Porn Wars Nostalgia
Sunday, February 24th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
I was doing some Google searches on old ErosBlog posts (about which more soon) when I discovered something amusing. Fourteen years ago I had a point to make in the endless wars that Serious Ideological Feminists were then waging (and, to a lesser extent, are still trying to wage to this day) against pornography. One of these extremists claimed that we pigdog porn consumers “CANNOT know if the girl you are masturbating to is, in reality, a sexual slave from Austria who has a gun pointed at her head just off camera.” To which my response back in 2005 was:
Yeah. And you cannot know that the bottle of salad dressing you pour on your salad isn’t full of stale unpasteurized jizz from bored wanking food factory workers, either. But that doesn’t make it likely, or stop you from eating creamy salads. Why not? Because of branding. If you worry about funky jizz in your dressing, you buy a reputable brand from a company you trust, one that’s got white-coated vat inspectors and security cams all over the factory floor. And, if you really worry, you do research. You get a tour of the factory, or (more likely) read the article in Consumer Reports by the reporter who worked there for three days undercover. The point is, you check into it a little bit.
This is perfectly possible with porn. You look for accounts of what it’s like to work for a particular porn company, how they treat their people, how the sets are run, whatever you’re worried about. Of course you can’t disprove sensationalist claims about porn factories full of enslaved Eastern European beauties this way – folks who want to cling to that fantasy will continue to do so, brandishing their “news” stories from The Weekly World News, National Enquirer, and Reader’s Digest – but you can satisfy yourself, along with any other reasonable people who might be curious, that the porn you buy is sex slave free.
Imagine my amusement and delight to discover that my stale-jizz salad-dressing analogy got quoted with approval in the middle of mostly-useless 2010 train wreck of a porn wars comment thread at Scienceblogs.com. That turkey of a thread is more than 46,000 words of hateful thrash (according to wordcounter.net) and I cannot recommend hardly any of it to you. My sense is that the porn wars are mostly more sophisticated these days, or perhaps I’ve just gotten better at avoiding the worst dens of festering idiocy.
There were a few high points among the 46k words of headbanging. Perhaps my favorite bits were these paragraphs by commenter “spit”:
Wow, the porn wars will never end. Never. I still have scars from earlier battles in it. Y’all are way behind.
I guess my take at this point, as a pretty damn feministy feminist, is that both sides are kind of wrong. I think it’s really pretty clear to me that porn can involve exploitation, that it doesn’t have to by nature (but frequently does), that it may encourage some people toward nastiness but not others, and that it likely has social effects on attitudes about women and is also a product of those and other longstanding attitudes about women (positive feedback loop).
People are often capable of having all sorts of fantasies that they don’t find ethical and would never actually act on. The origin of those fantasies may well be social attitudes, so in that regard, the problem isn’t just the gross porn nearly so much as it is that there’s a market for it in the first place. Of course, how much of that is a feedback loop is anybody’s guess. Those attitudes are built and reinforced in any number of troubling ways, porn simply being one of the easiest to argue about. But I tend to view what exploitation is in it as a symptom much more than a cause, I guess, and know better than to think that people would suddenly respect women sexually if they stopped watching porn while they’re still living in a culture that objectifies girls as infants. I guess in that regard, I just feel like I have other fish to fry, except in the cases of coerced stuff or utter lack of consent. My opinion, of course, and others’ mileage may vary.
Similar Sex Blogging:
