Update: Sara has an interesting post about worker safety that puts my notion that the “dual audience” of porn is behind the puzzlingly monolithic hateful nature of porn.
I’ve got a couple pages of notes from seeing Robert Jensen speak on his anti-porn views to a roomful of mostly undergraduates on Monday night. My reluctance to write about this subject comes from the perceived giant gulf between anti- and pro-porn feminists, a gulf that Jensen buys into, stating that the “pro” side won the debate. And, you know, Andrea Dworkin is dead. All in all, it seems a bit bleak from his point of view, and I can’t say I blame him. But the thing is that I think the line was drawn in the sand during the 80s when anti-porn feminists tried to escalate their concerns to legal recourse, which I think was a fatal mistake, a point I’ll return to later. But Jensen said the pro-porn side “won”, and I couldn’t help but think that was a little simplistic from what I know of 3rd wave feminist views on this. We don’t write about it much, because it gets so aggressively hairy so quickly and the debate notoriously generates huge amounts of intellectual dishonesty from people that have declared themselves members of this camp or that, but I have private conversations all the time with other feminists of my generation and I’d say that the general view is that most porn is indeed misogynistic crap but it doesn’t have to be, but censorship is out of the question and so, well, blah. Also, since I finally finished reading Virginity or Death! by Katha Pollitt, I have to note what she pointed out about Andrea Dworkin in the book, which is that her brilliant career got derailed by the porn fights, and she started mistaking the symptom (misogynistic porn) with the disease (that’d be the patriarchy). The irony of this is that Dworkin’s anti-feminist critics are eager to claim she was stating that fucking is inherently debasing to women when in fact she was saying that the patriarchy constructs fucking as such.
The symptom/disease relationship became quite clear during Jensen’s talk when he described the hostile nature of emerging trends in porn, namely acts like double penetration, more anal sex, and specifically “ass-to-mouth”, an act that’s hard for even the most determined to construct as anything but hostile. On the anal sex thing, it’s important to distinguish between reality and symbolic meaning; in reality, anal sex can be a lot of fun, but in porn it is represented in such a way as to seem endured, and it rarely is performed in a way that most people would really like to be on the receiving end. Jensen told us he went to an adult entertainment convention in Las Vegas and was interviewing people the whole time and he interviewed one director who figured that men turn to porn for just this hostility. As Jensen told it, the guy said that he thinks the average porn viewer turns to porn after hearing his wife “nag” him and thinks that he’d like to see her (or any woman, I guess) fucked up the ass until it hurt. The story was meant to illustrate how misogyny drives the market, which it did, but it’s noteworthy that misogyny drives the market. In this case, for instance, if the hypothetical viewer was not already of the belief that women were inferior to him, he wouldn’t be angry that his wife dares speak up to him, and then he wouldn’t have this anger that he takes out by watching a video where he gets an explicit representation of a woman being put in her place (at least as far as he’s concerned).
It’s true porn reinforces misogynist attitudes, but it’s hardly the cause and it’s probably undeserving of the reputation many anti-porn feminists give it as such a big instigator of violence against women. As Jensen noted in his talk, the group of men who don’t look at porn is “an empty set”, so the one unsettling thing that has to be dealt with is while the average porn consumer may very well be hostile to women and seek that out, a lot of men who are genuinely feminist are jerking off to it, too. So the bit of bait and switch that many people see with the anti-porn contigency is that the reason porn evokes such strong reactions is most of it is so nakedly misogynist and racist, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the cause of those feelings, so the attention paid to it seems a little out of hand.
There’s also the sex-positive argument that porn isn’t inherently hateful, which is true enough and has in fact led to the creation of a teeny subset of the market of more positive porn, but that subset is consumed primarily by women. But what is irrefutable is that the mainstream of porn stubbornly stays focused on racist themes and humiliating and hurting women. All the alternative outlets with teeny tiny audiences won’t change this one fact. And the language of porn being grounded in humiliating women is disputed only if you’re willing to lie to yourself—check out this post by Lauren where she finds not one but two references where a French chef jokes by comparing the force feeding of ducks to women in porn choking on cocks. Har har, yeah it’s cruel.
Still, these things make the pro-porn side seem very attractive but lately I’ve soured on it some, because of what I’ve noticed is that intellectual dishonesty is pretty pervasive. What porn could be is not what it is at present, and what it is in most cases is misogynist and racist. Because defending porn by its egalitarian possibilities that will only get a sliver of the audience is just so unsatisfying, people try to make sympathetic arguments to sort of toss dirt over how misogynist porn is or, failing that, try to explain the hostility in it as understandable reaction to this or that. One example that stuck in my craw recently was on a thread that Marc started because he was a bit shocked at how vile the advertising for rape porn is and belledame, straining to rearrange the pro-porn side to explain this shit away, went on a long rant about how it’s understandable that men have all this anger because of the oppressive patriarchal imperialism etc. etc. in their lives, all of which is true enough but not exactly unknown. She half-excused this stuff with this:
Me, I just keep flashing on this song title. it was a favorite of my best friend’s abusive asshole brother. “I Want You To Hurt Like I Hurt.�
These feelings of powerlessness and invasion are unbearable. Quick, pass them to someone else. -dump the load- Ah, that’s better.
And I retorted:
Nice theory, belledame. If the anger that leads to rape is caused by feeling powerless, then women should rape more than men since we feel that powerlessness more than men. But we don’t. Why?
Because it’s not about powerlessness. It’s about feeling entitled to have what you want on demand and then, when you don’t get it, throwing a temper tantrum like a spoiled brat.
This anger at not getting what isn’t yours will only disappear when we quit coddling and spoiling men and telling them they are entitled to have what isn’t actually theirs.
It seems so simple to me, and it’s also the middle ground between the two camps. It concedes to the pro-porn side that fantasies are a reflection of society, but it refuses to go along with the idea that fantasies themselves are somehow beyond analysis or criticism that makes the person clinging to the fantasy responsible for his own hatefulness. It concedes to the anti-porn side that misogynist porn (which is, to be honest, most porn) is a dreadful view into the cruelty at the heart of the patriarchy and even that it reinforces these attitudes, but it won’t go so far as single it out as a cause that’s noteworthy.
All this hate and anger, and yet weirdly, porn is also about sex, which for healthy people tends to be more about affection than hatred. The great puzzle I was stuck with after Jensen’s talk after conceding the point that most porn portrays coercive, abusive sex was this: If all men look at porn, and most porn is hateful to women, what does this say about men?
It’s the discussion that I think the intellectually dishonest porn wars are basically conducted to avoid answering. We talk about this or that or anything but that one question, which is why the majority of men are getting off on women’s degradation and humiliation, even men we know do not feel that way about women. After talking with a few male friends who are both feminists and won’t bullshit and play like they don’t look at that stuff, the best theory I can come up with is that men who seek porn out solely as a masturbatory aid develop something of a skill at ignoring the stuff in porn that offends them. The other thing that I came to realize is that men who tend to look at it occasionally are not the consumers who drive the market; most of them probably don’t even pay for it. It’s the men who have a psychological issue of some sort who get mildly to deeply obsessed with porn and buy a ton of videos, and since they spend the money, they drive the market. And they’re the ones who want the anger and hate.
I will add that after putting together this theory, my male friends I discussed this with honestly said that they figured my view of the market of it was mostly right but that they couldn’t help but admit that the escalating cruelty of porn probably has a lot to do with the way that arousal gets tied to forbiddeness when you’re looking at porn in a repressive culture. So they were willing to go a little further than me in suggesting that there’s something to the idea that porn is uniquely good at instilling misogynist attitudes in men. I tend to think, though, that the attitude that sex is wrong makes people feel that in order for it to be sex, it has to feel wrong, and if we could rid ourselves of this attitude, it might be easier for people to seek out erotic art that doesn’t push the envelope in a hateful direction to generate that naughty feeling.
