Additionally, I don’t think you can make any kind of art or media without, to some degree at least, objectifying the artistic subjects and creating your own narrative and interpretation of those subjects. To to say pornography is “objectifying” is, in itself, as much of a non-statement as saying its “visual” or “written”. Yes? And?BUT, that does not mean I cease to realize that the model I’m being turned on by is a full human being, with their own life and thoughts outside of what they do in porn. That seems self-evident to me.
You groked what I was trying to say and re-wrote the underlying idea far more eloquently than I could.
I think a person must be of an uncommonly low denominator not to innately realize that all people with bodies have an internal self that is worth empathizing with. I’d think if one didn’t automatically assume this, one would have serious cognitive deficits that could be labeled as a personality disorder.
And yet, some people who tend to get very in their head about social relationships assume that the world is one big social construct, and that noticing anything physical is a sin against the purity and primacy of good thought. As you said, a glorfied version of “it’s what’s on the inside that really counts”.
I’d sincerely love to know what evidence you think you have that most people are predisposed to respond to sexual dominance. Until you remove all, or most, of the patriarchal cues that support dominance and submission in relationships from society I fail to see how this is a testable hypothesis.
Firstly, people are animals, and all animals show patterns of social organization, and patterns of sexual activity. Lions have a social hierarchy of a tribe dominated by a female, I think. When they have sex there is a lot of biting and growling. If you saw badgers go at it you might think to report rape to the badger police.
Here is a quote from some some smart folks on this subject:
RU: If you acknowledge that every other living animal group has certain inherent forms of social organization, it’s fundamentally absurd to say, “Well no, human beings don’t.” And certain people on the left remind me of fundamentalist Christians. It’s kind of a denial of evolution. They’re not denying Darwin, but they’re denying something that is a logical extension of Darwin.
JQ: Right. And the sort-of social science academics on the left are the only ones who have a problem with this stuff. When I speak in front of most women, they’re trying to understand their husband and they’re all over it. They want to understand why does he do the things he does; why does he communicate the way he does? People on the street assume that there’s something fundamentally different about men and women.
RU: What happens with people in the process of a sex change — like a guy who’s taking a lot of estrogen and that sort of thing? Have you looked into that?
JQ: Sure, I’m fascinated with that stuff. If a woman gets a sex change operation, and she starts taking injections of testosterone, different genes that are suppressed are turned on in her, and she finds herself feeling more aggressive; she finds it harder to cry; she finds it easier to get angry; and she can’t get sex out of her mind. I talked to one woman who was in the midst of this process, and she said, “God, I suddenly understand how guys feel.”
Again, not everything has a social basis. You can’t extricate out the social elements, but that doesn’t mean they are primary.
Random Xpat Rantings 
Your earlier comments on Feministe are probably stuck in moderation. Moderation on that blog acts in weird ways and sometimes later comments show up before earlier ones.
As for your comments on the whole social constructionism vs evolutionary psychology debate (aka “nature vs nurture”), your basic point is well-taken, though one has to be very careful about how applicable findings about animal behavior are to present human behavior, especially since such findings can be overemphasized or taken out of context to justify all manner of social injustices. Especially when you’re talking about species that are quite distant from the evolutionary line leading to human beings, such as lions and wolves, which have societies where non-Alphas aren’t even allowed to mate. Primates aren’t like that, thankfully.
On the other hand, I would say that feminism often suffers from a rather dogmatic attachment to social constructionism, and simply does not deal at all well with the fact that dominance hierarchies, gendered sexual behavior, and the like are probably hard-wired into us to some degree. I take as evidence that these things are found throughout the animal kingdom, including closely related primates, as well as human societies that are separated by thousands of years of cultural evolution. Which doesn’t mean one has to accept dominance hierarchies or gender inequality as inevitable. It does mean that you do have to deal with the underlying drives and desires that can engender such social structure, and I think that repression (and I mean that in both the psychological and social sense) is a fantastically bad way of dealing with these drives.
This is where I think S/M has a lot to offer, in that it offers space to play with these drives and desires in a safe and consensual manner. And this is also where I think much of feminism, and, more broadly, left/liberalism has really messed up, in that they’ve simply fallen into a massive state of denial about their own will to power. This doesn’t make the will to power go away, though, and it has a bad way of coming out as authoritarian behaviors that the perpetrators have no clue is even authoritarian. This is very much where I see anti-porn/anti-BDSM feminism as coming from, but I see this in all manner of “progressive” egalitarian movements – animal rights, socialism, anarchism, pacifism, etc all have their authoritarian wings as well.
I agree, Iamcuriousblue. I posted this comment on another blog a few days ago:
You are right, that feminism can’t get to a feminist utopia from where it is right now. You can’t get there from here, because where here is, does not exist. Feminism, right now, denies sociobiology.
It has a long way to go to integrate the current data and facts within its frameworks.
—
The attachment to social constructivism and the utopian ideals get directly in the way of feminist aims. You can not get there from here, until here is really here.
Iamcuriousblue also made these well spoken comments over at feministe:
I hardly think that the position that there may be some hard-wired components of human sexuality, such as tendencies towards dominance and submission roles, sexual attraction to certain physical types, etc. constitutes “lack of belief in possibilities for social change”. It simply implies using real existing sexuality as a starting point rather than trying to mold everybody’s sexuality to some idealized form that exists in one’s own head. Lack of pure, unrestrained idealism is not the same as being against any change at all, something idealists tend to lose sight of.
I simply think a realistic appraisal of most sexual relationships does show some kind of dominance/submission aspect going on. Its very typical for one partner to be more the initiator and to tend to “run the fuck”. Even in relationships where the claim is that both partner’s are absolutely equal. The thing is, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that dynamic (being a top in bed does not automatically translate to being domineering in everyday life), but its better if its understood and acknowledged.
Also, some of the people who crow the loudest about “egalitarian” sexuality seem to take an inordinate interest in micromanaging other people’s sexuality, something that is very much a dominance relationship (or at least an attempt at it), and that much more unhealthy because of the often non-consensual nature of such attempts at domination.