If you are so inclined, you can download and listen to an MP3 of my appearance on Broadly Speaking last night. Click where it says “Listen Now to the Latest Broadly Speaking”. I’m on for for a full thirty minutes, and have a good discussion with the show’s two Canadian co-hosts about feminism, pornography, the Suicide Girls site, and larger issues around the objectification of women. I enjoyed the experience very much. I’m a multi-tasker; if you listen closely, you might hear me folding laundry in the background as I chat.
Both of the hosts of the show are college-aged feminists. One (I can’t remember which, alas) remarked that she first visited the “Suicide Girls” porn website when she was about sixteen. And we had an all-too brief digression into some of the various reasons why so many young women are curious about pornography, even porn that is produced primarily for the male gaze.
Those who defend pornography against the charge that it exploits women invariably point out that a sizeable number of women pay for and view pornography. Depending on who you talk to, and what statistics they claim to have, anywhere from 20-40% of viewers and subscribers to porn sites are female. While those numbers are hard to verify, and might be exaggerated for ideological reasons, I’m not a statistician and I don’t have contrary evidence, so I’ll take the claims at face value.
It is to be hoped that it is no longer revolutionary to declare that women have a visual component to their sexuality! Only a true troglodyte would claim that “women don’t like to look”. The evidence is clear that a substantial number of women do find porn arousing. Of course, that doesn’t make it feminist! It’s no more inherently feminist for a woman to pay for porn than it is for a woman to pay another woman to clean her toilets. The fact that a financial exchange takes place between women doesn’t mean it is completely free from anti-feminist implications. The problem of porn, from a feminist standpoint, involves both the impact on the “product” and the “consumer”.
But as the co-host last night remarked, a great many young women don’t look at porn merely to be sexually stimulated. As we talked about on the show, one of the things young women — particularly those just entering adolescence — look for in pornography is not their own arousal but cues to the nature of male arousal. Over and over again, we hear stories from young women who discovered their father’s Playboys (or, today, his browser history). We hear them talk about a mix of disgust and fascination with what they found. And I’ve heard from countless young women stories of how they carefully studied the centerfolds and the models, asking themselves “Is this how I need to pose? Is this what I should look like? Is this what I need to do to be desirable?”
Nothing could be more anti-feminist than having porn used as a teaching tool for young women. As we see with Suicide Girls, even porn that claims to be feminist-friendly is usually under the financial control and artistic direction of men, produced for a primarily male audience and reflecting primarily male sensibilities. Leaving aside the issue of how it impacts male viewers, leaving aside the issue of whether or not the women who pose are exploited, feminists ought to be troubled by the role that porn plays as a teaching tool for young women.
So many young women recall encountering porn just as they were in the process of beginning to discover their own sexuality; what porn too often taught was that they needed to think about their sexuality in terms of their visual appearance and their desirability to men rather than their own subjective wants and needs. I’ve often led discussions — with both college and high-school aged boys and girls — about the “first time” they saw porn. To generalize enormously, two very different words characterize their responses. From the boys, the stories I hear about the first time they encountered porn tend to revolve around arousal – most, but by no means all, confess to having been powerfully turned on by what they saw. On the other hand, while arousal is not an unheard of response from young women either, the most common theme I hear from them, over and over again, is anxiety. For many of these young women, their first experience looking at porn is shocking, even frightening. “This is what men think about? This is what they want?” It’s an experience that leaves many, many young women vaguely disheartened, confused, and often profoundly anxious.
I recongize that the plural of anecdote is not evidence. I’m not a social scientist, and this is not a refereed journal. I write about porn on many levels. I write as a Christian, concerned at the commodification of one of God’s greatest gifts. I write as a man, worried about the power of pornography to shape the fantasies and expectations of my brothers. I write as a husband who longs for his wife; I write as a husband who knows just how glorious sex can be and just how great the lies are that porn tells about it. I write as a feminist, deeply troubled by the frequent (if not universal) exploitation and abuse of those women who work in the porn industry. And I write as a teacher and youth leader whose heart aches for those young women who look in porn for clues about male desire, and who take from porn their cues as to how they ought to look and act and think.
