GENDER & POWER - A TUTORIAL, Outside Reading - Porn & Capitalism
[I am interjecting this excellent piece by Gail Dines and Robert Jensen as a kind of intermediate reflection while I get some other things done to follow up on the events in Washington DC this past weekend. But I am also placing this essay because it goes to the heart of the most controversial things I have published here - pieces critical of pornography. It is odd to me that any other critique of any other aspect of capitalism meets with generally positive replies.
I think there are two dynamics at work that serve to at least partly explain that.
One, the left is still in the process of struggling with the right in its Christian evangelical form, and there remains a tendency to respond to the efforts of these theocratic reactionaries like the old Beatles song - you say yes, and I say no, you say stop, and I say go go go, you say goodbye, and I say hello. This is very much like the tendency of some leftists to refuse criticism of someone like Putin simply because he is confronting the United States government right now. Very Manichean, when you think about it, and anything but dialectical.
Secondly, the left tradition was developed under the leadership of men, and most of the more influential voices on the left (I said influential, not insightful), and most of the leadership of left organizations, is still largely male.
In left organizations, which still cleave to forms of discipline that include the demand for ideological conformity, the “lines” that have been put forward in the past have confronted the various radical (used here descriptively) feminisms with the demand to subsume gender within the “primary” contradiction - class. But asserting that kind of ideological control within left organizations is not the same as full engagement with the critiques of the left coming from radical feminists.
This piece from Gail and Robert is a real step forward in the process of correcting left-patriarchy. -SG]
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Pornography is a left issue
by Gail Dines and Robert Jensen
Anti-pornography feminists get used to insults from the left. Over and over we are told that we’re anti-sex, prudish, simplistic, politically naïve, diversionary, and narrow-minded. The cruder critics do not hesitate to suggest that the cure for these ailments lies in, how shall we say, a robust sexual experience.
In addition to the slurs, we constantly face a question: Why do we “waste†our time on the pornography issue? Since we are anti-capitalist and anti-empire leftists as well as feminists, shouldn’t we focus on the many political, economic, and ecological crises (war, poverty, global warming, etc.)? Why would we spend part of our intellectual and organizing energies over the past two decades pursuing the feminist critique of pornography and the sexual exploitation industry?
The answer is simple: We are anti-pornography precisely because we are leftists as well as feminists.
As leftists, we reject the sexism and racism that saturates contemporary mass-marketed pornography. As leftists, we reject the capitalist commodification of one of the most basic aspects of our humanity. As leftists, we reject corporate domination of media and culture. Anti-pornography feminists are not asking the left to accept a new way of looking at the world but instead are arguing for consistency in analysis and application of principles.
It has always seemed strange to us that so many on the left consistently refuse to engage in a sustained and thoughtful critique of pornography. All this is particularly unfortunate at a time when the left is flailing to find traction with the public; a critique of pornography, grounded in a radical feminist and left analysis that counters right-wing moralizing, could be part of an effective organizing strategy.
Left media analysis
Leftists examine mass media as one site where the dominant class attempts to create and impose definitions and explanations of the world. We know news is not neutral, that entertainment programs are more than just fun and games. These are places where ideology is reinforced, where the point of view of the powerful is articulated. That process is always a struggle; attempts to define the world by dominant classes can be, and are, resisted. The term “hegemony†is typically used to describe that always-contested process, the way in which the dominant class attempts to secure control over the construction of meaning.
The feminist critique of pornography is consistent with — and, for many of us, grows out of — a widely accepted analysis on the left of ideology, hegemony, and media, leading to the observation that pornography is to patriarchy what commercial television is to capitalism. Yet when pornography is the topic, many on the left seem to forget Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and accept the pornographer’s self-serving argument that pornography is mere fantasy.
Apparently the commonplace left insight that mediated images can be tools for legitimizing inequality holds true for an analysis of CBS or CNN, but evaporates when the image is of a woman having a penis thrust into her throat with such force that she gags. In that case, for unexplained reasons, we aren’t supposed to take pornographic representations seriously or view them as carefully constructed products within a wider system of gender, race, and class inequality. The valuable work conducted by media critics on the politics of production apparently holds no weight for pornography.
Pornography is fantasy, of a sort. Just as television cop shows that assert the inherent nobility of police and prosecutors as protectors of the people are fantasy. Just as the Horatio Alger stories about hard work’s rewards in capitalism are fantasy. Just as films that cast Arabs only as terrorists are fantasy.
All those media products are critiqued by leftists precisely because the fantasy world they create is a distortion of the actual world in which we live. Police and prosecutors do sometimes seek justice, but they also enforce the rule of the powerful. Individuals in capitalism do sometimes prosper as a result of their hard work, but the system does not provide everyone who works hard with a decent living. Some Arabs are terrorists, but that obscures both the terrorism of the powerful in white America and the humanity of the vast majority of Arabs.
Such fantasies also reflect how those in power want subordinated people to feel. Images of happy blacks on the plantations made whites feels more secure and self-righteous in their oppression of slaves. Images of contented workers allay capitalists’ fears of revolution. And men deal with their complex feelings about contemporary masculinity’s toxic mix of sex and aggression by seeking images of women who enjoy pain and humiliation.
Why do so many on the left seem to assume that pornographers operate in a different universe than other capitalists? Why would pornography be the only form of representation produced and distributed by corporations that wouldn’t be a vehicle to legitimize inequality? Why would the pornographers be the only media capitalists who are rebels seeking to subvert hegemonic systems?
Why do the pornographers get a free ride from so much of the left?
After years of facing the left’s hostility in public and print, we believe the answer is obvious: Sexual desire can constraint people’s capacity for critical reason — especially in men in patriarchy, where sex is not only about pleasure but about power.
Leftists — especially left men — need to get over the obsession with getting off.
Let’s analyze pornography not as sex, but as media. Where would that lead?
Corporate media
Critiques of the power of commercial corporate media are ubiquitous on the left. Leftists with vastly different political projects can come together to decry conglomerates’ control over news and entertainment programming. Because of the structure of the system, it’s a given that these corporations create programming that meets the needs of advertisers and elites, not ordinary people.
Yet when discussing pornography, this analysis flies out the window. Listening to many on the left defend pornography, one would think the material is being made by struggling artists tirelessly working in lonely garrets to help us understand the mysteries of sexuality. Nothing could be further from the truth; the pornography industry is just that — an industry, dominated by the pornography production companies that create the material, with mainstream corporations profiting from its distribution.
It’s easy to listen in on pornographers’ conversations — they have a trade magazine, Adult Video News. The discussions there don’t tend to focus on the transgressive potential of pornography or the polysemic nature of sexually explicit texts. It’s about — what a surprise! — profits. The magazine’s stories don’t reflect a critical consciousness about much of anything, especially gender, race, and sex.
Andrew Edmond — president and CEO of Flying Crocodile, a $20 million pornography internet company — put it bluntly: “A lot of people get distracted from the business model by [the sex]. It is just as sophisticated and multilayered as any other market place. We operate just like any Fortune 500 company.â€
The production companies — from big players such as Larry Flynt Productions to small fly-by-night operators — act predictably as corporations in capitalism, seeking to maximize market-share and profit. They do not consider the needs of people or the effects of their products, any more than other capitalists. Romanticizing the pornographers makes as much sense as romanticizing the executives at Viacom or Disney.
Increasingly, mainstream media corporations profit as well. Hugh Hefner and Flynt had to fight to gain respectability within the halls of capitalism, but today many of the pornography profiteers are big corporations. Through ownership of cable distribution companies and Internet services, the large companies that distribute pornography also distribute mainstream media. One example is News Corp. owned by Rupert Murdoch.
News Corp. is a major owner of DirecTV, which sells more pornographic films than Flynt. In 2000, the New York Times reported that nearly $200 million a year is spent by the 8.7 million subscribers to DirecTV. Among News Corp.’s other media holdings are the Fox broadcasting and cable TV networks, Twentieth Century Fox, the New York Post, and TV Guide. Welcome to synergy: Murdoch also owns HarperCollins, which published pornography star Jenna Jameson’s best-selling book How To Make Love Like A Porn Star.
When Paul Thomas accepted his best-director award at the pornography industry’s 2005 awards ceremony, he commented on the corporatization of the industry by joking: “I used to get paid in cash by Italians. Now I get paid with a check by a Jew.†Ignoring the crude ethnic references (Thomas works primarily for Vivid, whose head is Jewish), his point was that what was once largely a mob-financed business is now just another corporate enterprise.
How do leftists feel about corporate enterprises? Do we want profit-hungry corporative executives constructing our culture?
Commodification
It’s long been understood on the left that one of the most insidious aspects of capitalism is the commodification of everything. There is nothing that can’t be sold in the capitalist game of endless accumulation.
In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to our sense of self. Whatever a person’s sexuality or views on sexuality, virtually everyone agrees it is an important aspect of our identity. In pornography, and in the sex industry more generally, sexuality is one more product to be packaged and sold.
When these concerns are raised, pro-pornography leftists often rush to explain that the women in pornography have chosen that work. Although any discussion of choice must take into consideration the conditions under which one chooses, we don’t dispute that women do choose, and as feminists we respect that choice and try to understand it.
But, to the best of our knowledge, no one on the left defends capitalist media — or any other capitalist enterprise — by pointing out workers consented to do their jobs. The people who produce media content, or any other product, consent to work in such enterprises, under varying constraints and opportunities. So what? The critique is not of the workers, but of the owners and structure.
Look at the industry’s biggest star, Jenna Jameson, who appears to control her business life. However in her book she reports that she was raped as a teenager and describes the ways in which men in her life pimped her. Her desperation for money also comes through when she tried to get a job as a stripper but looked too young — she went into a bathroom and pulled off her braces with pliers. She also describes drug abuse and laments the many friends in the industry she lost to drugs. And this is the woman said to have the most power in the pornography industry.
As we understand left analysis, the focus isn’t on individual decisions about how to survive in a system that commodifies everything and takes from us meaningful opportunities to control our lives. It’s about fighting a system.
Racism
As the most blatant and ugly forms of racism have disappeared from mainstream media, leftists have continued to point out that subtler forms of racism endure, and that their constant reproduction through media is a problem. Race matters, and media depictions of race matter.
Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned U.S. racism — stereotypical representations of the black male stud, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the demure Asian geisha. Pornography vendors have a special category, “interracial,†which allows consumers to pursue the various combinations of racialized characters and racist scenarios.
The racism of the industry is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. In an interview with the producer of the DVD “Black Bros and Asian Ho’s,†one of us asked if he ever was criticized for the racism of such films. He said, “No, they are very popular.†We repeated the question: Popular, yes, but do people ever criticize the racism? He looked incredulous; the question apparently had never entered his mind.
Yet take a tour of a pornography shop, and it’s clear that racial justice isn’t central to the industry. Typical is the claim of “Black Attack Gang Bang†films: “My mission is to find the cutest white honeys to get Gang Banged by some hard pipe hitting niggas straight outta compton!†It would be interesting to see a pro-pornography leftist argue to a non-white audience that such films are unrelated to the politics of race and white supremacy.
Up-market producers such as Vivid use mainly white women; the official face of pornography is overwhelmingly white. However, alongside this genre there exists more aggressive material in which women of color appear more frequently. As one black woman in the industry told us, “This is a racist business,†from how she is treated by producers to pay differentials to the day-to-day conversations she overhears on the set.
