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These thoughts were inspired by reading two books about pornography and censorship, Susan Griffin's Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature, Marjorie Heins's Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, so this is sort of a review and sort of not. I think everybody should read some Catharine MacKinnon at some point, too, just to see how good propaganda can be, and I mean that in the favorable sense. Feminism Unmodified changed the way I thought.
So, porn: I've written plain old sex, somewhat kinky sex, sex with issues of consent (designed to be hot and, judging by feedback, successful for some readers), and rape (not designed to be hot and, judging by feedback, disturbing to some readers, a more ambiguous kind of success). I've written graphic violence against women and men; I've boiled cats and crucified vampires. Sometimes the sex and the violence are intermingled. (Not with the cat, though. What kind of sicko do you think I am?)
How did a MacKinnonite college student become a pornography-consuming and producing professor?
Some people who want to regulate pornography would say that writing and images are inherently different in the way that they work on the mind that only visual images really count as the kind of pornography we should ban. In that case, I'm fine, though some of the fans whose work I look at aren't. Accepting that images may have more of a visceral impact, though, there's still the question of whether words matter. No, that's not right; of course words matter. I've never understood the position that writing or fiction don't affect reality; what do people think constitutes reality if not what we see and hear? Smarter minds than mine have considered the issue of the author's moral responsibilities.
It's not that subordinating images and stories directly train men that women should be subordinate (and if it were, I'd hardly worry about fanfic, since my male readership is probably fairly low, though the reciprocal problem of training women that we should be subordinate would still exist) – but stories can suggest attitudes and behaviors, and if they're consistent with the other messages people get from the world around, I think they do matter. That's why I feel the appeal of Griffin's argument that pornography is harmful because it teaches people that the world is a violent, unforgiving place and that softness in oneself, in others, is bad and must be eradicated, humiliated, and punished. My banal conclusion: sometimes you are responsible for what happens because of your writing – the Hit Man's Manual comes to mind – and sometimes you're not – Salinger is not at fault even if some wackos are inspired to commit crimes by Holden Caulfield. As with everything in life and law, some causal connections are stronger than others, and context matters.
Thus, I don't think I'm pro-rape because I write rape scenes. Or even, and this is trickier, scenes with issues of consent. I remember being initially shocked when someone referred to Incarnadine as a story involving nonconsensual sex, but of course that's a perfectly valid interpretation (though, interestingly, the person who said this didn't use the word "rape"). A big part of it for me is how I think the characters would perceive things: given Lex's experiences of being in and out of control, I can easily see him having very expansive definitions of what counts as consent – both for himself and for other people. Like every "sensitive" male his age, he surely recognizes that no means no, but silence may be another matter entirely. Anyway, my point is that what he thinks consent is may not be what I think consent is, even when I'm writing him. My Scully, by contrast, has a much more restrictive definition of consent – which is not unrelated to the fact that she's a woman. If she were being groped by a horny alien who hadn't put the whammy on her, she'd be kicking and screaming, probably biting and head-butting too, and I would hope the scene wouldn't be sexy to most readers.
But why write graphic sexually explicit stories at all? Again, all I've got is the banal: I think they're sexy, and that's what I see in my head sometimes. My experience of writing is that the characters tell me what to do. Sometimes I can nudge them a little, or confront them with something they didn't plan at first, but they're usually pretty adamant about the sex (or lack thereof – I had to cut resolved sexual tension out of Acadia because that Mulder & Scully were damn sure it wasn't going to happen).
It comes down to the fact that I like the writing that I do, and some readers do, too. When MacKinnon says about resistance to feminism that "getting laid was at stake," and talks about the difficulty of change when people really do get sexual pleasure out of current sexual arrangements, she's both depressing and incisive. I think I write as a feminist, but I hope I also write characters who are realistically messy, confused, and occasionally incoherent. If desire under patriarchy is inevitably infected with patriarchical desire, then I'm antifeminist when I experience or aid desire through my writing. But there has to be a possibility of change, a space in the field of control that let MacKinnon's and others' consciousness be raised, and I have to believe that desire can be present in that space, too.
Of course it's in my interest to believe that I can have it all, have the sexy fun and the political seriousness, but if I can be a committed feminist with these stories in my head, I'm going to hope that my readers can too.
That being said, do I want young teenagers (~14) reading my stuff? No, because I'm writing for people who have more experience and can more easily recognize troubling situations. I know I wasn't a very critical reader – really, well into my twenties. And I'm not sure that reading Anne McCaffrey's "she says no, but she means yes" stories when I was a preadolescent was a good idea, even though I wouldn't want it to be illegal for others the same age to read them.
But, here's one of the problems of living in a sex-saturated world: Given all the other things on TV and in ads that kids are exposed to, can I really say that McCaffrey is a corrupting factor?
I think the answer to this question may be changing: the public acceptance of "she says no, but she means yes" is down so much that – outside of self-identified porn, at least – you'd have to go back pretty far to find it in general popular visual culture. (I'm thinking of Marnie, and then even before that Gone With the Wind.) Buffy's producers were so confident that the trope had dissipated that they walked into a huge firestorm over Buffy/Spike -- they didn't even seem to notice that Buffy's behavior could easily be read as a refutation of "no means no," and I really think they didn't notice because "no means no" seemed like such a basic proposition to them, like the sun rising in the east. (I would also argue that this was a failure of overidentification -- the writers thought we'd all be sharing Buffy's POV, in which there was a clear distinction between ultimate consent and ultimate refusal, but a substantial segment of the viewers didn't agree.) The no-means-yes trope was still pretty common in the Harlequin romances I read in the 80s, but I wouldn't be surprised if that had changed. To me, McCaffrey represents the bad old days -- and I'd therefore hope it would be easier for a 14-year-old reading her now to come across one of her "seduction" scenes and react with, "what the hell?" Or at least to distinguish between plausible characterization and a healthy character.
