The way they talk about girls and women is a little horrifying
David Simon, creator of The Wire, has a new series about the birth of the porn industry in the 70s.
Simon also has a lot to say about pornography. Whereas his critically lauded The Wire was ostensibly about the drugs trade in Baltimore but subliminally about race, The Deuce could be seen as ostensibly about the sex industry in New York but subliminally about gender.
Pornography “affected the way men and women look at each other, the way we address each other culturally, sexually,” he says. “I don’t think you can look at the misogyny that’s been evident in this election cycle, and what any female commentator or essayist or public speaker endured on the internet or any social media setting, and not realise that pornography has changed the demeanour of men. Just the way that women are addressed for their intellectual output, the aggression that’s delivered to women I think is informed by 50 years of the culturalisation of the pornographic.”
He admits: “I don’t have any real way to prove that, but certainly the anonymity of social media and the internet has allowed for a belligerence and a misogyny that maybe had no other outlet. It’s astonishing how universal it is whether you’re 14 or 70, if you’re a woman and you have an opinion, what is directed at you right now. I can’t help but think that a half century of legalised objectification hasn’t had an effect.”
I think he got entangled in his negatives in that last sentence – he clearly means he can’t help but think the legalised objectification has had an effect.
Simon’s collaborator George Pelecanos also sees it that way.
“Personally, I think pornography has had a crude effect on society,” he says. “I’m a first amendment [freedom of speech] guy but I really feel it’s kind of like racism in the last few years: we’ve had a wake-up call because everybody thought, ‘Wow, it went away’. Same thing with misogyny, right?”
Pelecanos, 60, thinks about the two sons he raised and the conversations he overheard when their friends came to the family home. “The way they talk about girls and women is a little horrifying. It’s different from when I was coming up. It’s one thing what was described as locker-room talk, like, ‘Man, look at her legs. I’d love to…’ – that kind of thing. But when you get into this other thing, calling girls tricks and talking about doing violence to them and all that stuff, I’d never heard that growing up, man. I just didn’t.”
It’s not a little horrifying. None of this is a little horrifying.
“I think the culture’s changed because of the way women are depicted in popular culture. Pornography’s a big part of that. You can say nobody’s getting hurt, it’s just a masturbation fantasy and all that stuff, but these women are trafficked, man.”
He believes there is a through line to Trump’s stunning victory in last year’s presidential election. “There’s no doubt if Hillary Clinton had been a man, she would be president now. The code words that were used against not just her but female journalists and everybody that was involved peripherally in the campaign was awful. Never seen anything like it.”
And the actual president of the US is a guy who brags about grabbing women by the pussy, and tells us all that’s “just locker room talk.”
And who exhibited stalker behavior toward his female opponent during a debate.
I’m never sure about this argument. Is mainstream pornography misogynistic? Definitely. But is that cause or effect? Or, most likely, a combination of both?
I’ve long thought that the misogyny displayed by much pornography is just the misogyny of general society stripped of its pretence. And if pornography is informed by societal attitudes then getting rid of it – if that is even possible – won’t change anything. If anything, if societal attitudes change then pornography will also reform (realistically, it would require change in both axes).
The other thing I don’t see is a correlation between violence against women and increasing availability of pornography. I don’t see a period more than fifty years ago as being one where women were physically and emotionally respected. In fact, out of the entire span of history, right now is the best time it has ever been to be female. Yes, some men still beat, rape, and abuse women. Yes, many men fundamentally view women as property – theirs or another man’s. Yes, most men watch porn. But where is the evidence that factor 3 causes factor 1 and 2? And, crucially that there is actually an increase in factor 1 and 2 that correlates with the increase in factor 3.
It’s like violence in the movies and on TV. A few years ago we were assured that this influenced people’s behaviour. No evidence for it then or since. Listening to rock and roll causes X (satanism, drug abuse, fill in cause du jure as appropriate). In each case, what evidence there is suggests there is either no causative relationship, or the relationship just reflects what exists in society already.
In other words, pornography is the messenger, not the author of the message.
I can agree with the first part of this sentiment; I’m not so sure about the second. I think that women are losing ground, and rather rapidly, but haven’t lost all the ground they’ve gained over the past 50 years. While women are doing more and more all the time, they are receiving an increasing level of vitriol and hatred, not necessarily because men hate women more, but because it is so easy on the internet, and there is so little consequence.
