Re-post from Melissa Farley
The existence of state-sponsored torture is decried by social critics on the Left, yet the identical treatment of women in prostitution is ignored by those same analysts. Many view torture by the United States of prisoners at Abu Ghraib with shock and horror, yet at the same time consider the identical acts perpetrated (and photographed) against prostituted women to be sexual entertainment. Condemning the Bush administration’s tolerance for torture in the war on terror, one journalist noted the “gleeful sadism†of guards at Abu Ghraib. Yet political pundits maintain silence regarding the same gleeful sadism of men toward women and gay men like that seen at kink.com.
See the full article at Prostitution Research
DeAnander:
Here is (this day at counterpunch) absolutely typical drivelling liberal/leftyboy idiocy on our “national problem” of being so terribly repressive about sex: Twisted by David Swanson.
And here is the reliable — nay, indefatigable — Bob Jensen weighing in on the elephant in our bedrooms — the corporate porn empire and its relentless drumbeat of misogyny and racism.
12 February 2007, 3:20 pmDeAnander:
The comments to Bob’s piece at Alternet offer a beautiful (ahem) x-section of whiny male entitlement.
More than one male poster insists that porn is the fault of women who don’t give men enough “real” sex — one even has the racist chutzpah to suggest that Anglo women are particularly desexed, whereas African American and Hispanic women are — hope you are sitting down, don’t fall off your chair — “understanding that ‘you marry a man, you have sex with him.’ (at regular intervals)” … in other words, those dark-skinned women know their place in the home!
And don’t miss the whiny librul boy who still can’t get over losing his feminist girlfriend to a lesbian lover… while the loss of a lover is undeniably painful and resentment is almost inevitable — in other words, I acknowledge his pain — he works all this into a classic narrative of “oppressed by feminists”. This one should be bronzed and kept on the mantelpiece.
There just ain’t nothing like the outpouring of denial and flailing defence that erupts any time anyone criticises the porn industry… it’s even better than the outpouring of enraged entitlement provoked by discussions of a carbon tax or the elimination of non-essential air travel.
12 February 2007, 3:47 pmDeAnander:
BTW, the same Clueless Librul Alternet readership doesn’t seem to see any connection between prostitution and porn — where women have to smile and look like they are having fun while being displayed naked, publicly raped, soaked with semen, etc — and the parallel teatment of employees in “legit” business:
(Ehrenreich article at Alternet)
In other words Ehrenreich rightly points out that treating employees like porn stars — isn’t that last sentence interchangeable with one about a porn starlet faking an orgasm? — is abusive, overbearing, and humiliating… and describes the awesome power of money and bosses to exact shuck-n-jive asskissery out of the peonage, and how infuriating this is… on the same web site where much of the readership earnestly believes that porn stars are party girls having a great time in a funfunfun job….
Ehrenreich describes a man programming himself
into a delusional mindset, self-hypnotising with capitalist propaganda, to the same audience that denies any possible power of compulsive and repetitious porn viewing to have any effect on men’s attitudes to sex and to women. I somehow think the readership will not be nearly so resistant to Ehrenreich’s narrative as to Jensen’s, even though both narratives are the same: tales about the power of capital to dehumanise and demean labour.
I’m not sure the word “irony” really suffices here…
12 February 2007, 4:46 pmStan:
Melissa and Bob and Gail, et al, are running with it for now. We almost need relays to stay ahead of the inevitable flood of bullshit that gets regurgitated every time anyone dares cross the line into critiquing the porn industry. And it’s not like its newer, deeper stuff that might give me pause to reconsider my position because of its careful thinking, nuance, critical acuity, etc. It’s just the same superficial fallacies deployed again and again… reminds me of bringing up Palestine at Democratic Party gatherings… more a reflexive shunning than any debate.
As Ti Grace Atkinson said: Compared to feminism, communism was child’s play.
12 February 2007, 5:46 pmDeAnander:
I think we can separate the flood of BS into several oft-repeated tropes, each of which can be dealt with — has been dealt with by feminists repeatedly, including here at FS. Here’s a quick taxonomy off top of head:
1) men “need” visual stimulation in order to experience sexuality. [one wonders how the species ever reproduced in those long primate aeons before representational art] … related tropes: men “need” sex in a way that women don’t, men are not oriented to affection but only to penetration; this is evolutionary biology and has nothing to do with encoded relations of power in culture. [well I think we’ve discussed that one to death on earlier threads — all this is about an ideology which naturalises culturally constructed masculinity, labels it eternal and inevitable, and then regards all male supremacist cultural institutions (or whichever ones the apologist wants to defend today) as “unchangeable”.]
2) pornography has a kathartic effect by allowing sexual aggression to be indulged in vicariously; sexual violence against women occurs less in societies where porn is prevalent; rape and other sexual abuse of women has declined in the US over the period of “liberalism” during which porn became ubiquitous. [this seems easily disposed of by studies of the incidence of reported rape and good socio/police estimates of the real incidence including unreported, over the last 40 years; as to the often-mentioned but never actually cited “government studies” that “prove” this correlation, where are they?]… associated trope: so the Netherlands, or Nevada, or Oz, or any other place where prostitution is legal and porn more than usually ubiquitous, are presumably rape-free. [yeah right.]
3) men only resort to porn because their wives won’t “put out”. this grows out of both 1) and 2) and is, I think, adequately confuted by the popular reports of married women with active sex lives that their husbands in fact lose interest in sex with real women as they get more and more fascinated by online porn; by reports of women who were fairly happy with marital sex until their husbands started demanding that they re-enact scenarios from porn; etc. I think we might turn this on its head and suggest that many women become despondent or disgusted about marital sex with their men who use a lot of porn. I don’t have figures to back this up, only anecdotal evidence over time. has anyone studied this?
4) there’s no real abuse in the porn industry, it is all make-believe and harmless; porn actresses are paid big bucks; it’s an easy way to make a good living; etc. [and the field slaves are happy as can be, that’s why they sing all day long.] plenty of solid research, survivors’ orgs, etc. to substantiate the critique that this is a feelgood rationalisation whereby the consumers can salve their uneasy consciences.