Hugo – I’m intriqued by this. I’ve been considering attending Body Electric and one of the statements in their online video concerns the way porn distorts our view of sexuality and how Body Electric hopes to counteract that. Porn portrays sexuality as automatic, emotionally distant, bodies in motion without a vital emotional connection.
I feel pornography is terribly equivocal – simultaneously arousing and troubling – portraying bodies that one rarely finds in real life, creating expectations that are unlikely to be fulfilled, creating images and expectations of sexuality that are not only inaccurate but deceiving. Pornographic portrayals of sex and sexuality strike me as more than idealized – almost caracitures of real sexuality which is messy, silly, fun, awkward and at times disappointing. And yet the images portrayed in pornography are appealing – attractive bodies, unclothes, having sex.
I started thinking about portrayals of the body the other night while watching a show on fuse – Pants Off Dance Off. I was flipping channels, saw a video I liked start and realized what I was watching. Okay, it is the worst show on TV yet has a kind of car accident appeal. The premise is simple – people strip to their favorite videos, viewers vote on the winner who receives a cash prize. PODO has one characteristic that I found intriquingly positive – the bodies on the show are real bodies – not perfectly toned, depilated, tanned, and dressed. The dancers make funny, awkward mistakes. They’re average folks larking it up. From that trainwreck of a show, viewers would see people of all shapes, sizes, genders, orientations, and body types. Watching this one episode was for me a strangely affirming experience of being able to say “This is what real people look like.”
I’m not sure where I’m heading with all this. Maybe this: not just pornography but the media in general portray people unrealistically and set the rest of us up for failed expectations, but in the end, a real person who is a little out of shape, or overweight, or too hairy or too skinny or not quite perfect is so much better than an empty life waiting for that perfect person.
In my own experiences as a young woman, I think what was most damaging to me wasn’t idealized body images, but rather the perspective that sexuality is about what men want, not what I wanted. (This didn’t come to me from porn, but I certainly think it is a message often found in porn.)
I was taught by my mother (!) that you can’t let men go without orgasms, for instance. My first serious boyfriend shared this perspective, so while I often did not come from our lovemaking (which I was fine with), only once in our two years together did he not come, and it caused a ‘scene’ at the time. These days I’d like to think I wouldn’t put up with that for an instant, but I know those old attitudes are still embedded in me somewhere.
Women’s sexuality does not exist in the service of men. In general, an individual’s sexuality is about that individual, not about other people. I wish this message could be conveyed to all young people.
Glendon, I absolutely agree that we are hungry for realistic images of human bodies. But we can expose ourselves (!) to those and seek those out without a specifically sexual context. Nudity isn’t inherently sexual; we need to see more body diversity in a wider variety of non-pornographic settings.
Tam — amen to this: Women’s sexuality does not exist in the service of men.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think a big reason for this that rarely gets acknowledged is that we *don’t* have honest discourse about sexual attraction in this culture. Women aren’t supposed to admit to “wanting,” and guys aren’t supposed to admit to “not wanting.” This makes it easy for bizarre ideas about what the opposite gender wants to flourish.
Jeff, remember that we’re talking about porn that is designed for men. We’re talking primarily about women looking at other women naked, where the male body is rarely represented. While women and men can both experience visual arousal, it’s not always the case that women are aroused by what men find arousing.
Hugo – Nicely punned! I agree – nudity is not and need not be inherently sexual. I think as a cultural trait Americans tend to see nudity as sexual – we have a poor distinction in our society between sensuality and sexuality. I think the result is a paucity of healthy images of normal bodies and sexualization of the human body.
Sexism distorts the way in which we see and portray women’s bodies – as well as the way the male body is seen and portrayed in our culture. Both portrayals feel unhealthy to me. Based on my limited experiences, it seems that Europeans have generally healthier attitudes toward the body than do Americans – treating the body much more casually. And yet . . .
