Pornography and Global Warming
I’ve spent much of the last year brooding about pornography and global warming. Last week, I read something that brought those two trains of thought together.
In the upcoming June/July issue of Satya Magazine, which will focus on “A-ha! moments,” I’ve got an article about the moment when I started thinking seriously about my personal responsibilities concerning climate change. Ever since, I’ve been routinely thinking, speaking, and writing about global warming. It’s a recurring theme in my book, Aftershock, in which I argue that we must heal the ruptures in our relationship with the natural world if we ever expect to heal our own traumatic injuries and that we must heal those injuries if we ever expect to repair the damage we have done to the the world.
(If you’re not sure what you can do about global warming, by the way, you can read Turn Down the Heat! now and then read that Satya article — in which I give some practical tips gleaned from the scholarly literature about inactivity on climate change — when it comes out.)
After turning in the manuscript of Aftershock to the publisher last spring, I found myself collecting articles and books on the linkages between pornography and rape. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read those things but I’ve learned to trust that such tangents tend to lead to useful ideas if I have the patience to follow them without worrying about where they will lead.
It turns out that, somewhere below the level of conscious awareness, I was continuing to ponder the most vexing problem posed in Aftershock: the deep linkage of sexism and speciesism that leads to the use of sexualized violence as a tool of subjugation, as seen most spectacularly recently in the torture photos from Abu Ghraib. I’m still in the midst of what probably will be a multi-year project of reading, thinking, and writing about this.
(I just picked up a stack of books from the library, including texts on torture and on the sexualized fetishization of fascism. Let’s all pause for a moment of thanks for interlibrary loan, which is the #1 perk of working in academia.)
I call the project “unspeakable” because that’s what we tend to call the kinds of all-too-common violence that I’m talking about and also because we don’t have a word for the intersection I am hoping to illuminate. As I wrote in my recent post on what I’m reading right now, I am so deeply appreciative of Diana Russell and other feminists who have stood strong despite the double emotional assault of looking closely at pornography and being ridiculed for taking it seriously.
Which brings me — finally! — to today’s intersection. In her introduction to Making Violence Sexy, Diana Russell notes that the harmful impact of pornography is a well-established fact that is not recognized as such. A wealth of data — including extensive survey research, scores of experiments, testimonies of women and men from within the pornography industry, testimonies of rape and domestic violence survivors, testimonies of rapists, etc. — attest to the multiple ways that pornography hurts both the women who appear in it and women abused by the consumers of it. Application of the laws of learning to the question of the impact of literature consumed while masturbating offers further evidence that consumers of pornography do indeed take in, and may later act out, the messages embedded in pornography: Women are objects for consumption. Women like being raped. Degradation is pleasurable. Violence is sexy.
And yet, as used to be true of global warming, many if not most people consider the question controversial, unsettled, a matter for debate rather than a problem to be solved. Various strategems are deployed to keep this urgent and ongoing problem in the realm of the questionable. One study that purported to prove that pornography is a healthy outlet for, rather than an incitement of, sexually violent impulses is cited again and again, even though the data cited in that study has since been shown to demonstrate an increase in rape following the legalization of pornography in Holland. Scholars and activists who talk about the dangers of pornography are misrepresented as prudish censors or ridiculed as overly-emotional alarmists. The available evidence is portrayed as inconclusive even though it is actually weighted heavily in one direction. The personal stories of those who have experienced the danger directly are simply dismissed.
I’ll admit that I was fooled. Even though I knew about the dangers of pornography from personal experience and from the stories that women have told me, before I embarked on this research project I truly believed that the scholarly evidence concerning pornography and violence against women was inconclusive. I knew that the link was real but I believed that it had not yet been demonstrated and that was why we have such a hard time convincing people that pornography is problematic.
So, the question becomes: What led to the recent sea change in public opinion concerning global warming and is there anything we can learn from that to help us move the problem of pornography out of the stasis of false controversy?
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:37 pm
I have a lot of questions about this topic in general, though I feel like I should start by reading Diana Russell, and others who are educated on the topic, because I’m pretty clueless. Something I’m not sure she’d cover, and which I’m not sure you were addressing, is … I don’t know, I guess the question of whether there can be “good” pornography? I read Furry Girl’s interview in Satya (Aug 06), and I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts are on her perspective.
Specifically, she implies that anti-pornography is essentially the same as anti-sex, and there is a lot of terminology such as “sex positive” and discussion on sex workers rights, implication that you can’t be anti-porn and still support sex workers rights. From Furry Girl’s perspective, there are people who choose freely to be sex workers, and there are environments where they can explore that with out the typical exploitation, degredation, etc.
