Porn, porn, porn

Between the themes for January (bodies) and February (sexualities), there lies an ages-old feminist conundrum that was briefly mentioned in Emily's recent post: porn. Emily's post cast all porn in a negative light, but I'd like to suggest a more nuanced view of porn. Whether it's a Playboy subscription, some time spent at Live8, or meeting sex workers in Vegas, there are thousands of options for people curious about, excited by, or interested in working in the sex trade in some capacity. It's a ridiculously diverse facet of human culture- and I do mean human, since some form of stimulation-for-hire exists in every human culture on the planet. For this article, I'm planning on talking exclusively about porn- video and print stimulation- and I'm planning on starting with some rather sharp retorts to the ridiculous assumptions in Twisty's article.

First and foremost, before I start getting into feminist and cultural theories, I want to clarify a glaring error that Twisty made when she stated that "The masturbators you describe [men fantasizing about attractive women] are porn addicts." This statement is so many kinds of wrong that I was actually up late fuming about it. Sex addictions come in many forms, including addictions to pornography. The key term is addict. By definition, someone who is an addict experiences an overwhelming compulsion to perform their addicted behaviour whenever triggered by circumstance- in this case, by sexual arousal. In the last six years, I've seen some pretty impressive types of sexual addiction, including someone who spent $700 on internet pornography instead of buying his children new eyeglasses and winter coats. THAT is a porn addict. Simply fantasizing about the attractive people you meet, which is a behaviour that's common to men, women, and folks all along the gender spectrum all over the world, doesn't constitute a porn addiction. Calling it one does a disservice to the folks out there who really do become consumed, as it were, by porn. It minimizes the seriousness of actual addictions.

Moving on.

Is porn an inherently anti-feminist and oppressive commodity? I don't think anyone has The Correct Answer for this- we all just think we do, myself included- but personally, I don't think it is. For starters, porn is incredibly diverse, as commodities go. How many of you are big enough internet nerds to have heard of Rule 34? Simply put, the Rule states that "if you can think of it, there's porn for it." It doesn't just refer to behaviour (i.e. "I'm thinking of two people having sex in a wagon in a tower!"). It refers to every aspect of your fantasy or thought, to the extent where you have to specify what the people look like, what the sex is that they're having, what the wagon looks like, what the tower looks like, if it's day or night, etc. It gets more creative from there. Add a third person. Or add a sex toy. Add a food. Add some onlookers. All too often when we talk about "porn," what we mean are the things I referred to in the beginning of this piece: Playboy, Hustler, Girls Gone Wild, and anything involving Tila Tequila or Jenna Jameson. It's way too easy for feminists in the mainstream (and, for that matter, a lot of non-feminists) to forget that judging porn by these mainstays is akin to judging the entire comedic film industry by the works of Will Ferrell. They might be wildly popular, but it's such a limited sample that any conclusions drawn from it are really invalid.

Let's consider some examples of how pornography is used to further ostensibly feminist goals. One of my favourite podcasts of all time, Dykes on Mykes out of Montreal, dedicated a fabulous episode to interviews with porn director Shine Louise Houton and DIY web porn director Bren Ryder, both of whom focus on making pornography that appeals to audiences that aren't always acknowledged by the mainstream porn industry. Ryder's company, Good Dyke Porn, in part addresses the fact that lesbianism is often co-opted by mainstream porn; rather than exhibiting lesbians for consumption by a heterosexual male gaze, Ryder's lesbian porn is made to titlillate lesbians. I think this is important for two reasons. First, it really draws attention to the fact that sexuality can be used in porn in multiple ways and to attract the attention of multiple audiences, but second, and possibly more importantly, it does a lot to change the terms of the Great Porn Debate.

Think about it. When Twisty was discussing porn as a commodity whereby individuals were consumed by a viewer's gaze, she presumed that the individuals being consumed were women, and the consumers were men. Why does the consumer/audience/gazer have to be male? Furthermore, why does it have to be heterosexual male? When Jacques Lacan first brought the concept of the Gaze into discussions of cultural texts and subsequent meanings, and Laura Mulvey posited the concept of the Male Gaze, the presumption was established that film, in particular, is only marketed to a male audience, and females or women who happen to be part of the audience aren't permitted to Gaze upon the film as active, independent agents. Mulvey essentially states that all contemporary films are inherently exploitative because they set the male viewer up to "take" a film's female star as his own personal sex object, and female viewers are required to adopt the male viewer's perspective in order to enjoy the film. In some ways this has been a very useful theory for film analysis, including analysis of porn films, because it highlights the ways in which male privilege invisibly makes the rules for expected storylines and behaviour of both characters and audiences. After all- the Bechdel analysis exists for a reason! At the same time, however, it really doesn't allow for new spaces to be created in the film industry in which other arrangements are explored and set up for an alternative audience. This is where sites like Good Dyke Porn challenge Mulvey's Male Gaze and offer us opportunities to try new viewing structures- complete with reenvisioned (and potentially infinitely flexible) power dynamics. It's rather difficult to have a Male Gaze when a film and its audience are Female.

