Today’s reader email is a dream come true. Blamer M (not her real name) actually asks for my views on porn! I may be a hungry gal in a taco-filled world, but come lunchtime or high water, I’m never too busy to bloviate on porn. My response follows. It’s nothing I haven’t spouted off a hundred times before, but as longtime readers are painfully aware, I Blame the Patriarchy is like a Tex-Mex menu: the same 4 cheap ingredients disguised as 6,793 different dishes. Which of them achieve the distinction of culinary triumphs remains a matter of individual taste.
By the way, M raises some other issues, too; readers are encouraged to enlarge on whatever of these themes falls within their personal grey areas of blaming expertise.
In the last few months I’ve become addicted to your blog. Even within the feminist blogosphere (or whatever it’s called), I find that you are the only person who cuts through all of the bullshit. I’ve been feeling very distrustful of feminists lately, because of my crazy experiences at the BUST lounge. I thought they were feminists — they say they are — but they yell at me constantly because I think porn is bad for women. I’m done posting there, because it’s just pointless. Many of them defend BDSM as “my choice!!! Whatever makes me happy!!! How dare you criticize me, you vanilla prude!!!” Many of them talk about the feminist/alternative porn that they watch.
I’m wondering what your take is on this “feminist porn?” i haven’t seen much, as I don’t like porn, but I’m wondering what you think of it? Is this truly resistance? Is it really that different? They seem to think that creating an alternative will somehow stop the mainstream degrading porn. Or something.
If you are ever bored — you can check out the thread on the BUST lounge — it’s under “The F Word” and it’s called (get ready to puke) “Porn: Is it cock-blocking feminism?” Seriously, that is the title. Anyways — I’m pretty much hated by the people in that thread. I’m not posting over there anymore, but I still just feel so ANGRY about it. I’m wondering if you can do your magical thing and explain this shit to me in the wonderful way you do.
Is it that they are too scared to admit the truth? I know it’s painful to see the truth, so maybe that’s it. Or, are they just so brainwashed by mainstream pornification that they truly believe this stuff? These are people who think that posing nude “can be empowering!” And that there is nothing wrong with sex work as long as “it’s the woman’s choice, and she’s happy about it.”
Is this just 3rd wave feminism? Is this the sex-positive crowd? Is this the backlash to radical feminism?
Also — one of my online buddies and I have been talking a lot about weight and body and attractiveness and all that crap. We’ve both noticed that even though, in our minds, we know that we don’t care what “men” think of us- but in our guts, we truly believe that men MUST find us attractive. We both have this big fear of being found unacceptable — even though we know it’s BS. I’ve been thinking though — is it that we don’t want to give up the sort of privilege that we get from being found attractive? I feel like it’s actually dangerous to go too far away from the ideal. Or to even admit that you don’t care about the ideal anymore. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I’m a confused 30 year old, and I need help!
Signed, M
Well, M, the Twistolutionary manifesto argues that anything called “porn,” whether or not it is explicitly violent or BDSM-y or designed to titillate ‘feminists’ vs. sweaty, beer-gutted pervs, exists only to enthrobulate the fetishization of culturally-generated (and, frankly, comically hokey) constructs. It is readily apparent to the visitor from the planet Obstreperon that these constructs include arbitrary standards of physical sexihotness, arch-backed-heavy-eyelidded-ooo-baby body language, penetration worship, dominance and submission, corny fashion accessories, “the art of seduction” et al — and that they have, at their root, everything to do with a paradigm of dominance and nothing to do with actual sex between individuals with equivalent personal sovereignty.
So what’s the big whoop, the empowerful young feminist asks?
Well, in addition to pornography’s negative philosophic value, which anyone possessing even a sliver of sapience can see is reason enough to give it the old stink-eye [1], our world order is predicated on binary sex roles, one of which is privileged and dominant, the other of which is oppressed and submissive. In such a society, where a woman is a member of the oppressed sex class, her performance of sex in a film which is then consumed by paying customers to satisfy their prurience, this is not even remotely a politically neutral act. Porn — gay, straight, bi, live-action, animated, or ‘feminist’ — is the graphic representation of the oppression of the sex class. Until the sex class is liberated from male oppression, porn can be nothing else, no matter how many fun feminists claim it empowerfuls them.
Or, if you prefer, in order for porn to be politically neutral, it can’t be porn.
Merely announcing on the BUST boards that one’s participation in porn, whether as a consumer or as a prostituted woman, is voluntary does not make it so. This is because the women doing the announcing are, and have been since birth, deprived of such privilege as is necessary for them to freely make that choice.
When you’re already oppressed, it is, in fact, impossible to volunteer for oppression. A woman is a member of the sex class whether she “chooses” it or not. This pre-existing condition forms the backdrop to any fun feminist’s conclusion that her compliance with the patriarchal sexbot mandate is voluntary. She may believe otherwise, but her belief does not alter the fact that patriarchy — a social order predicated on an oppression to which she is already subject — is real and in effect and entirely beyond any unrestricted control she may wish to exert and only too glad to welcome her as a team player and sign her up for the rewards program.
The fun feminist confuses “empowerment” with the decision to acquiesce. This is understandable; it’s the one actual choice she has in this game: surrender, or stand and fight. She doesn’t have to be Candida Royalle to recognize that if she chooses the latter all she’ll get for her trouble is ridicule, hostility, suspicion, and the threat of bodily harm.
Whereas the rewards for surrender to male porn culture are not inconsiderable: social acceptance, male approval, little psuedo-privileges that accrue according to the degree of one’s conformity, and of course the enormous relief at not having to fight it anymore. The if-you-can’t-beatem-joinem gambit has enjoyed millennia of popularity for good reason. It gives the appearance of the shortest and easiest route to life’s rich pageant. Too bad that, once they get there, chicks are only eligible for the women’s auxiliary.
______________________
1. Porn’s negative philosophic value, in addition to its general assault on T & B (Truth and Beauty) spans the whole of women’s oppression, from Maybelline to rape culture.
Damn….well said. I don’t think you could have hit the nail on the head more….
I totally know how M feels about the difficulty of avoiding this feeling: the feeling of wanting to be accepted and loved, especially by men. It is so so tough to not fall into that trap because, as you explained, Twisty, that it gives temporary “benefits” or psuedo-privileges. Bah!
Great response!
Greatest post on porn EVER!
Perhaps you repeat yourself. Yet you hone, you chisel, you expound and get ever closer to a breezy, witty and witheringly realistic explanation of the same thing so many other women have only explained in difficult-to-follow academicese.
When these concepts are easier to understand they become nearly impossible to rebut. Because the fundamentals are so inescapably profound and so horribly irrefutable.
Everyone remembers that experiment done by that one elementary school teacher where she convinced blue-eyed kids that brown-eyed kids were less intelligent and worthy.
What everyone doesn’t remember is that she added a step to it — the brown-eyed kids had to wear a collar, a mildly annoying one that got in their way, but not so much that they couldn’t move. Enough that it impacted their movement and that they had to be very conscious of standing out.
I imagine that, had the experiment lasted years … lifetimes … those brown-eyed kids would have hit on the “empowering” idea of decorating their collars with paint and glitter and saying “I CHOSE TO WEAR IT! I DID I DID I DID!”
