That was the argument put by Age social affairs writer Michelle Griffin in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald this week.
“Steamy airport novels, raunchy teen lit and straight-up smut”, argued Griffin, would help take young people away from “commercialised banal porn”. In her praise of trashy novels and raunchy reads, Griffin recommended ‘House of Holes’ for the school library and family bookshelf.
This is the book described by The Guardian as a ‘wank book’ and ‘porn fest: “Baker’s frogmarches us into an arcade of blaring porn fantasies in which the tropes of triple-X sex movies are celebrated in all their cheerfully gushing banality…” (note to Griffin, porn without pictures can be banal too).
How Judy Blume’s ‘Forever’ and ‘Puberty Blues’ could even appear in the same article commending House of Holes is difficult to fathom.
Especially concerning is Griffin’s comment: “The trouble with much of the porn readily available is not that it’s explicit, or even that it’s brutal, but that it is reductive and samey.”
So because so much of it is similar, that is worse than it being brutal, violent and misogynist? The commercialised women-hating and sadistic brutality that so much of today’s on-line pornographic offerings is less worse than it just being “samey”?
I agree of course with the observations of sex therapists cited by Griffin that “porn is limiting young men’s visions of a good time to mere delivery-man thrusting”. This is well-documented in Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global sex industry (Spinifex Press, 2011), a book I co-edited with Dr Abigail Bray. I agree that young people have a right to know about pleasure and that sex education programs where only biological facts or a disease model of sex are taught, are inadequate.
But it appears to me naïve to think leaving porno-themed books lying around the house “badly hidden” is any kind of “arming” against online pornography, when 70 percent of boys aged 12 have seen porn and 100 percent by age 15. Even if they read one or two books, the bombardment of sexual imagery and porn online will barely be dented. And it seems foolish to treat porn books and porn online as somehow separate and disconnected.
What is urgently needed is explicit content on radical concepts like love, intimacy and authentic human connection. Girls and young women describe cold, soul-less sexual experiences in which they are expected to be service stations for boys, pressured to ‘put out’, with no concern for her emotional wellbeing.
Sex has become more about f***ing and less about loving. Our response should be to equip and empower young people to make positive choices about their sexual lives. Not throw more porn flavoured stuff at them.
As published by Generation Next
8 Responses
I watched the interview, she reminded me of a kid trying to explain why the school canteen should provide more junk food!
She was not convincing and didn’t look like she believed the rubbish she was spouting. She had no evidence to back up what she was saying….
such a load of twaddle!
Really well spoken Melinda! I love Michelle’s comment “trashiness is in the eyes of the beholder” 🙂
words fail to express the stupidity that this Michelle is promoting and has clearly no idea and probably is just looking for more readers is my guess. Sexualisation at any price? Reading is fine but porn does not give anyone what you have just expressed you think is needed!!!! Dr Nicki’s idea that we need to show what real bodies look like etc is a better way to go. Much better advice.
I haven’t read House of Holes and in all honestly don’t intend to. I did however read Puberty Blues and other books with a similar theme as a pre-teen and early teen, and I can testify to the damage they CAN do in the absence of information about healthy, respectful relationships.
The summer before I turned 11 I read Puberty Blues, and saw the movie, both with my mother’s permission. In my early years at high school I followed it up with Go Ask Alice, Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, Sybil, and H (also known as Christiane F), the story of a teenaged heroin addict and prostitute. Sex education was minimal, even for my prograssive school, and limited to ways to prevent pregnancy rather than anything about the needs for love and respect. The summer before I read Puberty Blues I was sexually molested by a distant relative, something I didn’t even realise was sexual until many years later.
All of this set me up with a rather strange mindset. Sex was abusive, exploitative, a transaction. Girls were expected to give out and shut up about it while boys were expected to take all they could. All of this scared me and it wasn’t until after I was sexually assaulted again in my 20s that I even slept with a man for the first time. In fact, my family thought I was gay until I announced my engagement at the age of 26.
The problem with what I had learned about sex as a teen didn’t end there. I was unable to recognise abuse for what it was. I truly believed the expectations that those books set up were reflective of life. Not having anything to balance it with left me vulnerable and I found myself in a marriage that was emotionally and sexually abusive. I knew nothing of what a healthy, respectful sexual relationship was like. Even now, at 41 and free of my abusive ex, I still don’t really know. I can talk about what it isn’t but not about what it is.
The truth is that kids and teens don’t need to be exposed to raunch, or porn, or stories of teenage angst about sex, although in all likelihood this will happen anyway. What is needed is information and modelling on what constitutes a healthy, respectful relationship. Kids, girls and boys, need to know that rape and sexual assault can happen in relationships. They need to be taught about being comfortable with the decisions they make sexually and that’s it’s okay to say no or that they aren’t ready.
I’m no wowser. I am a feminist who believes in choice in all areas of life (including being exposed to porn), but I believe strongly about this. I know from my own life what damage it can do.
Whoops, meant to say the summer I was eleven, the summer before I started high school.
I was a fairly precocious reader as a child. I would have read at least half of the books on my parents’ bookshelves and was borrowing mainly from the adult section of the library by the time I started high school (aged 11). I remember feeling very aware of the sex scenes which appeared in most books I was reading, often very graphically, but I was completely confused by them, sometimes even ashamed. Nobody talked to me about what I was encountering. And I certainly didn’t have the words or the confidence to ask.
As an adult, I have actually ended up feeling really angry with my parents for allowing these books to be such a significant source of my sexual ‘education’. An 11 year old girl deserves better than to have the sexual imagination of a middle-aged man played out on her naivete.
Cars and Nicole J – great insight. Thank you for sharing.
I was going to say more, but this by Nicole J nailed it. I couldn’t express it better if I tried.
‘An 11 year old girl deserves better than to have the sexual imagination of a middle-aged man played out on her ‘
The problem with erotica and porn fiction is that it’s often NOT an ‘innocent alternative’ to visual porn. Fiction gives the opportunity to create scenarios that are not possible in real life, or that would be difficult to film adequately. The written word gives the author the opportunity to explore scenes in much greater detail, for a lot longer than a 2 minute clip. Encouraging kids and teens to read erotica or ‘smut’ means that we’re probably going to be exposing them to hard-core porn in written form. And the problem with THAT (well, one of them… I think there are many problems with it) is that it will desensitise them to ‘real’ porn. Many, many compulsive porn users – particularly women – start out with erotica/smut/porn fiction. Eventually this stops providing the ‘hit’ and so they move on to online porn that portrays the things they’ve been reading about. Porn fiction isn’t an ALTERNATIVE to porn; it’s a GATEWAY.
(I recently wrote about this on my blog if anyone is interested: http://oneinsix.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/stranger-than-fiction/)