Violet Blue Versus Stop Porn Culture: Part 3, Critici$m and the Victim Mentality

Why are pro-porn people so opposed to any questioning of their perspective? Furthermore, why do they adopt a victim mentality about it, as though they're oppressed sex radicals whose scandalous enjoyment of porn marks them for scorn and derision? Their attitude toward porn might have been a serious point of contention in the late 70s and early 80s, when the feminist sex wars raged over issues like dildo use, bondage, and porn. Then, pro-sex activists were ostracized by their fellow feminists.

However, here in 2010, with pornography as plentiful and readily available as it is, with so many people watching porn with such frequency, how are those viewers in any way victims of anti-porn scorn? How are pro-porn supporters members of a marginalized minority?

They're not. But Violet Blue doesn't let that stop her from portraying herself and her fellow porn lovers as downtrodden sexual freedom fighters. She tweeted about their negative treatment in this column in the Boston Herald, for example.

Of course, anyone who follows online snits knows that Violet Blue doesn't take criticism well. Beyond a touchy ego, though, what's with the victim mentality and inability to accept even valid, constructive criticism?

Well, pro-porn activists start with an acceptable premise, rightly asserting that sexuality is still repressed in our culture. Sure, we can access idealized, airbrushed, fetishized image of sex presented in porn. But women's sexuality, particularly a liberated and honest sexuality, is curiously absent from scene. Honestly, I don't know exactly what that would look like. I don't think anyone does.

The sexuality we do see expressed throughout our culture and particularly in porn is still predominantly phallocentric. It's the "Samantha syndrome," where being a sexually liberated woman means acting like a man. Because only men are free to express themselves sexually--and a narrow, masculine sexuality, at that--that's the only model we have for what a sexually liberated woman might look like. I guess pro-porn folks believe that protecting this fictional "sexual freedom" is more important than trying to imagine new sexual options.

For example, they could support sexual freedom by pressuring the porn industry to feature more diverse performers. They could try to get porn producers to treat performers more humanely by offering better pay, benefits, and working conditions. They could try to discourage the production of Max Hardcore-type gross-out porn. But instead, they aim their vitriol at academic organizations like Stop Porn Culture. Because pro-porn folks so value "sexual freedom," they interpret anti-porn activists, not the huge porn industry that now largely defines what is sexually attractive in our culture, as oppressive.

Why don't they consider the many other ways sexual freedom is being threatened, like

• abstinence-only sex ed. policies
• rampant photoshopping that creates unrealistic images of the (usually) female body wherever we look
• how sexual difference, like sexual orientation or polyamory or consensual BDSM, is still constructed as deviance?

These are all oppressions, all ways that sexuality suffers. But if porn looks enough like "sexual freedom," if the porn industry keeps repeating that porn is sexual freedom, then opposition will continue to be interpreted as an attack on sexual freedom. It's as if pro-porn forces can't distinguish between sexual behaviors and identities, many of which remain marginalized and stigmatized, and sexual media, which have little to do with sex and more to do with money. Yet pro-porn folks conflate these two, as if porn itself were a marginalized sexual identity.

Or maybe it is all about money. Perhaps "oppressed" pro-porn advocates protest so loudly because rising anti-porn sentiment would eat into their profits. In a clear example of pro-porn's symbiosis with the porn industry, one of the winners of Blue's "Our Porn, Ourselves" video contest is herself a porn star. Blue, too, has an economic incentive to generate interest in porn and inspire people to defend it. Writing a book on porn and having porn sites advertising on one's homepage likely encourage a more zealous defense. I'm not sure anti-porn academics have any such financial incentive, as anti-porn forces (especially feminist ones) do not have a wealthy and powerful political lobby or millions of willing consumers, unlike the porn industry.

If you're riding the coat tales of a $10 billion business, I suppose you might want to cultivate the appearance of oppression. It certainly makes for better press. After all, who would listen to the pro-porn argument if they prefaced it by acknowledging the prevalence of porn and the strength of the industry? And Violet Blue craves coverage. I guess shouting oppression garners attention while obscuring that unconditional, uncritical support for porn, rather than being sexually liberated, is merely anti-intellectual and money-grubbing.

Perhaps pro-porn folks have even more in common with Tea Partiers and Sarah Palin than I'd thought.

(Thanks, Kristie, for the dialogue that evolved into this post!)