Sexism
Contemporary mass-marketed heterosexual pornography — the bulk of the market for sexually explicit material — is one site where a particular meaning of sex and gender is created and circulated. Pornography’s central ideological message is not hard to discern: Women exist for the sexual pleasure of men, in whatever form men want that pleasure, no matter what the consequences for women. It’s not just that women exist for sex, but that they exist for the sex that men want.
Despite naïve (or disingenuous) claims about pornography as a vehicle for women’s sexual liberation, the bulk of mass-marketed pornography is incredibly sexist. From the ugly language used to describe women, to the positions of subordination, to the actual sexual practices themselves — pornography is relentlessly misogynistic. As the industry “matures†the most popular genre of films, called “gonzo,†continues to push the limits of degradation of, and cruelty toward, women. Directors acknowledge they aren’t sure where to take it from the current level.
This misogyny is not an idiosyncratic feature of a few fringe films. Based on three studies of the content of mainstream video/DVD pornography over the past decade, we conclude that woman-hating is central to contemporary pornography. Take away every video in which a woman is called a bitch, a cunt, a slut, or a whore, and the shelves would be nearly bare. Take away every DVD in which a woman becomes the target of a man’s contempt, and there wouldn’t be much left. Mass-marketed pornography doesn’t celebrate women and their sexuality, but instead expresses contempt for women and celebrates the charge of expressing that contempt sexually.
Leftists typically reject crude biological explanations for inequality. But the story of gender in pornography is the story of biological determinism. A major theme in pornography is that women are different from men and enjoy pain, humiliation, degradation; they don’t deserve the same humanity as men because they are a different kind of creature. In pornography, it’s not just that women want to get fucked in degrading fashion, but that they need it. Pornography ultimately tells stories about where women belong — underneath men.
Most leftists critique patriarchy and resist the system of male dominance. Gender is one of those arenas of struggle against domination, and hence an arena of ideological struggle. Put an understanding of media together with feminist arguments for sexual equality, and you get the anti-pornography argument.
The need for a consistent analysis of power
Leftists who otherwise pride themselves on analyzing systems and structures of power, can turn into extreme libertarian individualists on the subject of pornography. The sophisticated, critical thinking that underlies the best of left politics can give way to simplistic, politically naïve, and diversionary analysis that leaves far too many leftists playing cheerleader for an exploitive industry. In those analyses, we aren’t supposed to examine the culture’s ideology and how it shapes people’s perceptions of their choices, and we must ignore the conditions under which people live; it’s all about an individual’s choice.
A critique of pornography doesn’t imply that freedom rooted in an individual’s ability to choose isn’t important, but argues instead that these issues can’t be reduced to that single moment of choice of an individual. Instead, we have to ask: What is meaningful freedom within a capitalist system that is racist and sexist?
Leftists have always challenged the contention of the powerful that freedom comes in accepting one’s place in a hierarchy. Feminists have highlighted that one of the systems of power that constrains us is gender.
We contend that leftists who take feminism seriously must come to see that pornography, along with other forms of sexualized exploitation — primarily of women, girls and boys, by men — in capitalism is inconsistent with a world in which ordinary people can take control of their own destinies.
That is the promise of the left, of feminism, of critical race theory, of radical humanism — of every liberatory movement in modern history.
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Gail Dines is a professor of American Studies at Wheelock College in Boston. She can be reached at gdines@wheelock.edu. Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. They are co-authors with Ann Russo of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality. Both also are members of the interim organizing committee of the National Feminist Antipornography Movement. For more information, contact feministantipornographymovement@yahoo.com or go to http://feministantipornographymovement.org/
Myles:
This article by Dines and Jensen is excellent in its analysis. Ive run into many leftists making the libertarian individualist defense of pornography.
Where do we go from here? This is where it becomes tricky. The culture has to change somehow, but how do we do that. I think education and relentless criticism of the current incarnation of the industry is a good start.
Despite its consistent movement towards the mainstream in U.S. culture the pornography industry is still a very personal form of consumption. Now that pornography can be accessed from the home via the internet and satellite/cable television, how do we as leftists intervene? It is no longer as simple as organizing around the red light district due to the technological advances sense then, although there are still very many such places which must be confronted. Because of the internet and the ability to inconspicuously consume pornography in the home privately and not out in society the rate of consumption has shot through the roof. This presents a new problem of social accountability as consumption is hidden.
People are entitled to privacy so the fight must be in the public sphere, excepting of course our our love(s) and partner(s), and other interpersonal relationships.
Sexist and racist pornography must be critically attacked and laid bare ideologically. But do we censor or punish those who participate in its production and consumption? I dont think so. I disagree with the stance of anti-pornography in and of itself.
I believe, perhaps wrongly, that there can be such a thing as transgressive pornography.
I think that the authors of the article may be conflating the sexist and racist genres of the porn industry with the very idea of a pornography industry in itself.
Perhaps through the formation of porn firms of a progressive type (anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-sexual diversity) a more egalitarian or socially diverse kind of pornography could be developed. But then that is probably not going to happen under capitalism. What would socialist pornography look like? Would there be pornography under socialism?
I can hear someone jokingly saying “I wont be part of any revolution where I cant get off on a steamy porno!”
If there were pornography that exhibited egalitarian social relations perhaps it would be a positive counter-hegemonic product to challenge the dominant forms of pornography.
This post is a bit all over the place. This article really got me thinking, and I will come back to it later on. I hope this is a good start and not too idealisitic or naive.
Best wishes.
28 September 2005, 1:26 pmStan:
I’m singularly unconvinced that the question before us is either (1) privacy or (2) socialist pornography. The critique many of us are calling for is one that connects actually existing pornography to an actual system, ie, capitalist patriarchy.
The real stories of the vast majority of women and children caught in the prostitution and ponrography industries is not one of choice in a marketplace, but of abuse starting at an early age, followed by violence, humilitation, dissociation, addiction, disease, and death. This global reality - which disporoportionately affects women of colonized people - has nothing to do with abstractions about privacy, policy, et al.
Any attempt to understand and struggle against patriarchy MUST critique pornography as part of an essential critique of the construction of desire itself. This is not merely a “private” matter, and reversion to the privacy argument is the continuation of a bipolar conception of this issue as between liberals and post-Victorian theocrats. We cannot understand gender in those terms, because they are both patriarchal terms - one actively, through a static and retrograde definition of marriage and family, and one passively through the non-intervention clauses of liberal law designed to conceal power relations behind a wall of abstraction. “The right to privacy” was originally designed to protect men’s right to control their wives and children any way they saw fit. While it has seem some progressive affinity in fighting things like COINTELPRO (not very successfully), the definnition of state power negatively, ie, by what it cannot do - no law shall be made respecting…. - it leaves in place systems of power that exist prior to the operation of the law, like class, structural national inequality, and gender, for example. Liberal law puts these systems out of the reach of state intervention, while pretending to protect us from the state. But more than that… as we see by the repeated appeals to “privacy” at the expense of millions of people, liberal law effects this concealment by abstraction. It is hegemonic. We have internalize a higher value for “privacy” than the ability to critique power and its violence against real people.
I appreciate the remarks from Myles above, and in no way intend this reply to be personal or disrespectful. This is an issue with sharp divisions. My comment is directed at a collective, and not you personally. It is also directed at me - a mere three years ago.
28 September 2005, 4:37 pmMyles:
Hi Stan,
I think my post is concerned with combatting the dominant racist and sexist discourses within the porn industry. I think that putting sexually and ethnically diverse people behind the production of pornography could lead to new discourses that challenge the dominant patriarchal and racist one. Through this I am trying to find a way to potentially challenge the current porn industry. I dont think this is abstract but rather a counter-hegemonic tactic that might be worth considering as far as changing the content of the porn industry’s products is concerned.
We know that if porn is abolished it will be run on the black market and lead to further exploitation and probably much more suffering. So how do we regulate the porn industry and make it as humane as possible under capitalism? This I do not know. Even in the more “reputable” studios the suicide rate and mental health of the performers is atrocious.
I view socialism as the destruction of conditions that would cause people to need to turn to highly exploitative work such as the commodification of human sexuality that is pornography. The fight for socialism must be pursued relentlessly while simultaneously engaging in anti-racist and anti-sexist organizing as well.
I hope I clarified my position while engaging yours. Dont worry about offending me or anything. I am interested in everyone’s opinions on this.
Stan, you should have seen me five years ago! I was a religious super-patriot old school conservative. Now I’d describe myself as a radical constantly fighting the oppresive views I’ve been enculturated with. So I welcome constructive debate and engagement-that’s the only way we can progress.
Best,
28 September 2005, 10:05 pmMyles
Myles:
Hi Stan,
I just read the tutorials on gender and masculinity, and Jensen’s study which struck me very hard.
I had no idea that mainstream pornography had become so sadistic and…I’m trying to come up with a word stronger than mysogynistic to describe it, but I can’t. I’m sitting here typing not quite able to outright cry or throw up; there is this sickening feeling in my gut and my eyes are wet.
I checked out the recommended reading on your site and was wondering if you had additional books to recommend regarding feminist theory, gender studies, etc.
I thought I was keeping up with these issues but it is apparent to me I havent scratched the surface. I am speechless, all I know is I have to start studying this material and incorporate it into my readings very seriously, so that it might affect my praxis and my awareness.
Thanks very much,
29 September 2005, 8:19 pmMyles Sullivan
peggy:
I am all for fighting racism, sexism, and fascism wherever they may be found, including in pornography. That being said, may I offer some suggestions? Just speaking from personal experience.
Most of the pornography I’ve seen, which admittedly is not much, is either boring or gross or both. Therefore, I am just not interested in it. Therefore, I do not buy it.
However, from when I was in my early teens through about my early twenties, I discovered and enjoyed some literature and pictures, which to me at that time were erotic. They were good masturbation material. None of these items was especially sexist, although one of them was a Playboy-type girl (automatically sexist?) in a scanty Santa costume coyly revealing her genitals. I guess it must not have been Playboy. Btw, I am not a lesbian. As far as I know.
There are three points to be made here.
First, girls and women can enjoy erotic pictures and stories.
Second, where do we draw the line between the erotic and the pornographic? I for one would not want to exclude the erotic from our cultural productions. And cultural productions do not have to support the capitalist enterprise. They can be used for this purpose, but after all, there was both culture and erotica way before there was capitalism.
Third, and most salient to the current discussion, I gather that the vast majority of consumers of currently produced pornography are male. The exclusive targeting of a male audience by producers of pornography leads, by capitalist logic, to not only more but “better” productions from the consumers’ point of view. What was hugely exciting yesterday may be ho-hum today, and definitely not worth the money tomorrow. The (male) consumers of pornography are being led by the capitalist producers, but also leading those producers, into increasingly “forbidden” - and therefore exciting - male territory. The “forbidden” here may be defined as anything that a female in her right mind would not put up with - e.g, cum on her eyeglasses, a dick (or anything)poked into her throat to gagging point, and, of course, anything that makes her hurt physically, mentally, or spiritually. Unless she is a masochist, which most of us are definitely not. Hence we have the current spate of mass-produced stuff that may be exciting to the average dumb guy (average of anything is dumb) but is totally boring and disgusting to … who? Us females.