“I WEAR IT BECAUSE IT’S HIP AND COOL AND TRENDY!”
“I’M WEARING IT IRONICALLY BUT YOU’RE TOO SQUARE TO SEE IT!”
Blue-eyed kids would have held the collars in contempt while secretly wondering what sort of kinky stuff they could engage in by wearing them.
And we’d get brown-eyed denial-addicts talking about how they wear their collar without the slightest influence from the outside world, moreover they love to go to the local craft store and buy glitter and stickers to decorate it, and in fact they feel bad for the blue-eyed people who don’t get to do it cuz it’s like such a totally fun bonding experience!
Cardboard collars. Cardboard collars.
You can do it to anything.
The one thing you can’t do is wear the collar as a neutral act.
When you’re already oppressed, it is, in fact, impossible to volunteer for oppression.
Wow. Thank you so much for this. You have such an incredible ability to distill all the outrage into such perfect, succinct statements like this.
I’m sure by now you could walk into any town in this country and be fed, but if you’re ever in Berkeley, all the tacos you can eat, my treat.
If only you had posted this a couple of days ago. Someone asked MY opinion on porn, and it would’ve saved a lot of effort just to write down this link for her.
It occurs to me that one of the reasons womenandchildren are lumped together in the patriarchy is the condition of being oppressed. You could say that children consent to oppression, given that their choice is submit or die. Pedophiles argue that three year olds consent. A judge recently determined that a ten year old consented to sex with her rapist. When the options are to suffer this abuse or suffer that abuse, the limitations of choice deny the existance of choice.
The only cookies the patriarchy hands out are made of fecal matter. If you eat them you won’t starve, you won’t thrive, and you’ll always feel hungry.
And that whole “but she consented” thing is such a total red herring anyhow.
Someone with mental illness could come up to me tomorrow, literally ask me to light them on fire, and say, “But I’ll ENJOY it so it’s okay!”
Fine. But I wouldn’t. I would take no pleasure whatsoever in lighting a person on fire, so even if you would like it, I’m still not going to do it. I’m not mindlessly compelled to do whatever someone else wants.
So, I don’t CARE. Even if we have tunneled into BizarroWorld somehow where a ten year old can give consent to sex and enjoy it, that doesn’t change the fact that the other person’s brain is also broken in that they would enjoy FUCKING a ten year old. It doesn’t change the brokenness in the brain of the perpetrator. Nothing changes that. That desire to screw a child is there, and that’s the problem.
Just because someone comes up to you and says, “Kill me,” does that mean you do it? If that person said, “Eat my shit because I’ll like it,” do you do it? No. Why? Because it’s fucking disgusting. So why are you suddenly compelled to just do whatever someone else tells you because they said they’d like it?
Hey, Mr. Kid-Rapist, I would REALLY get turned on by you giving me all your money and then jumping off a bridge. I totally give my consent to that!
What? Suddenly you can resist the temptation to give me what I want? No shit.
Another way to put it:
I don’t CARE if this particular dog won’t bite you back. You are still a sick fuck if you want to kick it.
The comments to this post are stellar. LMYC, you are admirably on fire.
My question about porn remains: Can we leave the frame sufficiently to imagine what non-patriarchal visual material intended to be arousing would look like?
(Also, my itching question about the blog is WTF is with the popularity percentage? It vexes me. This post has “2% popularity?” I mean, is that really telling me 98% of people *who visit this blog* are asshats who are rating this post negatively on a scale I can’t even see? Or is it calculated in some other way?)
LMYC, that is a really excellently clear statement of the ‘consent’ red herring. Thank you. I’m bookmarking this thread.
TheBewilderness, that ‘consent or die’ point is very important. Thank you for making it.
Mandolin, I don’t know exactly how the ‘popularity’ ratings work, but the newest post always has low popularity because very few people have found it yet. If you check back on this one over the next few days its popularity should go up.
Mandolin, I’m not so sure that anyone *needs* arousing visual material, other than the company of the person one is currently lusting after.
One does not need to be in a permanent state of arousal, which is what our current society appears to be aiming for. I think it dilutes sexual desire so that it is more difficult to become aroused and takes more and more effort. Thus this extreme stuff that people do, like asphyxiation.
Re: the “popularity” percentage: the number means this post is 2% as popular as my most-viewed-ever post, which is has been accessed, according to the popularity-bot, something like 50,000 times to date. I installed the thing as part of a plot I was hatching to compile data to test a crackpot hypothesis that readers prefer posts about shoes. So far, though, it looks like readers prefer posts where I make the most belligerently obnoxious remarks.
A post where I asked readers for parenting advice was pretty popular, too, though. I don’t know what it all means.
Mandolin said: “My question about porn remains: Can we leave the frame sufficiently to imagine what non-patriarchal visual material intended to be arousing would look like?”
I suspect the old standbys might suffice: sunsets, moonlight, that sort of thing.
This is an excellent example of the insidious degree to which pornsickness has been normalized by domination culture. A world without porn, however desirable, is nevertheless unimaginable.
I like shoes!
You know, I have read something similar several times on this blog already, but today, I finally had the Ding! moment. I get it. I finally get it. Stick an onion on my head and point me to the tacos. Thanks for your willingness to repeat yourself, Twisty.
I’ve read a hundred things on feminism and porn, and I do believe this is the first one that’s hit my “OH! I get it!” button. So, thank you for coming back to this. :)
WootWoot! Twisty, you’re on fire!
Anecdote about people not getting it in regards to sex, consent, and oppression:
I am required to sit in on an undergraduate lecture as part of my graduate training (woofwoof). Grad students are discouraged from participation as it is an undergraduate space. As the professor tries desperately to provoke a lecture hall full of bored nineteen year olds who genuinely don’t care about Hume/Locke/Rousseau, he asks: “What’s wrong with incest?”
The first ten answers were biological (ex. incest makes genetic freaks), the next ten were ‘because it’s gross,’ and after about 40 minutes, a few skirted, but never actually got to the response that there is something inherently oppressive about a relationship between family members and that oppressive power hierarchy makes it impossible to consent to the relationship.
These people were thinking hard. These people are not unintelligent. The issue is, I think, that people just don’t get that oppression isn’t a totally cool way to have a relationship. Power hierarchy is so ingrained in their young minds, that there is no language to question it, even when their guts (the because it’s gross response) tell them otherwise.
Patriarchy is so insidious that it moves beneath the level of language and becomes ‘natural.’ Instead, the corrupting patriarchal subtext produces an understanding that since there is an erotic response to pornography that also must be natural. Concluding: because it’s natural, there must be nothing wrong with it. Thus, you are wrong and unnatural if you question the domination of women as a legitimate sexual turn-on.
