Sexology | CULTURE

TW: This article contains mentions of rape, exploitation and drug addiction

When it comes to a discussion of the ethics of porn, sometimes just getting past the word itself can be a challenge. Pornography is a veritable hotbed of controversy. At the crux of the contention lies the relationship between feminism and pornography, and porn remains one of the most divisive subjects in modern feminist discourse, with pro-porn feminism extolling the right to freely express one’s sexuality whatever form that takes, while the anti-porn faction decries the industry’s extreme corruption and the harmful effects of porn on society. These extremely polarised sides both have the best of intentions even if, in reality, the issue is far too complex to be reduced to the black and white problem it is sometimes treated as.

That’s why, personally, I find my opinion on the matter cannot be neatly summed up with a prefix. On the one hand, I find much of the pro-porn rhetoric to be naïve and reductive: an attempt to decontexualise an industry that exists inextricably within and because of its context. On the other, the zerotolerance approach of the anti-porn stance strikes me as unrealistic. A total ban on pornographic material would only push the industry further underground and completely out of the reach of any form of regulation, putting those who work within it at even more risk than they currently are. In any case, I’m not really here to wade into a debate between these two sides. What I’m more interested in exploring is the possibility that the entire way we think about porn, and what we think constitutes pornography, needs to change.

Did you know that the word pornography comes from the ancient Greek word porne meaning ‘female slave’? Now I know etymology is no basis for a sound argument, especially given how many innocuous contemporary words have distinctly dubious origins, but perhaps it should make us uncomfortable that the word itself originally described a form of total female submission achieved through force. You may well argue that the meaning has shifted so much as to render this original meaning obsolete, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you. Having said that, there have been some very convincing arguments (such as Irene Diamond’s essay Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration) that suggest that the modern meaning of the word has not completely moved on from its historical roots: rather than being about sex, porn continues more often than not to be an exercise in male power and dominance.

Consider that there have historically and periodically been sudden explosions in the production of sexually violent material, often coinciding with early women’s lib movements. Consider that in 2014, the most popular search term on Pornhub.com was “teen” (interesting how that’s as close as you can get to seeking child pornography without actually breaking the law) and that googling ‘rape porn’ brings up around six times as many hits as ‘feminist porn’ (surprising precisely no one). Consider that in a piece entitled The Reluctant Pornographer that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in December 1976, Burton Wohl (on his brief career in a ‘pornofac’) said: “The letting of blood, violence, is porno’s bottom line and not even the insatiable marquis could get beyond it. Power depends on violence, bloodshed. And power is what pornography celebrates, illuminates – above all sublimates. The other stuff, the tumid-humid-licking-sticking-writhing-andfall is peripheral, a catalogue of ornaments like the botanical and architectural doodling in Renaissance painting.” Consider that pornographer Bill Margold has been quoted: “My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t much care for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up. I strongly believe this… So we come on a woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually: we’re getting even for their lost dreams. I believe this.”

Basically, consider that most mainstream porn is material that portrays men exerting power over women, whether through explicitly violent sexual acts or through more implicit, symbolic acts. It’s interesting, for example, that even so-called lesbian porn is overwhelmingly made for a male audience, and that this genre still largely follows the same mould as heterosexual porn: that is, one or more participants taking a dominant role over the other, so that what one might think has the potential to be something radically different actually ends up simulating standardly aggressive hetero porn… just with twice as many breasts.

There’s also the disquieting fact that the overwhelming majority of producers and directors of pornography are men like the above quoted Margold, who don’t make porn for people at large but rather for their fellow men, and ones who “don’t much care for women” at that. And this is where things get really bad, because the porn industry we currently have is not one that is good for women – this is well-documented. One of the most disturbing facts of porn is not just how prolific simulated rape is, but how often the accounts of porn actors include descriptions of actual rape. Interviewed on JMC Live, ex-porn actress Jan Meza said: “Any kind of safe word that anybody thinks you can use in the porn industry is a total lie – there is no safe word, they just keep rolling. They don’t care how much pain you’re in; they don’t care if they split you, if they cut you, if they bruise you... They don’t care what happens to you; you are nothing but a product to them.” In the course of the same interview, Meza describes her treatment and the treatment of other porn actresses by producers: the common practice of lying about the expected limits of a performance; refusal to pay an actor’s wage unless they perform acts they had previously been told they wouldn’t have to; the practically ubiquitous drug addiction, used as a tool to better manipulate actors.