So, hey! Any capitalist porn-producers who may be reading this? You are neglecting an enormous potential market, which is the likes of me, females with our own erotic desires. You who are not very smart still think of females as a powerless, cashless minority. You have bought into your own propaganda, which is that women are commodities pure and simple.
Wise up! Please us, and you will laugh all the way to the bank, while whatsisname who does Hustler will be out begging for work. Because we will use your product not only for our own enjoyment, but for the mutual enjoyment of us and our partners. And bear in mind that just about any man would rather have an excited and enjoying woman in bed with him than just about any videotape or DVD. Both are fine, but the video or DVD is just a substitute for, or at best an enhancement of, the real thing. And the real thing, a woman who enjoys lovemaking, is going to be bored out of her mind by the shit on the market today.
Leftists reading this: capitalism is one thing, and hegemony is another. The former needs the latter but not vice versa. Therefore, with a bit of intelligence and creativity, free of arrogance and mindful of the thoughts of those whom we too often shun as below our intellectual station, we can turn the tide.
Nuf said.
30 September 2005, 2:41 amPyrrho:
Very interesting article.
I worked in the industry on the retail end for a few years and consider myself a liberal _and_ a feminist yet held few qualms against what I was peddling. The other admitted feminists in my circle of friends agreed with my rationalizations; they were consumers of the product themselves.
Pornography is a somewhat difficult product to define. It’s much like a drug, in that clinical analysis of the composition of the device of delivery yields questionable results — and the more analyzed by the consumer the less palatable the product — yet the fruit of that delivery device is what people are interested in. People don’t shoot heroin because they like sticking themselves with needles. And yes, people can get addicted to porn.
One of the largest genres of porn is that of “barely legal” women, some who’ve turned 18 just days before filming. The younger and more innocent they look, the better. This isn’t to say the consumer prowls schoolyards wishing their fantasies could become reality, or even that they have fantasies of getting it on with children, but it touches upon a key point to porn’s success: forbidden treats are psychologically more tasty. When something is labeled taboo, that makes it all the more sensational when it occurs — if even played out by actors on a rented DVD.
Why do series such as “big black dicks & little asian chicks” continue? Because Asian men rent them in droves. And Mexican men. Statistically, black men have larger penises, Asian women have smaller bodies (and vaginas), and a lot of men with statistically smaller penises such as Asian and Mexican men get off on watching tiny girls getting stuffed with enormous cocks. Racism doesn’t factor in the traditional sense (the black guys DO have bigger dicks and the Asian women ARE smaller), so the battle — to me — doesn’t seem to begin there, but how to approach desire/reaction physiology.
30 September 2005, 8:27 amEBS:
Pornography is inherently sexist. We even have a different word for the less exploitive portrayal of sexuality - Erotic. The thrill is in the exploition, in doing anything you want to someone, in watching the most intimate momets of someone else’s life without revealing yourself, in not having to care, even though you are being taken care of.
No amount of diversity in the “players” will change the game.
Stan, I especially appreciate this posting because it give me sonmething to give my 15 year old son, who is facing tremendous pressure to be “normal”, including veiwing films that I would never approve with his friends. I hope he will see them differently, since in this culture I can not shield him from them, or replace them with erotica.
30 September 2005, 11:21 amJim:
What an excellent article. The authors are to be congratulated.
1 October 2005, 6:02 amI’m with you, Stan. This is about real, in your face, exploitation that has enormous effects on a very large population of direct, primary victims (people in the industry and people attacked and exploited by the secondary victims), secondary victims (viewers) and tertiary victims (family of viewers and the society as a whole). Not only is pornography bad in itself, it takes up the social and cultural space which now doesn’t get used to benefit everybody.
And lastly, the bleeding obvious - those males on the Left who excuse, if not defend, porn do so because they want to keep using it and can’t face their own shame and their own addiction. Not very complicated, really.
Stan:
Pyrrho is herein off this blog. I leave his offensive post just so people will know why. The rules for this blog are clearly posted, and there will be no “freedom of speech” here to engage in racial or sexual stereotypes. Zero tolerance.
Bye Pyrrho.
On the subject of women and erotic material, I feel that this is one of those recurrent diversions - not necessarily intentional, but the predictable outcome of a dominant sexual epistemology. I want to suggest looking back at the critique of liberal law and the concealment of power as the basis for understanding why mechanical liberal notions of equality - with regard to gender an race/nationality - are fundamentally inoperable in the real world.
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=169
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff05022005.html
Part of that episteme is the false bipolarity of Victorian standards of sexuality vs. liberal standards of sexuality. Neither paradigm confronts male social-political-sexual power - each just inscribes it differently.
My intention in posting this material is to re-open the discussion of pornography as an ideological transmission belt for capitalist patriarchy - which is a violent system of power. In the same way that anti-capitalists are on guard against distractions from the issue of class as a social structure and capital as a social relation, anti-patriarchists have to be stubborn and vigilant in their insistence that we always take structural power as our main point of reference.
This question about what is and is not “excluded” because the questions being raised about pornography by people like Dines and Jensen (and me, for that matter), and first raised by the radical feminists, are not questions about policy or prohibition. The anti-porn local policy campaigns that were part of Dworkin-MacKinnon’s activism never labored under any illusions about the capacity of liberal law to “correct” pornography. MacKinnon - who is a law professor - gave the best account I have read of the fundamentaly inability of liberal law to do any such thing; and one that is also consistent with a sound Marxist account of liberalism and law. These campaigns were designed to highlight how pornography mirrors racial hate speech, and other contradictions related to pornography within the ken of liberal law. This was a tactical matter. Some of us who are critiquing porn - especially among fellow leftists - are not aiming at legal prohibition, nor do we (or at least I) have any particular fear that this critique will lead to some abrogation of civil liberties.
Liberal law doesn’t protect us for the most part. It protects capitalists and pimps.
This is one of the key fallacies routinely deployed as part of the porn industry apologists’ playbook, though I don;t think Peggy is playing that role here. Porn industry apologists use this feint because it is an effective one in a society that has long marianated itself in the abstractions of liberalism.
Any good Marxist would not let the subject of class be turned into a question of abstract “equality,” and would continually refer to STRUCTRAL power, where oppressor and oppressed are bound together in a dialectical unity of opposites, and where the oppressed is “controlled” hegemonically by the ruling epistemology. Women’s desire must be critiqued the same as men’s because it is constructed within and by patriarchy just as the false-consciousness of a proletariat in a stable epoch is critiqued. Talk of marketing to women’s desire reminds me of those old Virginia Slims cigarette commercials, where a “feminine” cigarette is touted as a giant leap toward equality with the jingle - “You’ve come a long way, baby to get where you got to today. You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby. You’ve come a long, long way.”
And Peggy, you know as well as I do that this proposed new consumer base is imperial. The peripheral-nation women you worked with in Asia are not interested in consuming these kinds of titillation aids - there are more urgent concerns on their minds. “Third World” women are also among those who are deeply exploited by this violent and colonial industry.
The question about pornography - as an industry and with reference to its ideological content - is how does it articulate into a more universal system of capitalist patriarchy? The reason for the question is - gong back to the hirsute one - not merely to understand the world, but to change it.
1 October 2005, 2:09 pmDirk:
Just a few remarks from Germany (excuse my english):
What is defining porn? What makes it different from “erotic”? I’d say:
1. It’s an excess of “realism” and positivism. Porn revolves around the visibility and provability of male “lust”: the erection - and the provability of male orgasm: the ejaculate.
You will not see just one drop of sperm “wasted”, you will not see a guy “acting” he’s coming - this wouldn’t make sense within the paradigm. And within this sexist paradigm, women cannot compete, their sexuality and lust cannot be represented. Often it seems as if the women are pushed to somehow equally contribute, but no matter how loud they moan, they can only fail. There’s even a kind of “neurotic” structure within porn: While it always proves the male lust, porn doesn’t believe and cannot represent female lust: it can only ignore it or adjourn it indefinitely.
I had an interesting debate with friends long ago about the question, if the video to “Nothing compares to you” (Sinehead O’Conor” is pornographic. Back then I made a simple analogy: the tears in the video function like male ejaculate in porn. It proves that her feelings are “authentic”. But how often women are suspected to fake their feelings, to even use tears as a weapon. But “dicks don’t lie”.
If anything is “sexist” about pornography it’s this positivistic approach to lust. And men and women are victims of this paradigm and too many of them believe in it, both women and men.
And if the erected penis and the ejaculate are somehow the exchange value of the political economy of porn, than during the last two decades, it seems to me that somehow this economy is leaving the gold-standard behind. While in earlier porn, the guys simply stopped the intercourse to then ejaculate on the back or breasts etc. of the woman, in today’s porn you will rarely see any kind of intercourse that doesn’t end with a facial. Or just think of the so-called bukkake videos, where the entire videos mostly show guys ejaculating mostly into the face of women.
If I read parts of the article like “from the ugly language used to describe women, to the positions of subordination” - I don’t want to be offensive, but it reminds me of Woody Allen’s statement: Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.
Will the missionair position be replaced with the democratic social-equal position as the only one allowed in a socialist society?
Let’s take a position often shown in porn and mostly considered to be “subordination”:
the way guys behave - not only in porn - when they receive a “blowjob”: I guess the reason that guys behave so “macho”-like is that they adopt a passive position, a not only female but motherlike position, while the sexual partner is adopting a baby-like position. Just consider the analogy: breast->penis, sucking->sucking, milk-ejaculat!
Maybe the macho-like and often scornfullness attitude of guys serves as a kind of counterpart to the identification with a female and motherlike role. Maybe this kind of freudian perspective could lead further? Esp. considering the role of ejaculat in porn?
Hello from Germany,
1 October 2005, 3:00 pmDirk
peggy:
Hi Stan. The articles you link to above are about rape. On the absolute evil of rape there should be no room for disagreement. As you know, my favorite armed insurgents punish the crime of rape by death, and I fully approve of that policy, even though I abhor the death penalty in the US. Go figure. But the point is, I do not think pornography is the same thing as rape. Connected, yes, but definitely not the same thing, and therefore not to be addressed in the same way.
I’m afraid I came across in my earlier post as a fluff-headed liberal chick, which you know I am not. You are right that I, like you, am part of the imperial hegemon. And I buy stuff that I do not really need, including beautiful stuff made by people in China whose working conditions may for all I know be deplorable. And I suffer from that pathetic and ludicrous complex, liberal guilt.
But one of the important ways that I differ from the liberal stereotype is that, as you noted, I have spent a whole lot of time with exactly those peripheral-nation women in Asia, among the poorest of the poor, and here is a matter of interest: they like pretty things. And they like movies, the kind of movies filled with the wildest fantasy. Therefore it is not exactly true that they are uninterested in consuming the kinds of things I like (or once liked) to consume. Many very poor people will spend their last rupee on a movie ticket rather than a meal. Can you, dare you, blame them? The problem with Marxists is that they are so austere!
I have never met a person who is on the production end of the porn industry. At this age, I shudder to think about how monstrously they may be used. I do, however, know some prostitutes, and have worked closely with one of them on an academic project to do with prostitution, so from that person I have learned a bit. There is reason to think that prostitution is much like porn. There are some important differences, to be sure, but there are also some important similarities, most notably the fulfilment of a need (if it is a need) on the part of some men to have sex without having to consider the reality of the other.
