Robert Jensen: Liberate Sex from Porn (explicit language)
Posted by NPNAdmin at 3/31/2007 3:59 PM 
Categories: Feminist Perspective, Capital Video Corporation, Impact of Porn, Porn Examples--Judge for Yourself, What You Can Do
Categories: Feminist Perspective, Capital Video Corporation, Impact of Porn, Porn Examples--Judge for Yourself, What You Can Do
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.
---------------
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."
See also:
National Feminist Antipornography Movement
"As Jerome Tanner put it during a pornography directors’ roundtable discussion featured in Adult Video News, 'People just want it harder, harder, and harder, because like Ron said, what are you gonna do next?' Another director, Jules Jordan, was blunt about his task: '[O]ne of the things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems everybody wants to see a girl doing a d.p. [double penetration] now or a gangbang. For certain girls, that’s great, and I like to see that for certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It’s definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s headed from there.'
Interview with Ex-Porn Star Traci Lords: Abused as a Child; High on the Set; Power, Not Arousal; Bad Pay
I started going by Traci Lords in 1984, and that was after I had run away from home. I came from a small town in Steubenville, Ohio, and early on, I had a lot of sexual abuse that had happened to me. I was raped when I was 10 years old, and then my mother's boyfriend started molesting me from the time I was, like, 10 until I was about 15.
Punishment Porn: "Whether-She-Wants-It-Or-Not" (explicit)
"YEEOWWCH! STOP IT!!" I screamed and shot a hand back to protect my blazing behind. David's failure to concede to my pleas or to say a word in reply scared me to death!...
"I told you you'd be sorry, didn't I?" David demanded to know, breaking his silence but continuing to spank around my shifting hand.
Testimony in Minneapolis: Role of Porn in Child Sexual Abuse; Pornographers Perpetuate, Profit from Dysfunction
What distance is there between the depiction of children "begging" for sex in pornographic display, and Maggie's father (in Kiss Daddy Goodnight) saying to then-three-year-old Maggie, "Tell me you like it. No, tell me you really like it. No, tell me like you mean it"?...
Robert Jensen: When Examining Complex Social Phenomena, Scientific Method Has Limits; Listen to the Stories of the Victims (explicit language)
"I know all about you bitches, you're no different; you're like all of them. I seen it in all the movies. You love being beaten. (He then began punching the victim violently.) I just seen it again in that flick. He beat the shit out of her while he raped her and she told him she loved it; you know you love it; tell me you love it..." [Silbert and Pines, 1984, p.864]
This post also posted on NoPornNorthampton, Talk Back Northampton, and Mo Porn Northampton as a blog comment on those sites. This post was also submitted to Daily Hampshire Gazette as a letter to the editor on 4-1-07.
Written in Response to the NoPornNorthampton Website
It’s called personal accountability. That’s the one thing this website seems to neglect. They give all these reasons, articles, studies, etc. of why any type of pornography is so evil, but I have yet to see anything stated about self-control. One part of the site I noticed showed studies done on sex offenders who cite pornography as their reason or at least one of the main reasons for their doing whatever they did. How are these studies legitimate? What about the possibility that there is just an innate characteristic in some humans that make some more susceptible to violent acts than others. Maybe there were other things that made these individuals act in such a way. I truly find it hard to believe that every single sex offender studied had the most idyllic life in every way possible, making pornography the ONLY possible solution for their acting out in such a manner.
They have given Ted Bundy as an example of the evils of porn. He himself partially blamed porn for his violence against women. First of all, I must applaud the verbose attempt by this study and/or this website to truly push their message. There’s nothing like striking the fear in hearts of the masses and driving home the evils of pornography, by connecting the words, “Ted Bundy” and “addicted to pornography.” Bravo NoPornNorthampton.com. But if you are truly trying to spread the message of education and righteousness, doesn’t that stand to reason that you should incorporate more information than just enough to draw (for lack of a better term, and I mean this with all due respect), a half-assed conclusion, namely one, blaming pornography for the actions of one of the most notable serial killers in history. I find it ironic that nowhere in that article does it state anything about Bundy’s traumatizing childhood; everything from being told the woman who he knew to be his older sister was actually his mother and even the possibility that his grandfather was actually his biological father from an incestuous sexual relationship with his mother. Maybe, just maybe that MIGHT have had a little to do with his animosity towards women, don’t you think? But again, apparently there is only a one-sided perspective when it comes to certain things on this website. It seems to me, when you TRULY believe you’re correct in your beliefs, you have no problem openly addressing adverse arguments, if anything, you should welcome it. They hide behind the “save the children” mentality, or use feminism principles to further their message – all of which I extremely disagree with. Pornography is adult material, it is not meant for children. If you’re children are looking at porn, you might want to look in the mirror before you rush to the web to blame the pornographer. And as far as the feminism aspect, I am a 24 year-old female law student, I like to think of myself as an educated and tolerant individual, one who does agree with certain feminist principles. Actually feminism is one of the main reasons why I have such a problem with this website. Women are not helpless, mindless drones, we DO have decision-making capabilities. Thusly, I have every right to watch, not watch or even participate in any type of pornography I want. No one should ever be able to take that decision away from me.
