I also have to wonder about the accusation that porn makes female sexuality out to be a performance. These are performers, after all, performing sex. There’s a performance going on, but it’s one of sexual pleasure. I think a lot of the enjoyment of porn comes from empathy – it’s a very good reminder of what having sex is like, good enough to help you feel what the performers are supposedly feeling. Otherwise, I have no idea why we the money shot would be what it is.

Having sex is different than watching pornography, though, or at least it ought to be. You can ask your partner how they’re feeling or what they want. Maybe if all you know about sex you learned from pornograpy, you’ll have trouble actually pleasing or understanding the signs of pleasure from your partner. What happens on the teevee is not real life, and if people can understand that about Buffy, they can understand it about porn.

On the violence… this is a difficult area. Anti-porn activists have long constructed a strawman argument about pornography in which the actions on-screen were equated with real violence. If we’re talking S&M, I think it’s fair to say that almost all porn violence is acted and carefully controlled. But there is a significant amount of amateur and underground pornography that may well involve real rapes, beatings, and other physical and emotional abuse. This is made all the worse by the lack of recourse for women thus mistreated. I have no idea, however, how widespread actual violence is in the industry.

On performance and the gap between having sex and watching porn, agreed. I’m not sure how many people mistake the two experiences, though, and I’m not sure how many people become less sexually functional due to pornography. I’ve known quite a few women for whom the situation was just the opposite: porn allowed them to accept fantasies and desires which society at large had condemned. I’m not saying this is universal, I’m just saying that there is a range of responses to porn, some negative, sure, but also some positive.

Finally, on reminders of what sex is really like, I belive it was Andy Warhol who said all sex is merely nostalgia for past sex.

1.
It’s a widely acknowledged fact that many heterosexual wimmin having sex with “chosen” (a relative term in cultures where relationships under hetero, patriarchal, monogamous rule don’t allow full space for most wimmin to actually consensually choose relationships to men) male partners, perform erotic excitement, pleasure and release in lieu of actually exploring their own desires and needs. Does this make their experiences pornographic transactions?

2.
Dykes and wimmin who can be understood as sexually radical voluntarily consume all sorts of porn for their own personal pleasure. Yours truly has a open adoration for the very obvious, very raw power relations so prevalent in gay male porn that makes it seem “honest” by comparison to a lot of the romanticized “pretty woman” or “snow white” or “beaver cleaver’s parents” fictions that abound in the heterosexual erotic imagination and various related relationship paradigms.

3.
To reduce the discussion about porn down to “yes, it’s good” “no, it’s bad” leaves no space for complexity or layeredness. In that narrative all wimmin workers who act in porn are disempowered not by the industry but by a gaze that assumes domination as their only option. That this over simple gaze is predominantly feminist and academic does not bode well for conversations about ALL wimmin’s power and ability to define themselves and their circumstances for themselves.

A few questions:
Do wimmin who do sex work or, more specifically, porn really need to be “saved” by a dominating feminist discourse substituting itself for self-determination in the absence of the traditional white knight stereotype?

Do they really need to have the power of some academic, some christian, some middle-class wimmin all parts of a sanctimonious lily white hearted charitable moral mojority, inflicted on them as they are smacked on the wrist and told over and over again:

“We know better. We will decide for you what proper jobs and roles and lives look like. We will meddle in your affairs. Even as you say in a multitude of ways: ‘Fuck off, you don’t know what you’re talking about’, we will simply pat you on the heads and remind you that Big Sister knows best. Eventually, after we’ve worn down your resistance, we will save you whether you like it or not.”

Who is deciding whether the industry oppresses these wimmin?
Who gets to speak?
Whose voices are welcome in this discussion?
Whose opinions are absent?
What role does power play in this discussion?
Where is the venue where power among the wimmin discussing this issue can be explored?
Why are these discussions so unrealistically and unrelentingly polarized?
Who does this serve?

The problem I have with _Pornified_ and with Levy’s book (I say this not having read either, but having read a lot *about* both) is that they seem to start with the notion that sex and sexualized work need to be explored first and foremost in the moral domain — they need to be either condemned or defended. I’m not sure this is the place to start, or if it’s even an applicable dimension of this kind of work. The ramifications of that question are basically what I started this site to explore (though naturally I get distracted…). I think the old feminist standby is a good place to start thinking about this: whose voices are being heard in the discourses on sex and sexualized work? Whose voices are absent or silenced?

As for Pornified, one of the things my mom said that she liked about the book was that it wasn’t preachy. Now, she IDs as anti-porn, so maybe her mind glossed over some moral points because she agreed with them. But, like I said, I trust her judgement.

As for Levy’s book, I’ve only read the intro thus far (my friend had taken it out from the library). If she keeps up the same tone for the rest of the book, it seems like she’ll make a lot of good points and then go completely overboard. Like, she was talking about how women are pressured in our society to be sexually pleasing to men and then she held herself up as some kind of Patriarchy Monkey for wearing thongs. Well, excuse me, but it’s not the thongs that are the problem, but when women feel obligated to wear them to be “sexy”. I wear thongs because I *like* them. But I also wear boy shorts, and bikini bottoms, and granny panties. Hell, I buy lingerie to wear when I’m alone because it’s fun.

But, whether she meant it or not, Levy condemned me with her statement and made me feel like I was some sort of patriarchy-loving idiot. Fuck that. I’ve fought long and hard for my right to wear whatever the hell I want – and, yes, sometimes that is articles of clothing that are considered “sexy”. But I lived the alternative – where I was forced by an abusive boyfriend to wear oversized men’s shirts and ugly pants and I didn’t like it. It encouraged me to feel bad about myself because that’s not the way I wanted to dress. It took me *years* to get over it, and (as I’m sure you can tell from this novel of a comment) I’m still fucking sore about it. And I don’t appreciate any other person implying that I’m part of raunch culture because I don’t dress to their standards.

That said, Levy’s book is still on my list. I’ll probably get angry at it and scream at it several times, but from what I can tell – when she’s not implicitly condemning women – she has some good things to say.

Anyway there is solo porn out there, and I don’t hear anyone crying for all the young men out there who have fists rammed up their ass for a few bucks.

Are men and woman like cats and dogs are in law. That is you can be held responsible for something your dog does but cats can fend for themselves.

If I was a woman I would be seriously pissed off at being thought of as so stupid and easily manipulated, like you need constant oversight or regulatory care. Basically “a child for life”.