On one hand, I don’t feel like that has anything to do with the violence you’re talking about, but I also can’t imagine that there isn’t a connection buried in there somewhere.
I’m finding it impossible to clearly state what I’m getting at, probably because I don’t know much about the subject. I suppose my question is something along the lines of - if someone like furry girl chooses to be a sex worker, I feel like that’s her business. but at the same time, maybe all pornography is reinforcing the idea of subjugation and violence, so maybe it does affect me?
May 24th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Deb, I have a lot to say in response to this comment but I need both time and mental clarity to do so adequately. I’ve been caught up in sanctuary activities for the past couple of days but have been thinking about this in the back of my mind and will get my thoughts down very soon.
May 25th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Ok, you said I should come in and share my ideas, so. . . I don’t have totally formed thoughts here, but my worry is that statistics can be manipulated to say almost anything. For example I remember being extremely alarmed when I read an article saying that 90% of rapists either owned porn or had owned it in the past. Then I realized that 99% of the males I knew, straight or gay, liberal or not, owned or had owned porn. So I always want to be careful that I’m not jumping to the wrong conclusions by reading statistics.
There is of course the old proverbial problem as well, what causes what… Clearly porn, and some types of porn more than others, reinforce a degrading view of women.
However, I know a male who really seems to hate women in a way that is at times astounding (I’m being purposefully vague here), and while he is also a porn addict, I also know his story well enough to know that something else in his life created his distorted view of women. He is honestly someone that seeks out porn because it reinforces hateful views he learned elsewhere. So while I don’t feel the porn is helping anything in that situation, and likely makes it worse, simply eliminating the porn wouldn’t address the underlying issues, which are worse and far more disturbing.
There is also to me a tricky, slippery slope in defining porn. Clearly most of us if confronted with a particularly degrading video could point to it and say “that’s porn!” But most of also don’t view nudity in and of itself as a problem. I’m an artist, I like to paint nudes (I also paint nudes of varying sizes, resulting in one of my paintings being dubbed “the big butt painting”). Anyway, the point was that I find the human form in many variations to be beautiful and inspiring, and I don’t necessarily think we need to retreat into a realm where nudity is taboo again. However, when I was in school another student did say that as a Christian he was offended by my art and found it pornographic. So while I think we can all identify the extreme ends of the spectrum in porn vs. art, there’s a whole middle ground that is largely subjective and a matter of personal taste.
I’m also in the unique position of knowing way too much about one male who attacked me…. (long story and there’s a half-assed apology involved which was as much denial and excuse making as apology, which had been demanded by his priest, etc.)…. Anyway, he was not someone who viewed or owned porn, in fact he found it offensive. So, I’m not going to argue that porn, particularly violent or especially degrading porn, contributes to the dangers women face in our culture, but the underlying attitudes, contempt toward women, the view that men are not in control of their impulses, that women are intended to be controlled and dominated by men… Those attitudes can and do exist independent of porn. When those underlying attitudes are fueled also by drug and alcohol use or are passed down and reinforced through generations, there can be great danger in that too.
So I guess I don’t know where I stand. Confusing topic, really.
May 25th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
NoPornNorthampton.org provides a large library of articles that address many of the issues raised here. You may also download a free book on the subject by Diana Russell at http://nopornnorthampton.org/2007/01/25/free-book-download-diana-russell-against-pornography-explicit.aspx
Experiments suggest that people’s attitudes about sex, rape, relationships and women are quite changeable. Porn generally changes these attitudes in a harmful direction, but this can be reversed through education that combats porn myths, such as that women enjoy being forced to do various sexual acts. Please see, for example, http://nopornnorthampton.org/2007/01/14/male-attitudes-about-rape-can-be-learned-and-unlearned.aspx
The analogy between porn’s rapacious attitudes towards women and people’s rapacious attitudes towards the planet is apt. D.A. Clarke draws the connection in “Consuming Passions”:
“To accept that the costs borne by strangers in far-off lands make our way of life unaffordable implies that we learn to respect those people and that we become ashamed of living at their expense; to accept that we are responsible for the damage that we do to our soil, water, and air means that we learn to clean up after ourselves; to accept that resources are precious and should not be wasted is to learn that the world is not a consumable, an expendable - and neither are its people. To accept that our way of life is costing too much means accepting less: giving up excess, resolving to live within our means. Shoving off the costs of your behaviour onto others, expecting someone else to clean up your mess, blowing away the household economy with irresponsible spending, treating other people as objects to be used and discarded: are these not some of the traits for which feminists have persistently criticised and confronted men, the habits of privilege and arrogance?”
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/SexualFascism/dc/node17.html#SECTION000170000000000000000
It is our goal to collect and call attention to the overwhelming evidence that porn and adult enterprises cause harm, to get closer to a ‘tipping point’ in public opinion.
