This will be the first (long) part of a three-part post. Parts two and three to come next week.
I started reading Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity over the Thanksgiving holiday, and finished the relatively short book earlier this week. As I said in my post immediately below this one, it has had a deep and profound impact upon me.
In this first post, I’ll look at the case Jensen makes against porn, particularly the arguments he marshalls against the idea that porn isn’t a “big deal” and that “normal people” can use it without negative consequences for themselves, their relationships, and society as a whole. In the second post, I’ll respond to the charge against Jensen — reiterated by Courtney Martin – that his prose “reeks of self-hate.” Self-loathing is a common slur tossed at pro-feminist men, and deserves a response all of its own. In the third post, I’ll look at Jensen’s proposals about masculinity and sexuality, particularly his remarkable suggestion that we ground our sexual ethics not merely in pleasure, but in joy and in light.
Robert Jensen is one of a small group (others include Jackson Katz, Michael Flood, and Michael Kimmel) who are the dedicated public faces of the pro-feminist men’s movement. Jensen, a professor of journalism at Texas, wrote the marvelous Heart of Whiteness, about which I also ought to blog someday. Getting Off sees Jensen take an enormously brave step. Balancing thoughtful analysis with deep candor, he makes the most powerful case against pornography that I’ve read since the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, a book now more than 25 years old. And yes, Getting Off is dedicated to (among others) Dworkin herself.
Jensen starts by reminding us of what we already know: we live in a porn-saturated culture. Technological innovation has made the furtive peeps at father’s Playboy an unknown experience for most young people today. Jensen, born in 1958, describes his own adolescent fascination with pornographic magazines and the lengths to which he and his buddies would go to acquire porn. My own experience with porn was similar; I “discovered” it in 1979, when I was twelve. The porn that so indelibly marked (and marred) my nascent sexuality came in print with magazines like “Club International” and “Penthouse.” What’s available today online –even for free — is infinitely more vivid, infinitely more hardcore, and infinitely more interactive than it was in my youth or in Jensen’s.
We know all this of course. What we don’t know — or, as Jensen points out, what we don’t want to know — is how truly ugly pornography is. For a host of reasons ranging from denial to civil libertarianism to sheer horny curiosity, a great many voices across the spectrum are unwilling to name porn as one of the most corrosive influences on our culture and on our humanity. Jensen:
People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it’s about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruely. And that is much more difficult for people — men and women — to face.
Pornography as a mirror shows us how men see women. Not all men, of course — but the ways in which many men who accept the conventional conception of masculinity see women. It is unsettling to look into that mirror.
Jensen makes us look into that mirror. Though there are no images within Getting Off, his descriptions of the content of various porn movies and websites is vivid, graphic, and compelling. (For those who might find all of this “triggering”, please do read the book with caution.) While the plural of anecdote is not data, Jensen does more than just offer us scenes from “what’s out there.” He conducted an exceptional number of interviews with folks in the “adult industry”, participated in industry conventions, and collaborated with other social scientists in putting together this remarkable text. The sense I had after reading some of his accounts is “I’m glad Robert went there so I don’t have to.”
Jensen anticipates the liberal critique of his position. (This critique shows up quite a bit in the Feministing thread below Courtney Martin’s post on the book.) Jensen:
Feminist critics of pornography are often accused of selecting the most violent and degrading movies to analyze and then pretending such movies are representative of the industry. I wanted to make sure such a criticism could not be made of this work.. (the) study randomly selected 50 movies from a list of the top 250 rented VHS and DVD pornographic movies from December 2004 to June 2005. I did not select movies from the sadomasochism or bondage categories or from fringe sub-genres such as urination or defecation movies.
The fact that some pornography is produced by and for women, the fact that some explicit material features sexual activity that is truly mutual, doesn’t mitigate the harm done by the industry as a whole. Many defenders of porn cry “But not all porn is like that”, and they point to obscure websites or specialty magazines that occupy a small niche within a much larger, thoroughly misogynistic industry. But it makes no sense — and does women no service — to deny the deleterious impact of mainstream porn on our collective humanity merely because a few tiny sectors of the “adult entertainment industry” produce material that is genuinely egalitarian and redemptive.
Jensen is relentless, and devastatingly effective, in breaking down our defense that “porn isn’t a big deal.” In many ways, he’s writing less for folks like me (who have, like Jensen, struggled with porn use and worked hard to overcome it) and more for people like Courtney Martin, who wrote this week:
…generally I’ve steered clear of porn or, even, truth be told, erotica. (Somehow I even missed studying pornography in college or grad school.)
I never made a conscious decision; it was just one of those subconscious, self-protective moves. I think I sensed that there was a “point of no return” quality to being aware of what was really out there and I was scared to go down that road just as I was developing my sexual identity and getting involved in relationship…
Bold emphasis mine. Jensen knows why people like Courtney (and a great many others) don’t want to “go down that road”:
Men have a stake in believing that we are not really like that. Women have a stake in believing men really don’t see them that way. For each party, facing the truth often feels as if it is too much to bear. So we turn away and pretend.
