by Alice Zheng
Thursday, April 29 is the big day. This is THE porn lecture (7:30pm in McCosh 10 for all those interested!) that resulted in many Prince articles worth of controversy, an online petition from Anscombe, a response article by a porn executive/feminist and a surprise anti-porn lecture given by Mary Anne Layden and sponsored by Anscombe. I say “surprise” because a week after the fact I can’t find any mention of it on the Anscombe blog, on the Daily Princetonian, or, really, anywhere. If not for the enticing green posters papering campus last week inviting students to bring their prefrosh (and if not for my apparent obsession with lectures about porn), I would never have stumbled across Dr. Layden’s version of the anti-porn argument.
LeTS also sponsored an anti-porn lecture on April 8, given by Pamela Paul, a sex-positive anti-porn journalist and author of Pornified. I think that it’s important as we approach the much talked about event to view it in the context of these two anti-porn arguments.
Pamela Paul: How Porn is Anti-Sex (for a more comprehensive recap, see this article by Hannah Martins in the Prince):
I personally found Paul’s lecture much less satisfying than Layden’s. As a journalist playing the role of a social scientist, Paul is inclined to make unfounded claims or extreme extrapolations (like her theory that porn ‘pornified’ mainstream media) that don’t seem wholly believable, even if they suggest a feasible moral stance. I think that those who attended her lecture would agree that she didn’t present her argument well. Even so, her anti-porn argument had enough appeal to sway a casual porn supporter like me. This is because the anti-porn stance makes sense in an intuitive way, especially when supported by Paul’s evidence (mostly pulled from a few hundred interviews with male porn users and their female partners). As I understand, Paul believes that:
- All kinds of men look at porn, even if not all men look at porn.
- The way that porn portrays women affects the way that men perceive women.
- Porn affects men’s relationship with sex and with their partners. Men who jerk off too often are unable to have sex with their partners. Men who see too many perfect nude bodies are uninterested in their partners’ bodies in comparison. Men who view fetishistic porn unwittingly incorporate fetishistic fantasies into their sex. Similarly, men who see women denigrated for men’s sexual pleasure begin to denigrate women in their minds even if they don’t want to.
- Porn makes actual sex less appealing and less possible. Hence, porn is anti-sex and being anti-porn is congruous with being sex-positive.
- Porn portrays a false, idealized sex and a false, idealized female body. It’s hard to separate this from reality, especially for youths who don’t know real sex yet. This false impression of sex miseducates youths about what sex should look like, and this idealized female body affects women’s confidence. Because of this and the above, porn is anti-sex and anti-women, so the anti-porn stance is sex-positive and the only possible feminist stance (because supporting porn is inherently anti-women).
I had several issues with her argument. Perhaps this is a silly first fault for me to notice, but her evidence is very heteronormative. She looks exclusively at male users and female victims. What happens to the argument of objectification of women when a man is watching gay porn, a woman is watching lesbian porn, or a woman is masturbating to a single woman masturbating?
She blames porn for relationship problems, men’s inability or lack of desire to have good sex, women’s insecurities about body-image, the hypersexualization of media, etc without considering other social trends that may contribute just as much or more to these problems.
Because her evidence is anecdotal, it can basically argue whatever she wants it to. This is too often the case for journalists, even those who try to hold to standards of integrity (unlike Rita Skeeter who willingly misrepresents Harry Potter) because personal stories can so easily be used to support any hypothesis simply by taking the right quotation.
Dr. Layden made many similar points during her lecture last Friday, though her background as a scientist, and her well-organized presentation, made her argument seem much more credible. Where Paul’s argument is founded mostly on the anecdotal evidence of porn users, which provides interesting but somewhat dubious evidence, Dr. Layden’s evidence consists mainly of statistics taken from numerous studies, mostly in academic journals. Layden is Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the Center for Cognitive Therapy in U Penn, which hopefully indicates that she is a respectable academic who knows what she’s talking about. From my understanding, Layden believes that:
Porn, especially internet pornography, creates a perfect learning environment for behaviors. Pornography teaches permission-giving beliefs that the denigration of women, sex with strangers, pedophilia, bestiality, sadomasochism, group sex, and rape are okay. Pornography also mis-educates about sex by fostering unrealistic expectations, portraying sex as for one’s own pleasure instead of a partnered experience, and depicting unsafe sex (no contraception!).
This affects the way that men and women perceive women, sex, rape, and porn itself. Here she presents a series of graphs depicting the correlation of porn exposure and leniency/anti-social behavior (like letting porn extend into the workplace, prescribing shorter sentences for sexual perpetrators, etc.).