Sex workers are organized and have a voice in the place where I live, and they have effected some changes in the law that are to their benefit. Among these changes is that the workers should not be at the mercy of the clients, the madames, and the pimps. In other words, they have greatly mitigated, if not entirely eliminated, the capitalist exploitation of their labor from the system. Should prostitution, like porn, simply not exist? Should we as feminist-leftists fight for its eradication? That is a big issue in the feminist community as well as in the sex-worker community here. The two communities are, expectedly, on opposite sides of this what-might-politely-be-called a debate. Another one is abortion. People we know may take strong stands on one side or the other of the debate, but when you get down to look at it, it is a complicated issue, a matter of where you draw the line rather than a matter of obvious right and and obvious wrong. After all, is the choice to have, or not have, an abortion ever really a choice? The same is said about the choice to become a porn-actress. The woman’s self-respect demands that she claim to like her work, because if she admitted she found it humiliating, the admission would make the humiliation worse.
Pornography, prostitution, and abortion are all areas where the influence of patriarchal capitalism is glaringly clear. They are all intensely emotional issues. Maybe that intense, gut-level emotion keeps us from seeing the shades of gray.
Sorry to go on and on like this.
1 October 2005, 5:36 pmpeggy:
p.s.
You wrote:
… pornography [is] an ideological transmission belt for capitalist patriarchy - which is a violent system of power.
That is right on the mark. You should underline it and print it in red.
1 October 2005, 5:47 pmDeAnander:
Just a brief note — thanks Stan for posting this excellent article… and let me plug, briefly and shamelessly, the Spinifex Press book Not For Sale which addresses many of the issues of actually-existing porn and prostitution doing actually-existing harm to actually-existing women, girls, and boys. [Yes, I contributed to it; but all the contributors got out of the deal was a few free copies, so I have no financial stake in promoting it.] Every point made by Dines and Jensen above is substantiated and expansively illustrated in this book.
I want to make some connections here — and riff somewhat freely ‘cos I’m not in a pleasant or patient mood today. Some readers may be aware of a recent flap over the “baseball card trading” agreement between a “grassroots” porn web site and US troops in Iraq. (See the Nation article for details. The web site is dedicated to “amateur porn,” i.e. pictures ostensibly taken by men of their sexual partners and then posted in the spirit of digital exhibitionism — though we don’t have a word for the exhibitionism which involves displaying not one’s own body, but someone else’s. [Actually we do — it’s called “pimping.” But I digress.] Anyway, the US grunts sent photos of their victims, or victims of the hell that we have made in Iraq generally. Grotesque, bloody, explicit pictures. And the guys who frequent the porn site loved ‘em and wanted more.
Now, a note: this pimp charges 10 bucks per registered user and he claims 150K registered users. That means he has collected 1.5 MILLION DOLLARS off the bodies of these women, without even having to run his own stable of pimped girls — the customers do all the work for him. Never has Levi-Strauss’ assertion been more tellingly illustrated for the “new economy.” [Sorry about the bold all-caps, but I’m kinda worried about money right now and 1.5 megabux is a lot of cash, more than I’ll ever see.]
Another note: the payment this online pimp accepted from his “new customers” in country (or the payment he made to them, depending on how you view it) was to trade them access to images of women’s bodies, in exchange for access to images of murdered bodies. Another illustration of Levi-Strauss’ theory in action. Neither the women nor the dead Iraqis benefitted from this exchange.
Another note: the consumers of this site’s images apparently have no trouble making the transition from enjoying “intimate” pics of another man’s girlfriend or wife, and enjoying graphic pics of another man’s head-shot or gut-shot victim, or the victims of US foreign policy, or just helpless dead people generally being mocked and exploited by another guy. I suggest that within the mindset of these consumers, sex is dominance and the photographs of women which they consume on this site are trophy photographs in the same way that stuffed elk heads are trophies. Each one represents the “conquest” or “acquisition” of a woman; seeing sex as dominance they interpret the female’s role in sex as defeat, submission, or humiliation; the public display of her naked body adds a further element of humiliation; and that is what they enjoy about the site. If this were not so, why would they so eagerly and easily make the transition from enjoying “naked wife pics” to enjoying grisly murder-victim pics? This is a male/male bonding thing, a homo-erotic connection in which one man admires another man’s dominance over a suppressed third party (who doesn’t even have to be alive to participate). This is a Schadenfreude thing — the dead racial Other, the exposed sexual Other, makes the viewer so very glad that it isn’t him, that he is (maleness, whiteness, American-ness, straightness?) safe from similar exposure, mockery, exploitation.
Lastly I would assert that the above article by Dines and Jensen makes a very strong case that the majority of mainstream pornography is informed by, and serves, the exact same mindset or taste or predilection, i.e. it is all about commercialised, “ersatz” trophy pictures. But of course they are not really ersatz at all, because they confirm, graphically, undisputably, the second-class citizenship of females and particularly females of colour, in contemporary culture. Women still make about half a buck on average for every buck a guy makes in the US economy; and this fact has everything to do with the number of women who are “willing” (if the alternative is homelessness, hunger, violence, or simply vulnerable loneliness) to be photographed in humiliating, embarrassing, or painful poses which will be marketed for profits they never see a fair share of. Every picture of a woman “with cum on her eyeglasses” as a poster writes above, is a reminder that there are a lot of women who very badly need money because they are having a hard time surviving in the current (capitalist) system. And that there are a lot of men with the discretionary income to purchase such materials for entertainment. Who’s buying the images and whose glasses have cum on them, tells us everything about gender, power, and money. Which makes them genuine trophy pics, on a national and international scale.
On another discussion board the topic of the War Porn NTFU article and the remaining suppressed images from Abu Ghraib came up. I posted as follows:
Let us ask for a moment, how can we be so shocked (shocked, I tell you!) at the porn that soldiers made in Abu Ghraib, at the NTFU website and the “porn of war” that upsets The Nation (despite its decades-long, staunch support of mainstream pornography)? The fundamental driver, the underlying appetite is the same: enjoyment of “trophy pictures” of the humiliation of another person, of damage inflicted on another person, of the suffering of another person. How come Nation editors’ stomachs don’t churn when they see or read the kind of racist, misogynist drek described (and defended) by “Pyrrho” above? Where’s their vaunted concern for exploited labour, the poor, and the working class when they read the demographics about the income, health, and life expectancy of the world’s prostitutes? Why is it that when the Right makes one of its ridiculous, hypocritical forays against “pornography” [a Potemkin exercise, while wingnut Murdoch and his buds rake in pornoprofits galore] that lefties cry “Look out, here come the Sex Police“?
Not the Porn Police, the Sex Police. Meaning that for these lefty pundits, apparently, porn is sex, porn defines sex: to critique or attack the porn industry is to attack sex itself. So tell me, guys — is critiquing McDonald’s an attack on food? Is critiquing the Gap’s use of sweatshop labour an attack on clothing? Do these corporations get to define food and clothing for us? Could there be a more open declaration of abject addiction or dependence on a corporate product? Is this any different from the cry of the wingnuts that environmental critiques of SUVs, for example, are “attacks on our freedoms”? SUV=Freedom, Porn=Sex. Orwell should be sniggering in his grave so hard, the daisies are trembling up top.
Did the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, when they humiliated and raped Iraqis, re-enact scenarios they had learnt from porn consumption as boys and young men? To what extent can we see Lynndie England, fall-girl for the sexual torture policy, as merely a porn actress or madam, coerced and paid by her masters to act out their fantasies on the bodies of even less powerful, more unfortunate human beings? To what extent was Lynndie — and other women in her unit — subjected to rape and sexual terrorism by male “comrades” (40 to 60 percent of women in the armed forces experience harassment and/or rape)? Was she “seasoned” into her role as torturer by her pimps?
And how can a good lefty rag like the Nation continue to bewail “the porn of war” without recognising that porn is war, the propaganda arm of the ongoing class/gender/race war on the poor, women, and third world peoples? The fund manager of CalPERS once memorably said (wtte) that a corporation that uses sweatshop labour or pollutes will, in the end, screw over its shareholders. I suggest that men who have been raised on a diet of trophy pictures of humiliated, subservient, second-class-citizen women, will have no great difficulty consuming and enjoying images of other “inferiors” being humiliated, hurt, enslaved, coerced. The NTFU mini-scandal (Army officials have declared that no law has been violated, military or civilian) illustrates amply and vividly the intimate connection between porn and profiteering, porn and male power over (and betrayal of) female intimacy, porn and military aggression, porn and the sadistic impulse.
OK, running out of steam here. Thanks, Stan for inviting me to drop by. And many thanks to Gail and Bob for such a pithy, to-the-point, no-nonsense article.
1 October 2005, 5:56 pmStan:
Wow! Thanks, De. The trophy analogy is a strong clarification… and I very much appreciate your help in deconstructing the porn-industry-apologists’ debate playbook.
Replying to Peggy, whose participation I also very much appreciate, the links concerning rape and Hasan Akbar were not included to elaborate on rape or fragging, but on the inhering limitations of liberal law. I also strongly endorse Catharine MacKinnon’s book, “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,” on this topic.
Noting a phenomon on this blog that is interesting… any post that critiques pornography as part of a critique of patriarchy gets FAR more comments than most other posts on most other topics, and I have endeavored to ensure that all posts are related to timely and important topics. This is not meant to be one of those “my diary” blogs. I grow curious about why the porn debate triggers so many more people to respond.
I say this noting that Peggy has weighed in on several others, and is a pen-pal from the days of the marxist-feminist list.
In a few days, I’ll try to get the next installment done for the gender-power series. Rape will figure into that discussion prominently.
2 October 2005, 6:04 amStan:
Bit of disclosure about De and me. The name for this blog was a term I first heard from De. As the post above shows, she is always worth cribbing.
2 October 2005, 6:39 amMyles:
Since participating in this discussion I have made some simple observations in my everyday life at the university campus I live on.
This semester t-shirts that advertise the wearer as a sex-commodity have become very popular. Some examples: a shirt for women that has “Squeeze Me!” emblazoned across the chest, sweatpants for men that have the text “Nice grab” written on the seat, women’s shirts emblazoned with the Playboy bunny logo, male shirts with porn star Ron Jeremy’s likeness portrayed on the front, shirts for men stating in various degrees of explicitness the largeness of their penis, clothing for women stating “I’m juicy”, “Grab me”, etc.
The male apparel in general tends to proclaim some sort of sexual superiority over other men, a message of sexual dominace. The female apparel promotes the idea of constant availability and desirability, a passive advertisement or an invitation to engage sexually.
The male style promotes constant hardness and size of the genitals with violence often implied, the female style propogates the idea of constant wetness and nubile passivity.
These styles indicate a certain internalization of the porn industry’s ideolgoies, which indicates that the producers of these shirts presupposed a base of consumers eager to self commodify and objectify themselves along certain “normative” discourses.
These female and male ideologies should not come as a surprise. These ideologies extend into the most intimate of prodcuts. See the militarization of the male birth control products-the Magnum condom brand etc.
2 October 2005, 10:28 amRosemary:
Stan wrote:
“Any attempt to understand and struggle against patriarchy MUST critique pornography as part of an essential critique of the construction of desire itself.”
But are desires something that can be controlled? And is the desire exhibited in male’s enjoyment of pornography always one that involves conscious humiliation of women. I am not so sure. I am told that many men, porn addicts, main fetish if you like is to see a woman orgasm, genuinely orgasm, not act, and that is the principle fetish, to see a woman transported by sex, by male lust and ability.
