But she's baaack, and I haven't done a TFIFI in so long. Today's brilliance: "your so-called 'artistic' photography is a horrible affront on decency!" Because, y'see, we will never liberate vaginas as long as people can go around looking at them and stuff.
The evil pornographer in question is just some random DeviantArt guy with a slick and fairly tasteful portfolio of artistic nudes. His stuff ranges from the kinda porny to the more restrained to the definitely not porn at all. Oh, and this clearly raving misogynist also has pictures of himself naked, which just shows you how he equates nudity with dehumanized worthlessness, or something. He also posts in the commentaries about his friendly relationships with the models and which shots were their ideas, which shows the sad depths of this pornographer's self-delusion.
But Twisty cares not for your "art." What she sees is naked, and naked always means exactly the same thing to all people in all contexts. PORN! Which is an alternate spelling of "rape."
This amateur pornographer, known on the website Deviantart.com as “Pelicanh,” snaps photos of naked ladies, stands back, basks in it, and calls it art. Furthermore, he puts it on the World Wide Web and gets thousands of hits a day.
THOUSANDS OF HITS A DAY! I'm sure he's becoming a billionaire.
"Anyone taking even a casual stroll through my gallery will see a lot of pussy photos. Let’s just call them what they are, OK? NO….they are NOT photos of “vaginas” - learn your anatomy, people.
I’d LOVE it if there was a sweet and endearing name for them, ya know. “Pussy” sounds pretty “Playboy-ish” to me but it is the best I can do because it ISN’T a vagina photo and that sounds waaaaayyy too medical to me anyway. There are at least a billion names for that part of a woman’s anatomy but that’s not what this journal is about. SO - get over it, I’m gonna call it a pussy."
Well, sure, you’re a pornographer. This means you think “pussy” is “anatomy.” But even if you didn’t, obviously you’d have to call it “pussy,” since degrading women and telling them to “get over it” is one of the Inalienable Rights of Man.
Fuck am I supposed to call it, lady? "Vulva" is a detached, ugly, medical-Latin word; "pussy" is indisputably English and ground-level and kind of cute. Degrading? Acting like a woman's anatomy is too sacred, obscure, or disgusting to describe in ordinary language is degrading. "You have an abnormal growth on your vulva"; "I think your pussy's beautiful."
I'm not a man, but I think that being comfortable with women's bodies is part of being comfortable with women. If the pussy is always hidden, always referred to in precise and hushed tones, it's up on some kind of fucking pedestal. A pussy that's part of a human being, that gets used and revealed and exercised and loved, is going to get called a lot of things and seen in a lot of ways, and that's a good thing.
It might also dawn on you that a “sweet, endearing name for them” would be useful only to you and your efforts to distract their owners, through some kind of phony sympathetic display, from the fact that you are a dehumanizing, exploitative prick.
So if you say bad things about pussies, you're obviously a jerk; but if you say good things, you're faking, Twisty can tell. Win-win situation here. (The solution, of course, is for men to never speak or think about pussies, which will undoubtedly give them a very healthy attitude toward people who happen to own You-Know-Whats.)
It doesn’t occur to old Pelicanh that a vulva might have aspirations that rise above being photographed by some perv for public display on his perv web page, where viewers are “made” to look at “beauty.” Aspirations, for example, that do not involve complicity in dudely “art” projects, dudely perceptions of “beauty,” or perpetual availability for pornsick voyeurism. A vulva might want to just hang around. Hit the links. Go to a museum. Menstruate. Enjoy a taco. Chillax on the chaise with a marg and a copy of I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Or a pussy--or rather its owner, sheesh, I'm up here, honey--might want to be photographed. Why is it beyond conceivability that a woman might think her pussy was beautiful enough to share, or even that it was just fun to be photographed that way or even--really stretching the limits of what's possible in Twisty's reality here--that as a paid model she didn't mind accepting money for artistic nudes?
Give me the choice between being part of a well-crafted, beautifying, even kind of worshipful photo or sitting around menstruating, fuck, I know what I'd choose.
The “It’s beautiful so it’s art, not porn” argument always hilarifies me. Haw!
The "It's a crotch so it's porn, not art" argument always hilarifies me. (Although, really, most of the guy's photos are of women's entire bodies, so when you call those crotch-shots, well, tells me where you're looking. Who's reducing women to their fun bits now?)
What could it be about a vulva that makes it the universal Holy Grail of a certain species of male shutterbug? Why must these vulgar specimens insist on its unique “beauty” when, in fact, a vulva is precisely as “beautiful” as an elbow or a nostril? Why do they so vociferously declaim that they are not pornographers even though their “work” depends entirely on the gross imbalance of power between dudes and women, specifically on flattening women into 2-dimensional sex graphics?
Is it really bad to say that pussies are nicer than nostrils? Sure, there's a sexual attraction; why is that wrong or exploitative? Sex is part of life and art addresses life. It's not like the models are being kept in his basement and have no say in the matter.
And as for gross power imbalance--OH NOES NOW HE IS OPPRESSING HISSELF
A photograph of a disembodied vulva is not, as is one of an elbow or a nostril, a politically or socially neutral concept. It is the graphic representation of the universal belief that women = sex, and a symbol of male dominance in a rape culture.
It's the graphic representation of the truth that women include sex, and a symbol of our fundamental humanity. A woman who's nothing but pussy is problematic; a woman without a pussy is messed up.
I have a pussy. I love it. As a practical matter I don't hang it out in public, but I refuse to be ashamed of it. I refuse to be told that it is somehow a tool of my own oppression. My pussy is mine--mine to hide, mine to show, mine to protect, mine to offer up.
Shit, at least when this guy tells strange women what to do with their pussies he has the decency to pay them.
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