And that’s why this culture is so afraid of pornography. The woman-hating is right there, on the surface, fixed forever onto the printed page, the film stock, the video-tape, the DVD the computer chip. Pornography is a mirror of the way this culture hates women and children, which is why it is important that we look at it, honestly.
Bold emphasis mine.
I can’t go through this rich, marvelous, essential text line by line. Other reviewers and readers will be struck by different parts of Jensen’s case against porn. What I found particularly compelling, however, was his very compelling argument that porn use does indeed impact how men view the real women in their lives. Jensen has heard the old “just because I like porn doesn’t mean I would ever rape someone” argument even more often than I have. (I wrote a post about the myth of compartmentalization here.) Jensen:
When people ask me what kind of men enjoy — which means, of course, enjoy masturbating to — pornography that is so clearly rooted in woman-hating, my answer is simple: Men like me. Men like all of us. Not all men, but men like all of us. Men who can’t get a date as well as men who have all the dates they could want. Men who live alone and men who are married. Men who grew up in liberal homes where pornography was never a big deal and men who grew up in strict religious homes in which no talk of sex was allowed. Black and white and brown and any-other-color-you-can-imagine men. Rich men and poor men. For men, there can be no retreat to the category of “one of the good guys.”
Jensen is clear — and he cites others, like Ana Bridges, who has published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy on the impact of men’s porn use on their relationships with wives and girlfriends — that ordinary, everyday guys who would “never actually rape anyone” do indeed have their entire sexuality shaped and distorted through pornography. Jensen asks:
Does habitual use of pornography, especially those movies that feature extreme sex acts, ever give a “good guy” ideas about, and desires for, specific sex acts that are denigrating to women that he otherwise might not have considered?
In a great many cases, the answer is “yes.” To use one example: In my adolescence, I never saw porn (and I saw a lot of porn) in which men ejaculated on women’s faces. But the “facial” is now ubiquitous in porn, having appeared as a mainstream behavior perhaps a decade or so ago. I’ve heard from high school girls in my church youth group, and from students in my women’s studies classes at the college, that they’ve been asked (”begged” or “nagged” might be better verbs) by boyfriends to let them “come” on their faces. In my youth group a few years ago, I got an anonymous note from one of our kids, asking if it was true that “everyone” was doing facials, and whether or not she was “weird” for not wanting her boyfriend to “give” one to her.
A great many men look at porn and don’t rape women. But “not-raping” is hardly proof that porn is harmless. There are many ways in which pornography can damage our sexuality short of turning men into rapists. The discomfort and bewilderment of the girl who sent me that note, wondering why her boyfriend (who, in her own words, was otherwise a “good guy”) would even want to come on her face, makes this case with heartbreaking and stomach-churning effectiveness. The answer to the “why” is that he’s seen facials in porn. He might accept “no” for an answer, or he might just keep nagging until she gives in and lets him ejaculate on her face. She won’t be raped in the legal sense, of course, but she’ll be learning a bitter lesson about male sexuality and her own value that she didn’t have to learn.
Some of Jensen’s finest writing comes when he describes porn’s impact on men’s ability to empathize and connect with other human beings:
In my experience, which is also the experience of many men I’ve talked to over the years, we feel ourselves go emotionally numb when viewing pornography and masturbating, what in common parlance might be called “checked out” emotionally. To enter into the pornographic world and experience that intense sexual rush, many of us have to turn off some of the emotional reactions that typically are connected to sexual experience with a real person — a sense of the other’s humanity, an awareness of being present with another person, the recognition of something outside our own bodies. For me, watching pornography produces a kind of emotional numbness, a part of which is a process of objectifiyng myself.
Bold emphasis mine.
Leaving aside — for a moment — the question of whether or not the women who perform in porn are exploited or not, there seems little doubt that the male user of porn, the fellow whose masturbatory reveries are conditioned by images of women being gang-banged or facialized or sodomized, is participating in his own exploitation. His own sense of what he really wants is shaped, distorted, and ultimately replaced by what pornography tells him he ought to want. And he grows a little more numb, a little less human, a little less kind. And as high a price as that is to pay, the price that the women in his life pay is higher still.
Parts two and three within the week.
UPDATE: Amanda has a very fine post at Pandagon.
good write up, i look forward to parts 2 and 3.
I think porn, like much other media, can cause the ‘creep’ of what is considered normal behavior. the example of facials is particularly instructive.
Re: sodomy. I hate to be That Guy, but I’m going to split a hair on you. Anal sex is a healthy, pleasurable experience for a lot of women. There’s no doubt that porn largely constructs it as a horrible thing, akin to rape, but anal-sex-no-like-porn is happening in happy, non-exploitative, non-coercive sexual situations between men and women all the time. Of course, it looks nothing like the anal sex in porn. It’s slower, and there’s no “banging” most of the time. Porn actually has the potential to ruin anal sex for real women, though, because guys who get their ideas about it from porn will hurt you and make you pretty much averse to doing it at all. But if your ideas about it came, like mine did, from generally pro-feminist sex writers like Dan Savage and Susie Bright, it can be a very pro-woman activity.
I accept the hair-splitting. It’s why I brought up facials as a far better example.
Good post, also wating for parts 2 and 3.
Thanks for this post. The “question” of porn has bugged me for years.