In the 1980s, I could get an abortion without difficulty from an abortion clinic that no longer exists because it can no longer meet the increasingly stringent requirements to stay open. Many of the clinics have closed, and those that are open often feel like they are on borrowed time.
I also find that one thing has changed, and not for the better. When I was a young woman, there seemed to be an understanding that women were still struggling for equal rights, equal pay, etc, and there was the belief (at least among some) that they would get there. In fact, many of my more hopeful friends were sure this would happen by the end of the century. It didn’t. Now we are struggling just like we did then, but I hear from the younger generation all the time that this is not a problem, that we are post-feminist, and that everything is great, or going to be great as soon as the nasty misogynistic baby boomers all die off (taking all those nasty old-fashioned feminists with them).
Today, I had my second conversation in as many friends (young males, both of them) in which they concluded that their generation was not a problem, because they were totally tolerant, totally there – I guess, totally “woke”? When I pointed out that there was a lot of misogynistic abuse from young men online and in other areas, they both found it impossible to believe. They have been fed such a rosy picture of themselves and their fellow millennials that they honestly believe that only Baby Boomers form a repository for misogyny, and everything is just about to get great. There are no conservatives in the younger generation, no libertarians, no woman-haters, and no bigots. This is serious, because this prevents actual action from happening. They are complacent in their own goodness. And, to be fair, both of these friends are indeed like they think their generation is, and are decent human beings who treat the women they work with as respected colleagues who are just as skilled and capable as they are. But they are blind to the crap that goes on around them, and that they are oblivious to because it doesn’t happen to them, and may not necessarily happen in their presence.
So, yeah, I think I’ll have to disagree that this is the best time to be a woman. It is definitely better than when my mother was a young woman, and certainly better than when my grandmother was a young woman, but I don’t think it’s better than when I was a young woman. I hope we can make it stop declining, so when my granddaughter (should I ever have any) is my age, she can look back and think that she is leaving a better world behind for her granddaughters, and that it is, indeed, the best possible time to be a woman (if global warming doesn’t destroy them, first).
Steamshovelmama, you’ve heard of feedback loops. It’s not an either/or situation. It’s both/and.
Of course the patriarchy is misogynist with or without porn. But violent, humiliating porn — 99% of what’s out there according to those who research it, such as Gail Dines — pours fuel on the existing hatred. We have a forest fire, we pour gasoline on it, it gets worse. Just because the gasoline isn’t the original cause doesn’t make it less damaging.
Porn is hugely damaging to women, in the stories they absorb about who they are. To men in the stories they absorb about who they are. And I swear, if you’re old enough (60+) you can see a difference in how people feel about themselves.
Just one example: the male gaze was always overwhelming, but now it’s gotten even more so, with the result that the suicide statistics among young girls are climbing much faster than other groups. The expectations are impossible to meet and horrible in themselves. The crap is damaging literally as well is emotionally.
But that part at least is not new. That is, and has always been, just part of having privilege. And possibly of being young.
@iknklast#3
I think we’re both being a bit culturally anthrocentric here, now I think about what you said. I was kinda blurring the last twenty years into one “now”, and you point out, quite rightly, that in the US women have been losing ground.
The situation in Europe (bar a few outposts like Eire) isn’t – so far – losing ground in the same way as the US. In the UK the reproductive situation is broadly similar to fifteen years ago. Contraception is freely and easily available, prescribed by a GP, dispensed by a pharmacist on a repeat basis, pick up six months in one go, review by the GP every few years unless there’s an issue. Abortion is available up to 24 weeks gestation, on the NHS (so no payment) as long as two GPs agree that the physical or mental health of the mother is at risk. That’s the written ruling – and I’d love to see it improved to accord women the absolute right to abortion – but in practice the vast majority of GPs feel that bringing an unwanted child into the world is a mental health risk in and of itself. If you have one of the rare GPs who is anti abortion, there will be another doctor at the same surgery you can see, or there are charity funded places in all cities – and we’re a small island. We don’t have the problems with geographical restrictions of services that have happened in the US.