During the summer, even in benighted, god forsaken Utah, I perceive an increasing culture comfort with the body on display – as people wear comfortable clothing and draw fewer stares. Shorts, tank tops, and so forth are far more common today than even ten years ago and the response is ennui. It seems even in culturally conservative Utah, attitudes are softening toward display of the body.
Glenden, the immigration to these shores of so many Calvinists from Old Europe did change the balance over there, I suppose… having spent quite a bit of time in Europe, the son of a European-raised man and myself a dual national, I’m inclined to agree.
Someday, I will post more explicitly (!) about why I am both quite comfortable with nudity and absolutely adamant about my opposition to porn…
Huh? I’m really not sure how that’s at all responsive to what I’m saying – which is that one of the main reasons women can get the idea that porn is the pinnacle of attractiveness to men (as a monolithic group) is that we never really openly discuss our own attraction, and that if we did these sorts of images (as well as many of the other memes about attraction) would be much less powerful.
Jeff, forgive me, it seemed as if you were talking about why women don’t discuss responding sexually to pornography; your follow-up is much clearer.
I wonder if you could post something on the film about Betty Paige as this seems a very similar topic. I own the Suicide Girls book – and gladly so; do you know how hard it is to find pictures of full figured goth and tattooed girls embracing sexuality WITHOUT adding full nudity – pretty difficult. I believe there are some nudes in the book as well, I am not sure since I bought in from the “Art” section of the bookstore, and I tend to look at the pictures that interest me – I know you have posted that women need to be responsible for all thier acts in the greater feminist ramificiation – well, ho hum – instead of living life how GUYS have decided I should be living it I have to live my life how middle class college educated feminist majors decide how I should be living it?
I will not debate about what those images can be used for or how they are not “perfect” feminist alternative for women owning thier own sexuality except….that women ARE owning thier own sexuality; goths are saying, I can be an “individual” and feel sexy too (unless you are against women feeling empowered by feeling attractive?), that tattoos have gone in 20 years from “that’s what whores get” to an individual expression, and anything from empowering to cute to sexy – this IS what gets talked about in women’s locker rooms, at least round here. As for the touch of kink, well, as the woman director of the film on Betty Paige pointed out, corsets and knee high boots have gone from furtive photos to the shop windows of the elite fashion stores. I can’t say I would want to go to the Suicide girl website or a live show – but I put the book right next to my book on Queer Covers of the Pulp age – I don’t think ALL women look at those images and shudder because of the imagined eye of hungry men looming in the darkness.
Well, Hugo, What you have written hits home for me! I totally used Playboys that I “found” as a child as guidebooks to what I needed to be in order to be desired, nay, even SEEN, by males. (this would have been around 1970; I was ten.) Based on my own experience, I would say that pornography is used this way ALL THE TIME by young females: to give us instruction in what we are supposed to be.
THink how it would be for young MALES, if there were magazines devoted to what FEMALES found irresistable sexually. Believe me, those would be some Studied Tomes!
Hugo, I know you don’t subscribe to the notion that broadly-speaking, men and women are fundamentally different, among other things vis-a-vis men being ‘visual creatures’ and women being ‘verbal creatures,.’ However, there is a significant body of biological and behavioral literature showing that these types of differences indeed exist. So, humor me for a minute and assume that this it true. In this context, what I call ”visual porn’ (e.g., “Hustler,” “Screw,” etc. I don’t consider ‘Playboy’ to be “pron”) is targeted at men, however, there is a ‘verbal porn’ targeted at women, i.e., the graphic romance novel. So with this in mind, how do you feel about the objectification of men in the graphic romance novel, whereby men are objectified and idealized as persons whose sole purpose in life is to serve women’s romantic, monetary, physical, etc., needs? Seems to me that the objectification is essentially the same, it just comes in a different form because it’s targeting a different audience. I suppose that the main difference is that most men choose not to read graphic romance novels while women choose to peruse soft porn like Playboy. But really, who’s fault is that? The producers or the consumers?
