Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
Page 21
Also reaching new heights of post-feminist subversion is the ‘Ilya Fleet Dog Mask’ that comes with a very long pointy snout and alert little ears. Perfect for those protest marches against the new austerity measures that are impacting on disadvantaged women all over the world. Wearing a pointy nosed dog mask will set you back £350. You can also choose from a range of dog collars and leads for when you really want to explore being sexually autonomous. Or, if you’re on a budget – or just not a dog person – you could buy the more economical cat mask for £150. If you fancy being ridden like a horse there is a harness or two, or if you want to be treated like a pig you might find a ‘Hog Tie’ appealing. Dog, cat, horse or pig? Post-feminism has opened up your choices.
Lashings of other bondage gear will help you subvert the dominant paradigm: whips, spanking equipment, and so on, and so forth, etc. You know, things that will “ensure your lover knows who’s boss!” Oh, if you say so. But perhaps the most interesting is the “unusual and beautifully crafted leather leg harness [which] accompanies the Marlyn [sic] dildo.” Basically, it’s a strap-on dildo for the thigh. To be used, I suppose, in those consciousness raising bondage orgies that so terrify those in power.
If you can’t quite afford these revolutionary sex toys and would like to settle for a vibrator, rest assured that Coco de Mer offers what might be eco-friendly vibrators. Apparently, Coco de Mer is “the first luxury sex boutique to take responsibility for the materials our designer sex toys are made from.” I can’t help wondering what this means. Does it mean that the sex toys are eco-friendly, made from recycled rubber, or (and my mind is trying not to go there) that the materials used have some connection to an unspecified ‘Third World’ economic self-sufficiency program? I do wonder where they got the human hair for the £239 ‘Bombshell Human Hair Whip’. (Can we have your hair please – we want to turn it into a sex whip.)
Coco de Mer not only wants to liberate the wallets of cashed up Western women, but their minds as well. The shop that sells vibrating silver butt plugs and £1,000 masturbating mirrors is really about “establishing intelligent dialogues … about what is permissible.” The big problem, as Sam sees it, is that ‘we’ need to sex up feminism, as she told Anushka Asthana:
Feminism as a word is desexualised. If one claims to be a feminist, one is almost sacrificing her sexuality or her sexiness, right? Because it’s not really permissible to be powerful, self-determined, challenging of society and be sexy. So it’s very interesting how many women refuse to state they are a feminist. They fear that they are not going to be desired. I think it’s something that we’ve got to tackle.
With obscenely expensive militant lingerie, revolutionary butt plugs and oppositional dildos, apparently. It’s all about “reclaiming women’s sexuality”, you see. Yet, in an era in which “the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine” (Power, 2009, p. 21) and does a bit of home porn with her executive lovers for a laugh, invests in botox, fake breasts, and full body-hair removal, has become the aspirational ‘it’ girl of post-feminist consumer culture, this ‘reclaiming of women’s sexuality’ sounds more like another porn chic sell out. And at the risk of sounding uncool, a huge number of women are probably more focused on keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table than expending their hard-earned cash (assuming they even have a job) on ‘empowering’ themselves with a vibrating silver butt plug.
In 1980, Florence Rush wrote that “the current concept of sexual liberation has no relationship whatsoever to political freedom” (1980, p. 191) The counter-cultural 60s slogan ‘make love, not war’ quickly became a slogan for cool capitalism. And it’s still largely forgotten that the guru of the sexual revolution, Alfred Kinsey, employed a known paedophile to conduct sexual experiments on 800 girls and boys in order to prove that kids are sexual.3
Several decades later, Rush is still right: there is a big gap between sexual liberation and political freedom.
Today, the neo-liberal ideology of Big Porn has colonised just about everything, including what passes for feminism in corporate culture. Yesterday’s sexual transgression is today’s fast food advert. Big Pharma spams everyone with sexed up drugs. Girls and women are expected to be hot and up for it while also being subjected to new waves of misogyny they are forbidden to name for fear of being slandered as frigid feminists. It’s pretty clear what is going on politically. We’re not just living with a depthless so-called women’s liberation, there is also a big cultural insult at work here: reducing centuries of rigorous and ground-breaking feminist thinking and activism to the right to be hot and have more sex is insulting. It’s like reducing the civil rights movement to an Ice Cube rap about sex and drugs.
What would happen if a woman really took the slick ideological con of Coco de Mer seriously and decided to sex up her feminism with these hot new products? To avoid being sexually rejected for defending your rights, you can transform yourself thanks to the new ‘up yours!’ feminism of Coco de Mer. But inevitably, the products converge into an image of the post-feminist consumer on her knees, with various expensive items inserted into various parts of her body, wearing an animal mask, with a strap on dildo, being spanked, whipped and flogged with another woman’s hair, looking into a mirror. All of this would cost, oh say, £4000. That’s the price of the pornification of post-feminist sexual self-empowerment.
A more realistic description would be that this expensive sex shop chain is about gentrifying the sex industry with the help of a bit of consumer friendly post-feminist gibberish. Sorry but it’s all Coco de Merde* to me.
*Merde is ‘shit’ in French.