And Meza is just one voice to have come out of the industry. Many others tell similar stories and worse. Not to mention the fact that many of the women “working” in porn, as with prostitution, do not do so out of choice: they do so because financial need means they literally cannot afford to refuse, and many are victims of trafficking within the sex industry. Much pro-porn rhetoric uses the testimonies of women who say they work in porn out of choice, that they enjoy it and find it ‘empowering’ (a word thrown around in a lot of different contexts which carries its own issues, namely that sometimes acts of personal empowerment can be to the detriment of women at large). I wouldn’t dream of denying these testimonies, and I certainly wouldn’t accuse those women of lying. I would, however, say that the existence of a small number of women who enjoy their work is not enough to absolve an industry that is solidly built on deep foundations of manipulation, coercion, abuse – physical, sexual, emotional – and real, actual slavery.

Of course the most important thing, and the thing that makes whatever overall moral conundrum posed by pornography almost secondary, is the protection and care of those who work in porn and the removal of the stigma attached to them. This is dangerous work and these people need a system they can rely on for support more than they need academic debate on the matter. That must always be the immediate concern, and yet it rarely seems to be.

And then, there’s the other side: the production of so-called ‘feminist porn’ is on the rise. With better working conditions, more control given to the actors themselves, and more women as the driving force behind it, this is what some see as the porn industry’s saving grace. But ‘feminist pornography’ is a term I and many others find difficult to take seriously, because it essentially seems to be oxymoronic: if pornography production refers to the horror show I just discussed at length, then how can that ever be a feminist endeavour? The disconnect here, I think, comes from the fact that, when you break it down, ‘feminist porn’ actually is what we collectively define ‘normal’ porn as – that is, material simply designed to “stimulate sexual excitement”. Sex is not actually bad or evil, and there’s no reason why sexual material should be considered that way. The problem then is that in this bizarre reality we’ve stumbled into, porn is not really what porn should be. Or rather, porn is exactly what it should be if it adheres strictly to what its name historically denotes.

Either way, the porn industry as it exists really, really needs to stop existing. In its place we perhaps need something that does what feminist porn claims to do – except with a different name, because a term like ‘feminist porn’ (sometimes called ‘fairtrade porn’ or ‘ethical porn’) as well as being kind of like ‘carnivorous vegetarian’, also in some sense legitimises the very not-feminist mainstream porn we are saturated with. So if we’re talking names, perhaps something totally new like ‘sexography’ would work better: it encapsulates the main point of the thing it denotes without any horrible lingering connotations, puts a certain amount of distance between itself and mainstream porn, and can quite satisfyingly be interpreted as sex-videography, sex-photography, or sex-choreography. Multi-functional word with the added benefit of being fun to say. What could be better?

What I am not suggesting, however, is that we simply slap a new label on what already exists and call it the future. This new kind of “sexually stimulating” material, whatever it’s called, cannot come from the same old male-gaze-on-a-power-trip perspective as always. In fact, I have doubts about whether such a thing will ever be possible, because there’s a frustrating chicken-and-egg element to the problem. Pornography features violence against women because in a society that sexualises aggression towards women this is where the demand lies, but pornography itself is one of the greatest contributors towards this eroticisation of violence, so which one has to change first? Honestly, I don’t know. A cynical part of me thinks it might be naïve to even entertain the possibility of change in this arena. And there are still more complexities surrounding the issue of pornography that I would never have room to examine here. What happens when the male gaze assumed as standard in porn intersects with the lesbian gaze? Where do female consumers of mainstream (i.e. not ‘feminist’) pornography fit into this equation? On the Venn diagram of capitalism and sexuality, does porn sit at the dead centre of the intersection, and is that kind of commodification of sexuality something we should endorse at all, in any form?

The only real conclusion I can fairly draw here is a series of beliefs. I believe that the pornography industry as it exists in this society is not a good thing to be upholding, and in that sense I am anti-porn. I believe that being against the production of this kind of material that perpetuates the degradation of, and violence against, women is not mutually exclusive with being sex-positive in general. I’d like to believe that, at some point in our future, we will have progressed to a point where sexuality can be portrayed through something like this proposed sexography, without also supporting the production and dissemination of violent, degrading images. But I also suspect that cutting through the convoluted societal values that both reflect and sustain the demand for such images will be an immense, and perhaps impossible, task.

#CULTURE