Lovely and sad.

I really appreciate content like this - it ties in to previous posts saying that current feminists are more focused on the concepts of gender identity and expression than just women-centered explorations. I think discussions like this about masculinity and its construction and effects are just as central to modern feminism as similar deconstructions of femininity. Thanks for the link!

I have several male friends who ask me how they can help women or what they can do to learn more about how the system works so that they know what to do to take it down. I always tell them to read feminist literature and that if they really want to change our culture, they have to start with themselves. It's easy to write to your legislator. It's easy to sign petitions. It's easy to express outrage about rape and our seriously flawed criminal justice system. It's not easy to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror, admit how you benefit from and enjoy the patriarchy, and decide to give that up. I ordered this book for them, hoping that it will help with the hard part.

This is such an awesome book, I'm actually reading it right now.

http://essinem.blogspot.com/2007/10/being-feminist-in-sex-industry.html
An interesting article on feminism and the sex industry, from someone who works there.

That excerpt was just right for convincing me not to buy his book. I might check it out of the library, though, once it is available. The first page had me lowering eyebrows in disagreement, the second shaking my head and the third saying B.S. out loud. The cynic in me formed the thought that he wrote this in order to increase his chances at getting laid in certain circles, but that really is being too catty. (Note ironic reference by this male author.)

kmp, I fully agree that change in the culture of masculinity begins with each man's recognition in themselves of sexist attitudes and behavior. That change is boosted by the idea that shedding the old notions is almost as beneficial to men as it is for women. Feminism does not have to be anti-male. Feminism also doesn't have to be anti-sex or even anti-pornography.

I'll reserve judgment on Jensen until I read more, but this excerpt and other stuff I found on him through Google is not encouraging.

I really love Robert Jensen and I have a close friend who actually stopped watching porn after he read one of Jensen's essays.

I've actually met him and taken a class with him at UT, he's a lovely man. I think that he'd be very amused and saddened at the same time to see his thoughts on masculinity and pornography reduced to "trying to get laid" and I think those comments are pretty inappropriate.

I couldn't read this excerpt because the link wasn't working for me, but I am very familiar with his other works, I'm not sure why you (sixtiesliberal) thought that he was anti male? His whole argument is that masculinity hurts men and women.

I do think feminism has to be anti pornography in it's current context. But is anybody else kinda tired of the anti porn/pro sex debate yet? No one is ever convinced...

"Feminism does not have to be anti-male. Feminism also doesn't have to be anti-sex or even anti-pornography. "

Feminism isn't anti-male and it absolutely must be anti-pornography as long as it remains violent, racist, mysogynist, dehumnanizing, exploitive and teaches men to be dismally lame and selfish lays.

How can you predict how bad in bed a man will be? Pursue the size and content of his porn collection.

"he wrote this in order to increase his chances at getting laid in certain circles,"

Ah yes - because no men ever does anything that might be good for or kind to females without trying to get laid.

And yet it's feminism that's anti-male.

"But is anybody else kinda tired of the anti porn/pro sex debate yet? No one is ever convinced"

*lol* too right about that. The need to justify one's sexual proclivities trumps feminism for a lot of people, it seems.

This was the theory that my grade school teachers accepted as self-evident. Nothing could be done to combat the unequal status of women until the concept of masculinity had changed. Masculinity would never change unless children were taught differently. And the best place to start was the worst example of everything wrong with masculinity: the King of the Hill game.

But this posed a problem. When winter came, snowmounds formed on the sides of parking lots, and we had nice hills with something approximately close to padding to work with, all we wanted to do was play King of the Hill. They couldn't convince us that there were more enjoyable things to do. They showed us new games, they tried to organize activities that didn't involve competition, but we were persistent. We wanted to shove and kick and punch each other.

So every year, as positive reinforcement failed, they eventually turned to negative reinforcement. They'd punish us. Every new game organized more out of the way on the playground brought a new round of detentions, letters home to parents, and lectures. And that's how it always played out, until we were old enough to discover new forms of violent competition that were harder to regulate. Organized sports, for example.

It should probably be obvious at this point that when I'm saying 'we,' I'm referring almost exclusively to my male classmates (with the exception of two girls who preferred to play with us rather than with the other girls; both of them could took and kept the Hill fairly regularly). And when I'm saying 'the teachers,' I'm referring to all women. That is only how the gender breaks down in this anecdote, but I suspect it reflects a broader reality.

There are many problems with such critiques of masculinity and pornography as linked here (one I won't discuss being that they ignore gay pornography, instantly excluding me from existence in the realm of masculinity), but the problem that bothers me most is that the means by which a 'reevaluation of masculinity' are to be achieved are left out of focus. If you can't convince men that they don't actually want to compete with each other? That they don't really derive any enjoyment from it even when they don't win? That it is impossible to appreciate competition and at the same time be committed to the full, equal, and uncompromised human rights of women? Then you have to use power.

You have to realign the networks of power to force men not to compete. Not to consume pornography. Not to follow the cultural model of 'maleness.'

And that's when you get Andrea Dworkin siding with Christian fundamentalists in demanding criminal penalties for pornography. That's when it's decided that using power to force a change in gender roles is for the greater good.

Even if we say that it is possible, and I think the forces aligned against such a fundamental shift in power structure are too great, I still don't think it's right. I feel an inclination toward attraction to other men, and I feel an inclination toward competition. Is it 'natural'? Whatever, it doesn't matter, 'natural' is as much a cultural construct as any other. More importantly, is it wrong?

No.

It's not.

It is neither wrong for me to like other guys, nor is it wrong for me to like competing (with men, with women, in whatever circumstance something is at stake and more than one person wants it). I'm sorry, but no, I'm not about to erase either impulse from my psyche, and the rhetoric of the camp that wants me to be ex-gay and the camp that wants me to be ex-male sounds the same to me.

I do not buy this as the right way to end injustice against women. Not as a gay man, not as a man, and not as a feminist.

Dodgerdodger, for one thing, competitiveness and what Jensen is talking about are not the same thing. I compete with my colleagues for promotions. I don't subjugate them in the process. He was using King of the Hill as an analogy. And he wasn't saying that you should be an ex-male. I'm reading a lot of defensiveness, and not understanding why.

Agreed, he was using King of the Hill as an analogy. He was unremittingly critical of the game, and by proxy what it represents, which my reading interpreted as the world of 'male competition' (the back-stabbing corporate world being one example he used).

I have not read the book, only this excerpt, so I can't speak to his *whole* argument. If someone who has read the book can lay it out, I would be happy to hear. But by this excerpt, he seems to be drawing a connection King of the Hill -> fierce competition -> maleness -> dehumanizing pornography -> patriarchy.

I am defending both the game, and by proxy what it represents, the first three links in the chain, because I think he is wrong to conflate them with inevitable subjugation of women.

"I'm reading a lot of defensiveness, and not understanding why."

Because: The need to justify one's sexual proclivities trumps feminism for a lot of people, it seems.

No one asked or told Dodgerdodger to not compete, or to not be male. He unintentionally ( I think, anyway ) conflated being male with a *need* to subjugate women - or, in other words, to "win" by forcing them to do/be/etc whatever.

Sorry, I don't buy that this is all there is to men. I don't have such a dim view of men.

You can compete without dehumanizing, abusing, humilating someone. That's not at all true about porn.

Dodgerdodger, I think you're also conflating maleness with masculinity. Maleness is a state of being. Masculinity is a social construct. Jensen is not antimale, but is critiquing the construct of masculinity. You might be male, but that isn't the same thing as being masculine, and our culture's construction of masculinity is what is problematic.

"He unintentionally (I think, anyway) conflated being male with a *need* to subjugate women - or, in other words, to 'win' by forcing them to do/be/etc whatever."

We agree there. You do not 'win' by forcing women to do or be anything. You brutalize yourself and you rob another person of freedom.

"You can compete without dehumanizing, abusing, humiliating someone."

We also agree there. You can even play King of the Hill. Or work on Wall Street. You can't fight a war without doing those things, but I'm not signing myself on to state-sponsored slaughter.

"I don't buy that this is all there is to men. I don't have such a dim view of men."

Neither do I.

"That's not at all true about porn."

That is where our disagreement lies.

I realize that I am making a pretty sweeping rhetorical move in conflating criticism of porn with criticism of 'male competitiveness,' but I'm doing so with an eye to the excerpt's author's conflation of supporting 'male competitiveness' with supporting dehumanizing porn.

And I also realize that you cannot read my mind and know my real intentions in disagreeing with this article so vehemently. I can only state my intentions and try to make them consistent with what I'm arguing.

Finally, defense of one's sexual proclivities can certainly trump feminism, but these aren't my sexual proclivities I'm defending.

And you're correct, kissmypineapple, I am conflating maleness with masculinity. I am not saying that the cultural construct and the gender identity are exactly equivalent, but I do not think that the cultural construct was built on thin air. I think there are aspects of being of the male gender that dispose one towards aspects of the male cultural construct (leaving room for a lot of dizzying complexity when you incorporate intersex and transexuality into the mix. Not to mention sexual orientation).

This is a sticking point in a lot of these debates, a point at which people will start talking past each other. If you believe all of male identity is indoctrinated by the culture, changing male identity merely requires changing the indoctrination.

I'm not convinced on that point (realizing that his opens me to the charge that I think patriarchy is 'biologically natural'--I don't), and if that's where the argument hinges, then neither of us is going to make headway with the other.

Finally, defense of one's sexual proclivities can certainly trump feminism

I would argue, not justifiably so.

I'm not convinced on that point (realizing that his opens me to the charge that I think patriarchy is 'biologically natural'--I don't), and if that's where the argument hinges, then neither of us is going to make headway with the other.

Then, I suppose we won't make headway. I am not a gender essentialist, neither a biological determinist. Competition is a human trait, not a male one. And Jensen criticizes the rewards we give to competition that deliberately hurts others as a lead in to how that informs how most pornography is currently made. These things perpetuate each other. But, as you said, since I believe that all it will take to change the construct of masculinity is to change the indoctrination, and you believe that much of what makes up masculinity is, in fact, your maleness, then it makes no sense for us to debate.

Then it makes no sense for us to debate.

Just a note that I think defense of sexual proclivities does, regularly, trump feminism, not that I think it's a good thing for it to do so.

Thanks for the clarification.

I agree with feminism is not anti-male. But I have to disagree to a certain extent about feminism not having to be anti-sex. Feminism has to be anti-sex. Men use sex as a weapon, regardless of situation. And porn doesn't even tell half of the story. Most men who rape women and girls don't even have porn.

I think he is a misguided and focusing on the wrong end of the problem. The problem is that all Abrahamic religions, and by extension, the dominant western culture is anti-sex. Pornography has been with humans forever. You just have to look at Khajuraho temples in India for explicit sculptures, paintings during the mughal period which show Gods and Goddesses in more positions than would be possible for any pornographer to convey. Chinese and Japanese woodcarvings with extra large sex organs, and temples devoted to phallus worship even today. Expressions of sexuality, even for money, have never been a problem. In fact, I suspect they generally coincide with time periods where women have a high status. What is a problem is a cultures that try to drive something as powerful as the sex drive underground. When they do that, it comes out in ugly ways. Often, the ugliness is projected onto women.

Incidentally, the porn industry is one of the few industries where women make significantly more money than men.

It's such a bummer to read "masculinity is essential the male identity" on a feminist website.

Farhat-

That is the problem... the sex industry is the ONLY industry where women make more money than men.

It's not empowerment if the only way a woman can earn more $$ than a man is to sell her body in some form.

I think the sex/porn industry is a lot more problematic than you're making it out to be, Farhat (as KellyB points out), but I agree with the point that being anti-sex and anti-expressions of sexuality are not helpful at all and that our culture driving sexuality underground is really harmful to women - anti-sex rhetoric has most commonly been used to suppress the desires of women, not men, so I find the idea that feminism should be "anti-sex" as Jovan1984 says sort of ridiculous, because it's pretty much exactly what women have been suppressed by for years. That, and, I didn't sign up for an anti-sex version of feminism. I'm not sure if you're saying that ALL men use sex as a weapon, but it looks that way, since you said regardless of situation, which I find absurd and essentialist.

Sorry to bum you out, MirandaJay, but would you prefer I didn't read or participate? Is there no room in feminism for anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly agree with gender relativism?

Because that would be a bummer too.

I never understand why I can't be pro-sex and anti-porn at the same time. I am pro-sex and pro-sex expression. The majority of porn does not fall into those categories for me, and the commodification of women's bodies is also not a pro-sex concept.

You can compete without dehumanizing, abusing, humilating someone. That's not at all true about porn.

So you're saying that it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for there to be porn without dehumanizing, abusing, and/or humiliating someone?

I call that a big, steaming pile of horse shit.

Maybe nobody here is aware of amateur pornography?

How would you distinguish 'the majority' from the 'the minority'? A sub-categorical "I know it when I see it" to complement the current broader test of what is obscenity and what isn't?

And what's the solution? Ban pornography? How is that fair to pornography that doesn't belong to the majority you refer to (not to mention gay and lesbian pornography, where the issues become even more subtle)? Ban pornography that denigrates women? And who gets to decide? Simply encourage people not to view pornography? I think religious fundamentalists are already hard at work at that (when they're not organizing purity balls and criminalizing abortion). They're not exactly racking up a huge list of successes in the War against Porn by persuasion.

Why is it necessary to be anti-porn in order to be against exploitive or dehumanizing imagery? Because of the trend of modern, American, heterosexual, male-targeted porn?

I get the goal, but I question the means.

I am not completely anti-sex, as I believe that children should be taught REAL sex ed starting in the fourth grade. And I was referring to men using sex as a weapon in general because it seems like every other day we see the horrific stories of women being raped.

I don't see many porn and sex toys as a way of sexual expression at all. I truly don't. I see those two things as degrading to women.

I never understand why I can't be pro-sex and anti-porn at the same time.

I think part of the problem is one of the vague definition of what we mean when we use the word "porn." Some people are thinking specifically of sexual images that (in their minds) dehumanize the subjects; some people use "porn" to talk about a much wider range of sexual imagery. Some people think ALL sexual imagery meant or used for sexual pleasure is degrading, other people think some types are, some types aren't. But "porn" and "pornography" are loaded words that carry really different meanings depending on which circles you're moving in, where you grew up, and your own personal experience and opinion.

I, personally, an pro-sex and for freedom of expression (which means the creation of visual images I might not agree with, as long as their creation isn't actually harming anyone in the process). At the same time, I definitely reserve the right to be a critic of pornography. I feel perfectly free to say, "that is sexist, racist, bullshit" if I think it is. I don't think the genre per se is wrong, it's how that genre has been, and is, used. And I would say the same for sex toys.

