Some thoughts on porn
The argument against pornography, and about how it actively contributes to male violence against women, is scarcely brought down to the individual level enough . It is often discussed in the abstract as though pornography is a harmful machine that exists outside of our interpersonal relationships, or our choices, or without the complicity of ordinary men.
It definitely is a kind of machine; a capitalist monetising of our most intimate relationships that reflects back to us a culture that conceives human sexuality only from a specific male perspective. It displays sex as something to be done to women (instead of with us), as well as as something all women secretly want with whatever man asks them even when they say they don’t or even when the sex is violent, degrading and cruel. Even when they cry and beg him not to. Even when the man is many men, and they are none of them tender, or decent, towards her.
The snuff film, in a sense, is the terrible but ultimate distillation of pornography because it takes it only to its logical conclusion. The woman who is reduced merely to a sexual object to be used and dispensed with afterwards is completely destroyed, instead of metaphorically destroyed, by an extension of the same violence and degradation that is found in the more mainstream material over and over again.
A repeating conceit of pornography is that the woman must suffer and where possible act as though she enjoys that suffering. The alternative, sometimes, is that she must suffer and he must enjoy that she is suffering.
The violence and disrespect to women within porn is frequently and increasingly visible, and this is not a coincidence, it is part of the point. So is the reduction of women merely to some *thing* to be fucked, and not a real person at all . Men may have frequently divorced sex from love but they have decided to marry it to violence in pornography. When not to violence, to destruction.
How a man responds when you tell him about the harms in pornography is revealing. Who can hear of the coercion in pornography, how many female former victims of child abuse and tragic circumstance are sucked into its web, how women in porn are frequently controlled, coerced, compelled into sex acts they do not want and that will harm them, and even actively raped in the service of the ‘scene’ and then continue watching? It should make it abundantly clear how little women are valued by him if he does. Regardless of any protestations to the contrary.
When you extrapolate that and consider all the fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends and male friends who go on watching that done to a woman it should make it abundantly clear how little women are valued by society at large.
If a man will watch the rape and abuse of other women because he enjoys it and because it thrills him and because he does not see her as sufficiently human to make him want to stop, why should any woman trust him?
Our sexual behaviours are choices that we all make within the parameters of what we know to be lawful and what we believe to be right. They are not just desires we must chase like hounds after a scent. It is a huge, pervasive lie that men are somehow unable to control their own sexuality. That something in men is either so fundamentally lacking or so fundamentally powerful, beyond their own control, that they are not as responsible for it as women are for theirs. In fact, women are more often held responsible for male desire and male transgression than men are. As though we are supposed to be their locus of control.
The male viewer who is willing to masturbate to another man raping or coercing a woman is an accomplice to the man raping or coercing a woman. He is benefitting from her rape or coercion. He is justifying it. He is a moral accessory after the fact. Whether he lies to himself that this time, in this moment, she really is a whore and that whore really did want it.
He helps establish a market, with viewership if not money, that will lead to other women being raped or coerced or mistreated and he will consume that harm again for his own sexual gratification. At no point in this circle he is merely a hapless bystander.
It is a set up designed to dehumanise him as well as her because in that lack of integrity, he loses something of value of himself. He becomes less humane. He trains himself to continue to be aroused by the dehumanisation of women and thus also of himself.
Is it lack of proximity that allows this? Would the average ordinary man seeing a woman on the receiving end of sex acts she didn’t want in the room in front of him get out his penis to enjoy it? Does he fool himself that the miles between them lessens his responsibility or does he just think feminists are wrong that women mistreated in these films aren’t all gagging for the mistreatment?
It doesn’t take feminism to tell all of us the harms of pornography. It takes merely a basic amount of research and a small amount of listening to the women who have exited it. You only have to pay attention. To read about the porn actresses dying young, the ones doing drugs, the ones who speak after they have left porn on various programmes, that float around in the ether, about the harms they have experienced. Or to hear of how young so many of them were when they were groomed into it. Yet, still it is not enough for some men to think it has anything to do with them.
Porn is for him to consume because women are for him to consume and he feels no apparent personal responsibility to interrogate this. He feels no human responsibility to care.
Only in a society that has trained both sexes to devalue one is it possible to understand this. To understand, too, how some women can also not care.
The force against women within pornography is indisputable. Some people will try and suggest that, essentially, what happens within pornography stays within pornography. That it’s some kind of artistic endeavour which says nothing about, and has no effect on, real life.