May 26th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Thanks for sharing those resources, NoPornNorthampton. I want to stress the importance of educating oneself about this issue which, like race, is one of those topics that people tend to feel they have enough information about while actually being woefully uninformed.
Let me recommend again Making Violence Sexy, which is edited and introduced by Diana Russell but which also includes testimonies from numerous survivors of the pornography industry as well as an extraordinary essay by John Stoltenberg, called “Pornography and Freedom,” which directly addresses not only many of the common defenses of pornography but also the insidious pervasiveness of sexualized violence within the construct of male supremacy.
Another excellent resource on this topic is Carol Adams’ followup to The Sexual Politics of Meat, called The Pornography of Meat. That’s a book that ought to be read both by animal liberationists who aren’t sure about pornography and by feminists who haven’t fully thought through the subject of meat.
Now to some of the questions that have been raised, explicitly or implicitly, in the comments to this post. The words “slippery slope” tell me that the question of censorship is lurking in the background. People tend to dismiss critiques of pornography by means of the implicit syllogism “Censorship is bad therefore pornography can’t be harmful.” Stated that plainly, the logical fallacy is evident. The factual question of whether or not pornography harms women is quite separate from the questions of value and strategy that come into play when determining what ought to be done about it if it is harmful.
I guess this censorship question is also one of the reasons that we tend also to deny the strong evidence that violence in media does indeed lead people to behave more violently. As New Scientist magazine (which I read religiously) reported in a recent cover story, “Scientific confidence in the detrimental effects of media violence has only increased over time.” As with porn, study after study after study add up to as-close-to-certainty-as-science-can-get and yet we continue to question it in part, I suppose, because we cannot imagine creative solutions that do not involve government censorship.
(In fact, there are quite a few things to do that don’t involve government censorship. I’m glad that NoPornNorthampton mentioned a few of them. Direct action and boycotts of vendors are a couple of others.)
There’s also the question of profit. Pornograpy is a multi-billion dollar industry built (literally) on the backs of women. The men who make that money aren’t going to give it up without a fight.
Profit drives both pornography and other kinds of violent media. But there’s another problem that comes up specifically in relation to pornography: We don’t really look at it.
Diana Russell writes, “Since I became engage with this issue in 1974, I have observed that many women find it too threatening and ugly to willingly acquaint themselves with the contents of pornography…. Heterosexual women in particular find that knowing the contents and understanding the meaning of pornography often alienates them from men because of the blatant women-hatred that pervades it. Combatting pornography requires that women must stop avoiding looking at it and instead must face the women-hatred it both expresses and fosters” (Making Violence Sexy, page 17).
As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been making myself look at the things that we don’t want to look at, including the icky details about pornography. After spending quite a bit of time poring over the actual evidence, it seems to me overwhelmingly clear that pornography harms women in a number of ways. First and most directly, it harms the women who appear in it, many of whom are not free agents. You’ve heard about the worldwide problem of women and children trafficked into sexual slavery in brothels? Did it not occur to you that some of those enslaved sex workers also appear in pornography? Indeed they do.
Even when protitutes who appear in pornograpy are not physically enslaved, they are often acting under extreme duress. Many are under the control of domestic abusers who threaten them with beatings or worse if they do not perform for the camera, and act like they like it. Still others are under extreme economic duress and/or addicted to drugs and believe themselves to have no other source of the income they need to survive.
So, many of the sex acts seen in pornography are in fact rapes, whether or not they are portrayed as such. This is true even of the so-called non-violent pornography that does not include overt degradation. When you buy pornography, chances are you’re buying rape.
Next comes the impact on other women. Experimental findings, survey research, testimonies of rapists, and testimonies of rape survivors all add up to the conclusion that pornography makes men more likely to rape. That doesn’t mean that every man who uses pornography commits rape, that every rapist uses pornography, or that some rapists who use pornography wouldn’t have raped otherwise. Rape is a multi-determined crime. Pornography isn’t the only factor driving the high rate of rape. Methane isn’t the only cause of global warming. To ignore pornography because other factors also contribute to violence against women is like ignoring methane because carbon dioxide also causes global warming.
Let’s get to Deb’s questions rooted in the article that she read by a sex worker claiming that, because she personally has not been harmed by the work that she chooses to do, pornography and other kinds of sex work are not harmful to women. In my experience knowing, living with, and loving women who were or had been sex workers, I can say, first, that what women say about sex work while they are still actively engaged in it is very different than what they say once they’ve been away from it for a few years and the defenses that they had to erect against aknowleding the harm to their bodies and psyches have had the chance to come down.
