Why no outrage?
Gail Dines wonders why the outrage of what was done to David Dao is so obvious while the outrage of what’s done to women in porn is so obscure.
People saw the video, put themselves in Dao’s place, and came to the very sensible conclusion that what they were watching was a level of callous brutality that is unacceptable in a civil society. Andrea Dworkin would not have found our empathy strange because, despite her sadness and anger at the cruelty in the world, she always had faith in the ability for people to do the right thing.
What is strange, however, is that there is no public outcry over porn. You can type “porn” into Google and in 10 seconds come up with images that are so violent, so brutal, so dehumanizing that they take your breath away. You can see people being raped, tortured, strangled, beaten, electrocuted, and physically destroyed to the point that many must be thinking to themselves: “Just kill me.”
Why no outrage? Why no demands for the companies who produce this brutality to apologize? Because these people are women, and when women are brutalized in the name of sex, the violence is rendered invisible. As long as it is semen, not blood, dripping from her mouth (and usually from every other orifice as well), and she is saying “just fuck me” as she is grimacing, crying, and sometimes screaming in pain, it seems, as Dworkin pointed out, people require an explanation as to why this particular brutality is not acceptable.
If that’s considered sexually arousing…why isn’t the video of David Dao being passed around as porn?
Today’s mainstream internet porn — now a multi-billion, not multi-million dollar industry — makes the porn I saw in the 1980s look almost soft-core. The level of violence that women on the porn set endure today is akin to what has euphemistically been called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” If it was happening to men, it would be seen for what it is, and we would be asking: How is this possible? How has a global industry built on the torture of human beings been branded as “sex positive,” “empowering,” and “harmless fantasy?”
The answer of course, is that a woman is not viewed as a full human being. She is, as Simone de Beauvoir said, “sex… absolute sex, no less.” And indeed, no more. This is why, when we see pictures of men being brutalized, we see the brutality; when we see pictures of women in porn being brutalized, the culture sees sex.
I’ve never understood this. I don’t suppose I ever will.
It’s strange, isn’t it? It doesn’t take much for most people to become aroused. Nobody has to be hurt or exploited. Poorly-written pretend stories can do the trick quite nicely, for goodness’ sake.
Do humans crave the more extreme just because it exists? Or because it can exist? Are we demanding that it exists because we consume? Probably.
I’m pro-porn in the sense that governments shouldn’t tell us what we should and shouldn’t look at (ours is currently trying to tell us that porn is bad although it hasn’t explained why) but anti-porn in the sense that abuse is inevitable. The abuse argument has to win and it’s no great hardship, after all, to do without porn.
My main concern is that in many cases, consent is presumably not possible. That performers are paid doesn’t mean they have an alternative.
As an unattractive male, I have never had difficulty in finding people who want to be naked with me. Sex isn’t particularly difficult to come by if we’re honest, sincere and caring. Porn can be exciting but so can, well, role-playing, dirty-talk, swinging, fucking in public or whatever floats anyone’s boat. Not to mention just enjoying being with someone. Nobody gets hurt that way and hopefully everyone has a good time.
So yeah, I reckon porn, like prostitution, should be something we support in principle providing nobody gets hurt, but should also admit that people always do get hurt.
You want to see naked people? Find some people who want you to see them naked. It’s really not that difficult.
Really? It seems like a pretty straightforward distinction to me. The general public doesn’t share your beliefs about porn.
Violence was committed against David Dao against his will.
Violence in porn is committed against women who (the public assumes) have consented to this treatment.
You might as well ask why people weren’t as outraged at the violence committed against Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart as at what was done to Dao.
I’m sure that you will argue with the parenthetical above, and say that the public is wrong, that these women don’t consent, or that their consent isn’t meaningfully free because X, Y, and Z… which all may be perfectly valid arguments, but you haven’t convinced the general public of their truth.
You might as well be a pro-lifer demanding to know why people are upset when a baby is left alone in a hot car and dies, but shrug when hundreds of abortions are performed the same day. You’re assuming that people agree with you that the two things are identical and they are therefore hypocritical or discriminating by having different reactions..
I agree with screechy that the analogy is a poor one. It’s superficial at best and things are a lot more complicated than the analogy suggests.
But the analogy isn’t the important thing, I reckon. There ought to be outrage at the way the porn industry works and the things that happen therein.
There are surely better comparisons but we should still be outraged about what happens in porn, what performers have to go through and consumers’ shifting conception of the norm.
Or to put it another way:
People were rightly outraged at the violence against David Dao.
But the same people are not outraged about the violence committed against women in porn.
I think a lot of the outrage is fear – the feeling “That could be me, on my next flight”. Most people don’t think they will ever be a porn actress.
Screech:
In what sense do you imagine that consent in a particular case is “meaningful”? I don’t know, because it depends on people who aren’t me, but I think it serves us well to look at the pressures some people face and only then ask (them, preferably) whether the things they do are truly of their own volition.
@David Evans
Yes, I think that’s the point. We tend to worry mostly about the things that might affect us.
I myself am outraged that I might not be able to take my tablet on a plane but less outraged – or at least more personally distant from the fact – that millions of people don’t have food.
Explaining our own craven behaviour isn’t good enough. We have to do better.
latsot@3,
Probably. But you run into a couple of problems there. Gail Dines claim that
I’m a little dubious of that, but I hope you’ll forgive me for not testing that hypothesis right now on an office computer. I think even people who are seeking out porn can generally manage to avoid the kind of stuff Dines is talking about, but even if I’m wrong, I don’t think too many people are willing to go public with complaints about what they found while Googling for porn.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that most people will readily agree that “there is some very bad, dark shit on the internet.” But it doesn’t intrude into most people’s day-to-day lives. Which sounds cold, but we all only have so much outrage and anger and compassion and energy to go around. And there’s a sort of learned helplessness at work when it comes to the “dark corners of the internet”: what do you want the average citizen to do about some piece of disturbing pornography?
