Two weeks ago, revcom.us ran an article titled “Billie Eilish on Pornography and a Culture of Disgrace, A call to all those who are sick and tired of the degradation and have the fury to fight for liberation,” from a member of the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution.

This ran into sharp debate and controversy on Instagram with almost 30 people posting over 150 comments. Because this has everything to do with making revolution, and making it an all-the-way emancipating revolution, we wanted to respond to the main arguments raised.

One thing all the counterarguments had in common was a refusal to reckon with what the musician Billie Eilish actually said in her criticism of porn:

“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11 ... I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.” She said when she started watching it, she thought it was a form of sex education, but that it teaches women to think that abuse and degradation is supposed to be enjoyable during sex. “The first few times I had sex,” said Eilish, “I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.” As she kept watching, she got more into more and more violent pornography, which gave her nightmares that she suffers from to this day. But she didn’t just expose this as a point of personal preference, but from the harm it does overall: “I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay,” she continued. “The way that vaginas look in porn is fucking crazy. No vaginas look like that. Women’s bodies don’t look like that. We don’t cum like that.”

Is Billie Eilish some kind of anomaly? Is this a rare experience and response? No. The only thing rare about it—all too rare—is that she had the courage to speak up and sharply criticize the sick culture that is literally saturated with the pornified degradation of women.

The fact that people—including those who consider themselves progressive—didn’t deal with this deeper reality tells you how much needs to change in how women are viewed and treated in this society. The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said years ago, “You can do in this society today to women what you could not do to any other group without a huge outcry…”¹

Women are full human beings—not incubators, not punching bags, not bitches, hoes, or sex objects. And the fury of women needs to be unleashed as a mighty force for an actual revolution to emancipate ALL humanity… to bring into being a whole different world.

Here are four of the main arguments that people did raise:

** One person argued, “...in most cases, porn empowers women.” People talked about how this gives women “agency” and that because it’s a woman’s choice, you can’t criticize it. Another argued, “Denigrating sex work and treating pornstars as helpless victims without agency is anti-woman, anti-woke, and counter-revolutionary.”

First of all, “in most cases”?! Bullshit. Let’s look at the reality of “most cases” that people don’t want to confront. The reality is what’s documented in the film Hot Girls Wanted where women had to do scenes where they were “throatfucked” until the point of vomiting, while being called racial slurs. The reality is millions of “gangbanging” videos with groups of men violently dominating women. These were often women escaping situations who talked about going into porn thinking that they were just going to do the “soft-core” girl-on-girl scenes, but were driven to do the more “hard-core” man and woman scenes in order to survive. Some talked about becoming drug addicts to cope… others went missing. There’s nothing “empowering” or “uplifting” about that.

The majority of mainstream pornography² is violent rape pornography aimed at women who are depicted as enjoying the brutality and violence. The dominant Pornhub search terms include the most racist depictions of Black and Asian women, including images of young children. Please tell us what is empowering about documenting and reveling in this kind of misogynistic torture?!

Second, this renaming of “oppression” as “agency” is just an attempt to “own” your oppression instead of putting an end to it. This is a reflection of not being able to see beyond commodity relations, where everything, including sex, is locked into the cash nexus of commodity exchange. It’s a so-called “empowerment” on the terms of a system—vying for a piece of it—while the half of humanity that is female is viciously oppressed. By sharply calling this out, we are challenging women, men… everyone to break out of degrading themselves on the terms of this system and rise up to put an end to this and all forms of oppression.

As A Declaration: For Women’ s Liberation and the Emancipation of All Humanity says: “Even those who—for a time—are able to convince themselves that this ‘choice’ is somehow empowering can only do so by accepting the terms that demean themselves and other women in a male-supremacist set-up. And even deeper, you don’t get the ‘right to be sexy’ or to be the ‘owner of your own body as a sexual commodity’ without a world that gives rise to the notion that women should be evaluated by their bodies and sexual attractiveness—and that world thrives on and mandates the shipment of women in droves across borders as human chattel, into brothels and ‘comfort stations’ for U.S. troops, and as mail-order brides. No one should want to make peace with, or find their way in, that.”

** Another argument was that “I think women should choose what they want to pursue.” And, “It’s (obviously) wrong for someone to force someone else into porn, but i also think it’s wrong to tell someone they can’t make money doing something they enjoy, even if that includes sex.”

Here we see the basic argument that “I am the center of the universe” and “the world revolves around me! What I do is justified because I want to do it”—all completely separated from what shapes your “personal desire” and what impact your choice has on others, positive or negative. This viewpoint was in common with all the responses we got, and reflects the profound problem we have in this society of extreme individualism—everything is calculated based on how it affects “ME!” But to really understand something, you can’t proceed from the individual out—you have to look at its social effect.

And what is the social effect?

The whole culture is literally saturated with porn. Porn websites in the U.S. get more web traffic than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix and Linkedin combined! Generations of youth have grown up watching porn—most young people are exposed to porn by age 13—with, as Billie Eilish said, “their brains broken” with a twisted and demeaning view of sexual intimacy and partnership. In this society, watching porn is supposed to be a form of “male bonding” or a rite of passage—bonding over the degradation of women.

With all of this imagery bombarding people at every turn, this trains people to see women as nothing more than sexual objects to “get fucked” instead of being full human beings.

