More About Pornography

Via Helen Boyd, I came across this interesting article in the New York Times. Written by porn actress Stoya, it is a surprisingly articulate account of how it feels to have a public persona (and we are talking seriously public) and a private persona, and keep them separate.

Stoya: Not everyone performing in adult films uses a stage name. Tera Patrick has said she legally changed her name to match her professional one. A few use their whole legal name; others keep their given name while taking a suggestive or unique surname. Still more take Love or Star, sometimes with creative spellings, and I’d support a 10-year ban on every iteration of both.

Articulate: Stoya

I had never heard of Stoya before reading this article, and naturally performed a Google search, during which I was able to see, in some detail, how she makes her living. I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before, leading me to conclude that Stoya is special by being so insightful and so articulate. As someone in the porn industry, she has some very interesting viewpoints, such as this one:

Stoya: Yes, there’s a paradox here in that I willingly engage in work that reduces me to a few sexual facets of myself but expect to be seen as a multifaceted person outside of that work. I participate in an illusion of easy physical access, and sometimes the products associated with that illusion — the video clips and silicone replicas of my sexual organs (seriously, and they’re popular enough to provide the bulk of my income) — do, in fact, exist without attachment to a person with free will or autonomy.

Very interesting themes. I commend the article to you. In her video interview with The Huffington Post, Stoya describes how her father's reaction to her career choice has been, not overt disapproval, but merely disappointment that he could no longer enjoy internet pornography, since the websites he used often featured links to her pictures. That noise you can hear in the distance is the sound of my mind boggling at the nature of their relationship.

Although I have already written in this blog some thoughts about my view of pornography, I was struck by several things about the Stoya article.

 

First, she is disarmingly articulate, and funny. She writes well, and she makes her points very powerfully. One assumes porn stars choose their profession because they are blessed with good bodies, few inhibitions and few other skills (though I do not doubt that the very successful ones are also very shrewd).

 

Hidden depths?

Secondly, she seems to have chosen a career in porn quite carefully and deliberately, which again is a surprise. She is no meek or hapless victim of the porn industry, but someone who knows exactly what she is doing and why.

 

Thirdly, she seems to be remarkably open. I suppose one would expect that, but I wouldn't necessarily expect someone to reveal matter-of-factly that there are silicone facsimiles of their genitalia available to purchase, or the porn habits of their parents.

 

Fourthly, she seems to be aware of the irony that she is prepared to have herself photographed in all sorts of sexual activities, and to be considered to be a sex object, always available; and yet she values her personal privacy. You may think I am for sale, she seems to be saying, but only what you see on the screen is. The rest is private. It's mine, and you can't have it. I found this to be deeply insightful.

 

I find myself intrigued by Stoya. I can't help finding her choice of career somewhat distasteful. Pornography is a facet of prostitution, and while some people (perhaps even Stoya herself) might consider it to be no more than a simple economic transaction (I have something you want, you have something I want; let's trade), I am uncomfortable with the commodification of humans in this way. I discuss my views of pornography in detail here in my blog.

And yet, I am always attracted to the combination of confidence and brains, and Stoya seems to have a generous helping of both. (This may create the irony that I am not particularly attracted by her body, though as you can see it seems to be a perfectly nice one).

 

A colleague of mine has a daughter in her twenties. At a work dinner, I found myself sitting opposite this daughter. She was beautiful, confident, clever and funny. I was quite taken. I asked her what she does for a living, and her answer was that she is an erotic dancer in a nightclub. Her parents were originally horrified at her choice of career (she surely has the talent to go a lot further) but now they are more accepting, and even drop her off at work sometimes.

 

Pornography and lap dancing are probably very lucrative careers for young women, and they no doubt come with a large helping of life experience thrown in. I found myself viewing lap dancers with a new respect.