This could be argued, but it sometimes seems like the US is one of the few countries in the world heading backwards as regards women’s rights – though if Jacob Rees-Mogg ever gets near the PM’s seat, we could be in the same position… Actually, no. Even with a dinosaur like Rees-Mogg in power, we ‘re lacking the one thing that has empowered the US’s well named “war on women” and that is a massive resurgence of the religious Right. Personally, I think having that right-wing Evangelical pressure in mainstream politics is what has been driving the treatment of women backwards over the last ten to twelve years. And – so far – Europe just isn’t seeing that normalisation of disrespecting women that goes both with the religious right with having elected the guy whom Ophelia quite appropriately calls “President Pussy Grabber”. It could happen to us. In the UK we tend (alas) to follow US cultural trends quite closely, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I know what you mean about Millennials (both my kids are). There is a tendency to tunnel vision. Having said that, thirty-ish years ago, when I travelled to school, sexual harrassment was a weekly, sometimes daily, thing. Boys my age would try to touch you when you shared the same bus, older guys would catcall me in the street. I talked to my 20 year old daughter about this and asked her about her experience. She’s had it happen once or twice, she says, and then on the lines of, “Smile love!” rather than, “Showusyertitsbitch!” (NB, I’m not suggesting either is acceptable, and they both stem from the idea that women are there to serve men’s interests – but one is considerably less aggressive than the other).
Once or twice. In ten years of walking round on her own. It’s not that she gets about less than I did – we don’t own a car – or that we live in a “nicer” area or anything – we don’t. But something is different. This seems to be the common experience of her age group, and they are shocked when I tell them what my experiences were like. And this is something that talking to other women my age with children in their late teens/twenties also seems to bear out. Street harrassment definitely still exists, but it is both quantititavely and qualititavely less than it was thirty years ago. In the UK, that is.
But harrasment is dreadful online. No question. My personal interpretation of this is that, as harrasment is being driven out of public spaces, it has moved online to take advantage of the anonymity there. What can no longer be said on the street can still be said on Reddit. And will probably get a round opf applause. This happens when you get a rapid cultural change – those left behind are angry and resentful so they look for a place where what they think is normal is still acceptable. The internet has made that so much easier than it ever was in the past.
@quixote#3
No doubt. But the stories we absorb, that help shape who we are, do not reside solely in porn. They also reside in the books we read, the TV and films we watch – including the things that are supposed to be factual, that we treat as “real”, the advertisements we see, and, probably most powerfully, the way our peer group acts and interprets the world. Out of that list, porn, for most people, is probably the thing that we are least exposed to, yet somehow it is considered to be uniquely harmful. But then, anything to do with sex or sexuality is rendered a special case
I was thinking of a negative feedback loop when I suggested that changing things would require intervention at both cultural and expression level. I’ve read Gail Dines and have issue with her figures both in absolute terms, and in terms of her definitions – she excludes some things I would include under the label “porn”, and some of the things she defines as degrading, I would not. Plus… where the hell is she finding this “violent, humiliating porn”. Go surf PornHub, or YouPorn and come back and tell me that 99% of the stuff on there is violent and humiliating. I’ve actually done that and I’d say the freely available stuff is, maybe 10-20% what I would call violent and/or humilating.
Of course that stuff is out there – you can find anything on line, if you’re prepared to search, especially if you hit the Dark Web armed Tor – but that takes some motivation. It’s not something you do by accident. If you’re looking that hard, there’s something you’re specifically looking for which means the desire you’re trying to fill already exists. It hasn’t been created by what you’ve been looking at. This is the problem with Roy Hazelwood’s theories about “normalisation” – that pornography makes aberrant and harmful desires seem normal and acceptable. This is at least logical… but, like Dines’s work it supposes that pornography dealing with aberrant desires (and there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened once we try to define what those might be…) is something that your ordinary Joe will stumble over regularly during his wank sessions. In the example he used, Hazelwood played it safe and used paedophilia. He described a client who was troubled by sexual urges towards children. Hazlewood claimed that the mere use of pornography had normalised his client’s urges to the point where he wanted to express them. The pornography the client had was all hardcore child-abuse images. You don’t find those on the kind of sites that your average guy uses to get his rocks off. Because most men are not paedophiles, and sexualised images of children will turn them off, not on. You have to go and look for this specialist stuff. And if you’re going and looking then that strongly indicates that you wanted what you wanted before you saw the porn – that the porn exists to fulfill an already existing desire, rather than causing that desire.
