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It’s time for another edition of “comments that should have been posts.” I’m elevating this one to post status because a) it’s true, and b) it’s the kind of thing that gets our stomach acids going for days here in the Smoking Lounge.

At any rate, over in the Hillary poll thread, Alice P. said of Sarah Palin:

I cringe at the idea of someone who is a fundie being the first woman president.

And I said:

A factoid that’s bandied about is that the first woman leader in most countries is usually a conservative. Somehow that eases the path, since it means that she’s not threatening the patriarchal status quo completely.

Hillary was our nation’s best chance to avoid that fate. She was and is a feminist Democrat. She’s to the left of Obama.

Which of course is why it was such bullshit for the faux-feminists to pretend that they couldn’t support Hillary because she was so “right-wing” or “not feminist enough.” As opposed to Barack Lieberman Obama.

Ironically, Palin really is the right-wing woman that the faux-feminists claimed Hillary to be.

Hey, kids, it’s time for another episode of Comments That Should Have Been Posts!

The comment in question was deposited by me on the thread attached to this post, the subject of which was Rihanna’s “sexy” impersonation of a barbed-wire torture victim. Voilà:

This is the sort of thing that Liberal Dude Nation would say is unimportant - that it has no effect on reality, these glamorized images of torture.

Bullshit. The whole premise — that TV and movies and records and pornography have no effect on reality — is just preposterous. Humans are cultural animals. TV/movies/records/pornography are a means of cultural transmission, just like any other medium or form of communication. Nowadays, in fact, these are our primary means of cultural transmission.

And everybody knows that. That’s why people object to racist depictions or homophobia or even the absence of positive onscreen role models for minorities. Because all that’s part of our cultural transmission, part of how we share and exchange and teach values and ideas.

This knowledge mysteriously evaporates, however, when the subject is something dear to one’s heart — like pornography or violence or bimbotastic portrayals of women. Then, magically, the movies and porn are said to exist in some kind of otherworld vacuum: no cultural transmission, no values, no impact whatsoever on the humans consuming. It’s fucking ludicrous.

Octogalore replied, “Violet, your 11:45 is a great insight. I haven’t seen that argument come up in the various debates on this topic — that misogynist images don’t exist in a media-vacuum any more than racist or homophobic ones do.”

Actually, I have been making this same argument for years, and various formulations of it are scattered throughout the 29,365 comments that have been posted to this blog. But that’s the problem: it’s in the comments. I’m not sure I’ve ever stated it in a post.

So here it is. An official communiqué from the Smoking Lounge.

Octogalore also said, “I can’t help wondering what our friends at the big ‘feminist’ websites would do with that one.”

It depends. I think most feminists would probably agree, as long as the subject is movies, TV, magazines, or music. If the subject is porn, though, then amazing things happen.

For example, A Pro-Porn Feminist Blogger Who Shall Remain Nameless makes the argument that misogynist porn simply reflects a misogynist society. Create a better society, says she, and the porn will be better. But doesn’t the misogynist porn also contribute to the misogynist society, one asks? No, she says; it only reflects. One-way mirror. Movies and TV and radio and magazines all influence our behavior and fill our heads with ideas, but pornography is magic. It only reflects. No influence at all.

Magic all around.