Seeing as the two previous posts are Lauredhel’s on rape culture and mine on prostitution, I thought I’d add a link to this post that I had been saving up for later in the week: Trouble in Pornoland.
Written by a man who once used to enjoy porn with cheesy pool-boys and pizza delivery scenarios, and now wonders what the hell happened.
Categories: gender & feminism, violence
Grabbing somebody is Assault, and sexual touch makes it Sexual Assault. Stop minimising this. #rapeculture101 
Quicklink of the Day #2: #DestroyTheJoint excludes voices of women with disabilities 
Quicklink Of The Day #1: Transgender Day of Remembrance 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Hoyden About Town 
I’m usually pro-porn within the broad terms of a sex-positive feminism, but the kind of porn described in that article is about as far from ‘sex-positive’ as you could get. It may be a mistake to couch this in terms of nostalgia as Auslander seems to, but I agree that there is a problem here. Well, there are two problems: firstly there is a problem in terms of regulation of the industry, because it seems apparent that people are being exploited and abused; secondly there is a problem in terms of the desire that produces a market for this. The second problem is the more disturbing one for me. The question of how to effectively address it is a very big one.
I’m still trying to articulate a response to the debate around sexuality. I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of sexuality being taboo, and taboo being psychologically tied up with sexual excitement. Sex-positive movements from the sexual liberation movement up to modern sex-positive feminism have had the goal/effect of de-tabooising sexuality. In large part, this is a good thing. it suited the patriarchy for it not to be discussed, and many injustices to go unchallenged because they were not to be discussed, its part and parcel of homosexual rights, many people have felt much more sexually fulfilled, etc.
The problem is that as ‘normal’ sexuality becomes un-taboo, for people for whom the taboo, transgressive, associations of sexuality are deeply tied up with sexual excitement, plain old sex doesn’t work for them any more. On one side you get the bdsm and body mod set, but this extreme violent porn is another manifestation of the same mechanic – whatever is unacceptable, becomes eroticised due to its very unacceptability, and you end up with this horrible situation where a market exists for porn whose major selling point is, essentially, that it is so unacceptable that most people find it unquestionably vile and repellent.
The problem is that, if that is the mechanic at work, it doesn’t seem to lead to a clear way to address it.
On the contrary how can most people be finding it unacceptable if this porn is the highest selling porn out there and, as pointed out in the article considered so ‘mainstream’ that you no longer have to pay for it. This is something that has been pointed out by feminist activists for some time now and yet people still keep wanting to frame it in terms of “oh this is extreme, this is just a subset”. That view is demonstrably wrong.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4489853897776743667&hl=en&fs=true
What a hairy legged man hating prude!
Porn is not about making people more open to sexuality, it has always and is always going to be about reinforcing the status quo, namely the preservation of a sex class which is women.
If sex was openly talked about in our society and all the thoughts of it being taboo or dirty were gone I doubt the problem would be as horrible as it is now. Of course to completely get rid of porn as it has been/is seen in our current society we need to get rid of sexism.
But so many young people think that they are learning about sex through porn where all they’re learning is the subjegation, dehumanisation, objectification, and exploitation of women. If we talked about sex frankly and openly then they wouldn’t think that the place to learn about sex is through porn.
Instead of throwing their hands up in the air and saying “Gosh! Oh well, what can we do…” consumers of porn could ask themselves the following questions.
1. Can I be sure that the women in this film have not been trafficked?
2. Can I be sure that the women in this film are not being coerced, sexually assaulted, emotionally or physically abused, or prostituted against their will?
3. Can I be sure that the company that produced/funded this film, and any parent or subsidiary company is not engaged in or profiting from either 1. or 2?
If you cannot be sure of these things then you are contributing to the continued abuse of women by the pornography industry. Maybe one thing you can do is stop?
This just popped into my inbox: Feminist’s views needed in johns class.
Su, I think it is theoretically possible to have ethical porn/prostitution, I just don’t think such a thing exists right now, and asking the questions you suggest above is what is central to it.