5) it all depends what you mean by… porn. hair splitting attempts to define Good Porn vs Bad Porn. this is actually the smartest line of defence, I think, despite its abuse, because condemning all instances of erotic description or art doesn’t seem reasonable. I think (personal definition which I’ve proposed before) that the essence of porn, i.e. Bad Porn as opposed to the celebration of the erotic in art, is that it celebrates and sexualises the power of one person over another, i.e. the act of domination or subordination. celebrating the exercise of brute power — whether it be physical battery and torture or mental/emotional abuse or superior air bombardment capabilities being used to flatten someone else’s country — is pornography. obviously any porn in which actual women and children are harmed is the most unrestrained celebration of the power of men over women and children: not only the power of the pornographer over his “models” and “actresses,” but the power of the consumer’s almighty dollar over those same people: their dignity and self-esteem and safety is worth less than his orgasm (dickheaded CBA). the Good Porn/Bad Porn people can, I think, actually be engaged with; they at least admit that it’s not all good and groovy.
6) porn is a civil liberties issue, and interfering with it is censorship and unconstitutional and so on; first amendment absolutism I think has been dealt with pretty thoroughly in the literature, and by the McKinnon/Dworkin strategy of civil suit for harm done.
7) porn is trivial and it is a waste of progressives’ time to discuss it or think about it when we should be working on bigger more important issues like the war on Iraq, poverty, impeachment, etc. …two words: Abu. Ghraib. to pretend that these events and photos — central to the failure of the war on Iraq, central to the mindset of the men who started that war, central to their attitude to “the public” and to anyone they think of as “below” them (i.e. women and pseudowomen) — have nothing to do with American porn culture is, in the literal sense of the word, idiotic. to think that poverty has nothing to do with porn/prostitution is idiotic. to think that gender has noting to do with poverty or war is idiotic. and so on. what’s really being said here is that women’s lives are not important and progressives must focus only on issues that affect men (and women too, but only as an adjunct to men).
rightwing nutcases hate porn, therefore anyone who hates porn is a rightwing nutcase. [despite clearly demonstrating that the apologist flunked Classical Logic 101, this is one of their more successful moves: argument by Taint. the counterarguments are very well known and rehearsed by now, they just need more (and more visible) repetition.] related trope: sex is good, porn is sex, therefore porn is good. both of the premises can be deconstructed.
9) porn is not racist because it includes PoC as models/actresses. [oh please — and the US Army is not a racist institution because it recruits PoC?] this one is so thin it’s hardly worth contending with.
10) oh yeah, and then there are the Libertarians: how dare you interfere with my consumption of anything? [also hardly worth contending with for its sheer bloody irresponsible selfishness.]
did I miss any of the well-worn tropes from the Alternet thread?
what would happen if there was a “rape free” label for porn like the “sweat free” seal for clothing or the “no actual animals were harmed during the making of this film” notice on movies approved by the SPCA and Humane Societies? 1) who would be qualified as an authentication agency? 2) how much porn would that leave in circulation, if material that failed to obtain the Good Pornkeeping Seal of Approval were banned? 3) wouldn’t the approved porn be completely ineffectual in its instrumental purpose, since the whole thrill for the consumer is in “transgression” and dominance, i.e. the thrill of seeing someone else (preferably women and kids) getting hurt and humiliated?
did anyone wade through the thread long enough to read the poster who proposed that the only way to take the thrill out of violence and torture was to make them commonplace? and isn’t that exactly what porn has done in contemporary culture? make the abuse and torture of women a cultural commonplace?
if I had graduate students I’d assign them that Alternet thread for a term paper
13 February 2007, 1:07 amRequired:
I’ve been wondering about the whole good porn bad porn thing for a while. As far a censorship goes I think a workable proposal would be this. I have two ideas. One is what I call intellectual human rights. If you appear in a scene in a film wear people are simulating or having sex you have “intellectual human rights” over that film. What that means is that you have the power to withdraw that film from being sold if at any point you desire to do so for any reason.
The other idea is that we should just ban THE SALE OF films with real sex in them. That way they, to greater degree, are out of the hands of the market. But if it becomes necessary, as the libertarians have us believe it might, to create hundreds of gang bang tapes in order to overthrow a dictatorial repressive government we still have the right to distribute such material for free.
This good porn bad porn thing is interesting. I find a lot of images that couldn’t be called porn are still very damaging to women. I wonder how we tackle those. For instance, has anyone seen that Eddie Murphy film Norbit. He’s such a misogynist. It makes an atheist want a hell for that piece of shit.
13 February 2007, 7:35 amElki:
One of the things failed to be mentioned by anyone is the very complex nature of mens sexuality (we already know that woman’s is very complex). If you put aside the type of porn or sex industry that thrives on young naive girls (and males also) for a minute, there are sex workers who model themselves on ancient ritual sexuality. They take into account this complexity of sexuality. It is where men find they can express their vulnerability in the face of anonaminity, as opposed to expressing violence.
Some how sexuality has become the underbelly of western society and has become to be seen as this twisted perverted thing, when really everyone has a very deep and emotional association with their sexuality.
I do not personally condone slavery sex workers that have been bought into the world due to repression, poverty and naivity. But I do think there is a place in this world for a sex industry. I have said this before and stand by it (I speak for myself as a woman), that when a woman owns her sexuality, she is a powerful being. And if that so means she expresses that in such an industry as sex work or porography, then so be it. It’s just very unfortunate that the woman (and men) who get caught in it are usually too young to have reached that sexual maturity.
