When 'protection' becomes condescension

Debates have been raging between feminists on Twitter and beyond about the ethics of 'rape porn' and how best to address the alleged harm that it causes. One of the most important distinctions to make before going any further is to state that I am not talking about the filming of actual sexual assaults, which as the excellent Stavvers points out, is never defensible. It's porn which depicts simulated sexual violence which is the topic of controversy, and as this headline today implies, condemning it entails a curious view of women who act in or enjoy 'violent' porn.

 

Headline - "Online porn: animals have more rights than women, say campaigners."

 

Subheading - "Animals and corpses have more rights than girls to protection from being used for internet pornography, a coalition of women’s groups warns. "

 

Arrrgh. Sensationalist much? It's catchy, I'll give them that. But there's actually nothing in this article that's in any way shocking. All it states is that female porn actors over 18 are free to participate in pornography that simulates rape or violence. Nowhere does it state that they are coerced. So far, so legal. Then it states that, somewhat bleeding obviously, it's not legal to use animals or dead people in porn, because they can't consent.

 

Have I missed something here? Porn is wrong because it only employs people who can consent?

 

The usual arguments are deployed here. It's stated that violent porn causes 'harm', that old nebulous concept. No evidence is cited, nor is the phrase 'harm' quantified any further, although all research I have encountered, even studies which most strongly draws a link between porn and harm, still states that findings are 'limited in their interpretive value' and says "Potential associations between pornography and pathological behaviour are not clear." Then there's the emotive 'porn creates paedophiles' line, where it's implied that the sexual abuse and murder of April Jones and Tia Sharp could somehow have been prevented by a harsher crackdown in internet porn. This is an utterly fallacious argument, and is entirely irrelevant to the subject of the article since the murderers of these two girls viewed porn involving children, which is already illegal. The abuse of children being filmed for sexual gratification is simply not comparable to the filming of consensual sexual behaviour between adults. They are as different as filming a savage beating and filming a stage fight for a Hollywood movie. One is a criminal offence, the other is theatre.

Which brings me on to the demand that the government "close a loophole in the pornography legislation which allows the lawful possession in England and Wales of pornographic images that depict rape, so long as the actors are over 18.” OK. Say we tried that. Do we then censor all films that show rape scenes? Because I can see my DVD collection suddenly getting sliced in half. Thelma and Louise, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, This is England and even A Streetcar Named Desire would immediately have to be jettisoned. Because they show rape, and rape is bad, and watching rape makes you, if not more accepting of rape, then more likely to rape, right? Since crime drama also loves to fetishise violence against women, with the regular rapes, beatings and murders of attractive young women, they would all have to be taken off our screens, especially 'Hey look, another scantily clad dead prostitute on a slab!' CSI.

Hmmm. Then I suppose we'd better move on to literature. 50 Shades of Grey? Gone. Millions of books pulped - we could construct a papier mache Buckingham Palace out of all the destroyed copies. The Story of O? God, that would have to be BURNED, it's so incendiary, with its scenes of bondage, branding, piercing and orifice stretching. American Psycho? Banished to outer space. A M Homes (who incidentally was just awarded the Women's Prize for Fiction) would see her early novel, The End of Alice, which contains scenes of explicit paedophilia, destroyed with nuclear devices, so potentially 'harmful' such a book must be.

 

And I can't imagine there'd be much left on the GCSE and A Level English Literature syllabus after we start removing everything that depicts or eroticises sexual violence. Angela Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber is so full of bestiality, necrophilia and violence that I'm amazed I'm not a total sexual deviant after teaching it to 18 year olds every year. And as for good old Shakespeare? Jeez, where to start. With The Two Gentlemen of Verona reminding women it's fine to accept a man's hand after he's attempted to rape you, or Titus Andronicus teaching our kids that raping a woman then cutting off her hands and tongue is acceptable, even sexy, behaviour, it's clear that The Bard's works would have to be chopped and censored until we only had A Midsummer Night's Dream left (but wait, is it bestiality when Bottom falls in love with Titania while he has a donkey's head? Arrrghh...)

 

And as for music videos? Well, only yesterday I was watching Robin Thicke tug a barely-clothed woman around the room by her hair, while singing 'You're an animal...' in the video for his latest song, Blurred Lines. So if 'rape porn' has got to go, consistency dictates we've got to get rid of that shite too, right?