Jensen is making a weird argument. He says that feminism should be radical, by which he means getting at root causes. Okay. But machismo, what he calls "king of the hill" masculinity, has been with us for a very long time. Machismo's harmful effects on male-female relationships predate the growth in the popularity of porn. In the days of our grandfathers, porn wasn't as readily available or the shockingly (and sometimes nauseatingly) wide array of genres that you see today. Mainly, it was monthly magazines with soft-focus photos of naked women posing alone. Yet sexism and male dominance of women was hardly less of a problem. So how is attacking porn getting at the root cause of machismo? It just seems like a non sequitur.

Thanks for clarifying, Jovan1984, I didn't realize you were referring to the porn and sex toy industries as "sex" because as neither of those show up in my sex life, I think of them as variations of sexuality but I don't see being against those things as being "anti-sex" since plenty of sex exists outside of those two things. I too, wish sex education was better in school...

I never understand why I can't be pro-sex and anti-porn at the same time. I am pro-sex and pro-sex expression. The majority of porn does not fall into those categories for me, and the commodification of women's bodies is also not a pro-sex concept.

Totally, totally agree!

Dodger,

Cultural feminism sucks.

Christian fundies and radical feminists oppose porn for dramatically different reasons.
It is important to recognize those differences before proclaiming that radical feminists are "acting like fundies!" when they voice opposition to porn.

If banning porn had any connection to status of women we might have found the highest status of women in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and lowest status in places like Netherlands.

The dramatically different reasons still yield the same action. Radical feminists who are "acting like fundies" because they want to reify the equal human rights of women and end their subjugation are still "acting like fundies." The ends always, always include the means, and in this case the means (assuming one is arguing for censorship and the criminalization of pornography--I don't think every person who is against pornography is arguing for this) are a pretty odious thing to include.

MirandaJay,

I'm open to persuasion, but categorical statements don't have a great track record of changing my errant ways.

Dodger, it's possible to OPPOSE porn without wanting to BAN it.

Certainly, which is why I included the qualification that "I don't think every person who is against pornography is arguing for this." And I bet if we're both forced to sit down and watch the same "Young Sluts Get What's Coming To Them" shlock, we're both going to react with disgust. But I still don't see the need for categorical opposition to pornography.

Correct, Sarah. I OPPOSE sex toys and I DON'T want them BANNED.

Dodgerdodger, thanks for your clarifiation. There are people who are opposed to porn and sex toys that are members of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

"If banning porn had any connection to status of women we might have found the highest status of women in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and lowest status in places like Netherlands."

In countries where women are gaining greater and greater equality, it seems the porn "tastes" get more and more misogynistic.

So perhaps we can hypothesise a relationship between the freedoms women experience in a society, and the level of eroticisation of violence against women in the at culture.
Not sure about this, just putting it out there...

Also, sixtiesliberal (who seems to have left) strikes me as having the most appropriate handle ever; a white straight man who doesn't like "the Man" telling him to get a haircut, thinks that "sexual liberation" means "chicks" shouldn't turn him down for sex, and is generally, 40 years after the fact, still an asshole.

Is Swedish, Finnish, or Kiwi porn really more violent than American porn, though? I don't know, I'm not exactly a connoisseur, but the connection between greater gender equality and more degrading straight porn strikes me as tenuous.

The explosion of amateur porn probably has more to do with it. When your competition is producing sex for consumption for free, your best recourse is to do something your competition can't match. Say, by ramping up the extremism.

Yeah, you might have a point, dodgerdodger, I was just thinking out loud. There does seem to be a much stronger undercurrent of hatred of women in a lot of straight porn nowadays, even compared to 5 or 10 years ago. (I must admit I don't watch heaps of porn, and I prefer seeing two men together anyway, but that's a story for another time). Your explanation may be the correct one. It's probably a hard thing to verify.

Kiwi porn is pretty straightforward. And in my opinion, hard to take seriously. I guess it's the cultural cringe factor.

We have censorship here that Americans don't have, so you can't show anything that is illegal, i.e. bestiality, children, some representations of rape and sexual violence,(although I'm not sure of all the rules).

By the way, our Chief Censor is and out-and-proud gay canadian.
He's actually on my "fantasy dinner party guest-list".

Because I got curious, I looked up what is and isn't illegal here.

The key points are that a document must be shown to support or promote these things, not just depict them:

A publication shall be deemed to be objectionable for the purposes
of this Act if the publication promotes or supports, or tends to promote or support,---
(a) The exploitation of children, or young ersons, or both, for sexual purposes; or
(b) The use of violence or coercion to compel any person to participate in, or submit to, sexual conduct; or
(c) Sexual conduct with or upon the body of a dead person; or
(d) The use of urine or excrement in association with degrading or dehumanising conduct or sexual conduct; or
(e) Bestiality; or
(f) Acts of torture or the infliction of extreme violence or extreme
cruelty.

So there we are folks, the basic laws of censorship for New Zealand! Now you never need to lie awake wondering!

(Apologies for the threadjack)

Interesting point, dodger. Perhaps the rise in de-humanization, brutality, etc. can be seen more as a "porn arms race", an attempt to distinguish a place in a form of entertainment that has become much more mainstream with the inception of the internet. As for all this opposition to pornography, I'd say assuming this is reflective of the current culture is difficult to prove with all the factors involved, and the fact that some of the worst nations in terms of female sexual liberty also ban pornography (Saudi Arabia, anyone?). If you're opposed to pornography because it denigrates women, fine, but how do you explain gay or lesbian pornography? This issue is way more complex than simply being "anti-porn and pro-sex".

And on a side note, dodger, your first post about King of the Hill definitely resonated with me. I grew up in a house where at first my mother was strongly against displays of strong masculinity in its stereotypical form (swords, guns, fighting, scuffling, etc.), but luckily for me she finally realized that my brother and I would fight, and play fight, because that's just what we did. Sadly, the school system disagreed with my younger brother's love of such things, diagnosed it as ADHD, and put him on low-grade amphetamines for years to treat what I now affectionately call "boys being boys-itis".

I think it's a serious mistake to confuse porn being illegal with porn being non-existent. Plenty of right-wing countries ban porn--but that doesn't mean that men aren't consuming porn in those societies. Any serious examination of the correlation between porn and the status of women will need substantially better evidence than legality.

As for all this opposition to pornography, I'd say assuming this is reflective of the current culture is difficult to prove with all the factors involved

All art and cultural expression is reflective of the culture in which it is produced. Why would porn be any different?

Sorry for the long comment, but...

KellyB: Female obstetrician/gynecologists in the US make equal pay to men and are more likely to be hired (women prefer them). It's not JUST porn.

As for pornography in general... There should be a way out for the women (and men, too). Opportunities to change their career, if they want. But you know what, if they don't, and the porn isn't like staged snuff or involve bestiality/minors... It's fantasy. Most men can watch a movie about a vigilante who's cool and gets all the chicks and kills/tortures people, and they don't go out and kill/torture people. Racism should be toned down (it can be very bad in porn), but if a little power-play gets a guy off, he's hardly going to go rape the first woman he can, or try to beat his girlfriend. Well, he might, but it's not because of the porn.

Look, there are WOMEN who get off to power play and being ordered around (and don't start saying they're tools of the patriarchy, they can be complete feminists and still like to be spanked/dominated/etc). There are women who like bondage, S&M, rape fantasies. They're not going to let it happen to them unless they want it from that particular guy (and they trust him) but they still LIKE it. "Macho" porn can be sexy for women, too, because it's all fantasy. It's escapism. It's like imagining punching your annoying boss in the face.

Are there problems in porn? Sure. Racism is a problem, because it's only targeted at people who really believe African = "primitive" and Asian = "demure." I'd be stunned if people of other races got off on being called racial slurs and being described in stereotypic terms. Obviously there is really bad porn out there, involving animals, or minors, or scat (usually illegal, too). But many women do enjoy bondage, S&M, power play, all those so-called "degrading" things. And the reverse exists, dominatrices and cuckolding etc, so it's not like it's ALWAYS women "degraded" by men (admittedly the former is a bit more common, probably because it's less socially acceptable so more fetishizable). And the vast majority of porn out there is amateur stuff or involves mutual satisfaction.

So I don't see a problem with porn. I mean, you're free to disagree with me, but the assumption that porn is always degrading women for the sole sake of men is a naive one. The internet is filled with porn, some good, some bad, some horrible. But for everything you see and think "oh, man, that's so degrading to women," I bet there's another woman out there thinking how hot it is. After all, it's just fantasy.

I dunno. I don't feel that great when I look at a lot of straight porn.
I don't think fantasy exists in a vacuum.
It's a really tricky topic, and I guess everybody has a different relationship to pornography.
Personally, I tend to find (most straight porn) tacky and sexist.
I don't think it shouldn't exist, I just wish it wasn't (mostly) so sordid/lowest common denominator.

I think the reason that it's all so sordid/common denominator is partially because of competition with amateurs, and partially because "normal" romantic sex is so incredibly available in our culture. It's in movies and on TV and unless you either have high standards or are beneath everyone else's, you can get it in person. The stuff that shows up in porn is the stuff that people can't get anywhere else. Hence, the fantasy. And unless they're really clueless or misogynistic already, they know that it must always remain as fantasy unless someone offers to try it.

I apologize for my "getting laid" comment about Jensen. I shouldn't disrespect him until I've evaluated the whole work.

Anorak described me as

a white straight man who doesn't like "the Man" telling him to get a haircut, thinks that "sexual liberation" means "chicks" shouldn't turn him down for sex, and is generally, 40 years after the fact, still an asshole.

I define porn as photographs or motion pictures of naked people engaging in sexual acts where the genitals are visible. I find some porn degrading and some not. Just because "Mein Kampf" was vile doesn't mean all German philosophy or literature of the 20th century was vile. By that definition of porn I don't see that it is necessarily misogynist.

Basiorana

Why would you be stunned that some women would get off on racism, or being called racial slurs, but defensive of, and willing to accept women who get off on sexist acts like rape?

Could you please explain why sexism is ok but racism isn't?

Basiorana: very good post. People have some hangup about sex which causes them to place things related to sex differently. I can tell people I like Pirates of the Carribean without people wondering whether I'd really like to be a pirate. Tell the same people you like Secretary and they automatically wonder if you are normal.

I love Secretary, I hate porn.

MirandaJay: I am just saying what I have observed. Many women do get off on sexist acts. I might change my mind about the racism if I learned that a huge portion of the African/Latin/Asian-American population found it to be sexy, I just don't think that's the case (correct me if I'm wrong).

The race of your partner should NEVER make a difference on your sex life (culture maybe, but NOT race). The sex of your partner, however, is kind of really important. Thus, sexism in the bedroom doesn't seem as bad as say, sexism in the board room, so long as both partners consent to the acts without pressure.

There are men who get off on being "degraded" by their partners in the bedroom, and there are women who get off on the same thing. And if both partners get off on their respective roles in a power play dynamic, I have no objection. I simply doubt that the same is true of race.

Oh, to clarify-- I'm not saying you can't have physical preferences in partners that tie in to a certain race, just that you shouldn't require them to act a specific way because of their race.

Man, do I get tired of the "people who are anti-porn are just uptight, b/c they have, you know, hangups about sex" meme. I'm not uptight about sex. I find the great majority of porn to be upsetting. And if degrading women is part of a fantasy, I don't think that's defensible either. But, you know, keep it in your head, and we're fine, I guess. And, where did this banning porn thing come from? I haven't read the whole book, so maybe I'm just clueless here, but in the reviews I read, and from the excerpt I read, it doesn't sound like Jensen is arguing for the ban of porn. Nor did it read to me that he's saying that if we get rid of porn then *poof!* all better. I thought that the point is that you can see a lot of the problems with our construct of masculinity in the majority of mainstream porn, and that it feeds back into the construct. Given that, we should rethink masculinity (and by implication the construct of femininity) and work on engaging in a construct of humanity. I read a review that said in the end, Jensen says he'd rather struggle to be human than "be a man."

Whenever a hard criticism of porn comes up, everyone comes out of the woodwork to defend the sexual proclivities of themselves and other anonymous people, when, that's hardly the point of the discussion. I don't care if you personally know someone (or are someone) who gets off on having tomatoes thrown at you (hey Secretary, which I loved). That's not the point of the discussion.

kissmypineapple: I am simply sharing my opinion that porn in itself does not cause violence towards women or misogyny, and that women should not assume that since they don't like that kind of porn, it must be only appealing to women.

You can criticize porn all you want, but that doesn't mean I, or other people, shouldn't share our opinions on the subject simply because we disagree with the criticism.

As for the point of the discussion-- I thought the point was whether or not macho porn is a negative influence on society. Was I wrong?

Yeah, I really feel like my questioned was not answered.

"Many women get off on sexist acts" and that's fine and dandy and their "choice" or whatever, but many women of color don't get off on racist sexual acts? Could you please explain why many women would get off on sexism but many women of color wouldn't get off on racism?

Is the idea of a black women getting turned on by being called a nigger shocking to you, or is it that you have never met a black woman who was turned on by being called a nigger?

Because the only time I have ever heard or seen any woman getting excited by being called a slut/whore is in porn. And I've seen black women get off on racist things in porn, too. So I'm just saying, you saying "oh well, many women like to be degraded sexually!" but then immediately saying "I'd be shocked if a black woman was turned on by racism" is just TOTALLY confusing to me and doesn't make sense.

This is just boggling my mind how you can see how women of color don't find racism sexy but think it's ok for women in general to find sexism sexy.

(I also want to make clear I am not saying that WOC get turned on by racism, or should, or that I think that would be good if they did. I'm just pointing out that if one thinks one is is bad then the other one should be considered negative, too.)

Basiorana, I should clarify. When I said discussion, I meant the discussion in Jensen's book. And, again, I wouldn't say that "macho" porn is bad for society, so much as it is symptomatic of deeper problems, and in many ways, serves to feed those issues. And although I was orignally referring to Jensen's work, I suppose I don't understand why talking about what *some* people enjoy doing in bed serves to further a discussion about porn and its relation (or possible lack thereof) to misogyny and its practice in our culture.

May I remind some of you that one man's/woman's "harmless" sexual "fantasy" may quite well be a sex worker's miserable, nonconsensual, day-to-day reality?

I'm pro-sex, & pro sex-worker (used to be one) - and I resent the assumption that porn is ok since it is "just pretend." What a juvenile argument. Try being on the other end of the camera. It's pretty real.

I definitely reserve the right to be a critic of pornography. I feel perfectly free to say, "that is sexist, racist, bullshit" if I think it is. I don't think the genre per se is wrong, it's how that genre has been, and is, used.

Exactly.

What if mainstream feminists had said, "Because almost every movie we've seen enforces a sexist viewpoint, we have come to the conclusion that film is an inherently misogynist medium." What if normal movie actresses were ignored or shouted down by the feminist movement unless they vocally denounced film acting? Hollywood would become a misogynist ghetto.

The feminist solution to "the porn problem" isn't to marginalize porn further -- that'll only make things worse. We need strong, smart women to shake things up from the inside, like any other boys' club. And the women who are trying to do this now need the support of feminists outside the industry.