I do not accept that, and feminists must not accept, that there is a caste of women it is acceptable to abuse and for men to film themselves abusing. That there are any groups of women whose function it is to spare the rest of us from the worst excesses of a given man’s sexuality. Or women whose role it is to tend to the sexual needs of men as a group. We should not believe, either, that those women are in some way different to us, or that what they experience on camera, usually for a pittance of money, is different in kind to what women all over the world are experiencing at the hands of men. It is merely, sometimes, different in degree.
The devaluing of women in pornography, and the violence in it, both predates pornography, then infuses it and seeps out of it. Pornography conspires with narratives about women already in circulation and it conspires with male entitlement to women’s bodies as mere bodies, each one a substitute for the next because the woman in question is not a subject but an object in a patriarchal worldview.
It is, again, only a matter of paying attention to understand that the violence seeps. Teenage girls have been hospitalised with anal tears because we live in a world where pornography exists and has made anal sex incredibly mainstream. More and more women are reporting that men are suddenly now choking them during sex. Individual women are telling their stories of men they love becoming incapable of having sex with them because they are not women on a screen. Or of men who push their boundaries more and more to get them to do things they have seen on screen.
Men are degrading and mistreating them because that is the sex that has been modelled to them since they were little boys and long before they should have been exposed to sexual content at all. There are men who increasingly struggle to orgasm because of pornography. They keep it in the room with them during sex, and change videos every other minute so woman after woman after woman being penetrated is made necessary to his sexual gratification even when there is a woman he is meant to care about right in front of him.
Individual men, too, have stories to tell if we listen. Some are ashamed, some are angry and many are aware that being exposed to porn at young ages has harmed them. It is traumatic for young people, of both sexes, to be exposed to such content. For adults to have so abdicated responsibility to children and adolescents in the service of their desire for continued and unfettered access to pornography is unforgivable.
Pornography gives young people a template for sex that is unhealthy. One that is wholly lacking in emotion or sincerity. One that is inherently misogynist and conditions men to prioritise only their own desires and to believe women must endure them. A template that relies on an ever escalating set of sexual behaviours to achieve the same high and one that necessarily relies on seeing women as convenient body parts and as a mere site of various sexual acts instead of as full human beings.
The desire for pornography seems to become consuming for some men, too. It does something to them which alters their interactions with women as a whole. Women know this because we’ve met enough of these men.
Perhaps it allows them to oversexualise mundane situations so that he begins to anticipate that even as you fix the office photo copier youre moments away from getting on your knees. Or perhaps the eternal access coupled with the power of the images in porn simply edge out more real and more honest sexual ideas. Either way, how he relates to and how he speaks to women is compromised by the propaganda he is carrying. Neither she, nor he, deserves that.
Another obvious way porn has influenced interpersonal relationships is evident in the rise of women having nudes demanded of them. There is some sense that, of course, if you give human beings cameras and spare time some of them are going to want to take naked pictures of themselves but the almost old world innocence of that is not present here. We are now in a milieu where men one barely knows, barely likes, barely dates or who one casually interacts with online feel ready to share unasked for pictures of their own genitals and to demand nudes of any woman. What he is really demanding in such a situation is that you become part of his pornography.
Women are frequently advised to keep their heads out of such pictures so that if the man they are sending them to turns out to be a cruel man who shares his pornographic images with others she has plausible deniability. We aren’t just not in Kansas anymore, we are now in some other sad realm entirely.
In discussions on all of this, I have sometimes heard porn described as the fast food of sex but no one is being raped for you to get your McFlurry. Analogies like this are just meant to minimise the realities. To paint your participation with the porn industry as somehow akin to wanting a Big Mac. Women being inescapably framed as equivalent to the very objects you consume, in such a comparison, seems simply more honest than the person speaking intended to be.
I’ve heard even feminists say, too, that because so many parts of our society are unethical the fact people are willing to go along with the lack of ethics in porn by consuming it is just one of those things. I’m not sure you can use injustice to explain injustice. Or, why, society accepting that level of horror towards women, and girls, is something we should stop fighting against just because other things are also bad.
None of it answers why the men in any of our lives are so ok with our dehumanisation either. How they can continue to prioritise their desires over our humanity even when they then claim they stand with us against other men who do exactly the same.
I don’t think pornography is ever an incidental concern, or even a purely feminist one. It is a litmus test of the values of a whole society when what we do to women in porn is seen as widely acceptable because it gives men orgasms.
Anyone who believes healthy relationships between the sexes matter and that sex itself is an important human interaction should understand that pornography stands in the way of the first and relentlessly belittles the second.
We need, instead, to articulate a sexuality of equals between individuals. One that requires mutual desire and mutual joy. For all the talk we hear of sex positivity, sex is increasingly being reduced to something transactional, shallow and essentially damaging.
Sex is simply far too fundamental to be this diminished, and so is our collective humanity