Stuff like the David Dao incident goes viral because:
(1) Anyone who “flies the friendly skies” can identify with him. Unless United was lying about this part, too, he was literally chosen at random. For a variety of reasons, and I’ll stipulate that misogyny is no doubt one of them, most people don’t identify with women being mistreated in porn.
(2) It contradicts our settled expectations. This isn’t supposed to happen, whereas disturbing stuff on the internet is…. well, it’s the internet, whatareyougonnado?
(3) There’s an easily identifable villain. People can tweet at United, boycott them, and otherwise direct their anger. Who do we blame for producing a vile piece of pornography? What can we do to them that they’ll give a crap about?
Screechy #2,
WOW that is NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL. The acts committed against Mel Gibson were fake. The acts committed to porn actresses are real. Wake the fuck up.
Screech:
I don’t think you understand who is actually harmed by porn. It’s not the people consuming it, as far as I know, it’s the people performing who don’t – realistically – have a choice. Some performers do but obviously many do not. That is the problem. The assumption that performers consent to anything they’re asked or told to do is a wrong assumption.
For this reason, perhaps we shouldn’t use porn, is all I’m saying.
latsot@6,
I was just using that as shorthand for what I understand to be some of the arguments against (some kinds of) pornography, or sex work generally: that even if a performer “consents” in the sense that there’s no coercion, they could walk away and suffer no harm, it’s still not sufficiently voluntarily because of …. economic pressures, substance abuse issues, etc.
I think we should certainly try to understand the whole picture when evaluating a situation, but I feel like a lot of the language that gets used is unhelpful. But mainly I was trying to just acknowledge the existence of those arguments without being pejorative or really getting into their merits, other than to say that I don’t think they’ve won the day yet in the court of public opinion.
Don’t buy it, Screech. What the fuck is this:
I don’t understand why anyone ought to care about the general public being convinced, whatever that could possibly mean. The last time I checked that had nothing at all to do with what is true or with who got hurt. Those are things I care about. In reverse order, as it happens.
Cressida @ 9,
Thanks for completely missing the point and skipping directly to ALL CAPS OUTRAGE. I knew someone would, I’m sort of impressed it took this long.
Yes, the sex acts are really happening to the actress, and everyone gets this.
But this was a post about violence, specifically about how actresses are allegedly “being raped, tortured, strangled, beaten, electrocuted, and physically destroyed to the point that many must be thinking to themselves: “Just kill me.””
That’s a much different claim. Or at least, I assume it is, since I’ve been reliably informed that the whole “Andrea Dworkin said that all sex is rape” was a smear. It’s a claim that the actresses are not consenting to the acts being performed on them.
And that, I suggest, is NOT the general public’s view of porn. They see people like Jenna Jamison and Ron Jeremy appearing on reality shows. (I’m really probably dating myself with those names.) They see porn performers going to awards shows in Vegas and accepting trophies for “Best Anal Scene,” and they assume — rightly — that a hell of a lot of porn is being filmed using performers who consent to what is being done.
Obviously that is not the entire porn industry. But then we’re back to the original question. Why aren’t people outraged about porn like they were about Dao? Because the average person hasn’t seen anyone in porn who they believe was treated like that.
latsot @12,
I’m not saying that public opinion matters as to what is morally right or wrong. I’m just saying, the answer to the question “why isn’t the public outraged about X the way it is outraged about Y” is “because most people don’t think the two are equivalent.” If you’re asking a question about public opinion, then public opinion kind of matters. Right?
Screechy:
Sorry for pointing out what you actually wrote. But for fuck’s sake, read what you wrote rather than trying to defend it.
“Why no outrage? Why no demands for the companies who produce this brutality to apologize? Because these people are women, and when women are brutalized in the name of sex, the violence is rendered invisible”
Yes and I guess the underlying facts about male and female sexuality may be even darker and more inconvenient than this. Not just the dark corners of the internet, what about the mainstream movies like “50 shades of Grey”? That was written and directed by women and a majority of consumers are women.
No, because there is consent. There is of course a whole conversation to be had about the potential for financial straits and various other pressures causing people to consider doing things they ordinarily would not contemplate, but then again there truly are people that genuinely enjoy experiencing that sort of thing.
NOPE. Primarily because it does happen to men. I will tentatively grant that it does not happen to men in the same volume as with women, and thus that the market for watching abuse of women is larger than that of abused men, but it definitely does happen to men.
Screechy #13, porn is suffused with violence. Actual violence. I didn’t miss the point at all. Whether “the general public” realizes that is irrelevant.
latsot @15,
I read what I wrote that you quoted. I don’t think you understood it. I specifically said I wasn’t getting into the merits of those arguments, just observing the fact that they haven’t convinced most people, and hence the lack of outrage that Ophelia finds so baffling.
You and I seem to be talking about two different questions. You want to argue whether people SHOULD be outraged about porn on a level comparable to the Dao incident; I’ve merely been explaining why they’re not, and you’re mistaking that as some kind of argumentum ad populum on my part.
It’s as if you were going on about “why did people vote for Trump? He’s not going to help the working class, he’s going to be awful on foreign policy, etc. etc.” and I replied “Because a lot of voters didn’t see it that way,” and then you get all outraged that I’m somehow a Trump defender.
