XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (20 page)

Pornography provides reassurance and eliminates shame. It says to women, "You are not alone in your fantasies and deepest darkest desires. Right there, on the screen are others who feel the same urges and are so confident that they flaunt them."

If you love to give blowjobs, pornography applauds you. If you wonder about sex with a woman, pornography makes it seem harmless. If you wish to be overpowered by a man, porn allows you to see what it might look like. Videos make no comment on which sexual preferences are acceptable; they eroticize every aspect of the human body, from feet to breasts; no sexual question is wrong to ask; no sexual preference is wrong to pursue. Pornography is the true arena of tolerance.

It is also the great leveler of shame. It says, "Sex is good for its own sake." This is particularly important today, when sex education seems to dwell exclusively on sexual negatives: AIDS, disease, teen pregnancy, molestation, date rape,
etc.
Pornography balances the picture by reminding us that sex can be fun.

Can women afford to do without this essential element of human happiness? I say no.

5.
Pornography can serve as sexual therapy.

Pornography enhances the enjoyment of masturbation and provides a sexual outlet for those who-for whatever reason-have no sexual partner. Perhaps they are away from home, recently widowed, or isolated because of infirmity. Perhaps they simply choose to be alone. Sometimes, masturbation and vicarious sex are the only acceptable alternatives to celibacy.

Couples also use pornography to enhance their relationships. Sometimes they do so on their own, watching videos and, exploring their reactions together. Sometimes, the couples go to a sex therapist who advises them to use pornography as a way of opening up communication on sex.

By sharing pornography, the couples are able to experience variety in their sex lives without having to commit adultery.

The social commentator Fred Berger wrote of the need for variety. He wrote of sex being routine, dull, and unfulfilling. He ascribed this "neurosis" to the constraints on sex imposed by conservatives. "Those constraints dictate with
whom
one has sex,
when
one has sex, how
often
one has sex,
where
one has sex, and so on. Moreover, the web of shame and guilt ... destroy[s] its enjoyment, and ... our capacity for joy and pleasure through sex." [6]

Even those of us who never find sex "dull" need variety. In fact, an adventurous spirit may be absolutely necessary to retain the zing in marital sex. Many women are like me. I am not interested in pursuing variety through a series of affairs, which would involve hurting and lying to someone I love. I want to go through decades of sharing new experiences with the same man. I 80

want to tackle head-on the hard problem of keeping sex fresh and playful through a relationship that extends into old age.

Toward this end, pornography is a valuable tool that I do not hesitate to use.

Political Benefits

1. Historically, pornography and feminism have been fellow travelers.

Through much of their history, women's rights and pornography have had common cause. The fates of feminism and pornography have been linked. Both have risen and flourished during the same periods of sexual freedom; both have been attacked by the same political forces, usually conservatives. Laws directed against pornography or obscenity, such as the Comstock laws in the late 1880s, have always been used to hinder women's rights, such as birth control. Although it is not possible to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the rise of pornography and that of feminism, such a connection seems reasonable to assume. After all, both movements demand the same social condition-namely, sexual freedom.

Chapter Three provided perspective on this.

2. Pornography is free speech applied to the sexual realm.

Freedom of speech is the ally of those who seek change; it is the enemy of those who seek to maintain control. Pornography is nothing more or less than. freedom of speech applied to the sexual realm. It is the freedom to challenge the sexual status quo. Pornography, along with all other forms of sexual heresy, such as homosexuality, should have the same legal protection as political heresy.

This protection is especially important to women, whose sexuality has been controlled by censorship through the centuries. In recent decades, this control has slipped. Abortion is available on demand. Lesbianism no longer means ostracism. Nonmarital sex is commonplace.

But now the barriers to sexual expression are being erected again. The attack is directed not only at pornography, but at other sexual choices as well.

Our society is teetering on the brink of a revolution in sexuality, which is being ushered in by new reproductive technologies (NRTs). Through such techniques as embryo transplants and
in
vitro
fertilization, women in their sixties are now able to bear children. Soon there will be new family categories: sperm donor fathers, postmenopausal mothers, test-tube babies. The NRTs will redefine terms like motherhood and the family.

Women are on the verge of being freed from the barriers imposed upon them by nature. Thanks to technology, human sexuality is about to enter the twenty-first century, where a woman's reproductive choices may expand in almost unimaginable ways.

This revolution in sexuality is being opposed by the same feminists who attack pornography.

And for the same reason. Both the NRTs and pornography are condemned as "men controlling and exploiting the bodies of women."

As Janice Raymond approvingly states in her book
Women as Wombs:
"Radical feminists stress how male supremacy channels women into pornography and surrogacy as well as into other reproductive procedures. . . ."[7]

On every front, a woman's right to define and to pursue her own sexual destiny is being questioned. Antipornography feminists, such as Janice Raymond and Gena Corea, are also in the forefront of an anti-NRT crusade. The attacks on both issues have the same ideological root: the dogmatic belief that there is only one proper way to view sex. Their way.

Pornography threatens this orthodoxy. For doing this, it should be prized all the more.

3. Viewing pornography may well have a cathartic effect on men who have violent urges
toward women.

81

Pornography may be a catharsis for men with violent urges toward women. If this is true, restricting pornography removes a protective barrier between women and abuse.

Studies on rape differ, but many indicate that pornography may prevent violence against women.

Unbiased research on violence against women is desperately needed. Unfortunately, one of the casualties of the new dogma of sexual correctness has been good solid work in this area.