The penis-breast, sperm-milk analogy is an interesting one too in that context and merits some thought in understanding exactly what excites men so much about seeing themselves ejaculate on a woman’s face or in her mouth.
2 October 2005, 5:46 pmStan:
The point is not whether desire can be controlled… which suggests that desire is some timeless universal quality. It’s the fetishization of desire. In the real world, desire is always constructed socially… and contingently. Not only are beauty standards continually reconstructed, but so are the “desirable” characteristics in a sexual partner.
For a very good treatment of this question, and of “sexual orientations,” from a leftist perspective, I recommend Rosemary Hennessy’s excellent book, “Proft and Pleasure - Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism.”
No one is suggesting that the humiliation and other characteristics of the exercise of social power are “conscious.” On the contrary, and not just in explicit pornography - but in plain entertainment commodities and advertising - the ideology of patriarchy works precisely by naturalizing desire - by treating it in a biologically determinist way. What is interesting about pornography is that it is not only MORE explicit in its reproduction of sexual practice, but that it is FAR more explicit in its representations of male sexual aggression and female receptivity… this diad is magnified in porn, though it is legalistically termed fantasy - which is somehow separate from the real (political) world.
Referring back to a piece on cultural production and fantasy I wrote earlier:
http://www.freedomroad.org/content/view/307/40/
I would also note here that in the film under review - Man on Fire - one of the signature scenes in which the audience is encouraged to exult at the actions of the protagonist, a Dark foreign enemy is dominated and humiliated (and finally killed) by anal rape with an explosive.
More on this during the rape disucssion in the near future.
2 October 2005, 6:13 pmRosemary:
Nor did I think anyone was suggesting, that apart perhaps from very young men, or simple souls, that men who consume pornography are merely unconscious dupes of a cold corporate industry whose objective is to make lots of money out of the humiliation of women.
I am sure the sadistic, misogynist tendencies of many men are overtly pandered to and consciously indulged in much pornography.
But the statistics on consumption of pornography, its almost universal use by men everywhere, particularly those who have home computers, seems to indicate either that a hell of a lot of men are being unwittingly drawn into a hellish exercise which runs counter to their generally better nature. Or, that the sexual images of pornography, specifically what could be described as images of domination and submission, are meeting a need that is not identical with female humiliation and subordination (and that many women in their own sexual practice with men do not see it that way either), but rather a more “timeless” male drive to engage sexually with women in a way that mirrors the different sexuality of men and women - which is not totally a social construct, but also to a large degree, a biological given, which is why women also engage in it too, often willingly and with pleasure.
2 October 2005, 6:41 pmBen:
The article is great because it puts porn in a more general context of media sexism. One of the alarming aspects of porn is how it creeps into mainstream media marketing. So billboards have scantily clad women in virtually the same positions of display that [even] less clothed porn models adopt in photo shoots; the same dopey facial expressions supposed to represent lust and arousal. I guess it’s an inevitable spillover into marketing considering the popularity of porn. But more. There’s trends in women’s clothing/fashion. Modesty seems to be a rare attribute in this field, these days. Revealing cuts of cloth and the (aforementioned) ridiculous “I’m juicy” etc slogans abound. Then in the capitalists’ fever for expanding their markets, fashion is marketed to kids and — suprise!! — you start to see kids as young as 5 wearing these “sexy” clothes. Now I’m all for people wearing what they feel like, but if we’re to have any rationality we have to be able to analyse the trends and wonder what they mean. I think that word “backlash” sums it up pretty succinctly.
Further, to those lefties and would-be-lefties who try to rationalise/excuse their use of porn on the basis that porn actors are not necessarily worse exploited than, say, a child labourer making brand name sports shoes in Indonesia: you don’t buy a pair of shoes in order to get off on the exploitation of the labour that made them. You buy a pair of shoes to wear them, or at worst to show them off.
But viewing porn is quite different. It’s difficult to know where genuine erotic stimulation ends and voyeuristic power-tripping begins, because being turned on by images of naked bodies etc isn’t inherently exploitative, even if modern (western) men weren’t massively conditioned to seek out this form of gratification. But the essence of porn is, that it is what the “actor” is actually doing with their own body which is the desired product.
And it doesn’t take much looking at porn to recognise the nature of the “actually existing” porn industry. You can’t tell from looking at a picture (especially online) whether the model is a middle class uni student making a few bucks to get through college, with a friend taking the photos, or a Moldavian woman sold into modern day slavery and prostitution with the threat of death or worse if she tries to escape. And the (much more common) scenarios in between are almost all fairly sad or unpleasant. Look at the descriptions used by porn mags and websites, as Stan quite usefully did in his Counterpunch article. You can’t polish a turd: the whole porn industry reeks of exploitation and sexism.
3 October 2005, 4:23 amStan:
I appreciate your engagement on the topic, Rosemary, because your point of view on this reflects - in many way - the general point of view in liberal society. I apologize in advance for covering some of the same ground that has been covered in this series, but it is probably necessary because the the counter-hegemonic categories that form the backbone of this argument are both unfamiliar and densely packed in the interest of not writing another book about gender.
Rowemary: “Nor did I think anyone was suggesting, that apart perhaps from very young men, or simple souls, that men who consume pornography are merely unconscious dupes of a cold corporate industry whose objective is to make lots of money out of the humiliation of women.”
The reason we are talking past each other here is that we are basing our arguments on fundamentally different assumptions and categories. Your use of the word “dupes” is a tell, as is your anthropomorphic characterization of the industry - an industry with an “objective” to financially exploit women’s humiliation, like a fully conscious con artist (an individual).
“Dupes” suggest that a norm lies elsewhere, that men who consume (bad) porn are deviating from that norm. Of course, you are denying that this is your argument, and in fact suggesting that it is my characterization of your argument. It is not.
This is a conspiratorial account of one form of capitalism, not a systemic one. it is based strictly on the practice of individual actors choosing freely - the “rational man” account that I covered in some detail at http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=186.
Note -
Rosemary: “I am sure the sadistic, misogynist tendencies of many men are overtly pandered to and consciously indulged in much pornography.”
The tendencies are not described as social, but individual - attributes of individuals, rather than the reflection in each individual of social structures…. and in this case, only of sadism and misogyny (individual ‘aberrations’), and not a system - capitalist patriarchy - which reproduces itself economically, culturally, and ideologically in the way individual lives are structured within that system.
Rosemary: “But the statistics on consumption of pornography, its almost universal use by men everywhere, particularly those who have home computers, seems to indicate either that a hell of a lot of men are being unwittingly drawn into a hellish exercise which runs counter to their generally better nature.”
There are at least three things I will challenge here. First, what statistics are available, and by what methods were they generated? Second, when you say universal, are you suggesting by all men, or by the global minority that lives in the capitalist metropoles? I travel to Haiti with some frequency, and have spent a fair amount of time with the majority peasant populaiton, and a luxury consumer good is the occasional individual cigarette. They are not buying pornography. Third, “nature.” Again, I make my argument against naturalization in the aforementioned link, and I hope you will look it over.
Rosemary: “Or, that the sexual images of pornography, specifically what could be described as images of domination and submission, are meeting a need that is not identical with female humiliation and subordination (and that many women in their own sexual practice with men do not see it that way either), but rather a more “timeless†male drive to engage sexually with women in a way that mirrors the different sexuality of men and women - which is not totally a social construct, but also to a large degree, a biological given, which is why women also engage in it too, often willingly and with pleasure.”
If you have read the piece suggested, then you will know what I mean when I say “billiard ball” science. The point being that the “biological” and the “social” represent two poles of a false dichotomy, and that they are not mixed in certain proportions like flour and water to make bread. A better analog is that while they may be hydrogen and oxygen, together as H2O they have a completely unique character as water that neither has alone.
It is very easy to default to biological determinism because it is one of those baseline beliefs that exists largely beyond the critical reach of most people in the capitalist metropoles.
I also suggest the following for a brief discussion of “naturalization” in the realm of economics: http://www.audioactivism.org/audio/AA_StanEconomics3.mp3
The whole pitch is recorded in seven parts at http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=140
Long story short - I categorically reject the idea that there is a (natural) “male sexuality” and a “female sexuality.” That rejection is in many ways the basis of this whole series, so it is probably good that we are having this debate as a means of further clarification. I don’t argue that women’s (vastly more limited) participation in porn as consumers does not meet with the liberal definition of consent (which will come up in the rape section) or that some women are not sexually aroused by porn. Most male consumers are aroused by it. That is precisely the reason we have to critique desire… as in subject it to a critical examination to determine its characters and origins.
Desire is NOT some unreachable natural mystery, but is deeply conditioned by our socialization in a capitalist patriarchal society. Desire is also experienced by rapists - as I will cover in more depth later. Men who rape have erections. Men who rape are aroused and stimulated to the point of ejaculation. And they are not a sub-species. They are men - plain and simple.
By the same token, many victims of child sexual abuse report having sometimes experienced arousal during their abuse - which complicates their interpretation of their own experience with guilt and self-blame.
We are not dealing with a question of mere individual pathology. This is a ideological feint. One way the civil rights movement was eventually stood down - along with violence and bribery - was to redefine “racism” as something unconnected to colonialism and slavery into an individual pathology - the characteristic of a “racist” (a sub-species). Penny M. Von Eschen wrote an excellent book on this called “Race Against Empire.”
This stuff is all connected, but it doesn’t get connected inside our heads until we exchange our analytical toolboxes.
3 October 2005, 8:29 amgodlesscommunist:
I agree with the analysis of the authors of this article for the most part, but I want to respond to Jim’s comment above:
” those males on the Left who excuse, if not defend, porn do so because they want to keep using it and can’t face their own shame and their own addiction. Not very complicated, really.”
I think it’s a problem if we approach issues of sexuality by trying to make other radicals and those on the left feel guilty for their own sexual urges. This is not about condemning individuals. It’s completely understandable to me that people who grow up with a twisted sense of sexuality coming from pornography and sexism in general may find themselves sexually enticed by images that mimic that power structure.
To look at a slightly different example, I am in theory opposed to the complete enforcement of monogamy in relationships. Monogamy was driven into our lives in the context of solidifying property ownership, and is arguably not a natural condition for all human relationships. And yet, my response to this is NOT to demand that everyone I know break with monogamous relationships. I am, in fact, in a monogamous relationship myself because it is frankly not easy to get beyond my own conditioning, let alone to convince a partner to do the same.
We need to focus our efforts on condemning the system that creates this type of sexist industry, and on those who run and profit from the industry - not the individuals that have psychological hold-overs from a lifetime of sexism.
3 October 2005, 1:08 pmMyles:
I think this discussion has become very one dimensional.
To view all women in the porn industry as a priori victims who are culturally predetermined to go into porn becuase of drug addictions or class position etc. is too simplistic. To label anyone who feels this way as a liberal ideologue/capitalist apologist is just a disingenuous cop-out. The setting up of binary absoultes is always a dangerous thing, it does not allow for the dynamism and contradictions of real life.
I also feel that the self-portrayal of Jensen and Dines as victims of the intolerant male left is a little hypocritical when they then proceed to make blanket statements against the male left several paragraphs later: “the male left needs to get over its obsession with getting off.”
