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The idea that women’s public sexuality can so precisely mirror traditional male fantasy while simultaneously existing in a kind of pro-woman, I-do-it-for-myself alternate universe is the cornerstone of funfeminist “thought.”
Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Prostitution, Pornography on July 22, 2008, 6:49 am EST
From Jezebel (via FLP). Anecdotal, but they’re the same anecdotes I’ve heard from countless young women.
In a similar vein, after reading this post and thread at Feministing the penny dropped on what’s behind the “Yes Means Yes!” thing. Rape porn has become so ubiquitous that even normal regular everyday boys-next-door think that having sex with your girlfriend means raping her. These guys start whacking off to rape videos when they’re 11 and that’s what they think sex is, forcing it down her throat, calling her bitch, saying choke on it, just like in the porn flicks. Rape has become totally normalized.
Over on another board the college-age girls are commiserating with each other. All the guys they know talk about women’s pancake breasts and meat curtains and flappy lips. A neverending dissection. A coroner’s table. My boyfriend always just wanted me to act out whatever was in the video, he never even looked in my eyes and I have to stop reading.
Dear God in the Smoking Lounge, I’m so glad I’m old. I’m so glad my youth happened before porn ruined sex. I feel so sorry for the young women today, young women longing for love. My heart aches for them. They’ll never know, will they? Unless they hook up with a Samoan or an Inner Mongolian or maybe a Mosuo boy from Lake Lugu. They’ll never know how salty-sweet lovemaking can be. The tenderness of it, the radical intimacy, the surprise. The trust. A two-souled secret journey.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Pornography on January 14, 2008, 9:48 pm EST
Yesterday I came across a comment by Sam Genderberg that was so arresting I asked her if I could quote it here. She was referring to this video, which (WARNING) is very disturbing:
Sam’s comment (just the first part):
Making the blog rounds this week is a video of a man verbally and physically abusing his wife. Feminists are unanimous in their opposition to the man saying to the woman before he physically assaults her:
“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”
I watched the video and thought how different the feminist reaction would be if he was raping her while saying all that and worse stuff unacceptable for primetime tv. Then it would be pornography.
Feminists would no longer be unanimous that scenes of him saying all those hateful things to a woman while doing specifically sexual violence to her on film were abuse. Some would defend it as sexual freedom. Some would praise it as transgressive BDSM erotica and therefore pro-woman.
No feminist has expressed they believe it is that woman’s free choice to accept the non-sexual violence and verbal abuse he is throwing at her, so why do so many insist prostituted women in pornography make the choice to be physically assaulted and verbally harassed with:
“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”
Most women in pornography are as cowed into submission as this woman was but unfortunately when men call them bitches, sluts and stupid-ass heifers then sexually abuse them on film it’s defended as the woman’s right to allow herself to be called such hateful terms, to accept men slapping her, to make the choice to be choked.
Some of you will read that and immediately say, oh but pornography is a willing performance, this video is a real-life record of a woman who wanted out, mis-matched fruit, etc. Never mind that for now.
Some others of you will read that and immediately say, oh but a lot of pro-porn feminists don’t approve of the really bad stuff, and they don’t approve of women being abused in the porn industry, red herrings circling strawmen, etc. Never mind that for now.
I want you to put those things aside for a moment so I can tell you why Sam’s comment affected me so powerfully.
What Sam’s comment captures for me is the cognitive dissonance I’ve been dealing with ever since I started educating myself about modern pornography. Until that time, my sole exposure to hetero porn was some Playboys and Penthouses from the 70s, and a few minutes of a strange little video called Crocodile Blondee that my gay roommates rented one night as a joke back in the 80s. I assumed that all porn movies were like the scene in Crocodile, with stilted actors engaging in basic coition and trying to look as if they were fond of each other.
Perhaps you can imagine how stunned I was to discover what modern pornography is like. And my reaction to it was, and is, pretty much the reaction the average porn consumer would probably have to a video of someone abusing a child or a dog. Not, I note, abusing a woman, because obviously people who watch modern porn are quite used to that. So I have to say “child” or “dog” to convey the sense of horror I feel, since only a porn-naive person like me could possibly still be horrified by images of women being abused.
Modern porn is shocking to me, in a way it probably cannot be to those of you who have grown up with it, who have been exposed to it throughout your lives — or throughout pornography’s evolution from Crocodile Blondee to BangBros. I’m reminded of boiling frogs.
