Leaving Catherine MacKinnon aside for the present (i frankly could leave her to heaven), I would like to speak up for popular culture--one form in particular-- the daytime drama. While the form can be deeply and seriously criticized on any number of grounds, I find myself quite resentful of the priests of high culture who defend the Marquis de Sade and denigrate the intertextual possibilities of daytime drama. Two points seem particularly germane in relation to Dworkin's blanket critique of mass culture. First, while the daytime drama is a genre that partakes of its own particular brand of cliche and recylcling of writers and producers, the shows themselves are quite different in their stylistic and teleological world-views. 2) for every bad role model Dworkin can name,(for instance most--tho' not all-- the endlessly victimized women of Salem on Days of Our Lives) I can name 2 powerful, non-victimized, textured women in the genre--Lucinda, Lisa, Emma (Not to mention the marvelous actresses who play them). Further, there is an activity to the fandom in daytime drama that is complicated, textured, contested, whatever as well. It is not just about romance, sex on the beach, and an excellent grad student here of the U. of Il is writing her dissertation on a network news group. Her analysis of the varied levels of discourse/interaction/audience I think will be an antidote to the flat, humorless, dismissive, uninterested/ing analysis of philosophers who ought to know better (being employed as a philosopher, I take as part of my job to try to keep all sorts of texts and contexts dynamic and textured and complicated not to simplify them out of existence. there was a nice\ piece about the discourse of daytime television/ the transition to the fathers of truth aka our network anchors/the masc-fem accounts of life and their various relations to the possibilities of truth. I'll try to dig up a citation if anyone is interested. anyway, this is not meant so much as a defense of soaps or of mass culture as it is a critique of the endless narrowing of intellectual world-views-- to the familiar, comfortable , and safe. kal Kal Alston 236c Education--UIUC 1310 S. 6th Street Champaign, Il 61820 217-333-4382 [log in to unmask]