The reason, sixtiesliberal, that I was so harsh is that this isn't the first time you've made sexist jokes on this site.
Your joke about the irony of you being catty as a male writer; I'm sorry, what?
Because women are catty, not men, silly!
So it's like, funny, for you to accuse yourself of cattiness. 'Cause you're a man! Har de har.

And a straight man with an interest in women being treated like people, who'd a thunk it?!
He obviously is just hoping to get laid!

Ok, I'm sorry for calling you an asshole, that was a bit extreme.
I am probably projecting onto you some of the crap that men of your generation pull.

I do stand by the assertion that you are making sexist jokes.

This is one of the few places on the net where that shit doesn't fly. It'd be nice to keep it that way.

"It is important to recognize those differences before proclaiming that radical feminists are "acting like fundies!" when they voice opposition to porn."

Actually, SarahMC, I think that radical feminists are acting like Christian fundamentalists when, instead of following what is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of feminism -- encouraging every woman tell her story in her own way -- they instead insist that theirs is One True Way and that anyone who "strays" without repenting cannot be in control of her own mind, but is possessed by evil influences and should therefore be silenced.

There certainly is a lot of viciousness directed at feminists who are anti-porn. I'm also not a fan of prostitution, but that doesn't mean I am hateful of sex workers. I don't shun sex workers, whether they work in clubs, in film, or on the street. I loathe the conditions they work in. I think that if prostitution were legalized, we could implement a lot of desperately needed protections for sex workers, and I think it might help to diminish the prevalence of sex trafficking. ShifterCat, I think it is a stretch to assume that a feminist who is anti-porn is against women telling their stories in their own ways. If telling your story via porn is how you want to do it, then good for you. That doesn't mean I have to be suddenly pro-porn just b/c it's your chosen form of expression. I'm not calling for a ban of porn. I'm not working to marginalize it. And I do want the type of porn out there and the conditions under which it is produced to improve. But I will never see the commodification of women's bodies (or anyone's) as a positive thing. I think that Jensen's book probably will help to provoke thought about the current state of the porn industry, and hopefully will lead to a larger push to improve it. That would make me endlessly happy--to get to a place where the majority of porn celebrates sexuality in a positive way, and celebrates women's sexuality and their chosen manner of expressing it in a truly positive way. But that still isn't going to make me like porn. And why that apparently makes me comparable to people who want to take away reproductive choices, who want to alter the constitution to discriminate agains homosexual people, who want to get rid of any remnant of the separation of church and state the US still has, who want all women to keep their legs and mouths shut...I just don't see it.

Oh, sixtiesliberal, I take it all back.
The apology I mean!

Lookie what the internet found:

"No, not me. I jousted some at Marcotte's place, some on Edwards' site when the Marcotte flap broke out and at a couple of the self-proclaimed feminist sites. I've also batted about in the cave (different identity) but those folks are hard to take for long."

We are hard to take! So go away!

If anyone's interested, the link is:

http://s9.invisionfree.com/LieStoppers_Board/ar/t4166.htm

not to get too off topic, but I honestly have never had any rad fem ever tell me I was possessed or brainwashed. (As a matter of fact, I have never once came across any feminist who told me that it was bad to shave, wear makeup, or be a housewife, etc) The whole idea of the Feminist Police is kind of abstract to me - for those women who HAVE dealt with this (and I believe those who assert such a thing) - where and who does it come from, exactly? To me, it sounds like the idea of the meanie judgie scoldy preachy feminists is more of a media construct than a reality. But I am interested...what should I read?

To be frank, as a former sex worker, the rhetoric from the "pro porn/sex pos" side has always felt harsher and more presumptuous to me, and the rad fem veiw much more aligned to my experiences of the industry. (Which is why I now self-identify as a rad fem). But I am certainly interested in other women's stories...

The thing is - porn is not just a fantasy. It colors the men's perceptions and expectations of women... women who exist in real life.
A good number of men who watch porn think porn actresses are an acurate depiction of women and how they "should be" sexually.

MirandaJay: It is that I have never met a black woman who gets off on being called the n-word, but I know of many women, women I have actually met, who like to talk dirty and like to be called a slut as long as it stays in the bedroom. Do they want it done in front of their friends? No. So it stays in the bedroom, or on the computer/TV screen.

I don't know why women get off on it, but they do. So since it's something that both sides can find appealing , I don't think that it is particularly detrimental to society. Racism really only appeals to one side of the equation. It's providing pleasure to some members of one group while hurting all members of the other, while sexist acts in porn are providing pleasure to some members of both groups. Porn doesn't have to appeal to everyone.

kissmypineapple: My point was that since both sides can get off on it and both sides usually know to keep it in the bedroom, it is nothing more than harmless fantasy and it does not cause widespread misogyny outside of the enjoyment of the fantasy. Unless, of course, the person is already misogynistic.

alicepaul: In my very first post I specified that there should be options for any woman who wished to get out of porn. I do think that that is an area where reform is needed, but I think the answer is to give women a good way out, not eliminate porn. There is lots of porn that is bad for the actress, but that's not to say that every single actress hates her job and would quit instantly given a white-collar job with equal pay. The way the sex industry treats it's actresses may need to change, but I believe that it's a different problem-- there is amateur bondage and S&M out there, maybe they should find actresses who truly want to be doing what they need them to be doing?

SarahMC: Men who think like that would think like that without the porn. If you really think every man who watches porn where the woman is submissive wants his women to all be submissive in real life, clearly you haven't seen too many men's porn collections. You would be surprised at the normal men, even the women's rights supporters, who have that stashed away in a computer file marked "tax returns." It's something people hide because it's not socially acceptable, but it's still there.

Men who think like what, Basiorana? I don't think you've interpreted me correctly. I'm not saying every man who views porn does anything in particular. But porn has absolutely influenced the way men view women in real life. We're all supposed to have basket-ball-sized tits and we're all supposed to want anal and like getting pissed on. A LOT of men have warped views of women because of the way sex and women are depicted in pornography.

Do you really believe any man who has a warped view of women would NOT have a warped view of women if he had never seen porn? Men usually don't see porn until they are in middle or high school. By that time they've usually already decided what they want their women to be. Video games and TV have more influence on men's negative views of women than porn does.

There are men who are impressionable enough that they see a woman in a porn movie who likes anal and thinks all women should like anal. They probably need therapy, a shower, and to get back to the real world. But any man who actually has met women besides his mom and doesn't live in his parent's basement knows that a porn star in a movie is not the same thing as a real woman in a real relationship.

I think that if men felt comfortable sharing their whole porn collection with you, you would be amazed at what normal, respectful guys thought was sexy.

Basiorana, if TV and video games have an influence on men's minds, why wouldn't porn? And men's preferences in women are not solidified by middle school/high school. Why would you think that men's sexuality is formulated and unchangeable by that point?
The media has had an incredible influence on men and women and their views on gender, sexuality, their own sex and the opposite sex. Porn is part of that.

They aren't completely unchangeable, but most guys know if they like strong women or submissive ones by then. Other men in their lives, and their peers, have taught them what the "best" kind of woman is, and that impacts their porn choices.

I was referring to TV and video games played when they were fairly young, like middle/elementary school.

My point in all of this is that most men who watch porn you would consider degrading are able to keep it separate from real life and do not let it affect their image of women. Most women who watch porn you would consider degrading are able to keep it separate from real life and do not let it affect their image of themselves. The ones who think that women need basketball tits just because porn stars have basketball tits are exceptions, and usually have a whole host of other issues. Blaming porn for misogyny is a bit like blaming violent video games for school shootings. Yeah, maybe there's a slight correlation, but it's FAR more common that the problems existed before the media got involved.

It is a bit tiresome to engage in self-defense but sometimes necessary when faced with a personal attack such as anorak’s upon me.

The reference in her (?) quote to the folks who “are hard to take� was not to this board but to a discussion forum which often refers to itself as the “bat cave�. It was set up to discuss the Duke Lacross case and was populated mostly with pro-prosecution posters. I had several civil exchanges with Cash Michaels there, but much of the back and forth among posters on the different sides of the issue were abusive name calling and flame throwing. If you want to browse that board, the link is here:
http://p206.ezboard.com/General-Case-Discussion/fhackedbannedandlockeddownfrm14

The link provided by anorak was a string mostly about diversity, started by someone who was complaining about disparate press coverage of white on black crime, as alleged in the Duke case, versus black on white crime exemplified particularly by the Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian rape/murder case in Knoxville earlier this year. I had 8 comments on that string, so if anyone really wants to know more about my views on diversity and cares to be fair, read them all.

The quote from me cited by anorak was a specific response to this from a right winger on the Liestoppers board:

“Although I don't know any 60's libs (the hippies), I like you dukeParent. You can be reasoned with. Were you the guy that used to post on FreeRepublic and get in the constant battles with that pompous ass JLS?� That is why the start of my response was “No, not me.�

Here are a couple other posts of mine from the string linked by anorak:

“One of my alter egos when I post on other boards is "SixtiesLiberal". To me the label means tolerance and respect for values of others which may be different than mine. So, although I am no longer religious, I respect strongly religious people and I also believe the intolerance of the far left in this country is worse than the occasional intolerance from the far right (religious or not).�

“Having other people in my life with diverse cultural backgrounds makes life interesting. I also believe that greater association of people across diverse cultural and racial backgrounds does lessen the distrust among different groups. In that I am a classic liberal: I believe in integration, though other values might well trump that one (e.g. neighborhood schools, right of free assembly in private groups or clubs). As another example, I think the CCI [Campus Culture Initiative] group at Duke was right to look at and recommend ways to lessen voluntary self-segregation on campus. They went about it completely the wrong way, but it is a worthy target.�

I do often try to use humor (ironic, satirical, sarcastic) to make a point. Sometimes it’s not funny. Sometimes it offends. When the use of it is unfair, as it was in my first post here, I will and did apologize. It was unfair to ascribe motivations to Jensen from a three page excerpt out of book length treatise. But if anorak has not had the experience of a man trying to start a relationship by feeding her recycled rhetoric she likes to hear, then she is either fortunate, naïve, or too young for it to have happened to her yet. Many men of my generation are sexist pigs. To assume we all are is as block-headed as to assume all twenty-somethings are excessively prone to snap judgments about older folks.

I don’t think I’m a troll. I like this board because most people will discuss the issues on what is posted and not engage in personal attack or do an internet search to ferret out other posts to distort their views for that personal attack. But if the owners of this sandbox think I am a troll and want to ban me they will.

First, I didn't blame porn for misogyny. I do believe it negatively affects men's views about women.

Second, it's not about preferring dominant or submissive women. That is not what I'm talking about.
It's about expecting that actual women will be like porn stars and feeing disappointment when they are not.
It's about demanding things from women because "the women in my favorite porn do it!"

Wasn't there a commenter in here recently who said something along the lines of, "It's wrong when people say women don't enjoy sex. The existance of porn proves otherwise."

???

I also believe the intolerance of the far left in this country is worse than the occasional intolerance from the far right (religious or not)

This has got to be a joke.

SarahMC: That quote is ridiculous and I don't know who said it, but they clearly are full of crap.

Have you really had someone demand that you to do something, or someone demand one of your friends to do something, using that reasoning? I've never heard of such a thing. Maybe a "Okay, I saw something in a porn, I was wondering if you might want to try it" but that's a little different...

"But if anorak has not had the experience of a man trying to start a relationship by feeding her recycled rhetoric she likes to hear, then she is either fortunate, naïve, or too young for it to have happened to her yet."

If you've retracted the statement you should stop trying to defend it, because otherwise you make no sense. You can't actually be suggesting that a man would devote months or years of thoughtful energy and research to this subject because... he wants to get laid?

You made a bad, sexist joke and were called on it. I'm ready to let it go, but you should really stop defending yourself on the issue.

I don't think the linked post makes sense.

He opens by describing king of the kill, a dirt pile game. Then there's a (not very well supported) linked claim that society is all King of the Hill, which is both simultaneously "manly" and then there's... stuff. Which doesn't really go into king of the hill, or porn. Nor does it tie back very well into the opening thesis. Though it's interesting.

And then, at the end, there's some random porn assertion, which seems to really have little or nothing to do with the rest of his post. It's as if he said "I know, let's make this a porn post!"

I'm not defending porn, I just think the linked excerpt is badly written.

Basionara, I've heard enough women report that porn has influenced the specifics of het men's expectations of sex, body types and grooming that I do not doubt that it contributes to other, more sinister expectations as well.

As one example, Zuzu has blogged eloquently at Feministe and in comments elsewhere about how men are surprised that she retains pubic hair. When I was younger, only kinky folks, and specifically, female BDSM submissives had completely shaved pubic mounds; now it's pretty common. It appeared in porn first, now it's common. Years ago, men didn't expect to ejaculate on women, let alone on their faces or hair; that was akin to watersports: a wierd thing that very kinky people did. Then came bukkake porn, and now friends of mine tell me that when they seek NSA sex with men, lots of men assume they can come in women's faces. And I love anal (enveloping as well), but not everyone enjoys it, yet is seems like there's a lot of pressure to do it. These are changes that appeared first in porn -- we can speculate about why the industry went that way; I say backlash by entitled men. But these are clearly to my mind migrations from porn to real life (I'm leaving out breast implants because there are a lot of other cultural pressures for large breasts; facial comeshots and shaved pubic areas could only have migrated from more explicit media).

These days, porn that is outright about the humiliation and subordination of women is everywhere. Now, I'm not squeamish about pain and humiliation: I'm a serious BDSMer, a switch but mostly a bottom. But the current movement of abusing women in porn for male entertainment just uses BDSM as political cover. (And I want to make clear that for my part I reject it -- Violet Blue has said much the same thing, but I can't find the link now).

Sure, there is femdom BDSM porn. It is just about always presented in a context that uses the gear and the shibboleths of consensual BDSM relationships. The women are virtually always dressed up in fetish outfits, the men are clearly subbies or lifestyle "slaves." The painplay is paced, controlled; it looks like things people do in BDSM scenes. There's fem-sub porn like that, too; clearly BDSM. I don't know much about how most of the fem-sub stuff is made; I do know how the femdom stuff is made: lifestyle female dominants (often also pros) make videos with men that they have longstanding personal relationships with, or that they know from the community. I've seen postings for a male sub to step in last-minute on a video shoot; these women know the guys. These are consensual scenes.

Compare that with the current vogue for abusing women. They often advertise explicitly as rape. When they don't, they use the barely coded language of rape: "forced", "gang-bang". Many of them revolve around a theme that the women don't know what they are getting into; they are new to the industry, they are new to the site, they are young, etc. They also often frame the encounter as between strangers without meaningful negotiation (I don't pretend to know if that's actually how the shoot goes down). I'm not going to put the names of the purveyors here; either you know exactly what I'm talking about or you just don't know what's out there right now. This material mostly doesn't even nod in the direction of consent. It gets as close as nudge-and-wink will allow to rape.