When I read Sam’s comment, in my mind I substituted “people” for feminists. I was thinking of our entire culture, which has fetishized abuse in a way that boggles my mind. Any cruelty is acceptable now as long as sex is involved; the male orgasm legitimizes everything.
How can people look at videos of women being abused and insulted and humiliated and not see something wrong? When did this become acceptable? When did this become “sexy”? Did the water change from cold to hot so slowly that you just couldn’t see what was happening?
Do you still not see what’s happening?
I want to add one thing — not about pornography but about domestic violence. People always say, “why didn’t she just leave?” This comment at Feministe is the most eloquent answer I’ve ever seen.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Pornography, Recommended on September 21, 2007, 3:49 pm EST
Now here’s a coincidence. It so happens that I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking on advertising again to cover the site costs, and just this morning I was complaining to the other spirits here in the Smoking Lounge about the problems with Google Adsense.
Me: The problem with Adsense is that it goes off keywords
Spirit of Adsense: High Paying Keywords. Get Millions of High Paying Adsense Keywords & Develop Adsense Pages.
Me: but it doesn’t do any other screening
Spirit of Adsense: Buy imported Oriental screens. Shoji Screens Starting at $69.00.
Me: so if you have a feminist blog with the word “feminism” in your posts or on your header
Spirit of Adsense: The Book Feminists Don’t Want You To Read. Women Who Make the World Worse, by Kate O’Beirne. Now at 34% off. $16.47 in hardcover.
Me: you get ads for anti-feminist things.
Spirit of Adsense: Discover the Truth about God’s Plan for Men and Women. Biblical Headship and Christian Submission.
Me: For example, you could write a post about those fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Spirit of Adsense: Pregnant? Scared? Alone?
Me: and lo and behold if Adsense doesn’t serve up an ad from a goddamn Crisis Pregnancy Center right there in your fucking sidebar!
Spirit of Adsense: Hot Sidebar Fucking Online. Watch Free XXX Videos.
It’s really annoying. This blog averages about 150,000 page views a month, a minuscule figure compared to a blog like Feministing, which I understand is actually visible from space. Still, it’s ten times the circulation of my local Auto Trader. I should at least be able to sell ad space for a 2000 TOYOTA CAMRY 4 Dr LE V6 Sedan, at, ac, pw, pdl, tilt, cc, CD, loaded, Exc Cond, MUST SEE.
But back to Victoria’s post. The porn-ad thing made her think of this guy, a conceptual artist who has created pollination porn for plants. Here’s the description from Reuters:
Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats… filmed a six-minute long video of plants getting pollinated, then edited his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video. The result was what he claims to be the world’s first plant porn movie, “Cinema Botanica.”
“It is very boring but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive,” he said.
During September his film will be projected onto an audience of 60 house plants lined in rows at the 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California - a venue Keats has dubbed “the world’s first porn theater for house plants.”
It’s a sublime demonstration, isn’t it? A row of house plants lined up in front of a screen where grainy pollination footage is being projected. When I read that I thought this Jonathon Keats person was a good guy, the kind of artist who is able to deconstruct our cultural narratives and expose the absurdities.* I thought he was a feminist.
I was wrong.
Keats says he chose pornography because “it is so innately appealing.” What? Innate? And appealing to whom? He cheerfully cites early nickelodeons and refers to “humans,” as if pornography were as natural and innocuous as breathing, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea that pornography is a cultural artifact of our misogynistic society. Is it possible he’s deliberately playing the fool? That was my first guess, given his record as a performance artist.**
But it seems he really is a fool when it comes to everything connected to gender and sexuality. I dug around and discovered that not only is Keats a fool, he’s also an anti-feminist and a historical illiterate (a not unusual combination). In a book review at Salon — a serious book review, written apparently of his own free will and not under duress or in a state of extreme intoxication — he said, “What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight.” He referred to “hetero-patriarchal dominance” as a self-evidently absurd phrase, and went on to claim that “the academic feminist orthodoxy [wants] to keep the feminine body hidden from view, and female sexuality under wraps.” And finally, “the corset has been an instrument of liberation.”
I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Performance art! Gotta be! Clearly he’s just committed to his form.” Because really, who could be that stupid? But there’s more where that came from, since Keats regularly stinks up various online venues with his puerile ruminations. In one column he argued breathlessly that American Psycho was a work of “genius.” His own first novel was so sexist that even the distinctly non-feminist Publisher’s Weekly felt compelled to comment.