This view that the male left is obsessed with getting off is itself an incredibly sexist and baseless essentialist ad hominem directed against this straw man, or straw men in this case. This sexist view buys into the nonsense that men are not self reflexive and let their penis control their behaviors. The idea that most pornography is based on the pain of women is not true, which is why Jensen and Dines have no statistics to back up their statements.
Most porn in fact makes the enjoyment of sex, and the female orgasm a main part of the discourse. The male ejaculation over the female subject is also part of this orgasm-centric pornography. A new and popular porn niche is that of the ejaculating women, usually covering the man she is riding ON TOP OF with fluid. Along with fellatio a staple of the porn industry is cunnilingus, which is prevalent in most mainstream porn, depicting the man voraciously “eating” the female who is at the heights of erotic delight. I do not have statistics myself but I believe any study would prove my argument.
I wonder where the criticism of gay and lesbian pornography is, especially since it is the fastest growing part of the industry. Also, where is the critique of dildos and vibrators etc. that many women use to masturbate? Didlos represent the commodification of the male phallus par excellence.
A more three dimensional analysis of pornography is in order, rather than an essentialistic and binary analysis in which women are victims without agency and men are the oppressors and sexual automatons controlled by their penis and their “obsession with getting off”.
It is possible to be pro-porn, a feminist, and a radical all at the same time.
3 October 2005, 1:44 pmRosemary:
Feminism is a broad church and I have been a feminist for about 30 years since I was 18 and have read a lot of the key texts on women’s oppression and violence and pornography. I also have some knowledge of Marxist economics and philosophy.
I am not so keen these days on labels, whether liberal, Marxist, or reactionary, and even racist or biological determinist since, in argument particularly, they are a simple, (admittedly often effective) way to immediately categorise an individual and their views or ideas with the outcome of more easily dismissing all holus bolus, without looking at any nuance, import or truth in what is being said.
I am not and have never been an academic (I don’t even have a university degree and consider myself an autodidact) and therefore neither wish nor am able to engage with anyone on that level. As usual I find academic jargon unclear, confusing and off-putting and dislike it on principle for those reasons when it is used as a method of explication to a general audience or as a method of defence. I apologise for not having read the previous associated posts and discussions on this site and the links provided and intend to do so.
I have never downloaded or viewed pornography from the internet, or purchased or viewed it myself in any form, but I am aware of its content through reading and ancedote and I have discussed its content and meaning with some men who use it regularly. I think the pursuit of pornography by so many men today is in many ways tragic and ineffably sad, and much of its content and men’s seeming pleasure in and enjoyment of that, disgusting and enraging.
I have a niece who just attended a three day conference here in Sydney on domestic violence and pornography was a major feature of that women’s health, housing, refuge workers conference. She cited a study from Canada I think that showed almost 100 per cent viewing of pornography sites on the web by young men from a certain geographical demographic. I know of no other study I can site on usage amongst men in developed countries, and had in mind more the general figures cited by Germaine Greer and others on its colossal expenditure and growing popularity amongst men in advanced capitalist countries, or amongst the ruling class and other elite layers in many poor, less developed, or Third World countries.
Also pornography, and its real life acting out is not a modern phenomenon at all. I was reminded of this upon finishing recently a short course on ancient Rome, (actually on the poet Catullus) where transgressive, exploitative, violent (towards both men and women) sexual behaviour and some cultural production associated with this, admittedly for the sole benefit and consumption of elite, upper class men, mirrored in many ways the modern porn and sex industries. And yes it was not so much, or at all, an industry then, than simply an accepted way of life enmeshed in the slave society of the time.
I take your point about men in countries such as Haiti. However, I think the irrefutable point is that it is precisely the capability of the technologies of our times and their relatively easy access for many men of varying socio-economic status which has partly led to the explosion in the consumption of pornograhy, admittedly more so in the advanced capitalist countries and amongst relatively privileged men, but which is not confined to them by any means.
I am not so sure that “sadistic, misogynist” tendencies or capabilities are entirely social in origin and my reading of Freud and other psychoanalytical writers has influenced me here. I think all individuals are capable, in the “right” circumstances of all behaviours and feelings we know human beings are capable of enacting.
Whether or not the porn or sex industries deliberately set out to humiliate women is I think not relevant, though I would not be surprised if there was a conscious deliberate element in pornographic production and the design of the sex industry and its spin-offs, advertising etc, informed by an understanding of human psychology and elements of male and desire, and its previous or existing frustration. Certainly, there is a happy meeting of certain individual and social needs, let us say, in both production and consumption.
There are differences in men and women’s sexual desires and needs I am sure. The widespread nature of “rape” or “submissive” sexual fantasies amongst women, all sorts of women, is testimony to that as is the correlating desire of many men to dominate and control in the sexual act. And it is in that sense that I say that desire cannot be totally a social construct than can be shaped, regulated or appealed to on moral, ethical, political or any other social ground.
The individual psyche is still a mystery which the social sciences have not fully plumbed or understood and that I guess is the major conundrum for me.
3 October 2005, 5:13 pmSam:
I’m a frequent reader, but I don’t post much because this blog is one of the very few where I honestly think the other writers say most everything I would have said but better (Stan does this a lot- thanks for saving me the typing!)
I don’t have anything new to add, but I wanted to commend DeAnander’s magnificent post because it is hands down some of the most concise and incisive commentary on the “War Porn” issue I have yet read anywhere. Truly excellent stuff and I thank you for taking the time to write it.
3 October 2005, 5:27 pmDeAnander:
Nature, nurture, nature, nurture, schmature, schmurture…
Do Men Need Prostitution?
It’s an irrelevant debate imho. I’m as convinced by the clinical results on testosterone as the next person. What I am not convinced of is that biological explanations (very trendy in our world dominated by pharmacorps) suffice to obviate responsibility, personal or social.
Let’s say for a moment that violent male behaviour towards women and kids — often sexually predatory — is biologically determined. Then we must ask ourselves, where is Eli Lilly, where is P and G, where is GlaxoSmithKlineBeechamKitchenSink, with their latest pastel-coloured tastefully-shaped pill called “Nonviolax” or “Paxisterone” or “Domestiman”? If we accept that male violence is a biological condition, and we accept that it produces social ills, then we have to ask ourselves why it has not been “syndromised” and exploited like every other wrinkle of human behaviour by the licensed drug lords. I mean come on gang, they are busily entering “stage fright” into the DSM [as “Public Performance Anxiety Syndrome”] and assigning a specific prescription drug to its cure.
Instead they offer us Viagra — and is anyone really willing to believe the V-pill is not used by rapists?
We can talk biology until the cows come home, but it is how we deal with our biology that tells us who has the power. We have meds to “keep women young” (i.e. comfortably fuckable) after menopause, and meds to let older or unenthusiastic or jaded guys get it up. We don’t have meds to calm or short-circuit the predatory, bullying, violent behaviours that many claim are “biologically male.” Now why is that? think of the lives that might be saved!
3 October 2005, 6:43 pmStan:
“To argue that women should be put at men’s disposal for sexual use because men have an animal need for sex is about as rational as saying that men should be fed to sharks because sharks have an animal need for food”
-from De’s linked post.
Best laugh I’ve had in a week.
3 October 2005, 8:17 pmpeggy:
Rosemary, your spotty education is no excuse for your failure to understand certain facts: first, that a study from Canada of “young men from a certain geographical demographic”, learned by you second-hand, does not demonstrate “almost universal use [of pornography] by men everywhere”; second, that no human behavior is in any way, shape or form a “biological given”, least of all male-dominance and female-submission patterns; third, that Freud is not the last word on human nature.
Stan, I hope it is not true that Rosemary’s viewpoint reflects the general point of view of liberal society. Because if it is then we are in worse trouble than I thought.
Grrr.
4 October 2005, 12:03 amStan:
I really don’t think Rosemary’s point of view comes from a lack of good will, but from enculturation - not just in male-female generalizations, but also the very low value placed on intellectual rigor in this society. People (my own kids are included here) really do not know what constitutes a sound argument or how to identify the most rudimentary logical fallacies. That’s one thing that makes us so susceptible to liberalism - herein defined not out of the popular polarity liberal-conservative, but as shorthand for bourgeois democracy with its Jeffersonian “neutral” state. Perhaps I should try a different word, given the times, since classical liberalism is very close indeed to what we now more often call conservatism (as opposed to neoliberalism and neoconservatism… ugh!). On being in worse shape than we thought, check out a documentary called “Wrestling with Manhood - Boys, Bullying & Battering,” produced by the Media Education Foundation and directed by Sut Jhally and Jackson Katz.
“Miles to go before we sleep”
4 October 2005, 8:02 amRosemary:
Peggy pronounces:
“Rosemary, your spotty education is no excuse for your failure to understand certain facts”
Nasty.
“first, that a study from Canada of “young men from a certain geographical demographicâ€, learned by you second-hand, does not demonstrate “almost universal use [of pornography] by men everywhereâ€;
As I already admitted in the correction in my second post. True a damnable exaggeration, as is my unschooled want. I often find exaggeration effective in making valid general points. See Oscar Wilde.
“second, that no human behavior is in any way, shape or form a “biological givenâ€,
Really? How disembodied and dissociative of you. I can think of thousands off the top of my head.
“third, that Freud is not the last word on human nature?”
No Joel Kovel and Camille Paglia are pretty good contemporary updates on this genius. Check them out.
5 October 2005, 5:19 pmRobert:
“What is meaningful freedom within a capitalist system that is racist and sexist?”
I am a bit of interloper here–and once I show my identity papers as a white middle-class southern male, perhaps even less credible–but I want to ask a sincere question about the above statement. In what sense does the above statement apply to porn in particular? My sense is that it is as relevant to porn as it is to baseball or, better yet, football. I suppose the one signal difference is that female performers have apparent power in porn and, to use the words of a recent book, our culture seems to have become “pornified” in comparison to other times. Therein lies the particular significance for a feminist and left response to porn.
At the same time, I can’t see how this analysis here presented is distinct or interesting for being “left.” Sure, porn is a commodified industry; sure, racist and sexist stereotypes are exceedingly prevalent; sure, even apparently powerful female performers encounter abuse, sometimes all the worse because of the illicit nature of the profession. I fail to see how any of these critiques would not be offered by a liberal, or even a conservative critic. Again, there have been two books published just last month that take on porn’s deleterious effect on society. There is little that is radical in taking this position, but worse there is little that is interesting or different in this paper.
What would be interesting and what I think might be more dialectical or at least Gramscian, would be to analyze the sex industry as a whole. What does it mean that burlesque has become a cottage industry, of sorts, and is not limited by heterosexuality or body type? What does it mean that commercial filmmaking has become even more repressed about explicit sexuality and nudity? The above is little more than a policy paper instructing us how being leftist is compatible with being anti-porn. I suppose there must be places where this is the case, but I don’t know of them.
In any porn and sex-work in general place liberals and leftists in a difficult bind. Some of the commentators above acknowledge this. My first thought about racism and sexism was that, well, this paper doesn’t acknowledge that S&M is contaminated with this and worse, but it is done in the name of play. Can one play at being a victim and be a leftist? But more generally, how one uses one’s body is an individual choice, however shaped that choice by culture. I would advocate that leftists avoid moralizing about porn–even when it evidences the affects of being in the meaningless freedom of capitalism–and rather examine it in the larger context of sex-work and representations of sexuality in general. For do the former, is simply to repeat liberal claims, but with rebarbative jargon and less humor.