Although "no means yes" stories have decreased in frequency, narratives of male pursuit, which can cross into narratives of stalking pretty easily, are still acceptable. 50 First Dates, anyone? Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear made the interesting point that many men learn from popular culture and personal experience that pursuit in the face of rejection may well end with success. Certainly I've reversed myself when a man has persisted in the past. Especially when dramatic tension is required, I expect the line between "no, not now," and "no, not ever," will remain hard to find in many contexts, and I expect our cultural narratives will continue to instruct us in that uncertainty.
Where does that leave me? Before I'm a pornographer, I'm a contrarian. When I read anti-censorship books, I worry about harm, and when I read anti-pornography books, I worry about everything else. For example, one thing that's fascinating about Griffin's book, published in 1981, is how it completely justifies all that criticism I read in college about how mainstream feminism treated the category "women" as the category "white, middle-class women"; I read more of the criticism than of the texts that prompted it, but here it is – blacks, women, Jews are repeatedly equated, with almost no recognition that the categories aren't mutually exclusive, no thought as to whether the experience of pornography might differ from group to group. Pornography is racism; pornography makes women into blacks and Jews, because none were black or Jewish without that.
Griffin also suffers from never defining "pornography." When she criticizes studies purporting to show no link between porn and sexual violence, she argues that they were flawed because they included images that were merely erotic, not pornographic; but repeatedly she speaks of images such as Marilyn Monroe's early nude photos as "pornographic." The term seems to mean what she needs it to mean at the moment. I'm certainly more willing to believe that violent sexually subordinating images have a rehearsal or conditioning effect than that all naked pictures harm women, but she's not playing fair.
By contrast, Marjorie Heins goes too far the other way when she initially dismisses offhand the studies showing that men who viewed violent pornography and were then angered – particularly by a female confederate – were then willing to administer harder shocks to the confederate than men who had not been so exposed. There's no one-to-one correspondence between the lab and ordinary life, but that doesn't make the experiments irrelevant. Ask yourself whether you think Stanley Milgram found out something important when he looked for ordinary people's willingness to inflict dangerous, even life-threatening shocks as long as a person in authority told them to do so.
Heins' last chapter, taking on the studies directly, is much more nuanced and reflective on the problem of determining causation in a world overwhelmed by different inputs. I love her quote "The plural of anecdote is not data." She points out that aggression may be implicitly encouraged by the lab setting, the Milgram effect working in the porn experiments, but asserts, I think wrongly, that aggression is discouraged in real life. Sometimes yes; sometimes no, in which case the same reinforcement effects might persist outside the lab. (The rest of the book is mostly a standard narrative of the legal regime controlling indecency in America, with repeated comparisons to the UK and an informative chapter on current European practices for protecting children from, or exposing them to, sexual materials.) Hein concludes that we don't know much about whether children are harmed by exposure to sexually explicit materials, which seems generally right. Yet, as she sometimes acknowledges, a confession of ignorance is nonresponsive to ethical concerns about sexually explicit materials and their value to adults or children.
While Hein refuses any certainty but uncertainty, Griffin's more theoretical take allows her to make blanket condemnations. She goes way over the top with the Nazism analogies: I'd have an easier time accepting the repeated claim that the pornographic mind is the genocidal mind if I knew exactly what she meant by "pornographic mind," other than the tautology that it's the one that wants to kill all that is different in others and all that it fears and denies in itself. But I really choked on one line in her discussion of The Story of O, when O is given to a character named Sir Stephen. "And can it be a coincidence that his initials, S. S., call up for us all the horrors of the Holocaust?" Well -- yes, of course it can! Look, I was willing to believe that O was a propagandist for male sexual violence against women; I can condemn a rapist without needing to think of him as also a murderer.
Ultimately, Griffin suffers from assuming that there is such a thing as erotica, a healthy expression of sexuality, without ever telling us what it is. I'd like to think that my writing comes with a feminist perception of power dynamics and how they can poison and nourish a relationship, and that it can be part of a healthy sexuality, but ultimately that's in the hands (eyes? under the circumstances, maybe hands is right) of my readers.
I don't have any answers, just questions. I guess that's what ultimately put me in the anti-censorship camp, because the tools of law don't seem precise enough to deal with the messiness of causation when it comes to the relations between men and women. That, and reading a lot of fan fiction without being led away from feminism.
So, porn: I've written plain old sex, somewhat kinky sex, sex with issues of consent (designed to be hot and, judging by feedback, successful for some readers), and rape (not designed to be hot and, judging by feedback, disturbing to some readers, a more ambiguous kind of success). I've written graphic violence against women and men; I've boiled cats and crucified vampires. Sometimes the sex and the violence are intermingled. (Not with the cat, though. What kind of sicko do you think I am?)
How did a MacKinnonite college student become a pornography-consuming and producing professor?
Some people who want to regulate pornography would say that writing and images are inherently different in the way that they work on the mind that only visual images really count as the kind of pornography we should ban. In that case, I'm fine, though some of the fans whose work I look at aren't. Accepting that images may have more of a visceral impact, though, there's still the question of whether words matter. No, that's not right; of course words matter. I've never understood the position that writing or fiction don't affect reality; what do people think constitutes reality if not what we see and hear? Smarter minds than mine have considered the issue of the author's moral responsibilities.