13 February 2007, 4:07 pmJames M:
Reading the Jensen piece led me to write an entry about porn on my semi-private blog, which got a very interesting (and rather depressing) response from a young female reader. It’s long, but I hope you all won’t mind if I repost it here:
I developed a (not terribly original or brilliant) hypothesis a while back: That boys who have come of age in the wake of the internet porn explosion, and who have had at least a few years of steady exposure to it, would be by now thoroughly conditioned to its norms … and that what they’ve seen over their DSL lines would have established the parameters and dictated the behaviors they’re now emulating in their own sex lives. And unfortunately, young girls growing into women during that same period would also be conditioned to see it as normal, and coerced through peer and relationship pressure to play the same dehumanized roles as porn “actresses.â€
It seemed logical to me, at least in the abstract, given how malleable to sexual imprints a person is at that age, and given the always-on, easy-access, internet-provided flood of every kind of degrading sexual stimuli imaginable … but still, it was hard to really believe that violent, cheapened, humiliating porn-sex would become the accepted standard for sexual relations among an entire generation.
A friend related a story to me recently about a girlfriend of hers, a young and relatively sex-inexperienced woman just entering college. She had only recently begun having sex and expressed a lot of confusion about the process, and in particular what seemed to be driving her boyfriends to behave the way they did in the bedroom.
One of her questions to my friend was, “Why do they always want to come on my face?â€
My heart sank like a stone when I heard that. Hypothesis confirmed. If anyone else has any ideas, please tell me, but the only reasons I can think of for wanting to ejaculate on someone’s face are a) to dominate and humiliate that person in a sexualized way, and / or b) because you’ve learned by repetition to connect your sexual thrills to something you saw others do countless times on your personal computer screen. That’s only one anecdote; I’ve heard plenty more along similar lines.
Is there any hope for de-conditioning people away from reproducing this kind of porn-toxified sex with their real-life partners? It really doesn’t seem like porn and the attitudes toward sex that emanate from it can become any more soulless, extreme, transgression-oriented, and unromantic than they already are … short of snuff films gaining mainstream acceptance. My biggest hope is that we’ve come close enough to hitting bottom now, that perhaps there will eventually be a cultural backlash, back toward, for lack of a better term, “romantic sex.â€
—–
I’ll speak up as a female who has been sexually active, almost exclusively, with males of the porn generation, many of whom have expressed curiosity about this particular finishing move. What’s weird is that it was almost never coupled with any specifically dominant or humiliating sexual behavior. It has always come up in pretty respectful ways, honestly, as though asking to ejaculate on my face were as regular as asking if I might like to be on top sometime. Which would lead me to believe that it’s just a conditioned interest in playing out with a real girl what he’d been orgasming to since the days of AOL, especially since there was no other power play involved in most of these situations. But then a while ago I asked this guy friend of mine (who is totally respectful of women, very into romance and is actually a virgin at 23 because he wants to wait until he falls in love to have sex) why it’s so hot for a guy to come on a girl’s face. He said, in all seriousness and without flinching, “Because it’s like saying for the last time: ‘Here’s what I think of *you*.’” I feel like there’s a conflict in the guys I’ve been with between wanting to be aggressive and dominant (in similar ways to what they’ve seen in the porn they came of age with) and with all the things they’ve learned about how to treat women socially and sexually. While I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to be into that sort of sexual power dynamic, I most definitely think it’s an association that wouldn’t have been made in many cases without early and frequent exposure to it in pornography during that crucial time in a young man’s life.
13 February 2007, 6:58 pmDeAnander:
what is really sad to me is the halting, cautious way in which this young woman expresses the fairly obvious facts here: these guys are selfish jerks; they have self-trained in being selfish jerks from an early age, assiduously, so that they are now Olympic-class selfish jerks; it’s doubtful whether they are redeemable, without a deprogramming effort that is most likely not worth any woman’s time; and the only appropriate response to a request like that is “if that is your attitude to women — “here’s what I think of you” — don’t ever call me or get near me again.”
I am reminded of an incident almost 30 years ago, related to a Men and Feminism undergraduate seminar; a young man who honestly believed himself to be a feminist told me privately that he thought a woman in the seminar was really attractive because “she doesn’t shave and looks kinda, you know, like a lesbian, and I think that’s really sexy.” I was appalled by this remark — I mean, think for just a minute about what it means for a man to say about any woman, “you look like a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with men, and oboy that makes me want to have sex with you.”
I was young and idealistic and angry, still wet behind both ears, and decided to “out” him for this private comment, at the next meeting of the seminar — a confrontation. needless to say this did not pan out well; it polarised the group, with a minority of radical feminists saying it was indeed a disturbingly weird thing for him to say and he should re-think his attitude and apologise, and a majority of liberals feeling (as did he himself) that he was victimised by dogmatic man-hating feminists and humiliated in public, poor guy, he was just being honest about his feelings and his sexuality, etc. [funny how men looooove images of humiliated women to jerk off to, but they get really really upset about being criticised — even civilly — in front of a group of peers and consider this deeply humiliating.]
in retrospect there was something to be said for the Victorian notion that women didn’t enjoy sex and only “let” men do it as a kindness (or out of duty); at least well-brought-up and gentlemanly men were supposed to feel grateful, and to moderate their demands out of respect and gratitude! yes, it was a form of ‘noblesse oblige’ and as with all such attempts to humanise an oppressive relation of power it was unevenly honoured. amd fundamentally corrupt. but the current mercantile and brutal dehumanisation of sex and of women — with the pornification of culture and open celebration of misogyny, the implicit cultural redefinition of all women as prostitutes — presents us with these sickening attitudes: young men who have no notion of polite behaviour in the bedroom, who want to do humiliating things to women for their own juvenile and sniggering amusement/self-aggrandisement, things that give no conceivable pleasure to the woman — no quid pro quo — and who cherish the porn-apologists’ transparently idiotic bullshit that “girls really like this stuff, everyone should be forced beyond their limits now and then, embrace the dark side,” blah blah blah. yeah, and the Iraqis were going to welcome the invading Yanks with flowers and rice…
perhaps one thing feminists should be doing, openly, is offering young women self-defence resources for these situations: how to get rid of young men who want you to be their personal porn toy, snappy comebacks, physical self-defence skills if he starts to insist or bully, women’s consciousness-raising groups affirming young women’s rights in relationships, openly stating that these are abusive behaviours and tolerating them will only lead to an intensifying cycle of abuse. the more young women give in to these demands, the less respect they will get — this is very clear from the semantic/social content of the porn and the open acknowledgement made by the young man in the anecdote. they are behaviours of contempt. accepting them can only lead to more contempt.
it staggers me to think of young women trying to discover their sexuality in a world where they must contend not only with older male predators but with their own male peers so completely brainwashed into “AbuGhraib-ophilia.” it is so very sad. we don’t need madrassahs or mullahs; capitalism manages to enlist our young men in brainwashing themselves into reflexive misogyny.
13 February 2007, 7:50 pmJames M:
RE: “Women’s self-defense resources for these situations”, here’s a comment in my blog from another woman:
the issue with your young lady friend [the one I wrote about –JM] is NOT her lack of experience, it is her lack of self confidence. If she doesn’t like anything someone does to her in any part of her life, but especially the sexual arena, she needs to speak up! You don’t have to experience every sexual act known to man woman or beast to know what makes you feel uncomfortable. Learning about sexuality is a great idea. Knowing who you are is better.
While I agree with the thrust of her comment, I’m also somewhat disturbed by the implicit notion that the responsibility here is all the woman’s. I don’t know that that’s what she was ultimately getting at, but I know the default position tends to be that “boys will be boys” and women have to be the ones in constant vigilance, prepared to fend off every disrespectful advance. It saddens me as a man to see the belief perpetuated that all men have inherently abusive sexual tendencies. It not only naturalizes that abusive behavior, but shunts the responsibility for dealing with it off onto the victims.
Men have to speak up — like Jensen, Goff, et al are doing.
13 February 2007, 8:18 pmDeAnander:
‘the thrust of her comment,’ eh? I’m not even going there. what a language we all inherit.
agreed that the tendency is always to claim that if the woman only did this or that, or was more self confident or whatever, there wouldn’t be a problem. I think there are two faces to this. one is victim-blaming plain and simple, as you remark. the other I think is a kind of desperate need to believe that there is a magic formula that will keep a woman safe, and that I (whoever is speaking) have figured it out.
there have been several assaults on women in my town of late, including a stabbing and a couple of rapes. the woman who was stabbed was jogging on a popular oceanfront path after dark, wearing headphones. description posters were put up along the path and a friend (female) and I were looking at one of them and discussing the news when another woman (jogger) passed by. it was just about sunset. the gist of her remarks was: “well, that’s just not safe to jog by yourself after dark, and especially wearing headphones! I mean, everyone knows that.”
friend and I looked at each other after she had jogged on, with rueful Old Feminist expressions. “Blame the victim,” said my friend sadly, and I said, “Yeah, and my lucky rabbit’s foot is guaranteed to protect me.” the woman who spoke with us clearly needed to believe that she was safe because she had figured out The Rules — you don’t jog by yourself after dark and you don’t wear headphones therefore you are safe.
of course there aren’t any Rules — violent men don’t play by rules. but there’s a deep terrified need to believe that there are rules and that you’ll be OK if you internalise them and obey. a great deal of the victim-blaming one hears from other potential victims translates to a mantra of “that can’t happen to me, that can’t happen to me.”
14 February 2007, 12:33 amDeAnander:
oh and one other thing… I do think there’s an important difference between collective self defence and exposure/discussion and so forth, vs the notion that individual self-confidence needs to be cultivated. yes, individual self-confidence is a good thing, a very necessary thing — if you believe your own Self is worthless then it’s hard to muster the gumption to defend it vigorously. but more important is the establishment of a consensus among peers and friends, a cultural movement of resistance: clearly the boys have established their consensus (all women are contemptible whores and sex is purely instrumental/predatory) and are acting on it, with the presumed and sometimes explicit encouragement and approval of the culture and their peers. but women are struggling (still!!!) each alone against the consensus of the boys.
what would help greatly would be exposure of these issues in a very public way, so that (as with the original consciousness-raising effort) these girls and young women realise that their experience is not individual or anomalous but shared and systematic. I can’t even count the number of times, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s when in a self-defence class a woman would describe some manipulative or abusive move made by a male predator, and some other woman in the circle would gasp with outraged recognition. my memory is not all that accurate over so many years but I think I can remember one woman saying with indignation something like “Christ! do they all go to the same goddamn rape school?” and a kind of angry laughter.
it’s kind of like the moment when someone who’s been scammed meets other victims of the same con man. the fact that he’s done the same thing with the same rap and the same tricks over and over again, somehow rids the victim of any last shred of feeling that it was personal or somehow their fault or they deserved it. it becomes very clear that he is the one with the problem, or in this case that the men of the culture have a collective problem — whereas when it’s each woman all by herself she may still occasionally wonder whether there’s something wrong with her…
of course, given the ubiquity of misogynist pornographic drek in our lives and particularly in men’s lives, in a sense they do “all go to the same goddamn rape school,” from boyhood on. it is painful to me to imagine girls and young women experiencing early crushes and puppy love and all the vulnerability that those feelings bring, and meeting the kind of cold and brutal instrumentalism valorised in porn culture and revealed by these anecdotes. I suppose I should feel sorry for the emotionally stunted and damaged boys, but since their stunting takes the form of being turned into Manchurian-Candidate-type weapons against women, my sympathy in that department is somewhat limited.
14 February 2007, 12:48 amJames M:
The “thrust” part definitely didn’t slip through my filters. I chose to leave it in for reasons I didn’t bother to analyze at the time … maybe for irony’s sake, or maybe in acknowledgment of the futility of trying to communicate without using sexually-charged metaphors.
One could say it’s a battle metaphor, but the terminology of combat is, as we know, so intertwined with sexual terminology … anyway, I give up.
