must be free and open. Andrea's work shows that pornography contributes to enslaving women's minds and bodies. As a social process and as a form of ‘speech,’ pornography amounts to terrorism and promotes not freedom but silence. Rather it promotes freedom for men and enslavement and silence for women” (MacKinnon 1987, 129-130). In sum, a number of feminist theorists maintain that the legal and social suppression of pornography is necessary to achieve gender equality and to resist the oppression of women.

Not all feminist theorists concur with the feminist critique of pornography. While agreeing that the content of pornography condones the objectionable treatment of women, Ann Garry was one of the first to question whether pornography should be held responsible for pervasive gender-based violence and discrimination. Garry writes, “Much of the research on the effects of pornography indicates that any effect it has — positive or negative –is short lived” (Garry 1979, 132). Garry also questions whether treating a woman as a sex object is always bad, and suggests that pornography succeeds in harming women, in part, because viewers assume that sex is generally harmful to women (Garry 1979, 136-37). Garry encourages feminists to support the production of non-sexist pornography rather than try to suppress pornographic materials. Many of the themes of Garry's early essay have persisted in the ongoing feminist pornography debate: the causal properties of pornographic works, the moral significance of sexual objectification, and the legal suppression of pornography.
1.2 Causal Properties

Reviewing the social science literature on the connection between pornography and rape, Diana Scully writes, “the proliferation of cultural products, like pornography, intensifies the quantity and quality of violence in men's fantasies. Further, particularly when women are depicted as receiving pleasure from the violence directed at them, pornography trivializes rape and, thus, may encourage more men to act on their fantasies. Armed with the myths celebrated in violent pornography, such as women secretly want to be raped, men who rape can and do believe that their behavior is within the normative boundaries of the culture” (Scully 1990, 155). Unlike earlier research, which involved somewhat artificial laboratory experiments to detect the effects of exposure to pornography (56-57), Scully's research compares the consumption of pornographic materials by convicted rapists with a control group of felons. Although she notes some problems with her research design, she concludes that her “data do establish that the majority of convicted rapists were familiar with pornography and that their use of such material was somewhat greater than that of other felons” (Scully 1990, 154).

Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer question whether accounts of the causal properties of pornography are helpful or illuminating. They argue that such accounts assume a deterministic model of human behavior, in which men lose control over their behavior and respond somewhat mindlessly to pornographic stimuli (Cameron & Frazer 2000, 248-251). The idea that men simply imitate what they see in pornography, or are conditioned to behave in certain ways through exposure to pornography, implies that men are not able to creatively and critically interpret pornographic materials. Although some men may unthinkingly copy what they see, or may even become “addicted” to sexual violence through pornography, these men are the exception, not the rule (Cameron & Frazer 2000, 243). By treating sexual violence as a product of exposure to pornography, feminists promote a view that relieves sexual predators of responsibility for their actions, and blames their actions instead on expressive materials or the pathological conditions they allegedly cause. Although causal theories invoking the loss of the individual control through “imitation” and “addiction” may be useful to defendants in sexual assault and murder cases, Cameron and Frazer point out that these theories undermine the feminist goal of showing that sexual violence is a function of cultural norms and structural inequalities, rather than mental debilitation or disease (Cameron & Frazer 2000, 248). Ironically, causal models may engender social sympathy for the perpetrators of sexual violence and make it difficult to punish them (Cameron and Frazer 2000, 247). Cameron and Frazer conclude that feminists can be critical of “the discourses which inform sexual practice” and imagine alternative discourses, without promoting problematic models of human behavior (Cameron & Frazer 2000, 253).

Some feminist philosophers enlist the tools of speech act theory to explicate the causal properties of pornography, especially the idea that pornography subordinates and silences women. Rae Langton argues that pornographic speech subordinates by virtue of its illocutionary force (Langton 1995, 215). Drawing on the work of John Austin, Langton points out that pornographic words and images are a form of action. For example, by uttering the words “I promise,” “thank you,” or “you're fired” someone may complete the acts of making a promise, thanking, or disemploying someone. Austin distinguished the actions performed by words (illocutionary force) from their literal content (locutionary force), and their effect on particular listeners (perlocutionary force). The literal content of a pornographic work may be the depiction of a particular sexual act, and this may have the effect of arousing particular viewers and shaping their attitudes toward women. The illocutionary force of a pornographic work pertains to the actions performed in depicting sex and women. For example, just as a sign that says “Whites Only” may subordinate Blacks and authorize racial segregation in certain contexts, a pornographic work may, by virtue of its illocutionary force, subordinate women and endorse sexually predatory behaviors. The illocutionary force of a particular utterance will depend on a variety of factors, including the intentions of the speaker and the background conventions that link the literal meanings of words with social practices. Langton argues that there are good, though not conclusive, reasons to think that the factors which determine the hostile illocutionary force of pornographic texts are in place. However, she also suggests that the illocutionary force of pornography may be blocked effectively by the speech acts of its critics, rather than by censorship (Langton 1995, 216).

Jennifer Hornsby deploys speech act theory to explain how pornography silences women. According to Hornsby, pornographic materials reinforce ideas about women that deprive their utterances of their ordinary illocutionary meaning (Hornsby 1995, 227). For example, pornographic works may convey the idea that the women which men find sexy are eager to satisfy their sexual appetites, so that when women say “no,” their utterance constitutes not an act of refusal but an act of teasing. In this way, pornography may reinforce social codes that allow men to systematically misread and discount women's speech. Women may be silenced, then, not by having their speech suppressed but by changes to the background conditions necessary for successful speech acts, such as refusal. If pornography interferes with the ability of women to communicate, then women cannot contest the harm of pornography with more speech, but only by suppressing pornographic materials.

Nadine Strossen has challenged the claim that pornography subordinates and silences women. Strossen argues that pornographic works do not have singular meanings, nor do they command only sexist understandings. In her words: “Procensorship feminists may well view a woman's apparent welcoming of sex with a man as degrading, but this is because of their negative attitudes toward women's ability to make sexual choices. Other viewers are likely to see such a scene as positive and healthy” (Strossen 1995, 162). Furthermore, according to Strossen, “Ambiguous and positive interpretations apply to the full range of sexual speech, including violent imagery and imagery that might well be labeled ‘subordinating’ or ‘degrading,’ such as rape scenes and scenes dramatizing the so-called rape myth — namely that women want to be raped” (Strossen 1995, 146). To illustrate that pornographic texts can produce divergent responses, Strossen examines opposing reactions to films that depict rape, to controversial images of women in popular advertisements or print media, and even to Andrea Dworkin's own sexually graphic novels. Strossen claims that the effect on some viewers, including women, may be positive: “Pornography, including pornographic rape scenes, may serve another, intensely political end for women who read or see them: they go against the grain, thus allowing viewers to express rebellion and individuality. In this sense, too, words or images that literally depict a woman's powerlessness may well have an empowering impact on female viewers” (Strossen 1995, 174). The existence of divergent interpretations and responses to pornographic works challenges the idea that pornography has any single, harmful impact on the background conditions of communication. And without any single, persistent impact on background understandings, it is doubtful that pornographic works would have the power to silence or subordinate women, in any or all contexts. In some contexts, Strossen suggests, pornographic works can even invite viewers to rebel against conventional notions of female vulnerability and respectability, or to explore the origins of disturbing sexual fantasies. At the very least, such materials make aspects of human sexuality available for public debate and critique (Strossen 1995, 176). Ironically, as Georgia Warnke notes, anti-censorship feminists might charge that “antipornography feminism silences women's differing sexual self-expressions by condemning those with which it disagrees as false consciousness … [and] by promoting legislation that would suppress materials through which women can discover different views of an authentic sexuality and, indeed, different ways of being sexual” (Warnke 1999, 124).
1.3 Sexual Objectification

Some feminist philosophers argue that pornography violates the moral imperative to treat people as autonomous, rational subjects. According to Alison Assiter, “the Master-Slave dialectic seems to capture the relation between people in pornographic eroticism. In much pornography, people, usually women, become objects for another … In the case of pornography, what happens is that the one person becomes a body desired by the other, but this is not reciprocated” (Assiter 1988, 65). To treat someone as merely a body for another's use, without recognizing that she too is a subject with desires, is to treat someone as a slave, as a subhuman creature or object, and therefore violates her dignity as a human being. Assiter explains that, for Hegel, “‘the Master-Slave dialectic’ is a phase in the development of world history — in the progression towards freedom of the ‘Spirit’ that controls historical change. In fact, the relation is disadvantageous both for the slave and for the master” (Assiter 1988, 65), for neither gains the forms of recognition necessary for self-conscious awareness and emotional fulfillment. Assiter also argues that “the role of the wife in marriage is very like that of the Slave” for the wife's social identity is subsumed by her husband, who holds social power, and thus she is not a social subject in her own right (Assiter 1988, 65).

Harry Brod argues that pornography harms men individually even while it augments men's collective power (Brod 1992, 158). Brod also employs a Hegelian framework and writes, “The female is primarily there as a sex object, not sexual subject. Or, if she is not completely objectified, since men do want to be desired themselves, hers is at least a subjugated subjectivity. But one needs another independent subject, not an object or a captured subjectivity, if one either wants one's own prowess validated, or if one simply desires human interaction. Men functioning in the pornographic mode of male sexuality, in which men dominate women, are denied satisfaction of these human desires” (Brod 1992, 154). For Brod then, pornography enhances men's political power over women, while diminishing the quality of men's intersubjective relationships with women, and thereby contributes to the loss of positive human interaction and self-realization. Brod also argues that pornography contributes to the commodification of sexuality, which enhances men's powers as consumers, although not necessarily their genuine autonomy and freedom.

Catharine MacKinnon invokes Kant's idea of persons as ends to explain the moral problem of pornography: “A person, in one Kantian view, is a free and rational agent whose existence is an end in itself, as opposed to instrumental. In pornography women exist to the end of male pleasure” (MacKinnon 1987, 158). For MacKinnon, pornography involves men treating women as mere instruments in order to satisfy their sexual desires. Such treatment, at best, fails to recognize women as free and equal persons and, at worst, dehumanizes women and encourages their victimization. In response to MacKinnon's claims about the role of sexual objectification in women's lives, Martha Nussbaum has asked whether sexual objectification is always morally objectionable or whether it is only so in certain contexts (Nussbaum 1999, 214). Nussbaum identifies seven distinct kinds of actions that may or may not be part of objectification in any given instance: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity (Nussbaum 1999, 218). Some of these actions are always morally problematic, but some of them are acceptable when they are part of a larger relationship involving mutual respect. Nussbaum writes, “Denial of autonomy and denial of subjectivity are objectionable if they persist throughout an adult relationship, but as phases in a relationship characterized by mutual regard they can be all right, or even quite wonderful … In a closely related way, it may at times be splendid to treat the other person as passive, or even inert. Emotional penetration of boundaries seems potentially a very valuable part of sexual life, and some forms of physical boundary penetration also, though it is less clear which ones these are. Treating as fungible is suspect when the person so treated is from a group that has frequently been commodified and used as a tool, or a prize; between social equals these problems disappear …” (Nussbaum 1999, 238-39). In other words, some actions in which we use another's body sexually are consistent with recognizing the person so used as an end and do not involve treating her as a mere object, in the Kantian sense. But Nussbaum concludes that most conventional pornography, such as Playboy, fails to meet the Kantian moral standard, and “depicts a thoroughgoing fungibility and commodification of sex partners and, in the process, severs sex from any deep connection with self-expression or emotion” (Nussbaum 1999, 234). Nussbaum therefore concurs with MacKinnon that Playboy treats women as mere objects or trophies that can both enhance men's status and be exchanged for the next sex object at will.

Linda LeMoncheck argues that the sexual fantasies depicted in pornography imply that women's subjectivities are recognized by the consumers of this material (LeMoncheck 1997, 133). The fantasy of overcoming a woman's will assumes that she has a will to overcome (LeMoncheck 1997, 131), and the fantasy that women enjoy being sexually exploited assumes that they have desires that men's sexual use fulfills (LeMoncheck 1997, 133). LeMoncheck writes, “sex work is not merely about treating a woman as an object nor merely about dehumanizing her. Sex work is a complex dialectic between subject and object in which a woman's dehumanization is successful precisely because she is perceived as a person whose will, seductiveness, and power is properly subordinate to men” (LeMoncheck 1997, 134). On this view, pornographic materials and porn consumers recognize women's agency while imagining subduing it. Women are thus recognized as subjects with ends of their own and are not depicted as mere subhuman objects. Susan Bordo similarly recognizes that women are constructed as subjects in pornography, but she argues that they are subjects whose agency expresses itself only as a desire to please the projected male viewer. She writes, “an essential ingredient in porn … is the depiction of a subjectivity (or personality) that willing contracts its possibilities and pleasure to one — the acceptance and gratification of the male … The woman in porn abdicates her will, her sexual discrimination, her independence, but not to become a mute body for the man” (Bordo 1994, 276). For Bordo, there is a mind inside the pornographic female body, but it communicates only a limited range of nonthreatening desires, and therefore it exists as a truncated self.

