Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Published: "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?"

Abstract:

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio-sexual norms (for good or for ill).

Find it here.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Porn Reviews Site

Whenever I go somewhere to talk about my work on pornography, I have at least a few people ask me whether there really is decent porn out there. Well, there is, if you know where to look. Even then, though, it may hard to find the really good stuff. So I've started a new blog, "Sexually Explicit Visual Media", where I'm going to post short reviews of that sort of thing. I'll be watching quite a few such films in the next few months, since I'll be teaching my course on pornography this spring.

At the moment, the only things there are a mission statement and an annotated list of links to websites that have 'better' porn. But I'm intending to post the first review within a day or two. I'll link to those reviews from this blog.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

"Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted", by KS Woodmansee

This piece was originally posted at The Establishment, on 16 November 2016, but it has since disappeared from the web (with that whole site), and does not seem to be archived at the Wayback Machine. I have found it worth reading myself, so I'm reproducing it here.


Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted

KS Woodmansee

I first learned about rape fantasies when I was a naive 17-year-old who had never even masturbated, much less considered power dynamics in sexual relationships. A friend told me that a girl he was interested in wanted someone to sneak into her bedroom and “force” her to have sex. I was intrigued, but quickly dismissed my interest in the topic. I saw it as aberrant, and the last thing I wanted was to be seen as weirder than I already was.

Monday, December 4, 2023

New Paper: Sexual Fantasy and the Eroticization of Evil

Abstract

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed.

This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?".  

Download it here.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Schirmer's Early Intermediate Level Masterpieces

During the pandemic, I started teaching myself piano. Recently, I've been working my way through a book of 'selected piano masterpieces' from Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics: Early Intermediate Level. Of course, this is all public domain, and you can get the music online, but it's nice to have it in a book.

That said, it's also nice to be able to hear the pieces, and for that I've been using MuseScore, which is open source music notation software that will also 'play' whatever you enter into it. There's also a huge library of music that various people have uploaded into it, including a lot of the 'classics'. 

So here's a list of links to versions of the pieces in the mentioned book. Note that you can download these or play them directly from the site. Please let me know if any of the links should break.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Comparing PDFs, Round 2

I've found an even better application for the idea mentioned in my last post. It can be very hard to see all the copy editor's corrections. Well, PDF comparison to the rescue! This script is slightly more complex, since I have a number of different files from them, one for each chapter. But not a problem. First, explode the PDFs into images using pdftocairo, as before. Now:

#!/bin/bash

#DEBUG=echo;
# basename of the images for this
# chapter from copy editor
TYP=$1;
# basename for 'original' pages
BASE=
SenseBook-19-IX-2023-Revised
# first page number of 'original' pages
XPAGE=$2;

for PG in $TYP*tif; do
    NEXT=$XPAGE;
    if (($XPAGE < 10)); then NEXT=0$NEXT; fi
    if (($XPAGE < 100)); then NEXT=0$NEXT; fi
    $DEBUG compare $PG $BASE-$NEXT.tif Comp-$NEXT.tif;
    XPAGE=$(($XPAGE + 1));
done

When that's done, it gives me the comparison images for that chapter. So now just:

convert Comp*tif Edited-ChN.pdf

And now it's easy to see where the corrections are:



Saturday, November 18, 2023

Comparing PDFs

I'm working on final corrections for my book Modes of Presentation, which I'm again typesetting myself via LyX and LaTeX (as I did Frege's Theorem and Reading Frege's Grundgesetze). I'm paranoid about something weird creeping into the book and have been comparing the new and old pages as I go. I figured there had to be a better way to do that than flipping back and forth between the two PDFs. All the more so given that doing so feels like one of those change-blindness experiments.

Well, Linux and the command line to the rescue. The ImageMagick suite contains a 'compare' command that takes two images and produces a new one that shows the differences between them. So all I have to do is explode the PDF into a bunch of page images and run the compare command on them. Here's a generic script to do it:

#!/bin/bash

# Uncomment to test with just a few pages
#D2="-l 10";
# Image resolution
RES=100;

pdftocairo $D2 -gray -tiff -r $RES NEWPDF.pdf New;
pdftocairo $D2 -gray -tiff -r $RES OLDPDF.pdf Old;
for NEW in New*tif; do
    BASE=${NEW#New};
    OLD=Old$BASE;
    compare $NEW $OLD Comp$BASE;
done

Here's an example of what you get:

It's not readable, but you can easily see where the changes have been made and, if need be, check the actual page. Mostly, I want to make sure that nothing dramatic has changed with the page breaks, etc, anyway.

Of course, you can also do this on other operating systems, but they do not encourage you, as Linux does, to use the command line.