Do these women have any idea what these shoots will be like? I don't know, but I've read credible accounts of women who were raped on set; who didn't like what was happening but when they tried to stop were repeatedly violated for the camera. I don't want to be a market for this; I stopped paying for porn a while ago except for a few things I can live with supporting (like femdom porn when I have a good idea who the population of performers are).

But the conditions of production are only one of several concerns. To my mind, the other big one is the norms these materials pass along. When horny high school boys with few sexual experiences and young partners with not a lot of self-confidence see this stuff, what is its effect? Even if that stuff were all carefully negotiated between longtime partners, that's not what the horny teen boy sees. The material reads, on the surface, that roughness, pain, disrespect, humiliation and selfish use of a female body is hot. The material does not position that as some sort of weird alternative, like more traditional BDSM material at least implictly does (and some folks criticize Kink.com, maybe rightly, but on that score, they do something very different. They have pre-and post-scene interviews right in the videos, so they normalize BDSM community norms of negotiation, consent, attention to one's partner's needs and limits and aftercare). What the abuse-women porn does is position the kind of rough sex that is, in reality, only suitable for kinky people who have discussed their intentions and limits, as the sort of thing that one can and should do with any and every sex partner.

And the kicker: there is (of course) no corresponding body of work for femdom scenes. For BDSMers, there's explicity BDSM material either way. But the rough, humiliating abuse, the slap-and-choke, I can think of maybe one place where I've every seen material where women beat, abuse, humiliate and sexually use men. Maybe one, tiny, out-of-the-way site in the whole Series of Toobs. And I've looked. Because women topping men is, to reference Austin Powers, "my bag, baby."

I don't agree with anti-porn and prostitution feminists on everything (notably, many of those folks are intractably anti-BDSM and therefore, as I see it, anti-me), but I also don't like seeing this discussion turn into a mutual airing of uncharitable assumptions. Opposition to porn is not opposition to sex or prudishness. Opposition to porn is not necessarily advocacy of censorship; it can take the form of a call not to buy it or not to patronize it or to condemn it without seeking to use the power of the state. Dworkin and MacKinnon favored a private right of action over censorship, in fact (and I always liked that solution in concept, though in practice their model ordinance was specifically designed to eliminate depictions of BDSM, which is where I get off the bus, obviously).

So, while I think there's a lot to talk about around the question of definitions and what's okay/not okay, and what to do about it, I'm just not willing to wave off the whole question. The porn industry raises very serious problems.

I'm not naive. There is twenty five years of bad blood on this issue. Common ground is hard to find and nobody's really ready to make nice. But there's a difference between hanging up on really intractable differences on the one hand, and on the other simply painting the other side's position with a broad brush and dismissing it. The former may not produce any progress, but the latter guarantees that result.

/soapbox

Well Sailorman, I think the excerpt is too short. I think his thesis is sufficiently complicated that he didn't fully explicate in the first three pages of the book. That's frustrating for me, but makes me more motivated to go and check the book out for myself.

“It's about demanding things from women because "the women in my favorite porn do it!"�

Pornography definitely shapes men’s (and women’s) sexuality in a big way. A lot of boys start watching it at an early age before they are sexually active. So before they have any experience with real girls, they learn about anal sluts, Asian hos, ass to mouth etc., and if that’s what you learn to associate with sex, then that is going to be what you find sexy. Why do so many guys want to come on your face these days? Let me guess, it’s not because they have evolved that way …

"You can't actually be suggesting that a man would devote months or years of thoughtful energy and research to this subject because... he wants to get laid?"

Robert Jensen is actually gay, so yeah I am pretty sure, getting laid by women cannot have been not one of his motives.

Wow, Thomas. That was really informative for me. Thank you.

(Um, I'm always worrid about tone on internet, so I want to say explicitly that this is a genuine post of thanks. I'm not trying to be sarcastic.)

That's an awesome post, Thomas.

I feel that it's up to people to oppose the trend toward degrading and faux-raping women in mainstream porn. This isn't necessarily an anti-porn position. It's against the use of porn as a means of subjugating women. I think that's a big distinction.

THANK YOU, Thomas! Perhaps I should have explicitly described the types of sexual expectations I was thinking about, but you just did that for me. :)
Your phrase "the norms these materials pass along" is perfect.

" So you're saying that it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE for there to be porn without dehumanizing, abusing, and/or humiliating someone?"
I call that a big, steaming pile of horse shit."
Good, because that's not what I said. Read, then act all protective of your porn.
Sex on film or in photos or whatever is not inherently "bad". When mixed with misogyny, racism, exploitation, abuse, violent, gross names, etc. – it ceases being just sex on film and becomes a perfect expression of what women are to this society – something to absord all manners of male abuses. This is really not that complicated to grasp.
Notice, I did not say it was impossible for porn to exist without this. It just isn't the topic of the post, which, if you weren't in *such* a hurry to protect your porn, you might have noticed.

"Basiorana, if TV and video games have an influence on men's minds, why wouldn't porn? And men's preferences in women are not solidified by middle school/high school. Why would you think that men's sexuality is formulated and unchangeable by that point?
The media has had an incredible influence on men and women and their views on gender, sexuality, their own sex and the opposite sex. Porn is part of that."

Bingo. If advertizing companies spend billions of dollars a year successfully convincing humans that they need whatever they're peddling, it is IMPOSSIBLE to pretend the same isn't true about porn. Check out porn advertising - the abuse, humilation and rape of women is a BIG selling point.

As Thomas said above, porn is where far too many kids learn abotu sex (thanks to dismal sex ed in school, if any, and parents who can't be bothered to discuss it). So, this rape and abuse style porn is what they are seeing. If you're seriously trying to convince yourself that someone who sees porn thinks "oh it's just a fantasy", go ahead. I find that to be an extremely naive and self-serving fantasy in and of itself.

Thomas: Porn can give men ideas but the decision to not check with a woman first is their own. I refuse to blame porn because men don't think to mention either ahead of time or right before they do it what might come up. That problem existed before porn. There has always been the assumption that men can do whatever they want in sex and the woman will go along with it, and THAT is something that needs to be dealt with.

As I said before, I acknowledge that the porn industry needs a makeover because it can be abusive to employees. However, porn stars are actresses. They can act young and new and even scared but still have done it many times before. If that is the case, what is the problem? Rape fantasies are common in both women and men, often MORE common in women (many, many romance novels revolve around the concept of a woman being "ravished"-- essentially, raped).

I have said before that there is a lot of problems with porn and that some porn is inexcusable and should be discouraged. Maybe disclaimers should be run (for long enough that they can be fully read): "All the people in this shoot were fully aware of what was going to be involved and consented without coercion" or something. Though, I would like to point out, that's not required of movies.

Maybe there needs to be more clarification for young men that porn movies are just that, movies, no more real than Spiderman 3, and that the actresses are PAID to do that, so they shouldn't expect it from their SOs any more than they should expect their SOs to jump off buildings "because Bionic Woman does it!" That doesn't mean the porn needs to go away, just that we need to talk to our children about sex, including porn, and maybe porn movies need to run notices about the stars being paid actresses.

sojourner: Real sex education and better prevention to keep minors off porn sites than a welcome page that says "Don't go here if you're not 18" would be far more helpful to that problem than condemning porn all together.

So I guess what really should be done is that we should make sure by high school that kids, especially boys, understand that it's just pretend and has as much resemblance to real life as Tomb Raider has to theirs (I guess I figured most people were smarter than that, but then again, there are still people who think WWE is real). Oh, but wait! That would require talking to children about sex beyond "Tab A Slot B!" Oh no!

Foiled again by my faith in humanity. *sigh* But there are still a lot of people who enjoy even "abusive" porn while understanding it is fantasy, so I don't think the problem is the porn itself, just how people perceive it.

Thomas, thank you so much. Your post beautifully explains much of the way I feel about porn. It's also something of a relief to know I'm not the only BDSMer here on Feministing (although my kink runs in the fem-sub direction). Sometimes a girl can get to feeling a little lonely in feminist circles with a kink like that, particularly when the discussion turns to sex.

“Real sex education and better prevention to keep minors off porn sites than a welcome page that says "Don't go here if you're not 18" would be far more helpful to that problem than condemning porn all together.�
I shoulnd’t have posted before reading Thomas’ post because his encompasses mine and he is so much more eloquent. Anyhow, even if we had comprehensive sex ed, even if parents talked to kids about sex, teenagers are going to still be drawn to porn. Why? Because they are horny, and sex ed classes don’t provide wanking material.
I don’t know what you mean by “condemning porn all together�, but pray tell me what is about porn that makes it immune to criticism? Why is it that we can and must criticize racism and sexism everywhere else but when it comes to pornography we should shut up or else we will be shut up being called anti-sex prudes? When feminists criticize porn, it’s the misogyny they are criticizing. If they don’t bother to specify that they mean misogynist abusive and degrading porn, it’s because that’s 99.99% of porn that is out there. So yeah, no one here is condemning “all erotic imagery� that someone up-thread was saying have been with us for thousands of years.

Basionara, you've raised the "porn is like other fiction" argument and I think that has superficial appeal and does not bear up under scrutiny, so I want to engage with that.

Porn, as we use the term, is not really a branch of fiction the way novels, TV dramas and movies are. The whole point of porn is the unsimulated sex. Sure, in some porn there are fictional plots and dialog -- what porn performers call the "fast forward." 'Nuff said.

Lots of things get called "porn" nowadays. Rock climberw watch "bouldering porn." I'm a woodworker; I buy "furniture porn." How is the term used? A decontextualized, graphic depiction of the thing itself. A movie may contain some skateboarding, but only a video that is nothing but skating, filmed for those that love to watch really awesome skating closely, quasi-masturbatorily, gets called "skate-porn." If you're a vintage car nut, Speed Channel has "Victory by Design," where a guy takes close look at the seminal cars of a particular marque, then drives them hard, while the camera lavishes attention on them and the distinctive exhaust notes roar from the television. I love the show: I'm almost right there in the room with the C-type Jaguar or the original Lotus 7 or the Maserati 300S. It's not fiction; not the part I want to see. It's the unsimulated part.

In porn, the part people consume for is the unsimulated part. Since the master narrative is "what you're watching is real", fictional elements get absorbed by this (whereas in real fiction, that's the other way around. When an actor eats in a film, nobody thinks about whether the actress is hungry or likes the food; if you do, then the movie is terrible).

In fact, the marketing around the stuff I'm talking about seems designed to avoid destroying the suspension of disbelief.

As for faith in humanity, how successful would the Blair Witch Project have been if it didn't work very hard to position itself as nonfiction? There's a big market for horror films that everyone knows are horror films; that movie differentiated itself by trying very hard to make it look like a documentary. Maybe nobody was actually fooled, but a lot of people watched a mediocre movie in the hopes of getting closer to being fooled. I suggest that at least that same statement is true of abuse porn. At a bare minimum, men are watching hoping that they can suspend their disbelief and really buy that it's really nonconsensual. That's not good.

Finally, I recognize that many women have rape fantasies -- and I'm not willing to put in any of the polite caveats about how "if it's a fantasy it's not really rape" or how they're "ravishment" fantasies or whatever. I know women whose rape fantasies are really dark and disturbing; some of them rape survivors who eroticize the experience as a coping mechanism. Some women who have those fantasies are ashamed of them and some claim them, at least to close friends, without apparent hesitation. I'm not ignorant of that, obviously. So what adults ought to do with their fantasies obvioulsy is a different inquiry from what we want teens watching, and that issue informs answers to questions like "what material is problematic?" and "what do we do about it?" But it does not invalidate the concern. Just because some adults get off on something without being a danger to others does not mean that the material is harmless.

I'm a lawyer, and I see the threads of hundreds of years of free speech jurisprudence, and the incorporation of the "marketplace of ideas" concept, all the time on this issue. That jurisprudence, and all that thinking, really revolved around the discussion of official suppression of open discussion of the ideas around policy and religion by the religious and political authorities. It has been ported directly into our ideas about how the State relates to speech through the First Amendment: but that's our relationship to government. Nobody here, and really nobody in the feminist movement, is the government. So, when we're not talking about government censorship, I think we ought to realize that First Amendment thinking is a set of tools created for another purpose, and which have limitations. After all, does any observer of politics or culture in these times really believe that the better ideas win out on their own, or do we all accept that the size and placement of the megaphone matter a lot? Do any of us really believe humans operation as Randian androids of classic econ atomic rational maximizers? Or do humans do non-cognitive, emotional things, and get swayed by non-cognitive influences, all the time? Okay, then. "It's fiction" is a small piece of the puzzle, not an end to the inquiry.

I'm theoretically pro-erotica, but find the majority of porn unappealing for the reasons everyone else has noted. To me, the problem is that porn, like images in advertising, delineates a norm, or a shared cultural experience: it suggests that what it's setting up is the way that everyone knows that things are. Movies, to some extent, do this too, but the difference is that movies often concern aspects of life that we all experience from a young age, so there are checks and balances on what take away from it; but many guys (at least in my experience - I'm a college student) watch porn before they become sexually active, and it sets up an idea of normal bodies and normal sex that's both unrealistic and also very male-centered. I'm not suggesting by any means that porn is the sole culprit of misogyny, but I am suggesting that it's a symptom of it, and also helps perpetuate it. In addition, I find it quite authoritarian: it sets up a very limited range of what's sexy, and plays by the same few tired scripts: isn't there any more interesting or personal way that we can conceptualize sexuality and pleasure? mainstream porn is about as interesting to me as thinking about barbie and ken getting it on. I haven't done BDSM, but I can see it being a bit different, because it seems in a way to be an ironic look at - or a caricature of - gendered sexuality; it reinforces norms but also questions them by pushing them to their extremes (like wearing retro 50s clothing, which I do). Again, I'm not speaking from BDSM experience, but it seems like it could allow a way to work out the repression caused by a culture that eroticizes dominance and submission. Mainstream porn and the whole Hugh Hefner lifestyle takes itself so seriously. I certainly don't advocate banning porn, in the same way that I don't advocate banning McDonalds: I'm only suggesting that each of us has a careful think about what we find erotic and why, and whether the casual linkage of sex and violence in patriarchial culture is something that we want personally to perpetuate.

I'm theoretically pro-erotica, but find the majority of porn unappealing for the reasons everyone else has noted. To me, the problem is that porn, like images in advertising, delineates a norm, or a shared cultural experience: it suggests that what it's setting up is the way that everyone knows that things are. Movies, to some extent, do this too, but the difference is that movies often concern aspects of life that we all experience from a young age, so there are checks and balances on what take away from it; but many guys (at least in my experience - I'm a college student) watch porn before they become sexually active, and it sets up an idea of normal bodies and normal sex that's both unrealistic and also very male-centered. I'm not suggesting by any means that porn is the sole culprit of misogyny, but I am suggesting that it's a symptom of it, and also helps perpetuate it. In addition, I find it quite authoritarian: it sets up a very limited range of what's sexy, and plays by the same few tired scripts: isn't there any more interesting or personal way that we can conceptualize sexuality and pleasure? mainstream porn is about as interesting to me as thinking about barbie and ken getting it on. I haven't done BDSM, but I can see it being a bit different, because it seems in a way to be an ironic look at - or a caricature of - gendered sexuality; it reinforces norms but also questions them by pushing them to their extremes (like wearing retro 50s clothing, which I do). Again, I'm not speaking from BDSM experience, but it seems like it could allow a way to work out the repression caused by a culture that eroticizes dominance and submission. Mainstream porn and the whole Hugh Hefner lifestyle takes itself so seriously. I certainly don't advocate banning porn, in the same way that I don't advocate banning McDonalds: I'm only suggesting that each of us has a careful think about what we find erotic and why, and whether the casual linkage of sex and violence in patriarchial culture is something that we want personally to perpetuate.

