Archive for the 'Sex work' Category

Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 6, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness, Porn, Sex work, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 90 Comments

I’m easing back into blogging this week. I have a bad cold, my first in months, probably contracted over the course of various recent travels. My wife and I spent Rosh Hashanah with the Kabbalah Centre International in Dallas, Texas last week; on Friday we flew up to Northern California for a weekend at our family’s country place in the hills northeast of San Jose. We went, in the damp and the bluster of an early autumn storm, to the Cal-Arizona State Homecoming game in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon. And our plane finally landed at Burbank Airport at 10:30 last night. I’m a bit groggy, but hoping to feel better as the week goes on.

And the emails! Folks, if you’ve emailed me recently, please be patient. I’m more than a little swamped. (Seven — count ‘em, seven — with questions about older men/younger women relationships in the last week alone. Flattering but overwhelming.)

The discussion thread below my post on “rethinking a virulent anti-porn/sex work stance” is approaching 200 comments, and is still quite active (and, all things considered, reasonably civil.) Amber Rhea put up a lengthy and thoughtful initial response at her place, and both she and Ren took issue with this remark I made in the original post:

I am keenly aware that porn can play a part in reducing our ability to connect with each other as full and complete creatures of light. Porn, it still seems to me, is the enemy of empathy.

That deserves some more explanation.

Empathy, of course, is the ability to not only imagine what an other person might be feeling(sympathy), but actually to understand what an other person understands, feels, and experiences. Contemporary English often confuses empathy and sympathy to the point that even many scholars seem to disagree as to the precise boundary that separates one concept from another — a point driven home to me in a few minutes of googling about this morning! Here’s one possible definition, from an article for physicians:

The origin of the word empathy dates back to the 1880s, when German psychologist Theodore Lipps coined the term “einfuhlung” (literally, “in-feeling”) to describe the emotional appreciation of another’s feelings. Empathy has further been described as the process of understanding a person’s subjective experience by vicariously sharing that experience while maintaining an observant stance. Empathy is a balanced curiosity leading to a deeper understanding of another human being; stated another way, empathy is the capacity to understand another person’s experience from within that person’s frame of reference.

I like that last bit, and it’s relevant to the experience that I think a great many men have with heterosexual pornography. One of the valid criticisms that gets thrown at Robert Jensen is that as a man writing about men’s use of pornography from a feminist perspective, he centers men’s experiences and reactions; his Getting Off contains relatively few women’s voices. (Given that he was writing a book about how pornography impacted men, rather than an overarching cultural critique of commercialized sexuality, this seems like a fairly reasonable editorial decision to have made. The problem, if there was one with Getting Off, seems to lie in his fairly brief and caricatured descriptions of the women who work in pornography — more certainly could have been done to hear what they were saying.) In any event, both Jensen and I come to the same conclusion: almost regardless of the conditions under which pornography is produced, the impact upon the men who “consume” it regularly is often a decreased ability to connect and empathize with other human beings. Continue reading ‘Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward’

Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 24, 2008
in Feminism, Porn and Sex work
. 210 Comments

If you ask most folks who have been blogging for a while, they’ll remember the one “break-out” post that got them noticed, or first attracted a significant number of comments and hits. For me, it was this post about pornography back in April 2004. I wrote in response to news that several major stars of the adult film industry were infected with HIV.

I wrote that post, and many subsequent posts on pornography from two over-lapping perspectives. I wrote as a pro-feminist steeped in the anti-pornography tradition of one branch of feminism; I wrote as someone who was moved by the desperately sad story of Linda Lovelace, moved by the razor-sharp incisiveness of Andrea Dworkin, challenged by the dazzling legal theory of Catherine MacKinnon. But my intellectual response to porn was mixed with my own experience of “addiction” to pornography, and a long struggle to overcome the compulsive use of sexually explicit material. Porn addiction, particularly in my youth (long before cyber-erotica became available) had done tremendous harm to me — and as a consequence, it had damaging repercussions in many of my relationships. So my feminism, my faith, and my own intense desire never ever to go back into that addiction combined to form a very strong anti-pornography stance.

It has been a long time since I’ve “used” pornography of any kind. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the possibility of relapse. Heterosexual married men in my position — teachers, pastors, mentors — are famous for living sexual double lives. (The examples, sadly, are too many to list.) While some fall from grace in spectacular ways –Ted Haggard — others commit “adultery” only with their computers. I know my own tendency towards workaholism and Calvinist striving; I know that that Puritanical streak can, left unchecked, feed a dark side. It’s so easy, after all, to feel heroic doing what I do: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, advising, chairing committees and giving lectures. It’s easy, too, to buy into the lie that I’ve “been so good” and I “deserve” a little “me time.” For a lot of men, including myself for many years, that “me time” involved the compulsive consumption of pornography.

