My Response to Call to Porn, Boston Underground

[Valerie]

This was published in the last issue. Unfortunately, we then ran out of funding and had a disappearing computer guy problem, so the BU is probably caput. However, I consider it a very very sad thing that my article never made it to the internets, as I feel that I very effectively countered this tripe: [url]http://www.bostonunderground.info/article.php?id=212&issue=59

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A Call to A Call to Porn

Last week I picked up a copy of Issue #59 of the Boston Underground
and immediately flipped to the last article in the paper, titled "A
Call to Porn." This wasn't done out of puerile interest or
reaction to the intentionally provocative title; I've got more
personal reasons for devouring every single piece of writing I can
find on any and all forms of sex work. I buy enough sexploitation-
related literature that a quick look at my personal library tends
to put off some huge fraction of the people who make it all the way
into my den.

After all, I was a sex worker myself. In fact, while not disputing
the validity of anyone's experience, I was not a college-educated
girl posing for a few hours in a softcore publication put out by
her friends who later reported feeling "some of the judgement and
objectification felt by women in the industry," as the woman
interviewed in the article did. No, I was a full-service escort
whose first experience of anal sex was being unable (and not
allowed) to say no to the man my father's age who hurt me so badly
that I can't remember much of what happened that afternoon, not
even the fake name he gave me. I was a self- described "sex-
positive feminist," and I was lying.

I couldn't hold down my food, bruised myself intentionally, and
drove my car such that multiple people accused me of having a
secret death wish. I felt lucky to be running my own business, but
I knew on some level that most successful business owners don't get
cum in their faces from men who call them "good little sluts." All
the men I saw quite obviously didn't like women very much. There's
no money to be made, however, in prostituting to pro-feminist men.


I would go on and on about how happy I was to have friends who
"supported my decision," but the truth of the matter is that most
of them were men who thought it was hot and were trying to sleep
with me, or women who thought sex work was great in the abstract
but would never have touched it themselves with a ten-foot pole.
These people were hypocrites, and they stood by reinforcing me with
propaganda as I publicly destroyed myself.

I got out of the business for a variety of reasons. I started to
see someone who thought it would be a bad idea for me to go back,
although his motivation was largely a selfish desire to have
exclusive access to my body rather than a concern for my well-
being. I then got an STI that required I take a month or so to
heal up and make sure I was no longer contagious after I was
treated. By the time the month was over, my new boyfriend was
gone, but so was my desire to ever fuck old men who hated me again,
cash or no.

I went through a pretty bad time after that for a variety of
reasons, most of them centering around the fact that I'd never
learned to manage on less than a thousand dollars a day. I was
also part of a social scene full of libertarian anti-feminists who
thought that everybody is immune to societal messages and that all
decisions to engage in anything, from sweatshop slavery to high-end
escorting, happen in a vacuum. They didn't have much explanation
for why women are mostly the ones who find themselves in that
vacuum or why all these women with long histories of abuse are
making this mysterious "free choice" or even why there are so many
men willing to buy sex and so few women.

These people tended to just worship at the altar of capitalism and
call it a day. The free market was going to fix everything, pesky
union workers demanding higher wages were driving inflation, Ayn
Rand was the most brilliant writer ever, and if there was a demand
for sex then, by jingo, sex should be sold. Period. It was all
part and parcel of the same ideology, one whereby women must be
empowered because they say they are and, after all, they're making
money. These people were transparent, and making anti-prostitution
arguments to them was too easy-- so easy, in fact, that they became
angry at what fools they were making of themselves and I was left
with no friends.

When I became an anarchist, I thought I had entered a safer
community. After all, people who think capitalism is bad wouldn't
resort to arguments about how women are necessarily empowered by
earning vast sums of money. They wouldn't try to argue that one
particular industry was somehow not exploitative while all others
were. They certainly wouldn't like the capitalist intervention
into our sex lives that comes from tightly-scripted porn dictating
what desires are and are not "acceptable." They might even have a
thing or two to say about the lack of real intimacy brought about
by the marketing message of the sex industry that commodified
intimacy is somehow preferable.

