A lot of men I have met confuse the feminist critiques of porn with the notion that feminists hate sex, hate pleasure, and hate beauty. They believe that we want them to feel guilty every time they look at a picture of a beautiful naked woman, or admire a woman's body. Indeed, there is a strong strain of prudery in our culture that sometimes affects feminist thinking about these issues. However, critiquing porn is not the same thing as telling men they are bad people for wanting visual sexual stimulation.
I do not believe that sex and nudity are inherently degrading. I do not even believe that sex and nudity on camera or for money is inherently degrading. I believe that women who pose nude or who engage in sex work should be viewed as fully-fledged human with hearts and brains and souls worthy of respect.
The problem is that so much of the most popular soft-core and hard-core porn in our culture does seem to be predicated on reducing, degrading, or pulling one over on women. I am not even going to get into hard-core in this post (mainly because I don't have the stomach or the time to do any, um, research). But consider two of the most popular, socially acceptable, and allegedly "wholesome" versions of soft porn -- Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. Playboy, while preaching a philosophy of sexual liberation for both sexes, is all about infantilizing women. Posing naked is not inherently degrading. But walking around with a cotton-tail on your ass and bunny ears, while gushing about how doing so is the greatest honor of your life, is a bit degrading. Having the nude picture of you posted with a little cutesie yearbook entry about your likes and dislikes written in bubbly handwriting is all about portraying you as unthreatening and powerless as possible. Being one of three girlfriends fawning over 80-year old "Hef" while begging him to put naked pictures of you in his magazine and struggling to abide by the curfew he sets for you -- also degrading.
Girls Gone Wild, like Playboy, is marketed as good, clean fun for the red-blooded American male. What young (or older) man wouldn't want to see pretty young women appearing to spontaneously flash the cameras or engage in other sexualized behavior in the heady exuberance of the moment? But, as noted in one of my recent posts, newspaper accounts establish that Girls Gone Wild founder and his cameramen are routinely engaging in very bad-news predatory behavior on very young women whom they encourage to become intoxicated, and Joe Francis is a first rate misogynist.
Amanda, in a first-rate post on Francis a couple months ago, perceptively describe how the whole concept behind Girls Gone Wild is inherently both prudish and misogynist:
But more than that, it appears that the pursuit of unwilling women is not just done out of need, but it’s actually the whole point of the enterprise to Francis. This little throwaway part [from Claire Hoffman's piece on Francis] was extremely telling to me.
But the women are changing, Francis tells me, and that makes him sad. In the beginning, when “Girls Gone Wild” cameramen first popped up in clubs, the women who revealed themselves seemed innocent—surprised, even, by their own spontaneity. Now that the brand is so pervasive, the women who participate increasingly appear to be calculating exhibitionists, hoping that an appearance on a video might catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame.
To rephrase this bluntly, Francis doesn’t like working with women who are getting something out of it . . . The fantasy is not just regular girls getting naked, which is something I have exactly zero problem with. It’s a little more complex than that. The idea is to bend a usually unwilling woman to your will and enjoy the submission. Women who march up to the camera and say they want to be filmed in sexual situations are not bending to anyone’s will and that takes the fun out of it. Very, very telling.
It’s funny to me, how “Girls Gone Wild” is supposed to be hedonistic and yet is, at its core, prudish. Always hovering over the whole enterprise, as is indicated by that quote about how the women have changed, is the notion that the women should be ashamed of wanting to get naked and have a wild night of partying. Their shame is the focal point for Francis and probably a lot of viewers.
The problem isn't nudity or sex. The problem is that these publications promote and are motivated by a demeaning view of women.
In the late '80s or early '90s, I bought into the reaction against anti-porn feminism of that era, which seemed to me to be prudish and excessive and authoritarian. I even bought a subscription to Playboy, making me perhaps the only subscriber to buy the magazine for the articles. But I slowly came to loathe the magazine and its cheesecake portrayals of women. And I began to see where the radical feminists had a point that, in a society predicated on views of the sexes as unequal, sex and porn are inevitably going to be demeaning and degrading to women, which certainly seems to be the case.
But I don't necessarily see porn or sexualized images of women in our society as the major problem women face as women. I see it as a symptom of a larger issue in our culture, the fact that a lot of cultural views and assumptions about women in a variety of contexts have not caught up with our legal equality, and are thus still demeaning.
I will admit my views on this are very much evolving, which is one reason I have pretty much kept my mouth shut on porn over the year or so I have been blogging. There are a lot of articulate bloggers (and I am thinking of Laurelin in particular although I can't seem to find the particular post of hers that I liked so much) who write beautifully about the effects they perceive that porn and "lad mags" have on the treatment and self-respect of average women. While I favor full freedom of expression, I think as ethical consumers feminist men and women can work to promote more egalitarian views of women in all areas of expression, including but not limited to pornography.
As my feminism evolved, my (always limited) tastes in porn changed. I never really *liked* demeaning stuff with a serious power imbalance, but lately it've found it a turn-*off*. Where I used to be able to ignore that aspect of a story unless it was egregious, I no longer can.
Posted by: Hershele Ostropoler | November 08, 2006 at 11:54 AM
"The problem isn't nudity or sex. The problem is that these publications promote and are motivated by a demeaning view of women."
That sums up my feelings exactly.
Posted by: Ginger | November 08, 2006 at 01:04 PM
I suppose there could be actual damage to women by demeaning pornographic images, but I'm skeptical. (I am, of course, completely sidestepping the issue of women and men who have been actually coerced into participating in or mistreated during the creation of porn, since the immorality and harm there is inherent and beyond debate.) I've read that Japanese porn is much more violent than American porn, and yet they have a much lower reported rate of sexual violence. Also, a study by a Clemson professor suggests that the expanded availability of porn to teen males occasioned by greater access to the internet was correlated with a decline in rape, though some have taken issue with some aspects of the study's methodology.
Basically, I think this is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. belledame put up a great post about hard-core porn and violent porn which I think is nonetheless relevant here. She quotes extensively from a book which analysed the emotionally mangled way boys are raised in America, which lies at the heart of the demand for demeaning pornographic images in the first place. Renegade Evolution also has some thoughts about this (though once again, the focus is on the more violent varieties of porn, I think there is an overlap in the origin of the desire for 'rough' and 'demeaning' images).
Posted by: ballgame | November 08, 2006 at 01:45 PM
I wasn't referring to the notion of porn causing or contributing to rape (not that I buy the notion that it decreases rape either). More just that it may contribute to a generally demeaning view of women both by men and by women themselves.
Posted by: The Happy Feminist | November 08, 2006 at 01:57 PM
Depending on how it's presented of course.
Posted by: The Happy Feminist | November 08, 2006 at 01:57 PM
ballgame, i've seen the argument about japanese porn vs sex-based violence many times, and each time somebody has pointed out that in japan both rape and domestic violence figures underestimate the problem by a lot. i wish i could cite something concrete for you, but hey, if someone said it on the internet it must be true!
also there are lots of takedowns on the "porn access --> less rape" thing, the most recent one i've seen being amanda's at pandagon a week or two ago, that you might want to read. i think they are pretty reasonable; amanda for example calls herself "porn-liberal" meaning she's not philosophically anti-, so it's not about debunking the idea on principle. i can't read the study you linked because adobe freezes every time i try to open it, but either it's a piece of speculative fluff or every favorable blog post i've read about it is doing it terrible injustice. the bloggers who've written that the study makes a lot of sense don't make a lot of sense themselves, and when i tried to reason out their positive interpretations of the study i got the feeling it was challenging to defend logically. (here i deleted examples because i was afraid of over-derailing, but i promise i'm not just saying this.) so i too am skeptical.
Posted by: roula | November 08, 2006 at 02:45 PM
these publications promote and are motivated by a demeaning view of women
Exactly.
Porn is not sex. Neither is GGW.
Posted by: Liz | November 08, 2006 at 03:41 PM
roula: I think your skepticism about the Japanese porn/rape correlation is reasonable and warranted. By which I mean I don't neccessarily believe that it's false, but it certainly isn't proven either and I'll certainly be open to the idea that are significant reporting challenges in Japan, since my knowledge of that culture is pretty limited.
Professor Kendall's study, OTOH, had more meat to it than it's been given credit for, in my impression. Most of the critiques I read fell into the "purely negative" category, and as Marvin Harris used to say, "purely negative criticism does not kill a research program." I would most emphatically NOT characterize it as "speculative fluff" … the study's methodology seemed basically sound and Prof. Kendall himself was not shy about spelling out the study's limitations. There was one critique that I thought DID have merit — someone discovered an oddly inverted correlation with PC ownership and internet access that Kendall never discussed — but, unless there was some blatantly erroneous math in it, I'd say its conclusions were significant and that it's up to its critics to either come up with a better explanation of the data or come up with better data. But, once again, I would agree that the study falls far short of "proving" porn can function as a substitute for rape.
happy: isn't the futility in trying to define what is and isn't "demeaning" kind of fatal to the whole project of trying to reduce its prevalence? After all, there are certain sex acts (and I don't know how graphic you do or don't want to get here) that were probably widely thought of as demeaning in the past but which are now thought of as pretty ordinary. Doesn't the whole 'eye of the beholder' issue pose a pretty much insurmountable challenge?
Posted by: ballgame | November 08, 2006 at 03:46 PM
I always thought it was the articles that were the most sexist part of Playboy.
Posted by: mythago | November 08, 2006 at 04:30 PM
That's a good point ballgame, sexual norms shift in culture and correspond to how closeted the behavior is. I believe in emotionally mature adults having the capacity to separate fantasy and reality, and perhaps there in lies the rub. Assuming that the individuals who consume the pornography are emotionally mature. Kink has turned people on for ages, sexual urges often times cannot be erased only handled responsibly with a healthy consensual partner.
I am not troubled by the hardcore porn per se, it is more the general attitude of men and women that declare those who perform and enjoy such acts as damaged and not worthy of respect. It's the whole "fool around with the whore, marry the madonna" complex, I believe there can be a happy medium. It would have to be a shift from the perspective of relating rather than pornography though.
Is it the pornography that causes the demeaning, or is it the demeaning that causes the pornography, or is it demeaning because we as a culture say so?
Posted by: sassywho | November 08, 2006 at 05:00 PM