Discuss.

Money quote: “Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood. It embraced home video in the late 1970s, allowing people to bypass seedy theaters and watch the movies in their living rooms. Mainstream studios, by contrast, fought home video all the way to the Supreme Court before making it one of the most profitable pieces of their business.”

eponymous wrote:”I will agree with you that violent porn, underage porn, exploitative porn, or certain fetish porn are certainly damaging to the women involved in them.”

How do we know that? The women involved in porn are actors performing under pretty highly controlled situations. I’m sure abuses happen in the porn industry — abuses happen at Wal-Mart, which is far more in the public eye, so they’re bound to happen in the porn industry, which almost unexplainably isn’t in the public eye — but the possibility of abuse doesn’t mean we can simply assume abuse across the board.

Lorenzo is right to situate his (?) critique in the consumption of porn imagery, although I have reservations about a critique, even a “structural critique”, that writes the actors and agents involved out of the picture. “The problem with the sex-work industries, from a broader perspective, is that they are premissed on the social construction of women’s sexuality as consisting primarily or solely of performance to satisfy male sexuality.” Again, though, how do we know that? How far can an analysis of the imagery take us? How much is Lorenzo assuming about the women and men involved in making and consuming porn? And how much of that assumption is based on his own consumption of pornographic images, rather than on personal interaction with the people involved? (I don’t mean to single Lorenzo out here; the argument is an ubiquitous one, he just happens to be representing it in this forum.)

What concerns me is that, if porn is supposed to be so empowering to men and so disempowering to women, if porn is supposed to be so reflective of the male gaze and of male power-fantasies, why are men so intimidated, so uncomfortable about porn? In the (very) few accounts I’ve read based on actual interaction with viewers of porn, one of the recurring theme has been the shame and discomfort porn engenders. Buying porn is, in most cases, done secretly or anonymously. Viewing porn alone, the same. Male homosocial bonding experiences like stag parties and the like in wihch porn is viewed collectively are rife with embarassment and homophobic panic. As I mentioned above, the production and distribution of porn is veiled in secrecy (hence the greater potnetial for abuse), despite the fact that the biggest players in the industry are megacorporations like Marriott and News Corp. For something that’s supposedly so imbrecated with male power, male power sure seems to go to great lengths to dissociate itself from porn!

The question that rarely gets raised is “why do some people consume porn?” One of the reasons it’s so rarely raised is because it’s so hard to do the empirical research that would be needed to answer it, precisely for the reasons I just described. It’s hard to get people to sit still for an interview on their porn viewing habits, and harder still to locate all the people who consume it anonymously via the Internet. So we’re left to fall back on assumptions, whch reflect our own personalities and positions far more than they do those of people who watch porn. And while that may be satisfying, somehow, cutting out the actual subjectivities of the people we’re discussing is a far cry from feminist analysis.

The connection between eating and having sex is a fairly obvious one. Many of the words we use to describe sexual desire (hunger, voracious appetite) and sex acts themselves (eating out, munching), and even various body parts (my favorite: “the split knish”) refer to food — an obvious parallel given the importance of the mouth to both eating and sex. The connection is deeper than just slang, though — Edmund Leach noted in 1964 that the way we categorize the animals we eat and the way we categorize potential sex partners are parallel as well (at least in mid-century Britain): women and animals that live in the home (sisters, dogs) are off-limits for eating and/or sex; animals and women that live outside the domestic sphere (cattle and other animals that roam more or less freely, neighbors) are potential sex and marriage partners; and the truly exotic, those living entirely outside of the familiar world altogether (emu, Africans — from a British perspective) are neither food nor sex partners. Among the Arapesh and Adelam peoples studied by Margaret Mead (1935), a man could eat neither one’s own yams and pigs nor one’s own mother and sister, while:

Other people’s mothers
Other people’s sisters
Other people’s pigs
Other people’s yams which they have piled up
You may eat (Mead: 78).

With such a thin line between eating and “eating”, it seems unsurprising that some people would seek to combine the two more explicitly. Enter the cann-fetish (some explicit langauge, probably not worksafe) — cannibal fetishism (or cannibalism fetish). While many of us are familiar with the case of Armin Meiwes, the German man convicted recently of killing and eating a partner he met and coordinated the killing with over the Internet, Meiwes represents an extreme distortion of what is becoming a significant, if small, fetish community. For the most part, cann-fetishists stop short of actually eating or hurting anyone, rather endulging in a rather elaborate pretend-feast involving trussing the “meal” (generally a willing female, who is bound and whose various orifices will be poked, prodded, and filled with various trimmings and cooking implements), coating her (or, apparently far more rarely, him) with oil, butter, honey, and other basting substances, and “cooking” her in a make-believe oven.

