Everyday Pornography

Karen Boyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136942099
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Public and academic debate about 'porn culture' is proliferating. Ironically, what is often lost in these debates is a sense of what is specific about pornography. By focusing on pornography's mainstream – contemporary commercial products for a heterosexual male audience – Everyday Pornography offers the opportunity to reconsider what it is that makes pornography a specific form of industrial practice and genre of representation.

Everyday Pornography presents original work from scholars from a range of academic disciplines (Media Studies, Law, Sociology, Psychology, Women's Studies, Political Science), introducing new methodologies and approaches whilst reflecting on the ongoing value of older approaches. Among the topics explored are:

• the porn industry's marketing practices (spam emails, reviews) and online organisation
• commercial sex in Second Life
• the pornographic narratives of phone sex and amateur videos
• the content of best-selling porn videos
• how the male consumer is addressed by pornography, represented within the mainstream, understood by academics and contained by legislation.

This collection places a particular emphasis on anti-pornography feminism, a movement which has been experiencing a revival since the mid-2000s. Drawing on the experiences of activists alongside academics, Everyday Pornography offers an opportunity to explore the intellectual and political challenges of anti-pornography feminism and consider its relevance for contemporary academic debate.

Part I
Content and context

Chapter 1
Arresting images

Anti-pornography slide shows, activism and the academy

Gail Dines, Linda Thompson and Rebecca Whisnant, with Karen Boyle

This chapter presents a round-table discussion with Gail Dines (G.D.), Linda Thompson (L.T.) and Rebecca Whisnant (R.W.), chaired by Karen Boyle (K.B.) and recorded in Leeds in June 2009. Gail and Rebecca are US-based academics, anti-pornography activists and founders of Stop Porn Culture. In 2007, they – together with Robert Jensen – launched a new anti-pornography slide show at a two-day anti-pornography conference at Wheelock College, Boston.¹ Linda Thompson is a Development Worker with the Women’s Support Project (a feminist anti-violence organization) and works against all forms of commercial sexual exploitation across Scotland. Members of Linda’s organization attended the Wheelock conference and have since brought Gail and Rebecca to Scotland to speak at events challenging the demand from men for commercial sex, including pornography.

K.B. Gail and Rebecca, why did you decide to reinvent the anti-porn slide show at this point in time?

G.D. The anti-porn slide show produced in the 1980s had a huge impact on me. It shifted the way I thought about men, masculinity and sexual violence because it showed me, in stark detail, how porn users think about women. It delivered, in a succinct form, just what it means to be a woman in a male-supremacist society. So I’ve always thought that slide shows are hugely important tools, because a lot of women – even a lot of feminists – really don’t know what’s in pornography, especially in the age of the internet, and that makes it too easy to conduct abstract intellectual arguments about the empowering possibilities of porn.

R.W. Every feminist anti-pornography activist I know came to the issue through seeing a slide show. Especially for women, many of whom haven’t seen much if any pornography, there is simply no substitute for encountering the material itself in a reflective and critical context. In my experience, the vast majority of women who see these slide shows recognise immediately that they are looking at raw, visceral contempt for women.

The slide shows that many of us used in the 1980s and 1990s were showing their age; new images and some new analysis were needed to speak to a younger generation, for whom porn has become ‘normal’, and to address changes in the industry over the last couple of decades. So Gail and I decided to collaborate on a new slide show along with Bob Jensen. The goal was not to produce something that we would own and control, in the traditional way that academics ‘own’ their scholarship, but rather to provide a tool that people could take, adapt and use in their own communities. We wanted the slide show to help people move beyond powerlessness and despair into action – to help reignite a movement.

K.B. What is in the slide show?

G.D. The slide show takes you on a journey through porn culture. It starts with fairly mainstream images² in order to get us thinking about the sexualization of women in the culture more generally and the kind of ‘pornified’ sexuality that is being sold to women. This leads us into what is actually in pornography today. The pornographic images we use were all obtained easily and for free through internet searches, accessed within thirty seconds from Google. They are from the mainstream of the porn industry. We give a sense of the different genres within pornography and the different kinds of ‘acts’ and ‘characters’ that are now routinely depicted.³ But it’s not just about showing the images, it’s about providing the feminist analysis of them so that audiences can develop a critical understanding of the ways that porn shapes our reality and our cultural practices.