 

Flippancy aside, while I don't deny that the smorgasbord of sexually violent images that are easily accessible is not unproblematic, I will say that the muddled thinking demonstrated by this article and the campaign it refers to is not going to produce any solutions. Assuming that adult porn is in any way equivalent to child porn, that porn per se is inherently negative and harmful to women (ignoring the women who participate in and/or watch and enjoy it) and that simulated rape must be the same as real rape, or lead to real rape, will only result in 'Think of the CHILDREN!!' hysterical calls for censorship. And thanks to Prohibition, we all know how well outright banning things works.

 

Today's article also screams to me how even those who claim to be 'on the side of women' while condemning porn/violent porn, are only capable of viewing women as victims or sluts. Saying "animals and dead people are better protected than women and girls" implies that the women in porn need the same kind of protection as female children, and are somehow indistinguishable from other groups that can't consent to sex. While women in porn certainly need and deserve the same kind of protection that anyone in a workplace deserves, I doubt this is what campaigners are referring to. What I feel they really mean is protection from 'sexual acts I personally find distasteful, and can't imagine anyone else enjoying or choosing'. And that's just patronising, small-minded BS. I find it as patronising as when radical feminists state there's no way a woman could 'truly' enjoy being tied up, gagged, spanked, slapped or called names as part of sexual role play, when I know full well I enjoy all those things and more.

I remember reading an extract by anti-porn feminist Gail Dines where she wrote how she thought a porn scene of double penetration looked painful, and she couldn't imagine any woman finding it pleasurable. My immediate thought was 'Maybe you need to get out more lady, the female body is amazingly adaptable and many, many women [including the writer Colette, who wrote about that very sexual act in her erotica decades ago] would disagree strongly that this act isn't enjoyable."' While Dines is entitled to her view, I don't believe it deserves more weight than that of someone who believes the opposite, nor do I believe that such views should be used to effect legislation.

 

Yes, it troubles me when a friend tells me of other girls her age being shocked that their sexual partners think it's normal to throttle them or spit on them during sex. Yes, it upsets me to think of my 6 year old cousin stumbling across extreme porn on his mum's iPad. But pushing the aspects of our media culture that we dislike into dark corners is no solution. Neither is pushing adult women into the same bracket as vulnerable children - didn't we spend most of the 1800s fighting for our right to be distinguished from under-18s? We might think we are 'protecting' women by standing up and saying that rape porn causes harm, but actually we're not that far away from absolving rapists of responsibility. What's really the difference between saying a short skirt causes rape and saying an internet video causes rape, when both shift blame away from the attacker, and on to outside influences? If I go out in to the streets and force someone to fellate a piece of KFC, can I get Matthew McConaughey's recent film Killer Joe banned too, because it gave me the idea? Or should I perhaps take responsibility for my own actions?

 

Just a radical idea there.

 

Strongly recommended reading: The Fantasy of Acceptable Non-Consent by Stacey May Fowles

 

Related rants by me:

Violent porn doesn't cause murder

50 Shades of Kink-Shaming

Thoughts on feminism and the politics of kink

No good can come of watching the Virgin TV channel...

...but hey, sometimes a girl gets bored late at night and flicks over. And what do Virgin like to show at night? Programmes all about sex, loosely disguised in the form of documentaries. I knew I was probably heading for trouble selecting 'Why Men Watch Porn', but it wasn't as horrific as it could have been. The attitude was pretty predictable, starting from the perspective that porn is fine and groovy, with no discussion of its potential to harm women, and that consuming it is 'just something normal guys do'. It was even mildly interesting to watch the results of a study involving men of different age groups rating their interest in different types of porn - and somewhat heartening to see men from all the age groups stating their lack of interest in using it. The reaction of the men's (female) partners to what the study 'revealed' about their sexual tastes was a bit tiresome - the women seemed happy to make excuses for male consumption of porn viz arguments that 'men are just wired differently', that women can distract themselves with 'a bath or a book' or that when we 'get the horn', we're capable of waiting for satisfaction, whereas men have to be satisfied Right Now, Dammit. I thought the women's words were evidence of just how internalised the modern stance on porn has become, that being: it's fine, men need it, we couldn't possibly understand because we're women, there's no point trying to argue against it. I also wondered if any of these women had ever 'had the horn' to the point where a bath or a book just wouldn't do it, and only a date with Ms Right Hand would suffice - cos I know have!

