We are pleased to publicize this announcement from Stop Porn Culture:
Stop Porn Culture will be holding our next slideshow training at Wheelock College in Boston, MA. It will begin on Friday, June 5 at 5pm and end on Sunday, June 7 at 3pm. The cost is $50, with no one turned away for lack of funds. Some scholarships are available.
Come and get the experience, knowledge and confidence to talk publicly against pornography in your community. The training will include in-depth presentations on such topics as:
- Background on the economic industry that is pornography
- First Amendment and other free speech issues
- Women in the industry
- The question of “alternate” images
We will also have a long session of practicing Q&As in small groups. The training will end with a session on self-care for presenters and activists
since, as many of you know, this work can be grueling.Please email stoppornculture@gmail.com for more information.
See also:
Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)
This video includes explicit still images. Some may find it painful to
watch, especially victims of sexual violence. Acknowledging this,
activists have found that presenting today’s porn in an unfiltered
fashion is “an effective and rapid consciousness-raiser about misogyny and male views of women”. We have seen our opposition claim that we should go easy on porn because it’s a form of “art”, that it represents the empowerment of women, or that today’s porn is no more harmful than paintings or century-old erotica pictures. We feel the best counter to these arguments is to show people what today’s porn actually is.
Rebecca Whisnant: “Not Your Father’s Playboy, Not Your Mother’s Feminist Movement” (explicit language)
…Structurally speaking, as a person facing oppression of whatever
kind, one has two choices. One can resist the oppression—in general, or
in any particular instance—in which case one is likely to get viciously
slapped down. Alternatively, one can obey, that is, act in ways that
please the oppressors, perhaps in hopes of gaining some limited reward
(or at least of avoiding the oppressive system’s very worst
consequences). As you may have noticed, neither option is altogether
attractive…
…[T]he essential feminist question is not whether some individual
women like or choose or benefit in certain ways from X, but whether the
overall effect of X is to keep women as a group subordinate to men.
Feminism is about ending the subordination of women. Expanding women’s
freedom of choice on a variety of fronts is an important part of that,
but it is not the whole story. In fact, any meaningful liberation
movement involves not only claiming the right to make choices, but also
holding oneself accountable for the effects of those choices on oneself
and on others…
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Pro-Porn Activists Misuse the Law in Fresh Attempt to Suppress Anti-Porn Political Speech
The latest gambit of certain pro-porn activists is to claim that 2257 Regulations
apply not only to commercial pornographers but also to all
noncommercial uses of material produced by the porn industry.
Specifically, they want to suppress distribution of a slideshow produced by StopPornCulture.
According to Wikipedia,
the 2257 Regulations “require producers of sexually explicit material
to obtain proof of age for every model they shoot, and retain those
records”. The primary goal of the regulations is to prevent the
employment of underage performers, such as Traci Lords.
The
federal government has foreseen that requiring this recordkeeping from
noncommercial or educational organizations would unduly burden their
speech. The Code of Federal Regulations is careful to state that, with respect to the 2257 Regulations, “sell, distribute, redistribute, and re-release” refer to
commercial distribution of a book, magazine, periodical, film,
videotape, digitally- or computer-manipulated image, digital image,
picture, or other matter that contains a visual depiction of an actual
human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct, but does not
refer to noncommercial or educational distribution of such matter,
including transfers conducted by bona fide lending libraries, museums,
schools, or educational organizations.
To apply 2257 to the StopPornCulture slideshow is clearly
unconstitutional. Under the First Amendment, restrictions on explicit
expression that is not “obscene” must be as narrowly tailored as
possible to achieve the government’s objective. Not only would
application of 2257 to political critiques of the adult industry be
overbroad, it would undermine the purpose of the statute–prevention of
child porn–because the effect would be to severely impede criticism of
the primary producers of pornographic material.
Application of 2257 would also be viewpoint discrimination because the
record-keeping requirements would be so burdensome to nonprofit
secondary producers as to shut down all multimedia presentations from
that perspective. By contrast, the adult industry can far more easily
absorb this inconvenience, both because of their wealth and because
they are closer to the original production.
Why We Reproduce Pictures from Pornography
Renegade Evolution
and others who defend pornography have said it’s improper for anti-porn
activists to hold up actual examples of porn to public view. Unless we
get permission from the subjects to do this, we are exploiting them.
In
a sense this is true, and unfortunate. It’s the case anytime one holds
up another’s work for critical examination, but sometimes there’s no
other way to make a point but to show a picture. Describing scenes of
torture and misery with words is one thing. Pictures are more
compelling, less mediated. It was the photographs from Abu Ghraib that
made it such a scandal.
Pictures are important part of how porn
works. Countless images from porn show abusers what to do and help them
believe abuse is normal. Pornographic pictures are also used to season
victims–especially children. We want people to see the raw truth and
judge for themselves.
Intentions are important. Our purpose is
not to make a commercial profit, or stimulate ourselves with pictures
of others in pain. We are trying to get people to feel compassion for
their fellow humans in the pictures and stop feeding the sex industry
with money.