The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (9 page)

Thus, while antiporn feminism has been extensively critiqued for its lack of theoretical rigor, shaky evidence base, and failure to distinguish its position from other highly conservative views of sexuality and gender, it has retained significant purchase in both academic and more populist spheres as a perspective that can only ever be circumnavigated. In what follows, we want to trace the ways in which contemporary anti-porn feminism is increasingly rejecting academic terrains of analysis and debate in favor of appeals to common sense and emotional intelligence, precisely because this is the ground on which their arguments find most fertile purchase.

“We are all sitting here with our common sense”: Academia and Antiporn Feminism

In her discussion of the antiporn roadshows of the 1980s and 1990s, Eithne Johnson noted the use of slide shows to create spectacles that “purport to instruct even as they promise to titillate and/or terrify their audiences.”
²⁶
The roadshows were hybrid pornographic/educational attractions, privileging a kind of knowledge that discards the scholarly apparatus of analysis—the setting out of theoretical frameworks and discussions of methodology, contextualization, consideration of diverse approaches, dissection of examples, development of conclusions based on evidence, and so on. As Johnson also notes, they depended for their impact on precisely the set of characteristics that their proponents attributed to pornography: re-presenting women’s bodies as “gory, glossy body-part imagery” in a series of “shock cuts.” Over this, the presenter constructed a narrative inviting horror and outrage as the appropriate reactions for reading the images. This presentational style has, as Lynne Segal has described, also dominated the written work of some antiporn feminists, drawing on “sadistic sexual imagery,” employing the arts of “arousal and manipulation,” mimicking the horrific, shocking qualities that they attribute to pornography, and thereby reproducing what they imagine to be a “pornographic” view of the world.
²⁷

The antiporn slide show has now been updated for the twenty-first century. In their discussion of the slide shows being produced by Stop Porn Culture in the US, Karen Boyle and others describe how these differ from academic work on pornography. Presenters “get out of the academy and into the real world where people live their lives.”
²⁸
The slide show is designed to have “impact,” especially for women who “haven’t seen much if any pornography,” and it takes its female audience “on a journey” in which they are “pretty shocked” but leave “feeling unbelievably validated.” The power of the slide show depends on its difference from academic work that, it is argued, involves “abstract intellectual arguments” and which is less concerned with activism than with “bringing out books that won’t make waves in the academy.”
²⁹

This presentational style is indicative of the scenarios constructed by conservative groups in the creation of sex panics more generally. Understanding this style is important because it demonstrates how antiporn feminism operates as a particular form of knowledge and how sex panic style is central to its appeal, and suggests why, despite having no credible intellectual position or evidence base, antiporn feminism is compelling
for some. Indeed, although some recent writings such as the collection edited by Karen Boyle are presented as though they are academic work, and although they claim to be based in theory and evidence, anti-porn feminism has generally become increasingly and more openly hostile to scholarly work than in the past. In the discussion about slide shows for example, it is claimed that “If you give examples of what women at slide shows say, or feel, or think, academics will say, ‘That can’t be true, because it hasn’t been researched’ or ‘Show me the evidence of that’ which minimizes women’s feelings and reactions.”
³⁰
Porn is described as an “intellectual game” for academics working in environments which “have been primed to almost robotically generate certain kinds of objections. . . .”
³¹

This dislike of academia is linked to a more general set of suspicions about media and commerce in antiporn writing. In the
Getting Real
collection, links between commerce, media, sex work, pornography, and academia are repeatedly drawn; the media is “a de facto pimp for the prostitution and pornography industries”
³²
and there is an “unholy alliance . . . between certain post-modern academics and the most aggressive agents of consumerism, the marketing industry (including the porn industry).”
³³
In Abigail Bray’s discussion of the defenses mounted of artist Bill Henson’s photographs—one of a number of recent media events in which art featuring naked children has been described as pornographic and pedophilic—the term “moral panic” is described as “upwardly mobile,” one that “operates politically to do the work of neoliberal tolerance by governing the public gaze and erasing feminist critiques.”
³⁴
In Bray’s discussion, the more honest reading of Henson’s photographs is one that risks “spouting the vulgar sentiments of the moralizing masses . . . even if this means going against the grain of a gentrified academic subjectivity.”
³⁵
Here the possibility of any position that does not proceed from morality and feeling is dismissed. It is merely “the governmentality of the private upper-class art gallery—the compulsory celebration of sexual transgression, the genteel inbred world of experts . . . a normative technology of the progressive middle-class self.”
³⁶
From these perspectives, academic expertise is robotic, genteel, and inauthentic, and theory and evidence are self-indulgent and untrustworthy. As one of the roundtable discussants in Boyle’s book argues, “we are all sitting here with our common sense. We can look at the material, think about the messages it’s sending, and reason our way through to at least some tentative conclusions.”
³⁷

Back into the Charmed Circle: Porn Sex v. Healthy Sex

As Gayle Rubin wrote in 1984, much discussion of sexuality is based on the idea of a “charmed circle,” characterized by sex that is heteronormative, vanilla, procreative, coupled, taking place between people of the same generation, at home, involving bodies only, and avoiding commercial sex and pornography. Beyond this lie the “outer limits” of sex: promiscuous, nonprocreative, casual, nonmarried, homosexual, cross-generational, taking place alone or in groups, in public, involving S/M, commerce, manufactured objects, and pornography. Feminist critiques of porn have often made clear the need to distinguish their objections from those based on moral or religious grounds, or on the offense to taste or decency caused by pornography. Yet recent antiporn feminist work does not focus particularly on the problematic aspects of gender in porn, neither adopting a broader critique of sexism in media, nor pursuing an analysis of how sexist materials might be contrasted with nonsexist pornography or other forms of sexually explicit media. Instead it seems more concerned with the idea of “healthy sexuality” characterized by Rubin in her description of the charmed circle of sex. One of the ways that this is articulated by Dines depends on the use of the term “porn sex,” which is used to indicate sex that is debased, dehumanized, formulaic, and generic—“industrial strength sex” compared to sex that involves “empathy, tenderness, caring, affection” . . . “love, respect, or connection to another human being.”
³⁸