5 October 2005, 7:10 pmStan:
I had to look up “rebarbative.” Now there is at least one thing in your comment I understand, but it’s late, and at this time of night I am sharp as a bowling ball. Seems a lot of typing for something you find so passe.
I am white, southern, and male, too. I don’t get the identity papers bit.
I admit freely that I am offering not a single original argument, merely arguments that haven’t received a fair hearing.
Rosemary, I am shocked to see the estimable Joel Kovel and the odious Camile Paglia in the wame sentence.
5 October 2005, 10:12 pmmilosevic:
[small edit, please delete first version above]
I would usually be the first person to dismiss sociobiological explanations of human behavior as a load of reactionary crap, and point out that the environmental and cultural influences on people are so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to guess what the actual biological/genetic/evolutionary contribution to “human nature” is in any particular case.
However, in the course of this discussion, it seems that claims are being made which imply that human beings are entirely socially constructed, that any expanation of their behavior which refers to biology or instinct must be rejected as being a justification for inequality and oppression. This is a ridiculous position to advocate.
A prime example: Peggy said
‘no human behavior is in any way, shape or form a “biological given‒.
Really. What about eating, drinking (water), and sleeping? Why don’t you try abstaining from food for a month or so, and then come back and give us your views about how people are not determined by their biology.
It’s one thing to assert that the ways in which people express their sexuality are largely culturally determined. It’s quite another to claim that sexual interest in other persons of a specific (biological) sex is only a product of social conditioning.
Does anybody seriously believe, for example, that if a group of children were brought up from infancy on an island, and were offered no information about, or example of, human sexuality, that they wouldn’t eventually discover it for themselves? That this wouldn’t happen fairly quickly after puberty? That their expression of sexuality wouldn’t be mostly hetero?
Anyone who doubts this must be alienated to a quite extreme degree from their own life experience. It takes long years of academic training before people can defend this sort of idiocy with a straight face.
Speaking from my own (male) experience: I was given the standard lecture about how babies are made when I was about four years old. For about a decade after this, although I knew from a theoretical point of view that there must be a lot of sex going on to account for the non-extinction of the human species, and that I myself was the product of some of it, I thought the whole idea was completely disgusting, and was determined that I would never engage in any such activity. All the while, I experienced a strong attraction towards girls of my own age; the disgust I felt about sex did not extend to them. I was aware of the existence of pornography, but had no interest in it, and avoided it on the rare occasions when I encountered it.
My opinion of sex changed rather rapidly after about the age of fourteen, for reasons which are too obvious to require elaboration. Lacking access to the bodies of real women, I no longer actively avoided pictures of them. I did not, however, attempt to obtain pornography, because I had a vague feeling that there was something wrong with it. I think that this was a combination of the traditional idea that sex is somehow dirty, and a sense that pornography was degrading to women, who I still did not hate. Twenty years later, I have a rather more sophisticated understanding of these issues, but I’m unwilling to reject my own remembered experience and assume that I was then or am now exclusively a product of either genetics or environment.
In summary: it’s pretty hard to argue that interest in sex is not a human impulse which exists prior to culture, although the forms in which that impulse are expressed are to a high degree socially determined. If you concede this, then it’s not a very big stretch to assume that men and women have some instinctive interest in looking at each other’s bodies, or pictures of them. Whether or not such pictures are oppressive, humiliating, or degrading, surely depends on the social context in which they are produced and viewed, and on the nature of the human relationships which they explicitly or implicitly depict.
6 October 2005, 12:54 pmStan:
Everyone eats, but everyone also eats employing socially constructed methods for production, acquisition, preparation, and consumption of food. There is never a case - not a single one, ever - where the social constructions related to food are divorced from the biological processes involved in obtaining and consuming food. Likewise, there is never an instance - not a single one, ever - in which the processes explicable through biology operate independently of social life.
By the time you or I or anyone else reached 14 years we were all experiencing ourselves as sexual beings (as we were before - from the time we recognized sexual difference, in fact), but in no case - not a single one, ever - was this experience reducible to either social construction or biology. The social and biological were inextricably bound to each other. Human life as social-biological reality is like water, a reality that ceases to exist if the hydrogen and oxygen are separated.
The separation of social and biological for human beings is an exercise in reduction and abstraction that is sometimes convenient for analytical purposes but which is always misrepresentative of the reality. Nature-nurture is a false dichotomy.
The issue of “naturalization,” on the other hand, is highly political… that is, concerned with questions of social *power*. Naturalization is an *ideological* device that describes a transient, socially constructed reality (women are better at housework, eg) as if it were based on a timeless universal law of nature. This is not merely a misrepresentation, but a misrepresentation with an agenda. The agenda is to conceal the social constructedness of that reality in order to immunize that power from any social challenge.
6 October 2005, 2:10 pmpeggy:
Thanks, Stan, for answering the assertion “I can think of thousands [of biologically given human behaviors] off the top of my head.” Now I don’t have to go into that long lecture once again, and explain to one more person why what someone thinks off the top of their head is not necessarily true. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is such an American thing (a la Bush), though not all Americans have it, of course, and it is not found only among Americans. I greatly appreciate your taking the time to write about the inextricability of the social from the biological among human beings. It is such an important matter, and so few seem to care. I hope many people will read, and think about, what you say.
6 October 2005, 8:28 pmDeAnander:
Now this is War Porn
7 October 2005, 3:11 pmpeggy:
Milosevic, my discovery of sexuality was in very early childhood, before I even knew what “sex” was, and my sexual playmates were all girls, like me. By the time I was in my early teens, I was, as we all are, heavily enculturated. Thus, I “fell in love” with a boy.
There are a number of famous, cruel, studies done on monkeys. In one of those studies, baby monkeys were raised in isolation until they became adults. Then they were put out with other monkeys. They showed manifestations of feeling the urge, but they didn’t know how to do it, didn’t know where to put what. They had to learn from other monkeys - but by the time they were adults, it was too late. Some very sad monkeys were they.
If a bunch of children grew up on an island together, in the absence of adults to tell them what to do, if they somehow survived, I’ll bet their sexuality would turn out like that of bonobos - genetically, the closest species to humans. Google for bonobos and see what you find.
8 October 2005, 6:34 pma:
http://mindprod.com/politics/bushismsgay.html
Killer sexists - sadists - globalists - imperalists - fascists - Impeach Bush!
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050905114117273
What will it take for Americans to reestablish accountability in their government? Bush has got away with lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers, and now with the destruction of New Orleans.
What disaster will next spring from Bush’s incompetence?
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/081005Graniteshadow.htm
9 October 2005, 4:39 pmIn case you missed it, George W. Bush has been calling for the military to takeover when and if there is an outbreak of the so-called “avian flu.” That is very interesting in light of this follow-up information on the item about airborne tularemia, a noted bioweapon, being detected by biohazard sensors in DC during the antiwar protests on Sept. 24
random:
thanks for the above article. i wanted to give a link to another article on War Porn written when the first abu ghraib photos came out (scroll down the page for the article, not far).
10 October 2005, 5:03 amTwiss Butler:
For an exhaustive analysis of a South African trophy picture of a black man beaten as a kind of group entertainment see Susan Griffith’s Pornography of Representation (198?). I earlier discussed the theme of pregnancy displayed as a visible proof of invasion and conquest of a woman in a reply to a presumably heartwarming story about a homeless pregnant waitress in a small Texas town in Leon Hale’s Houston Post article ca. 1978.
In the many insightful responses to the Dines and Jensen article on pornography as a Left issue, I saw no mention of the way that both Left and Right (or liberal and conservative if you wish) target women’s reproductive organs - the body part and function that men commonly use as proof of immutable difference to justify discrimination against women. Whether it is pornography, prostitution, or legal barriers against abortion, all are expressions of misogyny that cut clean, oppressing women without touching men or restricting their behavior in any way. The perfect form of sex discrimination, invasion and conquest.
And the neatest thing is the way all are defended and justified by a First Amendment wholly owned and operated by men, since men still refuse to acknowledge women’s right to equal protection of the law, a right men receive as a constitutional birthright.
The basic motivation for categorical oppression (I suppose that the term class-based would cause confusion in a Marxist environment) also deserves mention. Oppression pays off for the oppressor at the expense of the oppressed. Sex discrimination pays off for men as a class as racism pays off for (usually) whites.
10 October 2005, 5:03 pmMyles:
Because of this discussion I’ve been catalysed into learning more about gender construction, enculturation, and the realtion to capitalism.
In my studies I found Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (Stan’s recommendation) very insightful, as well as a book called Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.
Caliban and the Witch illustrates the dialectical realtionship between capitalist accumulation and production and the sexist culture it requires.
From the books description: “Federici shows that the birth of the proletariat required a war against women, inaugurating a new sexual pact and a new patriarchal era…”
I highly recommend this book. It helped me to nderstand a lot of the discussion here.
Cheers
12 October 2005, 5:46 pmsrini:
they ought to reprint that piece in Adbusters. Hell, they should do a porn-industry-expose issue.
pornography is pathetic inherently but is a, what, billion-dollar industry? run by total scumbags? we are all here sexual beings and we live in a modern media environment which allows us to reproduce ourselves reproducing.
i really like what the author wrote about “the left needs new issues”. My gut also tells me that many of these women ARE driven into pornography and prostitution AGAINST their will, either by coercion or psychological domination or economic disenfranchisement.
i abhor any legal obstacles to free speech. but pornography as an industry is still pathetic. and frank political discussion is far more likely to get cracked-down upon by this right-wing government than pornography. the scumbags behind the porn industry may boast about being proficient businessmen but what is their net effect on our society and on our minds.
4 November 2005, 8:03 pmsrini:
forgot the “however” clause to my second paragraph above: so we all have the freedom to make pornography if we so chose. freedom does NOT include being controlled, dominated, exploited and “ripping out one’s braces to get a stripping gig”. what the hell kind of freedom is that. would you trade what you experience as freedom with what these women have? if women could make tons of money in the non-porn capitalist patriarchy perhaps the friends of the industry could let stand the ruse that their involvement in porn was “their choice”. as long as women are economically exploited into subservient and submissive situations, i’m not buying it.
4 November 2005, 8:08 pmcarolyn:
It’s really unreal what this poster Myles did on here, after several posts in which he recognized what Gail Dines and Robert Jensen are saying is true about how sexist and woman hating pornography is,he then posted defending it and saying the ludicrous unjust comment that someone can be a feminist,a radical and pro-porn! He claims that women are shown getting pleasure in pornography but this is only in a vry sexist dehumanizing way and women are reduced to nothing but things to stick a penis into ejaculated all over and used and disarded for the whole *male populations* sexual pleasure! Pornography portrays a distortion of women getting pleasure by being dominated,dehumanized,and used for men and this is presented as what pleases women to be men’s sex slaves! I find the men ejaculating on the women very disturbing and as Robert Jensen and Gail Dines and some others have written elsewhere it’s certainly an expression of degrading and hatred of women,male supremacy and women are often called cum eating whores and bitches in pornography with semen on them.
It’s unreal to me that Myles could have read this article which explains how sexist and woman hating pornography realy is and claim that someone can be a feminist,radical and pro-porn! Would you say this about blacks and Jews supporting racist and anti-semetic materials I don’t think so!