Your comments make for insightful reading as always, De. I wouldn’t presume to advise women on how best to resist the onslaught of porn culture; I am woefully underqualified in that arena. And I agree, there is no one-size-fits-all tactic. But as far as men’s part of the equation is concerned, the one I’m favoring currently is good old-fashioned “marginalization and shame.”
We’ve all seen in our lifetimes how porn has gone mainstream, and how the stigma that used to attend it has all but disappeared. A female friend recently told me she’s decided, without approving of it, to accept men’s porn viewing as an inevitability. I’d like to see that challenged, to have it pushed it back to the fringes, by re-attaching a sense of shame to it. But not shame of the Puritanical variety; shame at being a participant (vicarious or otherwise) in cruel and degrading treatment of another human being.
I think there’s at least some small amount of shame in every man who watches abusive porn … every man but perhaps the most far-gone of porn addicts. I hope that shame can be magnified by having more men talk honestly about the harm it causes.
I once saw Dr. Phil of all people render a pretty good summary judgment against pornography — he asked one of his guests, “Would you want your sister to be involved in that?” Watch pro-porn males get mighty nervous and defensive when you pose that question. Implicit in most of the typical defensive responses is that, while it may not be okay for my sister, there is a certain class of sub-humans (”sluts,” ho’s,” etc.) for whom such treatment is deserved … which is another one of those seldom-considered but near-ubiquitous sub-rosa rationalizations for watching porn, and for evading the shame that should naturally accompany it.
14 February 2007, 2:36 amJames M:
P.S. It’s also, as we know, a common rationalization for soldiers in wartime, who need to dehumanize their enemy in order to perpetrate violence upon them. Once again, we come to the intersection of Sex & War …
14 February 2007, 3:00 amShel Silver:
Got here from your AlterNet link. Two, maybe initial, points about the site and the porn debate…
1.Does the Feral Scholar have a definite (political, cultural?) mission & goals, &–if so–what are they?
2.It seems to me that images of naked male & female bodies and genitals have been among the more enduring forms in the human record–from the neolithic til now. However, this point & its implications, are rarely analyzed, discussed, or accounted for in the porn debate. Why?
STAN: FS is a blog, and that sort of limits its “mission,” eh? Points of view that are valorized here are eco-conscious, gender-conscious, race-nation-conscious, and socialist. No big surprise there foranyone who has ever browsed through it.
Our take on the porn debate (there are two moderators, one male and one female) is well-stated by De in her earlier effort at definitions. We are looking at it in its function as propaganda for capitalist-patriarchy, that is as an ideological support for the social (sexual) subjugation of women. Sexual subjugaton encompasses a lot more than conservative attempts to contain female sexuality within the marital household. It is highly disingenuous to suggest that we are focused on “nudity” as the content-issue… which further suggests that prudery and not power is the issue… one of the mainstays of the porn apologists’ playbook, comparing us (erroneously) to the neo-Victorian right-wing.
14 February 2007, 10:58 amAudrey:
the issue with your young lady friend is NOT her lack of experience, it is her lack of self confidence. If she doesn’t like anything someone does to her in any part of her life, but especially the sexual arena, she needs to speak up!
I can’t help hearing this play out as a drill sgt. screaming in the woman’s face: “What’s the matter with you, why don’t you have any self-confidence, you stupid moron?!â€
I’m watching the exact same conversation unfold - but on a different topic - on another forum, the basic question being “why do people in crap circumstances choose to live that way?†Any discussion of the reasons they’re in those circumstances – even from the folks on board who know first hand how it happens - is met with derision, because the folks who aren’t in that cycle don’t make decisions as if they were. “You decide what you will and won’t do. No other excuses.â€
14 February 2007, 4:50 pmDeAnander:
Neiwert’s series of articles on Eliminationism (what Stan calls Exterminism) may be illuminating here. He refers back, in part X, to the ever-useful Martin Buber who made in very simple and clear language the distinction between the I-Thou and the I-It relationships — the relational and the objective worldviews.
How much of mass market pornography is not about the display and celebration of male power over women, [or various “amusing” cross-dressing variants on the fundamental sexual law of patriarchy: someone must be on top, and the Other must be punished/humiliated/hurt]? the existence of “cruel dominatrix” sexual fantasies among men doesn’t alter the fact that the entire sexual memescape is predicated on a culturally constructed cartoon of male sexuality. What is truly forbidden, deeply kapu, in this memescape is mutuality, mutual kindness, mutual recognition, the I-Thou moment. Love is what is truly kapu in this mercantile culture: it is saturated with sex, a Grand Bazaar of Heinz 57 Varieties of instrumental sex — and pathetically devoid of love.
We could even analyse the presentation of nudity — that is, posed nudity without the depiction of explicit sexual activity: how often do we see images of nude people admiring each other, engaged with others in the frame of the image? no, what we generally see is an anonymous nude body — male or female — presented directly to the viewer (consumer), engaged with an audience, an object for display, existing in a vacuum as a product to be appreciated by the viewer.
The model is usually smiling or gazing soulfully (apparently) into the viewer’s eyes. But in real life, this person is staring at a camera, making that soulful face or smiling that bright smile at a camera, in the Nth pose of the day, to earn a buck. An entire pyramid of effort — the “market discipline” of money, the threat of poverty, the cultivation and maintenance of appearance, the technologies of image production and reproduction — has gone into the making of this image, all to satisfy the fantasy of some (usually male) consumer. And as with all advertising/consumerism, the underlying message is “How very important You are; Your fantasies and tastes and desires are the most important thing on earth.” If Bill McKibben had done his well-known 24-hours-of-cable experiment with 24 hours of porn, he’d have come to similar (though probably more despondent) conclusions. The underlying message of consumer culture is Entitlement, be it entitlement to infinite material indulgence, unlimited cheap air travel, unlimited SUV size and power, or unlimited objectification and consumption of commoditised sex.