Maybe there needs to be more clarification for young men that porn movies are just that, movies, no more real than Spiderman 3, and that the actresses are PAID to do that, so they shouldn't expect it from their SOs any more than they should expect their SOs to jump off buildings "because Bionic Woman does it!" That doesn't mean the porn needs to go away, just that we need to talk to our children about sex, including porn, and maybe porn movies need to run notices about the stars being paid actresses.

Everyone is aware that porn performers are being paid. The problem is most contemporary straight porn is presented in a verite style, and even though it's depicted as a scene for a movie, the actual sex isn't presented as fantasy.
Also, the performers aren't portraying characters from movie to movie. Sure they have personas, but those personas are static in all their public appearances. Angelina Jolie is 'Lara Croft' in one movie, then she's 'Jane Smith' in another movie, and she's back to Angelina when she's at the Oscar's or working for the UN.
By contrast 'Brenda' in that one degrading anal sex/facial scene is the same 'Brenda' that was in the degrading group sex scene in another movie by another studio, and she's still 'Brenda' when she's at the AVN awards or doing interviews.

I guess I figured most people were smarter than that, but then again, there are still people who think WWE is real

And there are a lot of teenage guys who do backyard wrestling regardless of whether they think pro wrestling is real or not because it's repeatable. Similarly, being a secret agent or a superhero isn't really a repeatable/accessible experience, but degrading a sex partner is.

"All the people in this shoot were fully aware of what was going to be involved and consented without coercion"

I don't see how "warning labels" on porn would accomplish anything at all. In fact, the ones without warning labels would probably spike in popularity.
I read about a study in The Guardian a couple weeks ago that asked johns what information would deter them from visiting a particular prostitute. The answer that was never given? "Knowing she'd been coerced or forced into the sex trade."

Anyway, I digress. Warning labels would be useless when it comes to porn. The same people would buy the same movies and the same norms would be internalized.

sojourner: My point was that if kids know it's not real, just a fantasy, yes, they will still be drawn to porn-- but they will be able to veiw it in the proper context, something to enjoy but still artificial, and thus will not assume that that is what to expect from real sexual relationships. People can go into medicine without thinking it's gonna be like ER because they know ER is just television, hyped up and processed for their enjoyment. Porn should be put at the same level.

That doesn't mean that we should look down on people who veiw "misogynistic" porn or ask their SOs to shave down there (by the way, hairlessness on women has always been considered attractive in Western culture, it's not just porn. Look at art from the classical times, or the Renaissance up until the modern concept of pornographic media). You can criticize all you want, but I'm not hearing very many people offer practical solutions to the problems they complain about. You can say "I think porn is demeaning and I hope it goes away but I don't want to ban it," but why bother? It does nothing. You will not be able to get rid of demeaning porn, but there are other things feminists can do to help the problem, like push for real sex education that mentions porn and explains that it is not real, or push to have disclaimers on websites that it's all consensual and without coercion, or make your own porn videos the way you think porn should be done (or financially support porn that is done in ways you approve of, there are whole sites that are just "Porn for Women").

Thomas: So if a man in a movie grabs a woman's face and forces her to kiss him, and they really do kiss, that means that he assaulted her, right?

The actors agree ahead of time to do specific acts with specific costars in exchange for money. The acts are staged and organized and often many shots are made to get it right. Thus it is fiction. A movie. Not even a documentary, if you think about it. Most movies are designed to suspend your disbelief, they just suck at it 95% of the time. A good movie makes you believe while watching it that it is real. Then afterwards, you think, "Okay, I know that life's not REALLY like that because it's a movie." Porn should be the same way and often is.

Also, as for what we want teens watching, I said before there needs to be a better way to control how people get on to certain sites. There is a difference between saying "That's misogynistic and men shouldn't be watching it" and "that's misogynistic and TEENS shouldn't be watching it."

SarahMC: "The same people would buy the same movies and the same norms would be internalized." They would buy the same movies, yes, but I respectfully disagree that the same norms would be internalized if it was widely understood that sex in porn is not the same thing as real sex. You can think I am wrong if you like.

I think that young men think that porn is very much real. Why? Because I spent the last 8 years having sex with young men. I can't tell you the number of times that I've been asked to do something that someone saw in porn. For example, I've been asked: to be shaved, to shave in front of, to dress up like a schoolgirl, to allow my face/breasts/stomach/back to be ejaculated on, to have anal sex. I've been smacked, spanked, choked during sex without my permission. I've had at least 5 (that I can remember) men in my life have whipped out their penises on me, again, without my prompting or consent, and have expected me to pleasure them simply because they presented me with the opporunity. In high school, a guy I was driving home from a football game took out his penis and started masturbating. He asked me if he could feel my chest while he did it. I said no and asked him to stop, but he finished off before I dropped him off and ejaculated on my door. In all of these situations, I had just started seeing someone or it was a one-night stand or it was someone that I had no romantic/sexual contact with at all.
Yes, I think porn has a lot to do with these attitudes towards sex. When I was younger, I didn't know how to say no and didn't know I COULD say no.
So I am saying, porn has directly been a negative force in my life so far.

"The actors agree ahead of time to do specific acts with specific costars in exchange for money."

That's a rather cavalier view. The actors may not know who they are working with, and usually have only the vaguest idea of what they'll do, before the camera rolls, is my understanding.

"The acts are staged and organized and often many shots are made to get it right. "

My understanding is that that is really not the way most porn is produced. They keep costs very low, they don't like to cut and they don't retake if at all possible.

"Not even a documentary, if you think about it."

I disagree. As I said, and you either didn't understand or chose to ignore; the part that people watch is the part that both purports to be and is unsimulated. The part of porn that is fiction is the part that people ignore, or in some genres, dispense with altogether. In the gonzo pro-am porn, where some producer-male talent has sex with a woman and there is no setup, what's the fiction part? It purports to be a woman having sex with a porn producer in a rented room, and it is in fact a woman having sex with a porn producer in a rented room.

I never believe while watching a movie that it is real. I can stop, fastforward and rewind. When someone gets killed, it never occurs to me that the actor is dead, or even hurt. If I did, I would call 911.

When I watch a Jackie Chan movie, I worry about whether he took a pounding on a particular stunt. Why? Because part of the setup for Jackie Chan films is that he does his own stunts with few takes and a lot of bruises, so it is a lot like a documentary. I never think that Ryan Reynolds is injured: he's not doing his own stunts.

When I watch ring sports, say boxing or MMA, I know that what I'm watching is real. Even though they appear on the same television as the movie Rocky, I know that Rocky is fake and Cotto vs. Mosley is a real boxing match. How do I know? Because of the way they are presented. It's all about the context. The boxing match is presented as a sporting event, and if the whole thing was CGI, I would want my pay-per-view money back. Rocky I take out of my DVD collection and put in the player.

Films presented as fiction do not cause most of us to actually believe in them -- at best we suspend disbelief enough to treat the characters and events as plausible, but not as though they are actually happening while we watch. Not even films like The Ring, which play with the idea of reality by implicating the viewer of a screen within the script; and frankly that I found much more creepy than other horror movies for just that reason: it played with the idea that it wasn't just a movie.

You're making empirical claims about how people interact with various materials that I think are flat wrong.

When I see some guy slap some woman on my computer screen, I think he really slaps her. Then I want to know why. If I know both of them and know they do BDSM and know that face slapping is something they do in scene, that's fine. If the context tells me enough to infer that, that's probably okay, too. But if they context says, "he's slapping her because she's a cunt and that's what cunts get" ... well, you seem to be telling me to assume that's not real. I don't see how you know that.

The bigger problem, though, is that you're telling me that you think if we tell our sons "that's not real" they'll not only hear it, but internalize that. That's that Randroid model of people I was talking about. Like Juan said above, kids know at some level that WWE is fake, but they still think they can replicate it in the back yard. In fact, Lionel Tate killed a playmate doing just that in Florida about ten years ago. So if kids emulate the fake wrestling, that everyone knows they know is fake, why wouldn't they emulate the fake rape?

Or are you saying you don't mind that kids play at fake rape, as long as they know it's fake? Because everythink I know about how my sex partners developed tells me that that's a recipe for disaster, where entitled boys push their desires on female partners who are horny but have not yet developed the self-assurance to set limits or lack the agency to enforce them.

And another thing ...

"You can say "I think porn is demeaning and I hope it goes away but I don't want to ban it," but why bother? It does nothing. "

If feminism had to either rely on the State to fight its battles or give up and go home, we never would have gotten anywhere. I believe in saying that the world should be a better place, telling people what they can do, and pressuring them to do it. No legislative solution requires more sustainable forestry or fishing, but it's happening, because people demand it. Maybe if we change the culture so that our brothers and sons and we ourselves are more critical of misogyny in their stroking material, maybe not as much of it will be produced. You see, I believe patriarchy can be changed if we challenge it.

That's some complicated and beautiful writing, Thomas. May I suggest, if you haven't already written professionally on this subject perhaps you should consider it.

Kimmy, it's not just us. See especially:

http://sm-feminist.blogspot.com/

Also, Belledame and Antiprincess (on the blogroll with their respective blogs, Fetch Me My Axe and I Shame The Matriarchy) are kinky feminist women. Others are around but often one-foot-in-one-foot-out.

I myself only use a pseud because I'm completely upfront about being a BDSMer, and I don't want to have to be out in all aspects of my life.

Oh, hey, thanks, Thomas!

I agree with szgax. You ought to consider writing about this professionally. Very well done.

Thomas: Regardless of how staged or not staged it is (and actors SHOULD be told what they will be doing and who with, that is something that should be changed when it is a problem), it's still about as "unsimulated" as reality TV. We are all told again and again ad nauseum that reality TV is not real, that people are using personas, etc etc. It is still fantasy, still not what real life is like, just like a reality TV show is not what real life is like, and most people understand that. If they do not, it should be explained to them. It's still fiction, even if they really engage in it, because that is not how they live their life when not on camera or in public, and if for some reason it is, they are a "public personality" and people usually understand that just because one public personality does something, that doesn't mean it's normal and in fact often means the opposite.

Also, if we tell our children that it is not real and that they must not expect women to be like that, they may play at it, but they'll phrase it as "let's pretend I'm raping you" like "let's play wrestling." If we also teach our children to have the confidence to say no to any sex act they are not comfortable with, and teach them to accept that if their partner says no, then the only time they will play at rape is if both partners agree (though obviously they should have a good understanding of safe words, another thing to teach them). And if two people who are informed and capable of withdrawing consent pretend to be raping each other, what's the problem, exactly?

There is a lot that needs to be taught to teens to prevent them from picking up things from porn that they shouldn't pick up, but it will be far more effective to teach those things than it is to simply criticize porn.

Also, rule #1: if it's forbidden by society, it's five hundred times more appealing. If you criticize the masturbation material of men, they will simply not tell you that they are using it, and use it even more. Porn is consumed in private, there is no keeping up appearances or impressing people. If they genuinely find it hot, no amount of condemnation will prevent them from seeing it.

nerdalert: You would have benefited more from an understanding of how to say no and how to respond to such things, I think. A guy in high school tried to grab my butt once, when we were new to dating. I grabbed his hand, held it up in front of his face, said firmly, "Please do not do that, I am not comfortable with that and you did not ask if it was okay," dropped it and walked away, because that is how I was taught to respond to situations I was not comfortable with (he later apologized and was much more respectful of me afterwards). I was very desperate to be liked, especially by boys at the time, yet to allow something I was uncomfortable with was unfathomable to me. If he had pressed, I would have left him immediately and reported it. If a guy ever tried to flash me I knew to immediately stop whatever I was doing, get to a safe distance, and call the cops. That is the kind of education that girls need.

Meanwhile, boys need to understand that they are not entitled to female bodies. That has always been a problem. If this were the 50's and the word "porn" was foreign to you, that same football player would still have tried to touch your chest. Also, I would like to note that simply being asked to do something that is from a porn video is not the same thing as being forced to do it. If a guy asks a girl to dress up as a schoolgirl or to shave, she is under no obligation to do it.

I am not saying there is no problem with the current dynamic. I am simply not blaming porn, but rather poor education, poor parenting, mainstream concepts of men being entitled to women, lack of confidence in teenage girls and teenagers generally being idiots.

I see where you're coming from, Basiorana. I don't want you to think I'm singling you out or anything.

I would like to note that simply being asked to do something that is from a porn video is not the same thing as being forced to do it.

Initially you denied that porn even influenced men's expectations/perceptions of women. Did you just not know what I meant by that or have you changed your mind?

The purpose of porn is to sexually stimulate. It's not meant to merely entertain, like a Hollywood movie. Nor is it meant to sell a product, like advertising.

I do see it as a problem that so many men get off to images of sexualized violence against women. And they do. Rape porn has become a lot more popular. What's considered "mainstream" has radically shifted. The threshhold has been raised; men required more and more extreme imagery to get sexually aroused. It's not enough that a man and woman sex it up on screen. Now the woman must be brutalized and sexually humiliated in order to be "sexy." That has real consequences for men and women.

Folks, I do write professionally: I'm a litigator. It's a species of technical writing, but the biggest part of what I do is write for a very limited audience.

I love my job, and for reasons of preserving my pseudonymity I don't talk about what my practice area is, but I think I make the world a better place in small ways every day.

However, I don't think that I could keep doing what I do if I were out professionally as a BDSMer. The number of people admitted to the practice of law that know I'm a sadomasochist can be counted on the fingers of your hands, and I expect it will stay that way for a long time.

Ok, sixtiesliberal, in the fresh light of a New Zealand spring morning, I see I was unjustifiably rude.
Just because I don't agree with what you say or how you say it doesn't mean I should insult you.

I apologise.

And now I will let this dead horse lie, or a similar mixed metaphor.

I find all this concern with normal bodies and normal relationships a little overwrought. Porn is the only genre where you can pick a style of relationship and be assured that someone is providing it. Fat women, skinny women, big boobs, smalls boobs, doms, subs, switches, asian, black, transgender, interracial in all combinations, old people, young people, middle aged people, mothers, pierced, tattooed, you name it, it's there. As opposed to the sanitized world of Hollywood where only pretty young people deserve to experience the joy of romantic relationships. Or if they aren't pretty, they turn into pretty by the end.