It's not that subordinating images and stories directly train men that women should be subordinate (and if it were, I'd hardly worry about fanfic, since my male readership is probably fairly low, though the reciprocal problem of training women that we should be subordinate would still exist) – but stories can suggest attitudes and behaviors, and if they're consistent with the other messages people get from the world around, I think they do matter. That's why I feel the appeal of Griffin's argument that pornography is harmful because it teaches people that the world is a violent, unforgiving place and that softness in oneself, in others, is bad and must be eradicated, humiliated, and punished. My banal conclusion: sometimes you are responsible for what happens because of your writing – the Hit Man's Manual comes to mind – and sometimes you're not – Salinger is not at fault even if some wackos are inspired to commit crimes by Holden Caulfield. As with everything in life and law, some causal connections are stronger than others, and context matters.
Thus, I don't think I'm pro-rape because I write rape scenes. Or even, and this is trickier, scenes with issues of consent. I remember being initially shocked when someone referred to Incarnadine as a story involving nonconsensual sex, but of course that's a perfectly valid interpretation (though, interestingly, the person who said this didn't use the word "rape"). A big part of it for me is how I think the characters would perceive things: given Lex's experiences of being in and out of control, I can easily see him having very expansive definitions of what counts as consent – both for himself and for other people. Like every "sensitive" male his age, he surely recognizes that no means no, but silence may be another matter entirely. Anyway, my point is that what he thinks consent is may not be what I think consent is, even when I'm writing him. My Scully, by contrast, has a much more restrictive definition of consent – which is not unrelated to the fact that she's a woman. If she were being groped by a horny alien who hadn't put the whammy on her, she'd be kicking and screaming, probably biting and head-butting too, and I would hope the scene wouldn't be sexy to most readers.
But why write graphic sexually explicit stories at all? Again, all I've got is the banal: I think they're sexy, and that's what I see in my head sometimes. My experience of writing is that the characters tell me what to do. Sometimes I can nudge them a little, or confront them with something they didn't plan at first, but they're usually pretty adamant about the sex (or lack thereof – I had to cut resolved sexual tension out of Acadia because that Mulder & Scully were damn sure it wasn't going to happen).
It comes down to the fact that I like the writing that I do, and some readers do, too. When MacKinnon says about resistance to feminism that "getting laid was at stake," and talks about the difficulty of change when people really do get sexual pleasure out of current sexual arrangements, she's both depressing and incisive. I think I write as a feminist, but I hope I also write characters who are realistically messy, confused, and occasionally incoherent. If desire under patriarchy is inevitably infected with patriarchical desire, then I'm antifeminist when I experience or aid desire through my writing. But there has to be a possibility of change, a space in the field of control that let MacKinnon's and others' consciousness be raised, and I have to believe that desire can be present in that space, too.
Of course it's in my interest to believe that I can have it all, have the sexy fun and the political seriousness, but if I can be a committed feminist with these stories in my head, I'm going to hope that my readers can too.
That being said, do I want young teenagers (~14) reading my stuff? No, because I'm writing for people who have more experience and can more easily recognize troubling situations. I know I wasn't a very critical reader – really, well into my twenties. And I'm not sure that reading Anne McCaffrey's "she says no, but she means yes" stories when I was a preadolescent was a good idea, even though I wouldn't want it to be illegal for others the same age to read them.
But, here's one of the problems of living in a sex-saturated world: Given all the other things on TV and in ads that kids are exposed to, can I really say that McCaffrey is a corrupting factor?
I think the answer to this question may be changing: the public acceptance of "she says no, but she means yes" is down so much that – outside of self-identified porn, at least – you'd have to go back pretty far to find it in general popular visual culture. (I'm thinking of Marnie, and then even before that Gone With the Wind.) Buffy's producers were so confident that the trope had dissipated that they walked into a huge firestorm over Buffy/Spike -- they didn't even seem to notice that Buffy's behavior could easily be read as a refutation of "no means no," and I really think they didn't notice because "no means no" seemed like such a basic proposition to them, like the sun rising in the east. (I would also argue that this was a failure of overidentification -- the writers thought we'd all be sharing Buffy's POV, in which there was a clear distinction between ultimate consent and ultimate refusal, but a substantial segment of the viewers didn't agree.) The no-means-yes trope was still pretty common in the Harlequin romances I read in the 80s, but I wouldn't be surprised if that had changed. To me, McCaffrey represents the bad old days -- and I'd therefore hope it would be easier for a 14-year-old reading her now to come across one of her "seduction" scenes and react with, "what the hell?" Or at least to distinguish between plausible characterization and a healthy character.
Although "no means yes" stories have decreased in frequency, narratives of male pursuit, which can cross into narratives of stalking pretty easily, are still acceptable. 50 First Dates, anyone? Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear made the interesting point that many men learn from popular culture and personal experience that pursuit in the face of rejection may well end with success. Certainly I've reversed myself when a man has persisted in the past. Especially when dramatic tension is required, I expect the line between "no, not now," and "no, not ever," will remain hard to find in many contexts, and I expect our cultural narratives will continue to instruct us in that uncertainty.
Where does that leave me? Before I'm a pornographer, I'm a contrarian. When I read anti-censorship books, I worry about harm, and when I read anti-pornography books, I worry about everything else. For example, one thing that's fascinating about Griffin's book, published in 1981, is how it completely justifies all that criticism I read in college about how mainstream feminism treated the category "women" as the category "white, middle-class women"; I read more of the criticism than of the texts that prompted it, but here it is – blacks, women, Jews are repeatedly equated, with almost no recognition that the categories aren't mutually exclusive, no thought as to whether the experience of pornography might differ from group to group. Pornography is racism; pornography makes women into blacks and Jews, because none were black or Jewish without that.