R.W. Yes, the analysis places the images into context. These images exist as part of an industry within capitalism and as part of an ideological system within patriarchy. They can’t be understood independently of these systems. If it was just about seeing shocking images, we could send people out to surf internet porn on their own!

This is why not only women, but many men too, are upset by the slide show. For the men, it’s not (usually) that they haven’t seen these kinds of images before, but that they are being cued to see them differently. Often, what disturbs them most is that similar images haven’t disturbed them in the past. They realise that they’ve been manipulated in the service of the industry’s profits and that their involvement with pornography has kept them from developing an authentic sexuality in accordance with their own values.

K.B. But this material is designed to be arousing. How do you deal with the possibility of that response – of arousal – in the slide show?

R.W. We say at the beginning of the slide show that these images are very carefully designed and choreographed to produce arousal, especially in men but also in women, so people may experience that along with other responses. We front-load that message, so that if people are experiencing arousal they won’t feel like they are freaks. It’s what pornography is designed to do, and it’s important that we give people permission to think about how pornography shapes all of our sexuality, without feeling guilt or shame about their physical responses.

We do need to develop better ways to talk about the idea that sexual arousal is not necessarily and always a pleasant experience for the person who’s having it. Some feminists have coined the term ‘dysrotic’ to describe sexual arousal that is experienced as disturbing, or traumatic, or unpleasant, or scary, or confusing … ⁴

G.D. Or against your will, basically.

R.W. … and that’s something we need to think about more.

K.B. How do you deal with the criticism that by reproducing these images you are further exploiting the women in them?

R.W. This is something we struggled with. If we could have traced each of the women and asked their permission we would have, but realistically it’s not possible. We did think about pixellating the women’s faces to conceal their identities, but hiding their faces can disguise what’s going on: there’s a whole genre built around ejaculating into women’s eyes for instance, and women’s facial expressions are essential to understanding the images. Is she bored, jaundiced, sad, confused, afraid, even when the text says how much she loves it? So while we recognize that there is a moral down side to this, we ultimately decided that the slide show needs to exist and that it cannot work without the images. I hope that we succeeded in treating the women with respect and dignity.

G.D. The key thing is to remind the audience that the women in pornography are real people, they’re human. Because pornography isn’t just a representation, it’s a documentation: this was really done to someone’s body.

K.B. But it is also a representation: it’s not a documentation of women’s sexual desires.

G.D. It’s a documentation (these things are actually being done by and to the people on screen), but it’s not a reflection of reality (so just because she says she likes it doesn’t make it so). If you read the threads on discussion boards where guys are talking about porn,⁵ they have a real investment in the idea that porn is depicting some kind of reality and will go to quite elaborate lengths to protect that. I came across a ‘gang bang’ discussion forum where the guys were discussing a supposedly ‘amateur’ film. One of them had recognized the woman from another porn film and was outraged by what he saw as an attempt to fool him. The other posters came back suggesting that the amateur film might be what she did in her free time when she wasn’t working. The story these men tell themselves is that she’s on a porn set all day having body-punishing sex but, because she loves sex, she then goes to film a ‘gang bang’ at night for fun. Incredible!

K.B. Moving on, a criticism often levelled at anti-porn work is that it uses the ‘extreme’ as paradigmatic. How do you respond to this?

R.W. Every image in our slide show represents a major porn genre, and no act or practice is depicted that would be unfamiliar to the average porn consumer. The porn world contains many images and acts that I wouldn’t dream of putting into this or any other slide show, both because they do not represent the mainstream of the industry and because they would be too disturbing to audiences. Our slide show addresses everything from Playboy and feature porn to mainstream gonzo – including the points of connection among these apparently disparate genres – while stopping well short of anything truly extreme.

G.D. To show just how routine hard-core porn is, take Max Hardcore.⁶ We didn’t include his porn in the slide show because we thought it may be too much for the audience. His violent and abusive movies used to be considered beyond the pale by people within the industry, but now he’s embraced and celebrated – he was on The Howard Stern Show, which is an indicator of just how mainstream he has become.⁷ When we went to the Adult Expo [in January 2008]⁸ he was so popular that there was a long line of men queuing up for his autograph. While Hardcore still represents the most violent and cruel of porn, his movies now look a lot more like regular gonzo.