Bugs me so much, I’m making up a bogus name to post under because
the shame of dealing with this cuts so deep.
Porn and how I deal with it both numbs hurt from and feeds hurt into
my married relationship. When my wife doesn’t want what — or as much
– as I want, porn offers escape to a fantasy in which I am entitled
to relate to The Woman of My Dreams as I want her to be, rather than
as who my Beloved really is in this moment. It lets me disconnect and
disregard what’s truly beautiful and trade it for what’s immediately
gratifying. Porn’s easy availability and quick gratification erodes
my willingness to stay emotionally with her when she doesn’t want what
– or as much — as I want. No doubt that, in turn, reinforces her
lack of interest in me and what I want.
None of this “proves” that life in a World Without Porn would be any
better than what we have here and now. I would still have my human
tendency to avoid what’s hard or painful, and I’d probably find other
ways to accomplish that.
Perhaps you could post which “tiny sectors” of the industry you think
are “egalitarian and redemptive.” Then we could all jack off in
good conscience :-)
Another good read, closely related to this topic is “Pornography Undressed” in Robert Master’s January 2006 newsletter:
http://www.robertmasters.com/newsletter/January2006.pdf
Hmm. Last I heard, Jenna Jameson was making about $15 million a year. If that’s cruelty, can I be on the receiving end sometime?
Sorry, I’m just not buying this. The roots of this guy’s argument seem to be the same espoused by people who want to blame violent video games for violence in society. And it has the same fundamental flaw in that it fails to recognize the simple fact that people are generally good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. Playing Doom every day certainly isn’t going to inspire me, or the vast majority of the millions upon millions of people who have also played it, to go shoot up a food court. And watching porn with facials isn’t going to delude me into thinking that’s the kind of thing you can get away with in your actual sex life (unless you happen to have a partner who’s into that, a rather unlikely possibility). Porn is all about selling fantasy, something most of its consumers get — and remember this is an industry that reportedly grosses more annually than the music business plus mainstream Hollywood combined — even if guilt-ridden hand-wringers like Jensen don’t. And in a free market economy, the solution for the individual is simple: don’t like porn = don’t spend your money on it.
Is it fair to say that this post and the book really say that mainstream porn as it exists today is degrading. It doesn’t seem like the argument that naked pictures of women are necessarily degrading has been made here. I’m curious. Was your Penthouse ok?
I’m so looking forward to part 3!!!
I’d really like to know more about
If it is arguably pornographic for men to objectify women as mere sperm depositories, is it not also arguably pornographic for women to objectify men as mere wallets?
Is it any more psychologically degrading for a man to entertain stereotypes of women as sex objects than it is for women to entertain stereotypes of men as success objects?
Does either fantasy dehumanize more than the other?
Porn is more about mutually complicit gender commodification than it is about unconsenting gender exploitation. Raunch culture (”girls gone wild”) is an invention of feminism and women’s exploration of sex as a liberating possibility.
When a man evaluates (and elevates) a woman based on her looks, is that more or less inherently pornographic than when a woman evaluates (and elevates) a man based on his car?
Every university Women’s Studies department offers at least one course on the redemptive possibilities of porn. Why?
One does not require a degree in theology to observe that America is a uniquely repressed culture when it comes to human sexuality, and the current debates about pornography cannot be uncoupled from an examination of our Puritan religious baggage.
To theorize that porn is primarily about patriarchal “power-and-control” requires one to endorse the infantilization of women.
Jensen’s book is really about his projection of sin and religious prejudices onto human sexuality.
That’s quite a collection of non-sequitors, a.repeat. I can assure you that this one
Every university Women’s Studies department offers at least one course on the redemptive possibilities of porn. Why?
assumes a premise that is profoundly incorrect. I have no doubt that such a class exists somewhere, but at none of the four universities I’ve been involved with as student and faculty has the women’s studies program offered such a course.
To follow on from bobvis’s comment, what I find most constructive about Jensen’s argument (at least as filtered through Schwyzer, Martin, and Marcotte) is that it focuses on critiquing the way much porn incorporates (and its users enjoy, condone, or try to filter out) that misogyny. But in making this argument, I think we need to do one of three things:
1. Have an additional argument as to why *any* erotic fantasy aid, no matter how progressive the message it purports to push, inherently contains some misogyny.
2. Have an additonal argument as to why indulging in erotic fantasy aids that taken in isolation are non-misogynist nevertheless in some way aids and abets the misogynist stuff.
3. Get in the habit of saying “misogynist porn” (or perhaps “bigoted porn” since porn is often also racist, size-ist, etc.) rather than just “porn” when referring to the object of your critique. If you take this route — which is my preference, and seems to be Marcotte’s, but is probably not Schwyzer’s — you have to also be clear about what things constitute misogyny in porn, including that which is subtler than “facials,” etc. Otherwise it’s too easy for guys whose habits fall in the misogynist-but-not-sensationally-misogynist range to imagine that they’re off the hook.
Sorry to everyone for jumping in without having read the other comments.