This ideal of healthy sex is further circumscribed in terms of the acts that are permissible within it. For Dines, anal sex, ejaculation on a woman’s body or face, and more than one man having sex with one woman are degrading. References to “addiction,” “grooming,” “pimping,” and “hooking up” pepper the literature produced by Stop Porn Culture, drawing together a view of sex as inherently dangerous with fears about child abuse, commercial sex, and casual sex, as though these were all not only related but also uniformly problematic and all with their origins in “porn culture.”

In Stop Porn Culture’s slide show, “It’s Easy Out Here for a Pimp,” the distinction between “porn-related sex” and “healthy sex” is spelled out more explicitly using a series of oppositions taken from the book,
The Porn Trap,
by sex therapists Malz & Malz.
³⁹
Porn sex involves “using someone” and “doing to someone.” It is a “performance for others,” a “public commodity,” “separate from love,” “emotionally distant.” It “can be degrading” and “irresponsible,” “involves deception” and “impulse gratification,” “compromises values,” and “feels shameful.” In contrast,
healthy sex is about “caring for someone” and “sharing with a partner.” It is a “private experience,” “personal treasure,” “an expression of love,” and “nurturing.” It is “always respectful,” “approached responsibly,” “requires honesty,” “involves all the senses,” “enhances who you really are,” and provides “lasting satisfaction.” This view of good sex as private rather than public, and clearly linked to love rather than to gratification, is also found in Robert Jensen’s work. Jensen argues that sex should involve “a sense of connection to another person, a greater awareness of one’s own humanity and sometimes, even a profound sense of the world that can come from meaningful and deep sexual experience.”
⁴⁰

But it is hard to see why these characteristics should be especially important for sexual politics or for feminism, or why feminists should value sex in terms of its capacity to develop intimacy rather than for any other reason. In fact, they correspond much more clearly to a view of sex as sacred or “special,” and to the contemporary ideal of the pure relationship that Anthony Giddens describes, in which sex is anchored to emotional coherence and persistence.
⁴¹
Casual sex, kinky sex, rough sex, and even monogamous, straight, vanilla sex that might be the product of routine, boredom, fun, or thrill-seeking, does not meet these standards. A proper purpose for sex is assumed and there is no consideration of the variety of sexual practices that people engage in, diverse understandings of what sex is, or the multifarious reasons why people have sex. Although they vehemently reject being characterized as “antisex,” writers like Dines foreclose the possibilities of sexuality as plural and in process.

Antiporn feminism’s attempt to define what is healthy extends beyond sex to a whole series of oppositions in the Boyle roundtable discussion.
⁴²
Here, health is equated with nourishing food, experience, creativity, authenticity, being and sensing, politics and activism, the real world, common sense, and testimony. Against this is set a world of unhealthiness, characterized by a wide range of things: McDonalds hamburgers, industrial products, images, the generic and formulaic, appearing, performing, acting, being looked at, by academia, self-interest, individualism, elitism, theory, and interpretation. In this view, not only are most expressions of sexuality unhealthy, so is anything that has been mass-produced, along with some forms of self-presentation, intellectual work, and representation. Indeed, there is an enormous amount of distrust of mediation of any kind; the “healthy” world is imagined as one in which industry, commerce, and representation appear not to exist, and where even some acts of expressing the self or interpreting the world become suspect if they are somehow not direct enough. This
view is made explicit in Robert Jensen’s argument that we should try to “transcend . . . mediated culture and explore things in more direct ways.” Because “sex is a form of communication . . . with others” and “with ourselves in some sense as well,” it should involve “direct face to face human contact,” which in “this hyper-mediated culture” is becoming harder to achieve.
⁴³

Saving Men

In this regard it is interesting to look at the ways in which men have been figured in the new antiporn writings. To quote Dines,

I get a lot of men coming up to me confessing their compulsive use: that never happened before. I get a lot of hopelessness from women because they’re trying to date men and they can’t find men who haven’t used pornography. And I always say, “You’re not likely to find a man who hasn’t used pornography. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether he continues to use it once you’ve given him the analysis.
⁴⁴

Here there is a naturalizing of male interest in pornography and an implication that this may just be because of the ubiquity of pornography. Women should “give the analysis” and this should be enough to turn the porn viewer into an appropriate mate. The “analysis” is of course that pornography is wrong, but that it also “hijacks” sexuality, and that using it is a symptom of weakness, demonstrating a lack of imagination, self-knowledge, and critical judgment. Recent antiporn feminist writings have tended to distance themselves from the much criticized notion of “effects” drawn from laboratory studies to focus on a view of men as programmed by their viewing habits. In these narratives of addiction, men come to prefer “porn sex” and pressure their partners to behave like porn stars. This may have the further deleterious result of finding porn more of a turn-on than their partners, losing the ability to get or maintain an erection, or experiencing difficulty with ejaculation, thereby damaging their authentic sexuality and destroying emotional intimacy in relationships.

Men talk about their compulsive use and how difficult it is to stop. Men are telling me that all they know about sex they learned from pornography, because they started using it at such an early age—it’s almost like it’s encoded into their sexual DNA. Some want to bring porn into their intimate relationships, others need to conjure up porn images to ejaculate with partners, and still others have lost interest in sex with real women. To show just how porn destroys creativity, men have told me that once they stopped using porn they didn’t know how to masturbate.
⁴⁵