Griffin also suffers from never defining "pornography." When she criticizes studies purporting to show no link between porn and sexual violence, she argues that they were flawed because they included images that were merely erotic, not pornographic; but repeatedly she speaks of images such as Marilyn Monroe's early nude photos as "pornographic." The term seems to mean what she needs it to mean at the moment. I'm certainly more willing to believe that violent sexually subordinating images have a rehearsal or conditioning effect than that all naked pictures harm women, but she's not playing fair.
By contrast, Marjorie Heins goes too far the other way when she initially dismisses offhand the studies showing that men who viewed violent pornography and were then angered – particularly by a female confederate – were then willing to administer harder shocks to the confederate than men who had not been so exposed. There's no one-to-one correspondence between the lab and ordinary life, but that doesn't make the experiments irrelevant. Ask yourself whether you think Stanley Milgram found out something important when he looked for ordinary people's willingness to inflict dangerous, even life-threatening shocks as long as a person in authority told them to do so.
Heins' last chapter, taking on the studies directly, is much more nuanced and reflective on the problem of determining causation in a world overwhelmed by different inputs. I love her quote "The plural of anecdote is not data." She points out that aggression may be implicitly encouraged by the lab setting, the Milgram effect working in the porn experiments, but asserts, I think wrongly, that aggression is discouraged in real life. Sometimes yes; sometimes no, in which case the same reinforcement effects might persist outside the lab. (The rest of the book is mostly a standard narrative of the legal regime controlling indecency in America, with repeated comparisons to the UK and an informative chapter on current European practices for protecting children from, or exposing them to, sexual materials.) Hein concludes that we don't know much about whether children are harmed by exposure to sexually explicit materials, which seems generally right. Yet, as she sometimes acknowledges, a confession of ignorance is nonresponsive to ethical concerns about sexually explicit materials and their value to adults or children.
While Hein refuses any certainty but uncertainty, Griffin's more theoretical take allows her to make blanket condemnations. She goes way over the top with the Nazism analogies: I'd have an easier time accepting the repeated claim that the pornographic mind is the genocidal mind if I knew exactly what she meant by "pornographic mind," other than the tautology that it's the one that wants to kill all that is different in others and all that it fears and denies in itself. But I really choked on one line in her discussion of The Story of O, when O is given to a character named Sir Stephen. "And can it be a coincidence that his initials, S. S., call up for us all the horrors of the Holocaust?" Well -- yes, of course it can! Look, I was willing to believe that O was a propagandist for male sexual violence against women; I can condemn a rapist without needing to think of him as also a murderer.
Ultimately, Griffin suffers from assuming that there is such a thing as erotica, a healthy expression of sexuality, without ever telling us what it is. I'd like to think that my writing comes with a feminist perception of power dynamics and how they can poison and nourish a relationship, and that it can be part of a healthy sexuality, but ultimately that's in the hands (eyes? under the circumstances, maybe hands is right) of my readers.
I don't have any answers, just questions. I guess that's what ultimately put me in the anti-censorship camp, because the tools of law don't seem precise enough to deal with the messiness of causation when it comes to the relations between men and women. That, and reading a lot of fan fiction without being led away from feminism.
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From:
no subject
Yes! Thank you for such a well-put-together set of thoughts.
And Harlequin, I'm sad to say, is still quite a bit behind the times in these matters.
From: (Anonymous)
Contrarian
Great essay, Rivka, would love to discuss and debate and all into the night, but too many hours of stuff here; but it occurred to me to wonder on the shock experiment, in the real world, what do men do while reading porn ("violent" or otherwise)? Right, they jack off. And I'd be willing to hypothesize that if the guys in the lab had been jacking off instead of just getting their hormones in a knot, they might not have had any measurable increase in lab-aggression, no matter what they'd just been looking at. In fact, it mighta gone way down. *wink*
Many, many other interesting and exciting lines and thoughts here. Glad Carene pointed me to it.
xxx, Mog
From:
no subject
I agree with you that the definition of pornography is essential, and I don't agree with the whole concept of "I know it when I see it", because, imo, that's not entirely true. What is porn to me, might not at all be porn to you.
If desire under patriarchy is inevitably infected with patriarchical desire, then I'm antifeminist when I experience or aid desire through my writing. But there has to be a possibility of change, a space in the field of control that let MacKinnon's and others' consciousness be raised, and I have to believe that desire can be present in that space, too.
This brings to mind the fact that we are biological creatures who have some hardwired responses to stimuli, and desire is part of that. We experience lust, and want, and we get horny. What makes us lust, want, get horny, may or may not change over time. I think that the biggest part (for me) of getting past patriarchal controls of desire is to acknowledge desire. As women, I think that we are too encouraged to not even acknowledge our wants in relation to sex, and I actually think that pornography can play a role in changing that. Just by saying, "This turns me on, this gets me hot," and not thinking, "Is this turning him on? Is this making him hot? Do I make him hot?" women are moving out of the patriachal induced attitude of submission. (I'm soooo not making sense here.)
Moving on, I think that children being exposed to sexually explicit material is not necessarily harmful--of course, it depends on the way in which they are exposed. I mean, if an adult is showing a child porn, then obviously that is probably not a good thing and is probably linked to some sort of child abuse. But if a child stumbles on her parents' hidden porn stash (*raises hand*) and explores it, finds it titillating and interesting, and is raised in a household where sexuality between adults is portrayed as normal and loving, I think can be a very healthy thing, allowing a child to come to grips to a very natural thing, i.e. desire.