Laurie Shrage questions the Kantian account of sexual desire that underlies MacKinnon's analysis of sexual objectification (Shrage 2005). Kant holds that the expression and fulfillment of sexual desire are uniquely powerful in their ability to dehumanize and objectify others. Sexual desire is fundamentally an animal urge that is fulfilled by taking control of another's body in a way that disrespects their autonomy and humanity, in almost all contexts. MacKinnon turns Kant's “anti-sex” view into an “anti-porn” one by arguing that the expression and fulfillment of sexual desire under patriarchy involves men taking control of women's bodies in a way that fails to respect women as persons. Shrage argues that Kant and MacKinnon illegitimately assume that the expression and fulfillment of sexual desire are uniquely powerful in their ability to objectify others, and both equate sexualizing someone with the failure to respect her humanity and autonomy. Shrage debunks these assumptions, in part by appealing to Nussbaum's critique of Kant's account of sexual desire. Shrage argues that the use of others involved in pornography is not incompatible with respect for their autonomy and personhood, as long as consumers and producers respect the ends of porn actors. These ends ******* the desire to exploit for economic gain others' sexual interest in them and their bodies within the conventional boundaries set by various genres of sexual representation and entertainment. The relationship between porn stars and consumers of their images are market relationships and should be held to the norms of those relationships, not the norms of friendships and romance. If sex workers need help from feminists, it should be aimed at protecting their rights as workers, not at protecting them from being sexualized by men outside the personal or family sphere.

Jennifer Saul explores the possible connection between objectification—treating people as things—and personification—treating things as people. Saul critiques earlier feminist claims that men's use of pornographic images involves treating pieces of paper like women, and therefore involves conflating women with inanimate instruments (Saul 2006, 49-50). The inclusion of real women and pornography in a single category—e.g., the category of entities that can arouse and satisfy sexual desire—can undermine respect for women and promote oppressive practices. Saul argues that personification and objectification are only linked in troubling ways if some conditions for morally problematic objectification are already met. Saul draws on Rachel Maines's historical work on the development of a device now known as the personal vibrator and contends that women's use of vibrators to achieve sexual pleasure and orgasm represents a form of personification. For some women, vibrators eventually replaced a service that had been provided by doctors (and midwives and spas). Yet this is not a troubling form of personification—one linked to troubling forms of objectification—because doctors are not likely to be confused with sex toys as a result of women's masturbatory use of vibrating technology. Doctors have other acknowledged medical uses, as well as ends of their own. Therefore, the transformation of their historical role in treating sexually frustrated (or “hysteric”) women, by both new understandings of women's reproductive and sexual health and advancements in vibrator technology, does not contribute to the oppression of doctors. Saul's discussion of the possible equation of people and things, and the background circumstances that may permit this, is useful for considering some new technological developments in pornography. New digital imaging and personal computer technologies enable users to interact and “have sex” with playmate animations on one's computer screen. Computer-mediated interactions with digitally-simulated but fictional people can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from computer-mediated online interactions with real people. Yet such pornographic possibilities do not necessarily involve morally troubling objectification, as long as background conditions enable the recognition of women as subjects, and the recognition more generally of flesh and blood humans as autonomous agents.
1.4 Legal Suppression

MacKinnon and Dworkin's model ordinance has met with mixed support from feminist theorists. Martha Nussbaum, who is sympathetic to MacKinnon and Dworkin's analysis of pornography's contribution to the subordination of women, offers four reservations in regard to their ordinance: (1) the justification for the ordinance fails to distinguish between moral wrongs that are legally actionable and those that are not; (2) violence against women has a variety of causes and it is difficult to isolate the distinct contribution of pornography; (3) making authors responsible for the criminal actions that their work may inspire is likely to have a chilling effect on valuable expression; and (4) officials and courts are likely to misapply the ordinance to controversial but not harmful speech (Nussbaum 1999, 248-249). However, Nussbaum rejects simple appeals to the First Amendment to protect pornographic speech, as she notes that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment (Nussbaum 1999, 247). She also notes that makers of other vice-type products, such as tobacco, can be held liable for the damaging effects of their products, and that other Western democratic countries permit restrictions on hate speech. Nevertheless, Nussbaum suggests that the harms of pornography can be addressed through moral dialogue and cultural critique.

A number of feminist theorists have claimed that women are consumers of pornography, and are not merely the objects on view. Some argue that pornography is about voyeurism and that women, like men, take pleasure in looking at depictions of sex. To explore women's use of pornography, feminist scholars have studied soft-core pornographic genres that are marketed to women, such as pulp romance fiction (Radway 1991). Some have studied lesbian pornography to challenge the idea that pornography always involves men subordinating women (Ross 2000). In 1986, a group of feminists published Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship, which argues that feminists have targeted pornography out of frustration with their lack of progress in reducing violence against women. The book showcases a variety of pornographic imagery in order to illustrate the types of materials that may be restricted under feminist-supported legal regulations. In the introduction, Kate Ellis, Barbara O'Dair and Abby Tallmer argue that “the feminist movement must not be drawn, in the name of protecting women, into the practice of censoring ‘deviant’ sexual representation or expression … Women had to learn, with the support of other women, to articulate experiences that lay outside the proper sphere of the ‘nice girl,’ to acknowledge our fantasies, and to be proud of our sexual choices … We must speak out when we are victims, but also acknowledge what excites us, and support women who make their living providing that excitement to men and to ourselves” (Ellis et al. 1986, 6). Ann Snitow advocates recentering feminist sexuality discussions on “the right to demand a sexuality more centered on female pleasure,” instead of focusing on controlling male sexuality (Snitow 1986, 11).

In Caught Looking, Lisa Duggan, Nan Hunter, and Carole Vance ask “How can feminists be entrusting the patriarchal state with the task of legally distinguishing between permissible and impermissible sexual images?” (Duggan, Hunter, & Vance 1986, 73). They argue that the task of evaluating the material targeted by MacKinnon-Dworkin ordinances, in terms of the definitions articulated, is quite complicated and subjective. Moreover, such ordinances would surely be applied materials depicting consensual SM, and thus allow the state to persecute sexual minorities. These authors give three further reasons for opposing these laws: “first, the sexual images in question do not cause more harm than other aspects of misogynist culture; second, sexually explicit speech, even in male-dominated society, serves positive social functions for women; and third, the passage and enforcement of antipornography laws such as those supported in Minneapolis and Indiana [MacKinnon-Dworkin ordinances] are more likely to impede, rather than advance, feminist goals” (Duggan Hunter, & Vance 1986, 80-81). More recently, Gayle Rubin has argued that “The scapegoating of pornography will create new problems, new forms of legal and social abuse, and new modes of persecution. A responsible and progressive political movement has no business pursuing strategies that will result in witch-hunts” (Rubin 1993, 38).

Judith Butler examines the role of fantasy in feminist politics and argues for maintaining conditions that permit diverse representations of women. Butler writes, “feminist theory relies on the capacity to postulate through fantasy a future that is not yet” (Butler 2000, 487). According to Butler, antipornography feminists uncritically assume a representational realist ontology in which “depictions” imitate and can causally affect some preexisting reality. Butler argues for a more complex understanding of the relation between representations and their referents, focusing both on the ways that representations can call into question the ontological status of entities and on how ‘the real’ is produced through social action. Curtailing representations will produce new forms of social action rather than protect some undisturbed, preferred version of reality. In Butler's words, “certain kinds of efforts to restrict practices of representation in the hopes of reigning in the imaginary, controlling the phantasmatic, end up reproducing and proliferating the phantasmatic in inadvertent ways, indeed, in ways that contradict the intended purposes of the restrictions itself” (Butler 2000, 490). Butler points out that efforts to censor homoerotic images have led to their greater production and exposure. She concludes that, “Feminist theory and politics cannot regulate the representation of ‘women’ without producing that very ‘representation’: and if that is in some sense a discursive inevitability of representational politics, then the task must be to safeguard the open productivity of those categories, whatever the risk” (Butler 2000, 503).

Butler's view fits in well with feminists who call for more speech as the answer to noxious speech. On this view, disturbing representations of “real sex” should be contested by different representations of sexuality. Drucilla Cornell develops this approach by arguing that “Political action, not legal action, should be the main mode of intervention in the production of pornography” (Cornell 2000, 551). By political action, Cornell means that feminists should form alliances with feminists in the pornography industry to create representations of sexuality that will benefit women. Like Snitow, Cornell argues that feminist activism should focus “on unleashing the feminine imaginary, rather than on constraining men” (Cornell 2000, 553). Moreover, Cornell examines the film and performance work of Candida Royalle, Ona Zee, and Annie Sprinkle to show how “femme” and feminist pornography challenges the ways that conventional pornography captures women and sex. Like Butler, Cornell emphasizes the importance of fantasy for realizing transformative feminist projects. She writes “Without new images and new words in which to express our sexuality, we will be unable to create a new world for women” (Cornell 2000, 564). Furthermore, Cornell criticizes MacKinnon and Dworkin's model ordinance for its tendency to enshrine an old stereotype of woman in the law — woman as vulnerable and in need of protection. She alleges that the ordinance approach relies on the law to enforce social norms and thus fails to struggle “beyond those symbolic forms that have been deeply inscribed in and by the structures of gender” (Cornell 2000, 554).
2. Prostitution
2.1 Origins

Whereas the rise of the pornography industry coincided with the emergence of communication technologies, prostitution, it is often said, is the “world's oldest profession.” The historian Gerda Lerner elaborates this idea by explaining that “the most widespread and accepted explanation of the origin of prostitution” is that it began with temple prostitution in places such as ancient Mesopotamia (Lerner 1986, 125). Lerner analyzes “cultic sexual service” in ancient Babylon, in which temple workers and patrons offered sexual services to the gods, often as part of fertility rituals. According to Lerner, “What seems to have happened was that sexual activity for and in behalf of the god or goddesses was considered beneficial to the people and sacred. The practices varied with the gods, the different places and different periods. There was also, especially in the later period, commercial prostitution, which flourished near or within the temple” (Lerner 1986, 125). Lerner argues that scholars have conflated cultic and commercial prostitution, ignoring their distinct social purposes and organizational structures. Moreover, she argues that to understand how prostitution evolved historically, we need to understand “its relationship to the sexual regulation of all women in archaic states and its relationship to the enslavement of females” (Lerner 1986, 124). Lerner writes, “It is likely that commercial prostitution derived directly from the enslavement of women and the consolidation and formation of classes. Military conquest led, in the third millennium B.C., to the enslavement and sexual abuse of captive women. As slavery became an established institution, slave-owners rented out their female slaves as prostitutes, and some masters set up commercial brothels staffed by slaves” (Lerner 1986, 133). Lerner suggests that prostitutes and concubines were used by rulers as symbols of wealth and power, and this practice was then emulated by other men of wealth and status (Lerner 1986, 133). Also, paupers were often forced to sell children, adding to the supply of labor for this purpose. Furthermore, “As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the family. Thus, commercial prostitution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the sexual needs of men” (Lerner 1986, 134). These practices created social hierarchies among women, in which women were distinguished on the basis of their sexual availability. At the high end were married women and their marriage-eligible virgin daughters, in the middle were concubines, and at the low end were unmarried temple prostitutes and slave women (Lerner 1986, 137). Although female slavery, concubinage, and temple prostitution are less common today, commercial prostitution and the custom of measuring a woman's social status in terms of her virginity and monogamy carry over to contemporary societies.

Lerner's account connects modern forms of prostitution to oppressive social practices: the enslavement of women and the treatment of non-slave females as sexual property to be exchanged both in and out of marriage. By contrast, rather than attribute the rise of commercial prostitution to slavery and capitalist class formation, Gayle Rubin traces the origins of prostitution to kinship systems in which women are exchanged as gifts among families to cement social bonds (Rubin 1975, 175). Rubin writes, “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges — social organization” (Rubin 1975, 174). In other words, in the very creation of society, women were allegedly subordinated through ritual exchange in order to create bonds of kinship among men as the foundation of the social order. Whereas Lerner's account was influenced by Friedrich Engels's writings about the institution of private property and its impact on sexual practices, Rubin's account was influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss's writings on kinship and marriage systems. Rubin writes “The ‘exchange of women’ is a seductive and powerful concept. It is attractive in that it places the oppression of women within social systems, rather than biology. Moreover, it suggests that we look for the ultimate locus of women's oppression within the traffic in women, rather than within the traffic in merchandise” (Rubin 1975, 175). On both Lerner's and Rubin's accounts, prostitution (women engaging in sexual activities for extrinsic rewards) and trafficking in women (control over women's sexual capacities by others) predates the commodification of things, and it is a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon that takes on different forms in different contexts.

