The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (8 page)

Antiporn feminism has re-emerged within this “new” culture of visibility and while it continues to label pornography with tendentious definitions like “sexually explicit material that sexualizes hierarchy, objectification, submission, and/or violence,”
⁴
it now sets this in the context of a “pornified” or “sexualized” culture—“a different cultural moment” in which “porn has taken over the culture.”
⁵
Books such as Gail Dines’s
Pornland
(2010), Karen Boyle’s
Everyday Pornography
(2010), and Melinda Tankard Reist’s
Getting Real
(2009) focus on the ways in which culture is increasingly debased by the seeping of pornographic practices, styles, and experiences into the mainstream. In this context of cultural change, they also argue that there is “a new receptivity” to anti-porn arguments in which women report that they “feel that they’ve been really naive,” have “been duped by . . . all these glamorizing messages,” or have had “an inchoate sense that something was seriously wrong,” while men confess their “compulsive use” of porn and its toxic effects on their relationships and sense of self.
⁶
In this essay we focus on three areas of discussion: how the re-emergence of antiporn feminism and its formulation of the pornography “problem” builds upon but also differentiates itself from earlier versions of antipornography feminism, and how it may be seen as characteristic of sex panic scripts and conservative common sense views of sex; how gender, bodies, and representations are presented in their arguments; and how the particular model of “healthy” sex inherent in these arguments has much less to do with gender than with a view of the world that is highly suspicious of reason, culture, technology, and representation itself.

Sexual Panic

It is no doubt a truism to claim that ideas and campaigns have their time, that for a multitude of reasons a particular argument will find a comfortable home in the academy, popular cultural commentary, and media representations. It will be discussed everywhere, debated at conferences, referenced in policy actions, and used to justify interventions whether institutional, political, or juridical. For a time, particular names associated with a campaign, a way of thinking, or an approach will become as familiar as the brands, celebrities, or politicians we encounter everyday. Certainly, the last five years have seen a flood of news reports, op-eds, policy documents, and calls for increased legislation against the “pernicious tide” of sexually explicit representations in music, film, and new communication technologies, and names such as Dines and Reist have been regularly name-checked across academic, popular, and institutional discussions.

The authors behind the current wave of antipornography campaigning draw on the arguments of 1970s and 1980s antiporn feminists but do so in interesting ways—for example, although they build on the central tenets of Andrea Dworkin’s analysis of the misogyny and cruelty of pornographers, they posit this as a prescient account but one that could never have envisaged the “juggernaut” of the Internet.
⁷
Melinda Tankard Reist argues that, “What was once considered unthinkable is now ordinary.”
⁸
Both Dines and her campaign group Stop Porn Culture play on this future-foretold, yet beyond imagining, in their constant reiteration that contemporary porn “is not your father’s
Playboy
.”
⁹
The idea is that middle-aged adults have a cozy, even rose-tinted view of Dad’s stash of pornography, accidentally discovered during their teens—and a belief that their version of sexual liberation has come to pass. Dines claims that we are witnessing “something new,” “a social experiment” that is a wake-up call: “we don’t know where it is going,” and neither do the pornographers who are “taken by surprise at how cruel and body-punishing [images are that] the fans are asking for.”
¹⁰

This complex narrative of nostalgia and futurology is a central theme of these accounts where pornography is acknowledged as an already existing feature of the landscape, but one that has developed outside the knowledge of “ordinary” adults and needs urgent redress. The key component of change is the widespread accessibility of the Internet and its ability to bring “outlier” sexual interests to the attention of naturally inquisitive but innocent children:

If your partner is over 40, his sexual development was probably inspired by the underwear pages of a Kays catalogue. Just 10 years ago, most teenagers might have seen only soft porn magazines such as
Playboy.
Yet today’s children are just a click away from a world of “scat babes” (women covered in excrement), “bukkake” (women weeping in distress while several men ejaculate over their faces), or websites offering an entire menu of rape scenes, from incest to raped virgins.
¹¹

