I thought I was coming to Australia for a mix of work and sightseeing. Well, I was correct about the work part, but missed seeing your beautiful country since I spent much of my time holed up in the studios of ABC.
My book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, was, thanks to the efforts of Spinifex Press, selected to be part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, so I assumed I would have a work-packed four days and then some down time.
What I didn’t plan for was that the book would ignite a firestorm and I would have to battle it out with a small but very vocal pro-porn lobby that was spearheaded by academics, public intellectuals and plain old pornographers.
I have debated pro-porn advocates for many years and usually have an interesting if somewhat predictable discussion. Their agenda is to sanitize porn as a bit of harmless fun, and my job is to speak for those women and men whose life stories are disparaged as “anecdotes.” While we disagree, it rarely gets personal and nasty.
3 Responses
I am sick to death of hearing that p0rn is harmless and ‘just fun’. I was a p0rn user for four years. I think it’s safe to say I’ve seen PLENTY of it. Like most long-term p0rn users, the types of things I watched escalated over time and went from fairly ‘tame’ porn to much more hard-core and violent. However, even in the beginning when I was watching the tamer stuff I never saw anything that was sweet or funny or in any way charming or innocent. Maybe this ‘sweet’ p0rn does exist, but if it does it’s very well hidden because in four years I never saw it once. I don’t think I’m alone in that – I’ve spoken with plenty of former p0rn users and none of them has ever mentioned any kind of nice p0rn.
Leslie Cannold has suggested that claims about the global p0rn industry don’t hold water, particularly in Australia, because most people actually watch free p0rn instead of paying for ‘industry’ p0rn. Well firstly, a lot of free p0rn IS industry p0rn – all paid sites have short teaser clips that are free and designed to entice viewers so they will want to pay to see the full clip in the members-only section. But even if we’re only talking about amateur, home-made p0rn, it’s foolish to suggest that just because it’s free it’s somehow nicer. For the most part, free p0rn, from whatever source, is usually still violent and degrading to women. The majority of standard p0rn – by which I mean non-fetish, non-BDSM, adult heterosexual p0rn – involves women being insulted, demeaned, humiliated and objectified. And I mean MAJORITY. Certainly other types of p0rn exist but they’re not what pop up when you type ‘p0rn’ into a search engine. Even softer p0rn – usually a solo woman with sex toys – objectifies and demeans women (there is often a man in the scene directing her actions, either verbally or physically). And ALWAYS, women are nameless and silent.
P0rn is violent, objectifying, humiliating and degrading. I have, to my eternal regret, four years of first-hand ‘research’ to back this up. I watched p0rn because I was hurt and damaged by childhood experiences, but p0rn did its own damage. I have images of violence in my head, and I fear they’ll always be there. Every time I hear someone say p0rn is innocent or nice or empowering to women, I think about the faces of the women I saw. They didn’t look empowered, and what was done to them was not nice. And I am haunted by the thought that many of them may not even be alive now. Don’t talk to me about sweet p0rn. It’s a myth – and as long as this myth stays alive, women will continue to be harmed.
Emily Sue, thank you for sharing so frankly. This is what I believe, but as someone who has always shied away from p0rn, I don’t have the evidence, as you do.
It’s a reminder that those who benefit from an unjust system are not reliable judges of whether or not it is harmful. I’m sure there were slave owners who were lovely, well-meaning people, who genuinely believed that their slaves liked being looked after and were better off as they were. Just as there were plenty who didn’t give a toss about the slaves’ well-being, as long as they served them. And the latter were very happy to have the social credibility of the good people bolstering their cause and convincing those who hadn’t thought about it at all that the staus quo was natural and good and only a foolish sentimentalist do-gooding wowser would argue with it.
Sound familiar?
The slave owners were wrong. Most people accept that now. The fact that the p0rn industry is likewise willing to fight and has managed to convince some nice, well-meaning people that their cause is just, doesn’t make them any more right than the slave owners. The fact that they have succeeded in making the status quo look hip and bucking it wowserish (and when did that happen? When did following the money make you cool and fighting it make you a sell-out?) doesn’t make the status quo right.
It’s dark and dangerous in the fight for social justice and equal rights, just as it was for those who ran the freedom railroad and for Rosa Parks and Gandhi and everyone who has ever stood up for what is right in the face of what seemed like overwhelming opposition. But with the bravery of people like you, Emily Sue and Melinda and friends, this is a fight we can win. Which we must win. So, in the future, we can look back on it, as we look back on black slavery (slavery, especially sexual, is still with us) as something we have evolved to be too civilised for.
Viva la revolution.
The embedded misogynistic male academic view is very, very old and this misogyny is regularly issued whenever radical feminists provide research showing that porn is all about male hatred and male contempt for women.
We consistently hear men and their female allies claim ‘women’s experiences at the hands of violent men are just annecdotal or not ‘real science.’ Odd is it not that whenever men are subjected to violence at the hands of other men we do not hear claims ‘this is annecdotal or not ‘real science.’
But such claims would be correct if we believed the male-centric view that only men’s views and versions of what supposedly passes for ‘real science’ are ‘truths’ not men’s myopic views which neatly ignore women’s experiences. Because men continue not to accept women are indeed human this is why we have male academics such as Alan McKee claiming Dine’s research is ‘cherry picking.’
No human was harmed is the male pornographers mantra and the same mantra their male and female apologists continue to proclaim. Trivializing/denying male sexual violence against women is male supremacist speech and designed as always to silence/trivialise radical feminist academics and activists who shine a light on how male domination and male hatred/contempt for women operates. Pornography is one such central tool of male supremacy and that is why the male pornographers; their male and female apologists work overtime attempting to dismiss ‘real feminist scientific research’ because the white male researcher is supposedly the only one capable of defining what is and is not evidence as opposed to annecdotes.
Male supremacist systems must work 24/7 to ensure their male domination and male control over women continues unabated because men never know when women will rise up and overthrow their male masters. This is precisely the same scenario white male slave owners had to apply because they never knew when their slaves (sic) would rise up and overthrow the white male masters.
It is vital men not be held to account for their avid consumption of violent filmed acts of sadistic male sexual violence against women. Phallocentricism (worship of the penis) is central within porn but as always the focus is on the harm women are subjected to which neatly invisibilises what the men in porn are doing. It is men who are the ones forcing their penises two or more simultaneously into women’s bodies for men’s sexual entertainment. Men are the ones committing filmed acts of sadistic sexualised violence against women. Men are the ones lining up all avidly masturbating before raping a woman and calling her dehumanised names. So what does porn tell us about men? And why are men so affronted when radical feminists denounce porn as male sexual violence against women? Is it because we are challenging male domination over women?