Thinking it all through, it doesn’t seem that hard to admit both that most porn is vile while also admitting that it doesn’t have to be that way, a solid middle ground between the pro and anti camps. So why is there this notion that common ground can’t be found? My theory is that it’s because the anti-porn feminists fled to legal recourse so quickly. I can’t say I blame them too much; I’ve seen porn from the 70s and most of it is distressingly cruel to women. (I saw one once where a scene was built around a man fucking a woman from behind while he drowned her to death in a bucket, finishing himself off as she died.) It’s so horrible you really do wish you could wipe it off the face of the planet, particularly if you’re a rape survivor and it triggers traumatic memories. But censorship is just unAmerican, and so the anti-censorship forces came down hard, particularly in response to feminists who were naive enough to side with right wingers who hate women, too, and are probably big consumers of the stuff that makes many of us reasonably queasy. People ended up taking sides quickly, and that was probably the cause. I wish that anti-porn activists kept their eyes on the prize—conquering the hate that creates the porn and educating the public towards making free choices to reject misogyny, instead of seeking legal channels. And I’m hoping that maybe with some honesty, those of us who are stubbornly pro-sex but anti-misogyny can stake out this middle ground and educate people on the issue.
More from Ann Bartow on how the lack of worker safety regulation has, contrary to what you might believe if you read the hype, helped spread HIV to porn actors. All the more reason that it’s important for feminists to advance the discussion beyond the current stalemate.
As an aside, one thing I learned from Jensen’s talk is that porn, which I knew was already wildly racist, seems to only becoming more so, trafficking in racial stereotypes more and more all the time. I don’t know how much of that is the “naughty” vibe and how much of it is that the industry has realized it can profit handsomely by tapping white male resentment at the loss of privileges. I’m not too up on the trends in this direction, so I’d like to either post about it in the future or see some intelligent posting elsewhere. Just a thought.
Fabulous post title for a fabulous post. You articulated really well what I’ve thought for some time about men who watch porn. A friend of mine who’s a little more squicked by porn than I am asked me, don’t I feel weird about guys I know who watch porn? And the thing is, I kind of felt like I should, but I just couldn’t, because I knew the guys in their non-porn-watching lives and they were some of the sweetest, least misogynistic, most feminist-friendly even if they don’t identify as feminist people I’ve ever met, and I’ve never once felt anything resembling sexism from any of them.
I think it’s also important to remember that a lot of people don’t think about cultural criticism as much as a lot of feminists do; guys who get off on porn because of the violence might actively seek out porn that is violent, whereas for other guys it’s just naked people having sex, which, you know, who doesn’t love naked people having sex. If it’s not explicity derogatory I think a lot of people just wouldn’t bother to think of it as such. The guys I know who watch porn, for example, are deeply disturbed by rape porn (like, obviously not just paying lip service to being disturbed in front of their feminist friend, but like, you can see the visceral reaction on their faces), so even if the stuff is, on some level, derogatory, that might just not enter their radar, as it were.
but that they couldn’t help but admit that the escalating cruelty of porn probably has a lot to do with the way that arousal gets tied to forbiddeness when you’re looking at porn in a repressive culture.
Except it strikes me that the most forbidden arousal for these porn consumers would be pedophilia, incest, or homosexuality. Some of these I imagine are popular; but I don’t see–and maybe I’m just naive–straight-identified men eventually tiring of what they think is vanilla sex and finally ending up watching two men go at it.
Good point, Karl. But hell, it’s not like most men would enjoy actually participating in a double penetration either, even if they do enjoy women’s pain. My thought is that it’s a couple of factors, really—the blatant misogynists pay the big bucks and the not-as or not misogynist men go along for the ride.
But my point is mainly, I guess, that the escalation isn’t towards variety, but cruelty—the industry shovels out sexist, racist stuff for people who love it and double their sales on the forbidden aspect.
I don’t look at pornographic images, although I do occasionally read pornographic narratives. It seems to me that the interesting comparison case here would be gay male porn. Does it feature humiliation as much as hetero porn?
the best theory I can come up with is that men who seek porn out solely as a masturbatory aid develop something of a skill at ignoring the stuff in porn that offends them.
Well, that’s what women do, so, um, yeah. Although Robert Jensen is typically full of shit with that “empty set” business. Even among men whose sex drive is so dulled as to need other people’s fantasies to replace the lack of their own, plenty of them jerk off to pictures of naked women who aren’t doing anything unpleasant, just standing around being naked.
Nice theory, belledame. If the anger that leads to rape is caused by feeling powerless, then women should rape more than men since we feel that powerlessness more than men. But we don’t. Why?
Thank you for saying this. For heaven’s sake, you’d think this would have occurred to more people, but it really hasn’t.
Soph, I haven’t met a man yet who hasn’t/doesn’t look at porn. I know a few who find hardcore sex videos distasteful, but mostly they tend to go straight for the explanation that the women’s plasticized bodies turn them off.
A great post, and one I think is clear and jargon-free enough for me to share with non-feminist male friends and ask their opinions.
I will say that I receive the impression sometimes that a lot of men use things that aren’t intended (or aren’t marketed) as porn as masturbatory aids. They may actually be less likely to admit this, as many people jeer at the supposedly teenage or weird or ‘in denial’ behavior of jerking off over lingerie catalogs or hot non-sex scenes in movies. Those sources of stimulation, while far from patriarchy-free, are certainly less hateful, and I wonder if more men than we realize only use softcore or, if you will, ‘repurposed’ porn?
Relatedly, did you see what I just wrote about regulating porn in the context of worker safety? If I may completely close the incestuous loop, I started it out with a link to you.
And while my comment is awaiting moderation, and this is on the subject of porn, I should point out that I guess I meant more of a blog circle jerk than I did incest.
I don’t know any men who haven’t ever looked at porn, but that’s not what I meant. I just mean that plenty of men don’t use videos as part of their habitual jerk-off routine.
I only count the testimony of men who I know extremely well, whose sexual habits I’m intimately familiar with, and most crucially, men who do not disapprove of porn themselves and know that I myself like it and therefore couldn’t possibly think badly of others who do. I know there’s this thing where a woman who says this is assumed to be dumb and naive and lied to, but no.
Soph, I haven’t met a man yet who hasn’t/doesn’t look at porn.
At one time I hadn’t either, or didn’t know I had, which is why I laughed at the first guy who told me that and told him I found it hard to believe. I am not impressed by guys who don’t like porn; he didn’t say this to impress me. A guy can be heterosexual, masturbate a lot, and find porn videos either unpleasant or unarousing. Honest.
Karl,
I don’t know how often you go looking for porn (or warez and other legally questionable materials) on ye olde intarweb, but it seems like there really is a lot of incest and pedophilia porn out there. And I don’t meant pedophilia in the whiney “ew, she waxed her privates!” sense, I mean pedophilia in the sense of “where can I report this shit?” It really is amazingly common. All that’s left to hope is that there aren’t as many pedophile consumers out there as it seems… maybe they just spend more on porn than the average viewer, and hence there are a disproportionate number of sites catering to them. But, optimism seems to be a good strategy for accuring disappointments.
As for homosexuality… Well, it’s understandable why porn-purusers aren’t led there more frequently. There’s lots of social pressure making the standard of feminine beauty younger and younger, thinner and thinner… eventually, the guy who goes looking for barely legal might be moved to turn his eye toward the almost legal, and finally the unconscionable. There’s not such a slippery slope between “hot asian teens” and “sweaty, hung twinks.” But, I’m sure it occassionally happens that a “straight” man finds his way there, anyway.
William,
It’s difficult to say if gay porn features as much humiliation as straight porn. If you’re comparing the “presentable” stuff to the “presentable stuff”, then definitely. Bottom boys in gay porn are often forced (though no more than “the usual amount of force”, as codified in law), slapped around a little bit, and fucked without much regard for their own enjoyment…
However, I haven’t seen any gay porn that approaches the level of violence and hatred in the really bad straight porn. I’ve never seen gay porn with real blood, for instance.
HOWEVER, some of the worst non-rape bondage porn (i.e. porn in which there is heavy BDSM play, but no rape back-story) I’ve seen is females doing violence to men. (not saying the women-torturing men stuff is worse, just that it’s “as-bad”.) I’ve never seen nearly the level of violence in male-dom or fem-dom straight porn in gay porn.