The Kinsey study listed seven different types of rape. However, it is no longer sexually correct to conduct studies on the many causes of rape, because-as any "right thinking" person knows-there is only one cause: patriarchy as expressed through pornography. As the slogan goes, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."

Studies such as the Kinsey report are no longer possible in the sexually correct environment of modern universities. By demonizing pornography, radical feminists are doing women a great disservice. They are blocking valuable research into other possible causes of rape, which could lead to new forms of prevention.

And
they are diverting attention away from the real issues underlying violence against women.

In
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts,
Russ explains: "[P]arallels can be drawn between today's antipornography movement and the 19th century Temperance movement. . . By pinpointing Demon Rum as the central issue, could avoid the real (and GDQJHURXVRQHVOLNHLQPDUULDJHDQGZRPHQ VODFNRIHFRQRPLFDXWRQRP\«>@

The real cause of rape is not pornography, patriarchy, or men as a class. It is the individual men who rape individual women. Pornography is a scapegoat.

4. Legitimizing pornography would protect women sex workers, who are stigmatized by
our society.

Antipornography feminists are actually undermining the safety of sex workers when they treat them as "indoctrinated women." Leonore Tiefer, a professor of psychology has observed: "These women have appealed to feminists for support, not rejection. ... Sex industry workers, like all women, are striving for economic survival and a decent life, and if feminism means anything it means sisterhood and solidarity with these women." [9]

The law cannot eliminate pornography, any more than it has been able to stamp out prostitution.

But making pornography illegal would further alienate and endanger women sex workers. Antiporn feminists realize that laws will simply drive porn underground. Even totalitarian regimes, with absolute control of the press and the media, cannot suppress pornography. [10] Indeed, making it forbidden fruit may increase its attraction.

Antiporn feminists also know that most of the danger confronting sex workers comes from social stigma, which isolates them. Without recourse to unions or to the police, performers have little control over their working conditions. Making pornography illegal-driving the industry underground-will take away whatever safeguards for women presently exist. Women in porn would become even more reluctant to go to the police for protection or to the courts for redress.

Women, who were involved in pornography in the fifties, when it was illegal, tell horror stories of police raids in which they were made to lie naked and facedown, while police pressed guns against their heads. The purpose: to make them answer questions about friends and associates.

By trying to drive pornography underground, antiporn feminists are encouraging a return to such violence against women sex workers.

In March 1985, a representative of the U.S. Prostitutes Collective stood before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and pleaded with them
not
to pass an ordinance against pornography. She explained that the closure of such sex operations would force the women, who needed to eat and pay their bills, out into the streets as prostitutes. There, they would fall prey to 82

pimps and police crackdowns. She explained: "Feminists who support the porn ordinance said they are not attacking prostitutes-yet the ordinance explicitly calls for enforcement of the prostitution laws. They can't have it both ways."

Pornography needs to be legitimized so that women sex workers can be protected by the legal system, not victimized. Keeping the industry visible is the best way to monitor how women within it are treated. It is the only way to bring public opinion to bear on abuses.

CONCLUSION

After any defense of pornography, a question invariably arises: Is
no
form of pornography objectionable?

On a political and legal level, the answer is: No form of pornography between consenting adults is objectionable. Pornography is words and images, over which the law should have no jurisdiction.

On a personal level, every women has to discover what she considers to be unacceptable. Each woman has to act as her own censor, her own judge of what is appropriate.

"A woman's body, a woman's right" carries certain responsibilities.

83

"Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex,
overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused
as children. "

-Catharine MacKinnon,
Only Words

With all the voices shouting about pornography-pro and con-the ones least heeded are those of women who work in the industry. Usually, when you want to know about something, you ask people who have first-hand experience of it. With pornography, however, most of the theories come from people who are "outsiders," with no direct knowledge of the industry.

I am open to this charge, as well. To provide a balance for my own inexperience, I interviewed women in the industry. I didn't expect to like them as much as I did. As much as I do.

I could claim that I plunged into my research with no preconceptions, but this would be a lie. My assumptions about the women had been formed by decades of television, movies, and trashy novels. I expected porn actresses to be hardened, uneducated, abused, and promiscuous women.

Although some of them might have "hearts of gold," they were women who had nothing to offer but their bodies. I know I expected this by how surprised I was not to find it.

I have less excuse than most people do for being so reactionary. When I was eighteen, my best friend was an older and far more experienced woman named K., who had red hair, green eyes, a stacked body, and a benevolent spirit. Over a Mexican dinner one night, K. explained she was financing her way through grad school at UCLA by working in a massage parlor.

She told this to me because something was worrying her and she needed a friend with whom to talk it over. A few years earlier, she had acted in a porn movie-short by the well-known director, Damiano. Recently re-released, the movie had been reviewed in the latest issue of
Playboy.
The critic had panned it, but he'd singled K. out for praise by name. Unfortunately, she'd used her real one. Now that she was closing in on a Ph.D., K. didn't want to carry the stigma attached to sex work. As a masseuse, she was anonymous; as a porn actress, her name was in
Playboy.

Talking to K. constituted a crash course on sex for me. It was a friendship from which I am still deriving benefits.

For example, during a recent phone interview with a somewhat reserved porn actress, I mentioned my friendship with K. The conversation stopped abruptly. A cautious question came back from the earpiece. "How did you react to her stories about the massage parlor?" I could tell I was being tested.