A world sodden with violence against women
Sarah Ditum connects a pornographic murder of a teenage girl to pornography.
She starts with a character in Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, a teenage girl named George who watches a pornographic clip over and over as a way of acknowledging what happened to the girl depicted in the clip.
Most people, of course, do not watch pornography for the same high-minded reasons as George. Most of them watch it to get off, and most of them are men – pornography is produced by and for men, an orgiastic confirmation of the most brutal sexual and racial stereotypes. At this point, it’s habitual for pornography defenders to step in and muddy the waters. Not all porn is like that, you will be told, and anyway how can you define porn, and even if you could, how would you prove that pornography actually caused harm?
One thing at a time. There is actually a perfectly good and workable definition of pornography – it’s from Dworkin and MacKinnon’s Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance. This is it: “Pornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” They also specify that in porn, women will be dehumanised as sexual objects, or shown to enjoy pain and humiliation, or to take pleasure in being raped, or shown tied or mutilated or injured, or presented in sexually submissive poses, or reduced to body parts.
So the kind that’s erotic and mutual doesn’t qualify.
It is not a question of whether pornography “caused” Matthews and Hoare to commit their crime. What matters is this: in a world sodden with violence against women, pornography is one more form of it. Matthews and Hoare apparently made no distinction between legal images and the video of the rape. All served the same need to see women (in Hoare’s case, other women besides herself) subordinated and dehumanised. Pornography is the propaganda of gender. Through it, men and women alike learn what women are supposed to be for: something to fuck, something to use, something to hurt if you’d like to, and something to dispose of when you’re finished. Matthews and Hoare dismembered Becky Watts with a circular saw.
There are CCTV photos of them buying the equipment they needed to get rid of Becky Watts’s body. People are probably using them as porn now.
No. No.
… a perfectly good and workable definition of pornography …
“Workable” for the purposes of creating legal and social antagonism toward whatever one calls that; “perfect” only to the likes of Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty.
Pierce, workable because it distinguishes that form of hate speech called “porn” from erotica that has anything to do with mutual satisfaction.
It doesn’t even seem difficult.
Unless you ignore the mutual part.
So what about pornography that does not involve any women at all? Do Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon honestly classify all media depicting gay male sex as “erotica” (or at the very least as “not pornography”), simply by virtue of its absence of women? Or what about pornography produce by and for gay women? Does their rubric ignore its existence, or somehow claim that it is still subjugating women?
The attempt to define pornography as “…the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words,” where “…women will be dehumanised as sexual objects, or shown to enjoy pain and humiliation, or to take pleasure in being raped, or shown tied or mutilated or injured, or presented in sexually submissive poses, or reduced to body parts” is that this is not how most people understand the term “pornography”, and thus when people like Andrea Dworkin attempt to challenge the legality and the ethics of producing and consuming pornography (by their definition), they run up against people whose understanding of the term is wildly different.
People like Sarah Ditum almost certainly understand this; they almost certainly know that when they say “pornography is produced by and for men, an orgiastic confirmation of the most brutal sexual and racial stereotypes”, that this characterisation is at odds with the notion that most pornography producers and consumers have of what pornography is. And yet, rather than qualify their terms, or try and use another term to characterise the subset(s) of pornography that they are addressing, they insist on conflating the part with the whole. Recasting “good” porn as “erotica” and “bad” porn as “pornography” is insufficient to convince most people that banning pornography would not in effect ban any kind of media designed for sexual gratification (even the erotica). That is the genesis of the knee-jerk whenever anti-pornography campaigns come ’round.
For the record, Becky Watts’ murder was a horrible and likely preventable tragedy, and I would not be surprised if her murderer’s inner world was shaped by the media (pornography and non-pornography alike) that he and his accomplice consumed. But it remains the case that nearly all of the harms ascribed to pornography are a result of a lack of real sexual education which emphasises self-interrogation, consent, and respect of other people’s boundaries (as opposed to the paltry reproductive biology which passes for sexual education wherever it’s allowed to be taught). There is certainly more room in pornography for demonstrating these skills and ethics, of course, but it is not the role of pornography to serve as sexual education (any more than it’s the role of an action movie to serve as firearms training).
