MIM Notes 226 January 15, 2001

Review:
Quills 
Directed by Philip Kaufman, December 2000

The best and worst thing about Quills -- the new movie very 
loosely based on the life of the Marquis de Sade -- is that it is 
class- and gender-conscious. It's a wonderful example of how the 
ideologies of bourgeois Liberalism and male chauvinism mesh and 
support each other. The ludicrous thing is that Quills and most 
bourgeois reviewers think that the movie is saying something new, 
provocative, and intelligent. There is nothing new or rare about 
this stuff -- you can find it all behind the counter at 7-11 in 
Playboy or cluttering up the AM talk-radio dial.

Here are some of the liberal dogmas Quills trumpets. (a) "Free 
speech" and individual "self expression" are absolute rights. (b) 
Porn/ideas and sex/action are completely distinct. Only a crazy 
persyn could mix the two up. (c) Sex is inherently good for men 
and wimmin, and only hypocritical prudes disagree. All of these 
shibboleths were criticized by Catharine MacKinnon in her book 
ITAL Feminism Unmodified END in the early 1980s.(1) MIM used her 
criticism as the starting point for its own radical critique of 
patriarchy.(2) Quills proceeds as if nobody has ever raised 
MacKinnon's critiques -- or ever could.

Of course, that's how reactionaries work. What? The masses stopped 
arguing about MacKinnon (imperialism, socialism, party-building, 
etc.)? Great, let's dig up some old, defeated ideas and dress them 
up as new. They're tenacious, those reactionaries, you have to 
give them that -- so we must be as well.

You can see just how disingenuous and shallow Quills is from the 
fact that it ITAL really END sanitizes de Sade. With one 
exception, the fictionalized de Sade comes off as simply a raunchy 
flirt -- sure, he talks like a prick, but as soon as the womyn he 
desires says "no," he stops. In real life, de Sade raped and 
whipped wimmin and children. And his "literature" glorified rape, 
torture, mutilation, and murder for pleasure. Indeed, de Sade and 
MacKinnon agree that sex is an act of power -- that much (if not 
all) of the pleasure men feel in sex comes from dominating and 
controlling wimmin. De Sade glorified this; MacKinnon decries it; 
Quills chooses to ignore power altogether.

So already -- without even asking if wimmin are in a position to 
say "no" under patriarchy -- Quills has left the real material 
world behind in favor of Liberal idealism. It ignores the real de 
Sade; it ignores the fact that men do not stop when wimmin say 
"no"; it ignores the fact that lovers killing each other is the 
most common pattern of murder in Amerika;(3) etc. It's easy to say 
"anything goes" when your idea of "anything" is a light slap on 
the buttocks and a giggle.

Furthermore, Quills' attempt to show "both sides of the censorship 
debate"(4) only succeeds in further illustrating its Liberal bias. 
The fictional de Sade dictates a story which involves the rape and 
mutilation of a womyn. ITAL Immediately END after hearing this 
story, one of the inmates of the madhouse where de Sade is 
imprisoned attacks and kills de Sade's chambermaid -- exactly as 
de Sade described in his story. The idea here is that if 
pornography is to be implicated in rape or gender oppression, 
there must be an immediate link between the porn and the act.

MacKinnon argues -- and MIM agrees -- that that's not how 
pornography works. "[T]he view [in bourgeois legal circles] became 
that pornography must cause harm the way negligence causes car 
accidents or its effects are not cognizable as harm. The trouble 
with this individuated, atomistic, linear, isolated, tortlike -- 
in a word, positivistic -- conception of injury is that the way 
pornography targets and defines women for abuse and discrimination 
does not work like this. It does hurt individuals, not ITAL as END 
individuals in a one-at-a-time sense, but as members of the group 
'women.'"(5) Looking for the smoking gun -- the one piece of porn 
that triggered a rape, say -- lets the bigger system off the hook. 
Usually there will be no one piece you can point to; but 
pornography contributes to a culture of rape and male chauvinism.

Quills never really considers that perhaps "free speech" isn't 
always good and censorship isn't always "brutal."(4) MIM, on the 
other hand, takes the real de Sade and Quills as evidence for 
censorship. As we wrote in MIM Theory 6, in reference to gossipy 
and distorted biographies of Stalin, "The massive scribblings of 
these intellectuals, repeated in simplified forms in the bourgeois 
media, present an excellent case for the censorship of media and 
books. The more the material veers into National Enquirer [or 
Hustler or Playboy or Maxim] mode, the better censorship looks for 
progress of humanity's mental faculties. The masses deserve better 
entertainment than what sells on the grocery stands."(6)

After the revolution against imperialism, there won't be billion 
dollar industries devoted to pornography or the ideological 
defense of male chauvinism. Pornographers will have to make an 
honest living. They will be able to make and distribute some kinds 
of porn in their spare time,(7) but the government will hire 
people to combat male chauvinist ideas.


Notes:

1. Catharine MacKinnon, ITAL Feminism Unmodified, END Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1987. See e.g. pp. 134-162.

2. "Getting clarity on what gender is," 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/gender98b.html.

3. MIM Theory 2/3, p. 120.

4. Promotional materials from Fox Searchlight.

5. MacKinnon, pp.156-157.

6. MIM Theory 6, p. 45.

7. "Sale of pornography will be forbidden. Distribution of nude 
photographs paid for by the photographer or persyn who signed a 
consent form to be displayed in photographs will always be legal, 
but government authorities may require a registration for 
financial bookkeeping purposes. Those publicly distributing nude 
photos of children 12 and under will be sent to re-education camp, 
whether money spent was their own or not." 1999 MIM Congress 
Resolution, "Free speech under the dictatorship of the 
proletariat," 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/freespeech.html.