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.
