Protecting Patriarchy

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Bonnie J. Dow for enduring numerous revisions, Jackson Katz for pushing me to stick with the project, Lisa McLaughlin for her guidance, and Jeanne Rose for her editorial comments. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Janice Hocker Rushing for her kindness, research on myth, and help with sections of this essay.

Notes

1. For a full discussion of the ideograph please see Michael Calvin McGee (1980).

2. Eidolons, or ideal figures, emerge in most societies. These eidolons may emanate from “living persons, legendary figures of dubious historiocity, supernatural beings, or fabrications of poets and cartoonists” (Wilbur Zelinsky 1988, pp. 20–21). Key belief systems are communicated and/or perpetuated through the use of various social myths connected to eidolons.

3. Isaacman is misrepresented in at least two ways in the film. This misrepresentation is important because, as I discuss later, the trial scenes in which Isaacman appears are fundamental to the rhetorical strategy of the film. Therefore, Isaacman must be a well-developed character so that we trust what he says, hence he is the only lawyer featured when Flynt had many. Moreover, he must be seen as another man who has paid a significant price for free speech, therefore he must also be shot in the film even though in reality it was another Flynt lawyer who was also shot.

4. This “harm” includes not only that which defines women socially, but also the physical and emotional harm that women who are involved in pornography must face. Similarly, women whose sex partners demand that they perform as they have seen a woman perform in a video may also do physical and emotional harm to those women. In this instance, men are truly having sex with the image of a woman—either one who may have a gun to her head that the camera does not catch, or one closer to home who is forced to submit to the dominant partner's will to imitate “art.” For more information on the physical and emotional harm that comes to women in pornography, please see Linda Lovelace (1980).

5. For more information on this phenomenon please see Clarence Spigner (1993), Herman Gray (1989), and Elyane Rapping (1992; 1994).

6. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between Hollywood and the United States government, please see Ernest Giglio (1995) and Ian Scott (1995).