The Comment Factory

“Whenever a taboo is broken,” Henry Miller once told an interviewer from the Paris Review “something good happens, something vitalizing.” Taboo-breaking is a way of laying the truth bare, of removing socially-imposed boundaries in order to see things as they really are. From the earliest stag films to the wealth of magazines, films and online content available today, pornography has always operated at the fringes of society and challenged each generation’s preconceptions of what is sexually – and morally – acceptable. Taboos are, after all, “only hangovers” Miller reminds us, only “the product of diseased minds, of fearsome people who haven’t the courage to live.”

To say that pornography is vitalizing in this sense is to assume that it necessarily tells the truth about male and female sexuality. Many women feel that it does. Others, however, argue that it does the opposite. Many feminists – that dirtiest of words – would go further and say that in a cash-rich industry run largely by men for men, porn can neither be relied on to tell the truth about women or be expected to be in any sense revolutionary. Yet women work in the porn industry, women watch the material produced by the porn industry and women have also campaigned against the censorship of that industry. How can this make sense?

The truth is that it doesn’t. Women are confused about pornography, and feminists are deeply divided by it. The traditional feminist position – and the one most frequently associated with the feminist movement – is vehemently anti-porn and pro-censorship. It sees mainstream pornography as part of a patriarchal discourse, a dialogue between men about women. Whilst women may overhear themselves being talked about, they are never able to be participants in the conversation. This exclusion is, of itself, reductive and objectifying: the viewer is invited to experience the woman being experienced, to part her legs. As her pleasure is commodified, so her sense of her own sexuality becomes warped. “One of the things that pornography has done,” writes radical feminist Angela Dworkin , “is that it’s changed the way women experience their bodies so that sex is what you look like, not what you touch or what you feel and do.”

More disturbing still, these women argue, is the recurrent theme of humiliation and violence that accompanies this objectification. Its hard to disagree. Enter any number of porn sites for offers of ‘tight sluts’, ‘dirty bitches’ and ‘nasty girls who like to fuck.’ Pick up Playboy for one of several rape scene photoshoots. Hustler for jokes about and cartoons of sexual violence. Gag Factor, one of the most popular websites in mainstream ‘gonzo porn’, for ‘new whores degraded every Wednesday.’ The list goes on. And on. And on. This pervasive sense of misogyny is damaging both because of the kind of feelings it unleashes against women, but also because of the way it conditions both male and female sexuality. As feminist and anti-porn campaigner Robert Jensen writes:

“We are constantly told pornography is about fantasies, but the scenes in these movies happened to those  women.  And after those scenes were put on videotape, the films were sold and rented to thousands of men who took it home, put it into VCRs or DVD players, and masturbated to orgasm. That also is real. Those specific women and those specific men are part of the world we live in. And that idea of what a woman is, and that idea of what men’s sexuality is – those ideas are also part of the world we live in. None of it is a fantasy. All of it is as real as we are.”

So how can such realities be changed? Angela Dworkin believes that the only solution is for women to be granted their own homeland and to live separately from men. The more moderate majority of anti-porn feminists – as well as Dworkin – have taken part in a sustained campaign for the widespread censorship of pornography. Here, anti-porn does not equate to anti-sex, but rather a belief that healthy sexual relationships between men and women can only flourish in the absence of an industry that seeks to make a profit through engendering feelings of insecurity and mistrust between them. Both sexes ultimately lose out, they argue, but it is women who stand to lose the most. As Catherine MacKinnon has so eloquently put it, through pornography, women are “reduced and devalued and silenced… Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?”

Pro-pornography feminists would like to re-frame the debate entirely: it is for a woman to decide what she puts in her mouth, and for other women to decide if they want to listen to her or not. Individualistic feminism insists that women be free to choose whether to work in or watch pornography, no matter what that choice entails. To maintain that any women taking part in porn must either be coerced, abused or desperate for money (See MacKinnon again: “All pornography is made overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children”) is to deny the fact that women are sexual beings too; that they have their own desires, fantasies and curiosities. Banning pornography altogether would be an act of silencing in itself, and amount to a kind of regressive moralism. However, while maintaining that the industry needs to be allowed to continue to exist, they would also argue that some radical shifts need to occur before women can occupy a comfortable place within it. They believe, as Angela Carter does, that “pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers.”

The kind of changes they propose involve a re-visioning of the industry so that it becomes one that genuinely reflects and respects female sexuality. Feminist porn star Bobby Lilly believes that “we have to understand the potential there is [in pornography] for women to speak about ourselves. This has not been tapped. It is only just beginning. If we close the doors to sexual expression, we will never find the connection between sex and our power.” She believes that the more socially accepted pornography becomes, the better the conditions will be for the women who work in it, as their rights would be protected by contracts. Furthermore, argues porn star Nina Hartley, women should not simply be protected from producers and directors through contracts, but occupy those positions themselves: “the old guard is the wrong age, the wrong gender, and the wrong attitude to be of assistance to women.”

Candida Royale is a good working example of such change. She is currently the most powerful woman in porn, and her production company Femme Productions has been running at a profit for over twenty years. There are strict on-set rules designed to protect all of her workers: she will not employ anyone with a history of substance or alcohol abuse or any other self-destructive behaviour, actresses will never be asked to do anything they are not fully comfortable with and safe sex is always practiced. Whilst she feels that many of her values are strongly feminist, she has officially left the movement now, believing that the pro-censorship group within it has changed the idea of what it means; that “`feminism’ now has a bad connotation to it for the younger generation: It is anti-man, anti-sex.”

Feminist pornography therefore seeks to re-equate women with both sexuality and power. As a result, it is often more challenging and complex than the more male-produced erotica that is intended for a female audience and features mostly mood music and candles. In terms of the argument over what is fantasy and what is reality in porn, Candida and many other feminists who are involved in the industry come clearly down on the side of fantasy. As long as the actresses are consenting and comfortable, they argue, then pornography can legitimately become a vehicle by which women can explore their sexual imaginations. The controversial mock rape scenes and themes of domination are felt to be acceptable because they are not about real sexual abuse but a form of consensual power play.

In the end, then, it seems that a subject which is so much about the physical comes down to an argument about imagination: about women’s anxiety over understanding their own sexual imaginations, over this imagination being (mis)understood by men, and over it being somehow manipulated or blunted. Both anti and pro-pornography feminists seem to feel this threat strongly.

Pro-censorship campaigners frequently express the fear that pornography does the thinking for us; subverting the privacy of our thoughts, dictating our desires and assigning us prescribed roles before we have even begun to try and understand our own. Since this dictating is largely done by men, a gap is left where women’s imagining ought to be.

Yet a similar question might also be put back to these campaigners. As feminist scholar Linda Williams has replied, “who are they to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?” The feminists who work in and watch pornography believe that it has the potential to offer emancipatory possibilities by filling this gap where women’s imagining ought to be. Their fear, however, is that this imagining will be deemed unacceptable and be pushed somewhere out of sight.

If there can ever be a resolution between such opposing views it will have to be one of compromise. Sexual instincts and social morality do not always sit comfortably together: if imaginations roam free then there will be creativity and discovery, but there will also be misogyny and violence. The debate as it stands at the moment therefore seems to ask that women now make the uneasy choice of exploring one at the cost of accepting the other.