Except it strikes me that the most forbidden arousal for these porn consumers would be pedophilia, incest, or homosexuality. Some of these I imagine are popular; but I don’t see–and maybe I’m just naive–straight-identified men eventually tiring of what they think is vanilla sex and finally ending up watching two men go at it.
You haven’t spent any time on alt.sex.stories.moderated lately. Incest is just about the most popular fiction fetish on the bloody planet, so far as I can tell.
Bottom boys in gay porn are often forced (though no more than “the usual amount of force�, as codified in law), slapped around a little bit, and fucked without much regard for their own enjoyment…
On the rare occasions that I’ve looked at gay male porn, this is what I’ve seen. A lot of it seemed to be about closeted “tops” taking out their self-loathing on other guys.
I tend to think, though, that the attitude that sex is wrong makes people feel that in order for it to be sex, it has to feel wrong
I agree with this, and I think most non-misogynists, to some degree, feel something for the typical straight porn narrative whether we give voice to that in our daily lives or not. Sexual fantasies aren’t formed in a vacuum, and there has to be a reason so many people’s fantasies are so similar.
My husband does not look at porn. Does not read it, does not view it, does not page through porn magazines. Of course he has — as a young 20-something, when it took him about 10 minutes to realize he just isn’t into it.
You don’t really have a very high opinion of men on this one, do you?
Pardon my ignorance, but what is an “empty set?” Does that mean that there is no such thing?
I have looked at porn. Both still and video. I have never used pornographic images for their intended purpose. Does that make me part of an empty set? (Then again, I don’t know any women who have never looked at porn) Maybe I never learned the proper way to view the stuff or maybe it just isn’t what pushes my buttons. Who knows? But seeing other people having sex just doesn’t interest me.
That said, I agree with most of your post. Porn is horrible, woman hating stuff with very, very few exceptions. It doesn’t need to be. It is a reflection of the culture that produces it. But anti-porn feminists do have a ton of valid points. I used to be wholeheartedly pro-porn on the basis of freedom of expression and my visceral hate of censorship. Over the last year or so I have become less vehemently so. Because the vast majority of porn is so outrageously hateful. But I still can’t overcome my opposition to censorship.
Middle ground is fine, in theory. I just don’t see how your middle ground can satisfy the anti-porn crowd. What are the steps to correct the misogyny? What are the measurable goals and can any of them be reached in the next hundred years? It’s very difficult for me to see how tangible progress in this respect can be made and, it seems to me, that this will be a major sticking point for the anti-porn folks.
But at least your definition of middle ground might lead to productive conversations instead of the same old fights with the same old arguments. Perhaps, while we still have the same fights over censorship, we can at least work together (both pro and anti) to reduce the cultural penchant for violent, woman hating porn.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is an “empty set?� Does that mean that there is no such thing?
You got it.
I once dated a guy for a long while who had an extreme dislike for porn — wouldn’t watch it, didn’t like it. I could breathe in the bedroom knowing he wasn’t bringing in any plasticized, violent shit in there with him.
That I just realized this makes me pause.
When I was in graduate school, I read a great essay in my film theory class about Hustler magazine and its philosophical underpinnings. That’s right, the philosophy behind Hustler, probably the nastiest “mainstream” magazine out there.
In a nutshell, Hustler is dedicated to breaking down taboos. The problem, of course, is that once you break down the first set, you have to become more and more outrageous until, by the time the writer of the essay reached the present-day issues, golden showers were a regular feature in the photo spreads.
After a certain point, I think you have to say, “You know, there’s a reason that act is taboo, and maybe we shouldn’t mainstream it.”
(sitting back and waiting for the flame war to begin …)
men who seek porn out solely as a masturbatory aid develop something of a skill at ignoring the stuff in porn that offends them.
Absofuckinglutely. In my case, at any rate. There’s some stuff that I have to turn off mid-viewing because I didn’t realize when downloading it that I’d find the level of violence to be, well, a turn off. And as somebody who’s probably a little more attuned to racial offense than sexist, when I was a fledgling porn watcher the first thing that weirded the hell out of me was the incredibly bizarre racial dynamics involved, which to be honest I still don’t really understand. And in general I guess I’ve gotten good at not paying attention to stuff which isn’t too blatantly offensive (to me). I’ve also gotten pretty good at finding stuff which doesn’t trigger my offensive switches; there’s a lot of porn out there on the internet where the women appear to be enjoying the proceedings* and there isn’t an attempt to realistically make it look like they’ve been coerced, which is really the most essential factor in my not feeling bad about what I’m watching. That’s not to say that someone else wouldn’t find the depicted actions inherently offensive, but that’ll always be the case.
To be completely honest and TMI (but I’m largely anonymous, so who cares?!) the male-dominant/degrading aspect of so much porn (in varying degrees of subtlety) doesn’t inherently bother me because that (can be) a part of my IRL sexual activity. Actually, I only got comfortable with it in porn after spending some time in a relationship where my partner and I found that we had respectively submissive and dominant tendencies; after that, I was a lot less bothered by the less egregious male-dominant stuff in porn, because some aspects of it existed, healthily, in my own sex life. What bothers me is that the male-dominant stuff, while unobjectionable to me, is so overwhelmingly pervasive, and the niche of say male submissive porn (let alone, you know, porn that doesn’t involve power games) so tiny - I can’t believe that it’s an honest reflection of the IRL predilections of guys out there, which leads me to believe that Amanda’s right: the industry is being driven by its more extreme constituents. (And I think she and her friends are also right about the shame-issues involved in watching porn, full stop, influencing the content as well. Actually, I think Amanda’s right about pretty much everything in this post.)
*Are they really enjoying it? I have no clue. I’d like to think so. Maybe they’re just really good actors, but if we’re being honest the same thought has crossed my mind in re: my real sex life, and in both cases it’s just a lot easier to take things at face value. The stuff I tend to watch on the internet is especially ripe for this kind of second-guessing because the premises of many pseudo-amateur sites out there have layers of fake/real/fake/real built in.
You straights and your weird, weird sex hang-ups.
Although Robert Jensen is typically full of shit with that “empty set� business. Even among men whose sex drive is so dulled as to need other people’s fantasies to replace the lack of their own, plenty of them jerk off to pictures of naked women who aren’t doing anything unpleasant, just standing around being naked.
That’s still very much porn, though. It just happens to be non-evil. (Not that there aren’t fellows who don’t watch porn.)
Non-evil porn is very easy to find, actually, if only because porn of every possible variety is very easy to find, for free, in huge quantities. Certainly getting to it requires wading through a bunch of misogynistic garbage. But I doubt many feminist men are actually-jerking-off to images with misogynistic content; the “ignoring” is in the sifting-through process.
I just wish pro-porn feminists would call themselves that, instead of pro-sex. As though anti-porn feminists just hate sex.
I’m an amateur-sex feminist, myself. But you’ve nailed it good: The patriarchy has even managed to fuck up sex. Which I’d thought was Dworkin’s point, more or less.
It’s a little unsettling to realize that for some guys, sex is the bait in porn, while for other guys the bait is the hostility. Add to that mix he way violence in general is approved of as Wholesome by the State and our neighbors, while sex is not — what gets an X rating, after all? — and you get some disturbing hints about what’s going on. Whatever the fuck it is.
Amanda said:
The same critique could be made of fashion, or sports, and even society as a whole: “What society could be is not what it is at present, and what it is in most cases is misogynist and racist.” Of course, you rarely hear anyone agitating for banning athletics just because the language of competition is so amazingly misogynist. Rather, people try to encourage and broaden the egalitarian tendencies that are present, and, if they are absent, to try to introduce them (Title IX, anyone?). Why is it that porn is treated so differently?
Maybe it is because porn is already so disreputable, being as it is the perennial whipping boy of the patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t like porn, because that’s people getting sex when they ought not. And feminists don’t like it because when given the chance to indulge in any fantasy they please, people still choose patriarchy, just with themselves on top. Thus it gets caught coming and going–an easy target.
