Saving women who didn't ask to be saved isn't feminism

I've seen this piece - "I clean up the messes of the pornography industry" by American lawyer Ann Olivarius - shared by several feminist groups that I follow on Facebook and Twitter recently. While I respect their right to hold different views to mine on the matter of porn, I do feel disappointed that feminists are getting behind such a post without deploying any critical thinking towards its content. 

I can see why the post is getting shares; it's not just written by a "random" feminist who has a beef with an industry with which (as is often the case with anti-porn activists) she has very little actual familiarity, but comes from a lawyer who has dealt with porn actors. (Or at least one porn actor.) That immediately appears to give it authority; it can't just be another piece advancing the moral biases of the author, now can it?

Well, actually - the very title of the piece is misleading. What exactly are these "messes" Olivarius claims to be cleaning up? The first - very deliberately emotive example - is about a suicide caused by revenge porn. I hesitate to even call non-consensual sharing of explicit images "porn" because it implies there's no difference between that and consensually produced porn. But that's a deliberate tactic by people such as Ann Olivarius - to make it look like these things all exist on the same spectrum. But they don't.

There's a world of difference between an adult woman making her living as a cam girl-- and I spent an evening amongst many such women last week, one of whom said "Everyone wants to know if I've been exploited in this industry; and I can honestly say I never have. In fact I sometimes wonder if I'm doing the exploiting, getting these men to pay me these amounts of money"-- and a vulnerable teenager being betrayed by their sexual partner. One has fuck-all to do with the other.

The porn industry does not have the power to create 16 year-old rapists. Implying it does lets the adolescent scumbag off lightly.

Which brings me to another of the author's deliberately heartstring-grabbing points; when she uses the case of an 8 year-old girl sexually abused by her cousin, and tries to lay the blame at the feet of the porn industry because apparently the cousin got ideas for how to molest the girl from his smartphone. Again, it continues to amaze me how feminists can't see the parallel between blaming porn for rape and sexual abuse and blaming a short skirt, an alcoholic drink, a smile, a "no" that wasn't screamed loudly enough. Any adult or teen with a smartphone has instant access to a dizzying cornucopia of images and videos at any given time. I can watch a cat video, or I can watch adults engaging in faecal play. I can laugh at a dog on a skateboard, or watch Colonel Gaddafi get beaten to death.

I make these choices. And even if I were to watch the more extreme choices, I would still consider no one and nothing but ME responsible were I to try and act out those things non-consensually on another adult or, god forbid, a child or animal. Same goes for everyone else on the planet. Having access to those images is not what makes you force yourself on another person. Billions of us do, and yet we manage not to rape or molest anyone. That twisted, rotten part of a person which thinks it's OK to do so is already there and was already there long before they opened their phone screen. By shifting responsibility away from the rapist/abuser you are merely supporting a culture and a system that already refuses to blame perpetrators far too readily. That's not feminism.

These emotionally manipulative tactics aside, the part of the article that probably got up my nose the most was the total misrepresenting of the porn actor who approached this lawyer. It's important to note here that the actor did not approach the lawyer with any complaints of mistreatment or abuse from her industry, as the title of the piece would have you believe. Instead, her question was a factual one; whether she was entitled to any job protections while being off work with an injury. Now, because the injury was sustained in her line of work -- from filming a scene that the author calls "brutal", even though the actor's own words are conspicuous by their absence -- that apparently is sufficient evidence that the porn industry is an evil, misogynist place where women are routinely injured. Even though, again, the question from the porn actor is not a complaint of mistreatment.

Well, let's just take a moment and allow me to list the injuries I sustained in my decade of doing care work on and off.

- Needlestick injury (where a hypodermic syringe accidentally pierces your skin, necessitating blood test and in some cases, Post-Exposure Prophylaxis to guard against HIV. Hepatitis is also a risk here.)

- Multiple bites; hands and arms were the most common places

- Cuts and bruises from having someone gouge their fingers as hard as they could into my skin

- Facial swelling and bruising from being headbutted

- Various bruises on arms and legs from being kicked and punched

- So many sore scalps from having my hair yanked I couldn't even begin to count them

- Ear infection from having a full plate of food thrown at my head (got gravy in my ear!)

(To work in care you're also advised to have Hepatitis B vaccination, because of the likelihood of coming into contact with bodily fluids, needles and/or sustaining one of the above injuries and then coming into contact with them [like the guy who gouged my arm - he often had faeces under his fingernails]. If you think porn actors are the only people who come into contact with some nasty stuff, you really need to get out more)

All those injuries, assaults and precautions come alongside doing a job that's both physically taxing and emotionally stressful, where one regularly has to clean up faeces, urine, saliva, vomit and blood, dodge violence from dementia patients and those with learning disabilities who exhibit "challenging behaviour," often work understaffed or with poorly trained, apathetic workers (three male staff once stood by and watched as a teenage boy a foot taller than my 5'2" headbutted me), where one gets paid maybe a bit more than minimum wage but not much more, and where one enjoys *none* of the protections of holiday pay, sick pay or pensions because I usually worked for agencies or as relief staff.

So, are feminists going to say that care work is inherently evil and degrading because people get injured doing it and because it's underpaid and there's little job security? Or because it's mostly women doing it?
Funnily enough, they are remarkably silent on that issue, except to suggest that we might need better working conditions and that care should not be seen as a solely female arena. I agree with both those statements. So why not suggest the same about the porn industry; that because as Olivarius says"this is not an industry in which performers can grow old, have a pension, guaranteed holidays, or job security," there should be reform, rather than abolition? Because I can sure as hell tell you that writing, my main career, is NOT an industry in which there are any pensions, sick pay, paid holidays or protection. No advances, pitiful royalties, and a plethora of clients asking you to work for a pittance, if not actively trying to get your work for free. I'm an internationally published author (not self-published) and yet if I relied solely on the money I've made from my book, I'd be homeless if not dead. I've worked for major publications on both sides of the Atlantic and yet I still have to supplement my writing work with private tutoring, care work and renting my spare room out in order to stay afloat. Where are the campaigns to save me from the evil, misogynist writing industry?!

I'm being facetious, of course -- I love what I do and I enjoy many privileges that mean I can manage to do it despite the often insulting remuneration offered. So why is it such a leap of the imagination to think porn performers -- who I would wager are HELLA better paid than care workers or writers!--might feel the same? So it might not be a long-term career choice - so the hell what? Neither is being an athlete, a dancer, a model, a racing driver, or indeed various jobs that require masses of energy and physical fitness, but we don't discourage children from aspiring to these jobs.

Ultimately what this misleading, mistitled, manipulative article is saying is "I don't like or understand porn, I don't see the appeal, and therefore I'm going to dress this personal distaste up as a moral fact." Did this lawyer ever ask the porn performer who came to her for a legal service how she actually felt about her job? Or did she just hijack her client's story to fit her own personal judgement on what is a totally legitimate job? If a male boxer came to her for legal advice on whether he was entitled to any job protections while out of work from having been injured in his line of work, would she use that as an excuse to go on a protracted rant about the evils of the boxing world, portraying this man as a victim of an evil misandrist industry that preys on those too stupid to see the harm it's doing to them?

Come on. You can't have it both ways. As feminists, we believe women are smart enough to make their own choices; a freedom enjoyed by men for millennia. You can't believe that and then simultaneously write off hundreds of thousands of women as moronic brainwashed children, preyed upon by an evil, male-dominated industry. You especially don't have the right to do that when your "evidence" that this industry is harmful amounts to nothing more than two unrelated anecdotes that deliberately use the old "won't someone think of the CHILDREN?!" tactic to manipulate readers into conflating non-consensual sharing of explicit images, rape and abuse, with consensual adult erotica; and one innocent legal enquiry by a worker who has made no complaint against her industry. 

