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!)

Violet Blue Versus Stop Porn Culture: Part 2, Anti-Social Networking

Blue's campaign against Stop Porn Culture has made effective use of social media to gather support for her pro-porn cause. Sure, everyone knows one can do marvelous things with Twitter these days. But who, exactly, is she reaching?

One of Blue's recent tweets was, "lesson: how NOT to be a rank f*cking amateur #1: make sure your anti-porn con has its Twitter account before event." Great advice IF your anti-porn con wants to reach people via Twitter. However, none of the professional, academic conferences I attend have Twitter accounts, nor are they "rank f*cking amateur" events, either. Such conferences do appeal to people who don't live and die by Twitter, though. Disinterest in communicating in 140-character blurbs doesn't make the anti-porn side less credible.

Consider the conference context. Stop Porn Culture conference presenters are academics from disciplines including philosophy, medicine, and sociology who have been brought together by their concern over pornography. Sure, one might surmise that there's a touch of ivory-tower-ness, that these folks who breath the rarefied air of academia daily are "out of touch" with the real world. That might be the case. However, it's important to note that their work on pornography has different parameters than what Blue is doing. It makes sense that they use more traditional channels of communication.

So, they're not as concerned with how pretty their Web site is, how many followers or fans they have, whether they're on Twitter, or how much user-produced content they can inspire. Instead, these anti-porn feminists study the actual subject of pornography, not how many people love porn. That's basically what Blue's video contest proves: people love porn. Well, file that under "water also wet" news. The numbers regarding how much porn is out there and how frequently it is viewed have already told that story. People like porn? No shit. Porn producers are exquisitely attuned to supply and demand, and the demand is high. Further, as Sarah Palin's book sales and Tea Party gatherings and Fox News ratings have shown, a bunch of people liking something doesn't mean that thing is unassailably good and right, or that smart people shouldn't question it. Porn is no exception.

I question whether the tools Blue uses: her blog, Twitter, and anti-conference Web pages are any less out of touch than the other side. She's preaching to her wired chorus, essentially, and in the process ignores academics who ply their trade primarily in the great big world offline: in classrooms, laboratories, universities, academic journals, and academic conferences. Their preferred media are NOT the same in terms of publication standards, either: journals and conferences involve peer review, whereas blogs require no such moderation (lucky for me!). That's fine, though, because they're speaking to different audiences with differing agendas.

But Blue implies that savvy use of social media somehow lends her argument credence, and that is not true. As I tell my students, "Any idiot can have a Web site, and many do." A quick glance through YouTube comments demonstrates that saying something online doesn't imbue the message with merit. It's up to the audience to evaluate the credibility of any argument, regardless of the medium used to deliver it. I'm finding Blue's argument to be prettily and widely disseminated but ultimately unconvincing as it perpetuates stupid stereotypes and "reasons" via logical fallacy.

Next time... the victim mentality

Violet Blue Versus Stop Porn Culture: Part 1

We need more dialogue between pro-porn and anti-porn feminists. As someone who has enjoyed porn, respects sex workers, and embraces gender and sexual difference, I identify more with "pro-sex" or "sex-positive" feminists than I do anti-porn activists. Although I respect the contributions of both, I prefer Pat Califia to Andrea Dworkin.

However, I cannot accept that porn is unquestionably a good thing. Porn is a business, and as with any business, I think we need to be critical consumers. Any business that uses women's bodies as its raw material should be particularly suspect for feminists. It's hard to see the sort of women who would never stoop to shopping at Wal-Mart uncritically defending the porn industry in the name of sexual freedom. Would the same argument work if I tried to defend shopping at Wal-Mart in the name of price-rollback freedom?

Anti-porn feminists aren't as prolific as they used to be, either. Among third-wavers, it's way cooler to identify as a "pro-sex" or "sex-positive" feminist. However, among anti-porn forces, Stop Porn Culture is one of the better known organizations, and their conference is coming up this month.

Well, sex-blogger Violet Blue is pissed. Sure, I understand her pro-sex orientation, and the title of her book The Smart Girl's Guide to Porn indicates her attitude toward pornography. In a perfect world, I share that attitude. But we don't live in such a sexually liberated utopia. And as feminists, we are not wrong to question pornography's impact, good and bad, on our culture.

Upon learning of the upcoming conference, Blue decided to wage a pro-porn campaign in response, encouraging pro-porn folks to make short vids about their love of porn to win prizes. Because of her Web presence, she's managed to garner quite a response in the short time she's known about the conference.

Initially, I was taken aback by her sudden outrage. Anyone even cursorily familiar with anti-porn feminism would know about Stop Porn Culture. I wondered how a feminist who makes her living writing about sex, who has written a book on porn, wouldn't have her finger on the pulse of the opposition. Violet's "discovery" of the conference was old news to anyone familiar with the debate.

Unfortunately, the aim of Blue's pro-porn campaign has not been to create dialogue or even to present an opposing perspective. Instead, it has been yet another attempt to construct anti-porn feminists as hopelessly naive, culturally and technologically backward, and generally oppressive to the clearly smarter and more liberated sex-positive feminists. Here's her film introducing the pro-porn video contest:



Her tone of derision is evident throughout, but one highlight is her calling anti-porn activists "douchebags." That certainly elevates the conversation, doesn't it?

I wonder, though...

• How does misrepresenting the anti-porn side's argument and mocking their perspectives contribute to the discussion?
• How is condescension a "sex-positive" attitude?
• Isn't it hypocritical of pro-porn activists to parrot the dominant culture's attitudes about porn while portraying themselves as oppressed sex radicals?
  

Being anti-porn is not a popular stance to take, particularly among a certain brand of tech-saavy, pop culture feminist. Questioning a phenomenon as ubiquitous as pornography takes more than a slick Web site and a slew of user-produced videos as support. It takes guts and conviction.

Does Blue seriously believe anti-porn activists can even make a dent in the veritable tidal wave of pornography currently available? Seriously, anti-porn forces can't force your porn-loving ass "back in the closet" (a questionable appropriation of LGBT terminology). They can't make pornography disappear from the Web. Porn is a fact of modern American life.

But then condescension toward feminists concerned about the impact of porn on our culture is easier than actually listening to them and responding thoughtfully and respectfully. Saying "hooray for porn" uncritically is more popular than questioning it.

I am a feminist who is sex-positive and pro-porn, under certain circumstances. But I resent Violet Blue and others with condescending, hypocritical attitudes toward the opposition being my compatriots.

More on this campaign next time...