I like your middle ground. But this is the same position that feminists take in droves on any number of other issues: yes, it’s patriarchal and misogynist now, but it can be fixed. Why is porn treated so differently?
Ok, I hear what you’re saying about the porn industry depicting women as “whores” and men as “studs”, and the overall eroticization of violence towards women. And that’s a symptom of the patriarchy. What you didn’t address, however, is that force, regardless of social context, can be and is a fetish “object” in the fantasies of many men and women. It is deeply satiating to interact with someone CONSENSUALLY on the level of force-play. And porn movies, since they are ‘movies’, imply consent! They are, after all, being made by actors and actresses who are more or less there because they want to be. Although it’s true that socioeconomically that isn’t the case all the time. The use of force to violate another human being, in any avenue of life, is what we are all fighting to abolish. What I am concerned about is the possibility you are advocating the throwing of the baby out with the bathwater.
I am unutterably lucky, in that both my best friend, and my husband , both male, totally HATE porn. So much that they would close their eyes rather than look at it.
Or maybe only half lucky; I read most of Mary Daly’s “Gyn-Ecology” to my best friend when we were both 18. It changed his world-view and made him a Feminist. He probably WOULD have been one ANYWAY, because he’s a saint, but undoubtedly it sped him up on the topic. (He’s straight).
But anyway, I KNOW what it feels like to be “safe” (as Lauren referenced above) and what it feels like to be “unsafe” (read Biting Beaver’s treatise on finding porn on the “history” button of the computer shared with a spouse).
Everything said here is very sane and true; nevertheless, I have to chose the anti-porn side of this one, due to the basic thing not really addressed: Viewing Females as Objects, not persons. It is very Basic and 70’s and everything, but I do not think it engenders a safe world for women and girls and our precious daughters, for it to be NORMATIVE for females to be seen by males as THINGS. THINGS to FUCK. DOES anyone want THEIR daughter to be seen as a “thing to fuck”?
Banning porn would only create a prohibition-type black market; I don’t think banning it is do-able.
I DO think we should do all we can to discourage people from looking at it. I am not sure what that would entail! We could start with reading “Gyn-Ecology” out loud to all our friends, though.
Or maybe PUBLIC SHAMING!! PUBLIC SHAMING has a LOT of potential. Seriously.
Great post Amanda, this made me think a lot. I like your middle ground.
I think one of the main issues for anti-porn feminists is the fact that some women are hurt in order to make some porn.* It’s one of the reasons why porn is different from fashion or sports. It’s a real sticking point for me - I can’t reconcile pro-porn sentiment with the actual injury to women. But that’s a production issue, not a consumption issue, and most men would be horrified to learn that soimething they’re watching is non-consensual - there’s that gap between men that watch porn for the violence and those that watch it for the sex again.
* The jury’s out for me on whether watching porn’s an instigator of violence against women generally; I’m talking about the few specific instances of porn actresses being abused. And I’m genuinely not sure how widespread a problem it is.
A while ago, I was on a board that was having some problems with obscene banner ads. They were for some Brazilian camgirl website, and you had these beautiful girls in bikinis lined up on the banner, then the bikinis disappeared. There was a great “OMG - the children!” kerfuffle and they were banned. What got me (and a very few other people) was not the sight of boobies but the way the bikinis disappeared - it seemed so objectifying of the women wearing them. All of the other pruney-arsed Puritans were just freaking out about boobies.
Wow, you are on a roll today. Excellent, excellent post.
if you think belle was making a wholistic and complete theory of sexual violence in that post, or was reccomending that stratagy of coping as moral and effective…
c’mon folks. one way that people may try to cope with perceived powerlessless or insecurity, especially in relation to a constructed masculinity rife with instability, given a social location and training that supports it may be the enforcement of sexualize violence on third parties.
That’s how i parsed her statement. Nothing excusing it, but an attempt to think about why patriarchy fuels a desire for such abhorrent material. Note that she *explicitly* connected the stratagy of hurt others for hurt inside with an “abusive asshole”?
Now, tell me with a straight face that Belle is a rape porn apologist.
Feck.
I was afraid this would turn into a purity contest. I accept that some men, maybe even especially those in older generations, haven’t looked at it as much or chosen to abandon it. But I refuse to imply to women my age or younger that there’s anything resembling hope that there’s a bunch of straight men out there who don’t/won’t. Hope is a thing with feathers, sure, but that idea has helium.
Tinfoil, my opinion of men is high, but I don’t think they are above human. Personally speaking, I’m not even remotely against the idea of “someone else’s fantasy” or some of the other heady ideas. Every time I watch a movie, especially of the popcorn munching kind, I’m watching “someone else’s fantasy”. I believe that there are people out there who never, ever, ever indulge in entertainment that is shallow and invokes cheap laughs or scares or sexual arousal, but their numbers are vanishingly small and frankly, I don’t think they’re morally superior but maybe just sort of born without that shallow gene.
So my opinion of men is they are human, no more, no less. I don’t see in any way why sexual arousal is a wrong thing to want out of your shallow entertainment product, so I don’t judge men one bit for using it that way. Noting that romance novels are snapped off the shelf at an unbelievable rate doesn’t mean I have a low opinion of women, so why should porn consumption mean I have a low opinion of men? And if using stuff to masturbate is sooooo wrong, then why don’t I get reamed for jokes about vibrators and sex toys? Judging men who look at porn as weak or to claim they are shallow or stupid is an effective way to get them to be shady and dishonest about watching it.
The issue here is not to judge men who want a fantasy to masturbate to—it’s that the vast majority of said fantasies are mean as hell, and I want to know why. And why, with there being people earnestly and diligently putting out alternatives that aren’t, those alternatives gather dust on the shelf why racist, misogynist shit snaps off the shelf. It’s not thinking low of men to note that this is a fact. If the product is sexual fantasy, why does hate drive the market? Well, like I said in the post, I think that most men (most to the degree that exceptions are almost worth not noting) may look at it on occasion, the men who are actually out there buying the videos are the pigs who have entitlement issues and anger they’re working out.
On the “what to do” question, Jake Squid, my general feeling is that we have to address the social reasons for porn’s hatefulness, while hopefully using this middle ground issue—porn’s not wrong in theory but in practice it’s so hateful, why?—to open people up to the need to be thoughtful about their consumption habits and maybe even change the market some. Not sure how effective that’ll be, but it’s the only way to approach the issue that could even work without shutting people down and dividing them into camps. And I’m opposed to the idea that our goals have to be achievable in our lifetime or we’ve failed—none of the women who started the suffrage movement had the chance to see women get the vote.
In my opinion porn is getting more extreme because societal taboos are breaking down (yay!). Porn is more extreme because, like you said (or I think you said), mainsteam media is making loving sex more available so porn has to get nastier to even BE porn. I also think that most men realize that this is all fantasy and probably wouldn’t even be interested in most of this stuff. More of a ‘Damn, I wish more women were this horny’ kind of thing. That’s just me though.
Heresiarch, beyond just the patriarchy-hates-sex internalization, I think that people freak out about porn because it’s supposed to and is very effective at generating visceral reactions. When talking to men and women I’ve known about their discomfort with porn—men and women who are otherwise cheerful perverts, mind you—the women pretty much overwhelmingly state that it’s downright terrifying to see so much naked hate and desire for coercion like that. The men, on the other hand, usually have told me that they worry that it’s especially reinforcing, for the obvious reasons.
Sly, I didn’t say belle was a rape porn apologist. But in all her very long comments, she is dodgy about that basic question—if hateful porn is an expression of powerlessness, then how come it’s not the least empowered people in any given society who are using it? It’s not compensation, and we have to face up to that. It’s people who feel entitled relishing that entitlement. At least this is true of people seeking it out for the hostile aspects. If you need further convincing that genuine entitlement is the source of this sort of predatory pleasure, I recommend rereading some of those Foley transcripts.