(I’ve also never met a sex worker who wasn’t a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which I think is often a factor for women who choose rather than are forced into sex work, since they were taught as girls that their primary value was as a sexual object. Participation in sex work tends to reaffirm that idea, thereby doing them pschological harm that they may not recognize as such.)
But let’s take Fuzzy Girl at her word and assume that she has not been in any way harmed by participation in sex work. That ’s lucky for her. I know lifelong smokers who haven’t gotten cancer. That doesn’t mean that smoking doesn’t cause cancer.
Sex work is an extremely dangerous occupation in which women ought not to participate, primarily for their own safety. Some researchers believe that murder is the number one cause of death for prostitutes. Sexual assault is the number one occupational hazard. I’ve never met a prostitute who hadn’t been raped at least once (by a John or a cop) and I’ve never met an erotic dancer who hadn’t been groped when she didn’t want to be groped (that’s sexual assault).
That said, shouldn’t a woman who truly wants to appear in pornography, be an erotic dancer, or otherwise participate in the objectification of women’s bodies be free to do so? Here we come to the difference between what one has a right to do and what is right to do. I would argue that any woman who truly has other choices ought not choose to participate in activities that make the rape of other women more likely.
Does that mean that I am anti-sex worker or anti-sex? Hardly! My views on this, long before I read the research, were forged by my profound love for specific women who I know to have been harmed by their participation in sex work. I want a world where things like that don’t happen to women like them and where no women feel like they have to sell their bodies to survive.
As to being anti-sex, well, read the first paragraph of my article “Gays at War” and see if you think that’s true of me. Seriously, this insulting accusation has so many problematic associations that I hardly know where to start. First of all, it’s often deployed as a thinly veiled kind of lesbian-bashing. Next, it’s almost always deployed by people who, like Fuzzy Girl, have a vested economic interest in defending the sex industry. Funny to think of her that way, isn’t it? But how different is she, really, from those industry-funded “scientists” who mock environmentalists while denying global warming?
May 26th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Thanks for this comment, pattrice. It definitely helped me start to get a grasp on the facets of the issue. I need to start to do some reading, but sometimes it helps me to understand the basics of several aspects of the issue first, so I can have some critical internal debate going while I start learning.
I’ve never seen any pornography, so it is true that it is something I have avoided knowing much about. But…well, I grew up with jokes about “debbie does dallas”, thanks to my name. It was never said meanly, but it is also a bit odd to feel tagged with a famous porn movie, just by virtue of a name.
I have some friends who are protective (for lack of a better word) of their “right” to watch and enjoy porn. These are women I’m talking about at the moment, too. They seem to be choosy in what they’ll watch, and though I don’t know anything at all about the movies they talk about, they seem to have researched and found producers who they are confident haven’t exploited the women involved. There is, of course, the question of whether that is possible. It is hard for me, since I respect these women, to really question them about it, especially since I know essentially nothing about it. So I’ve ignored it.
And, as you brought up, and as was brought up on a thread on a forum in one of the porn threads I’m thinking of, regardless of the producer’s ethics, the entire porn industry runs essentially on the backbone of the industry as a whole, which historically has exploited women. Alternative channels are essentially closed when it comes to porn, and so even the “good” producers will have to use resources that are tainted. (I’m saying “good” and “ethics” in the sense of repeating the opinion of others; I’m not actually defending them, just sort of taking at face value, for now, what others have said.)
Something that is related to me, and makes the lines indistinct, is the entertainment industry in general. There is objectification of women throughout. Music, film, theater, etc. It isn’t okay in any arena, but part of me wonders if the line we draw is quite as distinct as it feels. Is it sex that makes it pornography? I don’t think that is true. That is just my instinct, the easy obvious answer. I have to read up on the topic, by people who have spent time researching and thinking about this, and I will. These are just initial reactions.
As for the violence in the media, I am someone who hates TV. I haven’t ever personally owned a TV, and I refuse to live with one. I don’t even end up watching movies often, though that is out of forgetfulness, not a particular stance I’m taking. When I do watch movies or am shown a TV show, I always feel a bit shocked. Too much violence, too much …whatever. It always feels overdone, gratuitous, pointless. I ask others about it, and I always feel like I’m the only one who had that reaction, and I really do think it is because people simply get used to a certain amount of “extra” and always want more. They want to be “shocked and awed”, and they will cut their socializing with their friends in the reality of their lives to go home and watch reality tv…which is nothing like any reality most people I know have lived.
