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BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU

BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU. MILIEU. When a piece is written often influences How it is written – its tone & direction “when” shapes “why” and “how” So it’s important to look at the time period in which a work was written. MILIEU. We have many terms for this “time period”:

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BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU

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  1. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU

  2. MILIEU • When a piece is written • often influences How it is written – • its tone & direction • “when” shapes “why” and “how” • So it’s important to look at the time period in which a work was written.

  3. MILIEU • We have many terms for this “time period”: • milieu • environment • “writing situation” • kairos • occasion • tempus speciale

  4. MILIEU • To determine this, we can ask ourselves the following questions: • Why was it written? • What provoked the writer? • What event prompted it? • What happened/is happening in the contemporary society? • What’s going on in the world, in the culture, in the news? • How are people – such as women, minorities, children – treated or mistreated? • What are the culture’s values, morals, standards, ideals?

  5. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • porn was different, more violent • rape fantasies • 2 types of women: • nymphos & virgins • “bang” the virgins once  turn into nymphos • not the sanitized version of Skin-E-Max • or the air-brushed version of Playboy

  6. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • porn in 1970s, early 1980s: • from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1986 • Sometimes the movie she [Aunt Lydia] showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns, women tied up or chained or with dog collars around their necks, women hanging from trees, or upside-down, naked, with their legs held apart, women being raped, beaten up, killed. Once we had to watch a woman being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out. • […] You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then. • […] They don’t play the soundtrack, on movies like these, though they do on the porno films. They want us to hear the screams and grunts and shrieks of what is supposed to be either extreme pain or extreme pleasure or both at once […]. (118-19)

  7. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • porn was ubiquitous, everywhere • imagine going for a walk downtown • or through the mall • and seeing in the display cases sexually explicit rape fantasies – for ALL to see • men, women • young, old • children

  8. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • the Sexual Revolution series shown recently on VH1 helps with some stock footage, perspective, and interviews with Brownmiller and other Feminists • http://www.vh1.com/shows/sex_the_revolution/series.jhtml

  9. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • Sexual Revolution • 1960: birth-control pill • 1972: contraception legal for unmarried • 1972: Deep Throat gains patina of chic • 1973: Roe v. Wade • 1974: Against Our Will

  10. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • Times Square, NYC: • "worst block in the city." • “lawless climate” • “We'd hurry past prostitute-filled single-room-occupancy hotels and massage parlors, greasy spoons and pornographic bookstores; past X-rated movie houses and peep shows and a pathetic assortment of junkies and pushers and johns and hookers and pimps—the whole panorama of big-city low life.”

  11. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • Times Square, NYC:

  12. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

  13. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

  14. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • VISUAL ARGUMENTS:

  15. BROWNMILLER’S MILIEU • Heard above the Crowd:

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