This in itself is the I-It relationship (Buber), what radical feminists call “objectification”. The viewer/consumer is “I,” and everything and everyone else is It. When a man says he “expects” his wife to provide sex “on a regular schedule.” as did one poster on the AlIn and of itself this order of objectification in a still photo of a nude subject is not vile — but it is an indicator, a “tell”, of the officially sanctioned sexuality of the culture: “market sexuality” in which the Other is a marketable commodity and the individual’s sexual awareness is supposed to focus not on “what can I share with a loving other,” but “what can I get for Me Me Me, at the lowest possible cost to myself in time and effort.” Porn is the taylorisation of male sexuality, the search for the most “efficient” image (the money shot as it is so revealingly called) that will produce the most reliable, replicable, standardised erection and orgasm.
The prevalence of nude images and icons in other cultures may mean anything, depending on the culture. Warlike ancient Greeks who kept “their” women as slaves, confined to the home and deprived even of real names or civic identities, adorned potterywork galore with images of nude men raping other nude men, boys, women, and girls — often of warriors on the field of battle buggering a defeated male foe. They also ornamented their public places with large stone sculptures of erect penises. OTOH the Venus of Willendorf may have been created by some kind of matriarchal clan who worshipped the rotund female body for its life-giving capacities. Nudity is featured in the art of both cultures, but what it means is bound by the relations of power and production in those cultures. American women are baited by yobs in bars and at sporting events to “show your tits” to get public attention and to gratify male egos; when some N/Central African women display their breasts to men in public it is a shaming gesture, a way of bringing great shame and public condemnation upon the men who are being scolded or criticised.
Prevalent images of nudity in our culture reflect the values of our culture: consumerism, male supremacy, and white supremacy. Those values are reinforced powerfully by men’s masturbating to these images repeatedly over a lifetime, internalising those values with the most intimate physical feedback (somatic training). The I-It attitude to sexuality reflected in and promoted by these images is both emotionally bruising and physically dangerous for women who have to deal all too frequently with objectifying, selfish, greedy, sadistic and violent men….
14 February 2007, 4:56 pmDeAnander:
as did one poster on the AlIn oops!
got distracted and had a cut/paste disaster. s/b
as did one poster on the Alternet thread, this is a statement of entitlement, a statement of the primacy of the man’s “right” to sexual use of someone else’s time. body, attention, for his gratification, regardless of her wishes. it is a far cry from “I am sad because my lover doesn’t seem to desire me any more,” to “I am righteously angry because my servant does not reliably cater to my wants.” is it any susprise that a woman regarded in such a light, facing this arrogance and selfishness, would resist it in some way — if only with passive avoidance?
when men claim (as on the Alternet thread) that women are to blame for the porn boom because they “don’t put out” on demand or on schedule, how different is this really from the corporate management who claim that it’s the union’s fault they are offshoring, outsourcing, firing, locking out, hiring scabs, etc? after all, if the workers had just meekly accepted the total overlordship of the management and not asserted any limits or any humanity on their part, not demanded any respect, the management wouldn’t have “needed” to resort to these unsavoury methods.
14 February 2007, 5:13 pmDeAnander:
I am not a big Eve Ensler fan but she has a point here. Gynophobia and misogyny are deeply intertwined with biophobia and exterminism.
14 February 2007, 8:27 pmDeAnander:
Fashion Models Score High on Unhappiness
A liberal newspaper in Australia (where prostitution is legalised and normalised) has no problem running this article. I doubt it will generate a storm of angry letters, like the one which greeted Jensen’s fairly mild thinkpiece on porn at Alternet.
Yet we are supposed to believe that stripping, lap and pole dancing, porn modelling, and prostitution are liberating and happy careers for the majority of participants? Is modelling really the “extreme” example of objectifying women? If these are the mental health costs of modelling, what can we project as the mental health costs of prostitution?
14 February 2007, 8:42 pmFire Witch:
The photos of the loving embrace of the mantova skeletons , which archaeologists recently uncovered, seem to me profoundly symbolic of the way that pornography has killed and buried so many people’s capacity for mutuality and tenderness.
Your writing, De, goes such a long way towards digging us out from underneath the crushing layers of all that gynophobic, soul-killing drek.
Cheers.
15 February 2007, 11:34 pmMelissa Farley:
Hi Stan,
Thanks for your summary of the proporn arguments. It’ll help when we challenge the dude and his friends who bought the $14.1 million San Francisco building for kink.com
Re prostitution decreasing the rate rape - -I agre: NOT. Here are some numbers. Experts I spoke with told me that the sex industry in Las Vegas generates $1-6 billion a year. That includes a whole lot of prostitution in strip clubs, massage brothels, street and of course the ubiquitous escort or cell phone prostitution. (Las Vegas phone directory has 165 yellow pages of prostitution advertising – is there anywhere that tops that?) So no one argues that we have lots of prostitution in Las Vegas. But did you know this – excerpts from my forthcoming report (Legal Prostitution in Nevada: a Failed Experiment) on prostitution and trafficking in Nevada:
A Las Vegas rape crisis counselor spoke bluntly about the relationship between the sex industry and the city’s high rape rates. “ Men think they can get away with rape here,†she told me. Data from the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report validates these analyses and raises the possibility that there may be an association between legalized prostitution and rape rates in Nevada. The Nevada rate of rape was higher than the US average and it was significantly higher than rates of rape in California, New York and New Jersey. Las Vegas and Reno rape rates were significantly higher than rape rates other US tourist destinations such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Rape Rate per 100,000 Population by State
Nevada 40.9
U.S. average 32.2
California 26.8
New York 18.8
New Jersey 15.3
Rape Rate per 100,000 Population by City
Las Vegas 44.7
17 February 2007, 2:36 pmSparks-Reno 41.3
San Francisco 24.5
Los Angeles 23.2
New York 14.0
DeAnander:
Hi Melissa, actually I think that was my summary of proporn tropes…?
19 February 2007, 11:54 pmMelissa Farley:
De,
Sorry, I hadn’t realized that it was your summary. I misread who wrote which post.
