Talking about talking about pornography

“If I go to the debate on pornography, I’ll just fume about the fact that everyone’s got stupid analysis but me.” I said that a couple of months ago, and I was joking, but only a little bit.

Feminist discussions on sexually explicit material tend to be heated, and change no-one’s mind. The latest discussions on The Hand Mirror, another blog I write on, have followed this pattern. I want to explore why.

Media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold (which is a mouthful, but I think more precise than ‘pornography’) sits at an intersection: Desire, sex, the construction of men’s sexuality, the construction of women’s sexuality, bodies, work, the role of the state, objectification, the creation of rape culture and commodification (and much more, those are just what’s on top for me).

It only takes small differences in feminists’ analysis, weighting or experience of a couple of these before they’re coming at the issue that we call ‘pornography’ from completely different angles.

As well as making the issue complicated, these many facets also mean that those no such thing as a disinterested party. Everyone has a stake in what is being discussed, but what is most triggering about the discussion about sexually explicit material varies widely.

To simplify one example more than is really justified: discussions of sexually explicit material may trigger some women’s experiences of having their sexuality and desire denied, while the same discussion might trigger other women’s experience of having other people’s sexuality or desire forced on them. (I don’t mean this as a dichotomy, just an example of the sorts of talking past that can happen in these discussions).

I think it’s very difficult even to talk about, or articulate any of this, because the vocabulary we have around sexually explicit media is so limited. The distinctions I think need to be made about are numerous and complex:
Was it made by an individual expressing their personal desires?
Was it made to be bought and sold?
Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?
Does it normalise misogynist ideas about women, women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, or sex?
Do they normalise racist ideas about any group of women or men, their bodies or sexuality?
Does it normalise a limited view of human sex or sexuality?
How do the ideas it contains interact with rape culture?
Does it normalise a particular type of body?

Now the answer to most mass-produced mainstream pornography from Ralph to are yes (or no depending on the question). But my point is that these are different questions, and they’re different again from:

What do we do about it all? What do we expect other organisation, or the state to do about it all?

Those are just my questions, I’m sure other people have different ones (I’m sure I’d have different ones if I wrote them on a different day, after reading different material). Unless we are clear about what exactly we’re talking about, unless we actively try and overcome the difficulties I’ve outlined, we’ll never have anything useful to say.

I wrote this post – I decided to continue talking about pornography, despite my cynicism, because I think it’s important. I think untangling these threads, understanding the role of sexually explicit material in women’s oppression is vital. I think the first answer to the question: ‘what is to be done?’ Is that we have to figure out how to talk about this.

The comments on this post are open to feminists, and feminist allies only (I appear to have forgotten how to do the rule).

This entry posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Sex work, porn, etc. Bookmark the permalink. 

37 Responses to Talking about talking about pornography

  1. 1
    Myca says:

    Was it made by an individual expressing their personal desires?
    Was it made to be bought and sold?
    Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?
    Does it normalise misogynist ideas about women, women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, or sex?
    Do they normalise racist ideas about any group of women or men, their bodies or sexuality?
    Does it normalise a limited view of human sex or sexuality?
    How do the ideas it contains interact with rape culture?
    Does it normalise a particular type of body?

    I just wanted to say thanks, and that I think these are exactly the right kinds of questions to ask.

    Part of what makes the discussion so difficult modern day is that since the rise of the internet, we’re just seeing so much more pornography across the board that we’re seeing way more of the ‘bad’ stuff and way more of the ‘good’ stuff. Way more misogynist, exploitation and way more self-produced, non-corporate, body empowering stuff.

    For me, a lot of it can kind of be boiled down to asking the question: Is ‘media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal’ inherently bad? That is, beyond all the problems with the ‘how’ of it, is there a problem with ‘it’ itself?

    —Myca

  2. 2
    PG says:

    I have run into the problem in stating my objections to pornography in which, e.g., a woman calls herself a slut and whore, that sometimes people take this as one’s saying that their own sex lives must involve the degradation of women if they have participated in a similar practice. I think this is part of what makes discussions of pornography so touchy: a criticism of having certain practices reified by a decontextualized half-hour portrayal by paid actors comes across to some people as a criticism of them for having engaged in similar practices.

    ETA: This is especially true with people who have been in BDSM relationships or who enjoy that kind of sex, whether as a necessity for a fulfilling sex life or just as an occasional thing. It seems very difficult for most porn to create a convincing image of submission by women that is genuinely desired by those women in pursuit of their own sexual fulfillment, rather than as just one more image of women in a subordinate position.

  3. 3
    HazelStone says:

    “Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?”
    I’d like to know how this is truly possible in the Patriarchy.

    “Does it normalise misogynist ideas about women, women’s sexuality, women’s bodies, or sex?”
    Again as long as we live in the Patriarchy, this is the message of all porn. You can’t just “opt out” of being degraded and objectified in porn because you are some sort of enlightened being.*

    How can you ever ensure that what you are watching (if you are watching) is not another victim of sexual abuse recapitulating that abuse? Or an addict? Or just a desperate person who has been coerced in some way. You can’t. You can hope for that, or rationalize, but you can’t really know.

    * I placing the onus of this on the pronographers, not the sex workers (who like all of us are doing the best they can to get by).

