Porn again

I'm so going to make up T-shirts that say that.

Anyway, there's an article on Alternet today about "revisiting" the porn debates, trying to find a middle ground between the right-wingers, who view banning porn as a larger part of creating a hostile enviroment to sexuality, women's in particular and criticizing the porn industry as it stands for its rampant misogyny. Okay, I'm game. After all, as the article points out, there is some really upsetting and vile porn out there, and a lot of it is really popular.

One of the most popular booths at the expo was for the BangBus, which consistently drew large crowds of almost entirely male fans. What's the BangBus concept? One of the producers explained that the videos show men in a large van, picking up what appear to be women on the streets, talking them into having sex, and then degrading them in some way – dropping them off in desolate places, not giving them money promised, or throwing their belongings out the door.

Yeah, those videos are awful. I saw one once and I was pretty upset at the glee the actors took in degrading the actress. I thought it was particularly stupid, too, because the whole point of the fantasy to most of the people who like these videos is the idea of anonymous, no-strings sex. There's nothing inherently degrading to women about the fantasy of anonymous sex, but the producers seem to think that they might as well toss the degradation in, probably because the average porn consumer will tolerate it.

But in the end, I was just as frustrated with this article as I am with nearly every feminist critique of porn that I read. I just don't buy that sexual explicitness somehow creates a favorable atmosphere to misogyny. Yes, women in much of porn are portrayed as mere objects to be bent to men's will, and yes the only emotion they show is their delight in being put through whatever rigors fulfill the male fantasy, even if it's actually painful or unpleasant for women. But so do many movies of any genre.

Action films are particularly repulsive in their misogyny, and I would say that a far greater percentage of them have misogynistic themes than porn. For instance, take the popular scene in many an action film where a woman with some position of authority is challenged by our hero in front of a large group of people that she's speaking to. It's not enough, generally, to offer his opinion. No, there's a large dollop of humiliation and ridicule involved. Her reaction? Yep, she fucks him. Top Gun is the prime example of this fantasy played out in a movie and offered up to children as entertainment.

And don't get me started on the huge numbers of Michael Douglas movies that make me want to barf. How many movies has that man been in that demonstrated that women really are predators looking to suck the lifeblood out of innocent men? One could even argue that regular movies with sexist themes have more of an impact, because the audience of regular movies tends to read them as a whole whereas the porn-viewing audience is remarkably good at pulling out what they like and ignoring the rest. (Yea, fast-forward button!)

My concern is this--by singling out misogyny in porn without basing it in a larger context where misogynist themes are coming at us from all angles, it seems like, especially to average readers not well-versed in feminist thought, that the writer is saying that somehow sex and sexual explicitness are inherently degrading to women. I always feel that way when I read articles like this one, and I'm personally very insulted. The writer, Chyng Sun, says that she wants an avenue where porn is singled out for criticism without joining the ranks of those who would squelch ordinary people's sexual rights, but how exactly would that work?

I think that the only solution is to create sexually explicit work that portrays female sexual agency and desire. Which of course lots of people are doing. (Go Trish!) Simply criticizing porn without offering alternatives is pretty much going to be interpreted by a larger audience, including myself, as censorship of people's fantasies and desires. Maybe I come from this from a different angle--I keep thinking of how women in rock music when I was a young teenager rebelled against the stifling sexism of the punk scene and, instead of just writing off rock as inherently sexist, created their own product. There was a genuine ripple effect from that and now there is significantly less resistance to women in music than there was when I was a teenager.

Update: After finishing this, I saw that Lauren at Feministe wrote about the subject, too.