In my experience, my friends who were not exposed to sexually explicit material as children, who were given the usual spiel about sex being about procreation with little focus on the function of desire and lust, etc, were usually the ones who grew up with issues and hangups about sex. At least, that was my experience. Removing all concepts sexuality and desire (via removal of sexually explicit information) from a child's world only serves to take away their power in discovering how they experience desire, how they control desire, and what they want to do with those feelings. (Again, I'm certainly not advocating that parents sit down and show their kids porn. Ew.)
Oy. I'm going to stop now. Even though I have a ton more thoughts, words are not my friends today and I'm not able to express clearly what I'm trying to get at.
From:
no subject
1. The only way IMO to get from a culture of "no means yes" to one where "no means no" is for women, for *girls*, to be able to say "yes" to their own desires. I don't think we really are in a culture where "no means no", because girls who say or even think "yes" are labelled "slut". And we all know this labelling is done even more by other girls than by boys.
Smut -- or whatever you want to call it (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/146558.html) -- such as you write can be a really important way for you and your readers to get to "yes", to ownership and appreciation of our own desires. I actually suspect most conventional genre porn (written), e.g. Penthouse, is a way for males to control their own desires by distancing them, not by getting closer to them.
2. Pornography is a form of knowledge. Young people have a very strong natural desire for knowledge of all kinds, and sexual knowledge most of all. To a lot of "conservatives", all sexual information is pornography is sex ("knowing" in the biblical sense) is evil, a train of thought I can only describe as whacked.
From:
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From:
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i also think i've learned a lot from the media violence debates, b/c cause and effect really aren't as simple...neither is a plain 'parents can just turn it off.' i'm still somewhat in agreement with the anti-porn folks in their criticism of our society as sexist and violent as a whole...i just don't think banning one thing or another really solves anything. [i've always found it very ironic that germany and the us seem to print one another's 'forbidden' material...in the above class we had a book on gay porn printed in Germany while i know that a lot of political material forbidden there gets printed here and then imported]
sorry, i'm all over the place and need to read this one more time to actually adress the isues you raise...
before i do though, can i metablog you?
From:
no subject
I still feel I haven't addressed that crucial moment, the transition from being someone who thinks "porn is degrading and bad" to being someone who thinks "NC-17 Mulder/Scully fic? Show me the way!" And I think it's important to me that I came in through hetfic, which is why I didn't say anything about m/m slash as a way of dealing with male/female relationships.
From:
no subject
From:
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From:
no subject
i certainly rethought my position more and more, though i think i'd moved away from the anti-porn position and was just thinking of it as exploitative and anti-feminist in production. i still feel that way most of the time, though. as for written porn (or the virtual creations that do not involve actual human beings...)...i really don't know.
i do think it's a good thing to be in touch with yourself and your sexuality andit certainly hasn't hurt my sex life, but i wonder at times, b/c i went through phases where i'd need 'increased stimuli,' i.e., more, harder, faster, more brutal to be interested. i do worry about that effect! then again, a lot of us go through phases where most of the sex scenes are skipped, right? (or am i the only weird one? :-)
i don't think reading or writing explicit fanfic is anything but positive on an individual level...so the question would then be whether it can then still be bad generally...
From:
no subject
You are not the only one. *g*
Fascinating post and conversation, Rivka.
From:
no subject
Random incoherent thought that I'm going to try to get down. There's an idea that the pornographic mind is the genocidal mind to the extent to which it kind of kills its subjects by objectifying them--the ultimate objectification is death, right? Corpsification? However, more and more I've been thinking about pornography in kind of Gilligan terms, by which I mean--what if the key to the pornographic mind isn't so much objectification as repetition? --ie. the games playing mind, the mind that will do anything (as women often do) rather than have the game END. Now, okay, the opposite of this argument is that pornography is entirely end driven--gimme my orgasm and let me get out of here, and yeah, that's true, but it seems to me that the overall experience of pornography is repetitious and that in fact, that's one of the slams against IT rather than "original" works (just as it's one of the slams against fanfiction or genre.)
(Vis a vis metablog, by the way, which cathyxs suggested above--I fucking hate metablog for theoretical talk, but maybe that's just me. )
From:
no subject
re eros&thanatos...yes on the objectification...plus, there seems to be such a thin line way too often, i.e., we tend to eroticize violence and think of sexuality in terms of aggression (only heterosexual sex???)
i think you're definitely on to something with the repetition, though i still think it's repetition with a difference. we need the same but we need to pretend to get it in different ways, if that makes sense. but i think you're right that it's not about the end result as much as the experience along the way (is that gendered, though?)
From:
no subject
It's a trade-off--I have to say I'm increasingly frustrated with talking theory in "public" because you've got such diverse experience in the readership. While that's often a good thing (in terms of thinking outside the box, getting ideas from other disciplines, etc) I sometimes find it really frustrating when I'm actually trying to work on something. You know the kinds of things I'm talking about--when someone challenges the basic assumptions of your own discipline (like, for example, the idea of a theory, that a theory isn't intended to be "true" or apply to everyone or disempower anyone etc.) I sometimes feel trapped on endless sidelines with people--strangers--who don't know me or my politics; LJ frustrates me to the extent to which it allows people to surf into conversations with absolutely no context, so in a way, we have to have the same discussion over and over and can't GET anywhere.)
I(And you keep a friends-locked journal, so you're one to talk! *g*)
i think you're right that it's not about the end result as much as the experience along the way (is that gendered, though?)