  4. 4
    PG says:

    HazelStone,

    I think you understimate what it is possible for us to know as porn consumers, just as with consumers of anything else. Just as people buying shoes can avoid sweatshop companies, or people buying meat can stick to those farms with humane treatment of animals, people can choose to patronize only porn producers whom they feel they can trust. E.g., with regard to consent I feel Kink.com is pretty good; I’ve talked about it with a feminist acquaintance who knows people working there, and she vouches for their being non-exploitative. The problem is that even if the people working there are all delighted to participate in the depictions of women being “punished,” that doesn’t change the effect those depictions have on our society. (Not endorsing the views expressed in the linked post, just pointing out that one can object to porn even if it’s produced in a workers’ paradise.)

  5. 5
    Emily says:

    I wonder what the pros and cons are/would be of advocating that BDSM type porn include a description or recording (depending on what format the porn is in) of the negotiation of boundaries that occurs in real life BDSM relationships (or should). That’s something that I think could mitigate the message. I think there is a difference between engaging in scenes after having had such a negotiation and showing the scenes without any indication that that type of negotiation has occurred.

  6. 6
    Myca says:

    I wonder what the pros and cons are/would be of advocating that BDSM type porn include a description or recording (depending on what format the porn is in) of the negotiation of boundaries that occurs in real life BDSM relationships (or should).

    My understanding is that this is something Kink.com does, actually.

    —Myca

  7. 7
    PG says:

    Yes, Kink.com has been documented as doing that sort of thing:

    By early February, a fraction of the basement had been readied for a first official shoot. They were filming an update for the site Men In Pain. It would feature two players billed as Wild Bill and Claire Adams. Adams, who is 25, gave up on a philosophy degree to become a bondage rigger. (Last year, she tied up the actor Peter Sarsgaard for a bondage-themed spread in Vanity Fair.) She wore a fishnet top and a miniature barbell through each nipple.

    She laid her leather jacket over a concrete slab, and she and Bill sat down, nuzzling. Then she looked into the camera and, very cordially, spoke: “I’m Claire Adams.” “And I’m Wild Bill.” “And welcome to a very special Men In Pain update.” Just like that, like the opener of some fireside holiday special. They interviewed each other. She asked if there was anything she shouldn’t do, any ground rules. “I don’t like my ears being slapped,” he said.

    They started on an old stage in the armory gymnasium, rundown to the point of missing its floorboards entirely and gathering trash — a Coke case, a poster advertising youth boxing classes once held here — in the underpinnings. There, Wild Bill was tied to a column and flogged. (There are rarely story lines in Kink’s porn, and acting is discouraged.) His crotch was slapped. Later, in the boiler room, he would be kicked and suspended from the ceiling on his back, like a hairy spider. In between takes, after Wild Bill mentioned getting a little back pain, Adams would adjust the cat’s-cradle of ropes.

  8. 8
    chingona says:

    All these questions get at why I generally stay out of discussions of pornography, even though I’ve done a lot of thinking about feminism and pornography over the last couple years. There’s a conversation I’d like to have about it, but I almost always hate having the conversation that ends up occurring. (And of course, it’s certainly possible the discussion I want to have actually isn’t the interesting or relevant one, except to me.)

    I think PG’s right that people don’t like to have their own sex lives held up as examples of degradation and oppression. Also, a tremendous number of people use pornography, and we don’t want to think that what gets us hot is problematic, even though in some cases it’s precisely that it is problematic that makes it hot. Sex can be weird like that.

    Twisty from IBTP has said on a number of occasions that in the post-patriarchy, porn will be as interesting as watching someone else’s podiatry procedure. I don’t agree with that. Presumably people will still like sex, and images of sex will still arouse people, just like an appealing photograph of food might make you hungry. But I’ve reached a point where I’m pretty uncomfortable with most porn, even the supposedly “good” or “feminist” porn.

    Myca asked:

    Is ‘media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal’ inherently bad? That is, beyond all the problems with the ‘how’ of it, is there a problem with ‘it’ itself?

    I really want the answer to be no, it’s not inherently bad, but the place I’m at now is that in our current cultural/social context, I think the answer is yes or yes most of the time. Which is not meant as an attack or an indictment on those who use porn or make porn or who answer these questions differently. It’s just that no matter how good your intentions or how ethical your practices, the product still ends up in our misogynist culture. To boil the question down even further: Is sex ever “just sex”?

  9. 9
    Sailorman says:

    Media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold

    That’s an excellent definition, especially for this conversation, I think.

    HazelStone Writes:
    June 18th, 2009 at 9:13 am

    “Did everyone involve in making it give genuine consent?”
    I’d like to know how this is truly possible in the Patriarchy.

    Are you using your own definition of porn, or the definition Maia used? hers is quite broad, and appears to include written erotica. It seems fairly simple to imagine a fully consensual author; they’re not even having sex.

    Sex-in-pictures-wise, start with the small stuff and work up. I’ll start with “solo” (one subject) porn pictures:

    First, you have people who are sexual.
    Second, you have them making media for their own arousal.
    Third, you have them making media for their own arousal, and involving third parties in production of that media.
    Finally, you have them making media for their own arousal, involving third parties in production, and making it to sell.

    Where in that list, in your view, does consent become impossible?

