What would be seen as sexual violence in other contexts
Via Soraya Chemaly, I read this Washington Post piece about pornography and violence against women and girls. It’s not one that will please the choosy-choice, I’m a pornographer so don’t you dare connect porn with violence types.
A current government inquiry into sexual harassment in schools and a new cross-party campaign to tackle misogynist abuse online have all highlighted the ways in which pornography contributes to and legitimizes negative attitudes with very real impacts on the lives of women and girls.
It is crucial to understand pornography as a form of violence against women. Overwhelmingly, content is produced and consumed by men, with strikingly consistent themes. The content categories of two of the most popular tube sites — XHamster and Pornhub — reveal a dismal pattern of endless scenarios of male dominance and female subordination, categorized by specific acts, female body parts, race and age.
It doesn’t take a great awareness of cultural theory to grasp the social meaning of images of women being repeatedly penetrated in every orifice to a chorus of “slut,” “bitch” and “whore.” It does, however, require a willingness to think beyond the rhetoric of “choice,” “empowerment” and “free speech” that is invariably used by industry representatives to justify such content.
Sometimes those industry representatives are disguised as hip, knowing, awesome people, even feminists, even women.
First and foremost, mainstream pornography consists of socially sanctioned acts of direct violence against women. What would be seen as sexual violence and brutality in other contexts is par for the course in pornography, as female survivors will confirm. However, pornography does not simply function as an arena in which direct violence is sanctioned and routinized. It also functions as a form of what sociologist Johan Galtung terms ”cultural violence.”Exercised in the stories a culture tells itself — its texts, its images — it is “an aspect of the symbolic sphere that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” One of the things that pornography does extremely efficiently is provide an endless flow of narratives of women being treated as objects, violated or “done to.”
It’s still baffling to me that people – men – like that, like a steady diet of it, think it’s the best kind of sex fantasy.
[T]he cultural violence of pornography is usually far more mundane. Porn narratives are not simply those accessed by users; they also find their way into mainstream cultural images: the jeans advertisement that replicates a gang bang scenario; the perfume advertisement mimicking the penetration of a woman’s shaved vulva; the underwear advertisement that utilizes an “up-skirting” image. What these kinds of images do — and there is certainly no shortage of them, on billboards, in magazines, online — is cumulatively to tell us what women are about: that the defining feature of women’s bodies is that they are available and violable. Not only does pornography entail very direct forms of violence in its production; it also, in a world where violence against women is endemic, serves to naturalize and normalize such violence. As Galtung says, “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right — or at least not wrong.”
But, fortunately, there is no real violence or abuse of women in the world.
Oh wait.
I don’t. I find it annoying and tiresome.
See also: Why does porn got to hurt so bad?
Disclaimer: not sure about “best kind” and absolutely not sure how common my experience is among straight men. Not trying to justify humiliation/violence in porn, I can totally see that it has very negative side-effects across the board.
Personally, as someone who does watch humiliation role play porn, the emphasis is not on ‘humiliating women’. In fact it doesn’t matter what gender the humiliatee has, they serve as a proxy for me provided I find them attractive. I don’t care much for the humiliator, they are very very secondary to my fantasies. Unfortunately, men in porn are very often not attractive* which means almost all “good” humiliation role play features women being bottom. I wish it wasn’t so skewed, but that’s a whole other problem with porn in general.
In addition to this rather meagre observation I have no solutions on offer, except maybe bundle all porn with some decent sex-ed that gets past your ad-blocker.
* They are either unfit, decidedly older than their female colleagues, just enormous assholes, and more often than not all three at once.
‘It’s still baffling to me that people – men – like that, like a steady diet of it, think it’s the best kind of sex fantasy.’
Fifty Shades? Those horrible rape fantasies in ‘Gone With the Wind’ and all over Ayn Rand? All those ‘swept off her feet’ clichés in the whole ‘bodice ripper’ genre? All produced by and for a female audience.
Less graphic, but still reinforcing the same narrative. Women as limp, motiveless victims. Sex as a commodity to be traded, or an external phenomenon with no involvement on her part.
I haven’t read Fifty Shades or Ayn Rand novels. Very true about Gone With the Wind and I object – I find GWTW incredibly sinister and creepy, and the fact that it was massively popular as movie and as novel makes me want to vomit. But – the “less graphic” part is an understatement.
It’s been a feminist theme since forever, the way “seduction” and soft-porn rapey fantasies in pop culture shape women’s sexual fantasies. But it seems to me there’s a massive difference between seduction fantasies and “fantasies” about choking, punching, etc. Maybe I’m weird that way, I dunno. (Really though I doubt that that’s an eccentric view.)
I hardly think Ayn Rand is chick lit.
I suspect that what’s shaping both men’s and women’s sexual fantasies is the ages-old double standard that accepts that men have intense sexual needs and denies that women have them. Women having sex must be passive objects–or, if they show an interest in sex, they are wicked sluts who deserve whatever they get.
This thinking was so ingrained in 19th and 20th century thought Freud proclaimed women to be naturally masochistic. Women who actually sought pleasure for themselves, the way women do–via the clitoris–were sick. They were denying their womanhood.
Hell, DH Lawrence, widely considered brave and pro-“Life Force” (ugh) and sexually freethinking, thought women shouldn’t have orgasms.
We’re (both sexes) not over this yet. (Story of O.)