A Note on Porn and Misogyny

I agree with Julie Bindel. There's a phrase that won't win many friends. In feminist and socialist circles, pornography can polarise opinion in ways few issues can. And as par the course for strict dividing lines, either side are soon painted into absolutist corners. In this case, those against banning porn self-identify as sex-positive as opposed to the sex-negative killjoys on the other side. For the feminists and socialists who take the opposite view, they are the ones who are consistent opponents of sexual violence while the opposition are "malestream" feminists or left friends of the porn industry. Not the ideal starting points for a productive discussion approaching consensus, which helps explain why the debate has been an interminable affair since the 1970s.

Yet if Bindel's article is anything to go by, the chasm might not be as yawning as one supposes. Reading the piece as opposed to rolling one's eyes and filing it away in a drawer marked 'dirge' reveals two positions almost everyone can accept. That porn distorts human sexuality and, generally speaking, normalises objectifying, problematic gender relations. And second, it should not be banned. Yes, that's right, Bindel is opposed to the state banning porn. Finally some common ground, perhaps.

I've argued before that porn can be considered an ideology. That is in the sense Louis Althusser sometimes used it, as a set of ideas and discourses that mediate relations between ourselves and the social world. A UKIP supporter might frame their relationships with East European co-workers through anti-immigrant anxiety. A young Trotskyist could try selling papers to angry pickets in the belief it will progress the class struggle. And a young man, in his first sexual encounter, may pressure his partner into doing things he's watched in porn. There is no semi-coherent "theory" of porn, but an aesthetic that can frame experience of sexual activity.

You might say "big deal". Some people do. After all, what pornography is just people doing sex things on camera, right? No. Mainstream straight pornography* produced by the Californian-based porn industry has a pretty standard set of tropes that repeat themselves. In the majority of cases, men are basically anonymous dicks with bodies appended to them. And women are always insatiable, they just want to be used and, in some cases, abused. Consider the dynamics of the typical scene - the woman is positioned as the object for the viewer, and in turn her object is the co-starring penis. All her ministrations; oral, anal, vaginal, are for audience gratification. The anonymity of the male performer allows them to read themselves into the scene. The performance aims to stoke heterosexual male desire and, typically, it ends with the money shot either in the woman's face, breasts or some other part of her body. The economy of gender portrayed here is simple. The woman is subordinate and submissive, even if she is 'active' as opposed to passive. She willingly, mostly without on screen prompting, goes through the motions. She is not asked if she would like to do something, and would normally be the case in a real sexual encounter, the action grinds on to the film's (male) climax. And when the man has finished, the viewer has finished with that performance too.

The basic model of gender relations here is woman as sexual supplicant. It feeds off the sexual objectification of women long found in everyday Western cultures and imbues it with a pornographic sensibility, feeding into the further commodification and use of women's bodies as sex objects. I don't believe the nonsense of porn being the theory and rape being the practice, but straight, mainstream pornography concentrates in extremis the basic core of gender relations. Or, to be more precise, a set of so-called traditional gender relations whose hegemony has everywhere been challenged and are getting rolled back. Bindel is bang on, mainstream porn contributes to misogyny because it rewrites and restates a backward, reactionary and downright stunted view of women. As feminism - the struggle for women to be treated as human beings - pushes out to sea, porn is among the strongest backwashing currents pushing it back to shore or, worse, onto the rocks.

*More on different forms of porn another time.