It’s a shame, because if Keats weren’t a pornhound (which I’m betting five hundred gazillion dollars he is), he might be able to think about sexuality with the same transgressive humor he brings to religion. Instead he’s in thrall to the age, soaking in the effluvium of an obscene culture, unable to recognize that his frame of reference is, indeed, a frame and not Eternal Truth.
Of course it’s possible that everything he writes about sex and gender is a knowing joke; that his entire output, including his own novel, is intended as ironic commentary. But if so, his stance is so indistinguishable from the dominant cultural narrative that whatever irony he may have intended has vanished. With no space between subject and object, not even the tiniest crack, there is no commentary. The joke’s on him.
*Remember the Kilgore Trout story about the planet where pornography consists of movies of people eating?
**From the SF Weekly story about Keats’ research into the genetic taxonomy of God, which included an experiment to breed God in a petri dish:
Keats believes that much of the debate about his approach would be unnecessary if field scientists (other than Keats, who doesn’t “like to go camping”) were to collect additional field notes on God. “At least footprints, so to speak, or droppings, so to speak,” he says. “I mean, I don’t want to be vulgar, but the more we can get a concrete picture of God, the better this research will be.”
I’ve been saying the same thing for years.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Pornography, Recommended on September 10, 2007, 1:21 am EST
I’ve discussed anal sex a number of times with guys my age (and I’m referring to lovers, not office mates), guys who grew up when I did, before the culture became pornified. For the men in my life, pornography was the Playboys they whacked off to as teenagers, which they outgrew when they began their adult lives and started having actual adult sexual relationships with other human beings. Unlike young men today, they did not spend 90% of their waking lives whacking off to internet XXXtreme porn from age 12 on.
At any rate, the anal sex conversation is always the same, and we always say the same things to each other: Why do men and women do that? Why would a man want to do that? (This is the guy wondering aloud to me.) It’s understandable for gay men, they don’t have anywhere else to put it, but geez, women have those nice warm soft vaginas…
I have never had a lover — and remember, my men are not of the porn-fed variety — who wanted anal sex. Instead they wrinkle their noses and go, “ew, that place is for pooping…”
But it’s a new world. Now every young American male is consumed with the yearning to fuck some woman up the butt, and today Twisty explains why in Anal is the new ‘third base’. Of course I knew this already, but the Twist has such a way with words.
First she quotes from an article in Details, “the essential men’s magazine for looking good and living well”:
“Once a guy has anal sex, he’s put on a pedestal by his peers,” [Philip] says. He claims he hasn’t had much trouble getting women to agree to it. “I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I put it in your butt?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ Then time after time of having sex with them they finally said okay. It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”
And this:
“For most of my friends, it’s sort of a domination thing,” says John (not his real name), 30, a writer in New York. “[It’s] basically getting someone in a position where they’re most vulnerable. My friends enjoy that and they tell their friends they did it. But it’s not like girls are ready for it—it’s something they do when they’re really drunk.”
Or in Twisty’s words (with my emphasis):
It’s an escalation of porn culture. Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your wig is a big compliment! — too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. “Regular” het sex just isn’t brutal or insulting enough anymore. There’s no sport in it, no swaggering triumph, nothing to give men “a good story to tell over beers.”
I have no idea how many of the new breed of hetero butt pirates are actually motivated by a conscious desire to degrade women — thank god I’m not dating any of these clowns so I’m spared intimate knowledge of their fuckedupedness — but I’m quite sure that all of them are motivated by the desire to do whatever they’ve been whacking off to on the internet since they were 12. Monkey see, monkey do. Doo. And apparently anal sex is such a mainstay of the modern porn industry that you probably have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Burma and get on a six-month waiting list for a video that doesn’t have anal.
Speaking of the escalation of porn culture, Zuzu’s new blog is up and one of her first posts is on Captivity, a mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I’m sorry, I just had a brief out-of-body experience there after typing the words mainstream Hollywood torture-porn flick. I don’t know what happened, my soul just flew up to the ceiling and started batting frantically at the light fixture like a moth. Okay, I’m back now. Anyway, it is certainly… interesting, yes, I think I’ll stick with that, interesting, that torture porn is now acceptable enough that people make Hollywood movies out of it. I imagine within a few years there will be a torture-porn award category at the Oscars.
Sometimes I’m so glad I’m old.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on July 15, 2007, 3:39 pm EST
It’s a real question, not rhetorical.
