Porn: what is it good for?

If you just threw up a little bit in your mouth, you're not the only one. Go and swill out, then keep reading. Images like the one on the left use the conceits of violent pornography - in this case, gang rape - to sell everything from clothes to cars to washing powder. Violent pornography has become part of our cultural language.
But is censorship the answer?A recent article of mine on The F Word in response to the new UK porn laws laid down by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 generated a surprising amount of controversy. In brief, the government wants to ban various forms of 'extreme' pornography, including bestiality, necrophilia and some 'snuff' porn. I argued that censorship is not the answer, nor will it do anything to reduce the harm violent and extreme pornography does to some individuals' sexual and personal development; I argued that censorship will drive the industry further underground, making it more racy and enticing and generating an unsafe working environment for those involved in producing 'extreme' pornography. I mentioned that there is little extant evidence to suggest that 'extreme' pornography leads directly to extreme sexual violence. I was declared naive and gullible by 'Radical' feminists and anti-porn sexists alike, claiming that pornography is harmful, hateful and extremely socially damaging. I must protest at this, and not merely because noone who has read the synopsis briefs for SlutBus 4 and A Filthy Little Cocksucking Whore Named Marilyn for research purposes will ever ever be quite so naive again. I never claimed that violent pornography was not damaging. Violent pornography is unquestionably, incontrovertibly damaging, and as a feminist against censorship I am achingly aware of that fact. I merely happen to believe that porn censorship is not the answer, and that the Bill currently on the Commons table will do fat, shiny nothing in a bag for women's liberation.

Do I believe that violent porn directly causes sexual violence? No. Do I believe that banning it and driving it underground will do any good to anyone? Absolutely not. Do I believe that physically and emotionally violent pornography is symptomatic of an endemic social paradigm wherein masculine power and cruelty is eroticised, and that this paradigm leads to sexual violence amongst many, many other atrocities? Hell yes. Yes, I do.

The question of whether pornography directly causes or does not cause sexual violence somewhat evades the real issue. The reason that pornography is such a sticky problem, the reason that many feminists hate and fear pornography, is the same reason that many in the pro-patriarchal sphere are willing to go to the wire to defend it: mainstream, heterosexual pornography as it is mass-produced by western society holds up an accurate mirror to the violently misogynist world in which we are living.

Let me repeat that for the confused or post-orgasmic: the fact of pornography itself, however ‘extreme’, is not socially harmful, but the messages inherent in most western pornography, never mind the ‘extreme’ end, re-enforce social paradigms of sexual inequality, male sexual subjectivity and violence against women. When I say that ‘the quality of most porn is dreadful’, this is what I’m talking about.


You are what you jerk off to.

In this pornographic world, inequality and injustice are eroticised. Power and dominance, for the most part of men over women, are eroticised. The exercise of that dominance in cruel, violent or humiliating ways is eroticised, and when something is eroticised in the mainstream to this extent, it becomes normalised.

What isn't extant in porn is almost as critical as what is - to whit, respect, tenderness, human emotion, sensitivity. I'm with Jensen in conceding that there are economic as well as ideological reasons for this, namely that most pornography is bought by men as aids to masturbation, and on-screen emotion tends, it is posited, to detract from the salient pleasures of self-stroking. Some form of psychological kick has to replace that tenderness or affection as a narrative hook - hence the introduction of cruelty and violence into the remit of Joe Average Mustachioed Porn Director. I’m not yet proposing radical tenderness as a social strategy, not least because it would put paid to my favourite hobby of sitting in smoking rooms, drinking vile coffee and hating things. But I'm behind the radfems in noting that its total erasure from pornography is worrying, to say the least: pornography leached of mature emotional responsiveness is often (indeed, usually) the first illicit means of educating young men about sex. For almost half the population, violent or objectifying pornography is now the cultural blueprint for sexual relations. What does that mean for gender politics, and what are our options other than to lash out at the offending material?

If patriarchal culture, where rape and gender-fascism are facts of life, is the disease, then the many forms of porn are the oozing, blood-crusted pustules that cluster in the tenderest crevices of the diseased body. Like children, we attack the sores with nails and teeth, ignoring the fact that the body itself is sick to death. By scratching at the pustules, we will only drive the rot deeper.


Corpse-fucking and the state...

So what is the government's response? How are our politicians working to root out the infection from our feverish, sickening gender paradigms? Let's let’s look again at that government bill. One of the first types of pornography that’s forbidden is ‘[images of any] act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse’ – that is, necrophilia. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but necrophiliacs are a very small and specialised sect of the fetish community. There will never be enough necrophiliac porn, just as there will never be a large enough necrophiliac culture, to normalise corpse-fucking as a social paradigm. And frankly, if that’s your kink and you can excise it by watching badly made-up zombies shag each other on telly, then fair enough. So why is it that pornography that appears to show necrophilia – a very rare and totally illegal practice that doesn’t really have much of a social discourse – is NOT okay, whereas pornography that shows live women appearing to be raped, humiliated and beaten to within an inch or their lives is totally fine?

Let’s grit our teeth and face this one: it’s fine on television because it’s normalised in society. Maggoty, squelchy grave-diving turns the stomachs of our politicians, and yes, I’m a kink-friendly, accommodating anarcho-buddhist with not much sympathy for the meat of the body, but I can see why that might be. The bill covers necrophilia, bestiality, 'snuff' movies and severe injury to the sexual organs. Rape, all other sexual violence, extreme female submission, double- and triple-penetration, humiliation, sexual cruelty – all of this fails even to make it into the draft bill, because it’s been normalised in western society. Not only that, but in a neo-liberal capitalist system there could be no question of banning this type pornography, because such an action would by now mean outlawing nearly all heterosexual porn. And porn generates more revenue than the entire British film industry, minus many of the overheads. Not only is banning violent porn not the answer – it’s not even the question yet.

Censorship of 'extreme' pornography will not solve the problem of sexual violence and gender fascism eating away at the bones of progressive western culture. Instead, we need the courage to look into that mirror and respond appropriately to what we see there. Whether disgust, direct action or bland acceptance, our reaction to these images determines who we are, and who we will become as a society.