I could make an argument that it's gendered, yeah. The argument is all about men being end-driven in games and such, while women are into anything that prolongs play, right? So that could potentially be a basis for distinguishing between a male erotics and a female erotics; the porn might look the same: act... climax 1....act.... climax 2....act.... but the response to it, what gets emphasized or valued, might be different. The article about what women want from porn recently linked--was it the NYT?--made a comment about how guys want less plot, less action (The guy made a joke that in the famous "woman fucks the pizza guy" plot, men could even do without the pizza. Our porn, on the other hand, er, expands the pizza. *g* We're even more about the pizza. We want to know WHAT pizza parlor, and what's on the pizza, and all that. And so our porn evolves that way. But one could argue that what you've got is a gendered reading of the same event--that women value the alternation and repetition (AND climax--the climax is made better for it!) while men value the constant end-driven nature, seeing them maybe as more discrete: (act...climax) (act...climax) (act...climax).
Possibly if I were a biological anthropologist, which I'm not, I might make some kind of an argument about how this mirrors the structure of female orgasms or something, but I'm kind of disinclined. Moreover, having established this kind of gendered pattern, I'm also interested in undercutting it--so for instance, I think a lot more men watch porn as we (I ) do, kind of communally, or as an occasion for male bonding that's not really about the pornography per se at all; it's the enabling of a kind of homosocial social response that they enjoy but can't admit enjoying. We may not be as different as the model indicates, though frankly, I think the differences are there because of how different male and female-oriented pornography actually IS.
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We want to know WHAT pizza parlor, and what's on the pizza, and all that. And so our porn evolves that way But do we really? I'm a bit torn about that, b/c on the one hand somniespreus's great post last year that asked for our favorite one-handed reading produced a surprising amount of longer, plot-driven stories. Now part of that might be our unwillingness to admit to reading for nothing but the porn...another might be, though, that a lot of us do indeed want the slow buildup rather than the climactic sex scene only.
For me the difference always lies in the fact that a good sex scene to me lets me in. So i might not care about what's on the pizza but i do care what my pizza guy is thinking and feeling. [That being said, I've argued before that even PWPs offer a context simply b/c we *know* these guys in hundreds of other versions. Rarely can someone point me to a particularly hot scene in a fandom I don't read and know and it work for me. So even if we get an AU where the guys are just a quick and dirty fuck and don't know each other atall...*i* know them!]
OK, totally off track here. All I'm saying, I guess, is that I agree with the repetition as process vs repetition of climax, if we can cxall it that?
please, no biological anthro :-) I'm still reeling from warrior lovers :D
re your last point: i agree that the responses may differ in regard to the product but i also think they may simply be different due to different socialization. In other words, do we not watch porn together b/c we're not supposed to or b/c there isn't any good porn out there or b/c visuals don't get us as hot as writing or...
And then I'm always wary anyway to gender wholesale, b/c if we just think of the many, many reasons and ways we read porn...i can image juet as many reasons how and why men view porn...and i'm sure a lot of the intersect...
From: (Anonymous)
biological
xxx, Mog
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But I can see the counterargument that the repetition works into the deadly fantasy that you can control everyone else/all the women -- erase/rewind and then you're back on top; you don't have to interact or change. So while it's a repetition, it's a repetition of a fixed script that denies the women portrayed any agency. Part of it, then, may be whether you see each individual text as part of a conversation with others -- and thus see each text as a variation -- or as its own rehearsed and ossified entity.
For metablog, I've never done it before, so I'm interested to see what happens. Also, I figure that I should never suggest that anyone needs permission to quote/cite me unless I specifically ask for such treatment for a particular work; perhaps if this gets me into trouble I shall reconsider.
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Vis a vis metablog, I'm probably just feeling cranky today; I actually went over to metablog and reminded myself that, yes, there are real positives to cross-pollinating conversation. And of course, yes, I agree you shouldn't ever have to ask for permission about a public post; you published, you can be linked, QED. That being said, it's kind of like the issue of writing about slash in a newspaper or publicizing it with criticism or whatever--I can't stop people, but there are times when I wish people wouldn't.
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Incomplete thought:
I'm coming out of a program in which my advisor is a radical feminist, so under her influence I find myself struggling with these questions every day. She's built so much into my own feminism that I have to compartmentalize the part of me that loves and writes porn away from the feminist, but it doesn't feel right. I do that because she hates porn, finds it patriarchal, and she defines my feminism through my admiration of her. Mainstream porn certainly is patriarchal, but it seems to me what we do here on the internet as a community of intelligent women isn't patriarchal. Retaliatory? I think so, in my case anyway. Because sometimes writing about men doing other men feels like a strike back at all the male-pov-lesbian action in mainstream porn. It's like, you think that's hot, guys? Yeah? Well look at the way we women can make men interact. Or not even a strike back at the mainstream porn industry, but the good ol' boy homophobe porn purchasers who'd bash gay men in a heartbeat, but who love to watch two women get it on as long as there's a male director behind the camera calling the shots. But that's not right, either. It shouldn't be retaliation. I don't want to have anything in common with good ol' boys, but that violent impule to strike back sounds like I'm inching over their way.
And I'll trail off there, because I started out just offering applause, but I've written myself into a corner. I
*Gracelessly bows out, aware of flawed logic, offering kudos and big hugs*
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Mainstream porn falls into the category of patriarchal propaganda.
You can invent your own counter-propaganda. And it can be feminist.
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Yow! Toxicoso! You'd be well out of that relationship. It's too bad you can't show her some slash, but it would probably be a Real World risk. Maybe someone else will enlighten her someday.
It makes me uneasy to think of slash that way, as getting back at someone. If only because it makes men, yet once again, central, whereas I think of women as central to slash and (RL) men as just about beside the point.
You're a good writer (and I love your name) so I bet your porn is good!
xxx, Mog
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What kind of sicko do you think I am?