And I know that not everyone who watches TV is like this, I don’t mean to imply that or condemn people for watching TV. I just feel like I have a bit of an odd perspective, being relatively unplugged from what ends up forming a sort of collective unconscious, to steal a term from Jung. This actually goes back to childhood - people talk about cartoons they watched as kids, and I feel left out, because TV was limited in my home, and I was more interested in books anyway. I’m actually left out of a lot of conversations, and have been my whole life, because an oddly large percentage of conversations revolve around tv shows and commercials.
I’m a tangent girl, as neva knows! I rarely seem to have a direct point. But…this is a really good topic, pattrice, and I’m more aware of how much I need to read and learn and think about this. thanks for getting me started.
June 2nd, 2007 at 9:35 am
I notice that people are still clicking on this thread, so I’m going to continue the conversation about pornography. Deb, your most recent comment brings up two of the most vexing problems associated with the struggle against pornography: desire and the lack of solidarity among women.
Many people distinguish between pornography and erotica, considering erotica to be sexually-themed pictures or stories that do not depict and are not created via the exploitation, coercion, or degradation of any of the participants. But some feminists point out that pictorial “erotica” consisting of the filmed images of actual people always involves the objectification of those people. When you interact with those materials, you are literally interacting with the objectified bodies of others.
I would ask the women who enjoy some pornography: What is your relationship to the women in those images? Do you interact with them empathically as human beings or exploitatively as objects of pleasure? Looking at a woman in a pornographic film or photo, do you wonder what she was thinking? If she was cold or felt vulnerable being naked while surrounded by the clothed photographer and production assistants? If you are looking at an image of an actual sex act, do you wonder how it felt to be penetrated by somebody to whom you were not really attracted or to put your mouth on someone with whom you would not choose to be intimate were it not for your need for money?
Such questions are buzz killers. That’s a signal that it’s not possible to enjoy pornography without participating in the objectification of others.
And yet many women do enjoy it, some gleefully, many others reluctantly. Some women consume and defend the kinds of ostensibly nonviolent pornography sometimes classed as erotica. Many find themselves unwillingly aroused by pornography that depicts the degradation of women.
Both of these phenomena are linked, in my view, to lack of solidarity among women. I’m going to be crass and quote myself just because it’s easier than finding new words for something I’ve already said. In my recent interview in the Abolitionist-Online, I say:
“The chief complication in the struggle for women’s liberation is that the process of socialization occurs within patriarchal families, allying women with the men of their race, class, culture, and religion more strongly than with women of other groups. Meanwhile, within each group, traditions of all kinds conspire to kill solidarity among women. For example, girls in many cultures are encouraged to dream of their weddings as the highlight of their lives, thereby causing them to see marriage as the most valuable relationship and to perceive other females as competitors. All of this makes it very hard to organise women, within or across cultures, for their own liberation.”
That process of socialization also makes it unlikely that women looking at purportedly nonviolent pornography will be motivated to ask the kinds of empathic questions I raised above. More disturbingly, the process of socialization tends to sexualize subordination, training girls to swoon over rather than resist male aggression. I know it’s uncomfortable to think about it this way but the widespread sexual abuse of girl children is a large part of this process of socialization.
The sexualization of subordination, which has its deepest roots in patriarchal control of the reproduction of both women and animals, infuses our culture. That’s why I was surprised by those torture photos that most people found so shocking.
Quoting that Abolitionist interview again (sorry!):
” Nothing in those pictures can’t be found in relatively mainstream pornography: Women chained or tied up in “stress positions”… bound and naked women with their heads covered… women on leashes… all photographed for fun! That’s nothing new. And, of course, many of the women in such photos are captives, either literally enslaved by the international sex industry or putatively free but under the coercive control of violent men. I guess people were shocked by the photos from Iraq because the victims this time were men.
“And here we come to the reason why most analyses of these atrocities have been so inadequate: Because they treat sexualized torture as an exceptional event rather than as a logical extension of the regular rules under which women are everywhere and everyday abused. Whenever men want to thoroughly humiliate each other, they treat them like women. Similarly, whenever people want to degrade other people, they treat them like animals. And, because the exploitation of women and animals, originally and continually, revolves around the control of reproduction, the processes of treating men like women and treating people like animals is often highly sexualized.”
One thing I didn’t say: They took pictures of the torture! For fun!
And: Don’t think for a minute that lots and lots of people didn’t masturbate to those pictures.
All of which (I hope) helps to explain why I have come to see pornography as an urgent problem rather than just an interesting question.
Which brings me back to the question that motivated this post in the first place: What can be done to bring people to realize that (a) pornography does hurt women, both directly and indirectly and; (b) pornography both expresses and helps to perpetuate ideologies and practices that are at the root of our most urgent social and environmental problems?
June 6th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
You make some interesting comments Pattrice, and there surely is much truth in what you say. I don’t question that some porn is horribly degrading.