As I stated previously, most of the issues on this website are based on addictive behavior, when self-control, simply is not an option anymore. Believe it or not, I actually DO agree with something on this website. However, it has to be said, just because something becomes such a driving force in your life that it has no other suitable name besides the word, “addiction”, does not take away from the fact that it is still was your initial decision to ignore your conscience and keep up with the destructive behavior. What if you don’t have a conscience to tell you that you are losing control of your behavior? Well, then I guess that stands to reason that you most likely would have committed those wrongful acts/crimes regardless if you had ever seen a glimpse of porn in your life or not.
But, really, why sex? Is it truly the 1950’s-esque taboo of the touching of genitalia of two consenting adults that makes NoPornNorthampton blush? Better said, why stop at sex? What about violence? Will the NoPornNorthampton advocates attack video games and movies next? Should authorities go through every single video rental to make sure it’s “Northampton Appropriate”, better yet, what about a ban on Cinemax for the entire city (turning that on at 2 a.m. could definitely lead to some impure thoughts)? Is that crossing the line? Let’s go one step further, the website has an article discussing the correlation between porn addiction and others, i.e. – smoking. Well if we’re comparing porn to cigarettes, there ARE those who sued tobacco companies and won. What about the people who say that it’s Burger King’s fault they gained 70 pounds? Is it my fault or Burger King’s fault that I couldn’t put down the French Fries? It seems pretty ridiculous that I would be able to successfully blame and argue with a straight face that my city should get rid of all fast food restaurants. BUT, they ARE hazardous to my health and COULD cause death. Isn’t this analogous to the argument used by NoPornNorthampton? Quite the slippery slope isn’t it.
The whole point of my previous rant is, where does it stop? Some people of Northampton
might not like the expression that is pornography, but that does not take away
from the fact that it IS in fact someone’s expression. If you don’t like someone’s speech or
expression, or you don’t like what they have to say, then use your own right to
freedom of speech and expression to say so.
You give examples of the cartoons exhibited in Hustler Magazine, they
are deemed “misogynistic, pedophilic, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic hate
speech.” They don’t like the speech that
Hustler produces, and yet, the right that enables Hustler to produce cartoons
that make people disgusted is the EXACT SAME right that allows
NoPornNorthampton to say how much they hate what Larry Flynt has to show the
world in his publication. The point is,
who are you to take pornography away from a whole city, or even regulate it in
unnecessary ways? If you don’t like it,
that’s great, tell everyone in the world how horrible pornography is. That’s your right to do so. The First Amendment is not something you can
waiver on; either you are for it or against it.
You cannot use it to speak your mind, but then expect the expression of
others to be restricted simply because you do not agree. So instead of trying to censor an entire
city, how about letting people make their own decisions. After all, NoPornNorthampton.com, it’s 2007,
not 1984.
Reply to this
Ms. Harchuck repeats many of the same objections we have heard and rebutted since last summer (see our FAQ). Since our actual positions are modest, reasonable and well-supported, she develops an exaggerated caricature to more easily suggest that we are unreasonable. For example, once again we are accused of "trying to censor an entire city". We have never advocated such an extreme form of adult-use zoning, have no desire to, and the courts forbid it.
Personal accountability and self-control are excellent values. Unfortunately, the state of sex education in this country is such that large numbers of people don't know enough about sex, love and relationships to make good decisions. Meanwhile, many (including many who are not adults) are being bombarded by the toxic propaganda of porn. This website is one attempt to give people a more complete picture.
We have never claimed that porn is solely responsible for sex crimes or urban blight. However, it is a factor, just as smoking is a factor in lung cancer. It is unreasonable to suggest that the media people consume has little effect on their behavior. If that's true, America's multi-billion dollar advertising industry is a waste of effort.
You are dismissive of a "save the children" mentality, yet the fact remains that 10% of boys and 25% of girls experience sexual abuse in childhood. I'd say that's a problem worth taking seriously, together with the role of porn in child molestation.
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Adults should be allowed to do what they like, without coercion trickery or un wanted abuse. As long as no one is being exposed to anything unreasonable or harmful that they don't want to be, mind your own business. I have not seen any of what this web site "nopornnorthhampton" is discribing. Perhaps there should more regulation. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol.
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I encourage you to keep reading. Even if you aren't experiencing problems due to porn, it's clear that many spouses, partners, children and communities are. When a porn merchant like Capital Video proposes to locate one of their neighborhood-trashing stores on my street, you bet I'm going to make it my business.
We do not advocate prohibition. We do advocate workplace regulation, zoning and education.
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