Stentor, I think there are problems with all three of your options. I’ll grant that not all porn is misogynistic, so 1 and 2 are ruled out. But 3 is no good either, for precisely the reason your qualification points out. If critics of (mainstream) porn go about criticising `misogynist porn’, then our most important audience — the hetero male users of misogynistic porn that don’t think of themselves as misogynists — will dismiss our criticisms as misdirected.
Porn, without further qualification, normally means mainstream porn, which is misogynistic porn. It’s good to periodically step back and make that clear, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t normally criticise `porn’ rather than `misogynistic porn’.
dwj,
Re: quite a collection of …
“nonsequiturs” = an inference that does not follow from the premise…” (Webster’s Dictionary.)
Could you please explicate?
(”To develop the implications of … analyze logically) ?
Every time someone mentions “facials” in a porn context, I imagine men sitting in front of a TV set watching a woman relax with a clay mask and cucumber slices over her eyes.
Sorry to contribute to thread drift, but…
a.repeat:
“non sequitur- 1: an inference that does not follow from the premises; specifically : a fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative proposition or from the transposition of a condition and its consequent
2: a statement (as a response) that does not follow logically from or is not clearly related to anything previously said” (Websters Dictionary)
I’m quoting the entire definition here because, while I don’t want to speak for someone else, I believe the second part of the definition was the one being used.
Also, I’ve only been affiliated with two universities, and I never saw a course similar to the one you describe, either. Maybe it’s a geographical thing? Are you thinking of a particular college?
Tom Head:
“…I imagine men sitting in front of a TV set watching a woman relax with a clay mask and cucumber slices over her eyes.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one who keeps merging the two images. :)
When I was in middle school, I had a very dorky neighbor who was picked on by almost everyone. He never did anything wrong to me. I had been the target of some really nasty bullying myself, so you think I would have been sympathetic to someone else being the target of nasty bullying, but I wasn’t. I joined in with everyone else because at the ripe age of 12 I hadn’t fully developed empathy for others. Personally I don’t think my empathy really blossomed until I was in my mid to late teens. My mother was outraged at my behavior, and definitely let me know what she thought. The memory of her disgust at my behavior kept my pack animal monster in check until I developed a better internal monitoring device.
From this seemingly unrelated anecdote, I apply several lessons to misogynistic pornography - the sexual ethics and framework that young people are being exposed to prior to complete empathy development (assuming that I am relatively normal) may be short-circuiting the normal development of sexual empathy. I see empathy in a sexual realm as necessary for healthy, respectful, loving relationships. How can people who have their sense of what sex is set by misogynistic pornography before they have their sense of how other people experience the world not have some deep seated misogyny? And by people I do not only mean males, but also females.
What the larger group does seems okay (no matter what it is) as long as:
1) you are not the target - Many men protest that pornography isn’t misogynist because they can choose not to see it. For adults, I see this aspect as usually being willfully blind, just like my father declaring (to this day) that Bush brought integrity back to the White house. My father and his age/gender/race cohort are not on the receiving end of Bush’s lack of integrity, so they can be willfully blind to it without consequence.
2) even if you have been the target in the past, your aligning with the larger group gets you out of the target group (even if only in your own perceptions)- see Ann Coulter and the women involved in producing misogynist pornography.
3) you have no experience with any other option (for example, be a target or a bully as the only two options)- as many young people today are growing up with a growing universe of misogynist pornography images available with almost no effort, and an almost lack of access to any sort of counterbalance means that pornography will define what sex is for the vast majority of young people in America. And those who have differing views will be unprepared to deal with their contemporaries in the bedroom.
I have no answers to how to handle this issue. I have an 8 month old son whom I’d like to see grow up with a happy and healthy approach to sex and whatever gender he is attracted to. I have no idea how to assist him in such development. I don’t think the answer is to censor everything he is exposed to (which is impossible), or try to force others not to create things I don’t like. Right now I’m thinking it involves trying to use teaching moments to aid him in becoming empathetic and applying that empathy to sex.
djw,
Is the University of Michigan a main stream enough school for you?
Hugo: “But it makes no sense — and does women no service — to deny the deleterious impact of mainstream porn on our collective humanity merely because a few tiny sectors of the “adult entertainment industry” produce material that is genuinely egalitarian and redemptive.”
I certainly agree with this–at least the mainstream=misogyny part. However, this: “few tiny sectors.” Snags the conversation *every time* (and I’ve had this conversation too many times so I am going to demand more of it).
For example, I am not surprised someone has already asked for the nearest shortcut to this tiny section for guiltless whacking pronto.
Because don’t these conversations always, somehow, come back to this: yeah yeah, there is that misogynistic porn and then there is the “egalitarian” kind. That acknowledgement doesn’t exactly spur the kind of movement needed to stop the pain happening within the industry or from the viewer’s position.
And then, the second someone even attempts to section off what constitutes misogyny or not there are always a handful of persons there to rally “No! Hold on—that’s what I *like*, WANT and CONSENT to with my equally empowered partner every night.” So then, somehow, the conversation moves to “well no one can *really* know what is misogynistic or not by just analyzing the images so as long as you like it! Just so long as you’re consenting!”
Um? So why are we having this conversation? There will always be someone who claims they gain pleasure watching or performing the acts in question. And then what? Talks are off?
