Pornography and Disappearing Bees, Revisited
I’m still waiting for my brain to stop seething before I get to talking about the issues raised by the comments on my posts on Pornography and Global Warming and the Pornography of Violence. Meantime, check out “Just a prude? Feminism, pornography, and men’s responsibility”, which is a talk delivered by University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen at the Sexual Assault Network of Delaware annual conference in 2005. Jensen is the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, which is a book that I need to read and maybe you do too.
Warning: Jensen’s talk includes a description of a mainstream but still quite violent pornographic film, which you might find upsetting.
Jensen goes on to say, “I am afraid of the sex I just described to you” and to express empathy for both the women who appear in such films and the women they portray. Taking into account the well-documented escalation in the amount and extent of degradation portrayed in mainstream for-profit pornography, Jensen concludes that the feminist “critique of pornography is truer today than it was when the founding mothers of the movement first articulated it in the late 1970s.” Perhaps most importantly, he talks about what men who don’t want to live in the world described and inscribed by such pornography need to do.
That said, let me come back briefly to the problem of the disappearing bees, as I promised to do some time ago. I’m not ready to venture my own conclusions just yet but, in the interim, let me direct you to an article that asks, “Are the bees dying off because they’re too busy?” Read it if you’re curious about Colony Collapse Disorder. Even if you’re not yet worried about that, read it if you don’t know about modern beekeeping practices, which are, in essence, factory farming of insects.
What do pornography and disappearing bees have to do with each other? I’ve got some thoughts about that but why don’t you tell me?
August 15th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I am totally stumped — the only connections I can make are the typical ones about violence in general, and how we seek to control everyone, women, bees, everyone… But I have a feeling you have something more sophisticated in mind.
August 18th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
I guess the bees are all female for one thing.
Another is that just as porn seems to have become increasingly extreme, the bees are being transported further and “worked” more often.
Bees live in a society that depends on communication, cooperation, and relationships. Hives fail because the working members of the hive become exhausted, lost, or sick. If our culture keeps using people as objects won’t more and more people become exhausted, lost, sick, discouraged, disheartened and traumatized, thus causing the collapse of the whole?
Just thoughts.
August 19th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Those are all great ideas, many of which would not have occurred to me. I love collective thinking! Let’s keep going. I find that the intellectual exercise of trying to find the connections among things often leads to new and interesting insights. Let’s keep going!
August 20th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Ok, going out on a limb here…. Bees collect nectar for their own survival. They pollinate as a by-product of their efforts to collect nectar, and this pollination results in food for many creatures and the basic survival of the plants themselves. But humans have tried to harness this process for their own profit, taking the honey for themselves rather than letting the bees use it to get them through times of drought or hardship, and they take the act of pollination and sell it to farmers, again for profit. Likewise while our sexuality ought to be something natural and life-sustaining and beautiful, and most of all something for US and our partners, this industry harnesses our sexuality for profits and in the process has turned it into something it never used to be…
My thoughts aren’t fully formed. I’m somewhat terrified by the article you linked to and it has me somewhat shaky.
August 21st, 2007 at 2:47 am
Are you terrified because you’ve read it or because you haven’t? Either way, I suspect you’re not the only one and I am grateful to you for being the one to say it.
And these are some great ideas you’ve been having about the bees!
August 21st, 2007 at 9:06 am
Because I read it. The association there of arousal with violence, oppression and punishment was almost more than I could take.
August 21st, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Thank you for forcing yourself to confront that. I wish more people would. That’s one of many connections between vegan and anti-porn activists: Both need to get people to look at things they don’t want to know, things that are going to make them feel terrible about an aspect of daily life that they maybe never questioned, things that are going to raise deep and disturbing questions about power and pleasure. And, of course, both struggles are against the objectification of bodies for profit.
Which brings us back to the bees. It’s interesting to me that (at least here in the USA) we use the phrase “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex and also how our often perversely violent ideas about sex color our perceptions of plants, animals, and processes like pollination.
I had another idea this afternoon but I’ve forgotten it already.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Another possible connection. Bees are gatherers. Much of society, especially male society, has historically been more enamored with hunters. Witness the respect for eagles and grizzlies and mountain lions vs the scorn, contempt, and dismissiveness toward cows and hens. Male anthropologists have also tended to exaggerate the importance and nature of hunting in early humans, perhaps as some sort of fantasy combined with a need to validate their own predatory leanings and meat-eating. With bees we see once again the exploitation of beings performing what is conventionally considered to be a “female” task.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”
perhaps if we’ve sunk to the level we have with pornography, its just another indicator of mans short life span on this planet.