I’m not trying to be coy about the normative issue. I’m willing to discuss that, I just don’t know where we go with it. To be perfectly clear: I assume that at least some porn is out there that involves nonconsensual acts, the exact amount depending on how we want to define “consent” in cases of economic hardship, abusive boyfriend producers, etc. And I agree that it’s terrible that this happens at all, no matter what the exact number is. I also assume that those are relatively uncontroversial propositions. So now what? Are you — or Gail Dines, or Ophelia — proposing new laws, or increased enforcement of existing ones? Are you calling for a boycott of all pornography on the grounds that some of it is abhorrently made? Or any other proposal for doing something about it? Or are we just comparing who is sufficiently morally outraged about it?
Cressida,
Are you claiming that all porn is “suffused with violence”? Is it possible to depict sex that is not “suffused with violence”? Or are you defining depictions of sex that aren’t “suffused with violence” as something other than porn?
Screechy #19, that’s a straw man. Of course it’s *possible* to depict nonviolent sex. But the prevailing pattern is that pornography does not do that.
#20
As far as I have noticed, most porn does not contain violence. Anecdata of course, but then so is your assertion “But the prevailing pattern is that pornography does not [depict nonviolent sex]” unless there are stats on the subject.
I’m so happy to have the perspective of pornography consumers here. They’ve been too long ignored.
Look, we can argue about the definition of “most” or “prevailing” or what have you. The position that “violence occurs in less than X percent of pornography, therefore there’s nothing wrong with pornography” is manifestly ridiculous. If this were any other industry, leftists would be all up in arms if a percentage of the industry depended on exposing people to unsafe bodily fluids or subjecting people to activity resulting in prolapsed rectums. But since the pornography industry is all about facilitating men’s orgasms, leftist men are A-OK with those unsafe working conditions.
I suggest the pornography apologists get their heads out of the sand.
Cressida, I don’t see anybody here saying that they’re OK with violence in porn, or engaging in apologetics. What they’re doing is trying to find reasons why there isn’t the outrage that comes with incidents such as the U.A. one.
The suggestion is that there is less said about violent porn because, no matter how horrified or disgusted or angered people may feel over seeing some of the degrading acts, the perception may be that the women (and men; there is a lot of violent gay porn around*) have consented to be so abused, have signed contracts, etc, and so to protest would be protesting choices the women have made for themselves. There may also be the idea that the porn violence is like the violence in war or gangster films; it can look horrific but it’s just acting and special effects and make-up, and so on.
Screechy Monkey and Holms weren’t defending those viewpoints, merely offering them as possible reasons for the lack of protest.
I find the fact that there is a large enough demand for violent porn to make it worth making at all to be almost as shocking as the violence itself. As for the lack of protest, I feel that nothing will change unless the actors themselves start to speak out and say that they were coerced or forced into it. Until they do, you can’t blame anybody for not protesting about what the violence if they think that the women are taking part willingly.
*Not that I’ve actually seen much porn. I’ve never had much interest in it, not for prudish reasons but simply because I just don’t get off on watching other people have sex. I am, of course, aware of what is available, but am about as far from being a consumer as it’s possible to get.
No it isn’t, no more than rights violations in other trades / professions tarnishes that entire form of work.
There are legal requirements regarding frequent STD testing for all porn actors, and laws regarding consent. You may look at some of the acts and recoil in disgust / horror, but that is not indicative of whether an act is in breach of consent or unsafe.
Are you at all aware that women are also consumers of porn? I have no figures regarding the numbers of female vs. male porn viewing, but they both exist and there is porn marketed to both. Including the degrading stuff.
This is such an odd question that I thought I must be missing something. Isn’t it the same as asking why we are repelled by watching ISIS executions online but happy to pay to watch people being ‘murdered’ in Hamlet? Does anybody really struggle to understand the difference?
Messed up the formatting, apologies.
Confession: upon first reading the OP, I experienced a knee-jerk, “Wait a damned minute. This analogy makes me, a consumer of porn *AND* someone who was outraged by Dao’s treatment, sound like a hypocrite. Frankly, it’s a bit unsettling to think of myself as a hypocrite. Hence, the analogy must be flawed. I must convince everyone of this!”
I did reign that reaction in, and forced myself through the line-of-reasoning; “Ophelia is among the most insightful people I know. She is not prone to flippant or shallowly-flawed points. I think I’ll pause and think about what she’s saying a bit more.”
I’m still not convinced the analogy is perfect (though of course no reaction is), but a little reflection led me to conclude that her analogy was quite on-the-mark in making a salient point.
For one, a quick search turned up a near case-in-point (and an eye-opening article worth reading in its own right): http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/25/a-famous-porn-star-claims-she-was-raped-on-set-will-she-receive-justice.html. In the course of showing up to work, a person was brutally raped and thoroughly traumatized – at the behest of her employer – and went public with her story. Per Ophelia’s analogy, what was the scale of the public outrage over that?
And (more of a thought-experiment, but one I don’t think is far off) when I tried to imagine what might’ve happened if Dao had been a female passenger, I honestly found it trivial to see the story unfolding in an entirely different way.
“Woman goes ballistic when told she’d been bumped from flight.”
“Videos capturing woman’s hysterical shrieks now going viral.”
“Attendants given no choice but to subdue and physically drag crazed woman from the plane.”
“‘She seemed perfectly normal when we first boarded’, says stunned onlooker. ‘I guess I’m just glad she went crazy before we were up in the air.”
“Admits one flight agent, who asked that their name be withheld, ‘I always get nervous when we have to bump a woman from a flight – they just get so much more emotional.'”