As the quotation indicates, Aitkenhead’s article contrasted the harmless pleasures that characterized the first sexual stirrings of today’s over-forty population, with their children’s experience of being assaulted by rape, minority sexual interests, and the sexualized distress of women forced to engage in ever more extreme acts. In her address to a presumed audience of coupled, heterosexual women, male sexuality is naturalized as inquisitive, but in danger of taking a wrong turn if subjected to the wrong kinds of images at too early an age. Aitkenhead calls upon her readers to reflect on their own experiences of life with men who were schooled in the quaint transgressions of the Kays catalogue, and to envisage the tortured imaginings and sexual mores of future generations of men who, as children, have seen the excesses of bukkake. It is this mangling of what had seemed genuinely yet innocently transgressive in the halcyon days of the 1970s that renders contemporary pornography so potentially threatening, made all the worse by being too easily obtained.

It is tempting to name this moment of concern about pornography a moral panic—a spontaneous and sporadic episode of excessive worrying about “a condition, episode, person, or group of persons [who] become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”
¹²
In Cohen’s account, the mass media have a pivotal role as they fashion and orchestrate these episodes by amplifying supposed “dangers” and calling for political intervention against a newly identified “folk devil” or “monster.” However, we’d suggest that, like the “problem” of AIDS, the contemporary prominence of antipornography sensitivity is best understood as “the latest variation in the spectacle of the defensive ideological rearguard action which has been mounted on behalf of ‘the family’” for more than a century.
¹³

The voices raised against pornography take their place among the many and various worries about family breakdown, infidelity, rising STI (sexually transmitted infections) rates, AIDS, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuous sex, gay marriage, and more generalized fears of homosexuality. In sexual matters there is an “endless ‘overhead’ narrative” of anxieties that influence and are, in turn, influenced by worries
about sexually explicit media.
¹⁴
Thus, as Watney suggests, the label “moral panic” does not suffice in this instance because

Moral panics seem to appear and disappear, as if representation were not the site of
permanent
ideological struggle over the meanings of signs. A particular “moral panic” merely marks the site of the current front-line in such struggles. We do not in fact witness the unfolding of discontinuous and discrete “moral panics,” but rather the mobility of ideological confrontation across the entire field of public representations, and in particular those handling and evaluating the meanings of the human body, where rival and incompatible forces and values are involved in a ceaseless struggle to define supposedly universal “human” truths.
¹⁵

As Watney notes, pornography and its consumers are not “made” into a
new
“folk devil” by a spontaneously hysterical press (or feminists). Instead the seeking of inspiration and pleasure outside the sacred dyad of matrimony “is always, and has always been, constructed as intrinsically monstrous within the entire system of heavily over-determined images inside which notions of ‘decency,’ ‘human nature,’ and so on are mobilized and relayed throughout the internal circuitry of the mass media marketplace.”
¹⁶

It may be more fruitful to think of the antiporn resurgence within the more generalized and ever-present trope of “sex panics,”
¹⁷
those “volatile battles over sexuality” where moral values are turned into political action.
¹⁸
The scenarios of sex panics rely on a format designed to structure discussion in a particular way. A target of blame is established through its potential to destabilize normative sexuality and practice, and individuals may be publicly shamed, but are so within the context of the constant, private self-policing of individual deviation from the ideal. The edifice of heteronormativity, and the family structure that is its ideal, is presented as constantly under threat—not just from outsiders or refuseniks—but “everywhere, and at all times.”
¹⁹
Thus panics about sex draw on narratives of danger, disease, and depravity to which “we” are all susceptible, and rely on the repetition of “evocative sexual language and imagery” that urges “us” to be vigilant at all times, both as members of communities and as individuals.
²⁰