Pornography isn’t the problem. Leaving pornography as young people’s only exposure to sexual ethics and practice is.
Somehow I don’t think they got that idea from Girls Gone Wild. Maybe the Saw franchise?
There’s dehumanizing sexual porn, and then there’s dehumanizing-murderous-violent-porn. Mind you, only the second is allowed to be shown in movie theaters. Because seeing naked people is more dangerous than seeing semi-naked people get their limbs ripped off.
As a female porn producer, actress and consumer, I have this to say: You’re the one who’s dehumanizing women. Your hatred for any woman who doesn’t behave exactly like you want her to is palpable.
Anti-porn is anti-woman.
And if “radical feminists” grant themselves the right to define “porn” however they want without consulting us porn creators, I grant myself the right to define “radical feminists” as “bitter, hateful bargain-bin ayatollahs deluding themselves that their self-identification as victims allows them to trample on the liberties and happiness of women who fail to act in perfect accordance with a joyless ideology of resentment and oppression”.
Now anyone who calls herself a radical feminist but who still remains a decent human being is not actually a radical feminist. See how that works?
<blockquotePornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.”
But that begs the question: who is to say which kind of erotic pictures represent the subordination of women? One woman’s subordination is another’s enthusiastic involvement. And why only women anyway/ Can there really be no such thing as male gay pornography? And what do they mean by ‘graphic’? Obviously not its usual meaning, so what? She just demonstrates that the problem she is trying to wave away is real.
And there really is not evidence to connect watching pornography with violence against women (real violence, I mean, the kind that doesn’t need a special academic definition). Does Ditum believe, I wonder, that if these killers had watched On Golden Pond they would have chosen top bicker with elderly relatives in New England instead?
It is daft. The argument of a wannabe censor.
Omg, you all have to be kidding!
Ophelia hates women? Let’s talk about gay porn? There’s no evidence?
What is this, a sub-committee meeting of the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” Society?
‘Mainstream’ porn’s relationship to women is certainly as objectionable as the old ‘Mainstream’ western’s relationship to Native Americans.
Sweeping statements about ‘porn,’ with vaguely accomodating gestures toward ‘erotica’ are not really getting to the point. A culture ‘sodden with violence against women’ will produce pop-culture that reflects that starting point. Non-pornographic media are riddled with misogynist tropes too. The hatred is everywhere; romantic comedies, action pictures, bodice-ripper novels, music videos, etc.
Even if a magic wand could replace the furious ‘boy’s revenge’ porn with nice, mutual, celebratory ‘erotica.’ The rest of the cultural juggernaut would keep on rolling.
Vicki, so we can’t reach any conclusions about one-sided, abusive, degrading or violent porn without consulting the porn creator. Fine. Should we also be asking the human trafficker who prostitutes a 12 year old girl if that activity is ok before reaching a conclusion?
Note erotica or clearly symmetric porn, including stuff that would be kinky, doesn’t fall into the ad definition. Also, let’s not loose our shit by worrying about gay male porn in this definition the definition and discussion is about how porn affects women. Bad porn affecting gay men is valid discussion, but a different one.
Vicki #7
I think you forgot a few (and probably more): hairy, ugly, misandrist, old, pearl-clutching, moralising, jealous…
Rob @ #11 – “Note erotica or clearly symmetric porn, including stuff that would be kinky, doesn’t fall into the ad definition.”
But the definition specifically includes being tied, appearing to enjoy pain, or being shown in a sexually submissive pose, all of which can be mutually pleasing depending on the kink. Is anything showing a woman in a submissive position automatically porn or could it be considered erotica if the woman displays sufficient enthusiam?
There is a sub-genre within porn known as “fem-dom(inant)”.
And of course a corresponding variety known as “male-dom”.
Though not a connoisseur of either, I doubt it would take me too long to find examples of each featuring much the same roles, postures, and clothing (including restraints) for the sado- and masocho- players, with only the genders changed.
How could one be “porn” and the other not?
The Infallible Church Hath Spoken (and conveniently defined the word for us all: Catholic Bishops Release Anti-Pornography Report: