Opponents of pornography are prudes, moralisers, hung up about sex and want to put all women in burqas . Right? Not exactly.
Dr Helen Pringle tackles these weary and predictable stereotypes in a piece just published in On Line Opinion.
Helen is in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research has been widely recognised by awards from Princeton University, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the Universities of Adelaide, Wollongong and NSW. Her main fields of expertise are human rights, ethics in public life, and political theory.
Helen is also a contributor to Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global pornography industry, (Spinifex Press) with a much needed critique of a pro porn report.
Do you read discussions about pornography in the Australian media? Perhaps you followed the recent visit here of Gail Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality and an anti-pornography activist? Dines was introduced at a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel [ACTIVE] http://blip.tv/slowtv/porn-wars-dines-cannold-holden-lumby-5248617 by the chair’s making a snide dig to her as ‘the furthest to my right’. The panel chair asked Dines, ‘And where do you sit? So often in this debate there are odd bedfellows…you will often find radical feminists like yourself aligned in their views about pornography with Christians on the far right.’
Fair question? Well it is, if you only read of anti-pornography perspectives in mainstream media. The way the media reports on it, opposition to pornography comes only from the religious right. You know, those strange characters that have some problem with women’s bodies, and probably with men’s bodies as well. Who think that sex is sinful and who are obsessed with purity. Or, as the tired old joke goes, those who are opposed to sex because it might lead to dancing. What is even more frightening in this treatment of opposition to pornography is the women’s auxiliary wing of the religious right, in which everyone is having fits of the vapors at the very thought of a penis.
That is not my position on pornography. I am a woman on the left, and I am opposed to pornography…
See also: A studied indifference to harm, Dr Helen Pringle
One Response
Excellent post Dr Helen Pringle – thank for helping to break down the stereotypes!