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Foxtrot Tango Alpha: Fuck The Army

So now I know why they hate Jane Fonda so much. In the early 1970s, Fonda, along with Donald Sutherland, Nina Simone and comedy genius Paul Mooney toured U.S. military bases across the Pacific rim in a counter-USO tour called FTA, an acronym that meant Fuck (or Free) The Army. With stops in Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines and Tokyo, their variety show performed for thousands of active-duty GIs as the Vietnam war raged. With comedy and song penned by Dalton Trumbo, they attempted to bring rank-and-file soliders together with citizens of the countries the US was occupying and using to launch what had become a genocidal war in Southeast Asia. Promoting insubordianation and solidarity with the third world and domestic resistance movements, the FTA tour is what revolution looks like.

I was lucky enough to find a rare DVD transfer of the video here in New York City and I can't recommend it enough for public showings and anyone thinking about how to reach the soldiers. It's funny, the show is good -- but it's the interviews with soldiers and seamen that are most illuminating. The officers and lifers are theirs, but the army is up for grabs. Find this movie, distribute copies and show it everywhere possible.

Unburning a Witch: Andrea Dworkin Reconsidered

Pornography: Men Possessing Women
By Andrea Dworkin
Plume, 1979

Anti-sex. Reactionary.  A man-hating shrew out to destroy sexual liberation by victimizing women. Andrea Dworkin’s stature is mythic as the caricature of the woman who gave feminism a bad name in her fight to analyze, then criminalize porn. Who wants to be a censor and a prude? Apparently Andrea Dworkin. So she was cast out, denounced and ridiculed – told to shut up for the sake of the pornographers’ free speech.

But just about no one bothered to criticize what she was actually writing. To Dworkin, porn isn’t merely a picture or story about sex. It is the act of “men possessing women,” something so ubiquitous that we didn’t have a word for it. Dworkin provided one and bothered to report on what porn does and how. She says the etymology of the term itself is the “graphic depictions of whores.” And whores get used. Porn sexualizes degradation from the softcore gauze of Playboy’s ever-ready bunnies to the current industry standard of “gonzo,” where the pussy is ignored in favor of throat-fucking and hard anal.  Availability is expected, violation  preferred. It is the depiction of a generalized  reality.

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