Nice.
heh, I appreciated this. Thank you.
Wow, Witchy still swings by here? Awesome! Much love, I'm glad you liked it.
What kind of woeful sad cretin would need to watch a drama before they could freely converse with their partner? Don't people just kind of learn to talk, then in turn learn to converse, and improve with each tentative experience?
No, actually most people learn to converse by watching others do it, and if they are brought up in a society where certain conversation topics are off limit, they are not likely to know how to discuss those topics. For a person like that, watching a drama where people discuss those things could be somewhat helpful.
Is your point that pornography is actually useful, despite its harms, because it acts as a source of information on human sexuality - an otherwise taboo topic?
That is the skeleton of a good argument, yes, but pornography is about as informative on sexuality as is Yahoo!Answers. Also (item!) women are raped to make it. The cultural system that makes frank discussion of sexuality a taboo is the same system that produces (and consumes) pornography, and one sex benefits more from this than the other.
What are you arguing for?
Mostly, I just think that was a pretty bad analogy and that the assumption behind it, (that people always just naturally learn to have good sex) was equally bad. While I don't think porn is good sex education, your analogy pretty much writes off any outside source a couple might turn to, as well as insulting people who don't converse easily, which is not as outlandish a notion as you may think.
As for the harms of pornography, having seen a lot of arguments from both sides, I am not convinced that pornography itself has especially great harms or benefits compared to other forms of either labor or media.
What kind of woeful sad cretin would need to watch a drama before they could freely converse with their partner? Don't people just kind of learn to talk, then in turn learn to converse, and improve with each tentative experience?
Uh... a whole bunch of people who aren't exactly and perfectly neurotypical, actually. But hey, thanks for the overwhelming ableism.
I can understand this post would seem bizarre if you didn't think pornography was particularly harmful. I sort of just took it as read that it was. Primarily to the women involved in its production but also - importantly - to women and feminised groups in general as it informs attitudes about sexuality that don't exactly have the interests of women at heart. I tend more toward supporting arguments that it eroticises power differential and dominance - mainstreaming a conception of sexuality that, I believe, is (or 'should'?) be rare if nonexistent, all other things being equal.
And Hex - Ah, yeah I really put my foot in it there. The ableism wasn't intentional, but it's definitely there. This post wasn't written with much forethought, so I'll watch that in future. I appreciate the heads up, though.
I don't know whether your pointing this out was also intended to be an argument in favour of the use of pornography as instruction for sexual technique. I won't assume what you meant to argue, if anything, but 9-2 has a good series up about pornography - certainly better than anything I'll be producing any time soon. It's worth checking out.
No, it wasn't. I think pornography is dreadful sex ed. Unfortunately, I think that for a lot of people who struggle with similar issues to those brought up in relation to your communication analogy, it seems like the best option they have.
I've read 9-2's porn series. However, the issue here is that the two sides of the feminist porn wars are basically putting forth two different versions of reality and accusing the other side of lying or distorting the truth.
Personally, I find Renegade Evolution and Ernest Greene's account of things to be more credible sounding than Gail Dines or any of the other anti-porn folks. This is partly because they address the arguments of their opponents directly and in detail, (see Renegade Evolution's point-by-point response to Dines' slideshow or Ernest Greene's four-part response to the recent documentary "The Price of Pleasure"), and partly because when I compare what each party says about their opponent's arguments to the argument they are describing, the "pro-porn" side side comes off as a heck of a lot more honest. If someone cannot even be honest about what their opponent is saying, why should I trust any of their other claims?
One thing I do find interesting about 9-2's argument is her claims about porn reinforcing the virgin-whore dichotomy. On one hand I can see where she is coming from to some degree with some of the clips and descriptions of porn films I have seen. On the other hand, being fed up with the virgin-whore dichotomy is exactly why I became interested in the sex worker rights movement in the first place. Personally speaking, I feel that reading $pread magazine was what finally dealt the death blow to my own internalized virgin-whore dichotomy.
I think both feminist media criticism and fair labor and human rights standards need to be applied to porn, but I do not see is as abusive to the actresses by definition, nor do I see a generalized fight against porn as especially productive when it comes to fighting sexism in society. I have been thinking lately that a lot of what porn gets blamed for here is more the result of a lack of good sex education than anything else. The former combined with certain types of porn and general sexist attitudes might be worst than any of these things alone, but of those three elements, I think porn is the least important. I also suspect that many feminists target porn because it is the easiest of the three to target. All you have to do is appeal to the same sex-phobia that leads to the lack of sex education while justifying squeamishness around other people's sexual fetishes, and having watched both Gail Dines' anti-porn presentation and "The Price of Pleasure," I think that is exactly what both of them are doing! To be clear, I am not saying that all anti-porners are prudes, I am saying that many of the most prominent and respected ones take advantage of and re-enforce our society's sex-phobia, and I think said sex-phobia does more to oppress women than any porn movie ever could.
I also think a lot of the anti-porn people cross a certain line between acknowledging that no decision is made in a vacuume and completely dismissing the voices of a whole class of
Djiril - haloscan cut your comment short. Can you re-post the rest of it?
Alright... From the cutoff paragraph:
I also think a lot of the anti-porn people cross a certain line between acknowledging that no decision is made in a vacuume and completely dismissing the voices of a whole class of people (women who currently work in porn.)
I am not trying to dismiss anyone who has had a bad experience, but neither am I willing to dismiss women like RenEv, who claims to have found her dream job in gonzo. I also reject the premise that the interests of people who genuinely are victims are mutually exclusive with the interests of people who are not.
Sorry I've been lagging so much in reply; I'm tracking down and watching The Price of Pleasure, and I hadn't read RenEv's responses either - I'm not really conversant in their particular arguments yet.
I'll reply to you in blog rather than in comments, too. This stuff deserves serious attention, which unfortunately means my reply might take a few more days.
'Few more days'. Heh. Anyway, there are plenty more thoughts arising from this than I thought there were. Also I'm not really confident that presenting an argument is the best approach here. At least it's not likely I got anybody's hopes up. :)
Ok, but...there is more to feminism than porn, yes? I'm getting burned out on the porn wars. Have we lost focus?
Damn, I'm tired.
I wrote this post in, like, 2007, so it's nice to get comments.
I think it's a good thing that the porn wars heat up again from time to time - it's a big debate, and it burns people out, but that never means it's been settled. Good to see people return to the fray.
Uh, that was me. Cbf editing the previous comment, though.
Commenting by HaloScan