    (there would be a similar list for multiparty porn.)

  10. 10
    PG says:

    I’m also not clear if this discussion is meant to be constrained to hetero porn (i.e. either depicting hetero sex or targeted to hetero men, e.g. faux-lesbian porn), because while the Patriarchy of course has some effect on gay men’s self-concepts, sexuality and porn, I am not sure why the Patriarchy would prevent gay men from being able to give real consent.

  11. 11
    Mandolin says:

    PG — I imagine the answer to that question varies by who’s answering it and what they think. I can come up with feminist rhetoric to back up either supporting meaningful consent, or denying it, but if you wanted to support it you’d go the kyriarchy route, and note the consistent historical parallels between the treatment of female and gay male sexuality and how those were linked through identical systems to the simultaneous oppression of women and gay men.

    I’m not going to make the argument, though, because I’m not going to make an argument against meaningful consent for women either, which means I’m not even going to establish the point A that would be necessary to get us to point F (point G?). But it would follow those basic formal lines, I imagine.

  12. 12
    Jeff Fecke says:

    Is ‘media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal’ inherently bad? That is, beyond all the problems with the ‘how’ of it, is there a problem with ‘it’ itself?

    I think that’s the base question here, and I think the answer is that it doesn’t really matter, because the sex drive is powerful enough that humans will create art based around it as long as we are able. The question is not whether erotica and pornography will be created, but how to make them less troubling.

    From my perspective, I think there is the possibility for new technology to make pornography much more egalitarian, with true consent* and a focus on sex that is pleasurable for all parties involved. Indeed, I hope that is the direction we’re going, because for me, “traditional” pornography, with its emphasis on degrading women, its treatment of actors as nothing so much as commodities, and its laser-focus on what men want is almost completely divorced from what differentiates sex from masturbation, that being that there are at least two human beings involved in it.

    *I reject the notion that there can be no consent in a patriarchal system, as I believe that position minimizes the agency of women.

  13. 13
    PG says:

    Mandolin,

    But women were oppressed predominately by the men who wanted to have sex with them (i.e. by hetero men), whereas gay men were oppressed predominately by those same hetero men. In other words, women’s oppression by men is difficult to extricate from the sexual relationship between women and men (though many many individuals have non-oppressive hetero relationships), whereas gay men’s oppression doesn’t clearly have much to do with a sexual relationship between them and the oppressor class. When a woman is being solicited to participate in porn, it’s almost always by the oppressor class: the actors who behave dominantly or whose pleasure is the focus, the crew, the director, the producer, the investors, the audience, will be mostly men. I don’t think this is true for a gay man solicited to participate in porn: he will be with other gay men, and the audience is other gay men.

    That’s something I sort of envy about same-sex relationships; they seem less tainted by the history between men and women. At least, my gay and lesbian friends agonize a lot less about leaving paid work and having the primary domestic role than my female hetero friends do. There doesn’t seem to be as much of a concern that one is perpetuating inequities by playing a traditional gender role.

  14. 14
    Victoria says:

    Thank you Maia for that list of questions, they relate to most of the issues I think about but are articulated in a much clearer fashion.

    I just wanted to draw attention to a post on the blog Fourth Wave Feminism about a perspective/feminist identity regarding pornographies that tries to be the middle ground between anti-porn and sex-positive perspectives:

    http://www.fourthwavefeminism.com/2009/01/sexuality-feminism.html

    I have articulated my personal interpretations of ‘sexuality feminism’ further in my own studies since seeing that post back in January and want to bring up one particular point related to this post:
    It’s really difficult to call anything ‘porn’ or ‘pornography’ these days. Since the explosion of ‘porn’ on the internet, there pretty much is ‘porn’ related to any conceivable topic (Rule 34 anyone?). Often what people are referring to when they say ‘porn’ is mainstream pornography, but even with that there are the different media subsets of magazine, photography/still, video, and now internet. I believe feminists, in all their varying takes on ‘porn’, need to start contextualizing ‘porn’ itself if we want to have discussion that will change anything given the situation (i.e. “the internet is for porn”). There’s sexual content all over the spectrum from extremely violent such as snuff films to rape fantasies to BDSM to every kind of kink imaginable to fetish to soft-core to hard-core to sci-fi to hentai to specific fantasies to three/four/five-somes to orgies to mostly masturbation to voyeuristic to historical to feminist… The reason I listed all of those out (and that’s only a small fraction of what I can come up with) is to show that yes, the patriarchy manifests itself in all of them especially since the ‘porn’ industry is overwhelmingly controlled by men, but also that they are all different in many ways.

    My worry with saying that can never be ‘feminist’ porn is that 1-we start playing the my-definition-is-more-correct-than-your-definition game (when feminism is such a subjective identity/topic/perspective, especially when it comes to porn) and 2-we also ignore the need to contextualize sexualities, especially womens’ sexuality that is often incorrectly over-simplified into the double standard and madonna-whore complexes, when again, all women are not the same sexually or have the same orientation, preferences, fantasies, or desires.
    I liked Maia’s definition of ‘pornography’ – “media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold” – but unless feminism becomes deeply interconnected with ending consumerist culture and capitalism (which in some cases it is and in others it is not), then all pornographies must be denied by women (and most if not all products in our patriarchal consumerist culture too, through that argumentation)…and that quite frankly won’t solve at least the immediate problem completely either and is, from my perspective, denying some realm and (contextualized) relationship between women and sexuality, albeit produced sexuality.