Given the elaborate bindings and the rich fantasy elements, it would not be too far off the mark to describe cann-fetishism as a sub-genre of BDSM (bondage/domination/sado-masochism), replacing the leather-and-chains aesthetic with a playful June Cleaver look. Central to both “mainstream” BDSM and cann-fetishism is the (voluntary) passivity and objectivization of the subject — as one enthusiast puts it, “I like to think I’m inanimate, without a conscience. There’s a feeling of transcendence when I’m being transformed.” For the subject, there’s also an element of exhibitionism, of being the center of attention. The same woman says, “It’s the same attention you give the turkey on Thanksgiving. Everybody is just obsessed with that turkey. Ooooooh, the turkey the turkey the turkey. When is the turkey going to be done? It’s so exciting!”

While to outsiders (like myself, I must admit), BDSM, including cann-fetishism, seems centered around degradation and humiliation, for its practitioners there’s something rather more complex at work. BDSM participants, both “tops” (dominant partners, “doms”) and “bottoms” (submissive partners, “subs”), get off on playing with power roles, in a way that is often strikingly subversive. The power that a “dom” enjoys over their “sub” comes with great responsibility for the emotional and erotic satisfaction of the “sub”, as well as for their physical and psychological health. Consider this piece of advice from The Beginners Guide to Dominance and Submission (the first website I cam across googling domination+submission+rules):

The Dom should not arbitrarily punish the sub on a whim. There must be a reason. To do otherwise will break down the trust and security of the sub. The Dom has to be respected by the sub. Respect is a quality that is earned by the Dom being right, and issuing swift, correct justice and reward to the sub. The Dom is not there to inflict pain and degradation on the sub, but to give the sub a goal and a direction on how to love and please him.

Participants in this kind of play are binding themselves to their partner with promises and gifts of trust, making very explicit the “rights and obligations” that anthropologists see at the root of all social relationships. The question of “who is in control” can become muddied rather quickly.

What sets cann-fetishists apart in this regard is not so much the ritual consumption of the “sub” as the rich semiotic and aesthetic stew in which their particlar brand of BDSM is marinated. Unlike the pseudo-fascistic trappings of “mainstream” BDSM, cann-fetishism (or at least the kind described in the article) draws on — and, I believe, subverts — images of domestic bliss straight out of “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show”, images laden with power relations between dominant husbands and submissive wives only a short step away from climbing onto the table and offering their own bodies up for the sustenence of their families. Which is to say, only a short step away from devolving from the height of “civilized” living to the worst stereotypes of “primitive” cannibalism. One of the cann-fetishists in the article even collects old-fashioned gag images of cannibals boiling their victim in giant stew-pots, à la this image. Although tinged with a kind of nostalgia, the parodic “Ozzie and Harriet” aesthetic represents a conscious break with and rejection of these roles, reserving them for “playtime” and transforming them into scenes of orgiastic perversion. I doubt very much June Cleaver ever used the word “assplay”.

[Thanks to Jill at Feministe for the link.]

Work Cited

Leach, Edmund. 1964. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” In New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric Lenneberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 23 – 64.

Mead, Margaret. 1935 [2001]. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Harper Perennial.

blac(k)ademic’s post is inspired by the high number of websurfers that find her site via searches for racial/racist porn. The meat of blac(k)ademic’s argument is that:

pornography hurts women of color, because it reproduces the racist imagery assigned to brown bodies. when people type in “black lesbian bitches,” or “lesbian niggers” [on search engines] they are perpetuating the dehumanizing stigma attached to all women of color. the only thing that is different, is that pornography suppossedly makes these racist ideals sexy or desireable. it absolves racism as it is turned into a seemingly harmless sexual gratification.

I’m not entirely convinced that this is an argument against pornography so much as it an argument against the type of people or the type of desires serviced by pornography. The strength (or weakness) of the argument relies on how much of a role you believe pornography plays in shaping those desires; I tend to think “not very much”, noting for example that dehumanizing sexual relationships between white men and women of color predate the modern pornography industry by several hundred years. Neither do I think racism is “absolved” by the gloss of desire — the rationale here being, I think, that “if I were racist, I wouldn’t wanna fuck black chicks, now would I?” The reality is aptly described by blac(k)ademic a few paragraphs later: “the sickening part of it is, is that, when people…i assume men, young men or boys, look for “lesbian niggers,” they are relating their sexual arousal with racial hate.” Racism is not glossed over by racial porn, it is the object of it.

But raising the issue of racism in porn begs the question of whether blac(k)ademic would not be against porn if there were no racial porn. Is it just a particular type of porn that’s “bad”, or is it the nature of pornography itself? This question haunts Dines and Jensen’s piece, which advocates a strong anti-pornography stand as part of the mainstream liberal position.

As leftists, we reject the sexism and racism that saturates contemporary mass-marketed pornography. As leftists, we reject the capitalist commodification of one of the most basic aspects of our humanity. As leftists, we reject corporate domination of media and culture. Anti-pornography feminists are not asking the left to accept a new way of looking at the world but instead are arguing for consistency in analysis and application of principles.