Here’s the background: I’m used to hearing pro-porn people, even some pro-porn feminists, say that anti-porn feminists don’t like porn because we’re hung up about sex, think sex is dirty, whatever. That’s always seemed like a groundless accusation to me. I like sex very much; I just don’t like pornography. The same is true of most other people I know who object to porn. I tend to think that pro-porners make that accusation because they’re lumping anti-porn feminists in with godbags who rail against porn, and godbags definitely do have a problem with sex. Of course, godbags also tend to be secret and fervent porn users.
Anyway, I was recently reading a survey of modern pornography and I was struck by how much of it focuses on the “dirtiness” of sex, the “dirtiness” of women’s desires, and so forth. So much so that it all started to seem rather hilarious to me (well, aside from being depressing). Sex isn’t dirty, I’m thinking, no it isn’t dirty to “want it;” what, are we in third grade? All this focus on nastiness and forbidden desires. It reminded me of a guy I was making out with once who was apparently into that “bad” thing and started asking me “are you bad?” I burst out laughing, then got annoyed when he wouldn’t stop it. No, I’m not bad. I’m just an adult who wants to get laid. Jesus.
So suddenly it dawned on me: is it possible that a lot of people who like porn are also people who are very tuned into that whole “sex is dirty” feeling? The feeling, not the intellectual belief, because of course they’re two different things. If so, then that might explain why so many pro-porners assume that those of us who dislike porn really just think sex is dirty. Projection, or simply the human tendency to imagine that everyone else thinks and feels the way we do.
Well? Any thoughts?
Posted by Violet under Pornography on November 16, 2006, 10:25 pm EST
I was following various election links when I found myself over at Digby’s reading this gem from last month:
I’ll accede to the fact that romance novels may not be pornographic in the way that many people think of pornography. But they are indisputably very sexually explicit, which I guess many women find to be different from men’s pornography because the sex is in the context of committed relationships. Different strokes (and I mean that in the nicest way.)
That’s like saying that the main difference between a Stephen King novel and the videotape of the Rodney King beating is that the former takes place in Maine and is more intricately plotted.
The ensuing comment thread is more of the same: men piping up to say that women’s romance novels are different from men’s porn only in tone and style (or name). Well, you could certainly make the case that women’s romance novels are a kind of pornography; that’s not the issue. The issue is that when men analyze the difference between, say a BangBros video and a Harlequin romance novel, the big difference they see is that one features “sex…in the context of a committed relationship.” Whereas when I think about the difference between those two things, what jumps out at me is that one of them is just make-believe words on a page, while the other is a videotaped record of an actual event: a real human being getting fucked, slapped, and gagged. Kind of a humongous goddamned difference there.
It really makes you wonder what on earth goes through men’s heads when they look at porn. Obviously on an intellectual level they must understand that the women are real people who are really getting fucked, but it’s frightening the extent to which they are able to suppress this knowledge.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on November 7, 2006, 10:25 pm EST
My blog is famous for thread drift (well, as much as anything about my blog can be famous), but I’m going to be pro-active here and start a proper post for the issues raised in this comment, which is threatening to massively derail the thread where it was originally posted. Which thread was approaching an Ionesco-like level of absurdity, so that might not have been a bad thing, but whatever.
If I were writing a proper post about pornography I would phrase some of this differently, more carefully, actually make an effort to organize my fricking thoughts, but since a couple of people have already started responding I’ll just paste what I originally wrote, warts and all. And then move people’s comments over.
P.S. I was responding with this comment to various questions and observations that had been put to me about the stuff in the worm thread — Amanda’s use of porn, Delphyne’s arguments on imagery, etc. It’s not an organized manifesto.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on October 12, 2006, 9:19 pm EST
For those of you following the saga of Alas and the Pornographer, Barry has spoken: Yes, he knew there would be porn. Yes, he understood that the internet rating for Alas would drive up the search engine rankings for the pornographer. No, he doesn’t think it’s such a bad thing. Yes, he should have been upfront about it, and he’s sorry.
It’s been noted that Barry has the right to do what he likes with his domain, and yes, he does. But his readers also have the right to know that the site is both promoting and benefiting from pornography. Pornography like this:
First Time Auditions is exactly what it sounds like. These girls are at their first auditions, usually 18-25, thinking that they are auditioning for the next big role. Well, they do get something big alright, just not the role. These girls getting down and dirty on camera for the first time. Each trying to make a name for herself and make it to the big time.