Recently-released footage shows that Dao actually told the attendants, prior to things getting physical, “You’ll have to drag me out of here”. That statement, from “man-Dao”, was considered inconsequential to his subsequent treatment. In fact, probably because he said with an “cool and collected” man-voice, it’s being cited as evidence that he was NOT being belligerent. In the “woman-Dao” scenario, that statement would’ve been wholesale proof of belligerence. Whatever tone she actually used, I have no doubt it would’ve been a “challenge issued in a shrill voice”; there’d be speculation of “If she said that, maybe she wanted it… she’s probably one of those 50-shades-of-grey sex freaks”, or, to YouTube commenters… “Hah! The crazy bitch actually told em to give her a beat down.”
And for a real mind-fuck: just imagine if it’d been a black woman.
I honestly think that is silly. If Dao had been a woman, the outcry would, if anything, have been louder and more vehement.
@Pinkeen
Silly, you say?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyfZpiUqEEs
Uncannily, in a way (I’d not heard of this incidence before google-searching, “crazy woman assaults police officer”): the woman actually does say, clearly, to the DMV personel: “Then drag me outta here. Drag me out of here.” An officer walks up, says “you gotta go”, and grabs her by the wrists to do just that. She fights to get free of the large man grabbing her, throwing kicks and punches. The officer body-slams her to the ground; she continues to fight to get free. The skirmish continues with him ultimately pinning her, cuffing her, and dragging her out of the DMV. She was fortunate in that she did avoid major injury (very fortunate: it’s clear that there’s a time or two during the skirmish that the officer lost his balance and tumbled in a way that could’ve seriously injured her).
Note the reaction of spectators; notably, while there is (I think – it’s a bit muffled) a call for HER to calm down – nobody seems remotely upset that a 220+ pound officer just grabbed and then body-slammed a hitherto non-violent, non-belligerent woman half his weight to the ground.
And the public reaction? First off, the video is titled “Woman filmed attacking and fighting with cop at the DMV”.
The top five comments:
“Wow, that cop showed tremendous restraint by not punching her! He even still called her mam!”
“Thanks for bleeping out those curse words! God forbid I hear a bad word while I watch some dumb white bitch fight a cop.”
“The real crime here is, of course, that the video was recorded vertically.”
“What a dumb whore.”
“Self entitlement does that to people.”
Addendum: I really doubt your imagination is that challenged: if you’d only seen the DMV video and had to guess at how the comments would read… what would you have expected to find? If, during the struggle, the woman’s face had smacked into a hard surface, and she was escorted out bloodied and dazed with injuries similar to Dao’s, do you think the comments would be suddenly sympathetic?
Also, just as a point of comparison, top 5 comments on Dao’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zthf2IKkBk
“overbooked flight and the seat next to him was empty???”
“all of you calling him insane, just think, this man has done nothing wrong and they ripped him out of his seat and knocked him out, and he wasn’t saying “please kill me” he was saying “do not kill me”, you sicken me, he has rights that have been vilolated and its a completely normal reaction to scream when you are in pain.”
“Do not ever fly United Airlines. They are despicable beyond words.”
“The police should have said to united he isn’t breaking any laws you deal with it”
Kevin, you have to compare like with like. We are imagining a middle aged woman doctor being dragged out of a plane, teeth broken, face bloodied to empty a seat for someone else. If you think there would have been no protest or less, I think you are fooling yourself, but I can’t persuade you.
Screechy @18:
I understand that you’re suggesting reasons and that those reasons are not your personal position. I was attacking the reasons, not you and I’m sorry it came across otherwise. Very much my bad. My point is and has always been that consent is very difficult to define and is easily manipulated so perhaps we should be careful about consuming porn.
I don’t think that is true. Consent is very easy to define except in very marginal cases. I don’t really know if it is easily ‘manipulated ‘either, is that saying anything more than ‘some people can be persuaded to do things they would otherwise rather not do’? The fact that some adults choose to do things that we consider disreputable for motives that we consider inadequate, shouldn’t tempt us to believe that they are not in a meaningful sense consenting.
@Monkey:
As you can plainly see, I’m doing none of those things. I’m not in a position to make new laws or to boycott anything. I have no intention of doing anything other than making a suggestion, which I already did: perhaps we should think twice before using porn.
I think it’s a good suggestion. Let’s enjoy the naked people we already know.
@Holms
You might – amazingly – be surprised to learn that not all porn production is legal. Rather a lot of it is produced in places that are not the United States, for example. But if there are US rules for the regulation of porn, there are obviously people who disregard them.
This is true about every single thing, but we always have a choice about whether or not to consume it.
To get back to my original point: the notion of consent seems as dubious as it is for prostitutes. I’m fairly sure that the companies producing porn don’t care about the difference between technical consent and actual consent.
@Pinkeen
An example:
Someone is persuaded to become a prostitute because he or she is broke or threatened. Has this person consented to sex? I argue that consent is impossible in this situation.
I think this is a distinction without a difference. Another version of ‘false consciousness’.
@Pinkeen:
I don’t think I could disagree more.
Some people enthusiastically agree to do porn. Some people agree because they don’t really have a choice.
That’s a distinction and a difference, I reckon.
‘Really’ is doing a lot of work there. If there is no choice then there is no consent, but if there is, there is. I would agree that ‘pron or die of starvation’ is not a ‘real’ choice, but we are not talking about those sorts of extremes. Of course the consent will not always be enthusiastic but that does not make a moral or legal difference. We all of us often choose to do things without any real enthusiasm.
@pinkeen:
Then it is perfectly clear that you have never been desperate.
Yet another anecdote: When I was 14 I was kicked out of my home by my parents and had to survive by myself. Making money was difficult. Finding shelter was not easy. Tell me again about choice.
I have, more than once, but I was still able to make choices. I didn’t resort to burglary, for example, although others did. I didn’t rob my friends, but could have.
I do not think 14 year olds can consent to prostitution, but children are a special case. Making money is difficult, but it is possible without working in prostitution.