Bibliography
Asthana, Anushka (2010) ‘Sam Roddick: “We have only had a kind of lipstick liberation. Women still have a big battle to fight”’,
Power, Nina (2009) One Dimensional Woman. Zero Books, London.
Reisman, Judith (2007) ‘On Kinsey’s German Nazi paedophile aid; the New York Times asks: “Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert?”’,
Rush, Florence (1980) The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. McGraw-Hill, New York and London.
___________________________
1 First published on Melinda Tankard Reist’s blog,
2 This is not to deny that Sam Roddick hasn’t done some good things. She has supported campaigns against violence against women and sexual trafficking. But it is difficult to align these activities with an elitist global sex shop chain calling itself feminist. See
3
Helen Pringle
A Studied Indifference to Harm: Defending Pornography in The Porn Report
Since the 1980s, there has been a steady growth in the number of academics who study pornography and who believe they are being unconventional in their defence, or even celebration, of it (see e.g. Lord, 1997, and Williams, 2004). To treat pornography as a radical or cool political gesture, however, requires its defenders to turn a blind eye to the harms it does. A great deal of pro-pornography academic research in the social sciences is taken up with this task of masking the harms of pornography, in order to defend the lucrative global industry and guarantee a continued supply of cool pleasures to the hip consumer.
This chapter focuses on The Porn Report (TPR), published by Australian academics Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby in 2008 and heralded as “the first piece of serious research” on the state of pornography in Australia (TPR, p. xiii).1 The book promises an up-to-date and evidence-based analysis of production, distribution and consum
ption, grounded in a survey of pornography users and a content analysis of best-selling X-rated videos. The stated purpose of the authors is not “to challenge any point of view directly or to persuade others to adopt a position that any of the authors currently hold on pornography,” but rather to provide “factual information” to enable informed public debate (TPR, p. xiii). A central feature of the ‘information’ provided by the book is the claim that the harm of pornography is negligible and is, in any case, outweighed by the expressed pleasure of its users.
Contrary to the authors’ stated purpose, I contend that the heart of The Porn Report is not an intellectual inquiry but an ideological mission. That mission is to provide an apologia for the sex industry and, in particular, to shift the terms of public debate to a position consonant with that of the authors which supports the mainstream distribution and use of pornography.
1 The book and its project: Shifting the terms of public debate
Originally called Dirty Business, the book drew on a project entitled ‘Understanding Pornography in Australia: Public Discourses and Pornographic Texts’ funded by an Australian Research Council [ARC] grant of $174,500 over 3 years, from 2002 to 2004.2 From the outset, the project was conducted in liaison with, and with support from, the peak Australian sex industry organisation, the Eros Association, and pornography businesses such as Gallery Entertainment and Axis Entertainment (TPR, pp. xv, 168, pp. 191–192).
The pattern of funding and support does not of course necessarily dictate the outcomes of any research project. Alan McKee writes that in administering their survey of pornography users, the researchers were ‘open-minded’ as to its outcomes:
… we had no preconceptions about what we would find out about consumers of pornography. In particular, we did not assume beforehand that we would discover that pornography had bad effects on people or that those who used it were in any way abnormal, but we were open-minded about the possible effects of the consumption of pornography (McKee, 2007b, p. 36).
The extent of the open-mindedness of the authors is, however, put in question by their own previous work and publicly-announced position on the putative harms of pornography. McKee notes that the researchers did not assume they would find ‘bad effects’. And from the project’s inception, the researchers assumed that pornography has ‘good effects’ (see below). In conducting the project, the researchers confirmed those ‘good effects’ by looking in the obvious place: the self-reporting of a self-selecting group of currently active pornography users.
The Porn Report uses the term pornography in what is sometimes called a ‘non-stipulative’ manner, meaning that the term is not a definition but simply reflects commonly-held views about what falls into the category of pornography. So, for example, in a note attached to the surveys distributed to pornography consumers, the authors explained: “In this survey, we are using the term ‘pornography’ in its widest sense, from soft porn (‘erotica’) to fully explicit material. This includes magazines, videos, the Internet and explicit novels” (McKee, 2007b, p. 35). In the book, and in some media discussions, the authors do add a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ pornography. In the Introduction to The Porn Report, the authors note, “we are not anti-porn” (TPR, p. xv), but conclude the book by saying, “We strongly support good pornography – and we absolutely condemn bad pornography” (TPR, p. 186). Throughout the book, the authors shift back and forwards from protestations of dispassionate objectivity to open advocacy of pornography use.
Both Alan McKee and Catharine Lumby have publicly claimed to be users of pornography,3 and Lumby has argued that “feminists need pornography.”4 While all three authors consider themselves to be “entirely pro-feminist”, their idea of sexual equality in pornography is illustrated by the peculiar view that Girls Gone Wild is a sign of the success of feminism (TPR, p. 102). The authors take obvious delight in the material throughout The Porn Report. For example, a text-box entitled ‘Great Moments in Amateur Porn’ judges One Night in Paris [Hilton] to be “perhaps the best title ever of a porn movie against stiff competition that includes Edward Penishands and Buttbanged Naughty Nurses” (TPR, p. 134).5 It is unlikely that many nurses outside of Carry on Doctor share their enthusiasm for such a title.