I’m struck by how similiar the questions are to those one is meant to ask about free range meat/eggs etc for ethical consumption. Same principle.
The distinction I would draw is between form and content. I support porn as a form, but I don’t support the majority of its content. I agree with tigtog that it is a theoretical possibility to have ethical porn/prostitution (the two should be distinguished from each other, although are often interrelated), and I also think that there are places already where those things are emerging. There are numerous blogs and consumer oriented sites that already ask these questions and discuss these issues.
As for that list of questions, I think those are important things for consumers to think about, but I also think that the imperative to be absolutely certain is not applied in other areas, so it is unreasonable to expect that porn consumers take complete responsibility in this one. The imperative to be certain veers towards moral absolutism, and I reject such a prescriptive stance. In this moral economy, consumption is cast in either/or terms that are untenable: consumers will not simply stop consuming porn, even if ethical questions remain unanswered. Also, I don’t think that sort of rigid formula really addresses consumers: instead it speaks directly to other critical non-consumers.
Dealing with these issues may mean being more involved with industry and consumers, at the risk of complicity. If that sort of agenda is not to your liking, at the very least we should be demanding that governments regulate the industry more effectively and that unethical, coercive and violent practices be ended by extra-individual means. Governments should be held to this agenda, and should not be allowed to lapse into either of their default stances of moral absolutism or apathy.
You are going to have to explain this to me in lay terms. Are you saying that I am being a moral absolutist because (in the unlikely event that they actually consider the conditions under which the film was made) consumers continue to consume regardless. I would say that they are uninformed or informed but unconcerned consumers. Can’t do anything about the latter but asking those questions and educating consumers is a reasonable response I think.
You are focussing on one word to the exclusion of everything else. By the way I said “sure” not certain and so you are subtly misrepresenting what I said. Noone can ever be completely certain of the source of any product but they can take reasonable steps to find out. Have you ever boycotted a product because you were concerned about for eg child labour or other exploitative conditions? Are campaigns that make consumers aware of such products and advocate a voluntary boycott also examples of moral absolutism? Do you refuse to take part in them as well?
I also think that there is a theoretical possibility for ethical pornography but it does not exist and so consumption in the current environment does not run the risk of complicity, it is complicit.
Obviously there are other responses and some kind of regulatory response is definitely needed but that does not mean that a direct request to consumers to consider the consequences of their actions is not a valid response. Large warning messages are routinely attached to cigarettes, why not do the same for porn?
By the way “prescriptive”, “moral absolutism”, “rigid formula”; if I didn’t know better I would think you were calling me a hairy legged prudish moralising feminazi, only with teh big words.
Mucked up the quote tags again. Sorry,should be around “but I also think that the imperative to be absolutely certain is not applied in other areas”, and not around the last 4 paras.
I object to the moral prescription implied, and to the mode of address, but I do think that those basic questions about ethics are important. I don’t think informing consumers or organising boycotts necessarily amounts to moral absolutism, but suggesting that consumers be absolutely sure about things or stop consuming them veers in that direction.
Also, I’m suggesting that feminist interventions must be more involved and hence risk complicity if they are to be effective. Failing that, pressure needs to be put on governments to be more involved with the industry. The complicity of consumers was not under discussion, but since you raised the issue, I object to the idea that consumers of particular kinds of porn are necessarily complicit in all of the abuses that occur across the various parts of the industry.
Unless the porn they are consuming meets the criteria set out in those questions then they are complicit, whether you find that objectionable or not.
Agreed, but my point is about specificity. You can’t hold consumers who actively avoid exploitative or abusive porn as somehow responsible for the porn that they don’t consume. They are undoubtedly complicit in any forms of unethical practice that accompany the porn that they actually consume. ‘Porn’ is not a monolithic entity. As an example, I am not in any personal way responsible for the porn described in the article under discussion, even though I am a consumer of some other forms of pornography.