Certainly, a community so receptive to feminist concerns wouldn't
try to shush me when I expressed an opinion that was not consistent
with the supremacy of male desire and its divine right to override
all human rights when seeking out an orgasm. A community full of
anti-racists wasn't about to try and normalize the sex work
available almost exclusively to the educated and wealthy white
women of the U.S. rather than discuss the experience of the
majority of sex workers worldwide, who are slaves, were they? At
the very least, those on the political fringes weren't about to
tell me I was being utopian or inform me blithely that since most
people look at porn and are hard-pressed to stop looking at porn,
such behavior must be natural and okay. They had probably heard
the same tired defense made of capitalism.

My, was I ever wrong. Anarchists have said all of these things to
me and more, including accusing me of wanting all sex workers to
starve to death when I mention that I wish men would stop using
them. It is apparently the stance among many anarchists that
people have a right to watch whatever they want, that women have a
right to do whatever they want with their bodies, and that stating
these two facts (with which I agree) over and over again can
disprove any anti-prostitution argument ever. Unfortunately, such
is not the case.

First of all, I am not arguing that there should be legal sanctions
against porn or against sex work, so treating me as if I am trying
to exercise an authoritarian law-centered prohibitionist stance is
disingenuous. Second, although someone has a right to watch porn
or to be in the sex industry just as much as they have a right to
surgically remove their dominant hand if they truly desire it, this
does not mean that both shouldn't be seen as signs of emotional
disturbance within the individual, caused either by events in their
life or the ridiculous expectations of the white supremacist
capitalist heteropatriarchy in which we live. There's simply no
other explanation than that there's something wrong with someone
who thinks it's okay to watch porn when he knows that the odds are
very high the woman he's watching get double-penetrated is in pain
and hates her life. Consumption of sex and selling of sex really
should be considered harmful to those involved. In fact sex work
advocates, who differ from sex worker advocates, hate the use of
statistics specifically because there are scads of reliable sources
that document sex work's detriment to the individual.

Let's look at some people whose academic interest is stronger than
a desire to make any moral judgements about the desirability of
prostitution, people from organizations that exist neither to
support or destroy the sex industry. Say, the International
Society for Traumatic Stress in the annual meeting in 1992,
Victimology: An International Journal, and maybe the Canadian
Journal of Community Mental Health. Their estimates of the
prevalence of incest survivors among prostitutes range from 65% to
85%. As a former prostitute with a history of childhood sexual
abuse, this statistic does not shock me at all- I knew that what I
was doing was related to my trauma as I did it. There is something
wrong with a profession in which incest survivors involve
themselves with many much older partners on a regular basis. The
coerced signing of a release form changes this not one whit.

80% of prostitutes interviewed by the Whisper Oral History Project
said that clients showed them porn to illustrate desired sexual
acts. I know my clients did. They also wanted to watch porn with
me and often described desiring acts viewed in porn that they
previously hadn't even known existed. Porn is the advertisement
for sexploitation that inures us to the physical reality of it and
even paints it as desirable. The New York University Press
reported in 1995 that 80%-95% of all prostitution was pimp-
controlled, and even I had pimps try to pick me up, though I was a
high-end escort. Moreover, I worked with several women who had
started out in street-level pimp-organized prostitution.

The documentation of sex work's harm to the individual is endless.
A 1998 study of 475 female, trans and male prostitutes from five
countries, including the U.S., done by Melissa Farley and Ufuk
Sezgin for the publication Feminism and Psychology reported that
92% wanted to leave prostitution immediately. 67% had symptoms of
PTSD.

A study done of 41 women from different strip clubs, ages 18- 41,
having worked as strippers from 3 months to 18 years, showed that
100% reported having endured sexual, verbal, and physical abuse in
their clubs. Most reported some form of abuse at the hands of
management, owners, staff, and/or law enforcement. This proves
that legal and/or widely accepted forms of sex work are
(unsurprisingly) not magically immune to the negative effects of
all other sex work.

