Pondering porn

Not exactly sure what got me thinking about this, but I found myself pondering my feelings about porn, and since they turned rather analytical, I thought I'd codify them in a journal entry. I didn't intend for this to be the behemoth it turned into, but once I got started I found a lot of ground I wanted to cover. This is mostly about the issues porn raises for women, though I have tried to give fair examination to both the masculine and feminine perspectives on them. It occurs to me that I have mostly neglected the straight female use of porn in favor of the straight male use of it. I'm addressing the feminism of visual porn specifically, of which men tend to be the viewers and women the viewed, so this is the relationship I am analyzing. But I don't believe in double standards, so if I establish a rule for one, that means I believe the other must obey it as well. This entry gets a little, well, frank in spots, so if you'd rather not discuss such things, please read no further.

As a woman, as a feminist, and as a user of porn, where do I stand in all of this? As I've mentioned before in this rant of an entry, the biggest problem I have personally with it is the assumption that straight women aren't interested in it and therefore nobody produces decent porn aimed at straight women, or if they do it's all on ABSURDLY EXPENSIVE pay sites that I am not going to shell out for. Guy-on-guy is more readily available (again because it's aimed at men) and that's all well and good, but mostly I just want a hot guy and a hot girl with the focus on the guy. I maintain that if there actually existed more porn that they'd enjoy, more women would get into it, but as things stand right now, I'm most restricted to the written-word stuff. Which works just fine, I'd just like the option is all.

The issue that I want to examine now though is the frequent perspective held by feminists that porn is damaging to women, both those who are in it and by extension all females in general. The assumption here is that porn is filled with desperate women who feel they have no other option being taken advantage of for the sake of making films that are dehumanizing and objectifying their gender as a whole. This assumption is not just held by women, either. I spoke to a friend once who said that, while he did use some porn, he still had a hard time shaking the guilt of the concern that the girls on camera were being degraded and taken advantage of by the process. Is that really the case, that this is not simply a somewhat unorthodox career choice? Are in fact most of these girls actually low-self-esteem sheep who are being caused real damage by their participation?

I'm not sure, but I am inclined to think not. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but in this day and age, I'm inclined to believe that probably the majority of them do it because they want to. Not to say there cannot be some other negative factor-- sexual abuse in childhood or thinking she's not smart enough to do anything else --weakening her ability to take positive control of her own destiny. But I want to make it very clear that I feel that an integral part of feminism is that women, as valuable, capable human beings, must be accountable for their actions. If we don't want to be treated like we're helpless or weak, we must not abdicate the responsibilities that come with the rights to live as independent agents of our own lives. That means that not only do we make choices for ourselves, but also that it is not acceptable to blame other people if that choice is a bad one. Perhaps there are reasons why we made the bad one, but ultimately, the choice lay with us. To say otherwise is to reduce a woman to the level of a child, or of the second-class citizen that women have been relegated to in the past. That I find profoundly unfeminist.

And it's not like it couldn't seem like anything other than a bad choice to be taken only by the desperate. Make no mistake, there are certainly reasons to want to do porn. Whether or not you find participating in the making of pornography utterly distasteful or not, you must admit there are a number of thing about it that have an undeniable appeal. I don't know much about the economics of porn, but assuming it's something you are willing to do, I'd bet the money's pretty good for the nature of the work. You don't need a college degree, you don't need any special skills except those that anyone can develop with practice, you probably only work a few hours a day. If you can make a nice living off having sex on camera, you might be able to pay off those student loans, or not have to spend lousy hours on your feet all day waiting tables or working retail. And, of course, let's not forget the validation factor.

Honestly, well... I can understand that better than anything else. It feels good to be know that people find you attractive and desireable-- and the idea that people find you attractive and desireable enough to pay you to display that attractiveness and desireablity, well, who can't see the validation in that? Also, sex and beauty are powerful. When you're the girl that everybody wants, it gives you a kind of value that other people around you might not necessarily have. The appeal of that validation and power are intense; I know, I'm affected by it myself. The small amount of modeling I've done, basically being compensated because I am beautiful, speaks to that instinct in me. Something I've always kind of wanted to do was some kind of sexy pre-show striptease act before a campus performance of Rocky Horror. The idea of the attention, admiration, and, let's face it, the chance to turn every guy on and (every girl green ;-)) in the audience really appealed to me. I never did it, partially because Rocky ended and partially because Jared understandably wasn't quite comfortable with the idea, but I wanted to, and I still do. So I can definitely understand a girl doing something like going into porn because it she liked the way it made her feel desirable and powerful. Crudely put, nobody jerks off to girls they don't find attractive. So there are certainly, at least to me, very compelling reasons why one would willingly get into porn.

