Frequently Encountered Bullshit at the NYC Porn Film Festival

Stop Watching Porn—Start Fighting Patriarchy!

by Sunsara Taylor | March 3, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On Saturday, February 28, I joined with members of the New York City Revolution Club, StopPatriarchy.org, and others to protest the first ever NYC Porn Film Festival. We headed out in the biting cold because this festival represented a further step in the mainstreaming of pornography, even as pornography more and more concentrates violence and hatred against women. A glimpse at some of the all-time most viewed videos on Pornhub (see accompanying box), the Festival's sponsor and the largest porn site in the world, reveal the truth of this.

The Festival was located in an experimental art space on a quiet street in Bushwick, Brooklyn and was attended by perhaps 80-100 people at its peak. Despite the extraordinarily heavy police presence—two police vans, two squad cars, and a long double line of barricades to keep us from the venue—we were able to engage quite a bit with those attending, some in very rich exchanges. We also spoke with about a dozen local and international journalists.

When the same questions come up over and over again, it is often a good idea to develop a set of FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions. In this case, I think it is more appropriate to describe the arguments we were hit with over and over as “FEBs,” or “Frequently Encountered Bullshit.” While many of these folks clearly meant well and some were very thoughtful, there simply is no justification for porn. I hope you enjoy.

“What about MY choice? Liberation means I, as a woman, should have the right to do whatever I want!”

No, liberation is about EVERYONE getting free, not about YOU “getting yours” within the system of oppression.

Pornography is a multi-billion-dollar international industry which traffics in the sexualized degradation, dehumanization, and cruel humiliation of women. It both reflects and fuels a world of hatred and violence against women. It is no more “liberating” for a woman to choose to be part of porn than it would be for a Black person to choose to be part of creating racist propaganda. People who want real liberation—not just for themselves, but for all of humanity—need to rise up against and fight the institutions that propagate oppression, not join them.

“But we are 'flipping the script' and making feminist—or LGBT—porn.”

No, you are getting played—and you are part of playing other oppressed people. Over and over when we asked what made their porn feminist, they explained that it was women or LGBT people behind the camera or “calling the shots.” None of them spoke about the social content of what was being shown. When asked, ineverycase they described depictions of sexualized domination and degradation—it just had women or LGBT people involved in degrading men or each other. This is wrong. No one gets the “right” to degrade themselves or others without living in a world that gives rise to the idea that domination and degradation are “sexy.” And that world is filled with millions of women and children who have been tricked, trafficked, molested, raped, beaten, humiliated and killed. It is filled with brutality and bigotry against LGBT people. Women and LGBT folks need liberation, not “equal access to degradation.”

“It's natural for men to dominate women sexually, all the mammals do it.”

Bullshit! It's an anti-scientific LIE to say that the males of most mammal species dominate and conquer the females—this is simply not the case. Even more fundamentally, one of the key differences between human beings and other species is precisely how much elasticity we have to live and relate in vastly different ways depending on our social and material conditions. We are not just a product of our genes, we are shaped by—and in turn can shape—the larger structures of society, the culture and the way of life we come up in. In this era, it is possible to fight for—and make—the most radical revolution in the history of humanity, one that puts an end to all forms of oppression and degradation. Doing this requires a scientific approach to understanding the way the world actually works and our role in it, not lazy pseudoscientific myths about some reactionary or “fallen” nature of man.

“What would you say to a woman who got into porn herself and has written a whole memoir about how it is empowering and how much she sincerely loves it?”

The exact same thing I'd say to a woman who stands outside an abortion clinic calling other women “murderers”: What you are doing is objectively very harmful to women and humanity as a whole. The question is not whether a woman—or anyone—is “sincere,” the question is what is the objective content and effect of their outlook and actions. Reducing women to objects of sexual plunder and propagating that idea is fundamentally no different than reducing women to breeders and propagating that notion. Both are harmful to all women and no one should do these things.

As for those who seize on these “empowerment stories” to rationalize their use of porn: For every woman with a book deal or academic paper talking about how “empowering sex work can be,” there are millions of women around the world who are being kidnapped, tricked, sold by starving families, brutalized and raped, and/or driven through the desperate need to feed themselves and their children into the sex “industry.” Highlighting the stories of the tiny percentage of women who feel “empowered” to defend pornography is like highlighting the handful of people who made riches during the Great Depression to defend that as a period of “economic opportunity.”