However, I can’t help but feel that your analysis is flawed in some respects.
One, you don’t address gay (male-on-male) porn, of which there is plenty. Interesting fact: a large number of men in gay porn are actually straight. However, as one porn star stated in an interview on Howard Stern, he could make $500 per each straight porn, or $5,000 for gay porn, so he chose the latter. As he stated it, it just wasn’t a big deal to him. He was even married and his wife would go on the set with him and give him performance pointers, such as how to give head. How does this fit in your paradigm (i.e., porn is all about men subjugating women)?
Two, you seem to take a paternalistic view toward both men and women who choose to work in porn. You feel that if they were as informed as you are, or didn’t need the money, they would not do it. But each person has at least two economic opportunities, right? So you can’t really say people are forced into porn. Rather, they make an economic decision, and decide among the alternatives, porn is the most appealing (or worst case scenario, the least unappealing). We all make these decisions. So some jobs involve performing sex acts, as opposed to digging a ditch, or picking up trash, or the life-threatening job of being a construction worker on a bridge or highrise.
Third, there are quite a few jobs that some people might find unpleasant, and some off it might involve touching people one is not attracted to. Does this mean we need to eliminate the pedicure industry? Therapeutic Masseurs? Not everyone necessarily thinks having someone touch their private areas is so fundamentally different from other parts of their bodies. Now I might agree that pedicures are useless, but people ought to have the freedom to do what they want, and not have others take a paternalistic view of their choices. As in saying to a porn actress, “Poor little girl, you just aren’t smart enough to make decisions for yourself, we need to eliminate your job.”
I remember when someone from Feminists for Animals Rights spoke at my school, and the presentation was focused the alleged connection between porn and the exploitation of animals. An intelligent, liberal minded woman (someone working toward her doctorate) open to animal rights, but who had worked as a stripper and was not opposed to porn or sex work, asked what argument the speaker had to offer for those who were not opposed to porn. The response was that anti-porn feminists were the “real” feminists, and that women not opposed to porn just didn’t comprehend the issue. I found it ironic that the feminist speaker took such a paternalistic, condescending view of the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent woman.
June 7th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Paul, I think you have misunderstood my points about women in pornography and other sex industries. Many are literally enslaved in the brothels into which women from low income nations are trafficked. Tens of thousands are trafficked into the USA every year. Many of them end up in pornography. As the testimony of both men and women involved in filming pornography attests, many other of the prostitutes who appear in pornography are under the control of violent pimps or drug dealers to whom they are endebted.
Thus, the proportion of women appearing in pornography who are truly doing so as free economic actors is relatively low. I do not at all take a paternalistic stance toward such women, I see them as ethical actors like myself and I challenge them to show more solidarity with other women by not participating in the objectification of women. I ask: Is this the right thing to do when you know that it may have hurtful repercussions for other women? When you know that there is an association between pornography and rape? Yes, you can make more money than you might at another occupation. You can make more money working for a tobacco company than you can teaching school. But, is it the right thing to do?
It’s always somewhat amazing to me that feminists are portrayed as paternalistic on this issue when it is feminists, and only feminists, who have listened to and heeded the words of the women trapped in and violated by the sex industries. The antiporn movement was motivated by such women and is still energized by them. Look up the organization called Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt (WHISPER) for example. But, somehow, the feminists who are speaking up on behalf of sex workers are portrayed as the enemies of sex workers. It’s maddening!
And, for the most part, it is only feminists who have taken the time to really read and digest all of the relevant research. I have heard dialogues such as the one you describe so many times. Generally, there is one person arguing, “it didn’t hurt me,” with the implication that this means that all of the research showing that it is hurtful to many women doesn’t matter. (Again, smoking doesn’t kill every smoker. That doesn’t mean that smoking doesn’t kill smokers and, to extend the analogy, those who breathe their second-hand smoke.) Then, typically, the issue gets framed as if the feminist is telling her that she can’t do whatever she wants with her body when, in fact, the feminist has been talking about the harm done by pornography but has not said a single word against women who participate in pornography.
While it’s never smart to take a patronizing tone when responding to questions, I can imagine that it must be frustrating to hear the same uninformed objections over and over again. (I know I felt that way when, as an anti-racist educator, I had to answer the same fact-free arguments against affirmative action over and over again.) Like race, pornography is one of those issues where everybody feels like an expert even when they have not done the research. When a woman who has done the research speaks with the authority of that knowledge, she is considered patronising.
Of course, you may be accurate in your characterization of that particular speaker as patronising. I wasn’t there so I don’t know. I do know, however, that women who speak calmly and with assurance about known facts about this issue, safe in the knowledge that one counter-example doesn’t counteract an entire body of evidence, are often perceived as patronising in a way that, for example, a speaker who continues to assert that global warming is real despite the existence of some past warmer years would not be.