In the other thread Hugo you said stripping was a choice young women made because it was the best paid choice they had on offer. It seems a lot of women in porn are earning a lot of money and actively choosing this career path, rather than lesser paid employment like an office job. Having said that, there is still a vast majority of women who COULD work in porn, but choose not to.
Given that, I guess the main problem you have with porn is that it objectifies the female body. OK, but what about sexual fantasies? Are we supposed to only fantasize about our Significant Other, and only creating fantasies that are fully compliant to a non-objectifying protocol so as to protect our sexual appetite from being debased?
Personally I think our sexual appetite encourages imagination and exploration. Porn is a natural manifestation of this need. I think repressing our appetite for sex via shame is not healthy and spills over into other areas of life (see how often homosexuals have been shamed in the past for their desires).
Given the explorative nature of sexual desire and the fact that people employed in the industry are actively choosing their employment in a regulated industry (in the west, at least), I have no problem with porn in general.
You do of course understand that porno above all expliots its audience, their primal sexual instincts plus all the nonsensical veiws that people have about sex and the people who do it.
The film makers are ruthless. Their exploitation of the ‘actors’ pales compared to the implied labour it fleeces from the poor schleps who pay for porno filth just to satisfy a basic need for sexual gratification, that has been pervertyed beyond recognition in these daze of, er, post modernist (r)age.
Yes, l know women suffer more, such received wisdom is beyond discussion.
Research on the ‘visual differences’ means that if you show men and women heterosexual mainstream porn, the men are more likely to get aroused than the women are. Therefore, men are visually-oriented and women aren’t. Yay evo-bio!
For many of these young women, their first experience looking at porn is shocking, even frightening. “This is what men think about? This is what they want?†It’s an experience that leaves many, many young women vaguely disheartened, confused, and often profoundly anxious.
You know why, Hugo? Because it’s an uncomfortable truth. No, not that men all like fake boobs and bleached hair–but that many men see women primarily in terms of sex. It’s sort of the same feeling as learning that your friends have been talking about you behind your back: oh, sure, guys say they love you but, really, they’re just pretending so they can fuck you.
If you’re concerned about damaging messages, though, porn is really the wrong place to look. How much porn do you think young women see vs. how much sexism and shaming they get from magazines, movies and books aimed at women? Do you think that by the time a young woman first sees porn, she has never read an article about “catching his eye”, or losing weight, or about what clothes will fix her obviously numerous figure flaws?
Don’t know about any of you but my first exposure to Playboy and Penthouse came several years before I picked up my first YM, Seventeen, or Cosmopolitan. In fact at age 5-6 when my brother found dad’s porn and we looked at them in the playroom I could barely read “See Jane run”, but I can still see those pictures in my mind with amazing detail.
It’s been over 20 years since Dad brought home the Penthouse with Vanessa Williams in it and I can still remember her poses; I don’t remember much beyond Goofus and Gallant from my Highlights For Children subscription.
This is one of your more thought provoking posts, Hugo.
I’m interested, because my experience with Porn (at least hardcore porn) produced nearly the same reaction as what you’ve described that women go through. I wondered if this was how I was expected to perform, if my body would ever measure up to the monster schlongs in the porn flicks, and i experienced disgust at the raw, gynocological handicam shots.
For me the problem with porn isn’t porn per se…I have no problem with the idea of men jacking off to arousing images, its that Porn seems to revel in the dirtiness and degradation that is associated with sex. I think it was lenny Bruce that said “America is a Eunuch and pornography is its severed balls”. I feel the puritanism in our society has made us feel shamed and dirty about sex, and thus shame and degradation become part of sex’s metanarrative.
I’m curious, Hugo. What’s your take on BDSM?
First experience of porn (if it counts): a Playgirl centerfold passed around at a high school slumber party. Mild curiosity, no arousal at the sight of the picture.