Laurie Shrage criticizes these origin stories for their assumption that prostitution is a single, culturally familiar social practice, which can be traced to a single cause — the global subordination of women at a particular moment in human history. Shrage contends that, although Lerner's account locates the origins of prostitution in historical and cultural forces and marks important discontinuities in prostitution in different contexts (i.e., temple vs. commercial prostitution), it assumes that patriarchy shaped commercial prostitution in all contexts in similar ways. Shrage points out that Rubin's account fails to explain why women, rather than men or opposite-sex pairs, were exchanged in early kinship systems (a possibility that Lévi-Strauss acknowledged), and thus it does not really explain how men have gained some control over women's sexual capacities (Shrage 1994, 105, 131-32). Shrage tries to show how these accounts import into the past features of prostitution that developed in contemporary, industrialized capitalist societies. By trying to explain contemporary prostitution and trafficking in persons in terms of earlier historical and cultural developments, these accounts overlook important differences in sex commerce in different cultural and historical contexts. For example, commercial sex providers have not always been regarded as ineligible for marriage and have, in some places, been integrated into their communities to a high degree (Shrage 1994, 109, 115; White 1990, 19; Rossiaud 1988, 70). Shrage concludes that feminist analyses of prostitution should attempt to understand the variety and distinctness of different economic and cultural practices that are often lumped together as “prostitution.”

Carol Pateman deploys the basic concepts of liberal political theory to explain the existence of prostitution in modern societies. She argues that the social contract, which establishes the rights and freedoms of men in a liberal civil society, also establishes the terms of women's subjection. In the patriarchal social order, there is an implicit agreement among men granting them sexual access to women (Pateman 1988, 2). Men acquire rights to particular women through formal marital and informal prostitution contracts. In other words, men have a class privilege — a right to sexual relief from women — which they can exercise by asserting their rights as husbands or johns. Like Lerner and Rubin, Pateman challenges the notion that prostitution results from men's biologically driven behavior, and instead explains prostitution as the incorporation of a particular conception of masculinity into modern political and social structures (Pateman 1988, 198-99). For Pateman, the incorporation of prostitution into modern societies renders suspect political structures that are associated with freedom and equality. In this respect, Pateman's origin story differs from Lerner's and Rubin's, who associate prostitution with earlier practices of slavery or patriarchal and bourgeois kinship arrangements and thereby render prostitution a suspect social practice. Pateman condemns prostitution not merely for its problematic origins, but for other reasons that I will discuss below.
2.2 Harms to Women

Regardless of its social origins, many feminists claim that sex work is harmful to women. Some allege that the harm results from inherent features of sex work, while others allege that the harm results from contingent features of the social environment in which it is performed. Carole Pateman argues that the work of a female prostitute is different from other jobs, as it expresses the inferior social and political status of women. Moreover, because people's bodies and sexual capacities are an integral part of their identity as men and women, the woman who works as a prostitute sells her womanhood and therefore herself (Pateman 1988, 207). Christine Overall similarly argues that prostitution is a transaction in which one person must be defined as a social subordinate who caters to the desires of another. She claims that the prostitute's work differs from that of other low-status workers in that it is a form of labor that cannot be reciprocated (Overall 1992, 718). Elizabeth Anderson develops this idea and argues that the good of sex is “realized only when each partner reciprocates the other's gift in kind, offering her own sexuality in the same spirit in which she received the other's — as a genuine offering of the self. The commodification of sexual ‘services’ destroys the kind of reciprocity required to realize human sexuality as a shared good,” and may corrupt non-market sexual relationships by promoting the valuation of women in terms of their market worth (Anderson 1993, 154-55; see also Radin 1996, 133). Contra these views, Shrage has argued that the prostitute's work is objectionable on feminist grounds, not because sex has an inherent purpose that markets can corrupt or because our sexual capacities have an essential relation to ourselves, but because sex markets are currently organized according to principles that relegate women to subordinate positions. Moreover, tolerating their existence in this form perpetuates social myths that stigmatize women (Shrage 1989, 357). Debra Satz similarly argues that “If prostitution is wrong it is because of its effects on how men perceive women and on how women perceive themselves. In our society, prostitution represents women as the sexual servants of men” (Satz 1995, 78). Satz conjectures that the negative image of women promoted by prostitution “shapes and influences the way women as a whole are seen” (Satz 1995, 79).

Martha Nussbaum questions whether the sale of sexual services genuinely damages the persons who provide them or women as a whole. Nussbaum points out that, two centuries ago, the use of one's artistic talents for pay, such as singing or acting, was regarded as a form of prostitution (Nussbaum 1999, 277). Nussbaum acknowledges that sex workers are currently stigmatized for their profession, but questions whether the stigma that attaches to their work is justified. By tracing this stigma both to aristocratic prejudice toward waged laborers and to moralistic attitudes and anxieties regarding female sexual expression, Nussbaum challenges the rational basis of the stigma (Nussbaum 1999, 278-79, 286-88). She concludes that feminists should oppose the stigmatization of sex work rather than oppose sex work for its contribution to the stigmatization of women. Nussbaum also questions seven common claims against prostitution: it involves excessive risks, the prostitute has little autonomy, it violates the prostitute's bodily integrity, prostitution has a destructive effect on non-commercial intimate relationships, prostitution violates a person's inalienable right to her sexuality, it contributes to a male-dominated social order, and it relies on the economic coercion of workers. Nussbaum argues that the problems associated with prostitution are components of many other kinds of work and social practices, such as marriage, and that these problems are not inherent to the work but are often a function of the prostitute's working conditions and treatment by others (Nussbaum 1999, 288-97).

Scott Anderson resists the move to treat prostitution like other forms of work. He argues that normalizing prostitution undermines the general right to sexual autonomy, which is an important value defended by radical feminists. Prostitutes waive their right to sexual autonomy because their jobs place them under contractual obligations to have sex, and thus diminish their control over when and with whom they have sex. Anderson acknowledges that all jobs, to some degree, diminish various forms of autonomy. He contends that sexual autonomy should be valued differently from other forms, such as a person's control over when and to whom they serve food, provide a massage or dance, offer expert advice, or talk philosophy. He writes, “a person's sexuality almost always figures prominently as an aspect of his or her self-conception, status in society, and economic and social prospects...It is because sex plays such a pivotal role in the lives of most adults...that it creates its own special...realm within which one can be more or less autonomous” (Anderson 2006, 386). Anderson here echoes Pateman's contention that our sexual capacities and practices are an integral part of who we are as men and women. Their arguments against prostitution rest on the assumption that sexuality should be non-alienable, like children or body parts, because to alienate these is to destroy a person's wholeness or integrity. According to Nancy Tuana and Laurie Shrage, many sex workers argue that they are not alienating their sexual capacities but rather their sexual labor. Selling labor under conditions that limit an employer's capacity to exploit a worker is generally permissible in capitalist societies (Tuana and Shrage 2003, 33). An actress performing a sex scene, a nurse taking care of a patient, a “nanny” taking care of an infant, are all exchanging intimate bodily labor and nurturing capacities that shape social identities and economic prospects (Shrage 1999, 260).

Kamala Kempadoo argues that “the global sex trade cannot be simply reduced to one monolithic explanation of violence to women” (Kempadoo 2001, 28). Kempadoo claims that older feminist models, which see prostitution as reflection of patriarchy or violence to women, are “inadequate to capture the various histories, oppression, and experiences of women of color” (Kempadoo 2001, 35, 37). Kempadoo examines how histories of racism, colonialism, militarism, and globalization structure the choices of first and third-world women of color. Although Kempadoo urges feminists to understand prostitution in terms of a broader range of social forces, she maintains that feminist theorizing about prostitution should avoid overlooking the agency of women of color by treating them as mere passive victims of oppression (Kempadoo 2001, 43). Kempadoo writes: “The agency of Brown and Black women in prostitution has been avoided or overlooked and the perspectives arising from these experiences marginalized in dominant theoretical discourse on the global sex trade and prostitution. Our insights, knowledges, and understanding of sex work have been largely obscured or dominated by white radical feminist, neo-Marxist or Western socialist feminist inspired analyses that have been either incapable or unwilling to address the complexities of the lives of women of color” (Kempadoo 2001, 40). Rather than conceptualize prostitution in terms of the sexual objectification and degradation of women, Kempadoo advocates understanding prostitution as a kind of labor that is often performed by marginalized people (Kempadoo 2001, 45; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, 4-5; see also Leigh 1997). By conceptualizing prostitution as a form of labor and avoiding moralistic discourses about sexuality, feminists can avoid unrealistic abolitionist approaches (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998, White 1990, Shrage 1996). Instead, they can address the problems of prostitution in terms of working conditions and worker empowerment, the legal status of the work, and the occupational alternatives available to people oppressed by race, class, gender, and nationality.
2.3 Legal Status

Feminists are divided on the legal status of prostitution. Some feminist theorists promote stringent anti-trafficking laws, both internationally and locally (Jeffries 1998; Barry 1996). However, many feminist theorists worry that laws against prostitution will be applied unfairly to women, and will permit the state, though its police force, to persecute women for sexual promiscuity. Because prosecuting women for prostitution can compound their victimization, some feminists advocate prosecuting only the client who coerces sex with money, or the “pimp” who recruits women into prostitution (Satz 1995, 296).

Feminist activists generally distinguish views on the legal status of prostitution in terms of “abolition,” “decriminalization,” and “legalization.” “Abolition” refers to an approach that aims to eliminate all forms of paid sex through legal prohibition and social programs that “rescue” women and children from “sex slavery” or servitude. “Decriminalization” refers to the repeal of all laws that criminalize the action of taking money for sex. Advocates of decriminalization regard commerce in sex as essentially similar to commerce in other personal services. “Legalization” refers to an intermediate approach that regards prostitution as inevitable, but in need of special social controls and regulation. These special controls may ******* a state registry for prostitutes, mandatory health exams and condom use, zoning, and other laws that aim to protect third parties from harm and render prostitution businesses relatively invisible to the public.

The arguments for decriminalization and legalization often appeal to the ideal of individual privacy in matters of sexuality. Some argue that the right to control one's sexuality includes the right to use one's sexual capacities to make a living. Some feminists argue that a woman's right to control her own body extends to the right to grant sexual access to it for money (Almodovar 2002, 75). These arguments imply that governments abuse their power when they interfere with voluntary sex for hire by adults. Arguments for decriminalization and legalization also appeal to the notion of equal protection. Some feminists argue that men are generally not prosecuted for buying or selling sex, and therefore equality requires that the state either not prosecute female prostitutes (and “jeans”) or apply similar sanctions to johns and male prostitutes (Jaggar 1993, 124).

Feminists who take abolitionist approaches often compare markets in sexual services to markets in babies and bodily organs. The assumption is that laborers enter such markets only out of desperation and poverty, and thus their existence allows the more fortunate to egregiously exploit the less fortunate. Some abolitionists argue that women's labor is available for prostitution primarily because other markets and occupations are socially prohibited, due to traditional and sexist notions about a woman's place in society. Feminist critics of neo-colonialism see prostitution as a component of a global imperialist system in which women from poor countries are conscripted to provide “comfort and recreation” for the military personnel of rich and powerful nations. These feminists allege that prostitution is also used by social elites in poor countries to promote tourism and attract foreign investment (Enloe 1989, 36, 86; O'Connell Davidson 1998, 75; Bishop and Robinson 1998). What these abolitionist accounts have in common is a conception of sex work as manifestation of deep social inequalities and injustices.

While acknowledging the global injustices that both shape sex markets and explain the social characteristics of those who enter them, advocates of legalization or decriminalization argue that inequalities of power and opportunity shape all markets in goods and services in the contemporary world. That is, political and economic inequalities are producing sweatshop working conditions in many manufacturing trades, and exploitative trades in domestic work and childcare, as well as in sexual services. To address these problems, some feminists advocate a politics that focuses less on single issues, such as prostitution, and more on challenging the global inequalities of wealth and power that keep half the world's population destitute and vulnerable. International sex worker rights groups argue that, rather than challenging sex work, those concerned with the plight of sex workers should seek ways to end slavery and bondage, including all forms of child labor and sexual exploitation, and all forms of involuntary labor and sex. Together with advocating greater global economic justice, some feminists advocate lending support to worker-led movements, such as the many international and national sex worker organizations (Shrage 1996, 43). Rather than dictate from the ivory tower what marginalized women need, some feminists argue that we need to lend our expertise and social connections to disempowered women workers, including sex workers, while at the same time listening to and engaging them respectfully on the issues of strategy and goals (Kempadoo 1998, 24).
3. New Directions

In the past several decades, women in sex industries around the world have formed numerous labor, civil rights, health, and educational networks to advocate for basic human rights and better working conditions. Also, a body of research has developed on the lives of sexual and gender dissidents, such as lesbians and transexuals, and, more recently, on the lives of third-world women of color. Both of these developments are changing feminist research on sex markets. New areas of concern that are emerging from the confluence of these developments ******* colonialism and the regulation of sex markets (Levine 2003), and queer sex workers (Pendleton 1997; Highleyman 1997, Queen 1997). Some of the latter work adds to a small amount of earlier research examining the role of sex workers in radical social movements and dissident communities (Nestle 1987). In addition, some new research focuses on the political work of third-world sex workers, and examines the forms of agency exhibited by women in oppressed circumstances (Kempadoo 1999; Rajan 2003). Furthermore, many feminist sex worker activists continue to challenge feminist research about their lives and work, and offer alternative analyses (Nagle 1997, Sprinkle 1998, Quan 2001, Bernstein 2000, Leigh 2004). Regarding pornography, feminists are challenging new attempts at censorship in light of concerns about the Internet and child sexual abuse (Levine 2002), and some are continuing to explore how women consume pornography (Matrix 1996). And some feminists are responding to the feminist anti-censorship movement, restating earlier positions in light of feminist criticism (Leidholdt and Raymond, 1990, Stark and Whisnant 2004).
Bibliography
Works Cited

