Men! Gail Dines Wants to Save You!

Still working my way (slowly) through The Feminist Porn Book, and still really enjoying it.  I used to be an academic, but no longer consider myself one, so I appreciate how the different writers selected for this book approach the subject from different angles; some of those angles are more traditionally academic than others, as is the case with "Emotional Truths and Thrilling Slide Shows: The Resurgence of Antiporn Feminism", by Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith.  Attwood and Smith are researchers who wrote this article in part to point out that antiporn feminist analysis has moved away from academic analysis (with, y'know, facts and stuff) and now relies more on the kinds of shock and awe tactics that the religious right has been known for using. 

I appreciate their take on things, in part because they zero in on something that has been bothering me for a while about antiporn analysis, but something I was unable to pinpoint myself:  Antiporn feminist analysis has as an underlying feature the idea that there is good, normal sex that good, normal people have, and there is bad, abnormal sex as is portrayed in porn.  This isn't anitporn feminists' explicit argument, of course, but as Attwood and Smith point out, it's implicit in their change of methods from more academic/scientific methods to methods which are used to get an emotional rise out of folks.  They point out that antiporn folks most often now do a comparative sketch of sexual development, comparing 'normal' sexual development which may or may not have included seeing your older brother's Playboy magazines, as up against current sexual development, which now includes easy access to modern-day porn.  In their analysis of Decca Aitkenhead's ideas, they note:

"In her address to a presumed audience of coupled, heterosexual women, male sexuality is naturalized as inquisitive, but in danger of taking a wrong turn if subjected to the wrong kinds of images at too early an age. Aitkenhead calls upon her readers to reflect on their own experiences of life with men who were schooled in the quaint transgressions of the Kays catalogue, and to envisage the tortured imaginings and sexual mores of future generations of men who, as children, have seen the excesses of bukkake. It is this mangling of what had seemed genuinely yet innocently transgressive in the halcyon days of the 1970s that renders contemporary pornography so potentially threatening, made all the worse by being too easily obtained...This complex narrative of nostalgia and futurology is a central theme of these accounts where pornography is acknowledged as an already existing feature of the landscape, but one that has developed outside the knowledge of “ordinary” adults and needs urgent redress."

Of particular interest to readers of Feminist Allies, however, may be Attwood and Smith's analysis of how antiporn feminists like Gail Dines see themselves as out not only to help women, but to "save men":

The “domino theory” of the passions is invoked here along with a search for increasing levels of stimulation that leads inevitably toward more misogynous and damaging material. Pornography programs men’s sexual instincts and can have only one possible trajectory—to ever more encounters with sexually explicit imagery and toward more and more “extreme” material. Men’s sexuality is figured as totally plastic, intrinsically so—a barely constrained appetite that has to be civilized and ought to be kept away from the inflammatory influence of sexual media for its own good...

...[t]he view that underpins this approach can be usefully compared to the “crystal clear set of guidelines” about sex, set out in evangelical Christian and other conservative antiporn campaigns: “sexual pleasure is for men and women to enjoy inside marriage,” but those who fall from grace and are willing to repent can be forgiven. Under the guise of a politics based on gender equality, antiporn feminist writings are increasingly modeled on this religious approach to porn, though using a medical model of “healthy sex” and discourses that encourage men to see themselves as addicts, or the victims of “grooming” by pornographers or popular culture, as “abused,” “consumed,” and desensitized.

I dig this analysis in part because it shows that many antiporn feminists are using one of the most egregious of patriarchy's fables about men:  That men are animals who can't control themselves sexually in the face of some skin being revealed (or, in the case of modern porn, in the face of seeing people enjoying anal sex, for instance).

They manage to fold in a brief criticism of Robert Jensen's work, which is always a bonus for me--Jensen is a darn good writer, and it's clear to me that his heart is mostly in the right place, which makes the stuff he says all the more frustrating.  Smith and Attwood point out that much of Jensen's analysis of porn is rooted in the idea that there is 'good, normal sex' and 'not-so-good, abnormal sex'.  Good sex is never public, but is always a deep, private experience:

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."

Of course, some sex can include all of that, if we want it to. And some folks will really want to!  But some folks won't want to, or won't want to all of the time!  We are human beings--we create our culture, consciously and unconsciously; we create our sexual culture as well, and as such, there just isn't a normal/abnormal dichotomy that somehow exists apart from what we create. Sure, we can't make up any sexual ethics we want out of whole cloth--we have to consider our interdependence with other human beings and all of the ethical stuff that implies--but we can't look up 'healthy sex' in the dictionary and just do that; no such definition exists, and one definition certainly won't apply to all people.