There’s no “purity contest” going on here, at least on my part. Interesting way to put it. All I said was that my husband doesn’t like porn — and that you don’t have a high opinion of men on this one. They all get painted with the same brush, because they all view/read or have viewed/read porn. Which, if it were true, tells you…exactly what, about any individual man?
Lots and lots of men don’t like porn. At best, porn is for people with limited sexual imagination. At worst, it represents a host of ills, most of which you’ve touched on.
I just pause at some of your blanket statements presented as “fact,” somtimes.
It’s the men who have a psychological issue of some sort who get mildly to deeply obsessed with porn and buy a ton of videos, and since they spend the money, they drive the market. And they’re the ones who want the anger and hate.
I think this is an important point. The market is reacting to a group of consumers who purchase the most, hence the popularity of degrading videos. This leaves consumers who might just want to see a fantasy about some happy couple screwing digging through all the gross stuff to find something appropriate.
If there’s lots and lots of men who don’t watch porn, they’re probably more likely than average to read this blog. Maybe they could speak up?
Once again I have to say, my porn is not your porn, and most of what you-all are talking about seems aggressively non-arousing to me & my partner.
I agree with Sara’s post, that the most important way to regulate porn is via labor laws — I would be all for a ban on barebacking, for instance. One reason there aren’t such laws is because both consumers & producers are operating from a mindset in which women should be punished for having sex.
As for whether violent, degrading porn aids & abets real-life violence, the evidence is against it. Japanese pornography is incredibly, disgustingly violent, real wash-your-eyes-after-viewing stuff, yet Japanese women experience less domestic violence than women in other countries (WHO study).
I keep being startled by the assumptions running through Amanda’s post and the comments. For instance:
*blinks* Do you mean “rimming”? Because I have only seen rimming constructed as an expression of power on the part of the rimmer: “I have so much control over my own reactions that I can make you feel good in ways you’ve never associated with feeling this good.” The classic scene in the pilot episode of Queer As Folk (US) is the canonical example.
Similarly, I’ve only seen double penetration in the context of an emotional threesome (or moresome), so my reaction to Amanda’s assertion that
is, “because it would involve admitting that they like having sex with another man”, not anything about pain.
Another trend in porn I would add to your list in first sentence is the so-called “facial”: where the man ejaculates on the woman’s face.
I think the increasing prevalence of anal sex in heterosexual pornography is because a large number of heterosexual males are simultaneously revolted and fascinated by the act.
If you ask most males what their worst fear is about being sent to prison, I’m sure the overwhelming majority would respond that being anally raped is their greatest fear. All rape is about power and this power dynamic is most prevalent among prison populations. The strong assert their dominance over the weak by forcing them into anal sex.
While I haven’t seen any research on the subject, I suspect that for many males who derive a great deal of excitement from anal sex scenes in porn (and here I’m referring solely to heterosexual and not gay porn), much of the excitement is due to the underlying power dynamic. I also strongly suspect a large percentage of these men also tend to be strongly homophobic.
Whenever I hear or read a comment by some homophobe, almost invariably the rant includes a derogatory reference is made about gay men engaging in anal sex. I think the religious posturing of most homophobes is nothing but a smokescreen for the combination of fear and fascination they feel about the act and why homophobic acts in this country seem to be disproportionately directed at gay males. (This is not to imply, BTW, that lesbians, bisexuals, and the trans-gendered are not also frequent victims of bigotry and discrimination).
Reading the interview with the Girls Gone Wild Guy, and an essay by David Foster Wallace on the annual porn awards, it was clear to me that the porn industry is being driven by the guys directing/producing the films. Yes, sure, if you can come up with something new or outside the mainstream, you’re going to enjoy a little market share boost. It’s the filmmakers though, who spend all day rolling in porn, who find it desensitizing, who need to push the envelope just to find something of a novelty. I don’t think too many people become porn producers out of a love of women’s sexuality.
On the issue of using, I’d make a distinction between stuff that is only about naked people and/or naked people enjoying orgasms, and stuff that is about one person having orgasms by hurting another, who is not having orgasms. We’re social animals. Humans have spent a million years gathered in groups where sex would pretty much have to be in plain sight. I don’t think any true community standard could ban nudity or shiny happy portrayals of sex. Humans like to watch. But watching people be hurt is wrong. Up with erotica! Down with torture!
The lots and lots of men who don’t watch porn is highly correlated to those with no sex drive. And what qualifies as porn is very subjectvie (ie more naked boobies in one issue of W than the entire US run of Maxim, Stuff and FHM combined. All tend to objectify women, the audiences are just really different. And the idea that fashion doesn’t harm women in its making? Ok.)
As to why lots of porn tends to be heavily misogynisitc is due to the fact the market is driven by the “nice guy.”
thanks for the write up Amanda. As a guy who started worrying about exactly the issues you describe, I find that romance novels tend to at least partially fill the void (though certainly they come with their own baggage). Is there ‘eco-friendly’ pornography, or erotica out there, Porn liberal?
Because what a feminist thread about porn really needs is a lot of preening from guys who don’t use it.
Totally. I like porn, but most of it makes me kind of cringe. The giant horse cocks, the painful anal sex, the choking… boring and/or offencive. And most of it goes on for way too long: real people don’t have sex that vigorous for that long unless they have real issues. I just ignore the rest of it. I suppose if I were a better person I would work against it, and I’ll get to that in my voluminous free time.
I watch porn because I’m so desperate for physical affection that I’m willing to ignore the misogyny in order to feel good for at least a couple minutes. I console myself that at least I don’t pay for it.
I think this results directly from being raised as if in a Harlow experiment. (Harry Harlow raised baby monkeys with terrycloth dolls instead of mothers. The monkeys exhibited all sorts of distressing symptoms as they grew up.) I’m not certain what, if anything, I can do about this as an adult.
“Some of these I imagine are popular; but I don’t see–and maybe I’m just naive–straight-identified men eventually tiring of what they think is vanilla sex and finally ending up watching two men go at it.”
The link is escaping me, but I do remember a woman working at a porn shop talking about “gay drift.” It’s a phenomena she repeatedly observed where regular customers would start out watching strictly straight (and “lesbian”) porn, would gradually start getting some bisexual porn, and then some gay porn, and then almost exclusively gay porn. The site was called “Porn Horror Stories,” but a quick Google search got me nowhere near it.
Beyond that, I think Amanda hits it on the head: the aggregate of consumers of porn is wildly different than the paying consumers who drive the market. I will gleefully admit that I consume a great deal of porn, but due to the glories of the Internet, I’ve spent perhaps $200 on porn in my life. The however many billion dollar porn industry is not being funded by guys like me.
Which leads me to ask: why the hell does anyone pay for porn anymore? Unless you have some really specific interests, what is worth paying for when so damn much is out there for free?
There’s always animated porn and amateur porn. I am actually less alarmed at the content of pornography than I am at the conditions of its production - people have all sorts of absurd, superlative fantasies, and that’s fine with me.
Sly, I didn’t say belle was a rape porn apologist. But in all her very long comments, she is dodgy about that basic question—if hateful porn is an expression of powerlessness, then how come it’s not the least empowered people in any given society who are using it? It’s not compensation, and we have to face up to that. It’s people who feel entitled relishing that entitlement. At least this is true of people seeking it out for the hostile aspects. If you need further convincing that genuine entitlement is the source of this sort of predatory pleasure, I recommend rereading some of those Foley transcripts.
Congresscreatures like Foley aside, I think it would be most accurate to say that the primary consumers of violent pornography are those with the biggest gap between what they’ve been raised to feel entitled to and their actual fulfillment of it. Thus, it’s both an expression of resentment and privelige.
(Consider this a less succinct version of Rob’s note that pornovores are Nice Guys.)
So…guys who don’t view porn have low sex drives? Huh? Clarification, please?
It’s not difficult, in my experience, to find porn that doesn’t include overt violence, racism, or emotional brutalization. There’s plenty of stuff out there that’s not explicitly, aggressively hate-driven.
It’s harder to find stuff that presents any sort of plausible portrayal of female sexual pleasure — where a scene doesn’t, for instance, end in a woman moaning orgasmically as a guy jerks off onto her face or tits.