* Almodovar, N. J., 2002, “For Their Own Good: The Results of the Prostitution Laws as Enforced by Cops, Politicians, and Judges”, in Liberty for Women, W. McElroy (ed.), Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
* Anderson, E., 1993, Value in Ethics and Economics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Anderson, S., 2006, “Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of Prohibition and Prostitution”, in Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry, J. Spector (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.
* Assiter, A., 1988, “Autonomy and Pornography”, in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, M. Griffiths and M. Whitford (eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
* Barry, K., 1996, The Prostitution of Sexuality, New York: New York University Press.
* Bernstein, M., (ed.), 2000, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, New York: Harrington Park Press.
* Bishop, R., and Robinson, L., 1998, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, New York: Routledge.
* Bordo, S., 1994, “Reading the Male Body”, in The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures, L. Goldstein (ed.), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
* Brod, H., 1992, “Pornography and the Alienation of Male Sexuality”, in Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism, L. May and R. Strikwerda (eds.), Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams.
* Butler, J., 2000, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess”, in Feminism and Pornography, D. Cornell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Cameron, D. and Frazer, E., 2000, “On the Question of Pornography and Sexual Violence: Moving Beyond Cause and Effect”, in Feminism and Pornography, D. Cornell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Cornell, D., 2000, “Pornography's Temptation”, in Feminism and Pornography, D. Cornell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Duggan, L., Hunter, N., and Vance, C., “False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation”, in Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship, Seattle: The Real Comet Press.
* Dworkin, A., 1979, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Perigee Books.
* Ellis, K., et al., 1986, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship, Seattle: The Real Comet Press.
* Enloe, C., 1989, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.
* Garry, A., 1979, “Pornography and Respect for Women”, in Philosophy and Women, S. Bishop and M. Weinzweig (eds.), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
* Highleyman, L., 1997, “Professional Dominance: Power, Money, and Identity”, in Whores and Other Feminists, J. Nagle (ed.), New York: Routledge.
* Hornsby, J., 1995, “Speech Acts and Pornography”, in The Problem of Pornography, S. Dwyer (ed.), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
* Hunt, L., (ed.), 1993, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, New York: Zone Books.
* Jaggar, A., “Prostitution”, in Women and Values, M. Pearsall (ed.), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
* Jeffreys, S., 1998, The Idea of Prostitution, North Melbourne, AU: Spinifex Press.
* Kempadoo, K. and Doezema, J., (eds.), 1998, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, New York: Routledge.
* Kempadoo, K., (ed.), 1999, Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
* –––, 2001, “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Feminist Perspectives”, in Meridians, 1: 28-51.
* Langton, R., 1995, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts”, in The Problem of Pornography, S. Dwyer (ed.), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
* Leidholdt, D., and Raymond, J., (eds.), 1990, The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, New York: Pergamon Press.
* Leigh, C., 1997, “Inventing Sex Work”, in Whores and Other Feminists, J. Nagle (ed.), New York: Routledge.
* –––, 2004, Unrepentant Whore: Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot, San Francisco: Last Gasp.
* LeMoncheck, L., 1997, Loose Women, Lecherous Men: A Feminist Philosophy of Sex, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Lerner, G., 1986, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Levine, J., 2002, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
* Levine, P., 2003, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, New York: Routledge.
* Longino, H., 1980, “Pornography, Oppression, and Freedom: A Closer Look”, in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, L. Lederer (ed.), New York: William Morrow and Company.
* MacKinnon, C., 1987, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* –––, 1993, Only Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Matrix, C., (ed.), 1996, Tales from the Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography, Edinburgh: AK Press.
* Nagle, J., (ed.), Whores and Other Feminists, New York: Routledge.
* Nestle, J., 1987, “Lesbians and Prostitutes: A Historical Sisterhood”, in Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, F. Delacoste and P. Alexander (eds.) San Francisco: Cleis Press.
* Nussbaum, M., 1999, Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Overall, C., 1992, “What's Wrong with Prostitution?: Evaluating Sex Work”, Signs, 17: 705-24.
* O'Connell Davidson, J., 1998, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
* Pendleton, E., 1997, “Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality”, in Whores and Other Feminists, J. Nagle (ed.), New York: Routledge.
* Quan, T., 2001, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, New York: Crown.
* Queen, C., 1997, Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, San Francisco: Cleis.
* Radin, M., 1996, Contested Commodities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Radway, J., 1991, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
* Rajan, R. S., 2003, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
* Ross, B., 2000, “‘It's Merely Designed for Sexual Arousal’: Interrogating the Indefensibility of Lesbian Smut”, in Feminism and Pornography, D. Cornell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Rossiaud, J., 1988, Medieval Prostitution, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Press.
* Rubin, G., 1975, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, R. Reiter (ed.), New York: Monthly Review Press.
* –––, 1993, “Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong, an Analysis of Anti-pornography Politics”, in Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism, A. Assiter and A. Carol (eds.), London: Pluto Press.
* Satz, D., 1995, “Markets in Women's Sexual Labor”, in Ethics, 106: 63-85.
* Saul, J., 2006, “On Treating Things as People: Objectification, Pornography, and the History of the Vibrator”, in Hypatia, 21: 45-61.
* Scully, D., 1990, Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists, London: HarperCollins Academic.
* Shrage, L., 1989, “Should Feminists Oppose Prostitution?”, in Ethics, 99: 347-61.
* –––, 1994, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion, New York: Routledge.
* –––, 1996, “Prostitution and the Case for Decriminalization”, Dissent, 43: 41-45.
* –––, 1999, “Do Lesbian Prostitutes Have Sex With Their Clients? A Clintonesque Reply”, Sexualities, 2: 260.
* –––, 2005, “Exposing the Fallacies of Anti-Porn Feminism”, Feminist Theory, 6: 45-65.
* Snitow, A., 1986, “Retrenchment vs. Transformation”, in Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship, Seattle: The Real Comet Press.
* Sprinkle, A., 1998, Post-Porn Modernist: My 25 Years as a Multimedia Whore, San Francisco: Cleis.
* Stark, C., and Whisnant, R., (eds.), 2004, Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
* Strossen, N., 1995, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, New York: Scribner.
* Tuana, N., and Shrage, L. 2003, “Sexuality”, in The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, H. LaFollette (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Warnke, G., 1999, Legitimate Differences: Interpretation in the Abortion Controversy and Other Public Debates, Berkeley: University of California Press.
* White, L., 1990, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Other Important Works

* Almodovar, N. J., 1993, From Cop to Call Girl: Why I Left the LAPD to Make an Honest Living as a Beverly Hills Prostitute, New York: Simon and Schuster.
* Barry, K., 1979, Female Sexual Slavery, New York: Avon Books.
* Bell, L., 1987, Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face, Toronto: Seal Press.
* Bell, S., 1994, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
* Burstyn, V., (ed.), 1985, Women Against Censorship, Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre.
* Chancer, L., 1998, Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism, Berkeley: University of California Press.
* Chapkis, W., 1997, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor, New York: Routledge.
* Gibson, P. C. and Gibson, R., (eds.), 1993, Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography and Power, London: BFI Publishing.
* Griffin, S., 1981, Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature, New York: Harper and Row.
* Gubar, S. and Hoff, J., (eds.), 1989, For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
* Itzin, C., (ed.), 1992, Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil Liberties, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Kappeler, S., 1986, The Pornography of Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
* Kipnis, L., 1996, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, New York: Grove Press.
* Kulick, D., 1998, Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Kuo, L., 2002, Prostitution Policy: Revolutionizing Practice Through a Gendered Perspective, New York: New York University Press.
* MacKinnon, C. and Dworkin, A., (eds.), 1997, In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Miller v. California, 1972, U.S. Supreme Court, 413 U.S. 15.
* Outshoorn, J., (ed.), 2004, The Politics of Prostitution: Women's Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Pheterson, G., (ed.), 1989, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, Seattle: Seal Press.
* Russell, D., 1998, Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
* –––, (ed.), 1993, Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, New York: Teachers College Press.
* Segal, L. and McIntosh, M., (eds.), 1992, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, London: Virago Press.
* Truong, Thanh-Dam, 1990, Sex,Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia, London: Zed Books.
* Vance, C., (ed.), 1984, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
* Walkowitz, J., 1980, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Williams, L., 1989, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Other Internet Resources

* Prostitutes' Education Network
* Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
* Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
* Bibliography by Marit Synnevåg
* The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project
* EServer Feminism and Women's Studies
* National Feminist Antipornography Movement
* The Men's Bibliography
* Philosophy Talk

Related Entries
feminist (interventions): philosophy of law | pornography: and censorship

 
DeviousJ is offline
Old 11-26-2007, 03:02 PM   #123
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Fuck anyone who thinks diminutive stature is a legitimate lifestyle choice.

 
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Old 11-27-2007, 04:57 PM   #124
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gosh she's little.

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Old 11-27-2007, 05:11 PM   #125
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Old 11-27-2007, 05:14 PM   #126
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Old 11-27-2007, 05:25 PM   #127
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Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

By Linda Nochlin

"Why have there been no great women artists?" The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist "controversy," it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: "There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness."

The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from "scientifically proven" demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near equality and after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages too have still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts.

The feminist's first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to "rediscover" forgotten flower painters or David followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to think-in other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review,or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi, are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of women's achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.

Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of "greatness" for women's art than for men's, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women's situation and experience.

This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, women's experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men's, and certainly the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. Unfortunately, though this remains within the realm of possibility it has so far not occurred. While the members of the Danube School, the followers of Caravaggio, the painters gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven, the Blue Rider, or the Cubists may be recognized by certain clearly defined stylistic or expressive qualities, no such common qualities of "femininity" would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers, a case brilliantly argued, against the most devastating, and mutually contradictory, masculine critical cliches, by Mary Ellmann in her Thinking about Women. No subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Lee Bontecou, or Louise Nevelson, any more than that of Sappho, Marie de France, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag. In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.

Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of their medium, it may be asserted. But which of the women artists cited above is more inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Madame Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun? Or is it not more a question of the whole Rococo style of eighteenth-century France being "feminine," if judged in terms of a binary scale of "masculinity" versus "femininity"? Certainly, if daintiness, delicacy, and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks Of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, nor dainty and introverted about Helen Frankenthaler's giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of domestic life, or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the ImpressionistsRenoir and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.

The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.

The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of "hidden" great women artists, or if there really, should be different standards for women's art as opposed to men's--and one can't have it both ways--then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.

But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to ******* everything that happens t o us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts.

It is when one really starts thinking about the implications of "Why have there been no great women artists?" that one begins to realize to what extent our consciousness of how things are in the world has been conditioned-and often falsified-by the way the most important questions are posed. We tend to take it for granted that there really is an East Asian Problem, a Poverty Problem, a Black Problem and a Woman Problem. But first we must ask ourselves who is formulating these "questions," and then, what purposes such formulations may serve. (We may, of course, refresh our memories with the connotations of the Nazis' "Jewish Problem.") Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: thus the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the "East Asian Problem," whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the "American Problem"; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the "Wealth Problem" by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the "Woman Problem."

Now the "Woman Problem," like all human problems, so-called (and the very idea of calling anything to do with human beings a "problem" is, of course, a fairly recent one) is not amenable to "solution" at all, since what human problems involve is reinterpretation of the nature of the situation, or a radical alteration of stance or program on the part of the "prohlems " themselves. Thus women and their situation in the arts, as in other realms of endeavor, are not a "problem" to be viewed through the eyes of the dominant male power elite. Instead, women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.

It is certainly not realistic to hope that a majority of men, in the arts or in any other field, will soon see the light and find that it is in their own self-interest to grant complete equality to women, as some feminists optimistically assert, or to maintain that men themselves will soon realize that they are diminished by denying themselves access to traditionally "feminine" realms and emotional reactions. After all, there are few areas that are really "denied" to men, if the level of operations demanded be transcendent, responsible, or rewarding enough: men who have a need for "feminine" involvement with babies or children gain status as pediatricians or child psychologists, with a nurse (female) to do the more routine work; those who feel the urge for kitchen creativity may gain fame as master chefs; and, of course, men who yearn to fulfill themselves through what are often termed "feminine" artistic interests can find themselves as painters or sculptors, rather than as volunteer museum aides or part-time ceramists, as their female counterparts so often end up doing; as far as scholarship is concerned, how many men would be willing to change their jobs as teachers and researchers for those of unpaid, part-time research assistants and typists as well as full-time nannies and domestic workers?

Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or another.

