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Women, Porn and the F-word

Nov 28, 2009 - 1:57:32 PM

"Whenever a taboo is broken," Henry Miller once told an interviewer from the Paris Review "something good happens, something vitalizing." Taboo-breaking is a way of laying the truth bare, of removing socially-imposed boundaries in order to see things as they really are. From the earliest stag films to the wealth of magazines, films and online content available today, pornography has always operated at the fringes of society and challenged each generation's preconceptions of what is sexually – and morally – acceptable. Taboos are, after all, "only hangovers" Miller reminds us, only "the product of diseased minds, of fearsome people who haven't the courage to live."

To say that pornography is vitalizing in this sense is to assume that it necessarily tells the truth about male and female sexuality. Many women feel that it does. Others, however, argue that it does the opposite. Many feminists – that dirtiest of words – would go further and say that in a cash-rich industry run largely by men for men, porn can neither be relied on to tell the truth about women or be expected to be in any sense revolutionary. Yet women work in the porn industry, women watch the material produced by the porn industry and women have also campaigned against the censorship of that industry. How can this make sense?

The truth is that it doesn't. Women are confused about pornography, and feminists are deeply divided by it. The traditional feminist position – and the one most frequently associated with the feminist movement – is vehemently anti-porn and pro-censorship. It sees mainstream pornography as part of a patriarchal discourse, a dialogue between men about women. Whilst women may overhear themselves being talked about, they are never able to be participants in the conversation. This exclusion is, of itself, reductive and objectifying: the viewer is invited to experience the woman being experienced, to part her legs. As her pleasure is commodified, so her sense of her own sexuality becomes warped. "One of the things that pornography has done," writes radical feminist Angela Dworkin, "is that it's changed the way women experience their bodies so that sex is what you look like, not what you touch or what you feel and do."

More disturbing still, these women argue, is the recurrent theme of humiliation and violence that accompanies this objectification. Its hard to disagree. Enter any number of porn sites for offers of ‘tight sluts', ‘dirty bitches' and ‘nasty girls who like to fuck.' Pick up Playboy for one of several rape scene photoshoots. Hustler for jokes about and cartoons of sexual violence. Gag Factor, one of the most popular websites in mainstream ‘gonzo porn', for ‘new whores degraded every Wednesday.' The list goes on. And on. And on. This pervasive sense of misogyny is damaging both because of the kind of feelings it unleashes against women, but also because of the way it conditions both male and female sexuality.

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