Any of the porn consumers out there feel like offering recommendations for stuff that doesn’t make you feel like you compromised your principles watching it?
Kylroy,
I can only think of three explanations.
One, people might pay for porn when their appetite for images/videos/a connection to a particular person in porn is very great. This drives the sort of phenomenon “I made this site myself! Watch me suck my husband’s dick and fuck my neighbors in exciting lingere!” Sure, there’s endless free porn out there, but there isn’t endless free porn of this particular person. The guys who buy subscriptions to these sorts of sites might just want more of the same, or they might want the privelidge of chatting this person up… going a level deeper.
Two, people might pay for porn because their appetite for porn (or a particular sort of porn) is so much greater than any of us would like to believe. Anyone who has gone looking for free porn knows that there is a damn lot of it out there, even if you’re really specific about what you’d like to see. I honestly think that someone might be able to go looking for free porn every waking hour every day, and always find new stuff of a particular genre. Someone without a job, feel free to get a research grant and prove me wrong.
Third, they might feel like they ought to pay for porn. This one covers idiots, who think that the girls they so enjoy are going to benefit from their buying their stuff (they already got paid… I don’t think they get residuals), and people who want to support, drive, and grow a particular, anemic segment of the porn industry… i.e. people buying feminist-friendly porn. The existence of this reason for buying porn, and the continued poverty of feminist porn, taken togethe, are really depressing.
I’ve paid for porn through video rentals and the like, and to me it’s insurance against spending hours sifting through 10-second clips of things that you’re not interested in anyway. I haven’t done it a lot, but I imagine I’m not the only one who pays for convenience.
I have only ever bought porn to laugh at in mixed company. So there may be some selection for ridiculousness there. To put an optimistic spin on things.
Dr Science: “ass to mouth” is anal sex followed immediately by oral. I think degrading is an appropriate word.
Sara: and free porn online is just an invitation for computer viruses, worms, etc.
Dennis:
1. Yeah, I can see this, but I honestly think here we’re dealing with a relationship to porn quite different than most men have. I doubt most guys feel any sort of connection to the women in porn; in fact, the lack of connection is the point for many of them. So another excellent example of how consumers and paying consumers differ wildly.
2. This I find a little harder to believe. You could have a tremendous appetite for porn, and never run short of supply just skimming free sites on the Internet. You even get plenty of niche content that way. Possibly you have an extremely niche interest (balloon frottage, I dunno), and cannot find much content without having to pay for it; score another one for paying customers being different.
3. This one amounts to either a subset of 1 (trying to make a connection), 2 (feed my niche interest), or just plain charity. I don’t think much of the porn industry is fueled by charity.
I would add that the existence of older customers not entirely at ease with modern technology may be a factor. The 50something porn consumer may be more at home with a physical library of titles than a collection of files. For me, this raises the question of what happens in 30 years when nobody balks at using the Internet anymore.
Hardly any of the men that I know well (other than myself) “consume” porn regularly. Of course, they’ve all *seen* it. You can’t be an active person in this world and avoid it. But most guys I know just find it base and distasteful, not to mention misogynist.
This idea that all men view porn (subtext: all *real* men should be avoid porn consumers) is fairly recent. I blame Howard Stern mostly for it. And the Internets for making it so immediately available.
I have very little stomach for pornographic photographs and films of real people. There’s a face on that body, and I always wonder what the person is thinking. What made her do this? What is his story? Even in softcore images, I can certainly be aroused by the body, but the experience is made uncomfortable by thinking about the person in the picture.
I do consume fair amounts of furry porn (go ahead and chuckle, but you know you have little embarrassing kinks of your own). Since the zoomorphic people in furry porn are not real, and they live in fantasy worlds unbound by human cultural norms, it feels “okay” and “guilt-free” to consume Of course, this really doesn’t withstand critical scrutiny: There’s plenty of misogyny, cruelty, and non-consensual acts in furry porn, and its hard to dodge the charge that it promotes a sort of emotionally retarded or infantile sexuality (not to mention the questionable eroticizing of non-human animals).
It’s a sticky question (even after you’ve cleaned up): What porn is good porn? Or are we better off without any?
“I haven’t done it a lot, but I imagine I’m not the only one who pays for convenience.”
“Sara: and free porn online is just an invitation for computer viruses, worms, etc.”
I would counter that there’s fairly easy ways to avoid those virus issues, but that only reinforces Sara’s point about convenience; you have to know about the security risks, and know how to avoid them, before “free” porn is actually free.
I guess it all comes back to me being cheap.
Hattie-the point is that never lookign at porn tends to mean a fairly small sexual curiousity. And again porn here is taking to be fully hardcore, but there are so many degrees. Are Skinemax movies porn? How do they differ in objectifying women? They tend to be less degrading to women but much more stylized (ie boobs never move, even the natural ones). Is that more objectification or is it more fantasy?
As to paying for porn, keep in mind the big money makers are in home pay per view and hotel room ppv. Which means it has the “benefit” of no physical pressence afterwards..
What are my thoughts on porn? Well, I am in the anti porn group, generally. I don’t mind say, this sort of porn as I don’t worry that the women have been injured or coerced into acts that they may not really be OK with, or exposed to the risk of diseases. But I’m still not willing to have women hurt today, because some ladies before I was born, wanted to outlaw porn. In fact, I’m willing to have the worst stuff outlawed. Condoms should be mandatory. If a woman or a man is injured in a scene, the producer should have to pay to have them fixed up, you know? I’m not sure what to do about the double anal or the gagging with the cock, but I’m sure there’s something we can do about that. Some may say this limits sexual freedom, but balderdash! If they just wanted to have sex, they’d have it for free, so this is their job,ok?
Kathy McCarthy - could you link to the Biting Beaver post you’re referring to? I looked around and couldn’t find it.
Thanks.
Here’s my theory on the whole “all guys look at porn” point: I think that for a lot of guys, there’s a difference between what they do when they’re single and what they do when they’re in a relationship. I suspect that a lot of guys will watch porn fairly regularly when single, but can easily leave it behind when they’re in a relationship.
I dunno, just a theory I pulled out of my ass.
Spoke too soon. I found it.
http://bitingbeaver.blogspot.com/2006/08/rambly-stuff.html for anyone else who’s interested.
Cassandra, how would you feel about “nice” white liberal guys who got off on watching the evilly racist “humorous” films of the past, or whacked off to lynching postcards and that game where you shoot the wetbacks - but you just KNOW they don’t REALLY feel that way because they vote democratic and never, EVER use the N-word?
No, you can’t just brush it off. Or yes, you can - but then don’t be surprised when your nice liberal male friends turn out to be wife-beaters, or to tell you to STFU when you complain about them using “pussy” as synonym for disgusting coward, and “run get me a sandwich, bitch, and stop whining about Pie Fights”, because you’ve already seen what they think about women on the most basic, pre-rational, lizard-hindbrain levels. They’re like the firedoglakers of gender.
Scott, I guess you don’t read your spam, huh? The point of a lot of mine is that these women *aren’t* that horny, that they’re “virginal schoolgirls” getting banged beyond their tolerance or enjoyment, with or without their liking. It’s just a “milder” form of what Punkass Marc found.
The subtext that women are pretending to enjoy being screwed is - and always has been - a large part of the pleasure that men get from prostitutes as well as porn. She *has* to pretend she likes kissing your ass, or she won’t get paid, hahaha!
As to paying for porn, keep in mind the big money makers are in home pay per view and hotel room ppv. Which means it has the “benefit� of no physical pressence afterwards..
Beware the lure of the porn fairy’s claims that PPV leaves no evidence. The porn fairy does indeed leave evidence behind that wives will find if they grab the cable bill first.
Delany,
Most married guys I know look at porn… For those of us who are unequally yolked in terms of sex drive, it can be a lifesaver…
Not to mention, wanting an orgasm is not always the same as wanting sex. My wife and I regularly just need to get off with as little trouble and effort as possible just before bedtime, so we retreat to our own corners, spend 5-10 minutes at it, and then cuddle up for sleep.
none of the women who started the suffrage movement had the chance to see women get the vote.