I went through most of the alternet responses to Bob Jensen’s article. It was pretty depressing - not much has changed in the last 15-20 years. It highlights once again the brilliance of Dworkin and MacKinnon’s focus on harm-based approaches that cause economic damage to pornographers.
20 February 2007, 3:07 amCharles:
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070220/ENT01/702200384/1032/ENT
20 February 2007, 12:50 pmanother brother:
This data is interesting in what it doesn’t tell us.
NYC has effectively decriminalized prostitution. I haven’t counted the pages for escorts in the Yellow Pages, but I do read the Village Voice.
According to the date Melissa shared, NYC has a rape rate tht is a fraction of the Las Vegas rate – and I would suspect there are some other factors at play. (I also wonder how such data is collected as most women do not seek legal redress for rape… for all sorts of reasons.)
The focus of attack on Kink.com is surprising to me. Here’s a company that has bare bones ethics – consent and negotiation, extensive desexualized interviews before and after scenes, a commitment to “public” and explicitly ethicized sexuality.
In the fetish “community” there is an obsession with negotiation, consent, and agreed limits in addition (and relation to) extremism of practice.
Here we have the most extreme BDSM side by side with the most ethical clarity about consent.
This is obviously confusing to people who view “violence” and degredation as themselves the evil.
I have to disagree. There’s nothing wrong with Kink.com buying this building, and if more of pornography had their consensual, non-misogynistic framework – the whole industry would be different.
Compared with the leaders of the porn industry, these people are saints. They absolutely do not promote hatred of women. They are about power-exchange (mostly male-dom, but hardly entirely).
Do people really need to be “shamed”? Some folks above argued this, but that’s a losing battle and the wrong fight.
I think Robert Jensen’s effort to discuss the misogyny of mainstream het porn is important, and I’ve engaged it in more than one locale – but I’m sorry to say that efforts to shame people for their desires (problematic as they are) will end the discussion.
Porn has no doubt played a huge role in the spread of male sexual sadism, and women’s changed expectations of intimacy and their own role. At the same time, notions of “sex positivity” in the real sense, that is to say women’s sexual agency, has never been greater. To put it another way, men now know what the clitoris is and what to do with it – and women expect and demand this.
I guess I’m just skeptical of sexual politics that goes to the margins first – instead of right to the core.
Forget Kink.com. Let’s talk about Vogue magazine and Maxim, the crude misogyny of the Men’s Show and so on. It isn’t in BDSM that you’ll find misogyny, these are men and women who DEMAND explicit discussion and agreement as to what they want – not the mainstread of pornography that “naturalizes” male sexual sadism.
If people want to focus on BDSM as the issue – then you’ll have to go talk to some of the models and see what they think about it. Porn is ubiquitous and will be for the forseeable future. With that accepted, let’s dig into the questions folks like Robert Jensen have been raising, and let’s do it free of the “shame” that drives desires underground, that genuinely perverts and dehumanizes people.
Here is the link to
Read their “values” statements, look at the material.
Then compare it to any of a dozen other companies to compare the difference in fetishized woman-hating, naturalization versus ethicization, and what makes sexual subcultures different from the everyday horrors of the mainstream.
20 February 2007, 1:13 pmDeAnander:
@charles — and your point is … ?
20 February 2007, 7:57 pmCharles:
A major sex symbol is rebelling
21 February 2007, 3:14 pmCharles:
There isn’t exactly a sharp line between Hollywood and the Porn industry, is there ?
Britney Spears was/is on her way to being the 21st Century American , Blonde Bombshell, one wit da “Looks”. And she’s specifically seems to be messing up her looks ! Could she be conscious of some the issues so frequentiy discussed here ? Conscious or not, her current trend of activities are a phenomenon , a factoid pertinent to a discussion of of sexualized images, and their impact on the person imaged and the masses who view the image.
What are all those young girls who are Britney fans thinking ? Some are probably getting a message that Spears is rebelling against abuse of her sexual image.
21 February 2007, 3:38 pmDeAnander:
sorry Charles, but surely you must know that women with shaven heads are also sex symbols:
Eight Women Who Look Better…
which just goes to show, I suppose, that the objectifying male gaze can be just as rapaciously reifying as capitalism. anything is grist for its mill.
tell ya what, when Britney gains 50 pounds — or lets her hair turn naturally gray — then I will believe she is rebelling against the culture. anything else is just niche marketing and fashion statement.
21 February 2007, 4:32 pmCharles:
I’d say Spears whole train of conduct lately has the feel of a rebelling sex-symbol, not a growing one. So, in this case I’d say the bald head is not meant to be sex exploitable. That is , sorry, I disagree with your interpretation of Spears’ current actions. I think she’s being a bad-ugly girl on purpose.
Another supermodel, can’t think of her name right now, she’s Black, just did gain about 30 or 40 pounds and then got into arguments with people who talked about her.
21 February 2007, 6:00 pmMelissa Farley:
Britney, like Anna Nicole Smith, is going through some major emotional stress. And the press like leeches are on top of every move she makes. I don’t think the key issue is whether or not Britney is trying to rebel (I personally don’t think she is), rather what is glaring to me is way women who are defined as sluts are treated. Once she is named whore, it’s open season. I thought Bob Herbert made some good points in his column today, toward the bottom of my post you’ll see how he brings Britney Spears into his discussion.
Have they buried Anna Nicole Smith yet?
Excerpt from http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/opinion/22herbert.html
Are you kidding? Ms. Smith may be dead and rapidly decomposing, but there’s too much fun still to be reaped from her story to let it die just yet. This is world-class entertainment: Larry King, “Today,†CNN, The New York Times.
Even the judge in the televised hearing over what to do with Ms. Smith’s remains is milking his 15 minutes, like Judge Ito of O. J. Simpson fame. In a burst of wisdom from the bench, the judge, Larry Seidlin, said, “Like a Muhammad Ali fight, sometimes you have to wait the whole 10 rounds.â€
When we were kids we were taught not to laugh at people who were obviously mentally or emotionally disturbed. With Ms. Smith, who was deeply and unmistakably disturbed, we put her on television and laughed and laughed. Would she say something stupid, or spill out of her dress, or pass out in public from booze or drugs? How hysterically funny!