Thus the question of women's equality--in art as in any other realm--devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them. As John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago: "Everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural."' Most men, despite lip service to equality, are reluctant to give up this "natural" order of things in which their advantages are so great; for women, the case is further complicated by the fact that, as Mill astutely pointed out, unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of them not only submission but unqualified affection as well; thus women are often weakened by the internalized demands of the male-dominated society itself, as well as by a plethora of material goods and comforts: the middle-class woman has a great deal more to lose than her chains.




The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this. While the "woman problem" as such may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women. Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or unconscious, link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of "Great"-an honorific attested to by the number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question-and the Great Artist is, of course, conceived of as one who has "Genius"; Genius, in turn, is thought of as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.' Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, ****-historical premises that make Hippolyte Taine's race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.

Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great Artist-subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass's chicken soup, called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or unpromising the circumstances.

The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their creators has, of course, given birth to myths since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical abilities attributed by Pliny to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in antiquity--the mysterious inner call in early youth, the lack of any teacher but Nature herself--is repeated as late as the nineteenth century by Max Buchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have functioned historically to set him off from others as a godlike creator, one who creates Being out of nothing. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy, has been a stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto, discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a stone; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later artists including Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna, Zurbardn, and Goya were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always seems to have manifested itself very early, and independent of any external encouragement: Filippo Lippi and Poussin, Courbet and Monet are all reported to have drawn caricatures in the margins of their schoolbooks instead of studying the required subjects-we never, of course, hear about the youths who neglected their studies and scribbled in the margins of their notebooks without ever becoming anything more elevated than department-store clerks or shoe salesmen. The great Michelangelo himself, according to his biographer and pupil, Vasari, did more drawing than studying as a child. So pronounced was his talent, reports Vasari, that when his master, Ghirlandalo, absented himself momentarily from his work in Santa Maria Novella, and the young art student took the opportunity to draw "the scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks" in this brief absence, he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed: "This boy knows more than I do."

As is so often the case, such stories, which probably have some truth in them, tend both to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume. Even when based on fact, these myths about the early manifestations of genius are misleading. It is no doubt true, for example, that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona, and later to the Madrid, Academy of Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation. But one would like to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure--in whom, of course, art historians are uninterested--or to study in greater detail the role played by Picasso's art-professor father in the pictorial precocity of his son. What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?

What is stressed in all these stories is the apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semireligious conception of the artist's role is elevated to haglography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and, not least, some of the artists themselves tended to elevate the making of art into a substitute religion, the last bulwark of higher values in a materialistic world. The artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints' Legend, struggles against the most determined parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius. Here we have the mad van Gogh, spinning out sunflowers despite epileptic seizures and near-starvation; Cezanne, braving paternal rejection and public scorn in order to revolutionize painting; Gauguin throwing away respectability and financial security with a single existential gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec, dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthright in favor of the squalid surroundings that provided him with inspiration.

Now no serious contemporary art historian takes such obvious fairy tales at their face value. Yet it is this sort of mythology about artistic achievement and its concomitants which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of the times, economic crises, and so on. Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists-more specifically, the art-historical monograph, which accepts the notion of the great artist as primary, and the social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary "influences" or "background"-lurks the golden-nugget theory of genius and the free-enterprise conception of individual achievement. On this basis, women's lack of major achievement in art may be formulated as a syllogism: If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius then it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself. O.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget theory of artistic genius. If Giotto, the obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why not women?

Yet as soon as one leaves behind the world of fairy tale and self-fulfilling prophecy and, instead, casts a dispassionate eye on the actual situations in which important art production has existed, in the total range of its social and institutional structures throughout history, one finds that t he very questions which are fruitful or relevant for the historian to ask shape up rather differently. One would like to ask, for instance, from what social classes artists were most likely to come at different periods of art history, from what castes and subgroup. What proportion of painters and sculptors, or more specifically, of major painters and sculptors, came from families in which their fathers or other close relatives were painters and sculptors or engaged in related professions? As Nikolaus Pevsner points out in his discussion of the French Academy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transmission of the artistic profession from father to son was considered a matter of course (as it was with the Coypels, the Coustous, the Van Loos, etc.); indeed, sons of academicians were exempted from the customary fees for lessons. Despite the noteworthy and dramatically satisfying cases of the great father-rejecting revoltes~s of the nineteenth century, one might be forced to admit that a large proportion of artists, great and not-so-great, in the days when it was normal for sons to follow in their fathers' footsteps, had artist fathers. In the rank of major artists, the names of Holbein and Durer, Raphael and Bernim, immediately spring to mind; even in our own times, one can cite the names of Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, and Wyeth as members of artist-families.

As far as the relationship of artistic occupation and social class is concerned, an interesting paradigm for the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" might well be provided by trying to answer the question "Why have there been no great artists from the aristocracy?" One can scarcely think, before the anti traditional nineteenth century at least, of any artist who sprang from the ranks of any more elevated class than the upper bourgeoisie; even in the nineteenth century, Degas came from the lower nobility more like the haute bourgeoisie, in fact-and only Toulouse-Lautrec, metamorphosed into the ranks of the marginal by accidental deformity, could be said to have come from the loftier reaches of the upper classes. While the aristocracy has always provided the lion's share of the patronage and the audience for art-as, indeed, the aristocracy of wealth does even in our more democratic days-it has contributed little beyond amateurish efforts to the creation of art itself, despite the fact that aristocrats (like many women) have had more than their share of educational advantages, plenty of leisure and, indeed, like women, were often encouraged to dabble in the arts and even develop into respectable amateurs, like Napoleon III's cousin, the Princess Mathilde, who exhibited at the official Salons, or Queen Victoria, who, with Prince Albert, studied art with no less a figure than Landseer himself. Could it be that the little golden nugget-genius-is missing from the aristocratic makeup in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche? Or rather, is it not that the kinds of demands and expectations placed before both aristocrats and women-the amount of time necessarily devoted to social functions, the very kinds of activities demanded-simply made total devotion to professional art production out of the question, indeed unthinkable, both for upper-class males and for women generally, rather than its being a question of genius and talent?

When the right questions are asked about the conditions for producing art, of which the production of great art is a subtopic, there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius. Piaget and others have stressed in their genetic epistemology that in the development of reason and in the unfolding of imagination in young children, intelligence or, by implication, what we choose to call genius-is a dynamic activity rather than a static essence, and an activity of a subject in a situation. As further investigations in the field of child development imply, these abilities, or this intelligence, are built up minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and the patterns of adaptation-accommodation may be established so early within the subject-in-an-environment that they may indeed appear to be innate to the unsophisticated observer. Such investigations imply that, even aside from ****-historical reasons, scholars will have to abandon the notion, consciously articulated or not, of individual genius as innate, and as primary to the creation of art.'

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" has led us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, "Influenced" by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast.

 
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Old 11-27-2007, 05:41 PM   #128
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Originally Posted by Charmbag
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

By Linda Nochlin

"Why have there been no great women artists?" The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist "controversy," it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: "There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness."

The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from "scientifically proven" demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near equality and after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages too have still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts.

The feminist's first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to "rediscover" forgotten flower painters or David followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to think-in other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review,or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi, are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of women's achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.

Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of "greatness" for women's art than for men's, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women's situation and experience.

This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, women's experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men's, and certainly the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. Unfortunately, though this remains within the realm of possibility it has so far not occurred. While the members of the Danube School, the followers of Caravaggio, the painters gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven, the Blue Rider, or the Cubists may be recognized by certain clearly defined stylistic or expressive qualities, no such common qualities of "femininity" would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers, a case brilliantly argued, against the most devastating, and mutually contradictory, masculine critical cliches, by Mary Ellmann in her Thinking about Women. No subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Lee Bontecou, or Louise Nevelson, any more than that of Sappho, Marie de France, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag. In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.

Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of their medium, it may be asserted. But which of the women artists cited above is more inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Madame Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun? Or is it not more a question of the whole Rococo style of eighteenth-century France being "feminine," if judged in terms of a binary scale of "masculinity" versus "femininity"? Certainly, if daintiness, delicacy, and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks Of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, nor dainty and introverted about Helen Frankenthaler's giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of domestic life, or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the ImpressionistsRenoir and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.

The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.

The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of "hidden" great women artists, or if there really, should be different standards for women's art as opposed to men's--and one can't have it both ways--then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.

But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to ******* everything that happens t o us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts.

It is when one really starts thinking about the implications of "Why have there been no great women artists?" that one begins to realize to what extent our consciousness of how things are in the world has been conditioned-and often falsified-by the way the most important questions are posed. We tend to take it for granted that there really is an East Asian Problem, a Poverty Problem, a Black Problem and a Woman Problem. But first we must ask ourselves who is formulating these "questions," and then, what purposes such formulations may serve. (We may, of course, refresh our memories with the connotations of the Nazis' "Jewish Problem.") Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: thus the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the "East Asian Problem," whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the "American Problem"; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the "Wealth Problem" by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the "Woman Problem."

Now the "Woman Problem," like all human problems, so-called (and the very idea of calling anything to do with human beings a "problem" is, of course, a fairly recent one) is not amenable to "solution" at all, since what human problems involve is reinterpretation of the nature of the situation, or a radical alteration of stance or program on the part of the "prohlems " themselves. Thus women and their situation in the arts, as in other realms of endeavor, are not a "problem" to be viewed through the eyes of the dominant male power elite. Instead, women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.

It is certainly not realistic to hope that a majority of men, in the arts or in any other field, will soon see the light and find that it is in their own self-interest to grant complete equality to women, as some feminists optimistically assert, or to maintain that men themselves will soon realize that they are diminished by denying themselves access to traditionally "feminine" realms and emotional reactions. After all, there are few areas that are really "denied" to men, if the level of operations demanded be transcendent, responsible, or rewarding enough: men who have a need for "feminine" involvement with babies or children gain status as pediatricians or child psychologists, with a nurse (female) to do the more routine work; those who feel the urge for kitchen creativity may gain fame as master chefs; and, of course, men who yearn to fulfill themselves through what are often termed "feminine" artistic interests can find themselves as painters or sculptors, rather than as volunteer museum aides or part-time ceramists, as their female counterparts so often end up doing; as far as scholarship is concerned, how many men would be willing to change their jobs as teachers and researchers for those of unpaid, part-time research assistants and typists as well as full-time nannies and domestic workers?

Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or another.

Thus the question of women's equality--in art as in any other realm--devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them. As John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago: "Everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural."' Most men, despite lip service to equality, are reluctant to give up this "natural" order of things in which their advantages are so great; for women, the case is further complicated by the fact that, as Mill astutely pointed out, unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of them not only submission but unqualified affection as well; thus women are often weakened by the internalized demands of the male-dominated society itself, as well as by a plethora of material goods and comforts: the middle-class woman has a great deal more to lose than her chains.




The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this. While the "woman problem" as such may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women. Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or unconscious, link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of "Great"-an honorific attested to by the number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question-and the Great Artist is, of course, conceived of as one who has "Genius"; Genius, in turn, is thought of as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.' Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, ****-historical premises that make Hippolyte Taine's race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.

Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great Artist-subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass's chicken soup, called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or unpromising the circumstances.

The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their creators has, of course, given birth to myths since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical abilities attributed by Pliny to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in antiquity--the mysterious inner call in early youth, the lack of any teacher but Nature herself--is repeated as late as the nineteenth century by Max Buchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have functioned historically to set him off from others as a godlike creator, one who creates Being out of nothing. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy, has been a stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto, discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a stone; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later artists including Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna, Zurbardn, and Goya were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always seems to have manifested itself very early, and independent of any external encouragement: Filippo Lippi and Poussin, Courbet and Monet are all reported to have drawn caricatures in the margins of their schoolbooks instead of studying the required subjects-we never, of course, hear about the youths who neglected their studies and scribbled in the margins of their notebooks without ever becoming anything more elevated than department-store clerks or shoe salesmen. The great Michelangelo himself, according to his biographer and pupil, Vasari, did more drawing than studying as a child. So pronounced was his talent, reports Vasari, that when his master, Ghirlandalo, absented himself momentarily from his work in Santa Maria Novella, and the young art student took the opportunity to draw "the scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks" in this brief absence, he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed: "This boy knows more than I do."

As is so often the case, such stories, which probably have some truth in them, tend both to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume. Even when based on fact, these myths about the early manifestations of genius are misleading. It is no doubt true, for example, that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona, and later to the Madrid, Academy of Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation. But one would like to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure--in whom, of course, art historians are uninterested--or to study in greater detail the role played by Picasso's art-professor father in the pictorial precocity of his son. What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?

What is stressed in all these stories is the apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semireligious conception of the artist's role is elevated to haglography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and, not least, some of the artists themselves tended to elevate the making of art into a substitute religion, the last bulwark of higher values in a materialistic world. The artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints' Legend, struggles against the most determined parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius. Here we have the mad van Gogh, spinning out sunflowers despite epileptic seizures and near-starvation; Cezanne, braving paternal rejection and public scorn in order to revolutionize painting; Gauguin throwing away respectability and financial security with a single existential gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec, dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthright in favor of the squalid surroundings that provided him with inspiration.