 

Bank manager: making a deposit

What I wonder (and was heading towards asking my friend's daughter, but we got interrupted) is how women like Stoya and my friend's daughter come to view men. I assume they come to view them with contempt and loathing. It must be hard to visit your bank manager without imagining (probably correctly) how he looks with his tongue hanging out, stuffing money into your G-string. When all you see is men who are in a state of sexual arousal and testosterone toxicity, it must be hard to remember there are decent, balanced men with other interests beside masturbation. When men (including quite possibly your boss) treat you as if you are nothing more than a pair of breasts mounted on an always-willing vagina, it must be infuriating and dehumanising. Of course, I might have an extremely skewed view of the sex industry, but it's hard to imagine lap dancers or porn actresses coming home at night with a deep sensation of fulfilment at another job well done.

 

I have never been to a lap dancing club. To be honest, I don't really get the point. It seems like going to a gourmet restaurant and spending the evening reading the menu and looking at the food.

 

However, coming back to Stoya. A generation ago, it probably wouldn't have mattered that Stoya is brilliant and articulate and insightful; the New York Times would almost certainly not have published her writing. Now, however, it does. Does that reflect a newspaper which recognises good writing regardless of where it comes from? Or does it reflect that pornography is becoming recognised as a more acceptable phenomenon in our society?

 

Either way, Stoya has made me think about the people involved in pornography in a new way.

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Addendum: 23rd May 2014

I came across this recent post by Georgia over at BroadBlogs. She writes that the porn industry deliberately creates the desire in men for things which ordinary women are unwilling to perform. This means that the only place men can see those acts is by watching porn.

A comparison can be made with mainstream films, or computer games. Some people are critical of their content. The makers of those media say: "Hey, don't look at us! We're just giving the consumers what they want!" while the critics say "No. Actually you are driving what people want". So, for any medium, how much is a reflection of the actual demand, and how much is a driver for that demand? (Of course, in many situations, these two phenomena feed one another, as you describe). Advertising is a highly evolved industry designed to create demand for new products, and it does that by sowing dissatisfaction with what you've already got.

I remember reading that the porn industry is one place where the women are routinely paid much more money than the men. To me, this boils down to simple economics. Men are prepared to do it for less money because they enjoy it; women intrinsically don't enjoy it, and therefore require to be paid more before they will participate. This is a simplification with, no doubt, many exceptions, but I believe the central premise holds true.

 

 

 

Is Pornography OK?

Human beings are fantastically inventive. I imagine that, five minutes after the process of photography was invented, someone said "Hey, we could take pictures of naked women with this!"

Pornography, of course, existed long before photography. You should see some of the frescoes they discovered in the brothels of Pompeii, for example. Some of them depict intersexed figures such as Hermaphroditus in erotic situations, indicating that even the Romans had some interest in blurred gender boundaries.

But what makes photography different from other forms of erotic art is its apparent verisimilitude: the artist can show you things which are the product of their imagination (and there seems to be plenty of this still going on), but the photographer shows you something which actually happened. Moving photographs are, for the purposes of this discussion, merely an elaboration of the technology of still photographs.

My book this week is called Free Speech, by Nigel Warburton. It's an excellent and thought-provoking introduction to the issues around free speech. It's really led me to think a lot more about this subject, and drawn my attention to some very powerful key players in this field. Most of us are in agreement that free speech is a good and essential thing to a well-run democracy. And we think of the people in China, who are denied free access to information on the Internet, as well as freedom of expression. But free speech also includes material which may be offensive, even harmful, to the listener (such as overt racism or Holocaust denial). So where do you draw the line?

A full chapter of this book is devoted to pornography, and it started me thinking. The Internet, of course, as we all know, is full of pornography:

I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left. And it would be called 'Bring Back The Porn'.- Dr Perry Cox, Scrubs.

This interesting article from the UK's Guardian newspaper suggests that actually, only about 1.1% of sites on the Internet contain "sexually explicit" material. The article was written in 2006, which is ancient history in Internet terms, but even if the figure has quintupled since then, we are still only looking at 5%. (See addendum 3 below).