So why isn't the radical community getting this? Well, to be
honest, I think that it's a matter of privilege and maybe a matter
of limited consciousness. People are, after all, most interested
in dismantling the systems which have a direct negative impact upon
them. The sex work available to your average anarchist woman in
this country (who, all too often, is white and comes from relative
economic privilege) is decidedly higher-quality than that which is
available to most, so they might place priority on eliminating
police harassment rather than ending sex work entirely. Certainly,
very few anarchist women in the U.S. have experience in being
trafficked or pimped, though this is the norm in the global
prostitution industry. They focus instead on what affects them,
like being silenced by male radicals at meetings, getting an
abortion, or being allowed to have multiple partners of whatever
gender they choose without being ostracized and hated. These are
all worthy goals, but they are also the central tenets of most
liberal feminisms. That is to say, working towards these goals
does not a radical feminist make.

Perhaps these women assume that since they are anarchists and
feminists, they must be anarcha-feminists already and this is why
they never bother to read any Dworkin, Jensen, or MacKinnon. But
you know what? It's perfectly possible to be a labor radical, an
anti-racist radical, and a liberal feminist. In fact, that's what
most of them are doing by holding the traditionally
liberal/libertarian viewpoint that prostitution is empowering and
only prudes don't like it.

Finally, there is the mistaken idea that anti-porn feminists hate
sex or are puritans who will never get laid. In fact, I often
wonder if women don't ramble at length about how "sexually open"
they are as a way of bragging that they're good in the sack,
advertising how "sex-positive" they are as a way of letting those
present know that they like sex and are sexually available. While
I hate to imply that women who love to go on about how they have so
sexual hangups are ultimately just trying to get laid or hold onto
a certain level of social acceptance, I'm willing to bet good money
that this is a motive, just as I'm positive that women of all
stripes run in the opposite direction from feminism at times for
fear that they face a life of celibacy.

The beginning and end of "A Call To Porn" are paragraphs in which
the author tries to prove how much she loves porn by stating that
fact over and over again while discussing her own viewing habits,
just in case we didn't understand that she's no evil anti-sex
feminazi man-hater. I recognize the tactic, and it saddens me to
see that she feels this is necessary to get her point across to
what she clearly assumes is an audience so hostile to any criticism
of pornography that even her very mild statements may result in
total social isolation. Well, guess what? Straight ladies? Gay
dudes? Everybody who wants to have sex with men? I hope you're
listening. If men are consistently told that porn is not okay and
you won't have sex with them unless they gain an enlightened view
of gender relations, they will either change or learn to suitably
fake it in order to please you. Make them evaluate their
viewpoints in order to conform with what we expect for once, okay?
Men in question? I promise I am not part of a vast conspiracy to
take away your blowjobs- I just wish you wouldn't masturbate to
images of real people getting unimaginably hurt.

The article doesn't make me feel much better after the
introduction. It seems that the chief complaint about alternaporn
brought forth is that "most of the sites that claim to do something
'different' than what’s already out there are really just featuring
the same kind of mainstream models, except that now they have
tattoos and piercings and listen to obscure music." The author
bemoans the lack of unshaven models or models with bodies that fall
at all outside of the mainstream conception of beauty. She
explains the objectification is still objectification, "even when
the model has a gnarly chest piece." She even goes so far as to
state that "contracts are not empowering."

While the author seems to have noticed that virtually all porn in
existence is bad because it is a corporate-controlled
representation of very mainstream women existing for male pleasure,
she somehow seems not to notice at all that corporate control is
what created our porn industry. Porn is not food. Porn is not
something we need which has been taken over by people who made it
wrong when they began to subordinate women. Porn as an industry
was created for the express purpose of subordination, starting with
the backlash in the fifties which attempted to run women back into
servitude and also produced Playboy with its explicitly degrading
pictures and misogynist articles. Porn is not a genuine need, but
an artificial one. The problem is that it exists, not that it's a
good idea with poor execution. Boink is mentioned in the article
as being "great" because of its "DIY dimension," but DIY porn
makes no more sense than DIY iPods. If we were really doing things
ourselves, we wouldn't feel the need for either.

When I read articles about how the problem with porn is merely that
it's not different enough for some people to feel as though it's
been suitably marketed to their subculture in what purports to be a
radical publication, I'm not surprised, but I disagree
wholeheartedly. The statement that "Alternative porn really needs
to be something different- a reaction to what's established," I
wonder why a reaction to the firmly established porn industry, of
which alternative porn is a part, can't be to cease to consume it
at all.