Well, I repeated Dine’s experiment with Google. A one word search for ‘porn’ and then choosing ‘images’ (I don’t have any censoring or ‘child-protecting settings).
Of the first 63 images, only one had an overt violent ‘message,’ the man had his hand over the woman’s mouth. The horrors over which Dines was pearl-clutching just weren’t there. Of course, she will have had different results, but I suspect she didn’t actually do the search.
Yes, the porn industry churns out hostile, misogynist, sex-negative crap by the bushel. And there are substantial subsets of porn that are celebrations of hate and violence. The same hate and violence that is normalized throughout the culture.
There is a reason that Pussygrabber Of The United States wasn’t dumped the moment that tape was released. His behavior is normal. It is the way ‘successful’ men are expected to behave towards women.
I suspected that might be true Drunk John but didn’t dare put it to the test. I would imagine that the biggest market in pornography is for rather low-key stuff, although there is bound to be a market of some kind for just about anything.
Actually, it does. At least 4 states have laws regarding “affirmative consent” which is often interpreted as enthusiastic consent.
And I would argue that, legal or not, it does make a moral difference. A woman consents to have sex with you because you will not give her a raise or promotion otherwise – that is illegal and immoral, even though she did consent.
I don’t think that is true (the enthusiasm bit) but even if it were true for sex, it wouldn’t follow for pornography.
And yes, coercion and threats are illegal and immoral. But unenthusiastic sex is neither. It is not for us to police what constitutes acceptable sex for other consenting adults.
Discussing is not policing.
A later post by Gail:
And then there’s the overarching point about smug invocations of “choice” and “consent” when both are constrained by material conditions. People who work in hazardous jobs like chicken processing don’t “choose” that work because they love it, they “choose” it because it’s all they can get.
No, that is hardly ever true. They usually choose it because that is the best option they have according to their own view of their circumstances. Ask friends who do those sorts of jobs what other choices they had.
I don’t think it is smug to notice that people have choices, but it is terribly patronising to assume that people who do unpleasant or hazardous jobs have none. Of course choices are not unconstrained, no choice ever is, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The comment above by Gail Dines misses the point yet again. The question is not whether women enjoy doing pornography, it is whether they consent to it. That is what makes pornography different from assault. It is very odd that a professor cannot grasp this quite simple idea, I think.
No, discussing is not policing, but if we introduce laws, that is policing and thhat was what we were discussing.
@Pinkeen:
Lol, well it’s great to finally meet the sole arbiter of what behaviour is and isn’t acceptable under entirely variable conditions of desperation.
Latsot, I didn’t say anything like that. I said that desperate people still make choices. You were desperate but still chose not to do certain things, right? Just because choices are limited by difficult circumstances does not mean that they are not choices, that consent is meaningless. A poor boy who chooses to make gay porn is still making a choice, all other things being equal, and that is why filming him naked or having sex is different from assaulting him.
Pinkeen, I too have been desperate. A single mother with a teenage son, and at the time, almost no options. I ended up stuck in a job that I would have said no to in any other situation, and by the way, I am frequently vilified by my (leftist) friends for having done that…they are so sure there is always a choice, and no one needs to be a telemarketer, because there is always something else available. No, there isn’t.
And, yes, I did consider porn and prostitution – fortunately, the telemarketer job came along just in time, and I was able to avoid having to make that “choice”. If it had not been for a stroke of luck, I would have “chosen” to do what I had to do to feed my son, because his father was not paying his child support.
There are not always options. And sleazy people take advantage of desperate people.
It would be funny if Pinkeen turned out to be me, making my comments sound just reasonable enough to pass muster while still resolutely making the worse sound the better cause.
I couldn’t do it though, I’d get bored after the second or third sentence.
Iknklast, I don’t know your circumstances and sometimes there is no choice, or near enough, but was there really no cleaning job you could get? There has never been a time I couldn’t find work cleaning in a hotel, hospital or elsewhere.
Ophelia, I can’t quite work out what your last post means!
Guys, the point almost all of you are missing is that pornography is real. It’s not acting and it’s not fake. The women are enduring exactly what they appear to be enduring.
I stand by everything I said.
Pinkeen, when I said I had been able to find no job, I meant it. I had been looking for sometime, and was about to lose my house when that telemarketing job came through. I was actually working three jobs – the highest paid gave me $100 a month.
When you say things like that, you sound like Paul Ryan, honestly. That is the justification most Republicans use for cutting off benefits – there is always something. Except when there isn’t, but few people acknowledge that. I wasn’t even having luck with fast food, which I had used to work my way through college. So please don’t be smug.
Oh, and the interesting thing is that my leftie friends who condemned me for taking a telemarketer job, which they see as exploitation of the worker, would have been totally supportive had I done the porn or prostitution. I know – they suggested I should have gone that route instead.
It’s like a parody. I say people who work in hazardous jobs like chicken processing don’t “choose” that work because they love it, they “choose” it because it’s all they can get, and Pinkeen says no, that is hardly ever true. It’s hardly ever true that people work shit jobs because they can’t find better ones? Really? We can all stop worrying about anything then, because every problem has been worked out.
Pinkeen are you not aware for instance that people very often have to find jobs immediately to avoid various horrible consequences if they don’t? So they can’t wait until something better opens up, they can’t even wait long enough to knock on every door in town? Are you not aware that some people can’t afford to widen their search because of transportation costs? Are you not aware of various impediments to getting better jobs? And so on?
“Hardly ever true.” *shakes head in disbelief*
“Pearl clutching.” Gail Dines is an academic researcher with decades of work to her credit. But that doesn’t matter, because she’s a “pearl clutcher.” Or a “prude,” as is often claimed.