“But some porn objectifies men, how is that bad for women?”

The point is to end to all forms of oppression, degradation, objectification, dehumanization, and exploitation—not to gain access to the ability to oppress, degrade, objectify, dehumanize, or exploit others. Women and other oppressed people don't need revenge, or the equal right to objectify and oppress others, they need liberation.

“Porn is just about sex, don't be uptight.”

No. Trying to repress sexuality is “uptight.” Trying to rid sexuality of oppression is liberating.

Porn is not “just sex.” It is the propagation of a very oppressive kind of sex. And porn doesn't just train people in an oppressive view of sex, it also trains people in an oppressive view of women. In porn, all women at all times exist to be—and want to be—“fucked.” In real life, women who do not act this way are often perceived by men to be denying them what is “rightfully theirs.” Think I am making this up? Ask the women around you how many times a guy on the street has gone from, “Hey baby,” to “fucking bitch” simply because they didn't respond. The level of anger men express towards women simply for not being eager to be harassed, groped, or “fucked” is enormous. All this is reflected in and further reinforced through pornography.

“There have always been 'power dynamics' and master-slave relations, the point is that through porn you get to 'play with that' and 'work it out.'”

This is just craven capitulation to oppression. We don't need to “work out” and “play with” oppression and enslavement, we need to abolish it in every form! Besides, “playing” with master-slave relations in the bedroom does nothing to “work out” any of the horrors in the real world! Really, such “playing” is part of adjusting oneself to these horrors, coping with them, even getting in on—and getting off on—degradation and oppression. It is not incidental, for instance, that soldiers in the U.S. military often get pumped up on violent and degrading porn before going out into reactionary combat.

Besides, the world has NOT always been divided into masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, dominators and dominated. Read some history. It hasn't always been this way and it doesn't have to stay this way. Read some about the revolution that is possible in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal). Now, stop “playing” with oppression and start fighting to end it!

“I don't tell you what you should do, you shouldn't tell me!”

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.

And you know what? If I—or anyone else—was part of something that was deeply oppressive, you absolutely should challenge it. While it is extremely important that people have the space to think differently and strike out in many directions, tolerating oppression is very different and is nothing to be proud of.

“But people are turned on by degradation, including women—and they shouldn't be shamed for that.”

Give this up. Challenging people to think about the content of what is turning them on, what kind of a world and conditioning it flows out of, and what kind of world it reinforces is NOT “shaming” them.

It is no surprise that many people—including many women—find degradation arousing. For their entire lives they have been propagandized through pornography as well as in other ways to see sex as something “dirty,” to find degradation titillating, to see women as “temptresses,” to see LGBT people as “deviant,” and to see domination as a “turn-on.” All this is a reason to fight against pornography—and to challenge others, even people who are really into it, to join confront how harmful this is—not a reason to defend it.

“You have no faith in human beings to tell the difference between real life and fantasy?”

If film and other media had no impact on how people felt, what they desired, and their outlook on the world then billions of dollars wouldn't be spent each year on advertising. Ads hook millions on the idea that their brand of shoes, soft drink, car, etc. defines who they are. Everyone knows this. Yet, somehow when it comes to videos of women being gang-raped, being “violently throat-fucked” til they gag, being spit on and called “dirty whores,” being punched and preyed upon—videos that are viewed millions and millions and millions of times by millions and millions and millions of men—we are supposed to believe this “has no effect.” Bullshit. Porn affects the way that millions of men view women, and the way that women and others have learned to view themselves.

Further, fighting against porn—even more, fighting against this as a key part of fighting to make a revolution that puts an end to all forms of oppression—has everything to do with having “faith in human beings.” Oppression and degradation—in the larger world and in the intimate sphere of sexuality—is not “human nature.” Through revolution it is possible to bring into being a new system and a new culture where women and men relate with mutual respect and equality, where people of all genders and sexual orientations are valued, where the great diversity of nationalities and “races” are celebrated, where the lives of people around the world are valued as much as our own, and where critical thought and the collective good are valued and fostered. Taking on the institutions that stand against this, and winning growing numbers of people to take up this morality today, is a big part of hastening and preparing for revolution.

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