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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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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.