That’s misogyny right there. Standard cultural misogyny. Call the foremost academic expert on pornography’s influence on the conditions of women a “pearl clutcher.”
Men: Please do better. Please be willing to see what you’re doing when you say things like this, even if you don’t consciously mean to. It matters.
Thank you Josh. I was going to respond to that but put it off until later.
That also applies to “Of course, she will have had different results, but I suspect she didn’t actually do the search.” This is, as Josh pointed out, her academic specialty. Of course she did the fucking search. What an infuriatingly contemptuous dismissive thing to say.
If this was a discussion about how, say, factory workers were exploited (low pay, long hours,dangerous working conditions, etc.) would the “choice” argument still come up? It seems pretty uncontroversial to talk about the exploitation of people working minimum-wage jobs among the left. There seems to be a pretty good understanding that these people are working in these jobs because their options are limited; that having limited options shouldn’t condemn one to unsafe working conditions (because you always have the “choice” to quit, right?); and that these industries should be criticized and held accountable for the way they treat their workers. Why is porn different?
Adult film actresses have talked about the brutality they have been subjected to during film shoots. They have talked about signing up for one sex act, then when they get to the set they are expected to do something else entirely, something they absolutely did not want to do. And it’s either do it or walk off and not get paid. They have talked about their clear “no” being ignored while the film was rolling; about being held down against their will; about having to do drugs and alcohol in order to get through a scene. They have talked about the damages done to their bodies and the diseases they have contracted. If workers from any other industry were talking about this, would we still be talking about those workers “choice” to work in that field, or would we be asking questions about the way the industry treats its workers?
The thing is, there is very little in the way of regulation in the porn industry. Some of the larger producers and distributors seem to be a little better about the way they treat their performers, but they are not the only ones making porn. There is also the “amateur” and “professional amateur” categories, and there seems to be precious little oversight in these categories. These are not niche porn categories sought after by only a few individuals. And the thing is, because there is so little oversight, no one knows whether the “amateur” porn they’re watching is something that the performers consented to or not. There is no way to know whether we are watching a filmed rape. Even something as “mainstream” and “tame” as “Deep Throat;” as the star of that movie, Linda Boreman, said she was forced into porn and prostitution by her abusive boyfriend.
Even if it is only a small percentage of porn that contains the rape and abuse of women, does that mean it is acceptable? Do we shrug our shoulders and say those women “chose” to do it, or do we take a good long look at the industry and how it operates?
And that doesn’t even get into the issue of depictions of violence against women being portrayed as sexually arousing. Why is critical analysis of porn and its depiction of women so controversial? Any other medium, any other genre, there may be a a disagreement about whether those depictions of women are sexist or not, but no one ever makes the argument that because an actress “chose” to play that character or the writer “chose” to write that character that way, that the argument is invalid.
#31 Kevin
I am just amazed that you consider that incident comparable to the United Airline thing. Dao was selected by an arbitrary number generator to vacate a seat he paid for, in breach of the law regarding forced seat evacuation (e.g. they had not pursued the cash offer auction to the amount required by law), and was smashed by guards. He made no aggressive move other than – and this is stretching the word ‘aggressive’ – shouting his defiance.
On the other hand, your video shows that some argument had already taken place, as a result of which the woman is being told to leave. She refuses, and shouts her defiance – the only common element with Dao – and then kicks the guard trying to remove her. She is very obviously more belligerent than Dao, the guard uses less force than those air cops did, and she is even taunting him about his inability to fight. You claim that the guard grabbed and body-slammed “a hitherto non-violent, non-belligerent” woman, but this is belied by your earlier observation: she threw the first attacks.
This is not a comparable scene at all.
#36 latsot
And if we are single and don’t have any naked people at hand? Or a couple that have to spend some time apart due to e.g. work trips? Or a couple that likes to watch porn together? Or someone that has a kink, but knows no one that shares that kink?
#37 latsot
“You might – amazingly – be surprised to learn that not all porn production is legal. Rather a lot of it is produced in places that are not the United States, for example. But if there are US rules for the regulation of porn, there are obviously people who disregard them.
This is true about every single thing, but we always have a choice about whether or not to consume it.”
But this isn’t an argument against the concept of porn, it’s an argument that porn requires legal protections against exploitation, and that those protections need to be well policed. And I agree with that, there are plenty of areas that have next to no policing of such things.
“To get back to my original point: the notion of consent seems as dubious as it is for prostitutes.”
I don’t see that either is as muddy as you make it out to be. Doing something reluctantly for money is consent. Doing something because you were pressured into it isn’t. I’ll agree that there is a blurry line between the two, and that predation is certainly possible in either, but just as above, this is more an argument for responsible lawmaking and policing of this work than an argument against the work itself.
“I’m fairly sure that the companies producing porn don’t care about the difference between technical consent and actual consent.”
I’m fairly sure that you can’t really know that.
#38 latsot
“Someone is persuaded to become a prostitute because he or she is broke or threatened. Has this person consented to sex? I argue that consent is impossible in this situation.”
In the case of the former: yes. In the case of the latter: no.
#51 OB
“And then there’s the overarching point about smug invocations of “choice” and “consent” when both are constrained by material conditions. People who work in hazardous jobs like chicken processing don’t “choose” that work because they love it, they “choose” it because it’s all they can get.”
I have mentioned exactly your point on a previous occasion on this blog, that people in lousy jobs do so not because they ever particularly dreamed of having that job, but because the dearth of good choices forced them to contemplate jobs that others have the luxury of ignoring. But it is still consent, which is why we don’t complain about lousy jobs such as garbage collection being inherently exploitative.