Or maybe just trying to avoid getting beaten up by her boyfriend/pimp, or maybe trying to make enough money to get a drug fix…
Mikes Apartment, the only place where ass turns into cash. Mike puts ads in the paper for week-to-week room renting in his apartment. The only catch, you have to be female and you have to put out. Mikes Apartment features tons of smoking hot amateurs getting down and dirty.
Because there’s nothing hotter than women prostituting themselves for a place to sleep.
Other links include BangBros, well-known for its extreme-misogyny porn, and a bunch of other heartwarming sites.
A surprising number of commenters at Alas and various other sites don’t seem to grasp that the commercial relationship between Barry and the pornographer is ongoing. There seems to be some idea that Barry just sold the domain and now has nothing to do with it. I don’t know why people think this, since Barry has stated quite clearly that not only was he paid for the domain, but he receives free server hosting from the pornographer. And the pornographer, in turn, gets to feed off of Alas’s high internet ranking.
Barry can do what he likes. But pornography is a feminist issue, and if a feminist blog is being supported by and is in turn supporting pornography, the readers have a right to know. Just my opinion.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on October 11, 2006, 7:58 pm EST
I stopped reading Alas months ago because the anti-feminist quotient there was just too high. So I’m just now discovering what some of you may already know: Barry sold his domain to a pornographer, so now his blog is hosted alongside hard-core porn reviews. The deal is that the huge traffic to Alas — feminist traffic, generated by people who have built up that readership over years — drives up the search engine rankings for the pornographer. (Heart has a fuller explanation of the deal.)
Barry didn’t bother to tell any of his readers about this until someone discovered the links and asked him what the fuck was going on. Even now I’m not sure most of his readers are aware of it, since Barry’s explanatory post didn’t allow comments and so rapidly sank to the bottom of the list.
I think this is absolutely vile.
Some people are drawing a connection between this and Playboy’s recent endorsement of Pandagon, which is understandable given the timing. It’s like the porn Borg ship has arrived and is assimilating the feminist blogworld. But Pandagon didn’t solicit the Playboy endorsement — that’s kind of an important point. And Amanda’s flippant response, while not exactly the anti-Playboy manifesto I might wish, is nevertheless in keeping with her stated opinions and longstanding persona.
This thing with Alas, though…this is sneaky. Back-door selling out to pornographers. All those feminist women posting to Alas, all engaging in heartfelt discussion…while unbeknownst to them, every bit of their traffic is driving up the business for exactly the kind of hard-core pornography that many of them have spent their lives opposing.
Barry says that:
I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site.
Let’s parse that, shall we? Barry was able to stipulate in the contract that his Alas blog would not contain a direct link to a porn site. But he was not able to stipulate in the contract that the rest of the domain would not link to or host porn sites. He only received a verbal “assurance.” Why? Why wouldn’t the buyer put it in the contract that there wouldn’t be porn? Because porn was the whole intention, as Barry must have realized. After all, he tells us the “wrangling” over this contract took months. If Barry is able to tie his own shoes, then he was able to sort out why the buyer was unwilling to put in the contract that there wouldn’t be porn. What the contract does stipulate is that:
…he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property.
I’m sorry, there’s just no way I can believe that Barry didn’t understand perfectly well that this was going to be a porn site. No wonder he didn’t say anything to his readers.
Alas was probably the first blog to link to Reclusive Leftist when I started; certainly it was the first major feminist blog. Even though I’ve long-since bailed on reading it because of the anti-feminists, I’ve always wished Barry well. I never imagined he would do something like this. This is fucking bullshit.
UPDATE. I’m pasting this from the comments; Richard asked me why this matters, really, and here’s my reply:
There is a large contingent of feminists who oppose pornography on explicitly feminist grounds, so it’s definitely a feminist issue. It’s not like Barry’s just linking to stock-car racing sites or something that is of no concern to his feminist readers. That’s why it was dishonest of him, I think, not to be upfront about this. The pro-porn feminists who are fine with XXX BangBros can continue to patronize Alas, but the feminists who don’t want to support that kind of thing deserve to be aware of what the site is linking to.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on October 10, 2006, 4:39 pm EST
I pulled a muscle some time in the past couple of days while bending over backwards to maintain an even tone regarding pornography. I personally loathe the stuff, but in my capacity as Queen of the Universe it’s incumbent on me to be as fair and balanced as possible. Just like Bill O’Reilly.
But if you’re in need of a radfem palate cleanser, Burrow’s got the stuff.
Posted by Violet under Pornography on May 16, 2006, 10:12 pm EST