Eric Schlosser devotes a whole third of his excellent book Reefer Madness, to a discussion of the pornography industry in the US, and provides insight into the fundamental conflict of American attitudes:

Schlosser: The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.

Coming back to Warburton, is pornography a form of expression? And should it, therefore, be fully tolerated in society (provided nobody is harmed in its making)? Several attempts to have it banned, by anti-pornography campaigners such as Andrea Dworkin, have been overturned by US courts on the grounds that banning pornography violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution. So it seems that Uncle Sam, at least, thinks that pornography counts as freedom of expression.

Professor Catharine MacKinnon argues that pornography is all about the subjugation of women: their objectification as objects for male sexual gratification. She points out that pornography is made "overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children". She also makes the point that regular use of hardcore pornography by men habituates them to the idea that women exist merely as sexual playthings of men, and therefore eliminates the necessity of treating women as human individuals. It fosters the "she's wearing a short skirt so she must be up for it" argument. Sooner or later, the viewer wants to experience for real what he's used to seeing on the screen, and so he obtains it forcibly.

On the other hand, Wendy McElroy defends pornography from a feminist perspective. She argues that pornography can benefit women in at least three ways: by providing a panoramic view of sexual possibilities, by allowing viewers to experience and imaginatively explore sexual alternatives safely, and by allowing viewers to explore their emotional response to a fantasised scenario. Suppression of pornography would restrict women's choices. I must say I find these arguments pretty flimsy.

One-handed surfing

Is pornography harmful to society? It has certainly been argued that the objectification of women seen in pornography harms the status and role of women in society. On the other hand, there is some evidence that ready access to pornography reduces the rate of sex crime, the idea being that men gain relief from pornography which then means they don't need to take out their desires on women. From a scientific perspective, all the evidence I've seen on this topic has been conflicting and flawed, but the topic is important enough that I think it is worthy of more careful investigation.

So what's my perspective? First of all, sex is OK. That is to say, sex between consenting adults, male or female or any combination, who are choosing to engage in it for pleasure, is all OK. I'm not going down any roads debating the morality of actual sex. But any pornography or sexual activity involving children is unacceptable.

I admit my sympathies lie somewhat with the feminists here, though I am not sure I accept all MacKinnon's points. I think that prostitutes are, in general, poor desperate women forced into it by dreadful economic circumstances. Some of that may apply to women who take part in pornography, but what of all those amateur pornographers out there who freely post images of themselves? Not all of that is instigated by men (though I think a fair bit of it is). In addition, some women seem to have been able to make quite a lot of money out of deliberately producing pornography. And as we see, the link between pornography use and the increased prevalence of sex crime is tenuous at best.

What I see out there is absolutely in accord with MacKinnon's views, though. Pornography is almost universally about the satisfaction of men. Women are objectified, and often seem to be humiliated. There are scenes of roughness bordering on violence: men grabbing women around the throat during sex, for example, or women who appear to be weeping or distressed during sex. One website uses the word "destruction" seemingly as a synonym for "penetration". On the other hand, there are depictions of women appearing to enjoy or invite extreme acts of penetration. And intercourse is always filmed in gynaecological closeup. Why don't any of the women look like they are enjoying themselves? Why don't the actors look as if they even like one another?

So most pornography is distasteful to me, and a little of it has been so upsetting that I have deliberately attempted to banish it from my mind. When I was growing up, the only pornography I could access were magazines depicting naked women in positions of submissive (occasionally gymnastic) display. My imagination had to do the rest. But my kids will have access to streaming video and audio featuring any number of actors indulging in any sort of activity (no matter how I try to protect them from it). It worries me that my kids might come across that and think that is how sex should be conducted, from either role. Pornography is "junk sex". And just as teenagers want junk food, they will also want junk sex.