If discussions on porn are not going to involve an analysis of the concepts “want” and “consent” then wtf are we doing? Having at another merry-go-round? Pissing matches and all?
Meanwhile, back on Earth, people are being forced into a very exploitative and hungry industry…
How much does anyone “want” what they, in fact, claim to? What is “consent” in a society that very clearly oppresses and exploits?
If we could do it all over again, if we could condition ourselves from birth, what would we ask to “want” and “consent” to? Especially in terms of sexuality?
Attack this from the roots. Advance this conversation.
Let me clarify: I don’t think using “more egalitarian” porn is necessarily okay.
Perhaps it’s my Scorpio moon, but I tend towards radical positions: I’m a vegan, and I don’t use any sort of porn. (And yes, I used to eat meat — and liked it — and enjoyed using porn.) For me, I want everyone to be vegan, of course. But if they can’t and won’t be vegan, I would rather they buy organic, free-range chicken than chicken raised in awful factory conditions. I would rather they eat fresh wild salmon than farm salmon. I moved incrementally away from meat to veganism, with each stage being one in which I was less directly involved in taking animal life. If you aren’t ready to give up dairy but can give up red meat, then you’re making real progress, even if — in my vision of justice — you’re short of the mark. Like horseshoes, you get credit for getting closer.
I think there’s a parallel to pornography here: masturbating to, for example, a lesbian-themed magazine like “On Our Backs” strikes me as less inherently problematic than masturbating to “Bang Bus”, largely because of the way in which these two examples of erotic material present agency and humanity. That doesn’t mean that I think any kind of porn is good, just that I’m capable of making distinctions.
I agree Hugo, there are distinctions. But do you think recognizing or preferring these distinctions is enough? Can we not try to understand why pornography is needed at all?
I’m pretty sure we’ve been recognizing extents for a while now, so what is that doing?
And obviously, what is considered “radical” is a context issue. In a room full of misogynists, my not wanting to be raped or “checked out” might seem radical.
We agree misogyny is a problem and that its eradication is not a “radical” desire. But we are no where near identifying it within the industry or in the viewer’s mind because we must constantly tiptoe around these claims of “want” and “consent.” So I am suggesting we take on those concepts.
P.S. Moon in aquarius here–hence pisaquari (plenty of pisces, aquarius and aries in my chart)
Perusing old copies of National Geographic, George Bush’s speeches about Iraq and the Middle East, and this post, I find myself thinking about the concept of benevolent power. Going back, I find that those old National Geographic articles and images have a particular hold in my memory and even my imagination. As a child in the sixties, I read many articles in which, as a very detectable undercurrent, the idea that American power would shape the lives of people from the Mediterranean to Vietnam, with an assumption, one that went beyond argument, of the rightness of such shaping. Even today, I have to make a conscious effort to cut this assumption out of the way I think, to remember how disastrously wrong these assumptions have proved. Obviously, George Bush and many of his supporters have never learned this lesson, and even the corpse-strewn wreckage of Baghdad has failed to shake their convictions.
The fields of the world have shown themselves a treacherous a stage for the exercise of benevolent power, but Hugo and Robert Jensen have found an even more treacherous and fraught one: the interior of the human mind. Jensen can aparrently tell us, in a benevolent way, of course, what we should think, how we should feel, and how we should approach sex. And in the manner honed by the generations of writers for National Geographic who swept the world with their benevolent gaze and took me along with them, Hugo simply assumes the ethical basis of the enterprise. No notion that the assumption about how other people think disrespects their autonomy. Not a glance at the irony inherent in condemning pornography, which offers the illusion of the power to penetrate a woman’s body, with a call to get inside men’s minds. As Orwell put it in his article on Tolstoy, “There are people who… will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars.” To read Hugo on Robert Jensen, this irony, or even the appropriateness of humility in the face of the great mystery of the mind and the heart of a person, might not exist.
Few things offend me more about the notion of benevolent power than its certainty in the face of so much that we can neither understand nor measure. I do not believe we will ever achieve certainty in this life, and I believe the unending historical vista of wrecked certainties should inspire humility.
I suspect, based on previous conversations with Hugo, that we truly have an intellectual gulf too wide to bridge, and that on this we will have to agree to disagree. So I will take on two more pedestrian objections to his comments that we might actually manage to have a discussion about.
First, this “truths we would rather not face” rhetoric really doesn’t work for me, on two grounds. I object to it because it contains a manipulation: it ascribes to the reader an emotional attitude, and makes that attitude the issue. Speaking for myself, I have no difficulty facing the misogyny of mainstream pornography, any more than I have trouble facing the sadism of police procedurals (even as I enjoy Law and Order), the racism of Westerns, or the celebration of imperialism in Star Trek.
Second, and far more seriously, I absolutely disagreement with the idea that you can leave aside “the question of whether or not the women who perform in porn are exploited or not”. I do not consider it acceptable to ignore that question, or to defer it, or to treat it as a means to an end. The way the producers of any entertainment treat the performers affects the real lives of men, and especially of women, and the question of decent treatment for them ought to trump all other considerations. Not addressing the treatment of actors in pornography makes you Macaulay’s puritan, who objected to bear-baiting not because it hurt the bear, but because it the spectators enjoyed it.