Unlike academic discussion, which tends to prize a logical, calm, and rational mode of presentation, the scenarios produced in sex panics rely on the stirring up of public feeling that is presented as the real “site of truth and ethics.”
²¹
Yet, although they suggest passion and authenticity, these scenarios are tightly scripted. They draw their power from the
broader emotional culture of sex: “an affectively dense mix” of dread, excitement, shame, and fear, often working to produce an emotional arc of “outrage, anger, and disgust.”
²²
They may also provoke a “frisson of pleasure” for their audiences that mixes together sociality, emotional arousal, righteousness, and “the thrill of collective rage.”
²³
The “overhead narrative” of the threat to normative and ideal sexuality and the accompanying moments of panic are dangerous because of their capacity to “exert a widespread chilling effect on art, academic scholarship, political activism, and journalism,” because they “operate to the advantage of social and religious conservatives,” and because they are a “crucial vehicle for consolidating political power” for the Christian right.
²⁴

In what follows, we are not so much interested in arguing against antiporn analyses as in exploring the ways in which they tap into the ever-present constructions of “appropriate,” “natural,” and “decent” that underpin the suspicion of pornography as a threat to normative sexuality and “proper” relationships. In examining antiporn feminism in this way, we need to recognize the ways in which it frames, names, and delineates the “problem” so that it is usable by the mass media. Antiporn feminists are not the only participants in public discourse about sex, sexuality, and pornography—they are joined by an assortment of journalists, politicians, and activists in shaping the boundaries of what should be discussed, how it should be discussed, what constitutes proper evidence, and what constitutes the terrain of “the problem.” Drawing attention to the points of consensus involves a recognition that mass media generally present debates about pornography as battles between opposing sides where what is most important is the disagreement rather than the detail of evidence offered. Take as an example the recent debate in the UK’s
Guardian
newspaper entitled “Can Sex Films Empower Women?” between Gail Dines and Anna Span.
²⁵
This kind of debate may involve
balance
—two sides get to offer their views—but this is not so important as the space accorded to readers to adjudicate as
normal, ordinary,
and
everyday
humans. Neither combatant is presented as
like
the readers—Dines is an academic feminist and Span is a pornographer—so that a space opens up for individuals to orientate themselves to the expositions of the problem and then respond to them in relation to the morally constituted category of heterosexuality. And here we do not mean heterosexuality as a sexual orientation but as “the norm,” an ideal and a position to be policed and protected. Debates like this rule out questions about the varieties of pornographies, their origins and makeup, their significance to different sexual identities and subjectivities, and
instead focus attention on what it is
safe
to tolerate for the good of the social institutions through which
ordinary
men, women, and children live their lives.

It would be disingenuous to claim that antiporn activism gets a wider hearing than any other approach—there
are
media spaces for plural and divergent opinions on pornography. Similarly, in the porn studies that have been developed by other feminist academics, by gay male scholars, by researchers with an interest in new media and technology, and by sex-positive, sex-radical, and sex worker activists, there are the beginnings of accounts of the history, production, distribution, consumption, and significance of diverse pornographies. But in most public debates, arguments that do not begin from a suspicion of pornography are relatively invisible, and the discussion there can only operate within certain limits because the terrain has been so clearly demarcated by a framework of concern and the “overhead narrative” of “natural” sexuality. By far the most visible pro-porn stance in public debates is the argument for free speech and the individual’s right to choose to engage with pornography. Yet, defending pornography as free speech does little to challenge the presentation of porn as a singular form in which the degradation or subordination of women is played out or as irredeemably harmful to children who see it “too early.” Free speech arguments merely require that sexually explicit materials should not be censored for adults, and that in free and democratic societies pornography should be tolerated. But this toleration is always an unstable achievement for any minority grouping or interest, open to reassessment and redefinition at any time. And in making arguments for free speech, its proponents often cede the ground that
some
forms of pornography are indeed awful, damaging, and to be abhorred, thereby confirming the basic analysis that there is something intrinsically problematic about both the cultural forms of sexual representation and those who seek them out.