I believe pornography is this way because it sells. Men want those things: a quick five-knuckle-shuffle with no emotional strings attached. Inflated boobs, enormous penetration, highly visible climaxes. And they are prepared to pay for them. While some women use pornography in the same way men do, I think most women don't. For them, arousal comes from emotional stimuli, not physical ones. And you don't get any emotional arousal just watching sex: you get it from love and trust and intimacy, and it can't be achieved from scratch in five minutes.

One of the central points Helen Boyd makes in her book My Husband Betty, is that transvestites don't want to be like women, they want to be like men think women are. Here she discusses transvestite erotic material to be found on the Internet:

Boyd: There is one consistent motif: the crossdressed male is forced to give a blow job. The blow job scenario is probably crossdressers' most popular sexual fantasy after the fantasy of being dressed as a woman. Why does it not surprise me that when a crossdresser-- who is socialized as a straight man-- fantasizes about being a woman sexually, he envisions himself giving a blow job? This provides further evidence that the crossdresser's "inner female" is painfully loaded with stereotypical male ideas about women, in this case women's sexual behaviour. The idea that your average woman equates "I feel sexy" with "I want to give a blow job" is a remarkably male notion of women's sexuality. That they focus on the one form of women's sexual activity that is primarily about male pleasure is no coincidence.

I am stuck in the middle. Pornography is sexually arousing, but emotionally unpleasant for me. That creates a conflict worthy of Schlosser's book. As a result, I recognise that, whatever it does to individuals and society, pornography is harmful to me. It's not OK.

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Addendum:

I was thinking some more about pornography, and it's well worth considering its place in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I can't recommend this book highly enough. If you haven't read it, all the things you think you know about it (from your familiarity with concepts like Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police and so on) are wrong. It is all the more powerful for having been written in 1948, over sixty years ago.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, an unattractive everyman, lives in a dystopian 1984 under the constant surveillance of a totalitarian government led by an obscure figure known as Big Brother. In the novel, members of the middle class "Outer Party" are absolutely controlled: their actions and even their thoughts are ridigly confined. They are essentially denied any free time (how I can relate to that feeling!) and any freedom or self-determination. They are kept in a situation which denies them any sort of personal comfort or satisfaction: the only things they are allowed to enjoy or celebrate are Party activities and goals. Transgressions of the most minor nature are met with grotesque punishment and torture meted out by the Ministry of Love.

Big Brother seeks to control thoughts by controlling language: Newspeak is a deliberately constructed language with a shrinking vocabulary. The idea is that reducing the vocabulary reduces the ability to communicate ideas, and eventually to form those ideas in the first place.

And Big Brother seeks to control emotion and sexuality by doing away with intimacy and pleasure. Marriages are chosen by the Party, between unsuited partners to prevent physical attraction. We are informed that "neurologists are working to extinguish the orgasm". And pornography is extensively commodified: deliberately produced in large quantities and distributed by government decree, in a deliberate attempt to separate (and eliminate) the emotional satisfaction of sex from its physical act.

Orwell was making the point that the ready availability of pornography in large quantities does something undesirable to a population of people. While we are not in danger of succumbing to totalitarianism, I think his point is disturbingly correct.

Addendum 2:

I was thinking some more about pornography, and why some women deliberately create and display pornography involving themselves. It's just a theory, but I wonder if those women are doing it (partly) to create a sensation of power. The ability (and apparent willingness) to give pleasure is a powerful thing. To prominently display that places the woman in a position of power: I'm showing you this. I know you want it! But you can't have it, because I'm a stranger on the Internet thousands of miles away from you.

I suppose I am trying to explore the motivations of women who deliberately choose to involve themselves in pornography. Some, I think, do it for sexual arousal. Some do it for money. And I think some do it for power. Power, money and sex: the three most important motivations in all human behaviour?

This has become the longest blog post I've written. Something shorter next time.

Addendum 3:

The July 6th 2013 edition of my favourite mathematical radio programme, More or Less, suggested that pornography occupies only 4% of websites, but 14% of search engine requests.