Of course, there are equally valid reasons NOT to, and God knows I personally find them even more compelling. I may want to do a show at Rocky, but I would never actually do anything actually pornographic. Though I take for granted in this piece that porn is not inherently morally repugnant, sexual knowledge of me is a privilege reserved to the very, very few who are worthy of it, not a commodity to be bought and indulged in at leisure by anyone at all. That is too important to me. But could it be that that's simply where the dividing line lies? Is the fact that I see the appeal of but wouldn't actually do porn the difference between someone with healthy self-esteem and girls who actually are willing to have sex on camera?

So that begs the question-- if I don't do it as a matter of self-respect, does that mean that the girls who do aren't respecting themselves? Does the fact that I find porn to be something that I would never, ever do for the sake of my personal dignity make it so that I find those who are willing to do it automatically less dignified, and therefore less worthy of my respect? And if it's not so much a choice but a feeling of having no other option for whatever reason, does the fact that porn exists mean those who don't have much self-respect to begin with get put in an even worse position?

I have pondered these questions, and I have arrived at the conclusion that personally I don't believe just because you wouldn't do something yourself means you think someone else is less for doing it. Doing porn is not for me. Neither is polyamory, Islam, or allowing myself to become larger than a size zero. Not to imply that all those things are on a level, they're just what popped into my head, but the point is it's not that I think those things are bad; they just don't work for me. Does the personal rejection of an idea necessarily mean you don't respect it, or at least not think it's not okay if someone else accepts it as part of the way they live their life? No, I don't think porn is classy, I don't think anybody thinks that, but class isn't the sole indicator of worth in the world. I don't think Ikea furniture or not cleaning your bathroom often enough are classy either. Do these things make you a less valuable human being? I don't believe they do, and I don't believe just because I would never do it doesn't mean I automatically devalue those who do.

As for whether or not porn's existence facilitates taking advantage of girls with less self-respect... yes, I suppose it is very likely that at least some girls get into because they lack the self-esteem to keep them out of it. But again, I believe that women must be held responsible for their choices. Self-esteem issues are unfortunate and deserve sympathy, but you are the only one who can do anything about them, and if you don't, you are still not excused from the responsibility to run your own life. It is not the fault of the viewer, who is in all likelihood just looking for something sexy to help him get off, if you're doing something to hurt yourself for all the wrong reasons. I don't believe enjoying the feeling of being turned on by sexy images makes anyone anything other than perfectly human. To me, it's like saying knives shouldn't exist because people might use them to hurt themselves.

Also, I notice nobody ever wonders if the men in porn were sexually abused or have low-self-esteem. Why is it so much more likely for a woman to only be there because she was coerced by some factor, while a man could only be in it because he wanted to? I think we tend to see men as sexual to the point where having any kind of sex at all is a positive for them, one that outweighs any possible side effects. Men can use sex to feel better about themselves too, as well as make bad sexual choices based off of other emotional needs. Men and women are different but they're not that different; maybe MORE women are succeptible to these issues, but if women are at all, that means men can be too. Nobody worries about what being in porn does to male porn stars and I don't know if that's fair. It makes me wonder about the basis for so many of these concerns-- Reports? Statistics? Evidence? --or if at least some of it stems from that notion that the patriarchy is of course willing to do subject women to anything to satisfy their sexual urges. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle-- some women and some men get into porn because of their negative issues, and other men and other women do it because they want to.

So I suppose I feel that if you do porn, the choice to do so is ultimately your own. But that is not to say I think the user bears no responsibility to behave correctly in this situation. I believe that if you use porn, you've surrendered your right to make value judgments on it. It's biting the hand that feeds you-- it doesn't sound pretty, but frankly, I'm glad there are some people who don't have the hangups that I do, because if nobody was willing to do porn, then I'd have no porn to watch. It reminds me of how I sometimes get teased for the revealing way I dress by boys who like looking at my body. It drives me crazy to be treated negatively for doing something that they enjoy! It's completely unfair, and I think to myself, well, if I'm going to get mistreated for it, maybe I should stop doing it! Also, it seems to say an awful lot about you that you're involving yourself with something you find so base as to warrant your condemnation. If you're going to dismiss the girl you're jerking off to as a whore, what does it make you, the person who's jerking off to the whore? What makes you any better for wanting her to do something that makes her so bad?

