Robert Jensen: Liberate Sex from Porn (explicit language)

March 31, 2007 email@tunnel7.com

We have noticed that many of our opponents tend to confine their discussions to clean, safe realms of law and abstractions. Others like to talk about homeless shelters, churches or Wal-Marts, rather than concentrating on actual porn shops and other adult enterprises. Many also like to claim that if you are against porn, you are against sex. Let’s set aside these distractions and grapple with the raw reality of porn as it is–a narrow, twisted version of sex in a world of better possibilities.

Robert Jensen analyzes the evidence in “Just a prude? Feminism, pornography, and men’s responsibility”, a talk delivered to the Sexual Assault Network of Delaware annual conference, Woodside, DE, April 5, 2005.

…[W]omen do not speak with one voice about pornography, nor any other issue. There are pro-pornography women who would contest much of what I have to say. All I can do is acknowledge the women who have helped me come to understand the issue, tell the truth as I see it, and ask men to take seriously this critique of the domination/subordination dynamic that is so common in pornography and, indeed, in the world.

The minute one begins to make such a critique, one can expect this response: Feminists who critique pornography are really just prudes at heart. Pornography’s opponents, we are told, are afraid of sex.

In one sense, that’s true. I am afraid of sex, of a certain kind. I’m afraid of much of the sex commonly presented in contemporary mass-marketed pornography. I am afraid of sex that is structured on a dynamic of domination and subordination. I am afraid of the sex in pornography that has become so routinely harsh that men typically cannot see the brutality of it thorough their erections and orgasms…

Pornographic sex

Let me describe one kind of sex that I’m afraid of. This is a scene from the film “Gag Factor #10” released by J.M. Productions, which boasts that it pushes the envelope in pornography. The company website brags that this gag series, which is going on #17 as of March 2005, offers “The best throatfucking ever lensed.” If you want a sample, the website has pictures and short video clips, under the heading “this week’s victim,” with the promise “new whores degraded every Wednesday.”

In one of the 10 scenes from “Gag Factor #10,” released in 2002, a nagging wife is haranguing her husband and asking why he is so lazy. “Why can’t you do anything?” she asks, going on to insult his intelligence and criticize him because he doesn’t read. She asks him if he even can read, and then suggests Henry Miller, from which she starts to read. The camera focuses on her mouth as she reads, then cuts to his eyes, which look increasingly angry. The film cuts to the woman on her knees as he yells, “Shut the fuck up.” He grabs her hair and thrusts his penis into her mouth. From this point on, we hear almost exclusively from him: “Your teeth feel good you little bitch. Eat that dick… Are you OK? Are you crying? I love you. I fucking love you. Open that mouth.” He slaps her mouth with his penis. “Open wide. Choke. Open wider, wider. You’re so good baby. Put your mouth on my balls. You treat me so fucking good. That’s why I keep you here. Give me the eyes [meaning, look up at me] while I gag you… Do you like to gag? Beg for it. Say please. Say please gag me some more… Your throat is so good.”

At this point, she re-enters the conversation. She says, “Keep going.”
He says, “Good, that’s the fucking answer I was looking for.”

He the flips her over, putting her on the table with her head hanging over edge. She gags several times when he thrusts into her mouth. He holds her by the cheeks, spreading her face apart. She gags but he doesn’t stop. He allows her to catch her breath. Her face is unexpressive, almost frozen.
“I want those tears to come out again, baby. I want to choke the shit out of you,” he says.

He grabs her hair and drives his penis into her mouth. He says: “Suck that dick. Convulse. I want to see your eyes roll back in your fucking head. Yes, I love it.” He asks her if she loves it; she says yes. He ejaculates into her mouth and says, “Spit that cum out. I can’t hear you. What did you say? Don’t talk with your mouth full.” He walks away and says “Don’t give me any more shit.”

“Gag Factor” is a type of “gonzo” pornography, which is the roughest form available in the mainstream pornography shops and also the fastest growing genre. This scene is more overtly misogynistic than some, but it is not idiosyncratic. The sex and the language in what the industry calls “features” typically is not as rough, though the message is the same: Women are for sex, and women like sex this way.

Empathy

…If anyone wants to dismiss these concerns with the tired old phrases “to each his own” and “as long as they are consenting adults”–that is, if you want to ignore the reality and complexity of the world in which we live–I can’t stop you. But I can tell you that if you do that, you are abandoning minimal standards of political and moral responsibility, and you become partially responsible for the injuries done as a result of a system you refuse to confront…

We all live with that woman who finds herself making a living by being filmed in another kind of gonzo film called a “blow bang,” in which a woman has oral sex in similar fashion with more than one man.

In one of these films, “Blow Bang #4,” released in 2001, a young woman dressed as a cheerleader is surrounded by six men. For about seven minutes, “Dynamite” (the name she gives on tape) methodically moves from man to man while they offer insults such as “you little cheerleading slut.” For another minute and a half, she sits upside down on a couch, her head hanging over the edge, while men thrust into her mouth, causing her to gag. She strikes the pose of the bad girl to the end. “You like coming on my pretty little face, don’t you,” she says, as they ejaculate on her face and in her mouth for the final two minutes of the scene.