Here's some questions for the author of A Call to Porn:

You begin by stating that "whether or not porn can be feminist is a
scholarly debate." Why do you think so? What does that even mean?
Are we supposed to let university professors single-handedly
resolve the issues that affect our lives?

Given that you dismiss the discussion of the feminist legitimacy of
porn right off the bat, could you explain why exactly you'd "rather
not go there?"

Why do you have to state at the beginning of the article that you
are "sexually open-minded?" My sex life is, in all likelihood,
nearly identical to yours, but presumably without as much time
spent in front of the computer. Does my lack of ability to get off
on images of strangers when I could be fucking real people in
exactly the same ways you do mean I'm sexually restricted?

Why does your article presuppose that women involved in porn are
there because of "the satisfaction they receive" when, in fact,
most pornstars, current or past, admit publicly in interviews that
their jobs are not at all arousing to them, but just work?

Given that the non-alternativeness of alt-porn sites proves an
unwillingness on the part of the porn industry to make actual
alternative porn, what do you think is going to cause them to
change? Consumer demand from the vast and economically powerful
anarchist segment of the market?

If you realize contracts are not empowering, why do you masturbate
to professionally-produced porn, as you confess you do in the final
paragraph?

Do you know SuicideGirls is actually owned by a dude and that their
girls defect en masse on a regular basis to start up anti-SG sites
chronicling the shitty things that SG has done to them? You didn't
mention this when you discussed them.

Aren't you worried that the alternative sites' tendency to show
that there is "something behind the sex" is just a marketing ploy
to prove how punk/goth/emo/whatever they are in order to get you to
like them for being "alternative" regardless of what their porn
actually looks like? You said yourself that the "music movie and
book reviews," the fact that "the models keep blogs and members can
have profile pages" is the part you "really enjoy." Perhaps people
like you were interviewed by the website's marketing and
development department at some point?

Do you know that alt-porn sites monitor and censor the content of
their models' blogs?

Do you think it's possible to destigmatize sex and accept your own
sexuality by actually having sex rather than by looking at porn
which reflects what someone else thinks your sexual activity should
look like?

When your friend the Boink model said she didn't enjoy her shoot
and the guy in it definitely didn't either because he was gay, why,
and I do mean why, do you still express such enthusiastic approval
of its results? Did you, at any point, start to wonder whether
either of them should have been there at all, "proving themselves"
by doing something neither of them actually wanted to do or found
pleasurable?

Do you feel comfortable watching mainstream porn when you don't
know the people involved personally and can't tell if they're being
abused? Why?

Why do you love porn in the first place?

Have you ever read anything by Robert Jensen?

[SaltyC]

Very well-thought and well-written analysis, Valerie.

How disappointing that Masha's vapid and vague apologia was published but your serious critique wasn't. She was right in saying that piercings and tattoos don't make porn radical, but then doesn't explain why she loves alter-porn besides the fact that it also contains record reviews.

I like how you mentioned how this all started as a backlash to getting women back in place after we had won some workplace and political gains. I agree that Playboy was pivotal.

The blind spot that self-proclaimed radicals have for the kind of exploitation that gets them off is infuriating.
Even though many in their ranks do the kind of discretionary temporary sexploitation work, like you mentioned, you'd think that would give them some insight, or at least imagine what it would be like to go deeper. As disclosure, I was one of those dabblers, like the one Masha said was her friend. I was following through on the propaganda, taking it for granted. But just the few months or so I moonlighted as a dominatrix was enough to open my eyes as to what it's really all about: men feeling big for making women do things the men see as shameful. The hypocrisy among my liberal friends who told me to hide what I did, while they extolled the wonders of porn, was mind-boggling.

Later I had the opportunity to see it from the other side, when I was the first woman hired by a company whose staff were weekly customers at strip clubs and would talk about it very often. I was sickened by the way they went on and how they saw the women, the way the men bonded by collectively debasing someone else, someone with no defense or clothes. But their conscience was cleansed by all the money they spent. They believed they were doing the women a favor by giving them a lot of money, which is I guess all that mattered. Did they ever think, that each and every lapdance they bought was slowly wearing away the women's souls?

[allecto]

That article is brilliant, Valerie. Thank-you.