L.T. The most distressing material I’ve come across in doing this work has actually been via mainstream sites which are supposedly not pornography. For example, on Zoo magazine’s website I found a series of pictures of a young woman being fisted and having bottles inserted into her.⁹ There was no warning or notion that this material may not be appropriate on a high-street magazine site. The images had supposedly been sent in by readers and were offered to other readers to rate. I see some pretty extreme stuff but what was so distressing about that was that it was so mainstream. There’s nothing in the slide show that surprises me now.

K.B. What about porn by and for women? How do you deal with that?

R.W. ‘By women’ and ‘for women’ are very different. The vast majority of pornography, whether produced by men or women, is produced for a male audience and it is primarily that audience that dictates the content. What do men want to see? What are they willing to buy? So it’s not surprising that a recent content analysis found that there is very little difference in content between porn films directed by men and those directed by women [Sun et al. 2008].

G.D. My experience with porn produced by women is that it uses the same codes and conventions adopted in mainstream porn, even when they try to market it as something different, and that it’s not necessarily any more ethical in its production than porn produced by men. Take the Australian company Abby Winters as an example. It claims to be woman-friendly because it features happy, healthy, natural amateurs doing girl-on-girl scenes. At the Adult Expo we’d been talking to one of the women on the Abby Winters stall about the feminist anti-porn position and it clearly resonated with her. But, not surprisingly, putting her personal choice in a broader context was also unsettling for her. It meant she felt less able to perform porn sexuality on demand, which meant we were bad for business. So we were banned from the stand. There was no way for us to check in with her or have a genuinely open discussion about porn. And that’s supposed to be women-friendly porn. By the last day the Abby Winters women were indistinguishable from everyone else, offering live sex shows for the male customers. If you listen to what the industry is saying – in publications like Adult Video News and X-Biz – they acknowledge that there really isn’t much of a women’s market.

L.T. Something similar happened with Suicide Girls:¹⁰ they present themselves as an alternative community, yet when some of the women involved started criticizing how the site operated in their posts they were taken down, censored. When fans asked what was going on, all dissent was removed and quashed. This strategy of saying that because the women have tattoos, piercings and step outside the supposed norm of a porn appearance it is all empowering and equal falls down somewhat when you realise that it still operates in the same limited and controlled way. In reality, women in these sites rarely have any more power and control over their images and identity than others in the industry.

K.B. I’ve heard you say in the past that the feminist analysis of porn developed in the 1970s and 1980s still holds and that the current slide show owes a clear debt to that earlier work. But are there any differences in the new work?

G.D. In the 1970s the analysis was brand new and it was important to develop a theoretical understanding of the role of porn in producing and reproducing gender inequality. Porn was mainly discussed as a single unified entity because the industry was much smaller and its products more standardized. Today, with product diversification, sophisticated marketing practices and the need to find niche markets, the industry is more developed so we need to expand our understanding of both the content of porn and the ways it works as an industry located within a wider capitalist system.

R.W. And this is a different cultural moment. Precisely because porn has taken over the culture to such an extent it’s getting to the point where a lot of people have had enough. I used to get a good bit of resistance from slide show audiences in the early to mid-1990s and now I get almost none. Porn has gotten so bad and so pervasive that it’s pretty hard to argue with our analysis! So there is a new receptivity, even from many men, because they are starting to recognize what porn has done to their sexuality and relationships.

L.T. After one slide show I had two men come up to talk to me saying that they wouldn’t let someone take their sons into a room and talk to them about sex in the way pornography does. They talked about the importance of allowing their sons to find out for themselves what they liked, disliked, what turned them on – not having that predetermined for them and having possibilities shut down by pornography, like they had been for them. The new work has to acknowledge the rough deal men are getting and how porn is shaping relationships per se.

K.B. So why did your organization get involved in bringing the slide show to Scotland?

L.T. The Women’s Support Project has been ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Content and context
• Part II Address, consumption, regulation
• Bibliography
• Index