John, that was a rhetorical aside I made about the performers in porn, largely to keep the idiots who want to talk about how much money Jenna Jameson makes from hijacking the discussion. What I ought to have said is, “in addition to the question of whether or not the women who perform in porn are exploited” instead of what I did say.
And as for the Macauley line, I am indeed a Puritan who cares equally about the well-being of the bear and the well-being of the souls who delight in torturing it. It’s a both/and, not an either/or.
Pisaquari, taking on consent is indeed worthy (something I dealt with at length here). But I’ve only got so much time to post and am hitting the themes that I find most vital.
Hugo, substituting the words “in addition” to “leaving aside” improves what you wrote, but not by much. Your wording still clearly expresses most clearly your distress that men who watch pornography will distance themselves from the way you think they should live. You then write of the even higher price the women in their lives will pay, although this “higher price” seems to consist primarily of having to say no to sexual requests, or at worst having to end an unsatisfactory relationship.
The pornography industry probably has little concern about the health and safety of its performers; porn producers probably underpay many f their performers, particularly since, in that business, people tend to have short careers. I have no doubt that young women (and men) have gone into the industry hoping to make their fortune or transition into “mainstream”, and instead have ended up with nothing for years of humiliation. At best, people directly exploited by the pornography industry pay a much higher price than anyone who watches the movies they make.
John, you think I’m a culturally insensitive puritan who believes that everyone should live as I do. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing at all. Generally, you comment at length here to make that one point over and over again, but every attempt I make at saying so seems unconvincing to you, so I’m not sure I ought to keep trying.
We’re at that epistemological gulf again, buddy, and Evel Knievel and all his rockets can’t leap across this canyon.
I think the trouble here is that we’ve got too many answers and not enough questions.
- “Is the porn industry always exploitative?” That’s a big ol’ burger and I don’t think we can eat it in one sitting.
- “Is the porn industry almost always exploitative?” I think anyone remotely familiar with it can say yes.
- “Should I, Male in Question, be contributing money to the exploitative porn industry?” Probably not.
- “May I, Male in Question, be contributing money to self-produced or indie or Fair Trade Organic porn?” I wouldn’t, but it’s much less creepy than the previous option.
- “May I, Male in Question, whack off? If so, what may I look at and/or think about as I whack off?” Not my problem, my friends. I don’t know, I don’t want to know, and furthermore, I don’t care. I don’t mind reading folks discussing this question–might learn something brilliant from it all–but it’s way too esoteric, to me, to be a central feminist concern because it’s basically about men and their internal moral development. If you’re to the point where you’re even asking yourself this question in a serious way, pat yourself on the back, but don’t think the answer is going to affect the lives of women much either way. At the end of the day, nobody wants their tombstone to read “HE DIDN’T MASTURBATE.” The porn industry, and preventing real exploitation of women, is a much bigger concern from where I sit.
Tom, I adore you, but I couldn’t disagree more. What we fantasize about does have the very real potential to facilitate the very real exploitation of women. Worrying about men’s internal morality is not irrelevant to the feminist agenda, and it isn’t idle navel-gazing. It’s one aspect of transforming the culture, based on the premise that we can’t change how we treat women until we change how we think about women — and we can’t change how we think about women until we change how we fantasize about women.
“At best, people directly exploited by the pornography industry pay a much higher price than anyone who watches the movies they make.”
John, if you haven’t already, you might be wise to sit in on a meeting (or two) with the sexual addicts division of AA. The men and women there have lost jobs and family from their need to watch porn and they are not low in attendance.
And Hugo, I understand your time limitations and I certainly wouldn’t pose such questions/issues if I didn’t think they were so intertwined with the porn debate. I’ve read and agree with the enthusiastic consent model but the issues of “want” and “consent” I bring up are hardly understood with an uptick in enthusiasm. Should it ever suit your fancy and schedule, I would delight in hashing them out in another thread.
I agree in principle, but I’m just not sure it’s productive to discuss something that personal in a thread where the participants can’t even agree that giving funds to the porn industry is a bad thing. Being a Mississippi boy, I have to be pragmatic about short-term feminist goals. If this were a discussion completely separate from porn–say, one conversation about porn, the other about fantasies–then I think it might be more fruitful, but to the extent that we marble the two, I think we create an impassible gulf between people who just bought World’s Grossest Gang Bang #137 and people who don’t wank.
By the way, let me add my name to the “I Don’t Buy Porn” list. Never have. And in some ways I guess that’s part of the reason why I don’t want to have the fantasy discussion–because I’ve never wanted to buy porn, I don’t understand the aesthetic, and that makes me feel uncomfortable about criticizing men who do because it’s a temptation I’ve never had to face.
largely to keep the idiots who want to talk about how much money Jenna Jameson makes from hijacking the discussion…
I see you’re in typical form, Hugo. Can’t address a point with substance, so here comes the playground name calling. Well, I can play too. Nyah nyah, same to you and more of it, so’s your old man, etc. Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go back to being grown up for a minute here.
