Protesting the NYC Porn Film Fest: Bringing a “truly liberating perspective”

March 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a reader:

February 28—Today I rolled with a small group of activists from Stop Patriarchy to protest the NYC Porn Film Festival. This is being advertised as the first, with the sense that this should be an ongoing tradition, and as a venue to “challenge the proscribed male dominated narrative” and the stated intent of the festival is to “place sexuality and porn in context and recognize it as a medium and art.” The festival is taking place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, which is a talent hotspot with a very high number of “cultural creatives.” We were determined to oppose this eclectic spin and the festival’s weak postmodern frame that somehow the degradation and sexual violence of the porn industry is in any way liberating to women, LGBT, or anyone at all.

The relevant context is that PornHub is sponsoring the festival and is the largest pornography website in the world. PornHub is the biggest free porn website in the world; they are having a real and putrid societal effect. The vast majority of their media and particularly their most watched videos promote and celebrate rape, torture, and humiliation, and solely reference women in ways meant to dehumanize, such as cumdumpster. And this is all occurring in the larger context of a world where sexism thrives and is reinforced by the objectification and subjugation of women.

The first festival participant that I met was a Chinese woman in her early 20s who was waiting for her friend. She was coming to the festival because she was curious and thought that porn could be a form of art. She said she believes some cultures can become too sexually repressed and that it creates a complete objectification of women. She also stated that it is bad for teenagers to be exposed to, but that adults can control themselves. When her guy friend arrived she seemed to me to backtrack on some of her more definite statements and she reiterated that she was neither for nor against pornography. She said that she would not watch anything that was gross, but that others should be able to watch what they want.

After the showing of a James Franco film (about the making of a leather scene in gay pornography) a woman came outside and before leaving she yelled to us: if you are here to protest PornHub and their effect on the porn industry, then I’m with you; but if you are here to protest gay pornography, then fuck you. She wouldn’t read our pamphlets and said that she has heard all the arguments against porn before. Another participant that I met is Johnny Bootleg, a female pornography director of films that she characterizes as flipping the roles on their head and using the medium for therapy of sexual trauma. She was wearing a dress that had a butcher’s map of different cuts of meats on an animal. This is exactly the kind of murkiness that such a festival produces, and Stop Patriarchy offers a poignant analysis to help put things in a truly liberating perspective.

1. The people in porn are real.
2.  The society that makes people think that porn is “not a big deal” is real.
3. The effects of the fantasies being fed to you by porn are real.

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