reddecca:
Radgeek – can you expand on what you think the implications are for pornography involving masturbation. How does that mean we should react to it differently, why does that mean that different tactics would be effective?
Sure. The fact that pornography, unlike the rest of pop culture, is made and marketed and consumed and talked about with the expectation that men will masturbate to it, and the fact that many or most men do in fact habitually masturbate to it, changes the nature of the debate because it changes the effects that pornography has on how men view themselves as sexual creatures in ways that, and to degrees that, other forms of pop culture do not. It’s well known that habitual practice can change our beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior; I think that it should be no surprise that sexual habits can change our sexual beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior. If men habitually masturbate to pornography, i.e. use pornography as a part of arousal and orgasm under our solitary control, then it is going to have an effect on our sexual lives. One of the facts about masturbation is that most men do it very often, and the fact about masturbating-to-pornography is that men both do it very often, and also very often imagine pornographic scenes or close variations on them, when they are masturbating without porn directly in front of them. It’s habitual, and it’s one of the more frequently practiced habits that many men have. It’s also one that they usually take up in their sexually formative — i.e. adolescent or pubescent — years. (And in fact the average age has been getting younger as a result of the mainstreaming of pornography and its prevalence on the Internet.) So you can expect whatever effects pornography has to be correspondingly strong. I think this much is not reasonably disputable; a theory that suggests that pornography has no effects, or neglible effects, on men’s sexual lives is just not a theory responsive to the facts. The question is what effects pornography does have, and how fine-grained those effects are. If it has good or neutral effects on balance, then that doesn’t support the anti-pornography critique of pornography consumption; if it has bad effects but those effects apply in a pretty fine-grained way to the parts of men’s sex lives that don’t directly affect other people, then that would tend to undermine it also. (That doesn’t mean that the antipornography position would be wrong; it would just mean a shift of priorities is needed towards other parts of the critique, such as the critique of its production, rather than the traditional double-barrelled analysis.)
Here are some specific ways in which antipornography feminists claim that masturbation to pornography affects men’s sexual lives in ways that are pernicious, and that contribute to both social systems and individual behavior that hurt women: (1) pornography is repetitive. (It’s repetitive both across different pieces and in the use of a given “favorite” piece by individual men; men who use pornography very frequently and unapologetically often crow about their “collection” or “hoard” of porn and pick out “favorites” within it to use over and over again. I know because I used to be one of those men, and to talk to other men with similar attitudes.). (2) It associates a pretty strictly scripted progression of situations and sex acts with sexual arousal, pleasure, and orgasm for men who habitually arouse themselves by watching pornographic scenes, please themselves while watching pornographic scenes, use the scenes to heighten the pleasure, and orgasm to pornographic scenes (which was, typically, the purpose of viewing the pornography in the first place). (3) The content is generally concerned specifically with sexualized masculinity and sexualized femininity (this, of course, is also true within gay pornography and pseudolesbian pornography intended for male audiences; I wouldn’t know about pornography intended for lesbian audiences, because I haven’t seen any). (4) This content is specifically hostile to women in any number of ways (contains rape myths, focuses on acts that are often not nearly as satisfying to women as they are to men, focuses on acts that aren’t really satisfying to anyone but are easily filmed with extreme close-ups of engorged body parts, fixates on visual display in general, makes frequent use of deception or coercion from positions of authority to gain sexual access, etc.). (A full explanation of the details and defense of the claim here, if you don’t buy it, is really beyond the space I have available here, and is better found in book-length treatments or essays on specific sub-topics by antipornography feminists. Anyway, the hostility of pornographic content towards women is part of what Amp was stipulating to in the comments I was remarking on.) (5) Pornography provides a staple of sexual fantasies (that is, scenes that are found enticing and desirable). The fact that many of the themes alluded to in (3) and (4) are widely recognized as ridiculous and unrealistic may affect men’s plans but not their fantasies about what would be enticing and desirable. (6) This affects, among other things, how men look at women (think ogling), how men talk about women (think locker-room talk), how men treat women whom they have never met (think street harassment), how men approach women that they’re sexually attracted to, the sort of acts and positions that men typically want and typically don’t care about, the sort of emotional reactions men do or don’t have toward women that they’re having a sexual relationship with, including during sex itself, the sort of situations in which men think that sex is appropriate, the sort of reactions that a man may have when a woman isn’t interested in having sex with him — at all, or in the situation he wants to have sex in, or at the time he wants to have sex at, or of the kind that he wants to have. (Think about the idea, more or less universal in pornography involving women, intended for male audiences, that women are wildly and indiscriminately hypersexual once aroused, and that it’s acceptable to use coercion or deception to ratchet up the level of sexual contact until she becomes aroused. Think about the fact that many men are habitually masturbating to this kind of material, using it to arouse themselves and having orgasms to scenes that revolve around it. What does that mean for the sorts of things that men may find exciting and desirable in their own interactions with women?)
There’s a lot more to say, but this is already very long and contentious as it stands. I hope this gives some kind of idea about what I’m saying, though, when I say that some specific details about social use mean that there may be some specific differences between pornography and “the rest of pop culture” that merit special attention towards pornography. That pornography has a specifically sexualized role that other forms of pop culture don’t have should (I think) be obvious; that its specifically sexualized role might make reactionary themes in pornography of special interest and concern to people who are concerned with men’s sexual aggression towards women shouldn’t be much harder to see. But I hope this helps explain in some more detail. Feel free to prod me if I’m not being as clear as I could.
(Of course an explanation is not yet a defense. If you think that this position is wrong, fine, but you’ll find a better defense of all these positions in printed book-length treatments of pornography, and essays on specific sub-topics, by antipornography feminists.)
reddecca:
The odd thing about the feminist pornography debate is that both sides do appear to feel like the attacked and betlittled minority, which isn’t particularly good for discussion.
That’s a very good point. It doesn’t help at all that each of them tends to treat the other as a mere appendage of, or at least a spiritual cousin of, some larger and much more clearly menacing and mean force in cultural politics (i.e., the Religious Right, on the one hand, and mainstream pimps and pornographers, on the other).
Anticopyright.