In its early stages, the project was plugged in the Eros Association magazine by Alan McKee, who described its genesis:
A group of academics, fed up with this studied ignorance6 have just begun a three-year research project – called ‘Understanding pornography in Australia’ – to try to get away from the idea that ‘ignorance is bliss’ and to provide some facts about the subject … Together, Albury, Lumby and McKee hope that this information will help to change the way that we talk about pornography in Australia: to make some facts available, so that we can have a more informed an [sic] intelligent debate about the adult industry in this country (McKee, 2002, p. 21).
The Association appended the comment, “Eros encourages all of its members to support the researchers in their project [italics in original]”. McKee’s statement makes it clear that the very point of the project was to tilt public discourse towards a certain view of pornography, one that is in alignment with that held by the sex industry. He later summed up the project’s outcome by saying, “The surprising finding was that pornography is actually good for you in many ways” (quoted in Symons and Mackenzie, 2004, p. 4). Such an outcome was not in the least ‘surprising’ to the authors, nor to the Eros Association, which enthusiastically welcomed academic support for its position. For example, Yasmin Element wrote in EROS Magazine to recommend that McKee’s analysis (i.e. McKee, 2005b) of objectification of women in pornography videos “should be used as widely as possible by the industry”. Element added:
I encourage all Eros members to read the report and hand it on to staff, business colleagues and journalists, as it is extremely interesting and informative on many diverse areas of the adult retail industry. It should be passed on to all industry lawyers and lobbyists of all kinds for their reference and could be extremely helpful in all cases from the illegal selling of X rated movies to adult retail planning issues (Element, 2006, p. 7).
The CEO of the pornography firm AdultShop.com, Malcolm Day, apparently concurred that the findings of the project might prove helpful in challenging film and video classification guidelines. In 2007, Day sought a review of a Classification Review Board decision on a film entitled Viva Erotica, a pastiche of “real depictions of actual sexual activity between consenting adults.” The Board had determined the film to be “offensive to a reasonable adult” and classified it as X18+, which meant it was not available for sale or hire except in the ACT and NT. AdultShop.com challenged the Board’s rating in the Federal Court on grounds including how the test of “likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult” should be construed, and whether expert evidence offered in support of Day’s claim had been rejected or discounted. The expert evidence at issue was given by McKee, Lumby and Albury, drawing on their research, particularly in regard to the question of the sensibility of ‘reasonable adults’.7
Catharine Lumby’s participation in the AdultShop.com case became the subject of what she later said were “adverse comments” made during the 2008 Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children. A number of submissions to the Inquiry had argued that Lumby was “publicly pro porn.”8 The Senate committee permitted Lumby to record a formal response to these comments. Her response, addressed to the committee on 9 May, 2008 on University of New South Wales letterhead, denied that she was “pro-porn” or that “my values are seriously out of kilter with current community standards.”9 Lumby argued that she had given evidence in the AdultShop.com case through a contract struck between her then employer (the University of Sydney) and the West Australian law firm of Salter Power.10 She claimed that she had “never been an advocate for any organisation selling adult sexual material in Australia, and had never represented AdultShop.com in court or otherwise” (Senate Inquiry, Attachment A, p. 104); that she “was n
ot expressing any personal view and certainly not advocating the sale of such material” (Attachment B, p. 105); and that her evidence “simply and dispassionately reported the facts as I have them on what the ‘reasonable’ or ordinary Australian thinks about the availability of this material to adults” (Attachment B, p. 108). In the face of criticism at the Senate Inquiry, Lumby took on the persona of the objective intellectual, claiming, “I did not publish this research as an advocate of X-rated material but in my capacity as an academic, looking dispassionately at the evidence” (Attachment B, p. 106).
The AdultShop.com case is an example of how the findings published as The Porn Report have been used in public forums: to attempt to shift public debate and legal discourse to a position more favourable to the pornography industry. In the AdultShop.com case, the attempt was not successful because the evidence offered did not directly address the criteria at the heart of film and video classification decisions. Judge Jacobson in the case noted that in canvassing the question of how the film Viva Erotica would strike “reasonable adults”, “Professor McKee’s evidence addressed the wrong question because it focussed only on the attitudes of consumers of sexually explicit films,”11 and not on reasonable adults more generally.
2 The construction of expertise on pornography: The gentrified user
Having explored the broad lines of the project and its intended use in debates on pornography, I now turn to the mechanics of the research project, in particular the survey of pornography users and the content analysis of pornographic videos. These aspects of the project represent an attempt to ‘gentrify’ the consumers of pornography, through a reshaping of the image of the ‘average’ user from that of a ‘dirty old man’ to that of an intelligent, educated, reasonable and hip participant in consumer culture, who can offer ‘expertise’ in the formulation of public policy on such matters. This construction of a previously unrecognised ‘expertise’ is accompanied by an attempt to conjure away any suggestion of harm in pornographic videos, by a careful selection of the ‘typical’ material viewed by the ‘average’ consumer.