Then her son died. Then she died, leaving an orphaned infant daughter. Instead of turning away chastened, shamed, we homed in like happy vultures. Whatever entertainment value Ms. Smith had when she was alive increased exponentially when she was kind enough to die for us. Now she’s on the tube around the clock.
…..
22 February 2007, 7:24 pmParis Hilton and Britney Spears were on the cover of Newsweek last week with the headline “The Girls Gone Wild Effect.†When you turned to the story, there was a full-page picture of the former best friends, with a glassy-eyed Britney looking for all the world like a younger version of Anna Nicole Smith.
DeAnander:
Th3 New Yorker gets serious about the cultural/moral impacts of the ‘24′ show and the agenda of its rightwing creator but can you imagine them getting serious about the routine depiction of torture and rape of women in porn and pop media?
Are the creators of fashion ads like this one so clever/inegnious/avant-garde? or are they just promoting the same essentially rightwing agenda of domination and control via cruelty?
every now and then even Libruls will admit that the fetishisation and commodification (which they tellingly call “sexualisation,” as though women and girls had no sexuality except inasmuch as they are objectified and reified for the male gaze) of women and girls in the m3dia has negative social effects.
26 February 2007, 7:40 pmCharles:
NY Times, February 27, 2007
Justices Decline Case on 200-Year Sentence for Man Who Possessed Child
Pornography
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — An Arizona man who received a 200-year prison
sentence for possessing 20 pornographic images of children failed Monday to
persuade the Supreme Court to consider whether the sentence was
unconstitutionally excessive.
Arizona law imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for “sexual
exploitation of a minor,†and it requires that sentences for multiple
convictions be served consecutively.
The sentence that the man, Morton R. Berger, received was consequently
longer than the sentence any other state would have imposed for a similar
offense, a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last
year dissenting from that court’s decision upholding the 200-year sentence.
A majority of the Arizona Supreme Court declined to examine the aggregate
sentence as a whole, instead focusing on the sentence of 10 years for
possessing a single pornographic image, which it found was not excessive or
disproportionate. It was this aspect of the analysis that Mr. Berger, a
57-year-old former high school teacher, challenged in his appeal to the
United States Supreme Court.
“If this court reviews Berger’s entire punishment instead of examining the
sentence for a single count,†the brief said, “it would find Berger’s
punishment cruel, unusual and unconstitutional.â€
His appeal said that in most states, sentences for similar crimes would run
concurrently, and an offender would serve no more than five years, with the
additional possibility of probation or early release. Both are barred under
Arizona law. Had the offense been prosecuted under federal law, Mr.
Berger’s brief said, the federal guidelines would have provided a five-year
sentence.
The case, Berger v. Arizona, No. 06-349, has drawn considerable attention
in criminal law circles as providing a possible occasion for the justices
to take a fresh look at a subject they have treated only sparingly. While
fully engaged in reconsidering the respective roles of judges and juries in
criminal sentencing, the court has been extremely reluctant to strike down
particular sentences as excessive.
Douglas A. Berman, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State
University and an authority on sentencing, also noted the difference in the
court’s treatment of punitive damages and criminal sentencing.
In an interview on Monday, recalling that the court last week vacated an
award of punitive damages against Philip Morris, Professor Berman said,
“For a host of good reasons, the justices think they have a role in
regulating extreme corporate punishment, but I fear the court doesn’t
embrace a role in regulating extreme individual punishment.†Professor
Berman has been writing about the Berger case for months on his blog,
Sentencing Law and Policy.
Arizona vigorously opposed Supreme Court review of the sentence, telling
the justices that it had been properly based on “overwhelming evidence†of
Mr. Berger’s “large-scale, deliberate and long-term acquisition of child
pornography.â€
The state’s brief said that after Mr. Berger turned down a plea bargain,
the prosecutor whittled the case to 20 counts out of fear of “deluging the
jury†with highly graphic and disturbing images. The police had found the
images in Mr. Berger’s possession after learning that his credit card
number had been used to buy contraband images from a child pornography Web
site based in Dallas.
(clip)
STAN: I wonder when it will be legal to prosecute for “sexual exploitation of an adult.”
27 February 2007, 11:49 amCharles:
That there is even such an actually existing legal concept as “sexual exploitation” and a criminal statute based on taking pictures ,not actually having sex , means U.S. power structure and ideology is more in line with Dworkin and Mackinnon’s thinking than “one might have thunk”. The power structure can be real anti-patriarchal in a number of ways.
6 March 2007, 3:21 pmJames L:
another brother - The structure of the relationships between people engaged in BDSM play is completely different to that between the people participating in BDSM porn (which includes the consumer). BDSM play is personal, everyone knows and (presumably) cares about everyone else. Everyone is doing what they do to give pleasure to someone they care about.
In BDSM porn there is no personal relationship between the performers and the viewer. The viewer experiences pleasure but does not provide it. This is the essence of misogyny, and the central criticism that can be levelled at porn of all kinds. There is a fundamental inequality between the participants, the viewer is deriving pleasure from the performers without giving them any pleasure in return. It is the conditioning of the viewer to an acceptance of this inequality that is the harmful aspect of porn, the expectation that someone will give pleasure without receiving it.
So take careful note that the criticism of BDSM porn does not imply the criticism of BDSM play itself.
I think you’re totally wrong about Kink.com when you say that “they absolutely do not promote hatred of women”. Why are the viewers turned on by the suffering of women? I’m sure there are all sorts of positive emotions (trust, intimacy, etc) asociated with the BDSM portrayed on the site, but all those emotions can be a part of sex that does not involve pain. If the viewers are watching the porn because they want to see people experiencing these emotions, why are they only interested in watching painful sex?
- James L
12 March 2007, 10:36 pm