Now no serious contemporary art historian takes such obvious fairy tales at their face value. Yet it is this sort of mythology about artistic achievement and its concomitants which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of the times, economic crises, and so on. Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists-more specifically, the art-historical monograph, which accepts the notion of the great artist as primary, and the social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary "influences" or "background"-lurks the golden-nugget theory of genius and the free-enterprise conception of individual achievement. On this basis, women's lack of major achievement in art may be formulated as a syllogism: If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius then it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself. O.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget theory of artistic genius. If Giotto, the obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why not women?

Yet as soon as one leaves behind the world of fairy tale and self-fulfilling prophecy and, instead, casts a dispassionate eye on the actual situations in which important art production has existed, in the total range of its social and institutional structures throughout history, one finds that t he very questions which are fruitful or relevant for the historian to ask shape up rather differently. One would like to ask, for instance, from what social classes artists were most likely to come at different periods of art history, from what castes and subgroup. What proportion of painters and sculptors, or more specifically, of major painters and sculptors, came from families in which their fathers or other close relatives were painters and sculptors or engaged in related professions? As Nikolaus Pevsner points out in his discussion of the French Academy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transmission of the artistic profession from father to son was considered a matter of course (as it was with the Coypels, the Coustous, the Van Loos, etc.); indeed, sons of academicians were exempted from the customary fees for lessons. Despite the noteworthy and dramatically satisfying cases of the great father-rejecting revoltes~s of the nineteenth century, one might be forced to admit that a large proportion of artists, great and not-so-great, in the days when it was normal for sons to follow in their fathers' footsteps, had artist fathers. In the rank of major artists, the names of Holbein and Durer, Raphael and Bernim, immediately spring to mind; even in our own times, one can cite the names of Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, and Wyeth as members of artist-families.

As far as the relationship of artistic occupation and social class is concerned, an interesting paradigm for the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" might well be provided by trying to answer the question "Why have there been no great artists from the aristocracy?" One can scarcely think, before the anti traditional nineteenth century at least, of any artist who sprang from the ranks of any more elevated class than the upper bourgeoisie; even in the nineteenth century, Degas came from the lower nobility more like the haute bourgeoisie, in fact-and only Toulouse-Lautrec, metamorphosed into the ranks of the marginal by accidental deformity, could be said to have come from the loftier reaches of the upper classes. While the aristocracy has always provided the lion's share of the patronage and the audience for art-as, indeed, the aristocracy of wealth does even in our more democratic days-it has contributed little beyond amateurish efforts to the creation of art itself, despite the fact that aristocrats (like many women) have had more than their share of educational advantages, plenty of leisure and, indeed, like women, were often encouraged to dabble in the arts and even develop into respectable amateurs, like Napoleon III's cousin, the Princess Mathilde, who exhibited at the official Salons, or Queen Victoria, who, with Prince Albert, studied art with no less a figure than Landseer himself. Could it be that the little golden nugget-genius-is missing from the aristocratic makeup in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche? Or rather, is it not that the kinds of demands and expectations placed before both aristocrats and women-the amount of time necessarily devoted to social functions, the very kinds of activities demanded-simply made total devotion to professional art production out of the question, indeed unthinkable, both for upper-class males and for women generally, rather than its being a question of genius and talent?

When the right questions are asked about the conditions for producing art, of which the production of great art is a subtopic, there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius. Piaget and others have stressed in their genetic epistemology that in the development of reason and in the unfolding of imagination in young children, intelligence or, by implication, what we choose to call genius-is a dynamic activity rather than a static essence, and an activity of a subject in a situation. As further investigations in the field of child development imply, these abilities, or this intelligence, are built up minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and the patterns of adaptation-accommodation may be established so early within the subject-in-an-environment that they may indeed appear to be innate to the unsophisticated observer. Such investigations imply that, even aside from ****-historical reasons, scholars will have to abandon the notion, consciously articulated or not, of individual genius as innate, and as primary to the creation of art.'

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" has led us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, "Influenced" by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast.
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Old 11-27-2007, 06:09 PM   #129
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Originally Posted by Charmbag
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

By Linda Nochlin

"Why have there been no great women artists?" The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist "controversy," it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: "There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness."

The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from "scientifically proven" demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near equality and after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages too have still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts.

The feminist's first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to "rediscover" forgotten flower painters or David followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to think-in other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review,or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi, are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of women's achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.

Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of "greatness" for women's art than for men's, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women's situation and experience.

This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, women's experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men's, and certainly the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. Unfortunately, though this remains within the realm of possibility it has so far not occurred. While the members of the Danube School, the followers of Caravaggio, the painters gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven, the Blue Rider, or the Cubists may be recognized by certain clearly defined stylistic or expressive qualities, no such common qualities of "femininity" would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers, a case brilliantly argued, against the most devastating, and mutually contradictory, masculine critical cliches, by Mary Ellmann in her Thinking about Women. No subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Lee Bontecou, or Louise Nevelson, any more than that of Sappho, Marie de France, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag. In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.

Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of their medium, it may be asserted. But which of the women artists cited above is more inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Madame Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun? Or is it not more a question of the whole Rococo style of eighteenth-century France being "feminine," if judged in terms of a binary scale of "masculinity" versus "femininity"? Certainly, if daintiness, delicacy, and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks Of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, nor dainty and introverted about Helen Frankenthaler's giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of domestic life, or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the ImpressionistsRenoir and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.

The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.

The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of "hidden" great women artists, or if there really, should be different standards for women's art as opposed to men's--and one can't have it both ways--then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.

But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to ******* everything that happens t o us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts.

It is when one really starts thinking about the implications of "Why have there been no great women artists?" that one begins to realize to what extent our consciousness of how things are in the world has been conditioned-and often falsified-by the way the most important questions are posed. We tend to take it for granted that there really is an East Asian Problem, a Poverty Problem, a Black Problem and a Woman Problem. But first we must ask ourselves who is formulating these "questions," and then, what purposes such formulations may serve. (We may, of course, refresh our memories with the connotations of the Nazis' "Jewish Problem.") Indeed, in our time of instant communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad conscience of those with power: thus the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the "East Asian Problem," whereas East Asians may view it, more realistically, as the "American Problem"; the so-called Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the "Wealth Problem" by denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present state of affairs as the "Woman Problem."

Now the "Woman Problem," like all human problems, so-called (and the very idea of calling anything to do with human beings a "problem" is, of course, a fairly recent one) is not amenable to "solution" at all, since what human problems involve is reinterpretation of the nature of the situation, or a radical alteration of stance or program on the part of the "prohlems " themselves. Thus women and their situation in the arts, as in other realms of endeavor, are not a "problem" to be viewed through the eyes of the dominant male power elite. Instead, women must conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.

It is certainly not realistic to hope that a majority of men, in the arts or in any other field, will soon see the light and find that it is in their own self-interest to grant complete equality to women, as some feminists optimistically assert, or to maintain that men themselves will soon realize that they are diminished by denying themselves access to traditionally "feminine" realms and emotional reactions. After all, there are few areas that are really "denied" to men, if the level of operations demanded be transcendent, responsible, or rewarding enough: men who have a need for "feminine" involvement with babies or children gain status as pediatricians or child psychologists, with a nurse (female) to do the more routine work; those who feel the urge for kitchen creativity may gain fame as master chefs; and, of course, men who yearn to fulfill themselves through what are often termed "feminine" artistic interests can find themselves as painters or sculptors, rather than as volunteer museum aides or part-time ceramists, as their female counterparts so often end up doing; as far as scholarship is concerned, how many men would be willing to change their jobs as teachers and researchers for those of unpaid, part-time research assistants and typists as well as full-time nannies and domestic workers?

Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or another.

Thus the question of women's equality--in art as in any other realm--devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them. As John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago: "Everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural."' Most men, despite lip service to equality, are reluctant to give up this "natural" order of things in which their advantages are so great; for women, the case is further complicated by the fact that, as Mill astutely pointed out, unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of them not only submission but unqualified affection as well; thus women are often weakened by the internalized demands of the male-dominated society itself, as well as by a plethora of material goods and comforts: the middle-class woman has a great deal more to lose than her chains.




The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this. While the "woman problem" as such may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women. Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or unconscious, link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of "Great"-an honorific attested to by the number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question-and the Great Artist is, of course, conceived of as one who has "Genius"; Genius, in turn, is thought of as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.' Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, ****-historical premises that make Hippolyte Taine's race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.

Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great Artist-subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass's chicken soup, called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or unpromising the circumstances.

The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their creators has, of course, given birth to myths since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical abilities attributed by Pliny to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in antiquity--the mysterious inner call in early youth, the lack of any teacher but Nature herself--is repeated as late as the nineteenth century by Max Buchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have functioned historically to set him off from others as a godlike creator, one who creates Being out of nothing. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy, has been a stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto, discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a stone; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later artists including Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna, Zurbardn, and Goya were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always seems to have manifested itself very early, and independent of any external encouragement: Filippo Lippi and Poussin, Courbet and Monet are all reported to have drawn caricatures in the margins of their schoolbooks instead of studying the required subjects-we never, of course, hear about the youths who neglected their studies and scribbled in the margins of their notebooks without ever becoming anything more elevated than department-store clerks or shoe salesmen. The great Michelangelo himself, according to his biographer and pupil, Vasari, did more drawing than studying as a child. So pronounced was his talent, reports Vasari, that when his master, Ghirlandalo, absented himself momentarily from his work in Santa Maria Novella, and the young art student took the opportunity to draw "the scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks" in this brief absence, he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed: "This boy knows more than I do."

As is so often the case, such stories, which probably have some truth in them, tend both to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume. Even when based on fact, these myths about the early manifestations of genius are misleading. It is no doubt true, for example, that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona, and later to the Madrid, Academy of Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation. But one would like to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure--in whom, of course, art historians are uninterested--or to study in greater detail the role played by Picasso's art-professor father in the pictorial precocity of his son. What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?

What is stressed in all these stories is the apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semireligious conception of the artist's role is elevated to haglography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and, not least, some of the artists themselves tended to elevate the making of art into a substitute religion, the last bulwark of higher values in a materialistic world. The artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints' Legend, struggles against the most determined parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius. Here we have the mad van Gogh, spinning out sunflowers despite epileptic seizures and near-starvation; Cezanne, braving paternal rejection and public scorn in order to revolutionize painting; Gauguin throwing away respectability and financial security with a single existential gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec, dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthright in favor of the squalid surroundings that provided him with inspiration.

Now no serious contemporary art historian takes such obvious fairy tales at their face value. Yet it is this sort of mythology about artistic achievement and its concomitants which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of the times, economic crises, and so on. Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists-more specifically, the art-historical monograph, which accepts the notion of the great artist as primary, and the social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary "influences" or "background"-lurks the golden-nugget theory of genius and the free-enterprise conception of individual achievement. On this basis, women's lack of major achievement in art may be formulated as a syllogism: If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius then it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself. O.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget theory of artistic genius. If Giotto, the obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why not women?

Yet as soon as one leaves behind the world of fairy tale and self-fulfilling prophecy and, instead, casts a dispassionate eye on the actual situations in which important art production has existed, in the total range of its social and institutional structures throughout history, one finds that t he very questions which are fruitful or relevant for the historian to ask shape up rather differently. One would like to ask, for instance, from what social classes artists were most likely to come at different periods of art history, from what castes and subgroup. What proportion of painters and sculptors, or more specifically, of major painters and sculptors, came from families in which their fathers or other close relatives were painters and sculptors or engaged in related professions? As Nikolaus Pevsner points out in his discussion of the French Academy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transmission of the artistic profession from father to son was considered a matter of course (as it was with the Coypels, the Coustous, the Van Loos, etc.); indeed, sons of academicians were exempted from the customary fees for lessons. Despite the noteworthy and dramatically satisfying cases of the great father-rejecting revoltes~s of the nineteenth century, one might be forced to admit that a large proportion of artists, great and not-so-great, in the days when it was normal for sons to follow in their fathers' footsteps, had artist fathers. In the rank of major artists, the names of Holbein and Durer, Raphael and Bernim, immediately spring to mind; even in our own times, one can cite the names of Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, and Wyeth as members of artist-families.

As far as the relationship of artistic occupation and social class is concerned, an interesting paradigm for the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" might well be provided by trying to answer the question "Why have there been no great artists from the aristocracy?" One can scarcely think, before the anti traditional nineteenth century at least, of any artist who sprang from the ranks of any more elevated class than the upper bourgeoisie; even in the nineteenth century, Degas came from the lower nobility more like the haute bourgeoisie, in fact-and only Toulouse-Lautrec, metamorphosed into the ranks of the marginal by accidental deformity, could be said to have come from the loftier reaches of the upper classes. While the aristocracy has always provided the lion's share of the patronage and the audience for art-as, indeed, the aristocracy of wealth does even in our more democratic days-it has contributed little beyond amateurish efforts to the creation of art itself, despite the fact that aristocrats (like many women) have had more than their share of educational advantages, plenty of leisure and, indeed, like women, were often encouraged to dabble in the arts and even develop into respectable amateurs, like Napoleon III's cousin, the Princess Mathilde, who exhibited at the official Salons, or Queen Victoria, who, with Prince Albert, studied art with no less a figure than Landseer himself. Could it be that the little golden nugget-genius-is missing from the aristocratic makeup in the same way that it is from the feminine psyche? Or rather, is it not that the kinds of demands and expectations placed before both aristocrats and women-the amount of time necessarily devoted to social functions, the very kinds of activities demanded-simply made total devotion to professional art production out of the question, indeed unthinkable, both for upper-class males and for women generally, rather than its being a question of genius and talent?