Second experience: a friend, when I was in college, invited me to go with him to an X-rated movie. I wanted to know what they were like, and, actually, if they were really as bad as Dworkin and MacKinnon said. We wandered around, failed to find the movie theater, and went and saw something not X-rated. I was later scolded by college feminist friends for wanting to look at porn: “You don’t need to drink piss to know it’s piss.” And I decided to satisfy myself with getting descriptions of X-rated movies from a friend who watched and liked them; I’ve never again set out to watch video porn myself. (I did eventually see Midnight Cowboy, which I gather got rated as X, but which really didn’t seem to me to be porn.)
Third experience: After I’d graduated from college, I wandered into a store (for other reasons), which had a magazine wrack. This is the one that stays in my memory as really creepy. Magazines with naked women in improbable sexual poses were side by side with, well, the “captive women series” about women being kidnapped and raped and coming to like it. It’s really not the “perfect body” aspect that makes this stuff creepy; it’s the control and degradation.
I always assumed that, somewhere, from time to time, guys my age, that I didn’t necessarily have any sexual interest in, were masturbating to thoughts of me. That assumption didn’t bother me. But the thought that these particular images might be what some men really wanted, and that guys somewhere might be masturbating to the thought of me being hurt or degraded or defiled, in their minds, that creeped me out.
guys somewhere might be masturbating to the thought of me being hurt or degraded or defiled, in their minds, that creeped me out.
Hmm… fantasies like that are pretty common.
I’m uncomfortable with the criminalization of fantasy–no matter how creepy.
Joe, no one is criminalizing fantasy. But I’m judging fantasy, and there’s a big difference between calling people to consider exercising control over their thoughts and desires and literally criminalizing the content of masturbatory daydreams.
If by “criminalizing” you mean actually making it illegal, then no you’re not. So I’m perfectly comfortable using “judging” if you prefer. My point is the same: people should not feel guilty for having fantasies. To do so divides the house against itself and creates the desire/disgust tension that drives so much misogyny. There’s a scene in Moll Flanders where the clients of a brothel burn it down in moral outrage. Guilt about one’s desire causes hatred: first towards oneself, and then towards the object of the desire.
I see no percentage in exercising control over one’s fantasies…I don’t believe it will work. One can resolve not to act on them, one can recognize them for the fleeting distraction that they are (in the Buddhist sense) but one can not eradicate them…a god ignored is a demon born.
Joe, I’m writing as a Christian when I write about fantasy; Jesus’ words about “adultery in the heart” and Job’s note that he made a covenant with his eyes are powerful for me.
Yes. You are. And I’m writing as a Thelemite when I disagree. Our religious orientations are irreconciliable, but hopefully we can understand each other.
I’m uncomfortable with the criminalization of fantasy–no matter how creepy.
Ah, but isn’t it always the window into other people’s fantasies that makes porn anxiety-provoking? Would you have been as anxious at the sight of the monster schlongs if you didn’t think they might, after all, be what some women prefered?
In my case, I don’t mind if men prefer, say, Vanessa Williams to me in their fantasies (though I’d prefer that at least women prettier than me be acceptable in their non-airbrushed versions), but the nature of some of the fantasies favored does creep me out.
I see no percentage in exercising control over one’s fantasies
Depends just what level of control over fantasy you’re trying to exercise. I think I actually have less control of my fantasies than Hugo seems to, but still at times I find it useful to do a redirect. Picture them as clouds floating by and recall my attention to whatever I’m suppose to be doing, or something.
one can recognize them for the fleeting distraction that they are (in the Buddhist sense)
I’d feel better if the people with the captive women fantasies were recognizing them as a fleeting distraction, rather than going out of their way to feed them. I mean, I feel free to look critically at books and movies otherwise (while recognizing people’s right to make the ones I dislike), so why stop at the ones that have sex in them?
calling people to consider exercising control over their thoughts
Ah, Hugo, you always stick with the rhetorical classics.
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I think people who hate the Bible actually, in away, LOVE the Bible, DUE to it’s attitude toward sex. Because of the Bible’s anti-sex scriptures, those who say they hate the Bible can feel that sex is “forbidden fruit”, and, they can enjoy there sex more. In otherwords, the Bible adds spice to the sex-lives of those who aren’t Christians.