So yes, please do fight against bad working conditions. Please DO fight against lack of job security. Please fight against the industries in which work is shitty and low-paid being disproportionately staffed by women and immigrants. Hell, come and help me fight for care work and writing work to be remunerated to a level that actually shows some bloody respect for those two jobs. But don't take your personal crusade against depictions of sexuality that you dislike and hijack other people's stories to bolster that. It's cheap, manipulative and does nothing to improve anyone's job. That's not "cleaning up a mess," it's fighting an enemy that doesn't exist and then wanting a pat on the back for it.

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Burlesque - empowering or problematic for feminists?

I got to thinking about cultural phenemona that regularly get condemned as anti-feminist yet are largely supported by women, when I went to see *that film* recently in order to review it. Sitting in the cinema on a freezing, windy, wet British Friday morning, I noticed that I was surrounded by women. Some couples, but the audience was at least 85% female, if not more. Women of all ages, from 18 to at least 65. Women of all races, all shapes and sizes, varying socioeconomic backgrounds, all united in a desire to see the film of *that book* and find out what all the fuss was about. Some might have been there for that sole reason, others because they genuinely enjoyed the book and thought they would enjoy the film. Those who were there with their partners may have expected the film to enhance their erotic life, or simply give them something to laugh about as a couple. Others, like myself, may have been there as cultural commentators (with admittedly a little personal curiosity thrown in), trying to report on *that film* in a way that avoided lazy condemnation, pearl-clutching or snobbery. I saw very quickly that it was going to be women who made or broke this film, and if this audience - plus the opening weekend stats - were anything to go by, women were going to make it a roaring success.

This made me think about how, despite their strength as a consumer group, women are still strangely often treated as a minority group, or a "special interest". When they do come out in force and make a book or a film a huge success, it's given a patronising label ("chick flick" "mommy porn" anyone?) and treated as a trivial, fluffy, empty-headed preoccupation. And, perhaps more disappointingly (because we at least expect sexist dismissal from the mainstream media), it's sometimes treated with disdain or outright hostility by feminists too. 

I talk at length in my review of *that film* about how I feel there is an elitist and prejudiced element at work in the feminist condemnation of F**** S**** O* G***, so I won't go on about it here. But I started thinking about the parallels when I went to a burlesque fair this weekend. There are a lot of conflicting feminist opinions about the modern revival of burlesque culture; some women consider it body-positive, sex-positive, empowering and female-focused, others consider it simply more sexist objectification in cuter clothes, and of course some view it as just a bit of fun. At the fair, though, what struck me was what a female-dominated culture this was. The stallholders were majority female, as were the attendees (I went with three other women). Interestingly, not all the performances were by women - I was pleasantly surprised to see a male pole dancer and a male aerial hoop performer in the pictures afterwards. But what the whole experience made me think was that anyone condemning this as women being objectified for male pleasure would be so off-base it would be laughable. This was very much a female-oriented event, run by, enjoyed by, and supported by women. 

Now, of course there are those who will claim that women have just been so brainwashed into objectifying other women that we don't even realise we're doing it - we are Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs made flesh, and are no better than the women who accompany their male friends to strip clubs in the spirit of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." But when I was watching a size 16 woman in her 30s gyrate onstage in a spangly costume, I didn't feel like I was treating her like a piece of meat. I was aware of her as a person with a mind as well as a body, and very much aware that her performance was artifice - because it was so clearly intended this way. I was also aware that her performance was intended to be fun and humorous, and that the smile on her face wasn't trying to emulate sexual ecstasy, but was simply a cheeky grin. It certainly beat the furrowed brows, pouts and icy seriousness of other supposedly "erotic" performances I've seen, and reminded me of why I always liked the pin-up pictures one can find in the Taschen books filled with magazine covers called 'Wink' 'Titter' and so on - because the girls look like they're having fun. As someone who proudly owns a sailor playsuit and has been compared to a pin-up myself when I've posted pictures of myself in it, I can attest that it's not just a look either. It is fun to feel cute, to dress up, to feel colourful and sexy in a way that one still feels like one owns that sexuality. Yet as a feminist, you sometimes wonder whether it's OK to feel that way, or whether you should be trying to condition yourself out of it.

