The Porn Wars (In One Paragraph)
There was an excellent article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian yesterday about fair trade porn. So excellent was it that, frankly, I think the editors should be ashamed of the unwarranted click-baiting question mark in their headline: Is there such a thing as ethical porn?
Zoe Williams seems to have relied heavily on detailed interviews with Pandora Blake and her merry band of collaborators at Dreams Of Spanking, which was a wise choice. And there’s much goodness to be had in the interviews and quotes with other “fair trade” pornographers, such as long-time ErosBlog favorite Madison Young. But my absolute favorite part of the article is a single lengthy paragraph in which the complete history of the feminist porn wars is recapitulated and fought in Zoe Williams’s mind at a feminist convention in 2011:
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map.
If I was the kind of guy who got text tattoos, I think “I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are” would be a fine candidate. It would do for an ErosBlog motto, too.
Moving on: Pandora Blake is quoted being smart about porn throughout the article, but my favorite quote is this one on anti-porn feminists watching the wrong porn:
Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed ‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”
Not only do I agree that the anti-porn feminists (although I cannot use that phrase without wondering how feminist it can possibly be to deny the agency of women who make porn) are looking at the worst porn, but I think the problem even goes beyond that. I think they are looking at the worst porn and then, using empathy, they are projecting their own imagined reaction were they modeling the scene onto the models, of whose motivations, professionalism, and physical skills they are utterly ignorant. I first encountered this made explicit in the notorious “threads swimming in blood in your throat” passage by Andrea Dworkin, who, upon seeing the movie Deep Throat, seems to have re-imagined it as a horror movie based on her own gruesome fantasies of what giving a blowjob must be like. The rest of us saw rather a different movie.
Similar Sex Blogging:
- Raking In The Anti-Porn Dough
- Pandora Blake: Not Being Exploited
- "I'm Black And Blue... And I Love It!"
- Extreme Throat-Fucking
- Shooting With Max Hardcore
- Head-In-The-Toilet Sex
- Feminist Porn Wars
- Adele Haze Caned By Werewolves
- What It Feels Like To Deep Throat
- Putting Catherine McKinnon In Her Place
- Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=12715
Yeah, there is a similar view of porn in one of those Ted talks “Why I stopped watching porn.” And the porn he was watching was super hardcore rape/gonzo stuff. I thought, “well, gee, just stop watching the wrong kind of porn and find the stuff that makes you happy.”
Back when I was studying, we watched a video on the porn industry which featured the fact that many of the actresses had their own production companies. I used that fact to argue that porn was therefore empowering to the actresses. The lecturer didn’t quite see it that way.
Brad, Pandora Blake certainly finds it empowering. One of the biggest problem anti-porn activists are having these days with their “all porn is exploitative” rhetoric is the inconvenient voices of female porn models and producers who dare to stand up on their hind legs like real people and vocally dispute the rhetoric of exploitation. The activists simply don’t know how to deal with the constant chorus of “I am empowered, not exploited” counter-narratives.
I read it and enjoyed it, and wondered if you would mention it :)
I know women who work in the sex industry and never have I heard one say that they were exploited – if anything, they are rubbing their hands in glee at the men they were about to exploit.
My only disappointment with said article was the over-reliance on the DofS team; they aren’t the only ones out there.
Thorn, I expect that was because they are local to the reporter, who was able to meet them at a pub and spend a lot of time with them. Most of the other fair trade pornographers quoted are in the US or even Australia. Not an insurmountable barrier in the modern world, but it does make things slower/harder.