The very, very best kind. :)
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I write slash when I see the characters in the source as being attracted to each other. I write those characters as close to the way I see them as possible, so in that way I've always thought of myself as writing "gay men." However, I don't actually have any kind of archetypal gay man in mind when writing, and maybe that leads to what this fan referred to as unrealistic portrayals of m/m relationships and sex. Also, I usually don't write with a conscious agenda, but when I think about it, my agenda is always, "I, as a straight woman, find this hot/interesting/attractive," and maybe that's where the breach between the gay male experience and slash as written by me comes into it.
The thing is, even as I considered these factors, I had no intention of changing the way I write slash, nor what I feel inspired to write. And I do remember feeling resentment against this man trying to impose his own limits/beliefs/desires on my creative expression. At the same time, I'm still left to struggle with the question of whether slash exploits the gay culture the way straight male porn exploits women, especially straight male porn of the fake lesbian variety. I'm no closer to an answer, though I guess it's pretty obvious from my continuing slash activities that I'm more concerned with satisfying my own desires and creationary impulses than I am concerned with respecting a culture that doesn't include me and does include members I feel have oppressed a culture that does include me.
*re-reads*
My, that was a convoluted sentence. Let me see if I can clear up. I'm inclined to continue doing what interests me and stimulates me (emotionally, sexually, intellectually). I'm not inclined to stop because the possibility has been raised that what I'm doing may be disrespectful to gay male culture. Part of the reason I'm not inclined to stop is because of the male aspect of gay male culture. So in a way, it does seem rather...retributionary.
And yet, when I started out in slash, I didn't think about that aspect of it. I wasn't interested in retribution or revenge. I was doing it because I liked it, because it was about my desires, and owning them, to bring this back slightly on-topic. Revenge, if there is one, is just a fringe benefit.
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Men exploit women, and the male culture oppresses women to excuse, justify, and maintain this exploitation.
Do you think women who write slash exploit gay men and use slash to excuse, justify and maintain this exploitation?
Are the two forms of "pornography" really parallel, or do they only intersect aesthetically?
Exploiting someone else's culture is bad, yes, but slashers do not profit from such (if any, considering how little connection there often is between slash and actual gay men) exploitation of gay male culture in the same way men profit from their exploitation of women, and I have yet to find examples of slashers justifying the social oppression of gay men (whose exploitation, as a matter of fact, profits the patriarchy itself).
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That's one of the questions I was struggling with. I don't think so, but if a gay man tells me it is, who's right?
Are the two forms of "pornography" really parallel, or do they only intersect aesthetically?
Personally, I think they only intersect aesthetically. And I'd argue that the end results are certainly different. Whereas my interaction with the slash community has made me both more aware and more supportive of gays and gay issues in RL, straight male porn certainly doesn't seem to make straight men more sympathetic to women's issues.
Exploiting someone else's culture is bad, yes, but slashers do not profit from such (if any, considering how little connection there often is between slash and actual gay men) exploitation of gay male culture in the same way men profit from their exploitation of women, and I have yet to find examples of slashers justifying the social oppression of gay men (whose exploitation, as a matter of fact, profits the patriarchy itself).
There was a bit of uproar last spring, if I remember right, in which a few slashers said they read slash, or even write it, but they were anti-gay marriage and didn't like real people being gay. That's the only instance I can think of, though, in which I felt slash was exploitative of homosexuality. Most of the time, I agree that I don't see slash as necessarily having much connection to actual gay men. I think it tends to have a wider focus, namely looking at people as people and not defining them by either their plumbing or their preferred sex partners.
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A straight woman can oppress gay men based on her heterosexuality, which is an institution that exploits those it marginalises, ie, gays, lesbians, etc.
But she cannot oppress them because of her sex, since it is patriarchy that forms the actual institution wherein males exploit and marginalise females.
It's because of the intersection of privileges that slashers can feel guilt on some levels. However, forgetting our own oppression as women is the very last thing we should do, because all forms of oppression must be recognised in order for oppression to be fought. Trade-offs only divide, and the oppressors benefit from such division.
Part of the reason I'm not inclined to stop is because of the male aspect of gay male culture. So in a way, it does seem rather...retributionary.
If both slashers and gays formed a coalition to attack the heterosexual institution, that wouldn't be retribution. It would be revolution.
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I just want to say thank you for taking the time to address so many of the concerns I mentioned in my comment.
It's because of the intersection of privileges that slashers can feel guilt on some levels. However, forgetting our own oppression as women is the very last thing we should do, because all forms of oppression must be recognised in order for oppression to be fought. Trade-offs only divide, and the oppressors benefit from such division.
This is the basis of part of my quandary, though. I don't forget my own oppression, but I worry about perpetuating the oppression of another group of people. Or not, because I don't see how slash is oppressive to gay men. I do worry about it being exploitative, however. Admittedly, though, I only tend to worry about that when a gay man says something that makes me wonder.
And to be honest, my first reaction to the incident I mentioned in which a gay man complained that slash stories weren't matching his personal experience was, "I'm not writing your Gary Stu here. Not every gay or bisexual man is going to have your experiences or share your beliefs." Generally speaking, I tend to believe that if I get a character right as a human being, then I'm getting them right as a bisexual/homosexual/heterosexual/pansexual/whathaveyou being. And that's usually my personal complaint about both straight male pornography and the majority of female media characters. These aren't believable human beings, never mind them being believable women.
If both slashers and gays formed a coalition to attack the heterosexual institution, that wouldn't be retribution. It would be revolution.
It would be welcome.
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I mean, next time somebody brings it up, just say, "I want to speak with Ru Paul, please."