That’s why I tend to want to throw myself down the stairs whenever such dialogues start. I have, as I said somewhere in this dialogue, known and loved many women who were involved in and hurt by sex work. [More of my personal history in this regard is disclosed in my article, "Truth Against Trash."] As calm as I may seem writing about these things, it tears me up to see the injuries of sex workers so easily dismissed. Again, virtually every sex worker, if she does it long enough, is sexually assaulted in the course of her work. Some researchers think that murder is the number one cause of death for prostitutes. It may be possible to dance at a club for a short time and come out unscathed but to do so and then deny the hurt that sex work does to so many other women, taking the side of the sex industry profiteers against the feminists who struggle against those who make their money literally off the backs of women, that’s not showing sisterhood in my book.
Coming back to your earlier points, I think that the critique of pornography as objectification holds true for gay male porn too. And we do see some of the same abuses within the industry. Certainly, runaway and throwaway gay male teens are vulnerable to the industry in much the same way as are their female peers. Speaking of teens, I’m very troubled by the gay male “barely 18″ pornography in which young men who look like children are filmed. Similarly, I have seen pornography that asserts that very young boys like to be violated by older men. Finally, the sadomasochistic tenor of much gay porn goes right to the broader issue I am trying to get us to talk about here: the sexualization of subordination, which I suspect is rooted in the fact that women and animals were first enslaved specifically for the purposes of controlling reproduction.
June 7th, 2007 at 11:03 am
[Paul, I think you have misunderstood my points about women in pornography and other sex industries. Many are literally enslaved in the brothels into which women from low income nations are trafficked. Tens of thousands are trafficked into the USA every year.]
I don’t know about this statistic. Tens of thousands? Well yes, that would be a problem. However, we have also seen prosecutions where people have kept undocumented domestic workers (maids and nannies) in virtual slavery. But this has little relevance to whether one should be a domestic worker or nanny if they want, or that someone should be able to hire one. Also, women are being imported and “trafficked” to be wives, but that by itself does not make marriage wrong. You have also mentioned rape in the sex industry, but there is rape within dating and marriages, that does not make dating and marriages wrong (furthermore, rape of sex workers would be greatly reduced if prostitution were legal so that sex workers could feel safe in reporting rape.)
[Thus, the proportion of women appearing in pornography who are truly doing so as free economic actors is relatively low.]
This is an unsupported statistic/conclusion. I won’t deny that there are some women (and men) who may be involuntarily employed in the sex industry, but saying this is the rule rather than the exception is not empirically true.
[When you know that there is an association between pornography and rape?]
I think this too, is the manipulation of statistics. We have all heard the statistic, but without a valid control group it’s hard to say. Also, what type of porn are we taking about? Has the type of porn been controlled as a variable? If there is a correlation (i.e., men who rape are more likely to have watched porn), you may well find that something else leads to both observed factors.
[Then, typically, the issue gets framed as if the feminist is telling her that she can’t do whatever she wants with her body when, in fact, the feminist has been talking about the harm done by pornography but has not said a single word against women who participate in pornography.]
Well as you can see I come at this (as I do with most issues) from a libertarian perspective. If participating in porn harms other women, it is a very indirect link. I tend to think (straight) porn reflects culture and attitudes toward women, rather than porn causing attitudes toward women.
[As calm as I may seem writing about these things, it tears me up to see the injuries of sex workers so easily dismissed.]
You are passionate about this topic, that is good.
[Again, virtually every sex worker, if she does it long enough, is sexually assaulted in the course of her work.]
I would argue that this occurs more rarely in parts of the country where sex work is legalized (such as brothels in Nevada). We should expect that is sexual assault is a greater risk working in prostitution than walking down the street or going on a date, but making prostitutes criminals enhances the risk.
[Some researchers think that murder is the number one cause of death for prostitutes.]
You may be right, serial killers are opportunistic and do prey upon vulnerable people, but again, when we make prostitutes sneak around illegally and go with strange men to secluded areas so as to not be caught, we make them vulnerable.
[It may be possible to dance at a club for a short time and come out unscathed but to do so and then deny the hurt that sex work does to so many other women,]
I have been to strip clubs on a couple occasions, and I find them absurd because the men there are so stupid and so easily parted with their money. Then women make the men think they are interested, and men give them money, and I have heard strippers interviewed who say that in higher income places they get significant gifts, sometimes thousands of dollars (and in one case, a luxury vehicle). I can’t help having thought sometimes, who is preying on whom? These guys are morons. But it’s their money, let them foolishly do as they please.