I hadn’t really thought of that, but it’s a pretty sobering point.
This idea that all men view porn (subtext: all *real* men should be avoid porn consumers) is fairly recent. I blame Howard Stern mostly for it. And the Internets for making it so immediately available.
There’s a huge difference between “all men like porn, heh heh, deal with it, ladies” and “the vast majority of men like or have at least looked at porn, and that’s not inherently a bad thing.” The first is a statement of male entitlement intended to make you uncomfortable, like it should be offensive or hurtful to you that men like porn. The second is a statement of fact. They should absolutely not be conflated.
Misogynists want to take the fun out of porn by getting hateful and defensive about it, because that’s how they feel about sex. Most avid consumers of misogynistic porn, the kind that drive the market, are probably not enjoying healthy, active sex lives with women and use porn to sublimate their anger and hurt entitlement. Whoever pointed out that this is an extreme version of Nice Guy syndrome is absolutely right. Most guys probably don’t want to be associated with these losers, so they don’t develop an avid interest in porn. That, and porn as a medium is pretty shallow and silly, and only goes so far in getting the typical person off.
So I agree that if more people who like porn accepted it for what it is, porn itself might improve, but it also might not, because actual porn consumption by non-misogynists probably wouldn’t increase dramatically. It would still be the thwarted Nice Guys buying the majority of it and driving the market, and the producers of porn would have the same cynical view of their audience.
Fascinating post that raised a lot of questions for me. This debate mirrors a much larger one concering the representation of violence or disturbing elements in mass media. Its kind of a chicken and egg argument, does violence in the media cause mysoginy and violence or is it a product of the attitudes of the society it springs from? I tend to not believe that violent, disturbing, and definitively un-P.C. power fantasys or thoughts exist in all homo sapiens to a certain degree, and to a certain level I think its healthy and normal to seek out some form of expression or outlet for them. What disturbs me is that there a lot of dangerously unstable people out there who have a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. (Take the GTA games, I find them fun, but I’m not about to take a shot at a cop, but I’m not as sure about the stability of others) As to porn, one thing I’ve noticed is that all analysis of porn, both pro and con, share a conspicously lack of perspective from the people actually involved in porn or the sex industry. So for the sake of discussion I want to add an essay written by Nina Hartley for Counter Punch, that was written as a reply to a very anti-porn essay by NYU Prof. Chyng Sun. Here are some excerpted passages:
read the whole article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/hartley02022005.html
typo: I should have said “I tend to believe” not “not tend to believe” that could get confusing
“The subtext that women are pretending to enjoy being screwed is - and always has been - a large part of the pleasure that men get from prostitutes as well as porn. She *has* to pretend she likes kissing your ass, or she won’t get paid, hahaha! ”
I hadn’t consider that angle before. I’ve always assumed that boys either had no clue the woman was pretending to enjoy it, and just wanted to believe that they are killer in bed naturally, without ever actually having to learn what a given women really enjoys.
When I said no physical evidence, I meant actual physical evidence. It won’t work as a great way to hide things from a partner, but it does mean no videos to be discoverd by a child (or even worse, in laws). And for the business traveller, not need to have that sort of carry on or anything on a work computer. My guess is the anonymity mixed with its ethereall nature is what drives it.
And I’m opposed to the idea that our goals have to be achievable in our lifetime or we’ve failed—none of the women who started the suffrage movement had the chance to see women get the vote.
I agree. I’m just not sure that the loudest voices in the current anti-porn camp agree with that on this issue.
It certainly does appear that the vast, vast majority of men in the US use porn on a regular basis. What, if any, role does that play in the pro/anti argument? It also appears that porn has been around for the entirety of recorded human history. What, if any, role does that play in the pro/anti argument? This is an issue that hits so many buttons on both sides that it is very easy to get distracted by the disagreements. You can see that here in the arguments over who uses porn and what porn is for and what porn use means. Not that I’m not part of all of that or anything.
With the porn issue there is also the fact that both factions have a ,”you’re either with us or you’re against us,” attitude that really discourages cooperation or acknowledgement of points of agreement. Which ties back to my first sentence of this comment. (Look - closure. Well, before going off on the ubiquitous tangent in all porn-related threads)
Hattie-the point is that never lookign at porn tends to mean a fairly small sexual curiousity.
Hahahahaha! There is such a thing as non-visual porn. Your statements make it seem as if you must believe that blind people must have little sexual curiousity and low libido.
But that does lead into the issue of written porn and the (somewhat lesser) differences on that.
I’m sure there are meaningful distinctions to be made between porn, fashion, and sports, but this isn’t one of them, IMO.
Fashion’s the easier case. Women in the fashion industry are frequently encouraged to do harmful and painful things to their bodies (I’m thinking of skeletal runway models, for example).
Sports, especially at the highest levels, can also encourage bodily injury. In this case, men are the better known case (the pressures to play through pain, take steroids, etc.). But similar pressures exist in the world of women’s sports, and those pressures will increase as women’s sports gain more parity (in pay and public attention) to men’s. If you look at a sport like gymnastics, in which women — and women’s bodies — are the focus of attention, the damage done to women (who in this case are often actually young girls, whose ability to meaningfully consent is not entirely clear) can be really quite severe.
There are really two points to be made here: first, patriarchy does play a role in all of these things (including, I’d argue, men’s sports). And in an ideal, unpatriarchical world, they’d all be better.
But second, porn, fashion, and (spectator) sports (as well as dance and a variety of other human activities) are at a certain basic level in part about turning bodies into objects of spectatorship. As someone who has always felt that humans are both objects and subjects, I’m perfectly comfortable watching bodies as objects so long as the subjectivity of those being watched is also preserved, acknowledged, and celebrated. In fact, the pleasure of watching sports (or these other bodily practices) in part involves wondering at the incredible things fellow human beings can do with their own bodies. But these incredible things pretty regularly put those bodies in jeopardy. You just cannot play basketball at an NBA (or WNBA) level, for example, and have nobody risk injury. So I’m left falling back on the issue of consent, and its relatively difficult in certain spaces under patriarchy. So one of the ways in which porn, fashion, and sports (among other spectatorial activities) would be better without patriarchy would be our greater ability to take claims of consent at face value.
(Final note on this issue: as has been already noted, some of the most “extreme” porn does rely on fantasies of utter non-consent, and that’s obviously not the case in these other activities. But though I cannot claim to have any meaningful knowledge of the relative robustness of different sectors of the porn industry, my sense — or maybe it’s only a hope — is that most porn still does not rely on such images of utter non-consent.)
Dennis - considering my husband’s porn use has nearly destroyed my marriage, this really isn’t a conversation I’m willing to have with you.
We need somebody to seed high-quality rips.
Well for sports, how much consent is there? Here I’m thinking of the fact that biggest paying women’s sports (tennis, gymnastics, figure skating) all require their participants to start seriously before age 10 (men face the same thing). I don’t want to go too far off on the tangent though.
Would that “ass-to-mouth” were so tame as a simple rimjob. Ass-to-mouth porn happens when a woman sucks a man’s cock after he fucks her in the ass. Completely revolting, and by its very definition degrading.
I used to really enjoy using porn as a “tool”, but over the past couple of years my enthusiasm has pretty much come to an abrupt end. There have been too many instances where I was doing my thing, happily purring along, and then all of a sudden something so hateful and degrading happens - like, say, smacking and spitting in the face, lots and lots of vicious name-calling, scenarios that could only be construed as rape - that it would take me right out of the moment, to the point where I lost all arousal. (This is really TMI, I know. I’m sorry.) I mean, I even enjoy a lot of the stuff that is traditionally considered degrading, like double penetrations and gang bangs, but I prefer to imagine it instead of watching it in porn, simply because it is impossible to find that kind of porn that isn’t centered around treating the woman like a fuckdoll. I know it doesn’t have to be like that, that lots and lots of people engage in group sex that is mutually respectful and consenting and fun, but sex that is fun and respectful and not hateful seems to be a foreign idea to the major producers of porn these days.