I wouldn’t argue with you at all about the male gaze etc – but I question whether that is the fault of pornography. In the same period we’ve seen massive explosions on all kinds of visual media and, given that women are in the minority as consumers of pornography, it doesn’t seem reasonable to blame porn – or at least porn alone – for the effects we are seeing on women, particularly young women. What about the fact US TV rarely employs an actress who doesn’t look like she’s just been released from Belsen? My daughter grew up watching Friends to a massively greater extent than she did pornography. I suspect the skeletal faces of Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, and Jennfer Aniston had far more of an effect on her self image than porn. Repeat ad infinitum for most of the other US shows on TV. (UK TV tends to employ who actually look like human beings… occasionally very good looking human beings, but still human beings).
I do think there’s an issue with porn being easily available at a very young age. I’m not sure what the solution is. Good sex education woulkd be my top choice – including time spent learning about porn – what it is, the problems with it, how far it is detached from reality, what real sex should be – but that’s not something most schools or parents are very good at now, let alone adding porn into the mix.
I don’t know how you restrict porn from younger kids and young teens. You can use net nanny software, in the UK mobile phones have to be given permission to access adult sites – by the bill payer – but you only need one kid whose parents don’t do that (or who do unlock his phone for reasons best known to themselves… or the kid is a hacker/has a hacker friend who can do it) and those files get spread everywhere. It’s not even like the kid when we were young, who used to raid his Dad’s porn stash in the shed – those mags had to be returned and they couldn’t be easily copied. Not true of video files.
So, do we ban porn to protect children from growing up tainted by it’s influence? Even I’ll admit that’s tempting… but I don’t think it’s possible. All we’ll do is drive it underground with the knock on problems inevitable with that. There are already legitimate worries about porn performers, making it less legal will simply stop us being able to monitor that (even in the fairly ineffective way we do now). Personally, I think that leads to more exploitation and abuse, not less.
I’d rather approach porn from the “legalise/regulate/tax” model. Make it clear what studios/home producers can legally produce and distribute. Monitor the performers to ensure they are fully consenting, not using drugs (a very good case for mandatory drug testing), and mentally/physically healthy. This is largely the tack that Europe and the US are currently taking – there are issues with films from outside these areas – though we’re not as hot on the monitoring/regulating aspect as we should be.
I apologise for my posts missing the odd word… I type and spell check in Word before cutting and pasting into the comment field. I’ve just checked my Word document. the words are there. However they have disappeared into the ether between the cut and the paste… Go figure. I hope the meaning is clear.
It is. Thank you for the thoughtful comments.
Sounds like we’re similar in age, and I do agree with you on that. The thing is, when I was in high school in the 1970s, I felt like we were headed toward getting better. When I was started my professional career in the 1980s, we seemed to be headed toward stagnation or very, very slow progress (this WAS the Reagan years). In the 1990s, things sort of came to a standstill, and since then, they’ve been careening downward.
But when I was in high school, while “boys would be boys” was the common refrain, the intensity of the harassment was very localized (probably just because of the lack of Internet). So even if it was no better in the overall picture, very few women seemed to have it as bad as each woman who goes online gets it now. It has reached Category 5 (to use a language currently in our minds due to the events in the southern US).
What I see that IS different is this attitude among my millennial friends that was never really there with the other generations: the idea that it was “fixed”, and that somehow we were now living in a world that had gotten there and could be complacent. The complacency during my youth was more the complacency of young men who knew they were superior; the males who claimed to be feminists recognized the problem, and maybe even had some minor understanding of the scope of the problem. I never met anyone who assumed that the Baby Boom generation (known for its radical politics) was going to have the problem totally fixed because there were no Baby Boomers who were assholes. We all knew better, because we knew the assholes personally. Now, many of the youngsters live in a bubble where they don’t have to interact with those who are assholes, and the media is constantly praising them for their wonderfulness, and they believe that things will be great if all those asshole Baby Boomers would just die off already. Then their generation can usher in the era of peace and love and good hearted equality for all.