To this, some of these people said, yeah, but don’t you know about feminist porn or anarchist porn. This miniscule phenomenon is just a backwater of a tidal wave of horror that validates and justifies the “mainstream of porn,” and doesn't itself escape from these fundamental relations.

PORN FUELS RAPE!

We live in a society where 1 in 3 women is sexually assaulted… where men are trained to think they are “owed” women’s bodies—as dehumanized sexual objects. Where all women everywhere are terrorized, harassed and tormented.

And it destroys basic human intimacy: where sex is more of a performance than about shared pleasure, where women fake orgasms without knowing anything about their basic anatomy… where it’s easy for a woman having sex with a man to tell if he has watched porn or not by the often-abusive way the man views what sex is. Where for many young women, getting raped is their first sexual experience and they think something is wrong with them for not liking it! What kind of world—what kind of intimate destruction—is being justified with all this?!

This is not about what you enjoy—what you enjoy is shaped by this system and it contributes to the tremendous harm visited upon women in this system.

As Sunsara Taylor said in 2015 responding to “frequently encountered bullshit” at the NYC Porn Film Festival: “If you really think your desire to get off on depictions of women—or others—being brutalized and degraded is more important than the right of women everywhere to not be terrorized and humiliated through these depictions and the violent degradation they reinforce, you are seriously mistaken. Simply put: you are not more important than half of humanity.”

Your choices exist in A WORLD—which no one defending porn actually spoke to—while instead focusing on the wealthy enclaves of empire. What is the larger situation wherein some people choose to exploit themselves through pornography and prostitution? In his article “The ‘Industrialization’ of Sexual Exploitation, Imperialist Globalization, and the Descent Into Hell,” Raymond Lotta breaks down the fact that this is a worldwide system of capitalism-imperialism whose economic foundations are rooted in the exploitation of literally billions of people, a huge chunk of whom are millions of women whose humanity is crushed by the fact that the globalized sex industry profits BILLIONS off of their literal flesh and who are forced into these conditions of prostitution as a means to survive.

** Another argument we got was that the critique of pornography furthers “unsafe” conditions and potential criminalization for “sex-workers”: “All your stance does is victimize and criminalize the very people that you claim to want to help,” and, “I think we need to make the world safer for those who decide to go into sex work.”

This is a reflection of painfully lowered sights and capitulating to the terms of this monstrous system. We don’t need this system with these “choices”! What we need to do is tell the truth and get organized for an actual revolution to bring into being a whole new world. We could be living in a society where it isn’t a “choice” to turn your whole being into a commodity to be bought, sold and beaten to survive, but where women are full contributors to the betterment of all society!

Under the slave system, was the need to fight for slightly better conditions or work to abolish slavery? Fighting for some rights or safer conditions for some women being terrorized and brutalized (whilst the planet is becoming more unsafe for people every day and women as a whole are increasingly under attack legally, socially, economically and in every other way) and while this system grinds up billions is not just paltry, it’s ludicrous.

This system should not have the power to lock up women for being forced into, or even choosing, this kind of degradation, just like the system shouldn’t be given the power to use anti-drug laws to disproportionately criminalize youth caught up in hustling. But that doesn’t mean we should uphold this kind of hustling that does harm to humanity, and the oppressed themselves. It means we need to struggle with people to get the fuck up out of that, and get into the revolution. A revolution to overthrow the system that has patriarchy woven into its foundations, an OVERTHROW and REPLACEMENT of this system with a socialist system as part of getting rid of all forms of oppression and emancipating all of humanity.

In people’s responses, their horizons did not go beyond a world where women are degraded in all these ways, with the most we should fight for being the decriminalization of prostitution and pornography. Nobody—but us—put forward a strategy of how to put an end to the oppression of women, to bring into being a whole new world or even considered that this is something to be actively worked towards.

** Finally, several people said our critique was coming out of being “humorless prudes.” When in fact, the reality is that “if you can’t imagine sex without porn, you’re fucked!” The defense of and celebration of porn reflects the most stunted, degraded and impoverished view of sexuality.

Porn is not sex, it’s the sexualized degradation of women.

Sex is about sharing in a mutual understanding, caring, mutual respect, love and pleasure between people … it’s about exploration, joy or comfort. If entered into with respect, it can be one of the great human pleasures. Porn is commodified violence, degradation and subordination, it’s revenge against not just a particular woman, but against all women… it’s about ownership and abuse.

As Sunsara Taylor wrote in What Makes Sex “Good”?—And Why Porn Is NOT: “Good sex is based on people recognizing—and deriving pleasure from—connecting with and exploring each other’s full humanity and it is as potentially varied and rich as the people involved.”

To all those raising these differences, we say: RAISE YOUR SIGHTS AND FIND YOUR HUMANITY! To everyone who cares about the future: join the revolution that’s fighting to change all of society and for a world beyond all of this kind of oppression. The Revolution Club is getting organized now and modeling a whole different way people can come together and relate to each other—being future people, acting in line with the world we’re fighting for. And you are needed to be a part of this revolution. A revolution to break all tradition’s chains, a world where women, men and differently gendered people are equals and comrades. A world where people could truly flourish, and not be subjugated to the crushing weight of the putrid social relations we are enmeshed in.