Leftists regularly challenge representations of women, homosexuals, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, Arabs, workers, and so on in the mainstream press, while “giving a pass” to troubling representations in pornography. This is troubling not only because the nature of pornographic representation is so often racist and misogynist, but becuase for all intents and purposes, pornography is mainstream media. Pornography is no longer an underground, even criminal, business but is produced and distributed by some of the world’s largest corporations — and produces revenues outweighing the entirety of American professional sports.

The strength of this approach, however, is also its weakness. The corporate media produces sexist, racist, and classist representations, it’s true — and pornography is no exception:

Despite naïve (or disingenuous) claims about pornography as a vehicle for women’s sexual liberation, the bulk of mass-marketed pornography is incredibly sexist. From the ugly language used to describe women, to the positions of subordination, to the actual sexual practices themselves — pornography is relentlessly misogynistic. As the industry “matures” the most popular genre of films, called “gonzo,” continues to push the limits of degradation of, and cruelty toward, women.

No argument there — but then we’re objecting to a specific kind of imagery, not to pornography in general. When leftists critique the news, or movies, or sitcoms, they’re arguing for better news coverage, better representations of women and minorities in movies and TV programming; somehow, though, I do not get the impression that this is what Dines and Jensen are asking of pornographers. Rather, they are not “pro-better pornopgraphy” but explicitly “anti-pornography”, ostensibly supporting some kind of anti-porn legislation like the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinances. But if we are to legislate against certain kinds of representations — of women, of minorities, of whomever — and if pornography is just another form of mainstream media, then the focus on pornography seems a little misplaced. After all, however popular, porn is consumed by only a small fraction of the number of people who regularly consume similarly degrading, sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive representations that make up prime-time television, or women’s magazines, or Hollywood blockbusters.

Now, we can and should be critical of degrading representations wherever they occur, and maybe we should even outlaw all forms of such imagery (bye bye Man Show) — but this doesn’t explain or justify the persistent singling out of pornography, nor is it likely to affect corporate control of the media, which will simply shift its focus to different ways of commodifying and alienating our bodies. What I’m wondering is if there’s anything particular about pornography, anything essential to the medium/genre itself that merits drawing a sharp distinction between it and other forms of corporate media? Sharp enough, anyway, that the idea of an “anti-pornography” stance seems rational, while an “anti-media” stance… not so much. Is it possible to portray sexual relations in a way that is not degrading to women or minorities?

A tentative answer might explore some of those representations that are de facto not degrading to women or minorities — those in which either women and minorities do not appear, or those in which women or minorities are represented in empowered ways. The first would include, of course, gay male porn (I’m sure there’s racial gay porn — but as with all racial porn, I think we have to ask whether the portrayal of racialized subjects is different, either quantitatively or qualitatively, from representations of non-racialized subjects — and how it differs). Feminist anti-porn writings rarely consider gay porn, which is a shame because most of the tropes that feminists discuss (the woman held up to the male gaze, the violent or pseudo-violent rape or gang-rape of a woman, the ominpresent female sexual receptivity, etc.) are necessarily absent from gay porn. The second kind of porn might be harder to find and identify — I would guess that the “new wave” of female-produced “woman friendly” porn might qualify, or lesbian-produced porn. Another possibility might be, ironically enough, S&M-related porn, in which the same qualities that anti-porn critics find offensive in depictions of women bound, gagged, tortured, and otherwise dominated are very often present in depictions of men, often stereotypically represented as strong and powerful, likewise bound, humilaiated, and dominated. Does the semiology (maybe I mean semiography) of the image change when the subject is a man instead of a woman? How, and why?

I cannot answer these questions, but I think they are crucial to our understanding not only of misogyny, racism, male/white privilege, and so on, but of the commodification and alientation that have become central characteristics our our societies and of our selves in our societies. The reason many leftists are hesitant to challenge pornographic representations, why many lionize pornographers like Larry Flynt (but, interestingly, not Hugh Hefner), is that while many are uncomfortable with the imagery of pornography, they are also uncomfortable with the explicit anti-sex message that pornography’s other critics, conservatives an religious fundamentalists, have embedded in their characterization of pornography. Depictions of sexual activity challenge the kinds of bodily control that is the goal of those who are not only anti-porn, but anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-sex education, anti-gay marriage, and so on — and often provide rallying points in the opposition of sex-unfriendly forces in our society.

And yet, many anti-anti-porn leftists are not actually regular consumers of porn (including myself), for exactly the reasons Dines, Jensen, and blac(k)ademic describe. My own feeling is that a) pornography has a function (or functions) in our society that has nothing to do with the objectification of women, and b) that it is possible to depict and even celebrate sex, even “weird” sex, in ways that are not demeaning to the represented participants (as distinct, I must note, from the actual participants, the models and actors involved, which is a different subject and deserves more consideration later — but, quickly, who tend to have a range of responses to their work ranging from disgust to feelings of empowerment). Thus, while not embracing the strong anti-pornography stand of Dines and Jensen, and in fact opposing it, I feel that their critiques, and those of blac(k)ademic and of so many others, are necessary for creating a better understanding of both how power works in our society and how those whom power works against might become better empowered.