A Frequently Asked Question

How can you be FOR abortion but AGAINST porn?

February 21, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a Revolution Club member

Many people ask those of us involved in Stop Patriarchy, so you are FOR abortion and AGAINST porn!? How can that be!? This really trips people up. So in this piece I will go at how I, as a revolutionary involved in this movement, see these questions, how they interpenetrate, and why they both are key in defeating this entire war on women.

Stop Patriarchy is very much, pro-abortion. What I mean by this is that we are about promoting the fact that there is nothing wrong with abortion; that it is a perfectly moral decision that a woman should be able to make for whatever reason, at any point in a pregnancy. We are not about forcing women who do not want to have abortions to get abortions, but our argument goes beyond the discourse of ‘choice.’ We are about breaking the stigma, breaking the silence, and getting into the real science of abortion, i.e. the fact that a fetus is not a baby and that abortion is not murder. We are also about digging into the truth behind what the fight over abortion fundamentally boils down to, and that is whether or not women will be free to determine the path of their own lives or whether they will be enslaved to their reproduction.

So seeing as we are about women being able to determine the path of their own lives, why are we against women choosing to get into porn? To start, it needs to be said that this question on whether porn is harmful to women or not, whether it needs to be done away with or not, cannot be boiled down to what one individual chooses. People do not make choices in a bubble; they do not choose the choices they are given. Under this system, and by that I mean capitalism, with patriarchy woven into its fabric, there are certain choices that are laid out before people. Under capitalism and patriarchy, women are forced into a subordinate role, and any choice that is given legitimacy under this system, must correspond to and reinforce this system.

So with that being said, let us be clear on what porn actually is. Porn is, by definition, the sexualized degradation of women. There is not some good and some bad porn. It all portrays women as mere objects to be dominated and degraded, stripping them of their full humanity. Porn portrays sex as between a master and his slave, which once again corresponds with and reinforces the relations between people under capitalism. Even so called ‘feminist’ porn and queer porn only reinforces this kind of relation between people, simply with different kinds of bodies or in different combinations. And although some women do choose to get into this industry, MOST women do not; they are forced into it through desperate circumstances, or literal enslavement. So to say that some but not all porn is bad is completely missing the point, and is totally immoral as the reality of this industry is that it reinforces relations of domination, degradation, objectification, enslavement, and brutal abuse.

We are not about demonizing or criminalizing the women who do choose to get into this industry, but we will struggle with them to pull back the lens, get beyond their own ideas of what porn is, and look at the reality, and how it affects society as a whole. The choices that are laid out for women as the most legitimate and even ‘attractive’ reveal so much of what this system is about. You can be a mother, and only through this become a ‘truly fulfilled’ woman (and this is becoming less and less of a choice as abortion and birth control access have gotten acutely worse in the past 3 years). Or you can be a stripper or a porn star and ‘empower’ yourself as you supposedly make thousands more than you would most likely make even after attaining a college degree (a claim which is true only for a tiny sliver of women). Or the “best” of all possible options, you can be a sexy mom and take stripper aerobics classes to please your husband! See what I am getting at? What do these options all have in common? Once again they both correspond to, and reinforce relations of domination and degradation under this system. Only under capitalism, which turns everything into commodities, could you get the idea of “empowerment,” which takes the domination and subjugation of women as a given, and says the best we can do is ‘own’ it, and cash in on it.

As I stated in the beginning, we are out to stop this ENTIRE war on women, in all its forms. We are against all forms of domination, degradation, objectification, and enslavement. We refuse to accept these allotted choices laid out before women. This cult of motherhood needs to be put to an end! And the porn industry is an entirely illegitimate one, which also needs to be put to an end! Women are full human beings, and reducing them to breeders, or sex objects, strips them of their full humanity. We can get beyond all this. None of this was ‘meant to be.’ None of this is ‘human nature.’ There are root causes to all this: capitalism, this oppressive class society under which we live, which has always viewed women’s bodies as property and a means of perpetuating this class society; and patriarchy, the institutionalized domination of men over women. Both capitalism and patriarchy are what all these backwards ways of thinking have flowed from. To end patriarchy, we actually need to get rid of capitalism, and only through this transformation can women even have a chance of being viewed and treated as full human beings throughout society. People have been lied to and kept from gaining this kind of understanding and it’s long past time that we get this out into society in a big way because it matters a great deal how people think, what they are thinking about, and what it will actually take to win, and through this, they can and must come to understand the need to stand up NOW.

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