At least the Boomers (who did have a rather naive optimism about their ability to usher in a better future) recognized that there was real work to be done to get there. We just assumed that it would happen eventually. Until Reagan was elected by our parents desiring to undo all the environmental protections, union benefits, and minimum wages that had been enacted since the Great Depression, and also get rid of all those nasty welfare benefits that apparently only went to women of color, even though many of these people also believed that women of color were the only people able to get jobs. (Yes, I heard this sort of shite daily growing up; even then, I recognized the total illogical thought processes, especially when shouted at the top of the lungs by white men who were holding good jobs, screaming at women who couldn’t get nearly as good a job).
Sorry if I seem to be rambling and incoherent. My anger is frothing today, and I needed to vent a bit.
I don’t know how to untangle the causal loop either. I have enjoyed porn, sure, and been aroused by it. I’ve recognised problems in particular porn and in the industry in general and in the effect porn might be having on young people and I’ve still enjoyed looking at all nakey people doing stuff.
But I don’t look at porn these days because of the sort of stuff that’s been described here.
First: In principle, porn ought to be awesome. The people who like performing should be paid by the people who like to watch. That would be great but we know that isn’t happening. The market works in a much more complicated and shitty way than that and it’s difficult to imagine how consent is even possible given the pressures brought to bear on the performers, very much especially the female ones.
Second, fetishes ought to be fun, too. But that assumes almost all sexual fetishes are not about controlling women in some way. Even cuckold fetishes which are superficially about empowering women are obviously about sexualising them from an assumption of control (within porn, I mean, actual fetishes may vary). The fetish is usually about what men “let” their wives do rather than understanding that it’s none of their fucking business.
So these days I don’t use porn. It’s entertaining, but the cost to other people is far too high. It’s the pimps and porn producers who are making almost all the money with zero cost. As long as that happens, women especially are going to be exploited.
We all have imagination and most of us have hands. I suggest we use both.
@iknklast#10
I entirely agree at how appalling the harrassment and abuse online is. It’s one of the few things that can still move me to rage these days (most of the time I find I just get tired).
I hit high school in 1979. I agree, there was a feeling of optimism throughout the late seventies through to, over here, the early nineties. I think part of it was that the goals were more concrete – legislation to change, the challenging of female exclusion from work or leisure activities, the drive to show the patriarchy that yes women can do this. Look! We’re doing it! There was an exciting explosion in feminist scholarship. And we actually achieved enough of those concrete goals to give us a feeling that we were making progress.
It’s gets harder once the formal freedoms are won. Changing social attitudes is a longer, slower, less concrete process. There aren’t tangible milestones to say we are still moving forward. People get tired, people lose heart and, crucially, start concentrating on the smaller stuff and elevating that to a position of greater importance than it should have, whilst losing sight of the bigger picture. Then the movement fails to adapt to new tactics, starts to argue amongst itself and whoops! There went the Second Wave, organised feminism goes on a hiatus and that social change stops being advocated for.
There is also the phenomenon that progress is never a smooth upward line. It goes in fits and starts, three steps forward, two back etc. Even if the trend is generally upward, there are reverses and retrenchments. I think we’re in a retrenchment period right now – at least in Europe. The US seems more to be in the two steps back period. Of course, this is the time when we need to fight hardest to ensure we fall back as little as possible and to start pushing forward again.
I find Third Wave feminsim a bit of an odd beast. In particular their lack of a political analysis of women’s position in society is something I find baffling. Outside of identity politics – which up to a certain point can be a useful analysis but beying that becomes intellectual masturbation – there is no schema which links women as a group. They have admirably embraced the diverse experiences of women without seeming to understand that if there is no commonality to women’s experiences and status then feminism itself cannot exist in any meaningful sense. That lack of analysis, I think, lies behind the uncritical acceptance of certain Trans narratives. I applaud the resistance to the division of women into “good” and “bad”, and supporting all women’s personal choices but I want to tear my hair out when that support is extended from the acknowledgement that one woman finds stripping to be personally empowering to the idea that stripping is empowering to women in general…
My experience of talking to Millenials – my daughter and her friends – is a bit different to yours. She certainly doesn’t think that society has been fixed. She’s actually quite downbeat about what needs doing – she can see issues that still exist, and that are overlooked or poorly recognised but sees little chance of things changing any time soon. I don’t know if the perception is a cultural thing, or specific to her and her peer group, or a product of having been raise to know a lot about feminism and how to resist social pressures. Her social media of choice is Tumblr and the corner of it she’s active in is very, very feminist (more Third Wave than second, as you’d expect) and there’s some great stuff on there for younger girls and women about social pressures, about sexuality, about all sorts of pressures and how to survive/resist them. The only issue I would have is that they are, perhaps, just a little too nice… they don’t question much and they don’t have much of a theoretical background to what they are doing/saying. They certainly don’t think that none of their generation are assholes! Though, yes, I’d agree there is a general perception that they are doing better than their parents generation…. They are, after all, very young.