SarahMC: I changed my mind. In my experience, that has not been the case but I think that enough people have argued otherwise that I suppose my sample size was just too small or focused. I still don't think it influences all men, of course.

Women can get off to the idea of sexualized violence against them. Men can get off to the idea of sexualized violence against them. Women can get off to images of sexualized violence against men. I don't see this as a problem until they stop asking for permission or don't stop when they are told to. And I think there are a lot of things to blame for it, but that the porn is responding to a cultural shift, not that the cultural shift is because of the porn.

I love Secretary, I hate porn.

How about Shortbus? And anyway, why is your demarcation better than, say, Pat Robertson's or Larry Flynt's or even, say, Saudi King Abdullah?

Thank you, anorak. Similarly, I withdraw my crude suggestion to you.

My crude suggestion to Nixon, Agnew and Reagan, and by implication their supporters, stands.

Basionara, I'm offended by what you said to Nerdalert. If "the personal is political" is still a valuable statement (and on my account it is), then it is valuable in its original sense: telling people that the problems patriarchy creates in their lives are not just personal matters. The personal is political: what a woman faces every day doesn't just happen to her, it is part of the data set of what women face. If it happens to many, it is a structural problem.

Telling Nerdalert that she should have been better at saying No (1) is rather beside the point now; (2) ignores the political and structural implications, which is precisely what we're trying to talk about; and (3) not to put too fine a point on it, but it's victim blaming.

(Nerdalert, it's not your fault that entitled men thought they had a right to use you sexually. It's theirs, and the culture that produced them.)

Basionara, I continue to disagree with almost everything you say about how people interact with text. You said:

"Also, rule #1: if it's forbidden by society, it's five hundred times more appealing. "

Which explains the rampant popularity of cannibalism. Also, the rapid decline in tattoos right after the premiere of Miami Ink.

Actually, the "forbidden fruit" dynamic is much more complicated. Some people are drawn in, others are repelled, and there are a lot of variables having to do with who is still allowed the fruit and what it signifies.

Reality TV is real in some ways. When someone on a show says something racist, we don't say, "that was just the persona." When those folks on Real World pile into a shower or hottub together and fuck, we don't say, "that was just their personas fucking." So basically, I don't buy it. The editing may be deceptive, organized around a script to tell a story that doesn't reflect what happened, so that the exchanges may not fully reflect events. But we bring certain assumptions that things shown in fact occurred (in a way that we don't about movies or television drama), and those assumptions are, except at the margins, correct.

When kids "play" wrestling, they don't pretend to do moves they saw on TV. They do them. Sometimes that's not safe. If you want the same results with teens playing at rape roleplay, then we need to have a whole sea-change about how young women learn sexuality and limits. Postulating a teenage girl who is fully self-aware, chooses her partners logically and carefully, negotiates and sets limits and enforces them and is neither worried about whether she'll be called a slut nor whether boys will be disappointed or upset with her for not doing what they want ... well, I have not met that teen girl. That's girl who exists in a full-changed world, and we're only in a half-changed world. The actual teen girls I've known? That model doesn't fit so well, and pretending it does is making them collateral damage.

BTW, sgzax and kimmy, I meant to say and didn't say, thank you. I'm flattered that you think I make my points well. This is one of those areas where I've done a lot of thinking, obviously.

@ Farhat

I totally agree.

All this talk about how porn rape is becoming more mainstream, although true, is not everyone's cup of tea.

Some men like butts. Some men like women with socks. Other men like to dominate women.

My opinion aside (I find women that allow men to come all over their faces like trash a little unsettling) women are choosing to take those roles.

If we condemn them for it, are we going against our ideals of a woman's right to choose?

I guess that's a question for another debate.

First off, Thomas, your perspective is refreshing and encouraging. Thank-you.

Secondly, when people say porn isn't "real" sex, to me, it is equivalent to saying that sex workers aren't "real" women, and that's pretty fucked. We are not pixels on a screen, we are human beings. The absolute arrogance and ignorance towards actual sex workers is astounding and dispicable. We become left out of the discussion almost entirely, especially when it is automatically assumed that monetary compensation = consent, and that signing a contract somehow prevents coercion. Um, no. Nothing gets me angrier than when people who have never personally seen what happens in the industry, or have had to depend on it for survival, make generalizations about how porn is just fake/fiction/fantasy.

Whenever I bring this up, it seems to be ignored.

ModernFemme, this discussion isn't even about condemning women who takes roles in the porn industry.

That's the crux of the biscuit, ModernFemme, isn't it? When you give people the right to choose, they automatically have the right to choose options that you may not approve of. Otherwise it comes as the Biblical "you have free will, but if you choose what I don't approve of, I'll burn you in hell for eternity".

Alicepaul,

thank you for your input, it is so very important to remember that besides everything that happens once the text (video, photo, whetever) is produced, what goes into the actual production of the text is also important to consider.

(That sounds very rambling).

I guess I'm just trying to support your statements.

Thomas:
To put it mildly, you rock.
Can you add to the list of things that are "forbidden fruit" the huge popularity of consentual incestuous relationships, along with cannibalism, and murder.

I know it's frowned upon, but I just can't stop killing people! It really gets me going, because it's illegal![only kidding government agencies who are reading this].

alicepaul: if you are coerced into the industry, it is little different from slavery. Just because it is sexual doesn't make it any worse than someone who is forced to work as a maid for 21 hours a day for food, or a construction worker in Dubai working 14 hours a day to pay off a nonexistent debt.

Sexual slavery is far more prevalent in countries where these industries are illegal. The problem comes when criminals control the industry, and they do so when the industry is illegal.

I wasn't criticizing nerdalert, I was criticizing how we, as a society, teach our daughters to handle bad situations. There is a difference. I also criticized how we teach our sons to handle sexuality. I do not blame nerdalert for what happened to her, but I do blame our society for not properly showing her how to handle it at a young age, and I blame our society for making young men feel entitled to women.

I think cannibalism and other taboos like that are not anywhere near on the same level as sexual acts. They also have the advantage of being taboo for millennia. The response to forbidding something people find enjoyable is more people do it (think of drug use going down when it's been legal for a while, or teens getting a "thrill" out of shoplifting, or what happened with drinking in Prohibition).

Also, I know that I was taught, as was everyone else that I know, that people on reality TV have their every action warped and manipulated by the producers and they are told repeatedly to play it up, act outrageous, etc. So yes. I do assume that that is their persona. They agreed to take on that persona, but it is still their persona. I personally have only met one adult who thought reality TV was "real" in my entire life, and he admitted after a conversation or two and watching some episodes again that it was probably 75 to 95% artificial.

As a teen, I was fully self-aware, negotiated and set limits and enforced them and it honestly never occurred to me that it MATTERED if boys didn't like me saying no to them. If they didn't, they weren't worth my time. I also knew about the slut thing so I knew not to do anything with someone I did not trust and know well. I analyzed pros and cons and ultimately decided that I would not become sexually active unless I was in a long-term relationship with someone I trusted. I had terribly low self-esteem, even to the point of self-abuse, and yet I knew what I was comfortable with and knew exactly what to do if I was made uncomfortable. No repercussions from limiting a guy I was with were worse to me than the repercussions from NOT limiting them.

So I could have been the teen girl I described. Or my sister. Or some of my friends, who were raised the same way. Those girls exist, they are very real, even in our "half-changed world." Yes, not all teen girls are like that, but I am arguing that we need to raise our own children and encourage other children to feel and behave that way.

alicepaul: As I have said before-- there needs to be more regulation of how porn producers treat their employees and more ways for those employees to change careers if they are unhappy. I am not disagreeing about that.

When I say porn sex is not "real" sex, I mean that it is not happening the way sex usually happens in real life, not that the workers are not actually doing it. When I say it is fiction or fantasy, I mean that there are elements introduced to hype it up and alter it for production that are not present in real life.

I would not say a sex worker is not a real woman, that is clearly untrue. I would, however, say that a sex worker is not necessarily the same woman in her everyday life as she is when she is working. A paid escort is not a man's real girlfriend, though she may be pretending to be, and may be doing all the things a girlfriend would do (or more). But the circumstances are artificial.

I agree with Farhat-- if there is coercion, it is little better than slavery and should be treated as such.

People on reality TV shows may not be acting like their most authentic selves, but they're still really doing the things they're doing. There's no CGI there. If a woman on a reality TV show acts outre for the cameras by dancing topless on top of a car, she's still really dancing topless, even if the show's portrayal of her personality does not match what she considers her "true" personality to be. What, exactly, are you arguing?

And Farhat, that guff about how we should just suck it up because it's all about value-neutral "choices" is nonsense. Women don't make their choices in a social, cultural, or moral vacuum, and those choices contribute to the culture in which we all must live. Hence, we get to analyze, critique, and yes, even criticize those choices--though I should add, I haven't seen anybody on this thread castigating women who work in the sex industry, so I don't really know what you think you're talking about.

EG: I am saying that people need to view porn like they view reality TV-- the people are acting the way they are and doing the things they are doing because there is a camera there, and in real life-- the world outside of porn, outside of reality TV-- people do not act that way, and they should not act that way.

Most of the lefties and progressives I know believe that when economic coersion is possibly afoot, capitalism has to be aggressively policed. Like I said, I'm a lawyer, and one of the most important things that happened was the Depression-era "switch in time that saved nine" when the Supreme Court abandoned the Lochner case and economic substantive due process. You see, until then, the conservatarian view that people had the right to agree to awful working conditions if they were poor and economically desperate was the constitutional law of the US. The Supremes struck down wage-and-hour laws.

Why do I bring this up? To support Alice Paul's point, and disagree with ModernFemme. The defenses of choices people make out of economic desperation in the porn context would get roundly rejected among progressives on any other topic. There are lots of limitations we impose on the work people do, precisely because they may be economically coerced. Saying that we should let women be slapped, choked, spit and pissed on because she's poor and can't get by otherwise is not any better argument than saying we should let her work in a factory without fire exits or a mine without air pumps. It's not any better, and because of how it plays out in people's expectations of women, in fact it's worse.

It should be obvious that I'm not condemning the desire to do these things, or the people that want to. I'm that person. If a woman wants to get slapped, choked, spit and pissed on, great. Have fun at the Wet Spot and be nice to the staff, and if she needs advice on installing eyebolts in her bedroom I'll be happy to help. We're bottoms. Fine. That we ought to be able to do it for fun or for intimacy or because it moves us in ways that we can't always explain does not necessarily infer that one ought to be able to get paid for it. Once it becomes commerce, it's a different issue.

I want to take a step back to some macro stuff:

I am for a performance model of sex, not a commodity model.

If sex is a commodity, it is something women have, that men want. This view underlies the position of both the libertine and the moralist: the libertine wants women to give it up, the moralist wants them to keep it and trade it, generally in the form of marriage, for something good. Either way, it's worth something and she's got less when she gives it up.

That's the wrong view. That leads inexorably to woman-as-property -- woman as gatekeeper to what Zuzu famously called the "Pussy Oversoul."

The other model is of sex as a shared performance like dance or music. Musicians who jam with other musicians don't have less. They might get tired eventually, but they don't have a finite supply. They have fun, and they get better. There's no zero-sum in the exchange, no guilt, shame or buyer's remorse.

Porn partakes, generally, in the commodity model.

That's not a detail about porn. It's a structural thing. Sure, the specifics matter; some porn will have more, and some less, of the tropes about having and taking a valuable thing. But porn is merch. It is a product that people buy and use. Buying porn is a transaction, and getting off to it is one's entitlement once the transaction is done.

Now, there is "porn" or at any rate erotic material that is less like that. I have a longstanding example of the other end of the spectrum. From time to time, friends of mine send me erotic photos, with various levels of explicitness. They are for an audience of two: my wife and I. They are for erotic enjoyment.

Since I know the producer and the conditions of production, and also the producer's intentions, it's hard to see how that's a problem. The women are not objects of even strangers. They are my friends. The use of their representation is not an entitlement; it is a communication.

In that way, the photo, from one friend to another, is more like a sexual encounter by proxy and less like a transaction.

At the other end, some woman is coerced into making a video that goes on a website in some language she doesn't speak and men who don't know anything about her jack to images of her doing things that they have no idea if she likes or not. She's not a participant in a communication of getting them off. She's a worker bee, in a position of very little bargaining power (or none). The audience does not have even the barest mutual understanding with her.

At that end, a woman is being bought (leased, maybe?) for male sexual gratification. And, really, how can it not effect (at least affect, but I really mean effect) and conception that women are objects that can be used for male sexual gratification?

And that's not how it ought to be. Other people ought to be, for those of us that want partnered sex, partners in sex. These things we do, we ought to do together. Even the most casual partner, like the one-dance partner on the floor, we ought to be able to move with and then treat with respect, instead of using.

Basiorana, it seems you're making a false distinction, because porn IS real life, at least for the people making it.

I understand what you're trying to say, and if all porn was made with robots or whatever (side note: research robot porn!) then your point would be valid.

I'm sure you can find women who enjoy being sexually dominated.
But ennacting that domination of women for pornographic purposes, especially when it is humiliating or physically painful, adds to the sense that many men hate us.

As I said way up thread, fantasy doesn't exist in a vacuum, meaning if you get off on seeing a real woman have painful sex, or cry during sex or be "forced" to do things or whatever, it can't be claimed you can separate that fantasy from how you feel about women.

I see from your blog that you don't believe that Western, first-world [whatever that means]countries can be counted as patriarchies, so perhaps you just have a much more optomistic view of the world than I do.

Personally, if I know a guy finds women being hurt arousing, even if it's "only in porn, not in'real life'", I'm gonna give that dude a really wide berth. And then run fast in the opposite direction.

After seeing Thomas's excellent post, I feel I need to clarify.
The whole thing is about enthusiastic consent.
So if a person enjoys a mix of pain with sex, and they're really into it, I say go for it.
What I don't like is the lack of enthusiastic consent in most straight porn.
So often it's about doing things TO a woman, rather than WITH her.But I guess Thomas has just said that, only much more eloquently.

Farhat said:

"Just because it is sexual doesn't make it any worse than someone who is forced to work as a maid for 21 hours a day for food"

I couldn't disagree more, on account of (1) the personal, intimate violation and damage; (2) the participation in a culture of sexual entitlement. I don't think that every day women are grabbed off the street and forced to do housework for strangers. But every day women are forcibly penetrated for the sexual gratification of strangers.

Basionara, that old assumption about prohibition is wrong. Drinking was way down in prohibition though the law was flouted widely and organized crime flourished. In serious drug policy debates, nobody thinks that decriminalization makes use do down; and most folks accept that it may rise. Likewise, what I've seen so far is that in countries where prostitution is legal in brothels, there's still a lot of unlicensed inhouse and streetwalking prostitution. There's an elastic demand for the use of women's bodies. The more is made available and the more condoned it is, the more men seem to want of it. That's not, AFAIK, a solid empirical conclusion, but a rough conclusion from a bunch of messy data. When more porn is available, more is consumed.

