On the Idea & Promotion of "Feminist Porn"
February 7, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a supporter of Revolution newspaper and Stop Patriarchy:
Recently a question was posed to people working with the initiative to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women that I thought needed both a basic answer along with some deeper response. This is about the idea of "feminist porn" and whether any kind of porn can be "empowering to women." In taking out this initiative we've encountered this question frequently, and it is something that really needs to be debated out, especially among progressive and liberal-minded people. Please send your own comments, thoughts, questions, or experiences via the comment link at the end of this article.
Question: Well, what about feminist porn, isn't that empowering for women? Aren't there forms of porn that are geared toward women that you would want to embrace? Why can't you "re-imagine" porn?
Answer: In a word, no: "Feminist porn" is not empowering, and it actually limits the scope of women's liberation to women being "empowered" to own their own bodies as a commodity and to "get more" for themselves, which rests on the majority of women continuing to be enslaved. Even within so-called feminist porn and "sex-positive" porn it's clear that there are still relations of domination and subordination, and while that porn is maybe more outside of the traditional patriarchal gender roles, it still reinforces a mentality of master and slave.
Furthermore, this so-called feminist porn and the upholding of "some porn" actually dovetails with and supports mainstream pornography, which is harmful, and trains all of society to see women as objects for the sexual pleasure, plunder, and conquest of men. The idea that any kind of porn is empowering—either for individual women or for women as an oppressed group—is a straight-up lie. No kind of porn is empowering, and as long as anyone's body is commodified and objectified in this way, as long as women's bodies are up for sale, all women will continue to be enslaved and degraded. All this is why no one can really "re-purpose" or "re-imagine" porn in a more "feminist" way. We need an entirely different and much more positive vision of sex and the liberation of half of humanity than the approach of "sex-positive" feminists/pornographers. And (thankfully!) sex is different than porn, which is why we say "If you can't imagine sex without porn, you're fucked!"
I think that it's really important to get into discussion of this question because there is a great deal of confusion about this, including especially within more progressive sections of people. Also in academia there has been a radical shift from "women's studies" to "gender studies" and this has entailed a very strong adherence to the "sex-positive" or what amounts to a pro-pornography view. For more on this, there is a sharp polemic from Sunsara: Slavery by Another Name: Sex Work and the "Empowerment" Charade in Gender Studies. An Open Letter on Sexual Subjugation and Intellectual Rationalization. It's fairly short, and fucking right on.
Then this book that was being called into this discussion of this question (The Feminist Porn Book), well, I recognize some of the authors, and they are fairly well-known pornographers...yes, of the so-called feminist variety, but they are acting within the sex-industry, and their "re-imagining" of porn really is not that different from mainstream porn, and it is just not what is needed to actually liberate women. And that's not their goal, they are not fighting for women to be liberated...all they are really fighting for is for some women (including themselves as producers of porn) to get a bigger cut, a bigger "slice of the pie." And that rests on the majority of women continuing to be enslaved.
I think also that the idea of Stop Patriarchy being a "group against all porn, or some porn, etc." is not entirely accurate to what the initiative is about. Or maybe a better way to put it is that this isn't about "our narrative" vs. the "narrative of the feminist pornographers and pro-porn feminists." This is about opening up a society-wide and urgently needed debate and acting now to stop the war on women. It isn't just that "our thing" is to take a stand against porn, and for abortion, even though that is part of what we do, and how it might be seen by people. The point here is to engage the question of "what is the reality of life for women—literally half of humanity? How are women under attack, and how do we act to STOP the attacks, the whole war, on women?" And the question of porn/sexual violence/rape is central to answering those questions and that call to action. And I think that we have to engage and understand and discuss this question amongst ourselves if ever we hope to act and lead others to act in that kind of capacity, and on the scale that is so desperately required to put an end to porn and patriarchy.
In front of a porn store in downtown New York City, during the ten days of Take Patriarchy by Storm, August 4-14, 2012.
Photo: Li Onesto/Revolution
To give an example of this, when I first got really involved with this initiative, I had not firmly made up my mind about whether porn was truly harmful to women. I had previously engaged some "sex-positive" ideas and books and was very influenced by Carol Queen, Tristen Taromino, and some of the other pornographers. I had engaged some of the thinking of people that understand the harm of pornography (Robert Jensen, Gail Dines, Ariel Levy, Pamela Paul, as well as the Revolutionary Communist Party, Bob Avakian, and Sunsara Taylor), so I was starting to more deeply question and think through this, but I don't think I had entirely broken through to understand why porn is so harmful on a societal level, or even on an individual level. Certainly I didn't firmly understand or want to fight against porn and the ideas porn promotes. It wasn't until I took part in Taking Patriarchy by Storm in NYC in the summer of 2012 that I understood how much of a farce the "sex-positive" line really is. And I went with the expectation that I would probably come out understanding the porn question differently than I did....but I really had no idea going into it what that would come to mean.
Taking Patriarchy by Storm was really and incredibly transformative, a whole series of activities, actions, events, and protests that helped me to "get" on a visceral level exactly how much I, and women overall, have been degraded by porn, and including through this idea of it being a form of empowerment. Even as I'm writing this, I don't feel like I can fully capture in words what that experience was like for me. It was like all my thoughts on porn, sex, women's roles, my self-esteem, the daily "grind" of patriarchy, experiences of sexual harassment and coercion, and the ideas on how women could be under socialism, and I'm sure a lot of other things...they were all twisted and snarled, and I couldn't find a way to untangle and sort through that big ball of shit and bullshit. Yet through that 10-day-long stretch, I started to, and saw others—even others that had been revolutionary communists for fucking years—they were starting to sort through some of their own "balls of shit" in a different way than they had ever been able to do before.
One of the moments that stands out for me is when a group of us, some 20-25 people stormed into Hooters, chanting, yelling, holding signs, holding up caution tape that read: "Danger: Crimes Against Women," and generally disrupting the fuck out of the "norm" of Hooters....it just hit me very hard....Hooters is not even "as bad" as most of what's in a porn store...but the experience of that--of being part of a group forcefully and in-your-face-motherfuckers—rejecting everything that Hooters is all about...damn. It was an incredibly powerful moment, at the end of it I was fucking crying, I just could not hold back the tears....the tears were about years and years of conversation at the dinner table with my dad spewing misogynist "jokes" and bullshit, putting down females in general and my mom specifically, and sometimes my sister and I too....it was years of feeling like I didn't matter, that I'd never be that great at anything I tried to do, so why try to do anything of significance??....it was my whole childhood/adolescence, more than half my life, that I felt like I could see clearly for the first time. It was years of minimizing my own pain, in the face of my best friend being trafficked and raped by her uncle, in the face of several of my friends having babies at 17, one of whom was beaten repeatedly and severely by her husband-who she was married to at the age of 16. In the face of horrors like that, my experiences didn't seem "that bad." After all, I hadn't been raped, not even once, much less repeatedly, or forced into being a mother, or beaten by someone who professed to love me....but after storming into Hooters, it DID seem bad, it seemed horrific, and unjust, and unnecessary, and absolutely coming from the same source as what my friends experienced. I no longer saw it as "not that bad" or somehow in competition with what other women experienced. And if I couldn't see Hooters and those experiences in the same light, I definitely could not see porn in the same way. That was the day I broke through some denial, internalized oppression, and could see, and really deeply "get it."
And I think that there needs to be an argument made to those who are muddled in their thoughts and feelings about porn—ok, so you don't agree or have unity on the idea of porn being harmful, in fact being a form of violence against women, well, who have you read, and what do you understand about this question already? Have you really looked into this, not just on an individual level, but a societal level, looking deeply at objective reality, have you really been scientific in your method when you've considered whether or not porn is harmful???
And also, we should put the challenge out, to come along with us for a bit....actually come out with us to the strip club, the porn stores, the Hooters, be part of investigating this, and acting against this now, and make up your mind as you experience being part of a group that is forcefully and uncompromisingly confronting the reality of the harm of porn/sexual violence/rape and acting against it. Come out and hear the mic checks, hear the stories of women that tell us about being raped and then getting into prostitution because "I'm already getting fucked, I might as well get some money out of it." Come out with us and discuss this with people, including men, who literally have no other space in which to talk about this in a way that isn't about accepting and reinforcing traditional patriarchy, and the horrors that worldview creates.
Come out and act to end the whole war on women, and in the process lets talk with each other, and with the people that we meet on the streets and at events and protests, let's have an approach of being a team of scientists out to radically transform the world in the interests of the majority of humanity—let's change the world in the interest of liberating women and emancipating all of humanity-—the world doesn't have to be this way! It is fucked up right now, but the world does not have to be set up to enforce and reinforce the interests of the pimps, the pornographers, and the patriarchs. We have to go out sharply, with an uncompromising approach, and with a scientific method, because the lives and futures of women is what's at stake, but we also have to do this in a way that enables people to walk through, and helps them to unravel, some of their "big balls of shit and bullshit." There is much of this unraveling that needs to be done, and we are more than capable of engaging this, growing this movement, and acting now—with the aim of ending porn and patriarchy.
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