Whatever happened to Dworkin’s take on porn as an affront to civil rights? I keep looking for a way to make marriage (ie. letting someone else own a part, if not all, of you) the same type of affront. But then I look at all of the other inequalities in the world, most notably racial and economic, and realize that porn, and marriage along with it, will always be around as long as these other inequalities are, too, since they provide a way to pull one’s self “out” (at least higher up) of the mire of shit that the inequalities (the patriarchy) set-up in the first place. I still don’t understand marrying for love, but I can understand marrying for economic gain. The same thing with porn–who does it because they love to? No way around it, it’s degrading. But it pays. How can anyone blame the victim/participant for trying to make headway in a status-driven society? You can’t. But you can blame the people and the structure, blame the patriarchy, that creates such a society in the first place. Porn is terrible, but getting rid of it without getting rid of a system that makes sex labor appealing and without replacing it with an economically, racially, and sexually egalitarian labor structure, will likely hurt the very people feminism would like to help, while the higher-ups in power will just move on to some new exploitative scheme.
Twisty, I got bupkis on the link to your most popular post. A technical glitch, I hope?
What is said post?
“Can we leave the frame sufficiently to imagine what non-patriarchal visual material intended to be arousing would look like?”
Twisty’s response notwithstanding, before you can really speculate the possibility of porn in a post-patriarchal world you already have to question what makes porn possible in this present, patriarchal world.
You might say because it’s arousing. To that most of us would ask why is it arousing, though more accurately what that even means. What it means for porn to be generally arousing is that there is something generally arousing about the object of porn, typically though not always the female (body). This is to say, that there is something generally true about women, in this case their status as sexual object.
I think the question you’re meaning to ask is: will people in the post-patriarchal world still take pictures of naked people (while having sex)? Personally, I don’t see why it would be impossible, but by that token I don’t see what makes it possible either. If they do, I can say with as much certainty as I feel I’m allowed that how it is done and what it means for it to be done will be literally unthinkable from our current, patriarchy-conditioned consciousness.
I think the whole “is there such a thing as nonoppressive visually sexually arousing material” is sort of … um, no. Not really. There isn’t.
There really isn’t any other material surrounding the satisfaction of a body appetite that the viewing of which is considered to be a satisfying thing to do on its own. If I’m hungry, and I watch people eating, it doesn’t give me any less hunger. If I need to take a dump and I watch people shitting, it doesn’t change my state.
If I WANT to have sex, why is it the case that watching other people doing it is then called an entire satisfying activity on its own?
I would venture that it’s because sex, alone among those example body appetites, requires another person for its expression. (Please don’t sing the Betty Dodson song at me here; the equating of something that requires the presence of another human to that which requires solipsistic solitude is a whole `nother indicator of fuckedupedness, to me. The presence of another human changes things, yo. Fucking != jacking off, k?)
The reason it’s satisfying on its own is that it allows one to pretend to engage in a behavior that requires another person’s presence, without acknowledging the other person.
The special spice of porn is that it justifies ignoring another person’s humanity, or at least avoiding acknowledging it. Since no other appetite is sated by watching someone else sate theirs, I would say that this whole “ignoring another person’s humanity” is the kernel of satisfaction. It’s not just the unpleasant thing that must be done to get to the chewy candy center of porn, it IS the chewy candy center.
You are satisfying a body appetite without the tedious, annoying other person’s presence. You have turned another human into a three-dimensional, person-shaped blank. That’s inherently oppressive.
It’s not even that porn is arousing that’s the issue. I mean, if I’m hungry, looking at good food or smelling it will make me hungrier.
But I will not count that as its own satisfing experience that will fill my stomach. If you can be starving, smell a good meal, and walk off without eating anything and still feel happy, there’s something miswired in your brain.
But porn creates, requires for its existence, an audience of people for whom the false sating of that appetite is better than the real thing. Say what you want about Naomi Wolf (and while I think she can be a bit spacey and sometimes not deep enough in her analysis, I fail to see the whole contempt that’s heaped on her for the unpardonable crime of being white and educated, how DARE she), but she hit the nail right on the head in that article she wrote about how porn seems to make men less lusty in the real world.
Why simply engage in a fun but fairly mundane activity with your real, live human girlfriend who has stubble under her armpits when you can watch a four-titted space alien get penetrated by an insect-headed monster at lightspeed? Hey, why not?
Um … because the first activity might actually enable you to uh … connect with a live human?
Not only is that not a draw for the real thing, it’s apparently repulsive to porn consumers. The opportunity to connect with a human for that audience is instead viewed as the “icky, terrifying risk that you might have to talk to someone real.”
So yes. So sorry. Porn requires oppression. Sating a two-person body appetite without contacting another human, in a healthy world, would not be considered an up-side to anything.
“If they do, I can say with as much certainty as I feel I’m allowed that how it is done and what it means for it to be done will be literally unthinkable from our current, patriarchy-conditioned consciousness.”
So, in other words, it is not up to any of us to think of how we can “save porn,” because you cannot presently have any reason to do so that is not already corrupted by its patriarchal condition. Until you can articulate an idea of porn that has nothing to do with the patriarchal conditions and categories that presently make it possible, there is nothing to speak of saving.
Why these?
Medbh:”Twisty, I got bupkis on the link to your most popular post. A technical glitch, I hope?”
Fixed.
Porn in a post-patriarchal world? Someone you love who loves you back, in person. Any representations of this one thing that creates genuine human arousal is going to be an imperfect copy, having no soul, no tactile sensation, no reciprocation and of no use.
The idea of looking at other people aroused by each other is only arousing to us because we have been taught to believe it is arousing. Men teach themselves, over and over, hypnotizing their instincts into submission, by masturbating.
LMYC has provided us with the woman’s reference to masturbating: The refusal to do it with someone else. Men tend to look at masturbation as sex they have with themselves because women refuse to do it with them.
In that distinction lies a passel of pathologies that contribute daily to the global oppression of women.
Someone you love who loves you back, in person.
Nail hammer BANG.
Men tend to look at masturbation as sex they have with themselves because women refuse to do it with them.
There’s also the definition that men regard masturbating as sex they get to have without having to put up with a woman. Not her cunt, the woman herself.
How can women be empowered by porn when the patriarchy doesn’t even give women the right to have it? Checking out in my supermaket, the Cosmos have been covered up because the covers have headlines about sex tips. About six inches over, the male magazines, with boobs a busting on the front cover, are conspicuously displayed. This is a mild example but the message is clear–women who enjoy sex are sluts.
Those women merely watching porn? Probably permissible only in deference to her male partner. Those women who are performing sexual acts on camera must be super-sluts. Anyone of these porn-loving women teaching their daughters to aspire to porn star? Can’t imagine it.
I’m in an especially bad mood because I just checked out my state’s bar convention line up. It’s Dude Fest 2007 (the obligatory diversity speaker for that section does not count). I feel relegated to the women’s auxillary, and I did not VOLUNTEER for it!!! (Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.)
I think TP has got it here ’someone who loves you back in person’. I was reading a comments section on another blog on what would make porn accessible to women and this was the point made over and over again- women wanted porn where the characters had an emotional and intellectual connection to each other and sex developed out of that- for this reason some women found shows like Grey’s Anatomy as more ‘arousing’ than mainstream porn.
Now I completely agree with Twisty that porn can never be made unoppressive in a patriarchal society, and for that matter Grey’s Anatomy is not much better, but I still found this discussion interesting.
TP,
I don’t know if having physical contact with another person or not really is the defining element of if it’s masturbation or sex. The most obvious cross over is having sex with a prostitute. Is that not wholly mastubatory? Does the john love his prostitute any more than he loves his hand when he jerks off. More to the point, does he think about his hand (as his hand) when he uses it to jerk off any more than he thinks about the whore (as a human being) when he has sex with her?
If you can accept that much, then it is not that much more of a leap to consider otherwise “normal” sexual relations in the same way. I can’t personally speak to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, being interpellated by the same patriarchy as men, women often experience sex/masturbation in the same way. So, just because you’re doing it with someone else doesn’t mean you’re there any more than you are when you’re getting yourself off.
Yes! “Feminist porn” uses the same ploy “gangsta rappers” do in presenting themselves as icons of black empowerment, rather than the damn minstrel show it is.
Patriarchy apologists constantly use projection or doublespeak, such as claiming one is anti-sex for criticizing the porn message, which is truly anti-sex in its moral condemnations of sexual females (Hence, the necessary female degradation, torture, and destruction) and, thus, heterosexual sex itself, which is extreme not only b/c sex is natural but necessary for the survival of the species. Hell, if males are so offended by hetero sex that they “need” to degrade females mentally or physically to gain pleasure, why not just have sex w/ other men? Oh right, b/c then they’d be “faggots!” The dogma of patriarchy believes all sex is bad, as evident by the words used to describe it: fuck, nasty, dirty, etc.
Any activity females partake in becomes a source of vitriolic contempt, w/ sex proving to be the most explosive (Note how all female sex acts are slurs). Even if a sex video showed a loving couple in which the female was actually lavished w/ worship, society would still associate her w/ demonized stereotypes of inherent female immorality (Look at that slut!). Our morally hysteria toward females, and thus sex, reminds me of a friend (who happens to be black) and how she swore she would never eat watermellons in front of whites due to racist stereotypes. There’s nothing remotely wrong w/ eating watermellons but people would see her and think blackface.
Male supremacists (of either gender) have done the same thing w/ sex, in which our deep-seated misogyny is reflected in the desperate need to portray sex as inherently vile and for femaleness to be punished to sanctify such evil. As a young Catholic, I used to carry holy water to protect me from demons (Parents: outrageously devout). If you had to regularly engage w/ demons intimately out of biological urging wouldn’t you become more elaborate and fervid in your denunciations of the evil in your midst? Porn preaches such moral salvation (Misogyny is a religion. Religious zealots of any stripe tend to be the most disturbing in their sexual practices, as the root of any authoritarianism is “morality”.). Only intense shame could cause the masses to seek out vulgarity, slurs, and/or porn as a sexual “security blanket.”
LMYC says: If I’m hungry, and I watch people eating, it doesn’t give me any less hunger. If I need to take a dump and I watch people shitting, it doesn’t change my state.
(It seems you all know how to make italics. I do not.)
How about this: I am not hungry, and this makes me uncomfortable for various reasons. Watching people eat makes me hungry. Therefore, since many people don’t like to be watched while eating, I will view photography of people who don’t mind being filmed eating, and this will help my state and also rekindle my realtionship with food.
If I am constipated, and watching people shit in a similar fashion will help me out, should I watch them?
Is there just something wrong with the people and/or films that ‘help’ me? Is there something wrong with me for wanting that?
I am posing a hypothetical question out of curiousity, not attempting a defense of porn.
Avatar, that’s the whole driving force behind fanfiction — WHY are these two people fucking? The answer for mainstream porn is usually, “Who cares?”
“How about this: I am not hungry, and this makes me uncomfortable for various reasons. Watching people eat makes me hungry. Therefore, since many people don’t like to be watched while eating, I will view photography of people who don’t mind being filmed eating, and this will help my state and also rekindle my realtionship with food.”
This is the nonsensical part that you have to explain very carefully. What I want to know is, first of all, does looking at that picture or video of food make you any less hungry; and if yes, why do you eat at all when you could save probably in upwards of a million dollars in a life-time by deferring to your fancy, french photographic flip-book of satisfaction. However, if looking at a picture or video of some food doesn’t make you any less hungry, then what could you possibly mean by saying it helps you (assumably, with your hunger)?
Such is the case with porn, which you make by implying that it helps you with your sexual frustration, when there is nothing conveniently or conventially sexual about a picture or a video.
Brainwashing is incredible. According to the porn-loving “feminists” North Koreans totally “choose” to consider their dictator a God, whom they worship w/ an unrivaled frenzy to the point they are blissfully unaware how enslaved they truly. Dear Leader-mania swept China during the Chinese Revolution. Again, choice not a result of systemic cultural manipulation and oppression to condition the masses for enslavement. I mean, it’s not like the patriarchy threatens you w/ slurs, rape, torture or death if you speak out or anything. God no! That only happens to “bad” females. What I hate most about these bigot sidekicks is that their active encouragement of (violent) bigotry not only endangers them (though they’ll never admit it and if something does happen they’ll only blame themselves like “good” slaves do) but takes us all out w/ them. Complicitness in the dogma of female non-humanity and evil authorizes any male to punish any one of us as he sees fit, which universally results in a rabid state or righteous violence. They preach “Freedom!” while inciting hate that ensures the rest of us have none.
Can the two people be fucking because they live in a patriarchal society where the act of sex is a manifestation of male possession and aggression towards women or is that not sexy?
I wonder, really, why anybody would want or need “arousing” visual material? I mean I Just Don’t Get It. Why save porn? Why imagine that there will be a “better” version of it post-revolution?
I’ve often blamed the love of porn on sheer lack of imagination on the part of the pornsick. Is it too much trouble to close your eyes and imagine whatever it is that will help you get yourself off? REALLY? I don’t want porn, or erotica, or visually stimulating photos/films/paintings/literature. Never did. There are those who will think I’m a prude, vanilla, asexual, etc., and I resent being considered deficient because I don’t want that stuff.
Sex is really one of my favorite things about having a body, and I hate for it to be commodified and perverted by porn culture.
grumpybears, you’re reasoning from a really weird position. Saying, “If I’m constipated and watching people shit helps me out … ” is like saying, “If 1 1=3 … ” because well … watching other people shit generally doesn’t help anyone who is constipated.
It’s like saying, “Yeah, but if we lived in a universe where the king of teh United Stated had red hair … ”
Study basic reasoning. F->T is T.
“Why save porn? Why imagine that there will be a “better†version of it post-revolution?”–Thank you Jezebella.
And since I believe porn is as much a capitalist by-product as it is a sexual deviance I will put into buisness terms why keeping my sexuality free of all this titillation is preferred:
My sexuality is vertically integrated. I dont have to go outsourcing every damn point of arousal off-shore, pay cheap for the labor and thus sell my self short when it comes to homeland/domestic relationships. R&D, and Manufacturing are done in the same place, thus I can monitor and understand the effects and know what I am giving when the second party enters the equation. At that point the second party does not also become subject to the defects that could have possibly occured had I developed the sexuality through external means. I know what I am giving, and the second party also knows what they are getting.
This is really the most possible way for consensual sex to take place–for people to better understand their own sexuality and thus better represent it for consideration by party #2.
I pray for this day.
I got some Ding! moments out of this post too. I have been wanting to ask how gay male porn fits into the equation, i.e. if men objectify each other then doesn’t that suggest that it is part of their sexual psyche and not only about objectifying women? Now I get that it is part of the sexual brainwashing of patriarchy to understand sex as a dominant/submissive activity. Ding!
I don’t have a problem with there being no porn post-patriarchy. I do struggle with the concept that admiring physical beauty is inherently oppressive. Not that anyone said that exactly, but I wonder about it.
I don’t believe that pseudoscience that says “oh, men are just more visual.” Men have imaginations that work perfectly well. I think what unfortunately gets off a lot of men about porn is watching women being put “in their place.” And then there’s the whole notion of porn drift. After a while, lesbian orgies aren’t enough for your porn fan, so he has to move on to more and more out there stuff. But the common denominator is that its always a woman being used to turn him on in some sort of way, whether she is having sex with a man, another woman, or she’s crushing small animals while wearing high heels.
I think that non-sexist erotic material is possible in a post-patriarchal world, but I don’t think anyone would be making porn in a post-patriarchal world.
I would just like to take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge my appreciation of the blaming commentariat. The responses to this post — and really, to all the posts lately — represent some world-class blaming. BDL, LMYC, pisqauri,j, Miller — you guys are especially on fire. Yasoo! But I think BDL ought to have some kind of special recognition for the Blamer Brigade riff. Goddamn.
“in order for porn to be politically neutral, it can’t be porn.”
It’s a wrap!
“Men tend to look at masturbation as sex they have with themselves because women refuse to do it with them.”
does this hold true for women as well?
ok, then. as a man who masturbates, who consumes - but never pays for, not that it makes a difference - pornography, and who has a long-term and very sexually active relationship with a woman i love, may i point out that this thread is sorely lacking the benefit some first hand insight.
may i also say that twisty’s analysis of the situation re: porn and the patriarchy rings entirely true for me.
men being what they are, the mere image of a woman in a sexualized context or of a man and a woman having at it, is arousing.
a mucha print is arousing.
the sears catalogue is arousing.
you see where i’m going? it’s usually not difficult to get a man interested in sex. the point is, sometimes a man needs a sexual release. except for those men who can’t, or won’t, entertain the prospect of a healthy relationship with a woman, it’s not a substitute for sex - i hear women do it too!
sexual imagery helps with that. however, it is nearly impossible to find “adult material” on the internet that is not deeply and blantently degrading to women - if you accept that it is, in the first place, possible to create egalitarian porn. many (most?) men love it, and that scares the shit out of me. have i ever seen erotica online that was not degrading to women in some way? no, i don’t think so.
and of course, the women drawn into the business are often drug additcs, ready to aquiesce to the program of degradation for the promise of a hit. they are literally slaves.
see, it’s possible to know all that, and still be aroused by the sight of sex on screen. just like it’s possible to enjoy that new pair of shoes, knowing they were made with toxic materials by a 10-year-old on a 12-hour shift.
the reliance on imagery isn’t absolute, though. the most powefully arousing material i’ve ever come *ahem* across was a book of erotica written by women, for women.
sex between partners is about the relationship, about giving and receiving. it’s about love. it may even be about power and dominance, but those change hands often enough in the course of an encounter that it may be hard to tell. most men can distinguish between a temporary itch that needs scratching - yes, in the absence of porn, we still jack off - and a relationship with a real, live woman.
Dear god, rootbeer. I must insist that you reconsider your attitude toward the shift key. Not to mention your misconception that a discussion on a radical feminist blog is quite the right place for male insights on jerking off.
rootbeer said: see, it’s possible to know all that, and still be aroused by the sight of sex on screen. just like it’s possible to enjoy that new pair of shoes, knowing they were made with toxic materials by a 10-year-old on a 12-hour shift.
I don’t understand why men keep coming her and telling us what we already know. That their gratification is a higher priority to them than the life and health of a child or the degradation of a woman.
We know that, rootbeer. We blame the patriarchy for conditioning you to it.
Are you suggesting that you lack empathy to such a dramatic degree that you make no effort whatsoever to overcome the conditioning? You’re claiming this is reasonable in spite of the men right here on this here blog telling you it is not?
Ever notice how few cultural references there are to female masturbation, as compared to male masturbation?
In a post patriarchy world, the word “pornography” with its almost purient alliteration would seem stupid.
I have nothing else to add as so many said it so well, especially LMYC and your breakdown of consent and the denial of oppression.
I am alive here today for all who wish to know, to tell you that on a daily basis, refusing to be porntastic to amuse the males will not put you in physical jeopardy. That is a lie propounded by those in power. I am in more danger wearing a skirt and heels walking down the street than I am in my jeans, chore coat and doc martens.
That is at least I am safer from direct attack as the signals of my complicity and thus the approval of my suffering attack are minimized. No one wants to attack the ugly bitch in the doc martens, they want the pretty chic in the mini skirt. Not only do I offer no status for conquest, I also offer no built-in absolution from guilt.
Thus also, when I apply for a job, ask for directions or ask for a size 8 in that type, I am ignored until I push for recognition (thus earning women like me the title of pushy bitch). As a woman, the extent to which I signal my complicity to my oppression as a sexual object relegates the extent to which I am visible at all.
As woman, if I refuse to signal submission, I cease to exist. That I think is what many women fear.
I don’t believe that pseudoscience that says “oh, men are just more visual.â€
Metal Prophet, neither do I. Based on what?
Predominance of color terms.
Seriously — one of the more interesting linguistic things (that wasn’t stained with Whorf-Sapire nonsense) that I recall learning was that societies accumulate color terms in a fairly predictable order. Not all societies have all terms for color, and the first ones they generally get are “light” and “dark.” “White” and “black.”
Then, unsurprisingly, “red.”
Then “green” and/or “blue.”
Then you proceed from there.
What this means is that NO society has a term for “brown” or “purple” but no term for “red” or “blue.” They come in order, and they multiply as the society becomes more “complex” where complexity is measured in terms of technological whatsises and how hard you have to work for a living, distinct professions, that sort of thing. How “visually oriented” a society has to be, in other words, not because it’s innate, but because there are visual distinctions that need to be made. Not because they can suddenly tell “blue” from “green,” but because there is a reason to draw the distinction.
Which sex has the more complex color terms?
Which sex knows the difference between mauve and fawn?
Which sex knows the different between “turquoise” and “light blue?”
One guess.
And I’ll also hazard the guess that that’s the sex that’s more visually oriented, as much as that term means anything.
Funny that.
Personally, I think most men are only “visually oriented” because none of their other senses seem to work as well. They don’t bother listening to other voices — certainly not female ones. And as Joanna Russ once stated, they might as well be anaesthetized between chin and crotch.
the bewilderness, my point about the shoes is in reference to an earlier commenter’s post about liking new shoes.
we all indulge in things that cannot exist withoug creating harm in the world. i’d like to avoid it at all costs and, where i’m unconcious of the harm i cause, to be notified at once.
also, i accept that i have been conditioned by both the patriarchy and my genetic make-up. i also accept the fact that everything i say on this site - if i have not already been banned - will be taken with something more than a grain of salt, and that everything i say, even in agreement with the principles espoused by the proprietor thereof, will be seen to be, in some way, a defence of the patriarchy.
fair enough.
Really, this blog - and its comments - give me more “ding!” moments than anything else on the internet. I have been convinced of the evilitude of porn for many a moon, but the way you lot put things just makes me leap out of my chair and jump up and down pointing at the screen, shouting “Yes! Exactly! That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say for years!” High-fives all round.
Further to TP & LMYC’s exchange:
An old dude once told me that he thought that, when men paid prostitutes, they weren’t paying them to have sex. They were paying them to go away afterwards.
As far as my radicalisation went, that was something of an ephiphanic moment. His analysis was a huge oversimplification, of course: but the fact that it defined women as an irritant, and put them exactly on a level with other disposable sex commodities like a condom or a tissue - to be used once and discarded - was like if I’d been sleeping soundly in a warm bed and someone chucked a bucket of iced water over me.
i don’t have any erudite insight into why people think men are more visual, except that there exists a multi-billion-dollar industry to supply men with pictures naked babes. the market has spoken - not that it’s my custom to listen, but there might be something to that.
but, the visual instinct doesn’t apply during the actual act, because when you’re with your lover doing what comes natural, you’re too close to see anything anyway. that, and your eyes are often closed… and the lights off.
Hey all! Wow! I never thought that Twisty would respond, much less post it up! Very exciting.
I just have to say, I love you all. Seriously. I’ve been feeling so crazy for so long, and I finally feel like I can breathe. The comments are just amazing. And Twisty-well, I knew she would write something amazing that just put it all together. My brain has been spinning around with thoughts, but I try to write something and it’s just “duhh.”
Wow.
catherine, as one who has known many men who avail themselves of the services of prostitutes - i am not among them - your friend’s analysis is basically spot on. all the ones i’ve known have actually been sociopaths: completely unable to sense or sympathize with the feelings of another human being.
also, they’ve all had serious power issues. one has gone so far as to move back to korea where, so he says, the women aren’t “uppity.” i think he means, “empowered.”*
* i acknowlege that empowerment is a relative measure.
Holy crap, rootbeer that is the saddest thing ever-you need porn because you have sex in the dark with your eyes closed? Try opening your eyes and turning the lights on-it’s fun. This can’t be a serious post, can it?
sure it can. you just have to read it with your eyes open.
rootbeer: may i point out that this thread is sorely lacking the benefit some first hand insight.
Each of us is fully equipped with first hand insight, thank you very much. You are being presumptuous and rude when you dismiss all of the collective experience of the people in the discussion as “lacking in first hand insight” and then proceed to set us straight. Your opinion has no more or less weight than anyone elses. It is perhaps the patriarchial conditioning that causes you to speak as though it did.
right, but you realize that if you had read (with your eyes open) the entire sentence, you’d see that i’d stated my membership in a segment of the population to which i presume - shame on me - that you do not belong.
if i was not interested in perspectives other than my own, i would not read this weblog every day, nor would i have read your comment.
I do struggle with the concept that admiring physical beauty is inherently oppressive. Not that anyone said that exactly, but I wonder about it.
I’ve never needed an excuse to address something, but I can definitely speak directly to this one.
I fall within that slice of humanity that is considered “beautiful.” It is not something I did, it’s not an achievement, it is most emphatically not something that deserved admiration. On any plane.
It’s a birth defect in reverse. That is quite literally it. If you can justify regarding someone with contempt for being ugly by nature, then perhaps you can “admire” physical beauty. But “admiring” it is like “admiring” someone as a brilliant financial genius for winning the lottery. Beauty is a fucking genetic crapshoot, and mine came at the expense of my cardiac and orthopedic health, thanks to an odd genetic disability that created sharper facial features, sharp cheekbones, height, thinness … and fucked up heart valves. Had I not had this disability, I probably would not be called “beautiful,” or might at most be “pretty.”
Intersting how something that makes me hotly pursued as a reproductive sex partner by males also means that I am much more likely to die from pregnancy AND pass on the same defect to the next generation. That tells you everything you need to know about ev-psych and male standards for sexula partners.
It would be nice to find someone (women for me) who could acknowledge what I look like without ending up hanging a ton of baggage off of it, but it’s not going to happen. “Admiring” a human body cannot be disengaged from “admiring” the human living in it — or hating that human, or resenting that human, or any of a dozen emotional reactions that have nothing to do with leg length, waist size, hair texture, eye color and size, or skin condition.
It’s even that way with animals — just about every single animal that has some beauty-related “admirable” quality is so far down on the endangered species list that they might as well be extinct already. “Admiring” beauty is in every case you can name, dangerous.
And usually, “beauty” is just another word for “relative scarcity” anyhow. Where most people are dark, blondes are prized. In northern countries, black hair is almost irresistible. Most Americans are “overweight” by some possibly bullshit standard, so thinness is prized. Dark hair is more common here in a genetically mixed country, so blonde hair is prized (and labelled prized since money is made by selling hair bleach).
The second you start to talk about beauty, you walk into a labyrinth of patriarchal manipulation that you’ll never trace your way out of.
Beauty is a big pain in the ass. It’s useless. It tells you nothing about a person’s fitness for parenting, which is often the excuse used for admiring it. Etc. etc. etc.
the market has spoken - not that it’s my custom to listen, but there might be something to that.
OMFG, we got ourselves a libertarian. Honey, if you think that “the market” is some sort of automatic machine that generates perfectly untainted truth with no influence from arbitrary forcdes, you’re crazy. Or very, very young. Or stupid. Or all three.
Go back to “The Fountainhead,” it’s more your speed.
“It would be nice to find someone (women for me) who could acknowledge what I look like without ending up hanging a ton of baggage off of it, but it’s not going to happen.”
does this mean that women place as much importance on physical beauty as men do?
i read the fountainhead, but it left me wanting. i think libertarians are kooks.
i don’t think the market generates anything. i do know that greed compels some people to serve a possibly unhealthy demand by producing goods to satisfy it. pictures of babes for example. i do also know that if women had a similar hunger for pictures of naked dudes - or babes, or whatever - those same greedy people would be scrambling to get it onto the shelves.
i mean, sometimes ideology and reality really do intersect. at those points, it’s silly to deny it.
“i read the fountainhead, but it left me wanting. i think libertarians are kooks.”
This, I suppose, is the first step to recovery.
recorvery is what i come here for.
Catherine Martell, I am so glad you called me out, because I admire your writing unreservedly. And I am always flattered when someone as cool and passionate as LMYC takes my thought and improves it so much.
One clarification for my definition of porn in a post-patriarchal society: It can’t be reproduced, which means it would not exist, since pornography is the graphic representation of women of loose morals, by ancient greek definition. That’s some highly patriarchal shit. Our language is hard-coded to degrade women.
I can see rootbeer struggling, in a kind of hard to understand way, with the arousal he feels when looking at graphic representations of women. I say, keep thinking, rootbeer, and keep reading this blog.
I hate to sound like a whiny little brat soaking in my own piss pool of privilege, but it took me years and years to really accept the hard cold fact that my response - arousal - to pornography was due to decades - a lifetime - of conditioning. I flailed through every possible denial I could invent or steal to try to avoid the horrible realization that I had willingly given myself over to this pornsickness.
But the women in this forum have provided more examples and testimony than I could ever possibly ignore that have convinced me that the truth is the truth, and that I can at least try to rise above it.
I don’t expect the women in this forum to hold back a thing when they call me or any other man out for being smug or assuming privilege or just not getting it. It’s essential that they do. But I hope I can give a small shout of encouragement to a man that he can figure this all out and come to terms with his own responses by listening here.
i’m not struggling with my response to visual cues. as long as i’m a man and i can see, i will respond to the sight of a beautiful - by my standard - woman.
anyone who claims to be uninterested in the sight of an attractive man or woman is, i think, not being entirely honest.
LMYC: I don’t admire a person for being beautiful because I know they don’t have the choice. I do, though, take issue with your statement that admiration of a person’s beauty can’t be separated from your assessment of them as a person. In my personal experience, at least, this is not true.
I’m also not convinced that pornography that rests on good literary style — that is, pornography that would allow the reader/viewer/consumer to connect with the characters and sympathise with them as they fall in love/have sex — will necessarily be obsolete after the revolution.
rootbeer: if you don’t think women place as much importance on physical appearance as men do, you sure haven’t been listening to the right kind of locker-room talk. They’re just more often willing to ignore it, because fewer men make an effort to be sexually attractive, but the women still feel the need for sex and companionship and whatnot.
Sex in the dark? Get a more confident partner and turn on those lights!
Even when I don’t even try to live up to pornilicious standards, I get checked out by dudes. I can’t even go into the grocery store in regular jeans without getting the dudely lear. I don’t consider this attention a compliment.
When I get older and lose my fuckability, I’ll be more invisible. I don’t know how that’ll make me feel, but I know that I’ll feel somewhat liberated by my new found anonymity.
DISCLAIMER for misspellings: I wish that there was a spell checker feature here. Please excuse any poor spelling!
You have just, conveniently, changed the terms of the argument. There is absolutely an enormous difference between admiring a “beautiful” person and consuming pornography.
Can you not see that? Pornography is not about beauty. Re-read Twisty’s post and this thread, with that thought in mind, if you don’t understand that statement.
If all you wanted was to admire beautiful women, they would not have to be naked, submissive, fuckable, and being fucked for you to admire them.
This is a lie you are telling yourself: “I am aroused by porn because I enjoy beauty.” It is a BIG FAT LIE and I suggest you disabuse yourself of it.
oh, the lights stay on in the kitchen… and in the bathroom… and in the tool shed…
when a rendezvous takes place in a tent in the subarctic (as one is wont to do from time to time) and the midnight sun ain’t obliging, well, you take what you can get.
octopod, i do believe that women can be stimulated visually, but not in a way that causes them to buy massive quantities of porn. besides, the prevailing opinion among commenters here seems to imply - despite some glaring self-contradictions - that enlightened womenfolk will not be subject to, nor will they apply judgements of a physical nature. well, sure. whatever.
LMYC, thanks for your take on beauty. I didn’t mean “admiring” in that beauty is an accomplishment, but more admiration in an aesthetic sense. Male and female, some people’s eyes (lips, skin) are just stunning, and some bodies exude youth, strength and health in a way that I can’t help but notice and appreciate.
I’m sure you’re right that beauty is all tangled up in a labyrinth of patriarchal manipulation and poisoned by pornography and capitalist marketing. It’s also really unfair and a crap shoot (but so are a lot of things—I wish I could sing, but I can’t.) Anything so damaging and divisive to women is worth giving up, but it’s a struggle for me to get my head around it.
I was told here a few weeks ago that in the future, we will be ethereal brain clouds eternally contemplating the allness or whatever. Hence, there will be no such concept as physical beauty.
I was reading some blog or message board or godknows what a while back, and came across a complaint by a porn store clerk, saying that every once in a while, people would come in and ask where the femminist porn was. Eyerolling ensues because, well, there is no such cataglory. There is just a gradiation between hyper mysogenistic, twisted shit, and movies of people behaving in a sexual fashon.
//understanding that some people here consider them one and the same//
I like porn, because the memory of my 700mile absent ex girlfriend just gets really, really depressing after a while.
I do, though, take issue with your statement that admiration of a person’s beauty can’t be separated from your assessment of them as a person. In my personal experience, at least, this is not true.
Octo, I generally find that this is one of those things that is “true in theory,” in other words — not true. In my experience, people want to believe it’s possible, but … it’s not. Saying that people can separate their reaction to a person’s exterior and their reaction to that person is like saying that you can wear a thong as a politically neutral act. It’s just not doable, as much as people want to think it is.
jezebella, if you’re referring to my comments, i hadn’t intended to conflate the appreciation of beauty with the consumption of pornography.
but several commenters here do seem to think - not without grounds - that adjudication on the grounds of physical beauty is oppression, and that when men appreciate beauty they are really measuring fuckability. if that’s the case, it’s a short leap from there to the commercialization of this phenomenon, don’t you think?
also, if you read my comment carefully, you will see that the meat of my point is that virtually any image can be sexualized. is any depiction of a woman - beautiful by the patriarchy’s standards or otherwise - pornography? what if i told you any depiction could be arousing? now is it pornography? if venus williams shows up in sports illustrated, is she there for tittilation, or because she’s a spectacular athlete? does it depend on how men react to the images?
also, don’t accuse someone of lying when the evidence that contradicts you is printed on the very same page as the accusation.
Bringing this back around to Twisty’s post and M’s letter *waves at M* I’ve been giving invisibility a try. I’m 25 years old, live in NYC, have annoyingly big breasts and a damn cute face. Lately I’ve been stomping about town in wide-legged long pants, my steel-toed work-boots, baggy shirts, hair cut as short as I could get it without using clippers, and my usual no-make-up state.
Wow. It’s like I fade into the background everywhere I go. I’ve been stomped on, whacked with some dude’s umbrella (really fucking hard, in my bad knee), and cut in line by a few women who are better at obeying the laws of femininity than I ever was. Maybe it’s just been a weird couple of months, but this weekend when I wasn’t wearing my work clothes, I was deferred to, offered help in shops, and decidedly NOT ignored the way I am during the week.
It’s a really interesting experiment. I can understand why some women would dig the benefits the feminine drag gets them, but personally, I’m not finding it worth it. The other “benefit” of the invisibility is that I’m more free to notice how certain men react to women and, um, ICK. I want to slap some of these assholes I see ogling little girls on the train.
“They seem to think that creating an alternative will somehow stop the mainstream degrading porn. Or something. … Is it that they are too scared to admit the truth? I know it’s painful to see the truth, so maybe that’s it. Or, are they just so brainwashed by mainstream pornification that they truly believe this stuff?”
Perhaps they are equating free, voluntary access to a market with liberation from an oppression which may have created the market in the first place. Also, as per Rootbeer, even if men are more visually stimulated than women (Twisty’s prior post about ogling hinted that this is not true), one can still blame the patriarchy for perpetuating and rewarding it.
BDL, LMYC, pisqauri,j, Miller — you guys are especially on fire.
Thanks, I think - there is someone in here who uses the lower-case “j” as their screen-name. I’m thinking of writing under what’s become elsewhere my usual screen-name: “pdxstudent.”
I got a bit too big for my britchs a month or whatever ago, and took to doing in the comment-commons what should, by and large, be done in my head. So, I’ve taken to lurking while I re-ordered what it even means (or what it should or shouldn’t mean to comment, as a man, in a feminist blog) for me to “be here.” I’m still doing that, I guess, but becoming less of a lurker.
LMYC: your comment about porn’s appeal bieng tied to the fact that there is no actual woman-irritant involved is SO INCISIVE!
You are so BRAINS!
This whole THREAD is afire! WOW!
I read this post about half an hour before stumbling across this week’s New York Times Magazine porn-and-patriarchy affirming piece about a pornography web business. The gist of the article (which is called “A Disciplined Business”) is “porn’s mainstream, and those who don’t welcome porn-producing businesses in their neighborhoods are so out-dated prudish feminists.”
My rage was controllable during my reading of it only because I knew that there was an island of sanity to return to here at IBTP, and in fact this very post…
With something like this in the Sunday news magazine, I sort of wonder, what are we doing? That is, we who claim to care for liberating women from their position as the sex class? That porn should be so taken for granted…. it just seems like nothing’s being effectively changed despite all the alleged waves of feminism or what have you, despite years of solid blaming. Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, strategizing or something? I’m not sure I know what that would even look like - but it seems like somehow we need to be doing more than just posting on blogs… (Not to downplay the importance of this blog. Like I said, it helps keep one sane. But still, isn’t there something we all should be doing other than trawling the internet?)
I’m going to try and add my .02 cents as concisely as possible:
Porn is one of the primary social institutions by which the social construction of women’s sexuality as submission to male dominance and objectification by men is made hegemonic.
The issue of the consent of women performing in porn is furthermore wholly irrelevant because invisible to the men consuming porn because those women are being paid to act out a socially constructed role.
Okay, I couldn’t just leave it at that. I’d add that this is best evidenced by the exaggeration in Porn of precisely the aspects relating to the social construction of women as the sex class: submission by women, dominance by men; all the visual markers of acquiescence to this social role i.e. make-up, breast-implants; obsessive focus on sex acts socially constructed–in large part by porn itself–as degrading to women and demonstrating their enjoyment of being submissive to men’s gratification; etc. In this way porn clearly differentiates itself from the oft troted out hypothetical of the value neutral graphic representation of sex (ignoring, for the moment, the impossibility of such value neutrality within the social context of Patriarchy).
Thank you lucizoe, now I’m not alone in my refusal to play dress up for the patriarchy on a daily basis.
LYMC: I do not and never did possess the traits you have, but when I was younger I was quite fit and had the soft innocent brooke sheilds type of face, so a got a lot of attention, yet never saw myself as ‘attractive’ or those other more endearing terms used on me. I always did and still do, thought that such references were always clearly, “I see you as someone I can dominate and take as a prize.” It is was not comforting to be stared at, or approached, or followed by strangers or even acquaintances.
In fact, I think any woman can attest to that as most women will always possess some physical features that a man connects to his manhood.
Rootbeer: “that adjudication on the grounds of physical beauty is oppression, and that when men appreciate beauty they are really measuring fuckability. if that’s the case, it’s a short leap from there to the commercialization of this phenomenon, don’t you think?”
So you agree then that pornography is basically the commercialization of women’s oppression as demanded by men who get most aroused by images of women as sexual tools.
But then, you go and undo the sale to yourself: “you will see that the meat of my point is that virtually any image can be sexualized. is any depiction of a woman - beautiful by the patriarchy’s standards or otherwise - pornography?”
Yes, we see that the meat of most of your points is that you are struggling to rationalize your response to porn as a natural response and not the result of long term social conditioning. Shoes and fishes of the sea can indeed be sexualized when ’sexualized’ means fetishized. Our consumer/consumption oriented social system has come to equate fetish with love or some pure act of human connection which it is not.
Porn fetishizes (sp?) the domination of women, the denial of which in order to facilitate participation is absolutely necessary. Once porn is seen as the fetish of domination that it is, that involves and destroys countless lives and debases our humanity, then it no longer will have a need to serve.
Wait a minute, I meant to preface my last sentence as ‘in a just society’, cause it ain’t happenin’ here, I GAW-RAN-TEE!
it just seems like nothing’s being effectively changed despite all the alleged waves of feminism or what have you, despite years of solid blaming. Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, strategizing or something?
I have that same feeling of wanting to do something useful, to use my rage as a force for change somehow. But action can seem frightening, as witness all the recent news stories reminding us how near the surface the violence that enforces patriarchal rule is. Whether it’s the stalker who finally goes amok, or verbal abuse of a blogger that terrifies and intimidates her or even simply exhausts her into hanging it up, the energy it takes just to tread water and not lose ground is overwhelming. The ongoing assault is merciless, relentless, from all sides, every day, everywhere we go. I don’t know about you, but just having energy to get through the day feels like a major victory much of the time, much less putting on my armor and wading into the fray.
And I try, in my small ways, to stand up to ‘them’ - not deferring, not averting my gaze, not stepping aside. Insisting on being heard, not permitting interruptions, staring down some a*hole eyeballing me until he finally looks away, and eventually walks away as I continue to eyeball him back. But it’s exhausting. Some days it’s easier just to hole up in my hermitage.
Great post on porn, Twisty.
I’ve hated porn for as long as I can remember. I’m not quite as articulate as you, so when I was dating a fella who was into porn and going to strip clubs, all I could do was be in a rage for days and then dump him. I couldn’t articulate what the problem was. Although, in retrospect, I think it was that I couldn’t articulate the problem well enough for him to admit anything was wrong with the practice. He had the typical arguments you’d expect from a guy who was into porn and wanted to justify it.
What I especially hate is the violence, the degradation, the conflation of sex and violence. If you ever look at the shit that’s on the internet, the women are always mentioned to be filthy, dirty whores. I guess that’s to make it easier to do mean and cruel things to them. There is a genre of porn I came across known as ass-to-mouth. I had no idea such things existed. I’m sure everyone knows what I’m referring to, but just in case, it involves a woman sucking a guy’s dick after it’s been up her (or another woman’s) ass. Now, this had me in a state for days. I assumed that doing some activity that could potentially put a woman at risk for infection would be a sign of misogyny. But just in case it was some kinky fetish that had nothing to do with hating women, I tried looking for GAY ass-to-mouth porn. Interesting. Considering that male homosexuals are known to engage in anal sex, I did not find one instance of subsequent dick sucking afterwards. All searches for gay ass-to-mouth porn came back with only hetero results. So, I was convinced it was specifically designed to denigrate women. It is so disgusting. I wish I had never known about it. It saddens me to think that there are women who are forced to do that. I don’t buy this whole consenting bullshit. No one consents to sticking something in their mouth that was once up someone’s ass. Nobody.
I really wish I were a lesbian sometimes. It’s really hard to be a feminist and hetero. I just recently stopped shaving, and I’m sure that’s gonna make me even less attractive to men. But fuck ‘em. Who cares. Shaving is a purely advertising-driven thing anyway. I’m sick of capitalist pigs getting rich from making me feel inadequate. I’m a human female, dammit, and we have hair all over our bodies. I just went out today with shorts on and hairy legs, and I fucking loved it! The patriarchy can kiss my ass.