Burlesque performances are generally pretty tame compared to what you'll see in a modern strip club - I've not seen a burlesque performer strip below knickers and nipple tassles, although I'm sure some do, but the point is generally that it's about the art of suggestion so there's still likely to be some giant feathers or balloons in the way. Therein lies the fun - everyone in the room knows they're not going to actually see any pubic hair, or labia, or probably even a nipple, but we're enjoying the fiction that we might, and enjoying the tension that the performer is building up by teasing us with what's behind the sequins. Women and men stood and watched the performers, whooped, clapped and encouraged. It didn't feel sleazy or objectifying. It's also often forgotten that the art of burlesque didn't just use to mean 'stripping' - it also included acrobatics, tumbling, cross-dressing, skits and all manner of entertainment. The immediate tendency to focus on the nekkid-lady part of burlesque is a sad sign of the modern insistence on reducing everything to sex. I once saw a female burlesque performer dress up in a tux and do a Bruce Forsyth impression to Rizzle Kicks' Mama Do The Hump - how often does that aspect of burlesque get mentioned?

Still, as I put my pin-up-lady-themed mirror up in my bedroom, and my lady-in-nipple-tassles-and-knickers toothbrush holder up in my bathroom, I experience a twinge of feminist concern. Am I no better than the man slavering over Page 3, or leering at the women in Zoo? Am I just fooling myself that I'm more enlightened because I didn't mind the fact that the women I watched onstage the other day had rolls of flesh on their bodies, and parts other than boobs that wobbled when they moved - whereas those raised on a diet of airbrushed female bodies and porn would probably consider them unattractive and inferior? Who can say. It bothers me that there exists, in a movement supposedly supportive of female freedom to look, act and spend our money in whichever ways we wish, a faction that makes me have this very argument with myself. I also think this faction is operating on the often-mistaken premise that cultures such as burlesque only exist because of a (automatically evil) male desire to objectify and sexualise women. Based on my experience on Saturday, my answer would be - BOLLOCKS DOES IT. Some feminists will tell us that we've internalised male objectification of our bodies so much that we're now convincing ourselves that we're buying corsets or jiggling our nipple tassles onstage for ourselves or for fun, but that is, of course, just self-deception. We must be doing it because men told us or made us. 

Well, I don't know where those evil men were hiding on Saturday but they sure must have been well-concealed. Was one of them the very camp guy wearing make-up and dressed as a sailor: was he forcing my friend to alter her body when he laced her into one of the corsets he was selling, and is it worth mentioning he was also wearing a corset, as were several other men that day? Was another of them the petite, topless guy with a locked collar around his neck who was helping his much taller female partner run her stall? Were the dutiful partners following their girlfriends around as they excitedly scanned the stalls really calculating sexists waiting to reap the rewards of all this underwear their unsuspecting female partners had been duped into buying...and were they going to be disappointed if their girlfriends instead only chose to buy a necklace that said "FUCK YOU" (one of my friends' purchases from the day) or a cruet set that said "METH" and "COKE" (another friend's purchase that day)? Were the male performers onstage also victims of the patriarchy in some roundabout way, or interlopers here only to spy on all that exposed female flesh...even if it meant exposing most of their flesh too? 

I just didn't see anything to get one's spangly knickers in a twist about. I saw women running businesses, and other women supporting those businesses. I saw female friendships being formed and strengthened. I saw bodies being presented in a sexual yet fun way, and real bodies, bodies that made me feel good and less self-conscious about my own pale skin, my wobbly bits, my average-sized boobs, the rolls on my stomach. I saw a lack of fake tan, a lack of perfectly round breasts that stick straight out instead of being shaped more like half-moons and actually responding to gravity, a lack of underwear so groin-slicingly skimpy that retaining any of one's pubes would be an impossibility, and as a result of this, I felt at home. I felt comfortable. I felt like I saw my body and my sexuality more accurately represented here than I ever would see in the world of mainstream porn.

And next time I go, I'm wearing that sailor suit. ;)

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.