  15. 15
    chingona says:

    *I reject the notion that there can be no consent in a patriarchal system, as I believe that position minimizes the agency of women.

    I hope this isn’t a derail, but since the issue of meaningful consent came up so quickly, the argument would be no, women do not have agency in a patriarchy. I happen to agree with you – I think women still have agency, I think everyone has agency, though that agency can be limited by a variety of factors – but to say that you reject the idea that there’s no consent because that position minimizes agency kind of misses the point. It’s more that you believe there can be consent because you believe women have agency.

    This probably sounds really nit-picky, but since one of the topics of the post is how we end up talking past each other, I wanted to point that out.

  16. I have been, as you can tell, pretty much obsessed with what’s going on in Iran these days, but I need to drop in here, because porn is something I have written about and given papers on and so it’s a topic I care about. I say that simply by way of apologizing ahead of time if, once I post this comment, I don’t make it back to answer any replies. Anyway, answer to Myca’s question:

    Is ‘media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal’ inherently bad? That is, beyond all the problems with the ‘how’ of it, is there a problem with ‘it’ itself?

    chingona wrote:

    I really want the answer to be no, it’s not inherently bad, but the place I’m at now is that in our current cultural/social context, I think the answer is yes or yes most of the time. Which is not meant as an attack or an indictment on those who use porn or make porn or who answer these questions differently. It’s just that no matter how good your intentions or how ethical your practices, the product still ends up in our misogynist culture. To boil the question down even further: Is sex ever “just sex”?

    This resonates with me in all kinds of different ways that I don’t have the time to go into, so I just want to say this: If the response to the reality of the patriarchal context is that people stop producing sexually explicit texts/images altogether, then the patriarchy will have won. We need people to produce images/texts that challenge the prevailing norms, because it is only through the production of those images/texts that we will develop a language with which to speak/show sex, and speak/show about sex, differently, in a way that is not in keeping with the patriarchy. This does not mean that these new, different images will not be co-opted. Of course they will. But progressive speech, images, ideas, texts are always going to be co-opted when they are produced within the system that they set themselves against. I am not saying, chingona, that you do not think/know this already. I just needed to say it. If I have time, I will come back and say more.

  17. 17
    Dianne says:

    My personal response to visual porn ranges from indifference to disgust. And I agree that it is often degrading, can normalize a limited view of human sexuality, misogynist ideas, very limited body types as “normal”, etc. However, since virtually all mainstream media does this, sometimes more overtly or extremely than porn per se, why single out pornography as a problem? I’ve seen it claimed that sexually related images don’t generally provoke violence against women (or men) but that images of women being treated as less than human do, even if they have few or no sexual connotations. So maybe old reruns are more damaging than porn.

    Another question: In a society without sexism, if one could exist, would porn be nonexistant or just different? Or more or less the same but with different connotations?

  18. 18
    Jeff Fecke says:

    However, since virtually all mainstream media does this, sometimes more overtly or extremely than porn per se, why single out pornography as a problem?

    That’s a fascinating question. I think the answer lies in the worst of mainstream porn, which is (I am given to understand, as I really disdain mainstream porn) heavily into the degradation at an almost purely hateful level. That is not, however, to say that this is representative of all porn, any more than “Two and a Half Men” is representative of all television. There is erotica that is created for women by women, pornography that is produced by exhibitionist couples who are turned on by showing off their mutual good time, pornography that treats women’s interests and needs a feature, not a bug, of sex. These are outside the mainstream, but they do exist, and I think it’s important to remember that as with all media, there is severely troubling stuff and stuff that’s relatively benign, even positive.

    Another question: In a society without sexism, if one could exist, would porn be nonexistant or just different? Or more or less the same but with different connotations?

    Another fascinating question. I believe the answer is a decisive yes; women and men alike are fascinated with sex for all the obvious reasons, and while more pornography has been produced by men over the years, that’s for the same reason that more novels or films or plays have been produced by men — systemic sexism has kept women from parity on the creative side. Indeed, as women gain more equality, we have seen not an elimination of pornography, but an explosion of it. Part of that is technological, but part of that is the fact that women are more encouraged now than ever to view their sex drives as normal, and lust as something they should be free to express on their own terms.

    As society grows more egalitarian, I would expect that we will see the tenor of pornography change, and obviously some of the baggage surrounding it will fall away.

  19. 19
    chingona says:

    Jeff,

    You’ve mentioned the possibilities presented by technology in both your comments. Could you explain a little more what you mean? How technology makes porn more egalitarian?

  20. 20
    Charles S says:

    [fragmentary post deleted]

  21. 21
    Maia says:

    Thanks for all the interesting thoughts.

    I think it’s interesting the different directions people come at hte concept of ‘meaningful consent’. When I wrote that I was primarily thinking of the impossibility of giving meaningful consent to any labour if labour is all you have to trade for your subsistance (I don’t know why but as soon as I start talking about pornography I sound like a Marxist). I have quite a complicated analysis of this, which probably needs a full post to explain. But I don’t think patriarchy is the only reason people can’t give meaningful consent.