So, now, I don’t even bother. I’ve pretty much come full circle - whereas five years ago I would have defended my right to watch porn tooth and nail, now I am at the point where I think I’d be just fine if the whole porn industry just fell off the face of the planet.
Off topic - Another thing that has bothered me about porn is the unbelievably high numbers of women involved in porn who have been molested or raped. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a given that every sex worker was abused as a child, but it seems like there is a very high correlation there. It’s almost as if the porn industry is dependent on the sexual molestation of little girls to turn out hordes of future porn actresses to fill their rosters. And then there are the girls who have obvious drug problems, and the girls with major body dysmorphia, and so on and so forth. It makes all of the anger about child sex abuse seem even more like bullshit than it currently does, because it’s like, if you really cared about children who are sexually abused, then you wouldn’t be finding sexual release in the grown-up psychodramas they play out in front of a camera in some shitty hotel room in San Bernadino Valley.
I’m sure people on both sides could make cogent arguments as to why this idea is right or wrong, but the connection seems so strong to me that I find it impossible to look at porn without feeling as though I’m continuing the victimization of women and girls who have already been abused.
Hey Katy McCarty, public shaming only works if we care about what you think of us. Let me check; um… no. Sorry.
And the men in your life are most likely lying to you.
And the men in your life are most likely lying to you.
How would you know that? I think shaming people for looking at porn is a terrible idea, but why get so goddamn nasty about it, especially when lots of women have been legitimately hurt by porn?
Junk Science- I just get a huge kick out of naifs saying: “My perfectly normal in every sexual way boyfriend or husband, averts his feminist eyes in horror at the sight of people fucking, and isn’t the least bit turned on by it.”
It’s men telling their girlfriends what they want to hear to stay out of trouble. And when you ask them if your ass looks fat in those pants and they say “no”? They’re lying then too.
on a related (?) note, the repubs are re-using Vernon Robinson’s ‘don’t study jerking off” ad.
http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2006/oct/06/wi_03_goper_recycles_ad_from_vernon_robinson
I’m a man. When I look at porn, I like porn that depicts people who appear to be having a good time. The more convincing, the better. I like porn that depicts autonomous, sexually independent women. I like porn whose performers have freely chosen to participate. I like porn whose performers have been well compensated.
If I know that an performer has been abused as part of her career, I can’t enjoy the porn. If I know she’s gotten AIDS from performing, or that she later committed suicide, or that she’s renounced her participation, I can’t enjoy the porn.
I don’t like violence or degradation. I don’t think of porn performers as objects, any more than I think of any other person I fantasize about as an object. Mutual desire turns me on, and it’s a component of all my fantasies. I like porn that depicts women acting on their desires.
There’s not a lot of feminist discussion of porn that acknowledges the existence of men like me. So thanks, Amanda. I appreciate your comments.
I disagree that most porn simply involves men forcing things women don’t like onto women. No one would bother to fake orgasms if that were the case, but there are women pretending to get off at the drop of a hat in porn. There is the current of “She doesn’t think she wants it, but she does,” which is totally disturbing, but not the same thing, or quite as disturbing as “I want to make her feel terrible.”
Dennis - my marriage is like yours. Glad to hear of someone else out there for whom achieving a needed release (masturbating, maybe to porn, maybe not) and committing to a good session of sex (I’m not a fan of quickies) are two different things, and will admit to such. I’ve always felt sheepish about discussing this with my women friends in longterm hetero relationships, because I consider what works for each couple to be a private matter.
Since anything is possible, I will acknowledge that of course there is a chance we are unwittingly on the fast road to divorce because we do acknowledge that sometimes we just want to get off and we don’t necessarily need the other one there (indeed, I regard my fantasy life as an important part of our sexual relationship and I imagine his is, too) and we may, in certain circumstances, resort to the cheap-but-easy accelerator of porn to achieve that.
FWIW, I’ve seen most of my husband’s free downloaded porn, and while some of it doesn’t float my boat, I wouldn’t call any of it abusive, even though some of it is male-dom. He’s not a fan of tit jobs or Brazilians, that’s for sure.
Am I wrong? Deluding myself? Only time will tell, I guess. I wouldn’t ever deign to tell people they are wrong when they say porn has damaged their relationships (because I certainly see how it can), so conversely I do get a little prickly when an outsider with a different experience tells me that my relationship is doomed because my husband looks at porn to masturbate. Maybe I’ll eat my words in a decade, who knows. But it’s as alien to me as the mindset that if you ever think about another person or find another person attractive, you are “committing adultery” in your heart. (we’re monogamous)
I won’t deny this psot made me think. I know the porn of which we are speaking in this thread, I have seen it, or the ads for it, and it boggles my mind. And yes, I do think that violent/rape porn has more to do with ingrained, never-questioned entitlement than anger at powerlessness. The question is how to stop it. The answer is, it seems we can’t. I am at the impasse that most not-anti-porn (I wouldn’t say I’m exactly “pro-porn”) feminists have arrived at. Living here. Pitched my tent here.
Woodrowfan:
Dr Science: “ass to mouth� is anal sex followed immediately by oral. I think degrading is an appropriate word.
I would say, “not necessarily, but they damn well better switch condoms in between or else it’s seriously unhealthy.” And yeah, I know implying that there was a condom for Step 1 is unrealistic, but that takes me back to Sara’s “labor law” perspective, and my feeling that barebacking in porn is a slow-mo snuff flick.
*No* sex act is necessarily degrading, it’s all in the way you do it. I agree with the commenters above who point out that what much of what I call “genre porn” is selling isn’t sex per se, but the story that men are entitled to sex with women who do not fundamentally consent.
I think Kaethe and caitlin are on to something, that part of what is driving this kind of porn are (is?) conditions and mental habits within the porn industry itself: the men directing & producing porn cannot imagine sex that doesn’t degrade women, because the women they know are pre-degraded for their convenience. Again, it’s more about labor conditions than about the market.
I am amused but not surprised that no-one has suggested “higher quality” as a reason to pay for porn.
Ms. Hartley said [in an extract quoted above]:
Does she really think that young people’s difficult times with sex are more attributable to porn than to the enforced ignorance resulting from twenty years of abstinence-only “sex education� and anti-choice propaganda?
Maybe that’s why wingers hate porn so much. It’s not that it fucks your mind, it just does so in a way different than the way that they want to fuck your mind. It’s a question of turf.
I would say, “not necessarily, but they damn well better switch condoms in between or else it’s seriously unhealthy.�
Actually - and while I won’t be so facile as to deny that I ever watch porn, I’m certainly not a connoseiur of ass to mouth (oh God, just the NAME!) so it must only be from the zeitgeist that I know this - not only are you right that the idea that a condom is used is incorrect:
The entire raison d’etre for ATM porn IS the degradation involved in the lack of washing/cleaning etc. There IS no other reason for it to exist; there IS no other reason that men enjoy it; statements to the contrary are simply inoperable.
Doctor Science,
Ass to mouth scenes are purposively constructed to be demeaning. I agree, there are ways to pull it off where it’s fine. However, you’ll never see such an instance in porn. Ass to mouth scenes are all about getting the (usually bare) penis from the ass to the mouth as quickly as possible, as though it will go bad if it takes more than a second. In fact, in a lot of a2m scenes, there’s another girl on standby to get the penis in her mouth IMMEDIATELY after it plops out. So, it’s constructed as gross and demeaning.
And if you think you need to pay for “quality” porn, you’re not familiar with bit torrent. Any type of porn you can buy, you can download.
I’m a woman and a feminist who has a really conflicted relationship with my own porn usage. I found my father’s collection of Hustlers and hardcore extreme paperbacks when I was about 5 years old, and looked at them compulsively the entire time I lived at home. And it fucked up my sexuality pretty badly, I think. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I was able to critically look at the materials that got me off, and I’m now horrified at the misogyny and degradation, but I haven’t yet figured out how to stop getting turned on by it.
I was in abusive relationships for most of my 20s, but finally came to realize that I don’t