I did think of something that I think is worse now. The strict gendering of children’s clothes – not so much toys, I think they were always pretty segregated, but when we were kids there just wasn’t this massive split in the culture that girls and boys clothes drew from. We – or at least I – spent my childhood in sturdy, hard wearing dark clothes (often hand me downs). Boys and girls alike, except on special occasions, wore similar things for running around: jeans or other trousers, t-shirts, shirts/blouses that largely differed only by the side the buttons were on, knitted sweaters or cardigans… none of this sparkly pink stuff. It wouldn’t have lasted five minutes! Girls may have worn skirts, but again they were serviceable dark colours that could stand up to getting mucky.
I’m sure I intended to have a point with my last post but I don’t think I made one. I didn’t *think* I was trying to be all ‘splainy at the time but it definitely comes across that way, Sorry about that.
There may be a key to the difference in our experiences in this sentence. You see, most the Millennials I have been talking to are male…and they see women around them in key roles, and they think Hillary lost because she was awful (and they think that her being perceived by them as awful has nothing to do with her being a woman) and they assume that equality has been achieved. They don’t see the things women have to deal with every day, the way that we are policed for every word, every stitch we are wearing, every pound we gain, every gray hair. They don’t see the condescension, and don’t recognize when they themselves are mansplaining. And they’ve been fed a steady diet of how great they are, and how awful the Baby Boomers are, and their sense of history is skewed by that. Plus, the young men I talk to tend to be scientists, and that gives them a sense that every word they speak and every thought they have is automatically rational, so anyone questioning it must be irrational.
I think your assessment of what is changing is right on in many ways, but there is another thing. Because of the successes, we now have backlash. Huge backlash, from powerful people. People who don’t want change, because change might mean they have to share their power a bit. This has been a powerful regressive tool.
Also, we’re fighting the sense that somehow women are just trying to take all the fun away. Okay, we can have neat jobs now, we can fling ourselves out of airplanes to fight forest fires (probably better to stay in the plane, but you get the idea), we can go to war, we can run for President (even if we can’t win). Why do we insist on taking away fun things like rape jokes and locker room talk and objectification? Why do we want women in cartoons to have more realistic bodies and not have a butt that somehow angles up into the air all the time? Why do we insist that at least some intelligent capable women be included in the entertainment? After all, it’s innocent fun, right? So we’re killjoys, sucking all the light out of life, because it’s impossible to have fun if you can’t make rape jokes or pinch butts when the spirit moves you? And god damn it, how will they ever get a date if they have to have consent forms filled out in triplicate and filled with the federal government and the Bureau of Safe Dating?
Plus, it seems to them that other things are more important. There’s a war on. There’s a recession. There’s a hurricane. There’s a football deflation scandal. Why do you women persist in dealing in trivialities when there are more important things? Besides, other women elsewhere have it worse, so you should be glad we allow you so much freedom…oops, I didn’t quite mean it like that, but you know what I mean, right? So yeah, we’ve reached stagnation. Somehow we need to get things moving again.
Hey, this has been a great conversation. Glad we got a chance to talk.
My experience has been that the young people I’ve spoken too are much better at recognising the faults and hypocrisy of older generations than there own. Then again, I suspect that was so of me (us?) at that age. Hysteresis is very strong in cultures. I suspect you need to apply a large and sustained enough force to tip from one meta-stable state to another. I’m beginning to think that that force needs to be pan global and multi-generational.