My first visit to this group was last night serving on a jury for a post on a Tosh thread.

[seabeyond]

2. i like dines. i have listened to her. we really cant use her here for conversation because a group

has decided she is wacko and what she brings to the table is nutz.... so she is irrelevant and anyone that uses her voice is an extremist. thank you for not knowing better.

i like Melissa Harris Perry. and i remember the help interview. i could hear what she was saying was true, and proud and impressed with her ability to see beyond. and i am disappointed she chose this route. thank you for this article. it was informative.

they see their fun, hot-ratings-driver segment going down the tubes, and they are suddenly in the not-so-fun territory of cruelty, violence, and economic exploitation.

I remember watching an MHP segment on MSNBC after she saw the movie The Help. I use this clip in my classes on racism in media because her passion and eloquence are so deeply felt. She is upset by the movie, and she is almost in tears when she explains how white-produced images of African American women deny the reality of their lives and render invisible the pain and suffering real black domestics endured at the hands of white employers. In another interview, MHP said that her fear was that The Help will become “the historical record because of its popularity, and that people who see the movie will come to believe that that’s really what happened“.

Clearly, MHP understands the power of media images to shape the way people think. If this is true of movies, then it is also true of other media genres, including porn. If MHP is upset at The Help for misrepresenting black women’s lives, then what about popular porn sites such as Bad Black Babes, Pimp My Black Teen, or Ghetto Gaggers, or any of the thousands of websites that show black women “enjoying” sexual degradation at the hands of black and white men? These images, just like the ones in The Help, are part of the media world that creates ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that undermine all women’s rights to full equality, dignity, and justice. I didn’t expect Taormino or the other guests to take this on, but I did expect a political science professor to be a little more savvy and intellectually inquisitive about how individual and collective perceptions are formed by cultural institutions.

worse, in this segment, MHP went from being an academic to a talk show host, and along the way she compromised her integrity as a feminist.

and welcome to HOF