Now, I'm just saying this is wrong, not that that nobody ever does it-- plenty of lousy people are happy to stroke off to those they see as having no more value than chunks of meat. But I see this as a problem of the person using it, not as an inherent aspect of porn itself. I really don't think the average porn user forms any opinions about the specific woman he's looking at beyond "You are hot enough to masturbate to," or about women in general. The process is not deep; find suitable material, use suitable material, induce orgasm, move on with life. Christ, at least that's the way it is for me. And I refuse to accept the whole "But you're a woman and you don't have that problem of objectifying like that." Come off it. I use porn for the exact same reason guys do-- to help me get off. I am not any more evolved than they are.

In relation to this a lot of people also raise the issue of whether or not porn teaches men to disrespect women. Does the fact that in porn women are basically displaying themselves on camera for the express purpose of getting off a male audience necessarily result in objectification and dehumanization of the woman? I guess the argument here is that it casts women in the light of being nothing more than the objects of men's sexuality. I wonder if this comes from that outdated notion that using porn is the indulgence of creepy, socially stunted men who don't have any actual interactions with women and so don't learn anything about them as real people, from back when we pretended that not everyone masturbates. First of all, most men use some kind of porn, and a lot of women too. I feel like if you have interactions with actual women, you learn that they ARE people as a matter of course, and good upbringing is to show them respect. I feel like if you develop that, as pretty much every normal person does, porn has no power to negate it. Again, probably MOST men use porn-- does every man in your life have a block against respecting women? Of course not.

I guess you could point out that some porn is made specifically to cater to that misogynistic audience, but again, I think that's more because some people have the problem of misogyny. They also make all kinds of other media, including the completely non-sexual, that projects a negative view of women as well. Just as you pick your other forms of entertainment based on the kind of content you want to see, so do you pick your explicit material. Some people get off on pretty people having wild consensual sex. Other people get off on the degradation of women. Porn exists for both. Just as some people like sci fi and other people like realistic fiction, books, movies, and TV exist for both. This is not a matter of what is inherent to the nature of the medium-- this is a matter of what the consumer looks for. And Christ knows porn is an excellent example of how, if somebody's willing to pay for it, somebody else is willing to make it. Both nice guys and jerks watch TV shows, and both nice guys and jerks read porn.

Related to this concept is the worry of whether, through the omnipresent use of porn in our culture, men are being trained to want things that might not be healthy under the influence of the standards of porn, while the concern for women is whether they're internalizing the need to be an unhealthy pornographic ideal in order to be sexy. They say that women are made to feel bad by men that want them to look and act in these impossible ways that they see in porn, and when they either can't or don't want to, it both makes them feel less desirable and enjoy sex less. That is an unacceptable state of affairs, that I won't argue with. And certainly this is something that does happen. The trouble with this view, however, is that as an unfair byproduct it also demonizes sexuality that might not necessarily deserve it. There's this accusation that if you do enjoy certain things-- and I feel this gets leveled at men more often than women, but since I've experienced it myself I know it can go both ways --you've been conditioned by our porn-saturated culture to indulge misogynistic, phallocentric sexuality, and you're wrong for it.

I really resent this idea of presuming to tell people what is and isn't okay about their sexuality. Real sex, as in, sex that you are having with another person as opposed to watching on your screen, is an intimate act. What is and isn't okay is to be defined by the people involved, not by any external and unrelated standard. And that goes both ways. No, you shouldn't have to have an impossibly enormous rack and tiny waist in order to be sexy, or pretend to enjoy sex acts that you find frankly painful, much less orgasmic. But if you're a woman who gets turned on by getting called "slut" and "whore" by a man who loves you utterly, or playing submission games with him, are you simply expressing your sexuality in a way that pleases both of you, or are you both just products of the misogynist sexual culture that porn allegedly gives rise to? I hate that question because it's makes your private business with your significant other a matter for standards external to you to decide, rather than yourselves alone.

There's a guilt issue here-- if you're a man who likes a very mainstream standard of female beauty, or is turned on by the stylized version of sexuality in porn, you're made to feel like a bad person for it. If you're a woman, you get it both ways-- you feel like you're not attractive enough for the ways you don't conform to that pornographic standard, and you feel like a bad feminist for the ways you do. Are these fair? Can a man help what he's attracted to, as long as he doesn't disregard the feelings of any woman he's with? Should a woman have to be something, anything, she's not because some external force decided that's what she should be? These guilty feelings are dangerous because they lead to people developing complexes over things that needed healthy expression.

True sexual liberation in my opinion is women deciding for themselves what they want in the bedroom. You shouldn't be having sex with a man who doesn't respect you, but you should be able to decide for yourself what that means. You're in charge of your own sexual destiny. If he gets off calling you "slut" but you don't? Ask him to stop. If he wants to throw your legs back and pound you but it hurts? Ask him to stop. He's not a bad person for wanting these things; he's only a dick if you ask him to stop and he doesn't, and you shouldn't be fucking a man who doesn't care about your feelings. But if you do like and want those things, neither you nor your partner should have to feel like you're dirty or wrong for it.