[taking the side of the sex industry profiteers against the feminists who struggle against those who make their money literally off the backs of women, that’s not showing sisterhood in my book.]
I don’t think it is literally off the backs of other women, at best it is an indirect causal link that, in my opinion any way, does not change my libertarian tendencies to just let people do whatever they want so long as do not directly harm others. You can prove more direct harm, for instance, that alcohol kills innocent people via drunk drivers, but even then, I think we need to deal more aggressively with drunk driving, not drinking by consenting adults (by the way, I do not drink alcohol or do drugs, I don’t have any self interest in the matter other that to prefer to live in a free but imperfect world so that *I* can be left alone along with everyone else).
[Coming back to your earlier points, I think that the critique of pornography as objectification holds true for gay male porn too. And we do see some of the same abuses within the industry. Certainly, runaway and throwaway gay male teens are vulnerable to the industry in much the same way as are their female peers. Speaking of teens, I’m very troubled by the gay male “barely 18″ pornography in which young men who look like children are filmed. Similarly, I have seen pornography that asserts that very young boys like to be violated by older men. Finally, the sadomasochistic tenor of much gay porn goes right to the broader issue I am trying to get us to talk about here: the sexualization of subordination, which I suspect is rooted in the fact that women and animals were first enslaved specifically for the purposes of controlling reproduction.]
Thanks for addressing this. I am troubled with what I sometimes see as gender-neutral issues being advocated specifically for the benefit of women with the view that men are the problem. In my line of work I have dealt with, for instance, much female-on-male domestic violence (more common than most people think, and few take it seriously) as well as female-on-female domestic violence. I would agree that statistically speaking, male-on-female DV is the most serious, but portraying it as solely an issue where men beat up women does not completely deal with the issue.
June 8th, 2007 at 8:27 am
I wanted to come back to this and leave additional comments.
You are right that I really don’t know anything about porn. I’ve avoided it for a long time because I have this feeling it would set off a really bad reaction in me. Likewise, while I have read essays from academics both pro and anti-porn, I’ve avoided more in depth research for the same reason.
Also, though I have had several friends who stripped, I have never even been inside a strip club. It is somewhat easy in our culture to block out these things, particularly for people like me who feel that getting too emotional because an image might induce flashbacks could lead to a depression that might set me back a great deal. It is easier to turn away.
Rather than do the tough research that you’ve been doing I did something totally unscientific and polled my friends. What I found was not entirely what I expected. Out of the women I talked to there were a few that were pro-porn, and a few that were anti-porn and more fell in the middle, being fairly unsure but not really knowing much about porn. Nearly everyone agreed that some types of porn are inherently harmful and should be stopped. Only one woman suggested that rape themed porn, so long as nobody is forced to participate, and it’s all an act, was ok with her, though not something she personally would be into. Most had never even heard of rape porn. Some doubted its existence.
However, one woman blamed the break up of her marriage at least partly on her husband’s addiction to porn in general and rape porn in particular. She was the only person I spoke with who had ever seen rape porn first hand. She did say her ex-husband had not been violent with her, but his taste for rape porn was deeply disturbing to her, and the time and money he spent on porn helped the deterioration of their relationship. It was sad to hear, and sadder to know that if this happened to one person, it has probably happened to more. However, it is still hard to know whether limiting his access to porn would have saved their relationship. He may have had an addictive personality and if it hadn’t been porn, perhaps he would have gambled compulsively. It’s hard to say.
None of my friends were opposed to “porn” that was essentially magazine pictures of nude women–the discussion centered around videos and more hard core things. But this shows my lack of understanding on the basic discussion as the word porn covers a wide range of things from the fairly mundane to the really scary.
The discussion got kind of interesting to me when we got into the idea that younger males, boys even, might be prevented from “normal development” and forming meaningful relationships from too much exposure to porn. Also, now that we’re in the computer age, almost anyone can get anything, no matter how sick, online pretty easily. So the discussion of how to keep very young children away from porn is really difficult.
I know that my only real exposure to porn was unwilling exposure when I was very young, maybe 6 or 7. Most of it I don’t even remember, though some of it frightened me a great deal. And in this case we’re only talking about magazines. I can’t imagine what it would do to a child to see some of the stuff that’s only a mouse click away, or in some cases is downloaded through virus onto computers and plays on its own, exposing whoever is at the computer to disturbing images.
I do think part of the problem in the discussion though is that when we hear anti-porn we think of conservative Christians draping the statue of justice so that nobody has to glimpse a fairly old marble nipple on a work of art. So given the seeming insanity on the far right, many liberal people may err too far on the side of tolerating everything, even things that might be offensive or harmful.
June 8th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
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