This is another point in feminist porn debates that has bothered me repeatedly. When discussing pornography in a negative light, it's very easy to talk about exploitative working conditions, distributions that are beyond the actors' control, unrealistic body standards, and the setting of dangerous expectations about human sexual behaviour. These aren't unrealistic arguments, by any means- exploitation in the sex industry is definitely a problem, and it's something that a restructuring of the industry (such as what's happening in the fringes of porn) could do a lot to redress. Above all, however, the anti-porn narrative tends to focus on the power that (male) controllers of the industry exert over (female) employees, and how that dynamic plays out beyond the studio or DVD. What about the power of being a performer? What about the power to "normalize" bodies that are often ostracized or desexualized? What about the simple power that comes from being sexual and enjoying it? What about the power of changing definitions of good vs. bad female behaviour? What about the power of being a female director in a male-dominated portion of film industry? And so on and so forth. There are too many types of power involved, with too many complicated dynamics, to assume a simple one-sided power dynamic that inherently victimizes women. ESPECIALLY when that assumption denies voluntary porn participants the ability to decide for themselves how they feel about and perceive their industry.

Finally, I'd like to address the challenge that moral codes pose to pornography- what I think Twisty was probably intending to address with her comment about so-called "porn addicts." One of the best qualities of porn as a totality, in my opinion, is that it does a lot to dispell the myth that there's only one human sexuality, or that sexuality is only defined by who you like to sleep with (meaning gay, straight, or bi). Lacan's discussion of fantasy, as explained by Zizek, is a useful tool for unravelling this:

For Lacan, fantasy provides an answer to the enigma of Other's desire. The first thing to note about fantasy is that it literally teaches us how to desire: fantasy does not mean that, when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the deadlock of our sexuality designated by Lacan in his paradoxical statement "there is no sexual relationship": there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relationship with one's partner. Every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a "private" formula for the sexual relationship - the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as the partner fits this formula.

Essentially, Lacan argues, everyone fantasizes because it's scary for us to admit that our "perfect match" doesn't exist. The reality of relationships, particularly sexual ones, is so "traumatic in its breath-taking intensity" that "a sexual relation, in order to function, has to be screened through some fantasy." Moreover, upon an apparent attainment of that fantasy, we tend to lose interest- in part because the thrill of the fantasy is that we secretly believe that it's unknowable and unattainable.

I use this as a tool for understanding human sexuality because porn plays a very particular role: namely, that of fantasy. Actors are hired to portay parts and perform acts in settings that viewers find arousing simply because they aren't what we have. In this way, porn offers an opportunity for viewers to identify with actors in multiple ways. One way, of course, is the classic interpretation of "males are the sexual aggressors, females are the sexual passives." Another way to interpret it, however, is that it's an opportunity for any viewer to identify with the director, or the person guiding and controlling the fantasy as played by the actors. Viewed in this light, porn is what's already happening in our heads. Let's face it: everyone fantasizes about something, sexual or otherwise, and part of the point of fantasizing (say, about a promotion) is that the fantasy is entirely what you, the fantasizer, desire- whether or not it's about reality. In that sense, fantasies of any sort are always inherently exploitative because the people doing the fantasizing are dreaming of a world where no one besides themselves has any volition whatsoever. Another way of looking at this, of course, is to say that fantasy isn't reality for a reason: it's an escape from reality, an opportunity to relax from the constant rule-making and -breaking that we live with.

The rebuttal, of course, is the argument that there's a link between amount or type of porn watched and subsequent behaviour. I'd like to see the studies (please, nothing done prior to 1995). When people point to porn as their reasons for exploiting or assaulting or raping someone, or when a real-life assault mirrors a magazine spread (as has happened), we're doing our communities a disservice by blaming the porn. The magazine spread may have inspired the setting, but the fact remains that the people who committed the rape were sexual predators looking for an(y) opportunity. Currently, the data that exists from studies, as compiled by the National Online Resource Centre for Violence Against Women, makes conflicting observations. One author, Dr. Robert Jensen, notes that "men predisposed toward violence are most likely to show effects from viewing pornography and that men not predisposed are unlikely to show effects," suggesting that porn is exacerbating and not causing the problem, but then goes on to cite narratives from individuals he's interviewed who pointed to porn as a component of their abuse or assault. Additionally, his article focuses on specific types of porn- heterosexual, violent, male-aggressive- and doesn't examine how different types of porn interact with personalities and predilections. Finally, of course, he doesn't emphasize the key of his quotes: that the people who were citing porn in their accounts of abuse were talking about situations where porn was used as a weapon. On that point, I think all feminists can agree: sex, sexuality, and fantasy should never be used as a means of hurting or controlling someone. To me, this research suggests a need for a new discourse on fantasy, instead of suggesting that particular expressions of fantasy (read: porn) should be outlawed.

On a final note, I'd like to reemphasize that we need to stop demonizing people who watch porn as "addicts" or as though they're all sexual predators, and we need to stop patronizing porn actors and models as though they're all victims. I watch porn. My partner watches porn. My friends watch porn. Many of them even make porn. None of us are addicted, sick, perpetrators, or victims. We're adults who enjoy particular forms of fantasy engagement. Our dialogue about porn needs to stop this cycle that makes porn bad and villifies individuals for their predilections. It needs to take a more honest look at porn: one that includes condemnation of exploitative working conditions and unjust laws, but one that also includes a celebration of the empowering aspects of porn. It also needs to take an honest look at how we relate to porn- blaming it, hiding it, using it as a weapon- and start a discussion of how we can change that.