Let’s play Compare and Contrast, OK??
I am going to post two quotes dealing with feminism and pornography, from two radically different perspectives; both of which claim to represent progressive feminism. See if you can spot who’s real and who’s just spouting bullshit.
Comment #1:
We should be taking porn very seriously. Studies show that the more porn men watch, the more they want to play out porn sex in the real world. They become bored with their sex partners because they don’t look or act like the women in porn. What troubles many of these men most is that they need to pull up the porn images in their head in order to have an orgasm with their partner. They replay porn scenes in their minds, or think about having sex with their favourite porn star when they are with their partners.
What is new over the past five years or so is young men admitting their addiction to pornography. I had been somewhat sceptical of the addiction model, thinking that it was a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their porn use. But sex and relationship therapists Wendy Maltz and Larry Maltz discuss in their book The Porn Trap how therapists are seeing a wave of porn addicts looking for help. They find that “what used to be a small problem for relatively few people had grown to a societal issue that was spilling over and causing problems in the lives of countless everyday people.”
[...]
As someone who has studied porn for more than 20 years, I also don’t know where all this is going to end. If we have any hope of stemming the tide, we need to build a movement that includes grassroots education programs and media strategies that lead to cultural change.
It also needs to offer an enticing, positive vision of sexuality based on equality and respect. As long as we have porn, women will never be seen as full human beings deserving of all the rights that men have. We need to build a vibrant movement that fights for a world in which women have power in and over their lives, because there is no room for porn in a just society.
And here is Quote #2:
For me, one of the biggest holes in the sex-negs’ argument is that they assume sexuality is essentially part of the male domain. In their acceptance of the patriarchy’s dominion over, and definition of, sexuality, they have lost sight of the fact that there is strong theoretical evidence that in prehistoric times sexuality was the the domain of the female. Though it may seem paradoxical that it was not used as a weapon over men in those times, sex as a weapon or a tool of terror and aggression were both invented by the ascending patriarchy as a means of social control.
Sex-neg anti-porners say that “porn is the theory; rape is the practice.” For me, it rings truer to say “patriarchal sexual repression is the theory, rape by men and denial of sexual pleasure (to self and others) by women is the practice.” These anti-sex zealots believe they are correct in what they see, even though all they can see is what the patriarchy says is the truth about Eros. They refuse to listen to women’s voices that say that there is anything else.
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What galls me is that the way sex-negs express their rage impinges directly on my life and I feel I must resist this attack on my freedom of choice as assiduousy as I would resist Operation Rescue’s attack on women’s reproductive choices. It’s all part of the same continuum of sexual choice. Either women are capable of managing their sexual lives in their entireity or they are not. It can’t be both ways. In the end, I feel it comes down to whether or not one feels that [sexual] arousal and titillation are EVER desirable states to promote or achieve; and I believe that they are.
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I do not feel that the mere depiction of naked women is inherently degrading. Nor do I feel that depictions of women desiring sex is a negative thing. If one has been keeping up with the literature of the past 20 years on female sexuality, one would know that many women desire frequency as well as a wide variety of sexual experiences. I believe that women can, and do, use the pornographic medium to lay claim to their sexuality and we need to support them in their efforts. I believe that, for people not predisposed to sociopathic fixations, no amount of exposure to “harmful” imagery will goad them to violent behavior. One should keep in mind just how many people have used passages from the Bible as justification for rape and murder. Blaming all of the sexual violence in our culture on the availability of sexually explicit words or images (no matter how distasteful) is illogical, irrational, ahistorical, puritanical, prudish, ignorant and just plain mean-spirited, no matter how well-intentioned the purveyors of such attitudes may be. It is to the culture’s disadvantage that I hear no discussion of women as perpetrators of sexual violence nor acknowledgment of men’s very real sexual pain and exploitation. We must deal with the real and women’s sexual pain and rage as only part of a bigger picture.
To overlook the root causes of institutionalized violence (5000 years of anti-pleasure, hierarchical, patriarchal social engineering) in favor of placing the blame for Western society’s ills on an entertainment form widely available for less than 100 years exposes an extreme bias. Women alone are not the victims of the system. Rather, women, children and the majority of men are oppressed by our pleasure-negative, puritanical society which deliberately denies both genders full access to their own bodies.
- Nina Hartley, quoted from an 1993 essay she wrote in The Gauntlet magazine titled “Reflections of a Feminist Porn Star”; recently reposted here
Naturally, I have my particular bias…but this time I’ll just leave it up to you to read and decide for yourself.