28 November 2005, 9:00 amcarolyn:
I just noticed I made a few typing mistakes I meant to type the word discarded. And also there is a quote from former porn star and director Bill Margold in Dr.Michael Kimmel’s excellent book,The Gendered Society saying this,”My whole reason for being in the pornography industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t much care for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up… so when we come on a woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually,we’re getting even for their lost dreams,I believe this. I’ve heard audiences cheer me when I do something foul on screen. When I’ve strangled or sodomized a person or brutalized a person,the audience is cheering my action,and then when I’ve fulfilled my warped desire,the audience applauds.”
Many women have posted on message boards about being upset that their boyfriends are wanting to ejaculate on their faces from seeing it in pornography and they don’t want it and feel it’s degrading and disgusting. I even read a post from a guy on a a so-called “Adult” site in an advice section saying he couldn’t understand why his girlfriend who liked to be wild in bed,freaked out and left him because he came all over her face. He says he watches a lot of porn videos and the porn stars love the facials. Several other men on seperate message boards asked how can they get their wives and girlfriends to take a facial and they said how common it’s shown in pornography. One guy even made this a whole topic.And many women and childrenh have said that they were shown pornography as part of their sexual abuse and sexual harassment on the job and were often pressured to do the sex acts the men had seen in the pornography.
I suggest that you Myles read Robert Jensen’s much better articles, You Are What You Eat:The Pervasive Porn Industry And What It Says About You And Your Desires in which he gets into all of this including the ejaculaing on the women and how it’s tied into the social construction of “masculinity” sexist inequality and woman hating. And his other important article that was in MS Magazine in the spring of 2004 called A Cruel Edge:The Painful Tuth About Today’s Pornography And What Men Can Do About it.
Also this is how an anti-pornography workshop called Pornography:What’s The Harm? by therapist anti-violence educator Rus Funk is described on the web site for The Center For Women And Familes. It says, Join the Center For Women And Families in this frank conversation about pornography and the harm it causes to the women and men used in it’s production,to women and men through men’s use of pornography, to women in general,and to sexual,gender and racial justice. This discussion will include ways to combat pornography and to support the people who are harmed.Facilitated by Rus Funk MSW,The Center For Women And Families. Part of Sexual Sexual Assault Awareness month. Co-sponsored by Jefferson County Chapter of The National Organization For Women and The Women’s Center For Growth And Leadership at Jefferson Community College.
Rus Funk also gave this workshop at University of Louisvile and he has a powerful chapter in the recent important book,Not For Sale:Feminists Resisting Prostitution And Pornography(which Stan gave a great review of) called,What Pornography Says About Me(n):How I Became An Anti-Pornography Activist.
28 November 2005, 9:51 amHugh Manatee:
Psy-ops rule: “People need visible targets for their frustrations.”
Aaaaaargh! In order to fit into a model of exposing and condemning corporate-backed gender dominance-based messaging (real problem) Dines distorts sex, porn, the individual, who is REALLY controlling ‘mainstream’ media (military intelligence since WWII), and most CRITICALLY, the net effect on society.
Whew. Even lots of information can be a dangerous thing!
Dines sets up so many straw men and women I can hardly keep count. And when the torch of her condemnation is set to them, blinding smoke clouds the social horizen.
I’ve written a much longer essay deconstructing this so-called ‘feminist’ analysis of sexual images on-demand (of both men and women for FREE, by the way) but will instead open with this illustration of the muddle she feeds:
Here’s the real world of individuals she’s amplifying with well-intentioned but poisoned logic>>>
He: (looking at attractive naked women) “Oh my gawd-women are soooo beautiful…”
Her: (entering room ) “Oh my gawd-why do you hate women so much?”
Sexual neurosis is intentionally inflamed by **military intelligence managers of media**to keep the less war-prone woman from affecting the easily war-prone man. I study fascist social engineering through media control and gender truly is the key but Dines-Jensen feed the psy-ops dragon with more heat than light in their essay.
I’ve found more male-centric fascist social engineering in Disney’s animated ‘Chicken Little’ and professional sports then in porn.
Work a little harder, Ms. Dines.
Those who find release in porn are given a form of ’self-medication’ that relieves some angst which might otherwise be focused on injustice. Arundhati Roy has articulated how the bandaid mercies of NGOs (non-government organizations) can sustain tyranny by diverting energies and personnel that might otherwise be focused on real change, not palliatives.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shocked many when he opined that orgies were probably good for people as tension reducers. Hmmmm….Which social engineers has be been talking to?
Consider that the FBI cointelpro agents ca. 1970 realized that ‘feminism’ was yet another fracturing agent in an already divided New Left anti-war movement. They realized that getting women to focus on the chauvinist next to them instead of the fascist in the White House served their purposes.
Dines missed Big Picture complexities like these in the simplistic ‘porn is men on top of women’ diatribe.
So beware of simplistic ‘men are the problem’ themes that don’t do the topic of patriarchal dominance the justice it rightly deserves-!!!- because it excludes the TOTAL role of sex vs violence and playing people against each other.
Here are a few choice unfounded conclusions this ‘expert’ is peddling to college women in speeches and her TEXT book(!) and thus doing exactly what the CIA, the Taliban, Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Robertson hope for, an even more weaponized American sexuality, as if that were possible-
“Pornography ultimately tells stories about where women belong — underneath men.”
“Based on three studies of the content of mainstream video/DVD pornography over the past decade, we conclude that woman-hating is central to contemporary pornography.”
“As we understand left analysis, the focus isn’t on individual decisions about how to survive in a system that commodifies everything and takes from us meaningful opportunities to control our lives. It’s about fighting a system.”
“A major theme in pornography is that women are different from men and enjoy pain, humiliation, degradation;”
“Put an understanding of media together with feminist arguments for sexual equality, and you get the anti-pornography argument.”
Experts….sigh.
22 March 2006, 5:40 pmHugh Manatee:
Fascism is a domination cult and needs better explication than the caricature offered by Dines.
I don’t mean to minimize in anyway the elements of the porn industry that DO abuse women or use revel in racism.
Perhaps she thinks that the worst-case porn will shock some out of complacency, classic agit prop.
But she instead inflames neurosis and fascism.
A better approach to a safer world for women and everyone would be to examine the culture of violence in schools, TV, movies, the mock warfare called sports, and war itself, not naked people.
23 March 2006, 5:21 amHugh Manatee:
Looking for more Gail Dines articles to read since I was pretty critical of just the one article here on Stan’s site, I found this site which demonizes not just the quite tasteless and shock-seeking Larry Flynt and his juvenile cartoons but especially focuses on the ‘left’ writers who have done interviews with his Hustler magazine. Helen Caldicott, now there’s a real brute who did a Hustler interview, right? sheesh.
Rememeber, anti-fascist journalism was verboten in fascist America and for a number of years was relegated to outsider niche rags like Hustler which supported the First Amendment in a way that the ACLU would applaud if one hand weren’t already holding their collective nose. Flynt once printed an amazing article by researcher Mae Brussell which wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t. Brussell figured out who in CIA was an ex-Nazi and had been in on the murder of JFK and many other US government crimes.
So that’s why ‘leftist’ writers are in Hustler.
Next.
http://www.hustlingtheleft.com/CRAPP_E_LIB/dines.html
King Kong and the White Woman:
Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity
by Gail Dines
Ok, I’m trying to read this other Gail Dines article and take it seriously but…is this satire?! or does she really mean it when she writes-
“The penis becomes the defining feature of the black man and his wholeness as a human being is thus rendered invisible.”
She’s looking for “wholeness as a human being” in pictures of naked strangers?!”
I suppose if she were writing about sports she’d say “and they are reduced to a mere number on a jersey as if they didn’t have feelings.”
Actually, that would be a better line of inquiry into dehumanizing violence.
Does anyone else find her approach over-reaching when she attempts to pull social problems into a picture of naked people?
More-
“This article will examine how Hustler draws from past regimes of racial representation and articulates a more contemporary myth where black masculinity, having been allowed to run amok because of liberal policies, has finally rendered white men impotent, both sexually and economically.”
Contemporary myth???
More of this-
“Hard-core pornography similarly depicts black men as more sexually dehumanized than white men. This would seem surprising since in pornography all participants, men and women, are reduced to a series of body parts and orifices.”
Body parts and orifices. Exactly.
Not ’social values’ or ‘role models.’
Just sex.
Maybe she’s written something else I can find…
23 March 2006, 6:01 amHugh Manatee:
Alright. I went to the website that she and Jensen recommend
http://feministantipornographymovement.org/
and found this bizarre piece. Please comment on this, friends.
(If you can read this below and honestly think it means anything at all then you have a totally different idea of cause and effect and scientific inquiry than I do. This is contrived way beyond self-satire yet this is what Gail Dines is hanging her academic career on.)
http://www.dianarussell.com/pornsrole.html
I. THE ROLE OF PORNOGRAPHY IN PREDISPOSING SOME MALES TO WANT TO RAPE
>snipsnip
23 March 2006, 6:25 amElaina:
I don’t buy for a minute the idea that the debate over pornography should be dropped or put on the backburner in order to focus on some amorphous “bigger picture.”
The “bigger picture” is muddled not because more feminists and activists become more cognizant of the ways that patriarchy infiltrates our lives; the separation in ranks is, IMO, not due to feminists being duped into “abandoning” anything, or turning their angst up on men; instead they’re learning to not abandon themselves and ending up fighting an uphill battle with the men in the movement who need, earnestly, to drop this attitude that they have some sort of libertarian-inspired “right” to consume media materials (pornography) that systematically destroy the identities and humanities of women. It’s the men here who need to come to grips with what’s happening and how their own actions are splitting the movement. Stop fighting with US on this, please.
It seems to me that the size and wealth of the porn industry has grown in a correlation to the growth and development of the women’s movement. The more women that become aware and politicized and against pornography, the more money the industry makes, at least from my eyeballing of the whole thing.
Pornography is a vast print and media library of handbooks and how-to videos that show men how to rape, how to abuse, and how to think of women as non-humans. I’ve figured this out myself, and it’s been the hard way, and I ain’t an expert on any damn thing.
I’m just a woman. And I don’t accept that my and all my sister’s liberation is just a side item with the “revolution” as the main entree. Our liberation is necessary; revolution can’t happen without it.
Gotta go work for the man now.
23 March 2006, 3:41 pmVinnie:
I enjoyed this thoughtful and clearly written article.
On the issue of the portrayal of women in porn films and sites, it would be useful to compare it to that of gay men on porn films and sites. I’ve never seen a gay site describe any man in the same degrading terms used to describe women. Nor are they ever portrayed in the same humiliating poses and scenarios. Sounds like an easy paper for a grad student or other researcher.
10 September 2006, 10:56 amCarolyn:
Vinnie,
Thanks for the great insightful recognition. And it’s very true what you said,but sometimes in gay male pornography one of the male partners plays the “female” role as the inferior,sexually dominated and hated sex object. See the writings about this by anti-pornography anti-sexist,anti-violence activist and author John Stoltenberg in the excellent important book,Refusing To Be A Man in the chapter about pornography,sexism,womanhating and homophobia,and Christopher Kendal’s articles too.
Carolyn
15 February 2007, 5:14 amSteve Silver:
Excellent article. I’ve also read Jensen’s most recent book, “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity”, which is profoundly disturbing, but one of the best books I’ve read on the subject. There is also a recent interview with Jensen about the book at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t97Um-AaAM which I also recommend listening to.
28 December 2007, 8:00 am