“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.” –Tom Lehrer
When I first became politically aware, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, AIDS was making lunch meat out of every gay boy and leatherman within reach, and the term “feminist pornography” was an oxymoron to all but a very, very few people. What has come to be called the “feminist sex wars” was going at full bloody force back then.
Things have changed a lot since then, but not as much as I allow myself to think. Yes, Reagan has been put into his grave, but his legacy remains in the body politic like a festering tumor. Yes, gay men no longer have to bury their friends and lovers 25, 50, 75 times a year, nor are HIV-positive people classed as “innocent” or “guilty” and fed poisons disguised as medications. And yes, you can now declare yourself pro-feminist and pro-pornography without your fellow progressives staring at you like you’d just admitted that you moonlight as a contract killer.
In those days, Andrea Dworkin and her ideological shadow, Catharine MacKinnon, were not only taken seriously as feminist thinkers, but revered. Their ideas of porn as a system of warfare by men against women were the default within the feminist establishment.
The last fifteen to twenty years have been truly revolutionary in terms of how we talk and think about sexuality and gender. And sometimes, cruising through the reams of women and men who now blog about their desires in frank and shameless language, I think that the old ways of thinking about porn and eroticism have been buried like the bodies of Reagan and Dworkin, at least among those who term themselves progressives. I don’t expect conservatives to ever let go of that particular obsession; authoritarianism relies on the sexual closet as a method of control.
And so, whenever I think that that particular virus has been expunged, or at least safely contained, in progressive thought, something comes along to remind me that it just ain’t so. Recently, my wake-up call came via Alternet‘s publication of Robert Jensen‘s column, “A Call for an Open Discussion of Mass-Marketed Pornography“.
Ideologically, Jensen’s article is pretty much boilerplate anti-porn stuff. He speaks of porn very broadly, as a single indistinguishable mass of racist, misogynistic propaganda. He provides no argument nor examples, but just presents it as a given. The article describes some of his experiences at the National Conference on Media Reform as he passed out flyers promoting an upcoming anti-porn conference, and his dismay at repeatedly being greeted with two questions: “Is your conference an anti-sex project?” and “Do you support censorship?” Jensen, of course, considers both of these questions to be based on distortions. The censorship question, he claims, is a distortion on its face, because “the original feminist anti-pornography movement in the 1980s rejected state censorship that works through existing obscenity law and proposed a civil-rights approach that would give people hurt by pornography a chance in court to prove the harm.”
But the reason that the question comes up in the first place is a very good one: the goal of the legislation that MacKinnon and Dworkin proposed in the 80’s was censorship, through whatever mechanism they could get it. To claim otherwise is to create a distinction without a difference. The ideological linchpin of the legislation they proposed was that the very creation and distribution of pornography was an act of sexual discrimination against women, and that they should be able to seek redress for its very existence.
The first question is even more contentious. No one, even the most misogynist fundamentalist homophobe wants to be thought of as against sex. It’s like saying you’re against puppies. As an overt position, it’s indefensible. To many people, it’s like the Godwin’s Law of gender politics. But just as there are some people who should be called fascists because they are fascists, there are some people who oppose porn because of they fear their own genitals.
There are some certain basic points in Jensen’s essay that are very valid. Yes, mainstream porn is drenched in sexism and racism. Yes, a lot of it is more laughable than sexy. The body standards are ridiculous, and some of the cheapass tit jobs make the women look like they were created by a Cubist on a bender. We’re clearly in need of exactly what Jensen is asking for; an open discussion of porn.
But there are very basic ways of looking at those issues that separate someone who’s motivated by fear of eroticism and someone who’s approaching them from a genuinely pro-sex perspective. Nowhere in Jensen’s article is he asking “What do we do to get better porn?” Although he doesn’t say it in so many words, the implication is strong in Jensen’s article that we would be a whole better off if there were no pornography at all. We would be a more just society, a more equitable one. Men and women would like each other better. This is in no way a liberal viewpoint, no matter who espouses it. At its most basic level, it lacks integrity, as do pro-life arguments that also oppose birth control and sex education. You can argue one with moral validity, but not both. Similarly, if we’re going to be able to comb past all the sickness about sex and gender in our society, we need pornography. More specifically, we need good pornography, and we need lots of it.
I’ve already given Jensen a lot more ink than his article deserves. It’s appallingly generic; there’s nothing there that hasn’t been said millions of times before, completely lacking even in specific examples of the supposed evils of porn. Its main value for me is as a reminder of how, although the feminist sex wars died down sometime in the 90’s, they never ended. It’s a lesson that I should have down by now, but need to keep being reminded of.
If Jensen were actually interested in an “open discussion” of porn, and not a unified chorus condemning all of it equally, from Vargas paintings to Lizzie Borden, he would notice something surprising: that very discussion has been going on for a good fifteen to twenty years. The answers may not be to his liking, but there has been a vital cultural conversation about the proper place of porn in our society. It started during the sex wars, and got turbocharged with the rise of the Internet. The Internet has been a revolutionary thing in sexuality, and I think that it’s fair to say that if it weren’t for the fact that we’re a bunch of crazy monkeys who like fiddling with our naughty bits, it would still be running off steam-powered abacuses and transistorized slide rules tucked away in darkened corners of miltary bases and college campuses.