Yes you are, if the company that produces your “good” prn is also engaged, however much at arm’s length, in those practices in any of its other products. And by the way; have you genuinely satisfied yourself that none of the women in that good porn is coerced or abused in any way? It seems to me that your arguments are mainly about self-justification. I really don’t care what you do. Even if you have found some mythical font of prn in which the women are not exploited, then it is still 0.00001% of the total market and once again, a feminist is being goaded into agreeing that that 0.00001% is “OK” just to satisfy the feelings of a man, while that same man appears not to want to concentrate upon the vast majority of prn that is exploitative and abusive, that maims and harms women on a daily basis. You’ll excuse me now if I absent myself from any further arguments about that vanishingly small percentage of prn and the vanishingly small number of people who confine themselves to consuming it. The feelings of those poor consumers who may feel slightly put out that they are asked to consider the ethics of their practice are, despite your committed focus upon them, NOT as important as the many thousands of women who are materially harmed by prn.
I tried to raise the point about exploitive sexualisation during Krudd’s strip club moment. The radio vox pops, including the women, almost all siad it just showed that he was a normal bloke, as if it was normal for men (some even suggested women which tripped my brainfuse) to go to such places.
I think that it was TigTog & Su above who asked if there could be ethical porn. If this is what’s available I’d say not.
Do we have to seek another classifaction, ‘erotica’ as I think Robbie Swan the porn flack calls it?
Lost Clown opined that if sex was openly accepted in society there would be no porn which is true but irreleavant – we have to deal with what society serves up, tragic as it is.
I look back to the hippy daze when we lived naked, must have lasted all of 5 years….
“And by the way; have you genuinely satisfied yourself that none of the women in that good porn is coerced or abused in any way?”
See, here it is happening again. Do you seriously think that this kind of imperative is reasonable when it is not being offered to consumers of absolutely anything else? Have we all satisfied ourselves that not a thread of our clothing has been made by people being coerced or abused or exploited? What about the computer I’m typing this on: were all of the resources used to make it extracted in safe workplaces with good pay and conditions, and with sufficient consultation and remuneration of relevant indigenous groups. The list goes on.
My question is how do we address the various abusive and exploitative practices that are involved in the production of pornography? My answer to that will proceed from the assumption that porn and porn consumption exist in the world and that most consumers are simply not addressed by moral imperatives. Better that we engage with the industry and with governments to regulate, and that we get unions on side and try to unionise the work force. At the consumer end, the ethical questions you ask are centrally important, but they cannot be offered prescriptively. Also, you should not assume that at least some consumers and other parties involved have not thought about them.
Imperative, I would like to point out is your word, not mine. I have suggested that people should think about the impact of their choices. But ignoring your continued misrepresentation, yes it is being offered to consumers of other products and yes it is entirely reasonable, see my mxamples above. Think Nestles boycott, Nike boycott and so on. Also think about the choices people make about whether to buy locally grown food or imports, free range eggs or cage eggs (as per Tigtog’s eg above) and so on. In actual fact many people make these kinds of ethical decisions every day. Yes it is perfectly reasonable to ask them to do this. And while the chance that my Japanese-made computer involved indentured labour is quite small, the chance that the women in prn are subjected to abuse approaches 100%.
Most consumers do not consider the conditions of production of prn because it has been vociferously marketed to them for the last 30 years as “free speech” and the conditions that the women suffer, they have been told, is not their concern because they “freely choose it”. When feminists present arguments to the contrary they are howled down by people such as yourself who find ways of misrepresenting their arguments as “moralising.”
But isn’t that the world we’re fighting to create?
I am.
I don’t think I’ll go much further into arguing the finer points of my position because I substantively agree with you, and it seems like we are getting waylaid somewhat by this. Those boycotts are targeted at specific companies, not at, say, every company that produces shoes.
I agree, the alignment of porn purely with free speech and censorship is a problem, because that has tended to dominate public discourse on porn at the expense of the conditions of its production. I see it as fundamentally an industrial issue, that has been obscured by those other dimensions.