    I agree with Hazelstone’s basic point that you can’t know, when buying commodified sexual images, whether those involved in creating it gave meaningful consent. Given my experience as a union organiser I am very sceptical of people’s ability to buy ethically made anything. Often part of sex workers job is to seem really really enthusiastic. Certainly where my friends have worked, part of what the clients have been looking for is people who were really into sex (and I have a whole thought about that, but in the meantime I’m just going to express it in terms of the Dollhouse – is a client who hires a doll so they can have mutally satisfying consensual sex, any less creepy than someone who hires a doll to rape her).

    Also maybe our idea of what meaningful consent is is different. Unlike Jeff, I think there are lots of instances where you have agency, but do not give meaningful consent. So to suggest that someone can’t give meaningful consent is not denying them agency (choosing the least worse survival strategy is agency, but that doesn’t mean you’re giving meaningful consent

    The discussion about ‘is material that is designed to arouse’ inherently problematic, is really interesting to me. One of the challenges in all this, I think, is that it is impossible to know what sexuality would be like in a free and equal society. I think it would be very different, but I think in ways we probably can’t even conceptualise.

    I would go so far as to say I think the commodification of material designed to arouse is probably inherently a bad thing, but then I’m against commodification of anything (sounding like a Marxist again). I’d go further than that is that the commodification of arousal has implications for sex and desire, as well as for commodofication.

    Part of the issue – to look at Sailorman’s division which might work for some media. Is that commodified material designed to be arouse doesn’t have to start from anyone’s sexuality or desire. It starts from a desire to get money. There is no “first you have people who are sexual” – there is “first you have people with capital who wish to make more capital”

    And I think that Dianne’s question (which I meant to address in this post and forgot) about whether sexually explicit material is any different from other media is an important one. Because the television comparison is apt – there’s a lot of normalising certain sorts of sexuality and bodies and misogyny in television.

    But even if we decide that there is no difference, I think it’s clear that hte debate over pornography is different from the debate over television (and I say this as osmeone who has written a lot about television).

    I haven’t really thought this through, but where I’d place the difference, to the extent that there is one. Is that sexually explicit material that is bought and sold is on some levels about commodifying sexuality and desire.

  22. 22
    Simple Truth says:

    When I saw this thread, it reminded me of an article I had just read on Slate recently: Proof that Internet porn prevents rape
    I make no claims on the science or the study behind it. It just brought it to mind as a relevant idea to the discussion.

  23. 23
    chingona says:

    When I wrote that I was primarily thinking of the impossibility of giving meaningful consent to any labour if labour is all you have to trade for your subsistance (I don’t know why but as soon as I start talking about pornography I sound like a Marxist).

    I thought you were a Marxist. ;) But I think that’s an important point and thanks for making it explicit. I think it also complicates the question of whether it expresses the desire of the person making it, other than their desire to get paid. Even if you like your job, everyone has days when they don’t feel like going to work, and what does that mean for desire and consent when your job is having sex with people? And when you don’t get paid if you don’t work?

  24. 24
    chingona says:

    Richard:

    We need people to produce images/texts that challenge the prevailing norms, because it is only through the production of those images/texts that we will develop a language with which to speak/show sex, and speak/show about sex, differently, in a way that is not in keeping with the patriarchy. This does not mean that these new, different images will not be co-opted. Of course they will.

    Maia:

    it is impossible to know what sexuality would be like in a free and equal society. I think it would be very different, but I think in ways we probably can’t even conceptualise.

    I would go so far as to say I think the commodification of material designed to arouse is probably inherently a bad thing, … I’d go further than that is that the commodification of arousal has implications for sex and desire, as well as for commodofication.

    First, I think I did not quite express what I was trying to in my comment @ 8. My problem or concern is not just that whatever material is produced comes out in a misogynist culture, but also that a misogynist, male-dominant culture goes into that material, regardless of your intentions.

    I think the best way to explain what I’m getting at is to explain some of my problems with the porn that has been offered up as examples of the “good” porn.

    At this point, I feel like I need to say that I do not seek out porn these days, hunting for that ever elusive feminist porn that caters to female desire. I have followed links in other on-line discussions when a particular site has been offered up as an example of good porn. So it is certainly possible that I’m not being fair because I have not sampled everything that’s out there or made any extensive study of porn purporting to be “for women.” But my impressions from what I have seen haven’t made me want to seek out more.

    The single biggest problem I have is that it seems like the male perspective/male gaze from mainstream porn infects everything.

    Porn with more variety in body types? It’s just like mainstream porn, except the women look more like the type you might either actually get to sleep with or would want to sleep with in real life (you here being the hipster guys or the hippie guys or the guys who like fat women or whoever the site is marketed to). It’s almost always still promoting a certain “type,” just a different type than who you see in mainstream porn.

    Amateur porn by exhibitionist couples? Not a genre I’ve perused extensively, but the mutual good times seem to be interspersed with a lot of aping of behaviors from mainstream porn and stuff that I’m not sure is actually amateur. Or mutual.

