Tag Archives: porn

Freshman

For this performer – very much a feminist – it’s the stigma, not the work itself, that harms her. Exploitation within sex work is not universal. The way the anti-sex-work agenda silences women like this by dismissing them as mindless victims is just as dehumanising as other harmful stereotypes meted out to sex workers. There are many things about porn that are problematic and need to be fixed, but stigmatising the entire industry and those within it just makes everything worse for everyone. Feminists: the false dichotomy of virgin/victim is just as bad as virgin/whore and as much a product of patriarchy. Here’s part of a wonderful article at XOJane – “I’M THE DUKE UNIVERSITY FRESHMAN PORN STAR AND FOR THE FIRST TIME I’M TELLING THE STORY IN MY WORDS”:

“…It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.

I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.

I find it interesting that porn (a billion-dollar industry) is consumed by millions of people — men and women (and all other equally wonderful genders) alike — yet no one is willing to consider the lives of the people behind the camera. No one wants to hear about the abuses and exploitation that take place, no one wants to hear about the violence committed every day against sex workers, no one wants to consider that we have hopes and dreams and ambitions.

No, all we are is “whores and bimbos.”

I reject this. Instead, what I ask for is simple. I, like all other sex workers, want to be treated with dignity and respect. I want equal representation under the law and within societal institutions. I want people to acknowledge our humanity. I want people to listen to our unique narratives and dialogues…”

Read the full article here.

But is it Art?

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Here’s a chunk of a New Statesman article by Tabatha Leggett on whether porn can ever be art (especially prescient for me, as I’ve just started drawing smut again after a long break):

“…Feminist philosopher Anne Eaton, who writes about this subject often, thinks that expressing a morally dubious message undermines the value of a work of art because it requires its viewers to identify with ethical deformities, which distracts them from appreciating the works as art. Put simply, she reckons that to enjoy porn, you have to (at least temporarily) objectify women, and you can’t do this at the same time as contemplating it as art.

Eaton’s arguments are tendentious. Obviously pornography doesn’t always require viewers to objectify women. That’s simply an accurate, if not particularly astute, observation about the majority of the stuff you’ll find on any teenage boy’s laptop. But she’s wrong to think that you can’t objectify someone in a work of art and contemplate its artistic value at the same time. There are loads of artworks that let you do that. Remember Fiona Banner’s 2002 Turner Prize nominee “Arsewoman in Wonderland”, a pornographic film transcript printed in pink ink on a large canvas? It says things like, “he cums in her face, she moans and rolls over”. You can objectify the woman being described and think about whether it’s art at the same time.

The same goes for basically everything that Jeff Koons ever made. Koons even spoke about the function of the explicit paintings from his 1989 exhibition “Made in Heaven” being twofold: to encourage audiences to form opinions about acceptable expression of sexuality and to get them feeling a little hot under the collar…”

Full article here.

Goods Undamaged

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Another Angry Woman (aka Stavvers) has written yet another brilliant and well-researched blog entry on women and sexuality. This one addresses a recent Journal of Sex Research study of porn performers, self-esteem and an “assessment of the damaged goods hypothesis”. Here’s a bit of it:

“…The paper aimed to test the veracity of a set of beliefs surrounding women in porn. These attitudes were gleaned from a studies into attitudes towards porngraphy, finding that those with a negative attitude towards porn tended to believe that porn performers had low self-esteem, were drug addicts and had experienced sexual abuse in childhood. These attitudes, the authors point out, are also apparent in anti-porn feminist writing, which is backed up with little evidence. The authors also point out the distinct lack of quantitative research into the women in porn themselves, drawing attention to the fact that while there’s a couple of qualitative studies about why women get into acting in porn, there’s nothing quantitative.

So they decided to examine quality of life, self-esteem, attitudes towards sex, sexual behaviour and drug use in a sample of porn actresses. The headline findings were rather interesting: it turns out that the stereotypes aren’t true. Comparing porn actresses to a sample of women matched by age, marital status and ethnicity, they found that the porn actresses actually had higher self-esteem than comparable women, were more likely to feel positive, felt they had better social support and were more spiritual. There was no difference in current drug use, apart from marijuana (porn actresses were more likely to get high), although the porn actresses reported more drug use in the past. There was also no difference in incidence of sexual abuse in childhood. And finally, the porn actresses reported greater levels of sexual satisfaction, were more likely to identify as bisexual, enjoyed sex more, were having more sex than the women who weren’t in porn (sex as part of their work was not counted: this was entirely extracurricular sex), were more likely to be concerned about catching an STI, and had started having sex a little earlier.

Does this mean that the stereotypes about women in porn coming from some feminists and the general population can finally be put to bed? I’ll get back to that after we’ve had a little look through a few criticisms of the paper…”

Read the whole post here.