(Is anyone going to tell me that I have never been desperate enough to have such a job? Latsot perhaps? I dare you.)
#59 iknklast
Prostitution is certainly something of a hot topic lately with the ‘intersectional’ feminists, but declaring it to be less exploitative work than phoning people for a living? What a baffling attitude.
There is a world of difference between ‘can’t find better ones’ and ‘have no choice’, as I am sure you know. I am not saying all choices are happy ones. I bet you do what you do for a living because you prefer it to the alternatives, not because it is the only thing you would want to do. That’s one reason why working in a chicken factory may be unpleasant but is in a different moral category from being assaulted.
Not always. What job do you imagine you can get if you’re a homeless child? How different might “choices” look if the alternative is to lose your home or your children or your freedom? What if choosing a regular job is likely to make you visible to the people you’re trying to escape?
If there’s only one choice, then there’s no choice. And sometimes – and I don’t understand why some people can’t accept this – there is only one choice. Prostitution and porn aren’t on the spectrum of shitty jobs, they’re different for the excellent reasons better described by others here.
Someone upthread said that when I was a homeless child there were certain choices I didn’t make. I’d be interested to learn how they know that and what choices I did and didn’t make. I did a lot of things I didn’t want to but I don’t think of them as choices.
Of course if people insist – which seems likely – that they were choices after all, that’s technically true.
I could have chosen to die instead. I could have chosen to hurt people for a living.
For me, those were not choices. Neither was getting a cleaning or fast food job. Who is going to employ a kid with one change of clothes and no fixed abode?
I did what I had to, not what I chose to. It’s amazing that some people can’t understand the difference.
Latsot, children are, as always, a special case. We don’t allow that children can meaningfully consent to sex work.
Fuck’s sake, Pinkeen, that was one example. What about all the others that you conveniently ignored? And we’re not talking about sex-work exclusively, we’re talking about choice. You maintain that there are always choices. I argue that’s not necessarily true. You haven’t addressed that argument at all.
I certainly do not know. If you can’t find better jobs and being unemployed is not a live option, then there is no real difference.
And your personal speculation about me is silly as well as wrong, because how could you know that? Partly I do this and other writing for a living, and that is exactly the thing I want to do. The other part, the part that pays nearly all my rent, thanks to a massive stroke of luck over 20 years ago [when I randomly read some ads in the local paper that was lying on a table at the library when I had a few extra minutes], is also something I would actively choose to do and is in fact something I’d fantasized about doing for years before I stumbled into it…but with added perks I hadn’t even fantasized. So there. But I wasn’t in an emergency situation at the time; lucky me. Lots of people are; lots of people don’t have the resources to seek out their ideal job.
@Holms:
Erm… that’s entirely up to you. Why on Earth are you asking me?
I find it sadly typical that men will fight tooth and nail to justify watching porn. The risk that they are getting off to a woman being raped, (because how do you *know*?) is less important to them than their sexual satisfaction.
The fact that men can claim to be “feminist” and watch porn is mind-boggling, and sickening, and shows just how much more feminism has to achieve.
There’s really no excuse for wanking to potential rape.
Holms #65,
Dude, men have been jerking off without pornography for millennia. I hardly think “being single” justifies the production of filmed brutalization on a massive scale.
Cressida++
#73 latsot
You might have noticed the “#36 latsot” at the top of my reply…? No? Yes? This was the subtle clue I left for keen observers, to indicate that I was replying the 36th comment in this thread, which… why, look at that! It was written by you, latsot! Amazing. And in that comment, you said “Let’s enjoy the naked people we already know.” That was the part I was addressing.
I don’t know why you’re confused as to why I directed that comment to you, as it was a direct and obvious response to what you wrote. “Let’s enjoy the naked people we already know” sure except I’m single, and fairly isolated from others for the time being, so I’m going to check out some porn now and then.
Oh and from comment #1, also written by you, we have “You want to see naked people? Find some people who want you to see them naked. It’s really not that difficult.” People in porn for example.
@Holms:
Dude, calm all the way down. I understood that you were addressing the question to me. I won’t be so obvious as to quote the the things I said that prove it.
But here’s the thing: the whole business of getting people to be naked with you is really not my problem. What you should do if you can’t get people to be naked with you? Also very much not my problem. I don’t have any answers for you. I never pretended to have any answers for you.
If you want to use porn, go ahead. Knock yourself out, I really don’t care. I suggested that maybe we ought to be asking more questions about how porn is produced and whether people always or even often have a choice to appear in it. I stand by those thoughts. If your need for an orgasm outweighs the strife of a whole lot of people then I hope it’s a good one. But don’t come crying to me about it.
Repeating Cressida @ 75 with added emphasis.
Dude, men have been jerking off without pornography for millennia. I hardly think “being single” justifies the production of filmed brutalization on a massive scale.
#78
Bollocks. Your suggested solution for people’s sex lives was clearly stated twice: don’t use porn, have sex with people you know, overlooking I think the obvious point that most consumers of porn aren’t in a sexually active relationship for the time being. ‘Not in an active relationship? Go get one!’ real good advice.
But my main objection is to this:
“Calm all the way down” followed by that level of snide shit? I award you all the eyerolls in the world.
Also, no one is ‘crying to you about it’ in any sense of the phrase. (Yes I know you weren’t suggesting I was literally crying.) You offered advice to those that watch porn, and my response was to point out that it is inane.
If someone has sat through nearly 100 comments (between this thread and the other one) that explain, over and over, that pornography depicts the suffering of actual women, and at the end of it is still a proud consumer of pornography, I guess there are two possibilities.
1. He is unwilling to believe that he is the kind of person who masturbates to another person’s suffering, so he must insist to the bitter end that that other person is not in fact suffering, despite all evidence.