    Porn by women for women? Porn showing “real” female desire? A lot of this porn doesn’t seem to have men in it, which is kind of interesting. And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be lesbian porn because what about my needs, but this stuff seems to be marketed to women, period. One site was nicely lit, high-production quality, tasteful videos of conventionally pretty women masturbating to orgasm. The orgasms seemed real, which is nice because even way back before I took the red pill, it always bothered me how fake most of the orgasms in mainstream porn seem. But I was left kind of baffled about why this was supposed to be a big turn-on for straight women. Can you imagine straight men being told to watch other men masturbating? So either the site isn’t really for straight women or straight women have so internalized the male gaze that we can’t conceive of doing anything but looking back at ourselves.

    (re-written from here on) So Jeff seems to think we could be on the verge of a renaissance as more women make more porn, but what I see looks like more of the same, swapping out of some of the nasty bits so we can have our cake and eat it too. And it’s not my intention to just erase all the differences between pornography today. Gang Bang 4 is not the same as a couple getting a kick out of taping themselves and uploading the video. And given that I don’t think commercially produced porn is going away anytime soon, making sure there are good working conditions for people in porn certainly is more important than my unease about how even supposedly good porn is part of and contributes to a messed up culture around sexuality. But I feel pretty discouraged about the possibility of actually remaking the whole thing in some better image.

  25. 25
    Maia says:

    Chingona – I’m not actually a Marxist – just a socialist with some Marxist friends. But I find the idea of use-value and exchange-value necessary to understand the world. I get a vague if we go any deeper into Marxist theory.

    If I gave you any impression that I thought the porn industry could be reformed, that isn’t where I stand. But I’m interested in the examples that you gave, are they all images or film or text? Were they created to be bought and sold? I agree that there is something deeply wrong with what we call pornography, and I’m interesting in locating where that wrong is.

    The whole idea of ‘good porn’ seems bizarre to me. Part of what I was getting at with my emphasis on normalising – is that no one piece of media has much power. By itself any one story, image, or video isn’t saying “this is how men are, this is how women are, this is how sex is.” What says that is that there are many thousands of images/texts/whatever all saying the same thing. Now that’s like media analysis 101. But if there’s an idea ‘this is what’s good’ then that’s still normalising, even if it’s normalising in a slightly different way.

    For example, and this is pretty random indication of my younger self, but the first material created to arouse that I read was X-files fanfic. And for sure male-dominated culture went into that material. There was a whole sub-genre of Mulder/Scully romances, which started with Mulder raping Scully(and it’s strange that I remember all this stuff 10 or so years later, while I’ve forgotten almost everything I studied at university). But I’d argue that for all that, for all the messed up ideas in there, that there’s something useful in a substantial number of women exploring their sexual fantasies and finding out what other people say. And I couldn’t even necessarily put my finger on why I think it’s useful. But we all have to negotiate the relationship between male dominated-culture and our sexualities and that can be really lonely thing to try and do – depending on a lot of factors (sometimes it’s not of course).

    I guess what I’m saying is not to create a dichotomy between ‘genuine desire ‘ and ‘misogynistic culture’. But to suggest that there is a use in people creating media about their own sexuality to work out the tangled relationship between those two, but I don’t think that anything that is created to be bought and sold could fill that gap.

    I don’t know if that even makes any sense. I’m still trying to sort out these ideas.

  26. 26
    Myca says:

    Media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal and produced to be bought and sold

    Hm. I understand that the commerce portion of this is essential to your understanding and analysis of pornography. Is there a term you’d use for media that has been created for the purpose of sexual arousal but is not bought or sold?

    —Myca

  27. 27
    PG says:

    I assume that we’re talking about pornography at a moral level, but I think it’s still worth pointing out that when Canada began legally prohibiting some pornography, the first items targeted tended to be those from marginalized groups, e.g. actual lesbian porn produced by lesbians for a lesbian audience. I think RJN is right that porn offers the opportunity for marginalized groups to express who they are, to communicate both within their community and with the mainstream, an opportunity that may not exist for them in mainstream media.

  28. When I wrote about the need for people to be able to create “porn”–which I am using as shorthand for Maia’s more precise definition–that contains alternative images, etc., I was not thinking only about marginalized groups (though I agree with PG), nor did I mean that those alternative images could somehow be free of the misogyny, male dominant values, etc. of our culture; and that the only problem is in the fact that they might be co-opted (though I also agree with chingona’s descriptions/analyses in her comments). By way of example: When I was doing research on porn, I downloaded some videos from one of the first and biggest and most profoundly misogynistic reality porn sites. In one of those videos, there is a segment during the filming of a blowjob when the camera angle was not the conventional one that you see in most mainstream, heterosexual video porn: where all you see of the man is a closeup of his hard-on, while the woman’s mouth moves over it like a well-oiled machine. Instead, this shot gave you the man’s entire body and his facial expressions in ways that not only were far more realistic than anything I had seen to date, but in ways that did not conform to the male behavior one would normally expect in such a video.

    The effect was startling. Not that the video was overall any less misogynist or conventionally male dominant in its approach to sex–they switched the camera angle to the more traditional one and left it there until the cum shot–but that different view of a man’s body suggested possibilities, at least to me, for how porn might be filmed differently so as to show, to shape, to represent male pleasure, male heterosexuality, differently, more fully, more subtly, as more nuanced than patriarchal male heterosexuality insists that it is. More: the accidental camera angles–and I think it was accidental–was also more interesting than the way I have seen men and men’s pleasure, etc. filmed in mainstream porn produced by women, though I will admit that the only films I watched were when I was doing this research and those by Candida Royalle were pretty much the only ones out there.