Look at child porn. In the 1990s, Justice says that production was almost gone. People still molested children, but they were not documenting it, and pedophiles collected tiny hoards of hard-to-find foreign material. Now, molesters join clubs and trade all over the internet, and the databases of new molestation cases documented by Interpol have tens of thousands of children. I don't know if more children are being molested, but I will tell you something that is not reasonably in dispute: more adults are masturbating to images of children, by a factor of many many many, than was the case fifteen years ago, and that corellates to a huge rise in the availability of the material.

The "forbidden fruit" argument goes down with the closely related "cathartic effect" argument as nice ideas that absolutely lack empirical support.

Now, about those self-aware teens: I knew teen girls who were fairly self-aware and could set limits, but uniformly they were girls who waited to experiment sexually. The women I knew who were explicitly sexual in their early teens, and I'm including my partners, were messes; mostly sexualized early by molestation; sometimes with substance or mental health problems. Now, that's a small sample, and I'd allow that there are some women who are kinky early and are not complete messes, but as long as the mix is very iffy in terms of their ability to look out for themselves, I think that gleefully expecting them to roleplay rape and hope that nobody gets seriously hurt is unrealistic.

Realistic sex ed for our sons includes an education about how the world is: that there are norms that society imposes on women, that there are social as well as physical consequences for teenaged girls that boys don't face, that lots of girls lack the confidence to even say no when they're not enjoying something ... Basionara, you may find that hard to identify with, but if you doubt that, read the original "grey rape" thread. Real sex ed for our sons means teaching the understanding that consent is not the absence of No but the presence of Yes, that it is affirmative, that it is enthusiastic participation, and not mere toleration. That all encounters that are not good for both partners ought to be avoided. That's real sex ed.

“Porn is the only genre where you can pick a style of relationship and be assured that someone is providing it. Fat women, skinny women, big boobs, smalls boobs, doms, subs, switches, asian, black, transgender, interracial in all combinations, old people, young people, middle aged people, mothers, pierced, tattooed, you name it, it's there.�
Yeah, but that is supposed to be fetish porn, the weird stuff, the really dirty stuff, just like sex with animals. They are all in their separate categories as you can see.

“Sexual slavery is far more prevalent in countries where these industries are illegal.� Can we please see the stats on that?

"Just because it is sexual doesn't make it any worse than someone who is forced to work as a maid for 21 hours a day for food"

Thomas refuted that already, but I just want to add: So I assume for you being raped is just as bad as being forced to clean some guys apartment for a couple of hours, eh?

I feel like if you dig deep enough, behind a lot of the pro porn/ pro sew work arguments you find: “I masturbate to this stuff so there can’t possibly anything wrong with it, therefore when people bring up the real abuse that is involved in the production I’ll just stick my fingers in my ears or worse, I claim that being forced to perform sex acts is the same as being forced to pour coffee or whatever�.

anorak: People making porn know they are making porn (if they do not, the makers should be arrested). They are told what to do, to a certain extent ("go and blow that guy") and they are receiving payment for it. That may be their real life, but that is NOT the real life of the consumer. That is not the real life of anyone who is not a porn actress. I am talking about real life for the consumer, normal, non-staged, completely consensual sex that will not be sold for profit.

I know people who get off on seeing women dominated during sex in porn, even seeing them resist, who do not translate those acts to real life, and who respect and love women they know in person. If they ever act it out it's in the context of play, and they use safewords. The women on the screen, who they do not know, have never met or talked to or seen in any context but the porn, is a fantasy to them, as imaginary as if she was a robot. That sort of person likes porn like that because there is no relationship to the woman established, they are not presented as a "real" woman in the porn, so thus, they are not at the same level in the person's head as a woman they know in person, and fantasy is OK.

And if they met the sex workers, they wouldn't continue to think of them in that way. Meeting someone they saw in a porn would immediately make that person "real" to them, no longer a fantasy, and they would treat them with the same respect and care as every other woman (and probably get rid of their porn images of them).

I know not everyone is this way. I am saying that simply knowing a guy gets off on seeing a woman "resist"-- provided of course that she is acting-- is not enough for me to condemn them. They would have to first translate that to their own lives in a hurtful way.

Thomas: In countries where prostitution is legal, why do men go to the illegal prostitutes? Would it not be safer to just go to the legal ones? It's not just about prices.

They LIKE breaking the law. People everywhere like pushing boundaries of social acceptability. Stealing stuff, drinking to excess, engaging in casual sex with a stranger. Make what they are doing socially acceptable and they will find something else socially questionable to do. Not everyone, but a lot of people.

Every study I've seen says that what happens when drugs are legalized and socially acceptable is that their use goes up the first decade or so, and then it drops and while people may still use it, they do so much more responsibly.

Also, I am firm in the belief (and nothing you can say will sway me) that pedophilia is a mental illness requiring intensive lifelong therapy (and if neccessary to protect children, incarceration) and has nothing to do with "forbidden fruit" because pedophiles are still pedophiles if they are masturbating to images online or groping their nephew or just imagining kids naked. That has nothing to do with this discussion.

In truth, I would strongly discourage any teenagers today from getting involved in role play, period (I also was talking only about 16-19 year olds, not like 13 year olds, because quite frankly I would discourage anyone that young from having sex, period). But if I truly believed that they were both capable of handling it and desiring it(and such teens do exist, though they may be rare), I would not try to stop them.

I agree with you completely about what you are saying about sex ed. I just would also include a distinction that porn is not what they should expect in real life and that if they find porn where the woman seems to be emotionally hurt to be arousing, that does NOT mean that that can be translated to real life. They will find that arousing or not whatever we teach them, but we should teach them that it is NOT normal, "real"-life sex that they can ever expect to come across in real relationships unless it is complete acting and both partners get off on it.

We cannot change what is packaged and sold as porn unless we change what people are asking for. We cannot change what people are asking for unless we teach them as teenagers, when they still care what other people say. Thus, if we taught them some kinds of porn are okay and good, and others are just fantasy and will never really happen to them and they should never EXPECT them to happen to them (or agree if a partner tries to pressure them into it), society in general will shift away from that sort of porn. There would still be people who got off on it because it was forbidden, but they would know not to expect a partner to go along with the fantasy.

sojourner: While I agree that being forced to perform sex acts is not the same as being forced to clean and cook for survival, and I think that there should be MUCH stricter regulations on porn production, most normal people watching porn assume that the woman consented to being filmed doing those acts.

I think we should focus on cracking down on the way porn is made, not on the content of it. And cracking down on the way porn is made, at least in this country, is actually feasible and could be accomplished through legislation.

And with that ridiculously long set of posts, I must leave this thread. I will think about what has been said here.

"That would make me endlessly happy--to get to a place where the majority of porn celebrates sexuality in a positive way, and celebrates women's sexuality and their chosen manner of expressing it in a truly positive way. But that still isn't going to make me like porn."

Ah. If that's the case, then I'm sympathetic to your views, KMP. When I refer to "anti-porn", I mean the sort of people who make the argument that pornography by its nature is degrading to women; if it weren't degrading, it wouldn't be pornography. And yes, those people are still out there. Some have appeared in Feministing threads.

Many horror movies make me deeply uncomfortable. But it's one thing to refuse to watch Zombie 2, and another thing entirely to promote a Video Nasties-style public scare. Speaking personally, it's only the latter attitude that I would describe as "anti-horror".

As for Jensen's book encouraging a change in the porn industry... I doubt it. He states that he's taking Dworkin and MacKinnon as his models, the very women who came up with the definition of porn as degradation and therefore inherently irredeemable. If the porn industry figures that one side will condemn them no matter what they do, and the other side will forgive them no matter what they do, what motive do they have for self-policing?

Dworkin and MacKinnon defined pornography as ONLY degrading, and things that did NOT degrade as NOT pornography.

" 1. "Pornography" means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following:

a. women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or
b. women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy humiliation or pain; or
c. women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest, or other sexual assault; or
d. women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or
e. women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or
f. women's body parts-including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks-are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or
g. women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or
h. women are presented in scenarios of degradation, humiliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

2. The use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women in (a)-(h) of this definition is also pornography for purposes of this law.
3. "Person" shall include child or transsexual."

None of that sounds irrational or unreasonable to me. By their definition of pornography, yes porn is degrading. But notice they did not say pornography "celebrates women's sexuality and their chosen manner of expressing it in a truly positive way"

It's more like, if it's harmful to women, if it's degrading and dehumanizing, then it's porn.

Thomas refuted that already, but I just want to add: So I assume for you being raped is just as bad as being forced to clean some guys apartment for a couple of hours, eh?

Nice way to stuff words into someone else's mouth, eh? I wasn't talking about cleaning someone's apartment or a couple of hours, I am talking about having your life consist only of cleaning someone's apartment and waiting on them hand and foot for several years or all of your life. I don't think you could understand how utterly soul-destroying that kind of a situation can be so I'll let it be.

MirandaJay: By that definition, 1.b, Secretary is definitely porn.

Farhat, the irony of your comment at 10:12 is astounding.
And Secretary is a dramatic, narrative movie. The depiction of certain behaviors/attitudes is not necessarily promotion of them.
Porn is masturbatory material.

The problem, MirandaJay, is that they knew perfectly well that in the public mind "pornography" means something to the effect of "media made to help people get off sexually", and by adding their own definition, they were basically saying "all media made to help people get off sexually does these things".

On the other hand, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie specifically chose to define their graphic novel trilogy Lost Girls as pornography, and asked for it to be labeled as such, because they wished to raise the artistic and literary standard for explicit sexual material. They, too, are trying to redefine the word, but from the position of artists rather than lawyers.

I really do think that if laws are to be applied properly, legal definitions should be as clear yet as neutral as possible. The definition of "art" should include both good and bad art; the definition of pornography should include both good and bad porn.

I would refer back to Thomas's comments about the difference between violence in pornography and the BDSM community.

Lee is never presented as a sexual object. In fact the whole movie is about her, and narrated by her, it's HER story. She's a full character, she develops, explores herself, comes to different conclusions about herself, grows, and goes to great extremes to prove that she wants a relationship with Mr. Grey. She is in no way presented as an object in the movie nor is she treated as such by Mr. Grey, the fact that he fires her and breaks up with her because he is concerned about what he is doing to her or if he's taking advantage of her is a clear indication that he is not objectifying her because when you see a human as an object, you do not care how they feel, because they are an OBJECT and do not have feelings. Not so in Secretary or BDSM relationships.

In that movie, while Lee is the submissive, while she enjoys pain, she has complete control over it. She is powerful. Note the last scene where she drops the roach on the bed so she will receive a spanking and gives the camera a powerful, knowing look.

You keep bringing up Secretary, what are you getting at because I'm missing the point.

Well, I don't think they were saying "all media made to sexually stimulate people does x,y,z". They were trying to get specific, and you're right, it's not useful to use several different definitions of pornography. People will get confused, which is probably why there is so much backlash. People hear "Dworkin said all porn was degrading" and the common definition of porn being "sexual images" translates into "all sexual images are degrading" but that ISN'T what they were saying BUT that is what people were and still are hearing.

I posted it because I think they get harassed unfairly and people obviously have misinformation about them. Everyone likes to say "you can't call me a bad feminist" but people really shit on Andrea Dworkin and I don't think that's very appropriate.

I know people who get off on seeing women dominated during sex in porn, even seeing them resist, who do not translate those acts to real life, and who respect and love women they know in person.
[...]
The women on the screen, who they do not know, have never met or talked to or seen in any context but the porn, is a fantasy to them, as imaginary as if she was a robot. That sort of person likes porn like that because there is no relationship to the woman established, they are not presented as a "real" woman in the porn, so thus, they are not at the same level in the person's head as a woman they know in person, and fantasy is OK.

(a) I don't think it's ok to have different strata of women for whom it is and isn't ok to degrade sexually. One can still be respectful of mothers, wives, etc. and have a sexist view of women as a class.

(b) As I've said, In most mainstream, straight porn, the women and men are presented as real people, even if it's implied that they're being paid. They have the same persona/name in and out of the context of a scene, and in a wide variety of movies made by different studios. Porn companies make a lot of money of money selling the idea that their stars are the same people in public as they are on screen.
For example, I almost always see porn performers referred to as "models" as opposed to "actors."

(I'm kind of making the assumption that most recent straight porn is of the 'gonzo/reality' variety because this is mostly all I see.)

And if they met the sex workers, they wouldn't continue to think of them in that way. Meeting someone they saw in a porn would immediately make that person "real" to them, no longer a fantasy, and they would treat them with the same respect and care as every other woman (and probably get rid of their porn images of them).

If you're just talking about the people you know, I'm sure that's true. However, there are a lot of men who line up to meet porn performers in public, fully intent on 'seeing them that way' when they get home.

Where I am getting at is that the line between art and porn is blurry. I bring up Secretary because it is a somewhat well-known mainstream movie that explores BDSM. I brought up Shortbus but I got no reaction from that. I could bring up Y tu mamá también or Eyes Wide Shut or A Clockwork Orange all of which have sexually explicit imagery and have been banned in more than one country. If you are going to say you are anti-porn then we need to know what exactly is porn otherwise we are just arguing at cross purposes.

Wendy McElroy came up with an excellent neutral-language definition, Farhat: "Pornography is the explicit artistic depiction of men and/or women as sexual beings."

You're still going to get a lot of boundary-blurring and subjectivity, but there's no avoiding that.

"I don't think it's ok to have different strata of women for whom it is and isn't ok to degrade sexually."

Thank you thank you thank you.

Funny, also, how the women you think you are entitled to see degraded (sex workers in porn) are overwhelmigly poor women/WOC/immigrant women/transwomen/abuse survivors and other vulnerable, disenfranchised classes of women. But I guess as long as the real live gals (whose lives count more) remain unscathed, it's all good.

For real. Basiorana, did you read that section of your post before you posted it? Because surely it came out wrong, or something. Secondly, the last part of your post, referring to men who would all of the sudden de-objectify the women who perform in their favorite films, was incredibly naive. There was a young woman who appeared in Playboy's Big 10 issue when I was in college. She went to Indiana University, and worked in one of the dorm offices. She was shocked at how many men brought the issue in to show her and that they treated her as though they were entitled to her body in real life.

Miranda, true that the "object" paragraphs of the Model Ordinance don't apply to Secretary, where Lee is a complete character and not an object.

However, three of the last four paragraphs do apply. I defend Dworkin against the charges that she was anti-sex or thought all sex was rape: those are not fair reads. She and MacKinnon were anti-BDSM, though, and the ordinance as they drafted it would target even depictions of BDSM between gay men; even depictions between lesbians; even depictions of people like Lee who got a lot out of bottoming.

I'm all for defending D&M against unfair charges. Anti-BDSM is not an unfair charge; that was their position. That's a flaw in the MO that I was never willing to swallow, clever as the concept was.

