When the commodity spectacle of late capitalism unveils its charms the most surprising people get dazzled. Sarah Pickett and Sam Inman (SO 1) have fallen hook, line and sinker for Madonna's hard sell.
Madonna's antics are the opposite of feminism. Her pandering to male sexual fantasies is quite blatant. The fact that she has many women, lesbian and gay fans proves nothing. So did Marilyn Monroe. Madonna injects her lips with cow hormones to get that full pouting look. And now, apparently, she's had her breasts implanted to boost her cleavage. Is that the model of the 'sexually assertive women' that feminists want to promote?
So Madonna 'teased men's sensibilities' (an interesting phrase!) by simulating orgasm with another woman? Come oft it, 'lesbian' scenes are a stock-in-trade of porno movies.
OK. Madonna parades her sexuality in an assertive way. That's nothing new. Suzi Quatro got it right when she said of her own style 'that's part of men's fantasy too'.
Madonna's image is slap bang in the middle of bourgeois and sexist imagery of what is 'beautiful and 'sexy'. Millions of young women 'wannabee' like her? Yes, because they have interalised sexist imagery and the commodity spectacle. You've got to be blind not to see that Madonna is part of the alienation of sex and art in late-capitalism.
Assertive women - even sexually assertive women - do not equal feminism. That's a radical feminist, not a socialist-feminist argument. Wasn't Margaret Thatcher an 'assertive' woman? But assertive in a wholly reactionary cause. Surely an allegedly 'Marxist paper like Socialist Outlook should see the ifference! IT IS INTERESTING to note Hmmm... Swealshops! object of that sexual motivation Company stores. Fourth Internationai should not have been formed in 1938. My understanding is that it was the only, and very necessary, option open at the time. That is not to say that it is still the only possibility over 50 years later.
Thirdly, and as for the rest of the comments on state capitalism, I would draw Comrade Valentine's attention to one of the Rules which Marx wrote for the First International in 1864. 'The emancipation of the working class is