And I want to thank Attwood and Smith for nicely pointing out that one thing that underlays much of antiporn analysis is the idea that there is some sort of writ-in-stone sexual morality that we need to 'get back to'.  There are good criticisms of some sorts of porn, but in general, folks like Dines and Jensen aren't doing it, and they are implicitly depending on conservative, normative tropes that are not based in the reality of beings that create what is normal.

Porn Conversations

I've wanted to write about Robert Jensen's book, Getting Off: The End of Masculinity, ever since it came out, way back in 2007. The book is an anti-porn manifesto, but it also attempts to be a critique of traditional masculinity as well, advocating, as it says in its title, an end to masculinity. For such a slim tome, this is quite a goal, and it falls short.

One of the reasons I've been hesitant to take on Jensen's book in any substantial way has to do with the difficult, vitriolic "discussion" of pornography and sex work both within feminist communities and in the world at large. These are emotional issues (as they should be), and there is an understandable tendency toward oversimplification and over-generalization on all sides of the issue. As with many other issues, especially when they're discussed on the internet, the idea of giving a charitable reading to something sort of goes out the window--and I totally get that, since aspects of Jensen's book make me want to claw my eyes out in frustration, rather than "read charitably".

Which is why I have actually enjoyed the recent discussions between Meghan Murphy and Hugo Schwyzer, which were an attempt to have a conversation about "pornstitution" that would help everybody better understand at least some of the disagreements between (some) sex positive feminists and (some) anti-sex-work feminists (it is difficult to use neutral terms here). Just the attempt to have the discussion was refreshing, and I commend both Megan and Hugo for making the attempt; that said, most of what was clarified for me was the problems with the arguments (and attitudes) of the anti-sex-work folks. Which has led me back to re-reading the Jensen book, and working on some posts about the book, and about the anti-sex-work positions in general.

Before I begin with the book though, a preview of some of the ideas I want to examine, starting with just a little piece of the conversation that Meghan and Hugo had, because I think it highlights a particular theme that the anti-sex-work folks just get wrong.

Can People Choose Sex Work?
Meghan is frustrated with actual sex workers who put themselves forward as examples of people who have chosen to do that kind of work, and who don't consider themselves particularly oppressed. She says:

“Re: the teeny minority of self defined “sex workers” who enjoy it. Since when is enjoyment or pleasure or *feelings* of empowerment–*feelings* in and of themselves- the same as truth or reality? What sort of argument is being made here? Feelings are also socially constructed in a capitalist/patriarchal society: think of mania for commodities; see the mobs going crazy after sports events (like in Vancouver now?). Lots of feeling there: does it mean consumerism and mob-violence is ok? Men feel empowered by raping: so, do we validate rape? Abolitionists of slavery didn’t care what made a few slaves content–slavery is wrong. Selling people is wrong, no matter how content someone is to sell themselves. These ideas about individual empowerment and pleasure are all part of the way we are bamboozled in neoliberalism. Since when has being content with one’s lot stood as an argument that one’s lot is therefore just and right? We don’t have to tell an individual woman “porn star” about what her “experience” is in order to critique the prostitution of women as a societal institution–to critique the demand by men that women’s bodies are for sale.”

But of course people who want their voices heard aren't speaking up because they think their choice means that everybody has the same choice that they do. Instead, some folks who do/did this kind of work offer themselves up as counterexamples to the claims that some radical feminists make that sex-work can't even exist as work, because one can never, ever choose it without being in some sense coerced. Murphy chooses to place the term sex work in scare quotes when talking with Hugo, which follows suit with the idea that there just is no such thing as sex work, because all sex work is coercive. A sex worker who wants Meghan to listen and acknowledge that some porn work is chosen freely isn't asking Meghan to then never critique porn as a larger industry; she (or he, or zie) is asking Meghan to ditch the claim that doing porn can never be a choice.

And clearly there are lots of folks who don't have a free choice--sex trafficking, for instance, is a clear case of coercion (and, because it's obvious coercion, we shouldn't call it sex work. And clearly there are huge problems with the production of pornography--but that still doesn't mean it is the case that folks can never choose to do sex work. Some anti-porn folks acknowledge this, but when they continue to use scare quotes around the phrase sex work, I'm not sure why they don't understand that folks who do sex work feel silenced by that.