Robert Jensen essay on media & pornography

[sam]

Looks like Jensen will have a new book on masculinity and pornography published in a few months.

This article can be found:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/4780
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/698/81/
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne ... hould_.htm

Media reform should include critique of sexual-exploitation media

by Robert Jensen

At a progressive media reform conference dedicated to resisting corporate
control of mass media, where many of the participants focus on gender and
racial justice, it shouldn’t be difficult to interest people in the feminist
critique of mass-marketed pornography.

After all, the pornography industry creates a steady stream of relentlessly
sexist and racist films and web sites that undermine attempts to build a
healthy sexual culture, while filling the pornographers’ pockets with
substantial profits. A general critique of the effects of misogyny, white
supremacy, and predatory corporate capitalism on mass media dovetails perfectly
with the feminist critique of sexual-exploitation media.

Yet as I circulated at last week’s National Conference on Media Reform
http://www.freepress.net/conference/
and distributed fliers for an upcoming feminist conference on pornography,
http://wheelock.edu/ppc/
the responses I got were often skeptical and sometimes hostile. The questions
that were commonly asked of me that weekend revealed the need for the
left/progressive political community to deepen its understanding of the issue.

The most common of those questions was, “Is your conference an anti-sex
project?” reflecting the common distortion that feminist critics of pornography
share the right-wing’s obsessions about containing sexuality within traditional
“family values.”

My co-author Gail Dines has developed a clear response to the question, which I
borrowed during the weekend in Memphis: When we criticize McDonald’s for its
unhealthy food, environmentally destructive business practices, and targeting
of children through manipulative advertising, does anyone ask whether we are
“anti-food”? Of course not, because no one conflates McDonald’s with food; we
recognize that there are many ways to prepare food, and it’s appropriate to
critique the more toxic varieties. The same holds for pornography; pursuing a
healthy sexuality does not mean we have to support toxic pornography.

Another common response was, “Do you support censorship?” reflecting a
distortion of what feminists have proposed as remedies to the problem of
pornography. First, the original feminist anti-pornography movement in the
1980s rejected state censorship that works through existing obscenity law and
proposed a civil-rights approach that would give people hurt by pornography a
chance in court to prove the harm. There are questions to ask about any legal
strategy involving expression, and concerns about suppression of free speech
are important; there are even disagreements within the feminist
anti-pornography movement about this. But that discussion should start from an
accurate account of the alternatives.

Second, at this point in the feminist anti-pornography movement the focus is on
public education. The goal is to begin an honest conversation about the way in
which “mainstream” pornography, the bulk of which is marketed to heterosexual
men, is increasingly cruel and degrading to women and more openly racist than
ever -- at the same time that it is increasingly accepted as mainstream
entertainment. It’s ironic to be accused of trying to suppress free speech when
trying simply to exercise free speech in critique of profit-driven sexism and
racism.

There was much insightful criticism at the conference of the subtle sexism and
racism that still pervades mainstream corporate-commercial mass media. Although
men and white people -- including in progressive circles -- are sometimes
resistant to that analysis, no one argues that it’s an inappropriate topic for
discussion. Yet for some reason, many of those same progressives -- men and
women alike -- don’t consider a left/feminist/anti-racist critique of
pornography to be part of the media reform/media justice agenda. Why? I think
it has to do with fear.

Facing the pornography industry forces us to acknowledge the deep misogyny and
white supremacy that still exists in the culture, even with the gains of the
feminist and civil-rights movements. Both women and men might understandably be
afraid of confronting what pornography tells us about the cruelty of our
culture, our own sexual socialization, and the difficult struggles we face to
create a world free of sexual violence.

That fear is real, and all the more reason to confront the issue of pornography
more openly.


Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and
board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center
http://thirdcoastactivist.org. His new book on masculinity and pornography will
be published by South End Press in spring 2007. Jensen is the author of The
Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and
Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter
Lang). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

[oneangrygirl]

i claim the rights to the mcdonald's analogy.
except i think i said burger king.

[sam]

This article was posted on Alternet today. It's the weekend so it doesn't get as much readership as weekday postings, but that it's there at all counts for something.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/47677/

Comments are shaping up as expected.

[sam]

DeAnander has written a superb breakdown of the Alternet comments as well as other musings on the state of Porn Nation that should be widely read.

http://stangoff.com/?p=466#comments