[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Hello Dr. Slattery,

So very grateful for your responses. Yes indeed I received your response on the personal messenger. My only reason for not responding right away was my fear of taking up your time. Meanwhile, I have been visiting your website and your blog, reading your analysis of various books. All are immensely rich in thought and ideas, but the one that has drawn my attention the most,  is Susan Griffin’s “Pornography and Silence”.

Dennis, you wrote, “The pornographic imagination seems to seek a number of common goals: turn the other into something less-than-human; dominate that other, be it an individual, a race, an ethnic group, or those who disagree with you.”

This is such an enormous topic and very little attention has been assigned to it, or maybe it has been, I happened not to notice it.  You expressed it so eloquently, “What is just below the skin of pornography is lust: a lust for power, for control and for accumulating wealth at the expense of others’ well-being.”

It’s been the less-than-human side that has been winning thus far, because the side that’s been experimented upon must want nothing but a place to hide away?

Thank you Dennis for opening such an immense topic. I’ll definitely be getting Susan Griffin’s  “Pornography and Silence”.

I have often wondered if Maya Angelou was drawing our attention to just that, in her poem, “Still I Rise”,  that is “Pornography”  and the plight of the African American Woman.

“You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.”

Shaheda (with immense gratitude)