  29. 29
    chingona says:

    Maia,

    I don’t think that you’re advocating reform of the current system. I worked on that comment for a very long time, trying to say what I meant to say, and I think I still didn’t get at it. I started out quoting Richard because I had been thinking about this comment (which in a very general sense I agree with) and added you because I felt like your comment about commodification being perhaps inherently problematic got at something I think I agree with. But I think I ended up responding more to Jeff than either of you, so I really should have quoted Jeff and gone from there.

    There’s two reasons I generally hate talking about pornography. The first is that the two questions usually are “Is it exploitative?” and “Does it objectify women?” And everyone thinks they know what exploitative and objectify mean, but like you said, very slight differences in emphasis can put people miles apart. I really liked your questions because I think they get to the roots of what people are talking about with exploitative and objectify, but they break out the individual issues. That said, I think I still end up thinking about the questions in a way that collapses some of the issues. I think this happens because I am concerned about the net or cumulative effect of all these things operating at the same time, but it leads to some muddled thinking. So apologies to anyone wondering WTF I’m on about. Sometimes I don’t even know myself.

    The other reason I hate it is because in trying to express how uncomfortable I’ve become with the vast majority of porn, I end up sounding like I think no one should write or talk about sex, especially not in an arousing way, and everyone’s desires should conform (or they should strive to conform) to some feminist ideal. And I don’t actually think any of those things. My own desires don’t conform to a feminist ideal, and the last thing I’m about to advocate is that nobody should have any orgasms until we defeat the patriarchy. I like reading and thinking about sex. Hell, back when I watched mainstream porn, a lot of it turned me on. I’ve reached a point, though, where it’s almost impossible to go with the flow, if you know what I mean, with any material that has been produced and marketed as, basically, jack-off material (nothing against jacking off, just saying) because I’ve got this running analysis going on the whole thing. It’s just easier to use my imagination than try to find something that works and doesn’t set off a dozen little alarm bells.

    And yes, it’s not that the male perspective on sex is inherently bad, but that it’s almost all we get, and I feel like even when women take on porn, they still end up channeling that male perspective. That depresses me, but really, we know that other kinds of media don’t become woman-centered or woman-oriented or whatever just because there’s a female director. Maybe if we get some sort of critical mass of diversity of views, it really will shift, and I’m being unnecessarily pessimistic on that front.

    Basically, I think I agree with you that there is something in the commodification that is almost always problematic, but I feel like that sets a trap – because anyone who writes or makes images about sex for an audience is going to sell those words or images in some way. And the only way I could get out of that trap was to enter a line of reasoning that came really close to making a distinction between art and pornography that I think is 99 percent bullshit. So then I’m left with “I know it when I see it,” which doesn’t advance the discussion much.

    So, yeah, I’m still working this out.

  30. 30
    PG says:

    And yes, it’s not that the male perspective on sex is inherently bad, but that it’s almost all we get, and I feel like even when women take on porn, they still end up channeling that male perspective. That depresses me, but really, we know that other kinds of media don’t become woman-centered or woman-oriented or whatever just because there’s a female director. Maybe if we get some sort of critical mass of diversity of views, it really will shift, and I’m being unnecessarily pessimistic on that front.

    I find that erotica and romance novels, which seem to be female-dominated, seem to avoid male gaze better than most media. Although a lot of old romance covers, and even some on new publications, are driven by male marketers’ ideas of What Sells To Women — which in turn is based on what those men imagine they’d want — you’ll notice that the few romance novelists who have achieved significant individual market power (the Nora Roberts types) don’t get stuck with those because they can tell the marketers to go f*** themselves.

  31. 31
    chingona says:

    PG,

    I wonder to what extent that accounts for the supposed preference women have for written erotic material, compared to video/images. It tends to get chalked up to men being more visual, and women preferring sex in the context of a story, but I’m not sure that’s all it is. Personally, I tend to find written material less problematic, even though I’m also pretty visual, in that regard. The easy explanation there is you don’t have to worry about the performers being abused or exploited or not consenting or feeling pressured into that work. But I think there’s another factor. Way upthread, Jeff wrote that traditional pornography is “almost completely divorced from what differentiates sex from masturbation, that being that there are at least two human beings involved in it.” I think written material might be better at getting at the multiple perspectives and mutual desire and pleasure than visual media, and I think this is related to what the commodification of sexual material does to that material.

    Just to take this concept of porn that shows or focuses on female pleasure. The female orgasm is generally taken to be something elusive, that requires some skill and effort on the part of a man to bring about (compared to the male orgasm, which supposedly involves nothing more than inserting the penis into a wet orifice and repeating). In real life sex, the sense of pride and happiness and pleasure that a man might feel at giving his female partner an orgasm is not remotely problematic in my mind – it’s a good and fine thing. But when you have that porn marketed as “hot girls actually come!” – coupled with what Maia said about the high demand for enthusiastic performance – it becomes another way that porn promotes the idea that men are entitled to the use of women’s bodies, in which the woman’s orgasm is a performance for the pleasure of men, not something experienced for its own sake. (In response to the question “How do the ideas it contains interact with rape culture?” my concern even with porn that is not explicitly misogynistic is the extent to which it promotes that sense of entitlement.) I think that written material might do a better job at depicting female desire and pleasure without turning into a performance for men.