The point is that it’s a little difficult for you to support the thesis upon which your whole anti-porn argument rests — that it’s all misogyny all the time — when it’s a simple fact that a substantial amount of what’s offered in adult entertainment these days is produced by companies run by women, their videos shot and directed by women. Occasionally one of them gets nice and rich, too. You’d rather hold to your early-70’s, 42nd-St.-grindhouse image of the porn business as one where pitiful homeless runaways are kidnapped by evil drug dealing pimps, then repeatedly beaten and forced into sex slavery before the cameras for the leering pleasure of other men who, deep down inside, are all born misogynists anyway and thus think this behavior is doubleplusgood all the way. Not to say that kind of horrible thing has never happened, and if it does, the people involved ought to be prosecuted. But it doesn’t reflect much of reality today. Bring up that point here, though, and you’ll just be dismissed as a thread-hijacker. Oh well.
John, you think I’m a culturally insensitive puritan who believes that everyone should live as I do. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing at all.
Well, I’m with John on that one.
Porn is fantasy. Period. As long as people have sex fantasies, porn will be one of the tools they use to indulge those fantasies. It may not be a tool you choose, but so what? Not everybody is you.
On a point of John’s:
The pornography industry probably has little concern about the health and safety of its performers…
I understand that while this can be the case with many of the fly by night, schlock producers, most of the major US companies have strict rules about STD testing, and the biggest company, Vivid, has a mandatory condom policy. (Which shows a willingness actually to put performer safety above their bottom line, as most porn consumers don’t want to see condoms.)
Martin, the fact that there are women complicit in the exploitation of other women is not news. And while I’m delighted when companies require condoms, there’s more than one kind of safety; there’s physical safety and then there’s emotional safety, and I’m concerned with both. Read Jensen’s book — he based his stuff entirely on the top DVD releases of 2004-2005.
Tom, I hear ya on priorities. Porn is not my #1 issue (as any visit to my sidebar will tell you). But it is linked very strongly to how we see women, and fighting sexism without fighting the materials that construct our sexist images of women is fighting ineffectively.
Pisaquari, once I get through the next two posts I have planned I don’t know that anyone will want to read anything I have to say about porn ever again in any respect, but I’ll give it a go.
Tom:
” “Should I, Male in Question, be contributing money to the exploitative porn industry?” Probably not…
The porn industry, and preventing real exploitation of women, is a much bigger concern from where I sit. ”
(??Probably not?!? I didn’t know, when it came to exploitation, there was *room*–are you concerned about exploitation of women or are you not?)
And connect those two quoted portions. Because you know (you do know, I’m assuming) males are driving the VAST majority of the market. When demand slows/stops so does production. Males not consuming would, going out on a limb here, nearly *eliminate* the industry–esp. the exploitative side.
Unless, of course, you think post-porn-world women will be running into the streets begging to be raped, trafficked, and screwed with every imaginable object in every imaginable orifice.
Also, what Hugo said.
pisaquari, my point was more that feminist men are already not buying exploitative porn, I assume–maybe that’s naive of me–and that only feminist men would be interested in the discussion of fantasies.
As far as “Probably not” goes, that was an attempt at ironic understatement that obviously didn’t quite work.
“Porn is fantasy” Um? Is that a phantom pickle in your pants? Does cum poof into a cloud? Do porn actors not even get real life human status anymore?
(Don’t give up Hugo–I never tire of it and I’m just a measly little commenter!)
BTW- Hugo, I hear you and agree 100%. I’m not suggesting that either issue shouldn’t be tackled; just thinking that if the discussion seems to be hitting a brick wall, it could be because some folks need us to address the issues separately.
Hugo: you’re probably right. See ya.
unsettling indeed. when guys argue to me about how harmless facials are, i challenge them to taste their own semen. women are not cups.
I wonder if renting from the top 150 titles represents the most mainstream porn. For one thing, I’ve read “Diaries of a Porn Clerk” online and there are some individuals who go through five movies a day. That’s gonna pump up the statistics with jaded porn addicts tastes.
My self-selected experience with porn is a lot of stripteases and webcams, amateurs having sex and filming it, Cinemax movies, and straight vanilla porn of the “man = piston” variety. The word “fucktoy” is on a whole different stratum of porn — I think you’d have to pay for it, I don’t think it’s out there for free because it’s not mainstream enough.
I think I’ll pass on reading the book. I don’t need Jensen to tell me porn is bad. The irony here is that he claims men use porn to indulge their hatred for women; Jensen uses porn to indulge his hatred for men.
> “There are many ways in which pornography can damage our sexuality short of turning men into rapists.”
An intriguing male perspective in this post. It’s impact on the developing sexuality of females can be as equally damaging imho. It’s not like women don’t seek it themselves either.
Many sexually offensive/vilifying ads have actually been designed by women, where female marketing executives have often been quoted as truly believing it’s “empowering” shit for women. Have no idea if the female-marketing exec has just been employed as a “well, it was designed by a woman, so what’s you’re fucking problem” dummy in companies to counter complaints from the community.
I’ve tried “fighting” in the past, but have found it far more profitable & productive to focus on producing “new material” (i don’t mean porn, but also don’t mean to cancel out constructive articles/websites/work on sexuality-gender-identity issues etc) ~ which provides great/alternative/positive role-models that are needed, wanted & appreciated by others.