When the right questions are asked about the conditions for producing art, of which the production of great art is a subtopic, there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius. Piaget and others have stressed in their genetic epistemology that in the development of reason and in the unfolding of imagination in young children, intelligence or, by implication, what we choose to call genius-is a dynamic activity rather than a static essence, and an activity of a subject in a situation. As further investigations in the field of child development imply, these abilities, or this intelligence, are built up minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and the patterns of adaptation-accommodation may be established so early within the subject-in-an-environment that they may indeed appear to be innate to the unsophisticated observer. Such investigations imply that, even aside from ****-historical reasons, scholars will have to abandon the notion, consciously articulated or not, of individual genius as innate, and as primary to the creation of art.'

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" has led us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, "Influenced" by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast.


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Ginger
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For other uses, see Ginger (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with ginseng.
Zingiber officinale

Conservation status
Secure
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Liliopsida
Order: Zingiberales
Family: Zingiberaceae
Genus: Zingiber
Species: Z. officinale
Binomial name
Zingiber officinale
Roscoe

Ginger is the common name for the monocotyledonous perennial plant Zingiber officinale. The term is also used to describe the edible part of the plant which is commonly used as a spice in cooking throughout the world. Often erroneously referred to as "ginger root", the edible section is actually the horizontal subterranean stem or rhizome of the plant. The ginger plant has a long history of cultivation known to originate in China and then spread to India, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean.[1]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Chemistry
* 2 Culinary uses
o 2.1 Regional uses
* 3 Medical uses
o 3.1 Nausea
* 4 Folk medicinal uses
o 4.1 Local uses
* 5 Reactions
* 6 Horticulture
* 7 References in popular culture
* 8 Production trends
* 9 Similar species
* 10 References
* 11 External links

[edit] Chemistry
Ginger section
Ginger section

Ginger contains up to 3% of an essential oil that causes the fragrance of the spice. The main constituents are sesquiterpenoids with (-)-zingiberene as the main component. Lesser amounts of other sesquiterpenoids (β-sesquiphellandrene, bisabolene and farnesene) and a small monoterpenoid fraction (β-phelladrene, cineol, and citral) have also been identified.

The pungent taste of ginger is due to nonvolatile phenylpropanoid-derived compounds, particularly gingerols and shogaols. The latter are formed from the former when ginger is dried or cooked. Zingerone is also produced from gingerols during this process, and it is less pungent and has a spicy-sweet aroma.[2]

Ginger has a sialagogue action, stimulating the production of saliva.

[edit] Culinary uses
Ginger root, raw
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 20 kcal 80 kJ
Carbohydrates 17.77g
- Sugars 1.7 g
- Dietary fiber 2 g
Fat 0.75 g
Protein 1.82 g
Thiamin (Vit. B1) 0.025 mg 2%
Riboflavin (Vit. B2) 0.034 mg 2%
Niacin (Vit. B3) 0.75 mg 5%
Pantothenic acid (B5) 0.203 mg 4%
Vitamin B6 0.16 mg 12%
Folate (Vit. B9) 11 μg 3%
Vitamin C 5 mg 8%
Calcium 16 mg 2%
Iron 0.6 mg 5%
Magnesium 43 mg 12%
Phosphorus 34 mg 5%
Potassium 415 mg 9%
Zinc 0.34 mg 3%
Percentages are relative to US
recommendations for adults.
Source: USDA Nutrient database
25.4-pound ginger "root"
25.4-pound ginger "root"
Pickled Ginger
Pickled Ginger

Young ginger rhizomes are juicy and fleshy with a very mild taste. They are often pickled in vinegar or sherry as a snack or just cooked as an ingredient in many dishes. They can also be stewed in boiling water to make ginger tea, to which honey is often added as a sweetener; sliced orange or lemon fruit may also be added. Mature ginger roots are fibrous and nearly dry. The juice from old ginger roots is extremely potent and is often used as a spice in Chinese cuisine to flavor dishes such as seafood or mutton. Powdered dry ginger root (ginger powder) is typically used to add spiciness to gingerbread and other recipes. Ground and fresh ginger taste quite different and ground ginger is a poor substitute for fresh ginger. Fresh ginger can be successfully substituted for ground ginger and should be done at a ratio of 6 parts fresh for 1 part ground.

Ginger is also made into candy and used as a flavoring for cookies, crackers and cake, and is the main flavor in ginger ale-- a sweet, carbonated, non-alcoholic beverage, as well as the similar, but somewhat spicier beverage ginger beer.

[edit] Regional uses

In Western cuisine, ginger is traditionally restricted to sweet foods, such as ginger ale, gingerbread, ginger snaps, ginger cake and ginger biscuits. A ginger-flavored liqueur called Canton is produced in Jarnac, France. Green ginger wine is a ginger flavoured wine produced in the United Kingdom, traditionally sold in a green glass bottle. Ginger is also used as a spice added to hot coffee and tea.

In Arabic, ginger is called Zanjabil and in some parts of the Middle East ginger powder is used as a spice for coffee.

In India, ginger is called "Aadu" in Gujarati, "Shoonti" in Kannada language[Karnataka], Allam in Telugu, Inji in Tamil and Malayalam, Alay in Marathi and Adrak in Hindi and Urdu. Fresh ginger is one of the main spices used for making pulse and lentil curries and other vegetable preparations. It is used fresh to spice tea especially in winter. Also, ginger powder is used in certain food preparations that are made particularly for expecting women and feeding mothers, the most popular one being Katlu which is a mixture of gum resin, ghee, nuts and sugar.

In south India, ginger is used in the production of a candy called Inji-murappa ("ginger candy" from Tamil). This candy is mostly sold by vendors to bus passengers in bus stops and in small tea shops as a locally produced item. Candied ginger is also very famous around these parts. Additionally, in Tamil Nadu, especially in the Tanjore belt, a variety of ginger which is less spicy is used when tender to make fresh pickle with the combination of lemon juice or vinegar, salt and tender green chillies. This kind of pickle was generally made before the invention of refrigeration and stored for a maximum of 4-5 days. The pickle gains a mature flavor when the juices cook the ginger over the first 24 hours. Ginger is also added as a flavouring in tea.

In Japan, ginger is pickled to make beni shoga and gari or grated and used raw on tofu or noodles.

In Myanmar, ginger is used in a salad dish called gyin-tho, which consists of shredded ginger preserved in oil, and a variety of nuts and seeds.

Indonesia has a famous beverage that called Wedang Jahe, which is made from ginger and palm sugar; Indonesians also use ground ginger root, called jahe or djahe, as a frequent ingredient in local recipes.

In traditional Korean kimchi, ginger is finely minced and added to the ingredients of the spicy paste just before the fermenting process.

In South East Asia, the flower of a type of ginger is used in cooking. This unopened flower is known in the Malay language as Bunga Kantan, and is used in salads and also as garnish for sour-savoury soups, like Assam Laksa.

In the Ivory Coast, ginger is ground and mixed with orange, pineapple and lemon to produce a juice called Nyamanku.

[edit] Medical uses

The medical form of ginger historically was called "Jamaica ginger"; it was classified as a stimulant and carminative, and used frequently for dyspepsia and colic. It was also frequently employed to disguise the taste of medicines. Ginger is on the FDA's 'generally recognized as safe' list, though it does interact with some medications, including warfarin. Ginger is contraindicated in people suffering from gallstones as the herb promotes the release of bile from the gallbladder.[3] Ginger may also decrease joint pain from arthritis, though studies on this have been inconsistent, and may have blood thinning and cholesterol lowering properties that may make it useful for treating heart disease. [4]

The characteristic odor and flavor of ginger root is caused by a mixture of zingerone, shoagoles and gingerols, volatile oils that compose about one to three percent of the weight of fresh ginger. In laboratory animals, the gingerols increase the motility of the gastrointestinal tract and have analgesic, sedative, antipyretic and antibacterial properties [5]

[edit] Nausea

Ginger has been found effective by multiple studies for treating nausea caused by seasickness, morning sickness and chemotherapy,[6] though ginger was not found superior over a placebo for post-operative nausea.

Modern research on nausea and motion sickness used approximately 1 gram of ginger powder daily. Though there are claims for efficacy in all causes of nausea, the Physicians Desk Reference recommends against taking ginger rhizomes for morning sickness commonly associated with pregnancy due to possible mutagenic effects,[citation needed] though Chinese women have traditionally used ginger rhizomes during pregnancy to combat morning sickness and the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database states that it is likely safe for use in pregnancy when consumed in food-amounts.[citation needed]

[edit] Folk medicinal uses

There are a variety of uses suggested for ginger. A tea brewed from the is a folk remedy for colds. Ginger ale and ginger beer have been recommended as "stomach settlers" for generations in countries where the beverages are made and ginger water was commonly used to avoid heat cramps in the US. Ginger has also been historically used to treat inflammation which several scientific studies support, though one arthritis trial showed ginger to be no better than a placebo or ibuprofen.[4] Research on rats suggests that ginger may be useful for treating diabetes.[7][8]

[edit] Local uses
A pack of ginger powder
A pack of ginger powder

In the West, powdered dried ginger root is made into capsules and sold in pharmacies for medicinal use.

* In the United States, ginger is generally recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration, though it is not approved for the treatment or cure of any disease and is sold as an unregulated dietary supplement
* In India, ginger is applied as a paste to the temples to relieve headache and consumed when suffering from a cold
* In Myanmar, ginger and a local sweetener made from palm tree juice (Htan nyat) are boiled together and taken to prevent the flu
* In China, a drink made with sliced ginger cooked in sweetened water or a cola is used as a folk medicine for common cold[9]
* In Indonesia, a type of ginger known as Jahe is used as a herbal preparation to reduce fatigue, reducing "winds" in the blood, prevent and cure rheumatism and controlling poor dietary habits
* In Democratic Republic of the Congo, ginger is crushed and mixed with mango-tree sap to make Tangawisi juice, which is considered a universal panacea
* In the Philippines a traditional health drink called "salabat" is made for consumption with breakfast by boiling chopped ginger and adding sugar

[edit] Reactions

Allergic reactions to ginger generally result in a rash and though generally recognized as safe, ginger can cause heartburn, bloating, gas, belching and nausea, particularly if taken in powdered form. Unchewed fresh ginger may result in intestinal blockage, and individuals who have had ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease or blocked intestines may react badly to large quantities of fresh ginger.[10] Ginger can also adversely affect individuals with gallstones.[4][10] There are also suggestions that ginger may affect blood pressure, clotting, and heart rhythms.[10]

[edit] Horticulture
Ginger field
Ginger field
Sketch of ginger plant
Sketch of ginger plant

Ginger produces clusters of white and pink flower buds that bloom into yellow flowers. Because of the aesthetic appeal and the adaptivity of the plant to warm climates, ginger is often used as landscaping around subtropical homes. It is a perennial reed-like plant with annual leafy stems, three to four feet high.

Historical methods of gathering the root describes, when the stalk withers, it is immediately scalded, or washed and scraped, in order to kill it and prevent sprouting. The former method, applied generally to the older and poorer roots, produces Black Ginger; the latter, gives White Ginger. The natural color of the "white" scraped ginger is a pale buff--it is often whitened by bleaching or liming, but generally at the expense of some of its real value.

[edit] References in popular culture

* To members of the Race, an alien species in Harry Turtledove's novel series Worldwar, ginger is a highly addictive, psychoactive drug, with an effect similar to that of cocaine or PCP in humans. Additionally, ginger causes females of "the Race" to go into season (similar to heat in animals) causing a great deal of upheaval.
* In Cockney rhyming slang, ginger is a derogatory euphemism for homosexual. The original slang rhymed queer with ginger beer.
* In the west of Scotland (particularly Glasgow), ginger is a term for any carbonated soft drink.
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
* Ginger is also a common slang term in Great Britain for red-haired individuals (e.g. "the ginger nut" from the film Hot Fuzz).

[edit] Production trends
Ginger output in 2005
Ginger output in 2005

In 2005, China continued to lead the world in ginger production with a global share of almost 25% followed by India, Nepal and Indonesia.

[edit] Similar species

Myoga (Zingiber mioga Roscoe) appears in Japanese cuisine; the flower buds are the part eaten.

Another plant in the Zingiberaceae family, galangal, is used for similar purposes as ginger in Thai cuisine. Galangal is also called Thai ginger. Also referred to as galangal, fingerroot (Boesenbergia rotunda), or Chinese ginger or the Thai krachai, is used in cooking and medicine.