My foremost experience of this was the time I once got into it with a female acquaintance about what she called "pornocratic sexuality." She was extremely sensitive to the notion that pornographic standards are unfairly applied to women, feeling like women became obligated to do things they didn't want to in order to be attractive to the unrealistic preferences of their men. One of the thigns she cited as an example was shaving one's pubic hair, declaring it infantalizing, unreasonable, and denigrating to the nature of the female body. My response was that this was an over-generalization; why couldn't a woman actively prefer herself that way; why would it have to just be to please a man? "That never happens," she declared, and I started to get irritated. So I told her that I shaved everything below the waste, and I'd been doing so for years. Now this isn't something I should bring up often, but I'm certainly not ashamed of it. She basically said I was pandering to a misogynistic pornographic ideal, which demonstrated how insidiously the "pornocracy" influenced us that I could be affected that way and not even know it. That really offended me. Like I couldn't possibly simply happen to like myself better this way? The blunt fact of the matter is I think bush is kind of unattractive on a girl and I feel much sexier without it. I understand the notion of how that kind of thinking can lead women to seeing their bodies as unacceptable and disgusting for being something that is completely normal, which of course is extremely unhealthy and dangerous. But I do it because I want to. This isn't about pleasing the porn-addled expectations of a man, though I won't lie and say I'm not pleased when it does. If you don't want to shave, then by God you shouldn't. I don't think anyone should have to do anything so trivial if they don't want to. But this is something that makes me feel good about myself, and nobody gets to tell me I'm unfeminist for doing what I want to do with my own body.

Also? If a guy honestly thinks, "Well, I like you just the way you are, but I'd probably like you better without a bush"? There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean he finds you unattractive, or that he doesn't respect you. It's just the way things are. I'm sure you like him the way he is even you might like him a little better if he had rock-hard abs. It doesn't mean he's a misogynist monster, and it doesn't mean that you're not a sexy woman.

I've also heard this tied into the idea that porn creates unrealistic concepts of sex in the minds of the viewers. This one makes me roll my eyes, because this is overwhelmingly the problem of the viewer, not the material they're viewing. You should learn at a very young age that you can't believe everything you see on television, from how wrestling is fake to that models are airbrushed to the fact that it usually takes a little more than a good jackhammering to get a girl to come. Again, not to say that nobody ever does this, and that it's not incredibly stupid-- Christ knows I get irritated at people with the assumption that with every chick is two drinks away from a makeout session with her girl friend over there --but a guy is a moron if he gets his ideas about life from porno. I think there's a little bit of that old idea at work here again that only maladjusted bozos that can't get laid look at porn, which I guess I can understand if the bozo at hand has never had any actual sex, but again, normal people use the stuff too, and I believe it isn't too much to ask from humanity as a whole to know how to distinguish fantasy from reality.

See, I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that for me, porn for me is fantasy. It's indulging in a little make-believe sexual scenario and using it to get off when you masturbate. I don't think it's wrong for people in relationships to use porn, probably because it's not real. It's the same as indulging in a little sexual fantasy in your head of something you're not actually going to do. I'm never ever going to make out with another girl, so if that's what he wants to see, well, there's porn for that. Chances are my boyfriend isn't going to have the flawlessly cut abs that I love so very, very much. Does it make me a bad person for enjoying said abs? No, it does not. For that I'll go to porn. It's not that the people in the relationships are unsatisfied with each other. It's just masturbation, which everyone does and in the right moderation is perfectly healthy. If he stops fucking you and only uses porn, well, he's got a much bigger problem than liking girls with big racks, the same way he would with any addiction. So many of the problems people associate with porn I believe are not inherent to it, but come from the misuse of it, or the way it makes people express issues that they have.

So, my conclusions-- I do not find porn inherently degrading to women, or to men for that matter. The decision to make porn is a choice. I do not believe it is acceptable to look down on those who make the porn you use. I believe that men can use porn and completely respect women at the same time, and if they do not, the problem most likely lies within the man and is not the result of porn use. I believe it is up to the individual to determine what sort of sexuality is acceptable to them, and it is not anyone else's place to make that judgment. Porn is fantasy and the indulgence of the desire to get off.

So that, in probably way too much detail and far too many words, is how I feel on the subject of porn. Again, maybe I'm giving too much credit here, (such credit as that is) but I tend to think the complete thought process on the issue from beginning to end is, "That girl is hot. I want to see her naked and have an orgasm." I know that's my thought process. Only for me it's a guy. :-)