What was probably most dismaying though, was the final throwaway 'stat', which was that 32% of men surveyed thought porn reduced sex crime. That's an argument I get reeeal tired of hearing, simply because it seems to rely on a fatal misunderstanding of what sex crime is, and why it's committed. However, it means acknowledging that the opposition to that argument (that porn increases sex crime), also comes from barking up the wrong tree, which is anathema to some anti-porn feminists. I just think that this simplistic view of male sexuality needs to be dispensed with. If you're sadistic and fucked up enough that you're actually considering raping someone, I doubt that any alternative form of outlet is going to be enough. Rape isn't just about 'needing to have sex really badly' (and please, can we stop saying prostitution is justified because it somehow 'stops rape'? Newsflash - prostitution and rape still continue side by side) or wanting to do something so kinky that no woman would put up with it. Wanting sex and not always getting it is part of life - normal men and women can put up with that. They may masturbate, use porn, or just distract themselves, but to suggest that people rape because they're just too randy, is to fatally misunderstand what rape is about. It's not about sex, or sexual release, or satisfaction. It's about power, humiliation, domination, and controlling another person's body. If that is what you truly desire, then watching porn isn't going to stop you from wanting to go out and get it. Unfortunately, I think too many people 'normalise' rapists as 'regular guys who just got carried away because damn women won't put out all the time'. As if there's never been a rapist who was already in a sexual relationship with a wife or a girlfriend, or who had access to stacks of porn, or who used prostitutes, and went out and raped anyway.

However, as I said, this means also acknowledging the limitations of porn when it comes to influencing men's sexual behaviour. Now, it's important not to make blanket statements about this. When I say I don't think porn causes rape, that's not to say I think it has no impact whatsoever on the sexual landscape. But, as I said above, since rape has very little to do with sex, it stands to reason that its connection with on-screen depictions of sex, will only ever be fleeting. Yes, a violent porn film might give you an idea of how to violate someone, but it's not going to make you go out and do it. The impulse for sexual violence needs to be there already. Porn doesn't turn ordinary men into rapists - it doesn't have the power. It may give men who are already raping or considering rape, some methods for terrorising their victims, but that's where the connection ends. However, that's not to say I don't see the connection with porn and rape culture - one where rape isn't taken seriously because our porned society has numbed us to sexual violence. If we're all exposed to, or able to easily access, porn that sends out the message that women love to be beaten and raped, then our understanding of rape as a crime is going to be affected - even if it's just subconsciously. How many times have we heard rapists defended on the basis that 'she just liked it rough, your honour'? Only this week five men were acquitted of the rape of a woman on the basis that she had had fantasies about group sex, clearly sending out the message that if a woman has a kinky fantasy, she should be prepared to enact it with any man, at all times, and has no right to say no. Something's clearly fucked up - but it's not porn causing the rapes directly. It's a society so numbed to sexual violence, partly by increasingly violent porn, that's allowing rapists to go free, and sending out the message to would-be rapists that they'll always get away with it.

I wouldn't call myself an anti-porn feminist though. I don't believe that repression of human sexuality is ever going to lead to anything good. I think that porn can be produced responsibly, and that porn which depicts violence/coercion can be framed in the language of choice and consent, as BDSM porn always has been. It's the mainstream porn which steals the acts of BDSM porn, whilst leaving out the crucial aspects of consent (and failing to emphasise, as many BDSM sites do, that the actors are just that, actors playing a part and that This Is Not Reality) which I believe does the most harm. It's how to keep the good and dispense with the swathes of bad which is troubling. It was also telling on the programme that many men described a scene of anal sex - which would have been viewed as shocking and explicit a few decades ago - as 'quite tame'. It seems that the more extreme porn is produced, the more bored we get. Perhaps this is a worrying sign of how people will go to further and further extremes to get satisfaction, or perhaps it's a heartening sign that people recognised porn's limitations and will start to turn away from it, maybe even back to real people and having real sexual relationships. I think we are all capable of learning, and the depiction of men as so deeply influenced by porn that they're unable to shake off its 'conditioning' is more than a tad insulting. In the early days of our relationship, my partner admitted to me that the porn he viewed in his younger days made him think that women's genitalia 'worked a lot easier than it really does'. Ha ha, no shit, I remember thinking, and I didn't feel ashamed or guilty about my complex, hard-to-please body, but rather pleased that he had encountered a real woman and learned a lesson.