(For those that don't know, Miranda didn't post the whole thing. That's the definition section. The ordinance in full would not have banned porn, but rather gave women victimized by its production or harmed by men replicating the content a private right to sue for damages. Brilliant.)

“Nice way to stuff words into someone else's mouth, eh? I wasn't talking about cleaning someone's apartment or a couple of hours, I am talking about having your life consist only of cleaning someone's apartment and waiting on them hand and foot for several years or all of your life. I don't think you could understand how utterly soul-destroying that kind of a situation can be so I'll let it be.�

Ok let me spell this out for you: You are saying that being forced into a lifetime of sexual slavery (rape day in, day out) is equivalent to “having your life consist only of cleaning someone's apartment and waiting on them hand and foot for several years or all of your life.�. The logical conclusion of that is: being raped (being forced into having sex once, but not day after day) is equivalent to being forced to clean someone’s apartment once (but not day after day)? How can you not see that?

“If you are going to say you are anti-porn then we need to know what exactly is porn otherwise we are just arguing at cross purposes.�

What is your point really? Everyone on this thread who has criticized porn have made it plenty clear that what they are criticizing “misogynist sexual imagery� and not all sexual imagery. So you know very well what we mean. Bringing up Secretary or Eyes Wide Shut is a red herring.

You know you can find far more 'misogynist sexual imagery' in the Bible than in your average jerk-off mag. If you are going to argue about porn, then talk about porn. If you want to talk about misogynist stuff than talk about that. It is disingenuous to talk of opposing misogynist sexual imagery and then argue about opposing porn based on that. There is plenty of porn that's not misogynist. In fact, there is tons of porn that doesn't involve women at any point at all.

Yeah it is brilliant isn't it?
You hear all this ridiculous misinformation about them and you assume that their legal work was a big attempt to put men into cages or something when really it's incredibly reasonable and I fail to understand how it was a violation of the first amendment. Maybe you are in a good position to explain why that happened, if you feel up to it.

Miranda, the 8th Circuit in Hudnut laid out the thinking, available here.

There were a bunch of things. Mostly, though the First Amendment was originally a right as against government censors and makes most sense in that context, Hudnut was within a generation of NY Times v. Sullivan, where segregationists tried to use the libel laws and a private right of action to silence the hostile media; that and cases before and after dragged the First Amendment beyond its original context to include private actors the way, for example, the 4th Amendment and 5th Amendment never have. Especially because of the bad history in Sullivan, the Eighth Circuit didn't spend much time on the notion that the private right was different from state censorship.

Also, the courts have always been hostile to "viewpoint discrimination," the idea that speech that takes a particular point of view ought to be limited while the opposite point of view should flourish; and while the Hudnut court distanced itself from the idea that the "marketplace of ideas" is a necessary condition for the application of the First Amendment, that concept is pervasive in the notion that law ought not put a thumb on the scale between competing ideas. Now, let's face it, viewpoint discrimination is precisely what the ordinance was about, and precisely what we want. I'm not interested in banning material because of what it depicts; that's the "obscenity" model that Dworkin was so opposed to that she broke with MacKinnon over the Regina v. Butler case in Canada. I'm interested in limiting the acceptance of material that is for the subordination and objectification of women, without regard to how explicit it is. I am in favor of material that shows women as sexual subjects with agency engaging in sex that they want and like with respectful partners, no matter how disturbing some folks find the sex.

Also, the Eighth Circuit identified a number of areas where the statute was probably constitutionally sound, but declined to sever those provisions because it would have meant rewriting the whole ordinance. Among the things they said would probably fly was the private right for women victimized in the making of porn. I don't know the history of what happened after the Circuit struck the ordinance and whether there were attempts to move forward with a partial package; I also don't know if women have brought private cases against porn producers for abuse. There have been claims agains Joe Francis for his infamous conduct with GGW. I would expect that getting a fair shake as a young porn performer when raped on camera would be virtually impossible, though -- as a litigator, I wouldn't even want a jury; I'd prefer to bench try it and hope for a judge with a better handle on his or her prejudices. Just talking lawyer stuff here, I'd take a bench trial before most of the judges in SDNY (the district I know best) over any jury pool in the US.

BTW, it was the 7th Circuit, Judge Easterbrook, not the 8th. I always think of it as a Minnesota ordinance, but it was Indianapolis, and that's the 7th.

Also, Easterbrook is a tool. And a giant asshole to lawyers that practice before him. His brother Gregg got all the charm and all much of hte brains in that family.

“You know you can find far more 'misogynist sexual imagery' in the Bible than in your average jerk-off mag. If you are going to argue about porn, then talk about porn. If you want to talk about misogynist stuff than talk about that. It is disingenuous to talk of opposing misogynist sexual imagery and then argue about opposing porn based on that.�

Deep breath. Ok. We know there is plenty of misogyny in the Bible. Did you think we wear born yesterday? We are talking about porn at the moment (as opposed to taking about the Bible) and why the overwhelming majority of pornographic content is extremely misogynist and how that affects people’s sexuality and the society in general. Why is it disingenuous to criticize porn based on that? (I don’t mean what you mean by “oppose�)

“There is plenty of porn that's not misogynist.�
See, but that is just not true. Just do a google search and see how many “Dirty whore gets what she deserves� you find as opposed “Happy girl enjoys having sex on camera� or some such.

“In fact, there is tons of porn that doesn't involve women at any point at all.�
We are not talking about gay male porn, that should be pretty obvious. You know this. It’s you who is being disingenuous.

Oh, and I would very much like if you respond to the rape/cleaning apartment analogy that I addressed above at 08:38.

It was an analogy, not a one-to-one mapping. I wasn't talking about being a sex slave (being raped day in/day out), I was comparing working the sex industry with coercion for a limited time with long or lifelong slavery. Anyway, I don't so much care about the more oppressed than thou game so I'll drop the analogy. I still believe that issues regarding that can be dealt with laws opposing coerced employment or enslavement.

Farhat, we're already in a world where most places that have the rule of law have laws against coercing women into having sex for money, yet it's still common. In fact, we have a whole constitutional amendment about it -- two, really. But women are still coerced to make porn or do sex work. You might argue that it's less common here, but in this global age, not all porn is made here. I expect that it is illegal to enslave women and abuse them to make porn most place, just like it's illegal to enslave children and make them make rugs most places. The laws have not stopped it.

When it comes to sneakers and rugs, public and consumer pressure probably does more than any state to attack the issue. But when it comes to porn, where's the consumer's union that demands that the production be under ethical conditions? You're a fan of porn; you think it can be made without oppressing the workers? Well, get to it. Go get a porn consumer group together and pressure the industry to adopt certifications, form an industry watchdog with independent inspection powers to contact the performers offsite and see if they're under someone's thumb, observe shoots to make sure that if a woman is yelling "stop" it's acting and not her actually trying to stop a scene to no avail. That's not going to win everyone over, and not entirely me either, but I think we would all agree that it would be an improvement. So, you want porn and think the problems can be fixed? Be part of the solution.

As far as the resilient and in my view wrongheaded idea that coerced sex work is just roughly analagous to other coerced work, I just disagree. Having someone's cock inside you is intimate in a way that most work just isn't. I am saying, and I maintain, that coerced sex work is worse than coerced domestic work, coerced hard labor or virtually anything else. I don't think further argument will change anyone's views on this: either you get it or you don't. I just wanted to say that I reject your position.

I think porn is good. I think it is harmless. I think it is a good accessory for male masturbation, which itself has many benefits.

But, as a token of love for my wife, I've done best I can to boot it from my life. I'm giving it up in exchange for our relationship.

Of course, I'm holding up my wife to the same standards. I won't let her own romance novels, because I believe that if I'm forbidden to have fantasies, then so should she. If nothing else, it will give her understanding of my position.

I would respond as to the major difference between porn and romance novels, but I can't tell if you are being serious or not.

daenku32 said:

"I think porn is good. I think it is harmless. I think it is a good accessory for male masturbation, which itself has many benefits."

Best paragraph on this entire thread by a mile.

I fail to see how forbidding you to watch other women get naked and have sex is forbidding you from having fantasies. But, whatever.

P.S. In the book I Heart Female Orgasm there is a section of quotes from men who are downright disappointed by actual women and actual partner sex as a result of their internalizing porn. One said he has a hard time getting an erection, b/c when he's with his girlfriend all he can think about is how much hotter the "porn chicks" (his words) are and how much hotter the sex is.

Tell me again how porn is harmless.

It is a proven fact: most men who don't see any porn are not adventurous at all in the bedroom. Which could explain as to why over 99% of these men see toys as very harmful.

...BTW, most men don't have a hard time getting an erection with his girlfriend/wife. Those who do have trouble getting an erection with their girlfriends are sex addicts.

Kissmypineapple, to answer your other question, I am not going to say that all porn is harmless, because that is like saying that all ice is harmless. Videos -- homemade and commercial -- are the most harmful pieces of porn to come out since the beginning of the decade in 2001. And that is the stuff that is most mentioned on Youtube and here. Pictures in a magazine don't tend to have that kind of effect on most men.

Jovan, where did you find that most men who do not view porn are unadventurous in bed? My boyfriend saw maybe two movies in high school, didn't think they were that great, and has since not partaken. He and I both like to try new things. You have to be adventurous if you're going to be in a long-term monogamous relationship, so I doubt the validity of that statistic. I also found that the other lovers I had were not so adventurous. They were the ones who watched a lot of porn, and they had no interest in having sex in a non-pornified way. I always had to be on all fours or wearing some ridiculous negligee for them. That's the other reason I question the validity of that statement. What is adventurous? B/c doing one thing that others may deem adventurous over and over again, is monotonous and boring for others.

I was talking about those who never, ever in their lifetimes viewed even one image of porn. So, KMP, that would exclude your boyfriend from my stats since he saw two movies in his HS years.

You are right about this: what may seem adventurous to one person is not adventurous at all to another person.

Then again, KMP, maybe it all depends on the person. I know that those with deeply held religious views would be part of my stats, and those who aren't would be part your stats -- people who did view porn and were boring.

Actually, I was serious.

On erection, as much as we men are sex-machines, we are not 100% reliable. Especially if we have that worry in the back of our minds during the activity.

As to internalizing porn: The claim is that men who watch porn will expect real life to be the same. How is this not applicable to romance novels? Do romance novels put forth a reality based relationship?

Our sex has always been on her terms and when she wants it. I've never expected anything from. She gets to be in total control of my sex life.

Well, daenku32, I think that romance novels do give people an unrealistic view of love and sex, but it doesn't compare to porn. Why?

1. A thing that you reinforce through masturbation is going to have a far more powerful effect on your psyche than most other mediums.

2. Far more people use porn than read romance novels. You weren't suggesting that all women read romance were you? Because most don't. I'd say about as many women read romances as men read action novels. It's a significant sub-genre perhaps, but it's not most of us.

In fact, I would suggest that more women look at porn than read romance novels, but I haven't done a study that would support that hypothesis yet.

daenku32,

It’s really cute that after it has been explained in over a hundred comments how misogynist porn (i.e. 99.99% of mainstream porn) is actually harmful and how it is happening to real people in real life and is far from being a fantasy you ccome here and state “I think porn is good. I think it is harmless.�, without offering any new insight.

“I was talking about those who never, ever in their lifetimes viewed even one image of porn. So, KMP, that would exclude your boyfriend from my stats since he saw two movies in his HS years.�
It’s pretty hard to not have ever set eyes upon any porn in your life nowadays. Are you saying it’s b/c KMP’s boyfriend has watched two pornographic films in his lifetime, that he is now sexually adventurous and if he hadn’t done so he wouldn’t be adventurous today? That sounds like so much bullshit.

“I know that those with deeply held religious views would be part of my stats�
I don’t have any information on the sexual habits of “those with deeply held religious views� but if that is true, what makes you think the determining factor is the not-having-set-eyes-on-porn?

Well, considering my case was my wife, then I can say with pretty good certainty that she did read them.

Of course the actual reasons why we read/watched what we did, didn't really have much to do with the reasons why they got booted. It was simply because the other person was uncomfortable. I know how she felt about porn, and I most certainly knew how I felt afterwards when I browsed through her romance novel.

I'm very open to considering people's personal objections to whichever, but I vehemently oppose using generalizations about them.

Robert Jenson appears to write about end of masculinity, and if I'm understanding liberation movements correctly, this is a good thing. I'm not sure masturbation has never been a masculine thing to do. It was only a sign that you couldn't get a girl. Porn is bringing the end to masculinity much faster than he thinks.

Typoed a bit.
"I'm not sure masturbation has never been a masculine thing to do."
should have been:
"I'm not sure masturbation has ever been a masculine thing to do."

Romance novels can also be harmful if they are internalized. I am not an expert on the genre but they do promote the myth that simultaneous orgasms are easy and plentiful, that every man has a huge penis, every woman has a heaving bosom, and lots of other myths about sexuality. However, although the words are written on a page, all the action happens in the reader's imagination. Porn, however, uses actual people, who perform actual sex acts. Porn has a very real effect on people's lives, as has been stated on this thread many times. If your wife's romance novels make you as uncomfortable as your porn makes her, then fine. But to compare the two as if they are equally harmless as tools of fantasy, well, that is just bullshit.

Porn has real affect because it is projected to be harmful.

I'm sure there will be a day when I no longer lust after the female body. When the woman's body will be about as sensual to me as any man's body. And maybe I will no longer have a desire to have sex. That'd be awesome. Because then I wouldn't feel the need to get off anymore. Gender equality gained, male desires, gone.

Re: masturbation
It was only a sign that you couldn't get a girl.

What?! Men who "have girls" masturbate. What - do you think married men and men with girlfriends/lovers don't masturbate?

Romance novels, fairy tales and romantic comedies create unreal expectations for girls and women. You're probably not going to get any arguments on that here. But romance novels are nowhere NEAR as popular as pornography. Nor are they AS harmful to individuals or society.

Sarah,
When you are a single guy, masturbation is considered a weakness. I can't tell you how many times I was laughed at and mocked for not having a girl. In traditional "masculinity" it is a weakness.

And btw, I'm doing my best now to not masturbate because my wife doesn't allow it.

Daenku32- Your posts are making me sad.

Please be assured that your relationship is not representative of all relationships.

Most men masturbate. Most women masturbate. Many many men and women in relationships masturbate, sometimes with each other and sometimes alone. It is normal and natural. Not allowing someone to masturbate is controlling in the extreme and seems punishing to both partners.

Also, gender equality would not be gained if you no longer had a desire to have sex. Why? Because most women want sex. And because inequality is also about unequal access to power.

I suspect that you're being disingenuous with these posts because the relationship you are writing about (with a frigid, controlling, shaming wife) is a stereotypical way of dismissing the concerns of people who find porn troubling. If you aren't being disingenuous you might want to get help, because the relationship you have described is not a healthy one.

I agree with sgzax about your relationship, daenku32. If a woman's husband didn't "allow" her to masturbate, I'd consider it manipulative and somewhat abusive. Same goes for a man and his wife.

I'm sorry.