Today’s video of the day is “No One” by Alicia Keys. This is the first single from her newest album, As I Am.

It’s time to admit that the subordination of women perpetuates the very conditions of repression and violence liberals abhor.

Liberal Denial: The Link Between Porno and War
By Riane Eisler 

Liberals often defend images of men chaining, whipping, torturing, and even killing women in the name of sexual pleasure as harmless exercises of free speech. At the same time, they strenuously object to war propaganda.

But if war propaganda is effective in dehumanizing members of “enemy” nations to make it possible for men to hurt, kill, and degrade other human beings — as it clearly is — why would images of women as merely body parts for male sexual use and abuse not have similar effects? Why, like other propaganda, would stories and images that dehumanize women not blind people to the reality of women’s suffering? If linking sex with violence had no effect on behavior, why would savvy media professionals link sex with whatever they are trying to sell — from cars to Coca-Cola — to influence peoples’ behavior?

Books such as Robert Jensen’s recent Getting Off show that porno is really propaganda in an undeclared war against women. Many studies show that images linking sexual arousal with cruelty and violence desensitize men to rape and other gender violence. Even beyond this, porno dehumanizes women and perpetuates the notion that half our species is put on earth to be used, and abused, by the other half.

But the damage done by porno goes further. As Jensen points out, porno reflects cultural acceptance of cruelty. But porno itself makes cruelty acceptable.

Now what we’re talking about here is pornography, not erotica. Erotica is about giving and receiving sexual pleasure. Pornography is about linking sexual arousal with the infliction or suffering of pain — be it psychological or physical. Erotica (from Eros, the Greek god of love) is about sexual love. Pornography is about male control over women — and even beyond this, about domination and violence as normal and fun.

Images that link sexual arousal with causing physical or psychological pain perpetuate repression and injustice across the board. They condition people to accept, and even want, relations of domination and submission enforced by violence.

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A Thug’s Humanity?
By Mark Anthony Neal

At this point—as if there was ever a previous point—any discussion about the artistic merit of Curtis Jackson’s “music” is little more than a banal exercise in corporate music journalism. Mr. Jackson has never been interested in art, no matter how we might shift the signifiers to fit into the expectations of a music industry that seems to have little use for actual music. Yet Mr. Jackson’s literal body and its cartoonish doppelganger, 50 Cent, continue to stimulate curiosity, if only because of his deft performance of late stage American masculinity.

Considered purely within the context of a constructed masculinity, 50 Cent might rank as one of the most compelling examples of black masculinity since Jack Johnson. Signature generational figures like Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) or Tupac Shakur, challenged notions of black masculinity in their respective historical eras, in part, because they complicated how black masculinity functioned in distinct political, cultural, social, religious and sexual spheres. In the case of Jack Johnson it was the blunt force of his masculinity and the anxieties produced in response to fears of how that force might be employed beyond the boxing ring, that made him the projection of so many racialized and gendered fantasies. In the case of Mr. Jackson such fears are purely the product of the capitalist wet dream that literally feeds upon—consumption as literal practice—the “body” 50 Cent willingly provides.

If Forbes Magazine can credibly describe Mr. Jackson as a “masterful brand builder”, what exactly is his brand? I would argue that it is literally his body—a body offered up for whatever sexual confection we can concoct as easily as it becomes the “bootstrap” muse for a generation of vitamin water addicted professionals. Two decades ago popular comedians like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy were described as “Reagan’s Jesters”; In 2007 Mr. Jackson is clearly Bush’s “nigga”—the literal embodiment of three centuries of American hegemony in the capitalist and militarist realms—allowing us to dually pleasure and replenish our fears—with the ease of an I-Tune transaction—in a moment of distinct uncertainties about national security and an eroding infrastructure.

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Exposing Bigotry
By John McWhorter

Today, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are down in Jena, Louisiana leading a protest.

Many will roll their eyes. I typically do at the theatrics of aforesaid Messrs. But there are times when it’s time to take out the old whistle and blow it on good old-fashioned bigotry.

At Jena High School, black students have traditionally gathered on certain bleachers, while white ones have gathered under a certain tree. At a school assembly last year, a black student jokingly asked whether he was allowed to sit under “the white tree.” He and his friends then did so. The next day there were three nooses hanging from that tree.

In the months after this, assorted black-white altercations culminated in six black teens beating up a white one who taunted them.

Five were first convicted of assault, but District Attorney Reed Walters upped the charges to second-degree attempted murder. These boys could have been in jail into their fifties. Jena’s black community rose up in indignation.

This month, the conviction of one, Mychal Bell, was overturned since he was under 18 at the time of the attack and should have been tried as a juvenile. Most of the others’ charges have been reduced to battery as well.

The Jena story, it must be said, does not show the school’s black teens in their best light. In protest against the nooses, a large group staged a sit-in under the tree, and later a larger one tried to address the school board about the incident.

The nooses, though, were a prank. Mean, but a prank. Humor and mischief are all about pushing the envelope: witness Kathy Griffin’s comments about Jesus at the Emmy Awards last week.

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