Because porn permits anti-social behaviors that are depicted in it, “Pornified” men are more likely to go to prostitutes, have affairs, be less interested in their partners, be sex offenders, etc. “Pornified” women are more insecure and more likely to be victims of rape. “Pornified” kids are more likely to *gasp!* have engaged in sexual intercourse, but more disturbingly to have done so without contraception, and, according to Layden, have a strong desire to conceive.
Also, the porn industry does not treat its workers well, so the porn industry should not be supported.
Conclusion: We should avail ourselves of existing obscenity laws to de-pornify society because porn encourages anti-social behavior and treats its workers unethically.
For further reading, take a look at this article of Layden’s featured on the website of an ex porn star turned missionary. Layden also offered to provide her annotated bibliography and slides to any who e-mailed her at layden@mail.med.upenn.edu
Some flaws:
Because I haven’t read her annotated bibliography yet, I don’t know how true a lot of her claims about “pornified” men are. However, I can tell that a lot of them don’t follow naturally from the other evidence presented about the correlation between exposure to porn and lenient views about porn. If these are extrapolations based on this evidence, then some seem pretty stretched. A lot of her points are also based on a perception of sex as good only in marriage, and bad if it is pursued solely for pleasure, a view that not all people share.
Some of her claims, like the claim that pornified kids want to conceive because they feel unloved and want babies to love them, frankly sound more than a little implausible, and contributes to the existing negative stereotypes about teen mothers, who often have enough negative attention already without such far-reaching claims.
The consensus, and something that sex-positive, open-minded people can probably accept is that porn affects the way that porn-users perceive those things that are depicted in porn. An increased tendency to view people as sex objects because of exposure to hypersexualized media seems pretty plausible. Other possible ways in which porn might impact perceptions are equally undesirable. Regardless of whether antisocial behavior and the end of all relationships ensues or not, porn seems to have some negative consequences. Whether or not these outweigh the personal pleasure that an individual porn user gets from watching porn depends on how much of Paul’s or Layden’s arguments we’re willing to accept.
Of course, all of this anti-porn preamble is about a particular type of porn that denigrates women and misrepresents sex. Tristan Taormino purports to make “feminist” porn that doesn’t denigrate women. Today, we shall see whether she manages to do so, and, if she does, whether her porn does a better job of educating viewers on (her version of) good sex.
Bodice-rippers: you should think about them.
Is it because of these novels that so many women have rape fantasies, or is it because so many women have rape fantasies that there is a market for these novels? Do the same criticisms that apply to porn apply to bodice-rippers? If so, should bodice-rippers be banned if porn is?
Why is it that the market for porn is overwhelmingly male while the market for bodice-rippers is overwhelmingly, perhaps even exclusively, female? What does this say about differences between males and females? Is it a “double-standard” or “domination” of men, or whatever term you would use, to criticize/ban porn but not to do the same to bodice-rippers?
What about the fact that most bodice-ripper-authors are female? Are bodice-rippers more fixed in their content, or as you might say stereotypes or whatever, than porn is? What does that say about women?
Bodice-rippers seem to be parallel to porn in many ways. But (though I am not an expert) presumably you can’t have a bodice-ripper if you don’t have a bodice being ripped, i.e. some sort of forceful, not-explicitly-consented-to sexual encounter with a rugged male. Thus it would seem that there could be no such thing as a feminist bodice-ripper. And so maybe there can be no such thing as feminist porn.
I didn’t hear Pamela Paul’s talk, but based on your summary her position sounds radically anti-human. The word “pornified” reminds me of contaminated water or rabid dogs. It implies a cynical view of the possibility of genuine human agency—a human being, in her view, is nothing more than the sum of his or her Pavlovian conditionings. And if this view of porn is correct it is only because most pornographers have a similar cynicism about their art, which is precisely why so much porn is so horribly clammy and unerotic.
Taormino respects her audience as well as her actors, and in this way she takes steps to overcome the clinically Pavlovian character of most porn: by letting her actors talk instead of just making them have sex, she reminds viewers that sex is something that happens between people rather than an abstract “third thing.” What is harmful about porn, in my opinion, is not the depiction of sex *per se* but rather the depiction of sex as something abstracted from the rest of life.
I wish that I could have been in Princeton to hear Tristan Taormino speak. The other two talks seem like the substance comes across well enough in written form. I enjoy porn myself, so I wonder if I should be considered “pornified.” Sometimes porn works as sex education but more often than not it is just mindless entertainment, like watching sports or sitcoms.