Neither gay men or women (lesbian or straight) have been able to express our desires under patriarchy, and it's only a matter of time and place and circumstances who's getting beat to death for trying -- or "merely" being hushed or laughed at. One might *think,* given the suffocating blanket of Het! Sex! Allthetime! in our culture, that heterosexual women are free to speak (write/paint/film) our desires, but one would be wrong. We still have to tell so much of it "slant," even to ourselves, and I think this is (part) of what slash is about.
(One thing it's about is *ordinary* women writing sex and making sexual art, not just extraordinary women. We can't all be Madonna or even Susie Bright. We don't want to be famous, or notorious -- just normal everyday pornographers. Argh! You know what I mean!)
I don't know if there will come a day when slash is no longer "needed" in this way -- and maybe we'll look back at slash the way gay men look back at the heyday of the musicals, but it's gonna take a real sea change to get us there. And in the end we might just go, "slash was good all along! We wuz right!"
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I mean, next time somebody brings it up, just say, "I want to speak with Ru Paul, please."
Oh, you know, that's a really excellent point. And I, of course, never even thought of it. @@
Neither gay men or women (lesbian or straight) have been able to express our desires under patriarchy, and it's only a matter of time and place and circumstances who's getting beat to death for trying -- or "merely" being hushed or laughed at. One might *think,* given the suffocating blanket of Het! Sex! Allthetime! in our culture, that heterosexual women are free to speak (write/paint/film) our desires, but one would be wrong. We still have to tell so much of it "slant," even to ourselves, and I think this is (part) of what slash is about.
Dude, word, word, and word. This is so exactly how I see it.
(One thing it's about is *ordinary* women writing sex and making sexual art, not just extraordinary women. We can't all be Madonna or even Susie Bright. We don't want to be famous, or notorious -- just normal everyday pornographers. Argh! You know what I mean!)
I do. What's more, we don't want to have to be famous, or viewed as notorious, in order to lay claim to our own desires. A man can say, "I'm horny," and it will be shrugged off as the natural state of things. If a woman says, "I'm horny," she lets herself in for all kinds of grief, from being accused of being a slut to being asked (in hushed tones) if she's menstruating, to random bypassers trying to psychoanalyze her. Because it's not "natural," and it's not "normal," according to the patriarchy, that a woman have such desires, let alone talk about them.
I don't know if there will come a day when slash is no longer "needed" in this way -- and maybe we'll look back at slash the way gay men look back at the heyday of the musicals, but it's gonna take a real sea change to get us there. And in the end we might just go, "slash was good all along! We wuz right!"
I think slash will always be needed. It may become more open. Original slash, or TPTB-approved media tie-in slash, might become official literary genres with their own space on the bookstore shelf. It will still be around, though, because it fulfills needs no other genre does.
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This is key, the point at which you have to ask, "DOES straight male porn, especially straight male porn of the fake lesbian variety, exploit women?" Which is a question with, as we all know, thousands of pointy little spines, but I'm talking about "in essence" -- could it be possible that the enjoyment men (at least SOME men) feel from porn is no different in quality from the enjoyment we feel from slash? Granted there are issues of profit; but not to the man reading/viewing the porn. If the nicest guy you know should happen to be watching some porn, what would he be feeling? Could he experience some of the same complex delight that we do reading slash? Yeah, his porn is kinda culturally deprived *g*, compared to ours... but he doesn't know any better. :-)
I'm finding it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that people are still doing this "erotica vs. porn" dichotomy. I thought we kicked that fallacy's ass back in the 80s.
Mood: Old, crotchety.
xxx, Mog
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It's not just the question of profit, at least to my mind. It's a question of fallout. I have yet to meet a man who has gained a new appreciation for women's rights and issues from watching/reading straight male porn. I have met more than a few men for whom porn has reinforced their view of women as less than human. Conversely, I know several slashfen, myself among them, who have shaken free of societal homophobia as a result of being involved with slash. And that doesn't even touch how much slash has been a force through which I've laid claim to my own desires, and gained a better appreciation of myself as a woman, and the potential of woman-generated culture.
I'm finding it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that people are still doing this "erotica vs. porn" dichotomy. I thought we kicked that fallacy's ass back in the 80s.
Not to be obtuse, but huh? Who was talking about "erotica vs. porn?" Not me. I was just discussing how slash may or may not compare to straight male porn, and how it may or may not exploit or represent gay men.
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The closest I have come is to say that if the personal is political, the personal needs to be able to be spoken and taken seriously. And there are few things more personal than what gets you wet (or hard). Any movement which doesn't allow for the reality of that -- and for the reality that it's not always pretty, or egalitarian, and for the reality that people are *going* to seek out what turns them on, and make it if it doesn't exist -- is ultimately flawed and incomplete.
I need my feminism to meet me where I am because trying to reshape myself to have approved feminist feelings is no easier or more rewarding than trying to shape myself into having only approved patriarchal feelings. And I need feminism to meet men where they are, because it's not fair if I can have fantasies but they can't. Plus these are the people many of us are going to be having sex with. And if this movement is going to succeed, it needs not to be boys against the girls forever.
So for me the question is not censorship or non-censorship but, taking porn as a given, how do we decouple it from objectification and exploitation and violence? How do we teach people that we can take turns being a sexual object without losing our subjectivity and our rights?
And to me, some of the best ways to do that is by example -- for girls to make porn about guys and girls both, and thus show how you can exist simultaneously on both sides of the camera/pencil -- and by fighting for the rights of women who work in porn rather than trying to ban their livelihoods for their own good, and thus reinforcing a new version of the dichtomy of the good woman and the bad, sex selling woman who doesn't count.