2. He is the kind of person who masturbates to another person’s suffering and is A-OK with that.
I guess #1 is preferable, but not by a whole lot.
#75 Cressida
“Dude, men have been jerking off without pornography for millennia. I hardly think “being single” justifies the production of filmed brutalization on a massive scale.”
Sure… but the objections here, at least that I have given, have been that a) violence, humiliation and the like in porn is not solely directed at women, there is also such against men in porn; b) reluctant consent to such treatment is still consent (and for what it’s worth, not all people in that genre of porn are actually reluctant at all).
#81 cressida
Alternatively, he may object to your series of sweeping generalisations.
– Most porn does not contain violence. Humiliation, abuse, subordinate/dominance, bondage, even blatant violence do exist… but they are niche markets, because they are niche interests. The primary activity in porn is sex. Like John at #45, I used ‘porn’ as in google image search and came up with a single picture alluding to violence out of a page of results. I scrolled for something like eight more pages, and came up with two more. The statement by Gail Dines in the second paragraph is an exaggeration.
– Of the porn that involves violence, humiliation etc., not all of it is directed at women. I’ll agree that it is probable that it is directed towards female participants more often than at men, but this is a far cry from what is implied and also plainly asserted in the OP article. “If it was happening to men, it would be seen for what it is…” But it does happen to men, with no outcry being raised.
– Of the porn that involves violence, humiliation etc., not all of the recipients of such treatment are reluctant! There are actually enthusiastic participants in BDSM and the like, male and female, who enjoy that pursuit even without the incentive of money. I haven’t the faintest idea how many of the participants in that genre of porn are reluctant vs. enthusiastic, but then again, neither does Gail nor any of us commenters. Arguing that they must be reluctant because look at how painful it must be is simply an argument from personal proclivities, which are not shared by all other people.
– Finally, while I agree that there are some people reluctant to be in porn and glad to get out of it when they are able, being a reluctant participant in porn is not always coersion. I maintain choosing to have sex in return for money purely out of a lack of money is still consenting to sex. I’m not saying that there is zero coersion / predation of vulnerable people takes place in the industry, only that having restricted options due to financial circumstance does not amount to that.
Aaaaaaaand … Holms comes down squarely on side #2. Did not see that coming.
Wrong, Holms argues against your underlying assumptions.
Holms is doing no such thing. Holms writes a lot, but doesn’t get anywhere near a successful rebuttal of the one thing I’ve been saying over and over and over and over, which is that women are enduring physical pain and suffering when they film pornography. There are multiple links on the other “guest post” thread that illustrate this.
Therefore:
Dude. The. sex. is. violence. Women – actual, real, breathing women – are being penetrated and pounded until they suffer injury. And you are masturbating to this.
No it isn’t. Sex is sex, and violence is violence. Some people engage in both at the same time – at home, or at a porn shoot – but most don’t, and most porn does not mix them. Violence in porn is a subset of porn, not the whole thing.
@Holms
No, I never suggested a solution to sexual frustration. That exists entirely in your own hand, I’m afraid.
You’re not entitled to sex and if you aren’t getting any perhaps you should examine what you’re doing wrong instead of feeling entitled by proxy via porn from people who might not have been in a position to consent. Other people do not exist in order for you to orgasm. I thought most people knew that.
It really isn’t terribly difficult to find people who want to fuck you. Being a decent person rather than a demanding, entitled baby who sees sex as an objective rather than part of a relationship might be one way to go.
Holms
You’ve been told that performing in porn isn’t always really a decision. You’ve been told that sometimes the fucking that goes on in a porn set hurts people. It’s hardly surprising.
Your weird distinction between sex and violence doesn’t make sense. You cling to the idea because you don’t want it to be true. Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way.
Holms @ 82 –
Really? You’re happy with that thought? You think that’s a good-enough reason to justify the whole thing? You’re happy to defend violent porn on the basis that reluctant consent is still consent?
#88 latsot
“No, I never suggested a solution to sexual frustration. That exists entirely in your own hand, I’m afraid.”
Tee hee? You did give sex life ‘advice’ though.
“You’re not entitled to sex… Other people do not exist in order for you to orgasm.”
NO SHIT. Your pretence that I believe those is disgustingly dishonest.
#90 OB
“Really? You’re happy with that thought? You think that’s a good-enough reason to justify the whole thing? You’re happy to defend violent porn on the basis that reluctant consent is still consent?”
Choosing to do something due to financial straits and not having better options? Yes, I still consider that ‘opting in’ to that something. The best remedy for this – in addition to actual legal protections surrounding the porn industry I mean – is a safety net approach to public policy. America’s Ayn Rand approach to poverty is perhaps the largest contributor to the seedy, low budget low oversighe side to porn.
And don’t tell me I haven’t been sufficiently desperate to have an opinion on this.
Producer: “Right, in this scene Dave is going to fuck you hard doggy while slapping your arse and reaching around to twist your nipples. He’ll then fuck your arse while you scream.
Girl: “I don’t want to do that.”
Producer: “This shoot is costing me a fortune. Do the scene or you won’t get paid, I’ll see you blacklisted and I’ll take the money out of your hide and you’ll be back on the streets where I found you…”
Girl: “Oh all right…”
Not saying this happens all the time, but to say this, or something similar/worse never happens (I suspect it’s actually pretty common from what I’ve read), would be a brave move.
Reluctant consent for the intimate use of one’s body doesn’t meet my definition of consent. I note the standard of consent we apply to dating is ‘crystal clear enthusiastic and capable’.
No coercion, no impaired capability through drink or drugs etc.
OB, if you consider the above to be too graphic, in bad taste or unnecessary, please delete.
Not at all.