I’ve encountered a few posts here which aims to do similar for men. Well done. It’s a great blog ;)
Wonderful job with this. I have a little hope that things might actually get better when I see people like yourself post things like this.
Thank you, Lisa!
Hugo,
“and we can’t change how we think about women until we change how we fantasize about women.”
as this post came up through the new comment, I was reminded that you once promised in the comment section of some post to write about this - “May I, Male in Question, whack off? If so, what may I look at and/or think about as I whack off?”” - your understanding of ethical masturbation, objectification, and how fantasizing is, in your opinion, logically possible without “objectification”.
“For me, I want everyone to be vegan, of course.”
This is, I suppose, a statemtent that goes a long way in explaining why I often feel put off by your statements even though they contain a lot I agree with. Just because I happen to believe in something doesn’t make it necessarily right for everyone else. I like soccer, but I don’t care if other people don’t. I think that humans CAN exist as pure herbivores, but in the “natural order of things” humans developed as both carnivores and herbivores, omnivores. So, limiting yourself consciously may be a great and right thing for you, but claiming that your conscious decision should be the conscious decision of everyone else, even if it opposed to their evolutionary heritage is a bit much.
There’s a HUGE difference between arguing that people’s human rights are violated (or not) and preaching “mind to matter” articles of faith both with respect to veganism and when it comes to sexual fantasies.
I like soccer, but I don’t care if other people don’t. I think that humans CAN exist as pure herbivores, but in the “natural order of things” humans developed as both carnivores and herbivores, omnivores. So, limiting yourself consciously may be a great and right thing for you, but claiming that your conscious decision should be the conscious decision of everyone else, even if it opposed to their evolutionary heritage is a bit much.
Sam, you’re confusing an ethical issue with an aesthetic one, as the philosophers would say. It’s one thing to say “I like soccer but don’t expect other people to share my passion” and another altogether to say “I like not killing animals but don’t expect other people to share that commitment.” Ethical issues (animal abuse, slavery, child pornography) are not mere aesthetic choices, and we have an obligation to do all we can to convince others to see things as we see them. I don’t expect other people to share my passion for peanut butter or soccer or the color pink; but I do think it is reasonable for any of us to make a case, as best we can, that others adopt our moral positions.
I became a vegan not because of a natural lack of taste for meat but because of a moral argument that was made to me that ultimately proved convincing. I stopped using pornography for exactly the same reason.
All moral positions are in opposition to our nature: we are violent creatures by our nature, inclined not only to eat animals but also to murder each other. The purpose of society is to redirect our worst impulses. Justice and non-violence and veganism do not come naturally to many of us, neither does using a toilet instead of shitting our pants.
I don’t think anyone should commit rape or genocide, and I don’t think anyone should eat meat. That is not a mere personal preference, but a claim to a universal truth. Some people claim that rape is natural and therefore to be tolerated, and I see no reason why I should give that position credence.
wow. there’s a lot in there to reply to. I’ve just come home, slightly drunk and emotionally confused, so I’ll do it tomorrow. Just wondering before I do that - you’re not actually comparing rape to genocide and either to eating meat, right? And you’re not actually saying that eating meat is equal to animal abuse, right? And you are actually saying that you believe humans are “violent” by nature with a natural tendency to murder each other (and all that while you don’t believe that there is anything hard-wired in humans with respect to sexual behaviour…)? Wow. That’s a lot to reply to. More when my brain’s working correctly again…
One can assume that the “porn industry” exploits performers just as the “music industry” exploits musicians. This becomes a problem of “capitolism.” Most industries exploit labor. However, one is leaving out the motives of people who enter into porn. It may not just be the 19 year-old trying to make rent in a big city. In some cases the performer is an exhibitionist or someone who has other options for employment but chooses this avenue. As a trend, porn has become more extreme-it makes those oldschool Penthouses seem almost innocent. Now, images of explicit sexuality have been around forever. There are tons of “hardcore” stone carvings in India for example. Mainstream porn seems to have an almost fast-food quality to it-no real substence in my opinion.
As far as the guys jacking-off: Let’s just say a single male has access to a nude beach. He often goes nude and enjoys swimming au naturel. He sometimes see’s some of the nudist women who go there and a few who are regulars are comfortable enough with him to say “hi” and even stand close to him. He never does anything rude or innapropriate. He doesn’t need Playboy as the images of tatas from the day flash through his mind. Is he objectifying these women by fantasizing about them? Is the guy who fantasizes about a fully clothed co-worker degrading her?
I also sense an almost puritanical attitude towards (male) masturbation. It is actually very healthy for the prostrate. (So the question would be weather images of porn create unhealthy relationships between men and women rather than is “jacking-off” wrong. Guys are gonna whack no matter what and the guys who claim self-control either have low drives or intense discipline.
Oren, i’ve dealt with the concerns you raise in other posts if you go through my pornography or masturbation archives. I will say, I do love a good typo. This is classic:
I also sense an almost puritanical attitude towards (male) masturbation. It is actually very healthy for the prostrate.
Damn, what about those of us who are upright?