No, those boycotts were/are targetted at specific practices, the fact that single companies were/are guilty of them is beside the point. You don’t get to reject the questions because you don’t like the answers. If all prn companies are guilty of unethical practices then
there is no reason for excluding any of them from a boycott.
There is a pertinent quote from David Guinn’s introduction to the book “Pornography: Driving the demand in International Sex Trafficking”;
That makes sense. In case it wasn’t clear throughout my comments (and I can see how my last comment was misleading), I do think that addressing consumers is important as part of a strategy. My objection was to the mode of address and the implied blanket application, not to the project.
I don’t know why you feel that you needed to highlight that passage since I in no way share the assumption that that particular desire is an inexorable force of nature. I don’t think you can effectively address desire with simple prohibition, but in spite of the complexity of addressing it (gestured to in my first response) I do think it is an important object of scrutiny and can be changed.
I believe a blanket ban or boycott of all porn would be unsuccessful, and more attractive to critical non-consumers than an address of consumers who don’t feel they are doing anything wrong. I endorse the kinds of education campaigns that you refer to, and I think that targeted boycotts could be very effective.
I would also add that a large minority of porn consumers are women, so the focus on the desire of men to sexually exploit women is not all that’s involved in addressing the problems of pornography.
Interesting post from Violet Socks on the transition from stilted tableaux porn to today’s hyper-raunch abuse porn.
That is a great post. I like her focus on the broad context rather than the usual pro and con arguments. I think the boiled frog metaphor is brilliant.
A boycott always involves an education phase. Raising awareness is the first step. Creating critical citizens is the most important thing that social action does. I do not think that most consumers are aware of the human rights arguments around pornography. They see the free speech/free choice angle and the religious right in opposition.
As for a ban, why would you think that that would be unsuccessful? That is the Swedish solution; to criminalize the johns’ actions rather that those of the prostitute. No one could say that it has been unsuccessful. In the UK they are about to criminalize possession of certain kinds of violent prn images; those which depict or appear to depict life threatening or disabling abuse.
Okay, some very good points there, and I would agree that most consumers are not aware of the associated human rights issues. A boycott could raise consciousness of those issues, although I am wary of the potential of such to be co-opted by the typical morally dichotomous diversions.
I have some reservations about the way in which pornography and prostitution are conflated in these discussions. The two are different, if often interrelated. As for the UK changes, I would be a little anxious about the content of that legislation if I happened to engage in BDSM etc or enjoyed images of the same. I haven’t looked closely at this, but that would be my initial response to such a proposal: how will it affect already marginalised and scrutinised sexual orientations?
I am not very knowledgeable about the UK situation but from what I have read the BDSM community have voiced their concerns over the the need for legal definitions to take account of their practice. I think the definition expressed above is narrow enough to exclude even most BDSM. But once again the rights of a privileged few (and willing practitioners of BDSM are holders of such privilege when compared with women in prn & prostitution) should not take precedence over the prevention of harm to many thousands of women. The overlap between prn and prostitution is very significant; 49% of prostitutes report having had prn made of their tricks. I have not used the terms interchangably and the book I quoted was specifically dedicated to the links between prn and trafficking, not prostitution and trafficking. Obviously prn is harder to regulate, including addressing demand, especially where that demand is met via the internet. I used the Swedish example as a broad indicator of how a more progressive society has addressed demand for prostitution successfully, not as some one size fits all blueprint that can be applied to prn without thought or modification.
hi, i stumbled upon this…
Why do some people have such a hard time believing that woman would want to do porn of her own volition?
Yes there are risks, and there are measures to ensure the risk is not too large (reletively speaking).
Some porn is exploiting and involved with traffiking and this is wrong, but in the “celebrity super-star porn world” women are treated as equal citizens in a physically demanding, risk-taking occupation. We don’t question why women feel the need to sail accross the atlantic single-handed and risk their lives (for our entertainment, arguably).
