There was an excellent article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian yesterday about fair trade porn. So excellent was it that, frankly, I think the editors should be ashamed of the unwarranted click-baiting question mark in their headline: Is there such a thing as ethical porn?
Zoe Williams seems to have relied heavily on detailed interviews with Pandora Blake and her merry band of collaborators at Dreams Of Spanking, which was a wise choice. And there’s much goodness to be had in the interviews and quotes with other “fair trade” pornographers, such as long-time ErosBlog favorite Madison Young. But my absolute favorite part of the article is a single lengthy paragraph in which the complete history of the feminist porn wars is recapitulated and fought in Zoe Williams’s mind at a feminist convention in 2011:
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map.
If I was the kind of guy who got text tattoos, I think “I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are” would be a fine candidate. It would do for an ErosBlog motto, too.
Moving on: Pandora Blake is quoted being smart about porn throughout the article, but my favorite quote is this one on anti-porn feminists watching the wrong porn:
Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed ‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”
Not only do I agree that the anti-porn feminists (although I cannot use that phrase without wondering how feminist it can possibly be to deny the agency of women who make porn) are looking at the worst porn, but I think the problem even goes beyond that. I think they are looking at the worst porn and then, using empathy, they are projecting their own imagined reaction were they modeling the scene onto the models, of whose motivations, professionalism, and physical skills they are utterly ignorant. I first encountered this made explicit in the notorious “threads swimming in blood in your throat” passage by Andrea Dworkin, who, upon seeing the movie Deep Throat, seems to have re-imagined it as a horror movie based on her own gruesome fantasies of what giving a blowjob must be like. The rest of us saw rather a different movie.
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