Five men have finished. The sixth steps up. As she waits for him to ejaculate onto her face, now covered with semen, she closes her eyes tightly and grimaces. For a moment, her face changes; it is difficult to read her emotions, but it appears she may cry. After the last man, number six, ejaculates, she regains her composure and smiles. Then the narrator off camera hands her the pom-pom she had been holding at the beginning of the tape and says, “Here’s your little cum mop, sweetheart–mop up.” She buries her face in the pom-pom and the scene ends.

Dynamite is one of us. She is a person. She has hopes and dreams and desires of her own.

The women in the movement to end men’s violence have helped society understand that we have to empathize with the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. We also need to extend that empathy to the women in pornography and prostitution…

We are constantly told pornography is about fantasies. Those scenes I just described are not fantasy. They are real. They happened…

Choices, hers and ours

…We know that any meaningful discussion of choice can’t be restricted to the single moment when a woman decides to allow herself to be sold sexually, but must include all the background conditions that affect not only the objective choices she faces but her subjective assessment of those choices. What matters is not just what is available but how she perceives herself in relation to what is available. We know that in anyone’s life, completely free choices are rare, that every choice is made under some mix of constraint and opportunity…

…so long as the industry is profitable and a large number of women are needed to make such films, it is certain that some number of those women will be choosing under conditions that render the concept of “free choice” virtually meaningless. When a man buys or rents a videotape or DVD, he is creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being hurt, psychologically and/or physically…

So, men’s choices to buy or rent pornography are complicated by two realities. First, at any given moment, the consumer has no reliable way to judge which women are participating in the industry as a result of a meaningfully free choice. And second, even if the men consuming pornography could make such a determination about specific women in specific films, the demand for pornography that their purchase creates ensures that some women will be hurt.

Given that conclusion, there is only one decision that men who claim to have even minimal standards of moral and political responsibility can make: They must not buy or rent pornography….

Justice and self-interest

…I want to tell a story from my experience at the 2005 convention of the pornography industry, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which I attended as part of a team working on a documentary film called “’Fantasies’ Matter…”

I had listened to young men tell me that pornography had taught them a lot about what women really want sexually. I had listened to a pornography producer tell me that he thinks anal sex is popular in pornography because men like to think about fucking their wives and girlfriends in the ass to pay them back for being bitchy. And I interviewed the producer who takes great pride that his “Gag Factor” series was the first to feature exclusively aggressive “throat fucking…”

I don’t want to feign naivete. As a child and young adult, I used pornography in fairly typical fashion. I have been working on the issue of pornography since 1988…

My defenses were inadequate to combat a simple fact: The pornographers have won… The pornographers not only are thriving, but are more mainstream and normalized than ever. They can fill up a Las Vegas convention center, with the dominant culture paying no more notice than it would to the annual boat show.

And as the industry has become more normalized, paradoxically, the content of their films becomes ever crueler and more overtly degrading to women. The industry talk is dominated by talk of how to push it even further. Make it nastier. Make it, in the terms of one industry observer, “brutal and real.” That’s the way the pornographers and the customers like it: Brutal. Because brutal is real. And real sells. It is real, and that’s at the heart of the sadness…

[A]ll I could say to Miguel was, “I don’t want live in this world…”

Feeling and thinking our way forward, together

…For men, we have to make them face that to be a pornography user is to be a john, to be someone who is willing to buy women for sex, someone who sees sex as a commodity, someone who has traded his own humanity for an orgasm…

When we talk like this, one of the predictable rejoinders is that we are trying to impose strict sexual rules on others. As one prominent pro-pornography feminist scholar, Linda Williams, put it in a recent interview, “Really, who are [anti-pornography activists] to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?”

I agree. No one can tell others where their sexual imaginations should go. Imaginations are unruly and notoriously resistant to attempts at control. But our imaginations come from somewhere. Our imaginations may be internal in some ways, but they are influenced by external forces. Can we not have a conversation about those influences? Are we so fragile that our sexual imaginations can’t stand up to honest human conversation? It seems that pro-pornography forces live with their own fear of sex, the fear of being accountable for their imaginations and actions. The defenses of pornography typically revert to the most superficial kind of liberal individualism that shuts off people from others, ignores the predictable harms of a profit-seeking industry that has little concern for people, and ignores the way in which we all collectively construct the culture in which we live…

So, I am afraid of the sex that pornography creates because it hurts people. But I am not afraid of talking about an alternative to the cruelty and brutality of the pornography industry…

We have given the pornographers far too much power to construct our sexual imaginations. It is our world, not theirs. It is our world to take back.

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Recently on sale at Capital Video’s website, Amazing.net, was Gag Factor #20 from J.M. Productions. “Gagf [sic] factor is a love story about a man and a throat. You will laugh you will cry you will jerk off.”