A dicotyledonous native species of eastern North America, Asarum canadense, is also known as "wild ginger", and its root has similar aromatic properties, but it is not related to true ginger and should not be used as a substitute because it contains the carcinogen aristolochic acid. This plant is also a powerful diuretic, or urinary stimulator. It is part of the Aristolochiaceae family.

[edit] References

1. Spices: Exotic Flavours & Medicines: Ginger. Retrieved on 2007-08-08.
2. McGee, Harold (2004). On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (2nd ed.). New York: Scribner pp. 425-426.
3. Al-Achi, Antoine. A Current Look at Ginger Use. Retrieved on 2007-08-02.
4. a b c University of Maryland Medical Centre (2006). Ginger. Retrieved on 2007-08-02.
5. MD O' Hara, Mary; & MSt; David Kiefer, MD; Kim Farrell, MD; Kathi Kemper, MD, MPH (1998). "A Review of 12 Commonly Used Medicinal Herbs" (HTML). Archives of Family Medicine (7): 523-536. Retrieved on 2007-08-06.
6. Ernst, E.; & Pittler, M.H. (2000). "Efficacy of ginger for nausea and vomiting: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials" (PDF). British Journal of Anesthesia 84 (3): 367–371. PMID 10793599. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.
7. Al-Amin, Zainab M. et al. (2006). "Anti-diabetic and hypolipidaemic properties of ginger (Zingiber officinale) in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats". British Journal of Nutrition 96: 660 - 666. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1079/BJN20061849. Retrieved on 5 November 2007.
8. Afshari, Ali Taghizadeh et al. (2007). "The effect of ginger on diabetic nephropathy, plasma antioxidant capacity and lipid peroxidation in rats". Food Chemistry 101 (1): 148 - 153. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2006.01.013. Retrieved on 5 November 2007.
9. Jakes, Susan (2007-01-15). Beverage of Champions. Retrieved on 2007-08-02.
10. a b c Mayo Clinic (2006-05-01). Drugs & Supplements: Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe). Retrieved on 2007-08-02.

* This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 edition of The Grocer's Encyclopedia.

[edit] External links
Wikispecies has information related to:
Zingiber officinale

* Fresh Ginger from India
* Plant Cultures: botany, history and uses of ginger
* Medicinal uses of ginger

[hide]
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Herbs and spices
Herbs Angelica • Basil • Basil, holy • Basil, Thai • Bay leaf • Boldo • Borage • Cannabis • Chervil • Chives • Cicely • Coriander leaf (cilantro) • Curry leaf • Dill • Epazote • Eryngium foetidum (long coriander) • Hoja santa • Houttuynia cordata (giấp cá) • Hyssop • Lavender • Lemon balm • Lemon grass • Lemon verbena • Limnophila aromatica (rice paddy herb) • Lovage • Marjoram • Mint • Mitsuba • Oregano • Parsley • Perilla (shiso) • Rosemary • Rue • Sage • Savory • Sorrel • Stevia • Tarragon • Thyme • Vietnamese coriander (rau răm) • Woodruff
Spices African pepper • Ajwain (bishop's weed) • Aleppo pepper • Allspice • Amchur (mango powder) • Anise • Aromatic ginger • Asafoetida • Camphor • Caraway • Cardamom • Cardamom, black • Cassia • Cayenne pepper • Celery seed • Chili • Cinnamon • Clove • Coriander seed • Cubeb • Cumin • Cumin, black • Dill seed • Fennel • Fenugreek • Fingerroot (krachai) • Galangal, greater • Galangal, lesser • Garlic • Ginger • Grains of Paradise • Horseradish • Juniper berry • Liquorice • Mace • Mahlab • Malabathrum (tejpat) • Mustard, black • Mustard, brown • Mustard, white • Nasturtium • Nigella (kalonji) • Nutmeg • Paprika • Pepper, black • Pepper, green • Pepper, long • Pepper, pink, Brazilian • Pepper, pink, Peruvian • Pepper, white • Pomegranate seed (anardana) • Poppy seed • Saffron • Sarsaparilla • Sassafras • Sesame • Sichuan pepper (huājiāo, sansho) • Star anise • Sumac • Tasmanian pepper • Tamarind • Turmeric • Wasabi • Zedoary
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger"

Categories: Wikipedia articles needing copy edit from August 2007 | All articles needing copy edit | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since August 2007 | Medicinal plants | Spices | Zingiberaceae | Tamil words and phrases
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BumbleBeeMouth is offline
Old 11-27-2007, 06:11 PM   #130
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Headbutt
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The top combatant can attack with headbutts while being held in the bottom combatant's guard.
The top combatant can attack with headbutts while being held in the bottom combatant's guard.

A headbutt is a strike with the head, typically involving the use of robust parts of the cranium as area of impact. Effective headbutting revolves around striking a sensitive area with a less sensitive area, such as striking the nose of an opponent with the forehead. It is known as a risky maneuver: a misplaced headbutt can cause more damage to the headbutter than the headbuttee.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Etymology
* 2 Mechanics of the headbutt
* 3 Headbutts in combat sports and martial arts
o 3.1 Illustration in Burmese boxing
* 4 Headbutts in other sports
* 5 References
* 6 External links
* 7 Footnotes

[edit] Etymology

From French boter = "to push or strike". Rams are well known for butting with their heads and horns. From this the terms battering ram and hydraulic ram are derived. Many males in various animal species employ butting during courtship.

[edit] Mechanics of the headbutt

Headbutts can be used from close range such as from the clinch, or on the ground. They are typically applied to the head of the opponent, since the head is often a readily available target and has several sensitive areas. An effective headbutt can be performed with a forward, rising, sideways or backwards motion; each being effective from different positions.

Parts of the cranium with thick bone and high local curvature make for good weapon areas, and these ******* the forehead near the hairline, the outboard curved part of the parietal bone, and the occiput. Ideal targets are usually the fragile areas of the head, including the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones, the hinge area of the jaw, the temple, and the top edge of the eye socket.

Hitting the opponent's teeth or mouth is likely to cause mutual damage. The chin of the enemy is also a generally bad position to headbutt unless striking from below up into the bottom of the chin, similar to an uppercut. With sufficient force, one could cause the opponent to bite through his or her tongue, or slam the opponent's teeth together so hard as to break them against each other. Headbutting the chin hard enough to accomplish such a task is very difficult, though.

[edit] Headbutts in combat sports and martial arts

Headbutting is considered an illegal technique in nearly all combat sports, with a few exceptions such as Burmese boxing, shootfighting, and some mixed martial arts competitions such as Finnfight. It is also simulated in professional wrestling. Reasons for illegality vary from specific technical reasons to general inappropriateness; headbutts are prone to cause lacerations, often deeper ones than from punches,[1] and may lead to both fighters sustaining concussions.[2]

Even though generally banned in sport application, several martial arts and self-defense systems do, however, ******* headbutting in the curriculum. In some rare systems, such as Eritrean Testa, headbutting is of major focus or is the sole focus.

[edit] Illustration in Burmese boxing

A head strike or head butting is one of the most dangerous techniques used in traditional martial arts (in self-defense). The blow itself is rather simple – the technique is based on butting a vulnerable par of the opponent’s head with a harder part of our head.

Head butt to be effective in counterstike (counterattack)




In competition, head butting can sometimes be delivered jumping (in burmese boxing)


[edit] Headbutts in other sports
Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals.
Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals.

Headbutts are generally forbidden in most sports.

Headbutting has recently received some attention due to its use by some players during FIFA World Cup matches. Headbutting is considered illegal in association football and is punishable by a red card. In the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Ariel Ortega headbutted Dutch keeper Edwin van der Sar in the Argentina vs. Netherlands quarterfinal match and was sent off. In the 2006 FIFA World Cup another Dutch player, Mark van Bommel was headbutted, this time by Luís Figo in the Portugal vs. Netherlands Round of 16 match, but Figo received only a yellow card for his offense. In the final match against Italy, Frenchman Zinedine Zidane headbutted the Italian Marco Materazzi in the chest, for which he received a red card and a subsequent three match ban (although the red card meant Zidane could play no further part in the match, the three-match ban had no effect since he had previously announced his intention to retire after the World Cup).

[edit] References

* Moffatt, Gerald. Headbutts or How to be a Nutter. stickgrappler.tripod.com. URL last accessed February 2, 2006.

[edit] External links
Look up headbutt in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

* Self Defense: The Standard Headbutt

[edit] Footnotes

1. Saurini, Jocelyn. The job of a ring doctor. www.braggingrightscorner.com. URL last accessed February 2, 2006
2. Pettifer, Ross. What is MMA - Background. www.cagewarriors.com. URL last accessed January 31, 2006.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headbutt"

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Old 11-27-2007, 06:27 PM   #131
Professor Fox
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Stop posting feminism bullshit. It's really killing my erection.

 
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Old 11-27-2007, 08:32 PM   #132
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man, you people have some fucked up ideas about feminism. True feminism seeks only equality, not emasculation. You can suck dick and bake your man a pie and still be a feminist.

and you can also enjoy pictures of Ginger in miniskirts and fake eyelashes and still be a feminist, so ummm... more please.

 
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Old 11-27-2007, 08:36 PM   #133
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth
* Before the First World War, it was common for mounted regiments to receive large vats of root ginger before public ceremonies, which were peeled and cut into suppositories for the horses. The burning sensation made the horses hold their tails up; this practice is called Figging or feaguing.
http://banggogo.com/ginger/ginger202.jpg

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 12:02 AM   #134
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandra
man, you people have some fucked up ideas about feminism. True feminism seeks only equality, not emasculation. You can suck dick and bake your man a pie and still be a feminist.

and you can also enjoy pictures of Ginger in miniskirts and fake eyelashes and still be a feminist, so ummm... more please.
Feminism is a lie. Feminists should love capitalism because capitalism doesn't discriminate. Feminists love opportunism.

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 12:24 AM   #135
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Originally Posted by CrabbMan


She has a nice grip on that bass.

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 12:30 AM   #136
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*cue ginger + whatcolor beer bottle pic shop

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 12:59 AM   #137
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ok, it's time now for lisa pics...

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 07:42 PM   #139
Sandra
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Professor Fox
Feminism is a lie. Feminists should love capitalism because capitalism doesn't discriminate. Feminists love opportunism.
Feminism can't be a lie, it's just an idea.

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 08:07 PM   #140
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandra
man, you people have some fucked up ideas about feminism. True feminism seeks only equality, not emasculation. You can suck dick and bake your man a pie and still be a feminist.
Have women been oppressed throughout history? Yes. Are they still oppressed today? Yes, without question. Does this need to be fixed? Absolutely. Do the vast majority of supposed "feminists" seek equality or preferential treatment? ERRRHHMM
!#@!#!

Until I see a large portion of the feminist movement stand up and march on Washington demanding for the right to be drafted into military service, I'll continue to withhold my opinion that the vast majority of modern-day feminists are hypocritical pieces of shit.

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 08:13 PM   #141
BlissedandGone2
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how come in women's lacrosse they cant check and dont have pockets on their sticks?

 
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Old 11-28-2007, 08:17 PM   #142
BumbleBeeMouth
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that was fucking excellent ggk

 
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Old 11-29-2007, 03:29 AM   #143
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A blast from the past.

http://banggogo.com/ginger/ginger50.jpg


 
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Old 11-29-2007, 03:56 AM   #144
null123
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Boots Electric
Until I see a large portion of the feminist movement stand up and march on Washington demanding for the right to be drafted into military service, I'll continue to withhold my opinion that the vast majority of modern-day feminists are hypocritical pieces of shit.
wow. women being drafted is an interesting idea with many implications that should be considered. but this is all beside the point.

feminists do not all believe the same things. thus critiquing "feminism" altogether is pointless. there are feminists who just hate men. but I think you're mistaken if you think they make up the majority or even a significant proportion of feminists.

I see feminism as being about liberation for both sexes. you can't change women's role in society without changing the role of men. the only way it's problematic is when one operates under the premise that each gender can only control or be controlled, dominate or be dominated, rather than work together.

 
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Old 06-30-2008, 04:12 PM   #145
BumbleBeeMouth
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hey guys any new hatpx ov ginfer

 
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Old 06-30-2008, 04:26 PM   #146
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BumbleBeeMouth View Post
hey guys any new hatpx ov ginfer
http://www.garstangcyclingclub.net/i...ngerbakerr.jpg

 
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Old 06-30-2008, 04:32 PM   #147
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Originally Posted by jackhalo View Post
I didn't see this one before.

hothothothothothothothothothothothothothothothot

 
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Old 06-30-2008, 04:54 PM   #148
fluxequalsrad
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shes got quite the little ass, but her face is going to age terribly.

 
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Old 07-01-2008, 07:41 AM   #149
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Originally Posted by GlasgowKiss View Post
She must give a brutal handjob.
what cause of the long fingernails?

 
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Old 07-01-2008, 10:27 AM   #150
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I think she's a mighty fine little lady. I bet she knows how to make a quality sammich.

 
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