  32. 32
    chingona says:

    I assume that we’re talking about pornography at a moral level, but I think it’s still worth pointing out that when Canada began legally prohibiting some pornography, the first items targeted tended to be those from marginalized groups, e.g. actual lesbian porn produced by lesbians for a lesbian audience.

    I am talking at a moral level, and especially with the Internet, I don’t see how you could actually regulate pornography even if you wanted to. And I might well find the vision of sexuality in a conservative religious marriage manual more damaging and dangerous than something labeled porn. I don’t have any illusions about what would be targeted under a legal regulation regime. (I seem to recall from This Film is Not Yet Rated that there was a lot of agonizing over how many seconds of orgasmic facial expressions could be shown in the oral sex scene in Boys Don’t Cry, and when you compare that to the sexism of the average rom-com, it’s pretty clear we don’t have our priorities quite right.)

  33. 33
    Rosa says:

    I think the evolution of sex in romance novels – since it’s concurrent with the “pornification” of our culture, to use Twisty’s words – is really interesting, since it has moved in the opposite direction (towards women asserting agency) from “mainstream porn” in some ways, and with it (towards kinkiness, towards purely sexual fantasy) in some ways.

    Another question – is mainstream porn actually financially bigger than romance? Since romance is the majority of all fiction sold, and romantic comedy is one of the big genres of movies? I hear that “porn is the biggest media industry” but I’ve never seen the two compared.

    And i wonder if the the male-gaze visual porn marketed it as “hot girls actually come” actually is a message to men, or if it’s a message to the women (like me) who occasionally spend some time wading through the selection of the video store looking for something we might like?

    One of the things about text porn (and cartoon porn, which would be my favorite if it were easier to find stuff I like) is that the reality that the actors are bored, unhappy, in pain, being interrupted by stage crew, whatever it is = doesn’t come seeping through.

    Not that misogyny and universally degrading fantasies by male authors/editors/artists don’t still show up. (Lost Girls, for instance, is SO BEAUTIFUL in parts of it but by the end I just felt…icky. Too much incest, too much abuse of children.)

  34. 34
    sylphhead says:

    Rosa,

    I don’t know if mainstream porn is bigger than romance novels. I’ve heard it said that romance novels sell more than all other books combined. While these sorts of claims have the faint whiff of e-mail forwarded factoid about them, I’m pretty sure romance novels is the single largest market – if only by plurality – in the entire book publishing market.

    Romance novels, I think, are the closest distaff counterpart to porn, in that both the customer base and the primary producers are overwhelmingly female.

  35. 35
    PG says:

    Romance is about 50% of all new paperback sales. So it’s probably not the biggest money-maker for a publisher (because paperbacks have much smaller profit margins than hardbacks), and that’s based on a very large number of titles coming out each month, most receiving little promotion. But that figure (plus the resale market) indicates that many women are getting their portrayals of sex from a genre dominated by women writers and editors. Indeed, given that the average romance consumer buys about one book per week (either new or used), such women have a pretty solid amount of woman-produced sexual material they’re consuming relative to the amount of male-produced sexual material.

    Jennifer Crusie has written some of my favorite essays on the romance genre. I wouldn’t consider her progressive, but she proudly identifies as a feminist and her characters do so as well. I particularly recommend these:
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/defeating-the-critics-what-we-can-do-about-the-anti-romance-bias/
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/i-know-what-it-is-when-i-read-it-defining-the-romance-genre/
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/let-us-now-praise-scribbling-women/
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/the-five-things-ive-learned-about-writing-romance-from-tv/
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/this-is-not-your-mothers-cinderella-the-romance-novel-as-feminist-fairy-tale/
    http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/you-go-romance-writer-changing-public-opinion/

  36. 36
    Rosa says:

    I love Jenny Crusie :) And she has quite graphic (though not in the style of porn, if that makes sense) sexual content in her novels.

    So if we include discussion of sexually-explicit romance novels (against the howls and wails of the authors) in the porn discussion…does it change? Especially the rape culture part, because that has *totally* shifted in the last 15 years in the romance world.

  37. 37
    PG says:

    Rosa,

    I think including sexually-explicit romance novels in the discussion of porn does change it in some ways. Because romance is mostly written from a female gaze, it tends to be far more accepting of the range of female bodies (disabled/ post-mastectomy/ deemed-overweight), although not necessarily of male ones (I’ve never read a romance with a disabled/ 5 ft./ fat hero). I find most of mainstream romance a little whiter than I’d like, and the “white woman carried away by Noble Savage” so does not count for diversity numbers, but as a whole the romance genre does avoid a lot of the problems that Maia noted in the OP.

    Yes, there’s still too many virginal heroines or (more prevalent lately) women who can’t have an orgasm until they find True Love, and too much “gosh my legs are so long and breasts so large and perky, who could find me desirable?” But in a comparison of bestselling sexually-explicit romance novels to bestselling sexually-explicit visual pornography? Middle America housewives FTW!