Why do feminists think that women are incapable of making their own decisions, of risk taking in a calculated way for money…I am not saying it’s something to be especially proud of, but men take those risks, and are not assumed to have some kind of mental problems. Is a women so unaware of what she wants wants to do that she needs society to tell her? Isn’t this a step backwards?
The influence on young men who belive porn teaches them about women, and sex…is another issue however, and I do believe some harm, or hindering of their learning the “truth” may occur.
Finally there is a huge shift in porn these days towards capable business women using their body and those of others (who consent…as adults you are allowed to consent to things! Women aren’t children!!) to exploit men for their hard-earned cash.
And even more recently to be on the sharp end of a strap-on! Are these men being exploited?
A boxer can consent to getting blows to the head, potentially life-threatening situations…but a woman can’t consent to have sex for money on film?
Where is the right of a woman to choose?
yes there are emotionaly broken, vulnerable women in porn….they are everywhere…
We need to look out for them with industry unions and protection and proper upholding of anti human trafikking and anti rape/assault laws….in every walk of life, including those involved in porn. But porn can be a place for women to make money (more than the men do) and feel that they are expressing themselves, and who are we to judge or tell them they shouldn’t do it?
People jump out of planes, run into burning buildings, climb mountains, risking their lives, we don’t know the exact reasons why people feel the need to do these things, but as humans they are free to choose to risk their own lives without hurting others…in my opinion.
Thanks for reading
x
Speaking only for myself here, not on behalf of all feminists. I’m not especially worried about the women who make a considered decision about the risk/reward equation – to them – of being a sex worker, so long as one is truly free to leave the job whenever that risk/reward calculus changes to a negative for one. Much is written by former sex workers who are mortgage free and enjoying the expensive education they paid for from their sex work earnings, and that’s just fine. But just because such stories are frequently heard, expressed by intelligent, educated and articulate women, doesn’t mean that the industry has no problems with endemic violent abuse, and that it shouldn’t be held to account for the women who are not freely choosing.
Why do sex industry defenders think that feminists don’t see the difference between those women and the women who are getting trafficked, exploited and abused for profit?
If the film set is as tightly regulated to protect her physical safety as a boxing ring is to ensure the fighter’s safety – if the referee is allowed to stop the filming and the performer is allowed to throw in the towel without suffering harm to anything more than the credibility of their performance reputation, go for it.
Clever but poor men who sold themselves into slavery in Ancient Rome could rise to extraordinary heights of wealth and power, and be freed after a set period of time to enjoy a prosperous and respected retirement. But we still outlawed slavery, didn’t we? Because of the abuses that were heaped upon the people who weren’t clever and lucky enough to gain adequate reciprocal benefits from the slavery arrangement.
Strawman. Prostitution and porn are both, as you say above, high risk professions which can generate high risk rewards. High risk professions are regulated in so-called civilised society all the time for the purposes of occupational health and safety and for harm minimisation generally: it is illegal to recruit people to other harmful professions with safety standards being rigorously followed. We haven’t accepted the argument that because professional boxers do well financially that we should stop regulating fighting for profit which exploits the poor, vulnerable less talented boxers and leaves them brain-injured invalids. Why on earth should prostitution and porn be excepted from the same sort of harm minimisation regulations?
So nothing should be done to challenge and regulate an industry which actively seeks out such damaged women because they are easier to manipulate into the highest-risk areas of the industry, where they will be literally raped on screen? Or to protect those women in prostitution who don’t work the glamour jobs and are routinely battered, raped and murdered?
What a despicable attitude. Ok, sure you go on to say that there should be protection for the vulnerable, but then you still come back to some weird position whereby entering into sex work is just choosing to work in a risky industry just like any other risky industry, but that feminists are somehow inconsistent and purselipped in arguing for industry safety regulations just like any other risky industry.
Glamour at the top tiers doesn’t excuse vicious and violent exploitation of the less talented workers in the industry that leaves them with lifelong mental and physical damage, or dead. Not in boxing, not in the sex industries either.