Conclusión

Abstract

This chapter highlights how obscenity is marshaled both for and against rape culture and misogyny in our own time, demonstrating how practices of obscene pedagogy from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries continue to shape Western sexual culture. It argues that the use of obscenity to foster fraternal bonds and endorse violence in recent years has taken the form of explicit recordings exchanged among men, enabling them to boast of their conquests in a digital brotherhood. In light of obscenity's continued power to teach humiliation, aggression, homophobia, and rigid masculinity, the chapter uncovers how little has changed culturally from Chaucer's band of “felawes” swapping comic tales of assault and Scottish poets exchanging misogynist vitriol about one another's wives to prove their literary supremacy. The chapter urges us to acknowledge the perniciousness and unacceptability of locker room talk regardless of where it occurs, and we must reckon with how this discourse uses obscenity to educate men about sex and power. It concludes by suggesting that we respond to its provocation by exploring how its galvanizing charge can be harnessed to protest injustice and shed unforgiving light on persistent inequalities.