I learned early that a fulfilling sex life with a partner or a spouse is not a prophylaxis against porn addiction. I’m very clear these days that it isn’t my wife’s job to keep me sufficiently sexually sated that I don’t stray, even in my mind. It’s my job. And staying faithful in body and mind involves many things, of which willpower is actually the least important. Staying faithful to my commitments is made much easier by honoring the needs of my body as they arise. I was much more prone to use porn when I was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired; I have become much better (thank God) at recognizing my triggers. I listen to the needs of my body, and I don’t suppress them. That doesn’t mean I indulge every imperious demand! It means I do take the naps I need; it means I do get the (very non-sexual) professional massages that release the tension and the ache in my flesh. It’s when I bottle everything up, I know, that I am at risk of “acting out.”

But writing about pornography from the perspective of a recovering addict is problematic. Most saliently, it leads me — as it obviously did in that 2004 post — to be dismissive of those whose experience with pornography was radically different from my own. I’m not talking about the Larry Flynts of the world, mind you; I have little time for them. I’m talking about feminist voices, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, voices of women who work or have worked in the sex industry. Like so many folks, I’ve been more willing to hear the stories that match up with my pre-existing world view. I confess I’ve given more credence to those who spoke of the sex industry in negative terms (exploitation and abuse and addiction) than to those who talked about genuinely enjoying the work they were doing.

What I am most guilty of is pathologizing those whose experiences do not match my world view. I am not alone in this; many of my fellow anti-porn feminists do the same. We of all people, who ought to know better, still regularly suggest that women who work in the sex industry (or merely those who enjoy watching porn) are — take your pick — “deceiving themselves”, “working through childhood abuse issues”, “filled with a self-loathing they cannot acknowledge.” Sometimes, we infantilize female sex workers, suggesting that they are in desperate need of “rescue” by we the enlightened, the middle-class, and the sexually vanilla. Continue reading ‘Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side’

Paying for pleasure: some preliminary thoughts — with links — on sex work, pleasure, and touch

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2008
in Sex work and WAM 2008
. 42 Comments

The struggle over sex workers and their rights has been much on my mind since the WAM conference ended just over a week ago. As I wrote in this post, I went to Audacia Ray’s presentation on representations of sex work and sex workers in the media. As a Christian feminist deeply troubled by sex work, I came largely to find a way to alter my vocabulary: I wanted a way to speak about sex work and sex workers that was less paternalistic and stigmatizing. But I found many of my assumptions being challenged by Audacia and others in the workshop, including my fellow blogger Amber Rhea.

The model to which I am still attached is one that sees the act of paying for sex to be fundamentally at odds with feminist ideals. This is more grounded in intuition about the unique nature of sex itself than it is in an actual consistency. After all, my wife and I employ women to clean our home. We make sure we pay them above the prevailing wage, we make sure that they have comfortable conditions, we avoid agencies and deal with contractors directly. But we have no trouble renting, if you will, a woman’s hands to scrub our toilets. We also are fortunate enough to be able to afford visits to the spa once in a while. I have no trouble these days paying a woman to massage my shoulders and back, though it took me a while to get accustomed to being touched by a stranger.

The line between sex work and massage is a clear one, except it isn’t: in both cases, a consumer pays for physical pleasure that is delivered via the body of a working person. I don’t have a problem renting the hands, muscles, and elbows of a skilled masseuse: the idea of renting the vagina of a woman seems an utterly different thing. I’m troubled by surrogacy, as I don’t like “renting wombs”, but I’m willing to hire women to clean chinchilla cages and rub out my knots. Feel-good slogans like “Women’s bodies are not for rent” run into a whole host of problems and exceptions.

Even when I lack the power to describe it, I think sex is qualitatively different from all other activities. My acculturation leads me to maintain that there is something unique about the power of sex, particularly intercourse, to bind two people together emotionally. But is that really true? Or is just my heterosexist cultural programming that has taught me this? When I think about it, I’ve had intercourse that was lousy and distant. On the other hand, I had a massage a couple of years ago where the masseur who was rubbing me seemed to be pouring love into me. I felt hot light coming in wherever his hands were, and I wanted him to keep close to me forever. I didn’t know his last name, but, for sixty minutes, I loved him because I felt that for that precious hour, he loved me. I’ve had sex that was a hell of a lot less intimate! He was $150 an hour, this fellow, and worth every penny. Bottom line: learning to be massaged has taught me that radical physical intimacy is not always sexual, just as my colorful past taught me that sex is not always intimate. And radical physical intimacy that you pay for can be really, really good.

There’s an implication for sex work in all this.

I recommend this post that Amber linked to: Reaching the Media, Sex Workers Against Rape posted by Jill Brennemann at the work-safe “Bound, Not Gagged.” It’s got me thinking.