The Internet, and especially the newly-expanding blogosphere, has been fertile ground for people to both explore porn and to voice their criticisms of it. The dynamic explosion of the blogosphere in the past few years has been driven largely by sex blogs, and particularly by blogs by women and queers who write shamlessly about their sex lives. In the eighties, Gloria Steinem wrote a famous essay delineating the differences between “erotica” and “porn,” but if that dichotomy hadn’t already been shown up as the canard it so clearly is, bloggers like Chelsea Girl, Selina Fire, and Urban Gypsy would have finally driven the stake through its heart. They’ve written frankly and unapologetically about their libidos, with all the filthiness and passion of true smut without the teased hair and tit jobs regularly foisted upon us by the San Fernando Valley porn crowd.
One voice that Jensen should be aware of is that of Audacia Ray. I have the honor of knowing and having worked for Audacia, and she is a truly remarkable woman. Between her forthcoming book, Naked on the Internet and her recent debut as a porno film director, The Bi Apple, she’s soon going to be someone that even Jensen can’t ignore. Right now, though, Audacia is best known as the editor of $pread, the only magazine by and for sex workers of all sexualities and genders. Within those pages is exactly the kind of discussion that Jensen claims to want; $pread’s articles are openly critical of the sex industries, but neither do they take the stance that the only recourse for sex workers is to quit and get 9 to 5 jobs. Audacia and Jensen would probably agree on a surprising number of criticisms about porn and the sex industries. The difference is that Audacia lacks the whole “sex is icky” vibe, and she has a positive agenda, rather than a negative one. I’ve looked over several of Jensen’s other articles, and while I have a pretty clear idea of what he doesn’t like, I have no clear idea of what he would like to do with his naughty bits. I have no idea even how to talk about what makes me hard and tingly in the context of his writings, never mind how to imagine what Jensen’s own sense of eroticism is. He is perfectly willing, over and over again, to go into explicit — even “pornographic” — detail about sex acts that disgust and horrify him. He is far more discreet about thoughts and images that give him pleasure. There you have our society’s pathologizing of sexuality in a nutshell: the pain and trauma of sex is legitimate; the pleasure, not so much.
Another voice I would recommend to Robert Jensen: Lux Nightmare. Lux was one of the first alt-porn stars to hit the Internet. She was alt-porn when it was still alt, before the term was hijacked and corporatized by the likes of Suicide Girls. In 2002, she started her own well-regarded site, That Strange Girl, and ran it herself until 2005. She continues to write about sexuality as Sexerati with Melissa Gira, and has a now-inert blog at the old That Strange Girl site. Although the blog hasn’t been updated for a long time, it would be instructive for those whose only visions of sex workers’ lives are the luridly-described nightmares manufactured by moralists on the left and the right. Lux’s writings about the good and the bad parts of making porn are poignant and bluntly honest in a way that exposes more far than simply flashing your privates in front of a camera.
And there are so many more I could recommend. Most obvious is Susie Bright who helped kick off the feminist porn movement as one of the founders of On Our Backs. Or Carol Leigh, a long-time unrepentant whore and advocate for whores’ rights. Or Ignacio Rivera, a transsexual performance artist and sex worker here in New York. Or Margo St. James, founder of the St. James Infirmary, a free clinic in San Francisco run by and for sex workers.
One of the standard criticisms of smut by anti-porn feminists has always been that it “objectifies” women. I’ve always had a problem with the term “sexual objectification” because whatever validity it had originally, its usefulness is long gone, thanks to being battered and stretched out of shape thanks to decades of definitional drift, so that it now functions as an all-purpose term for lust. But alongside that is the issue that anti-porn activists have just as much a history of placing sex workers in the role of passive objects, if not more so, as the customers who keep the industries alive. In the late 70’s, for example, the feminist organization Women Against Pornography famously gave regular tours of peep shows and porn stores in Times Square. For a suggested contribution of five dollars, middle-class women were able to marvel at the degradation of the sex workers there, not unlike the audiences who paid to see the Hottentot Venus when she was exhibited in London and Paris zoos. The people I list above have broken out of the zoo and spoken for themselves about their own lives. The most shameful thing about Jensen’s writing is that he presents porn as an undifferentiated mass, and to do that, he has to completely disregard years — decades — of writing by women and men who have been there and back.
The one thing that Robert Jensen and I could probably agree on is that there is a lot of crappy pornography out there. A whole fucking lot. He and I could probably sit together for days and catalog all the different things that is wrong with the modern mainstream porn industry. The difference is that he’s one of the reasons that it stays that way. Porn will be crap as long as it’s considered shameful to look at it, act in it, or produce it. The world is, I think, a better place with good porn, and so I think it’s a better place because of people like Audacia Ray and Lux Nightmare and anyone else who’s made an effort to make smut that’s smart and humane and hot. It’s a better place because of Carol Leigh and everyone else who has tried to make whores and strippers safer without shaming them.
Looking at this, I can’t help thinking that this is a whole hell of a lot of words to be using on an essay that says so very little new or unique. But the fact that it is so old-fashioned is really what struck me about it. Like I said, I keep thinking that we’re past this shit. I’m dismayed that even in 2007, a progressive outlet like Alternet would validate such simple-minded, puritanical thinking about pornography. The open discussion has been going on for a long time, and moved on without Jensen and his ilk. I would feel more secure about the future if Alternet recognized him as the dinosaur he is and let him languish in obscurity.
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