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Mass media: sex and violence
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Mass media: sex and violence
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In her Submission By Feminists Against Censorship To The Home Affairs Inquiry Into Computer Pornography (1994), Avedon Carol argued against censorship on the grounds that there was no demonstrable link between exposure to pornography and the commission of crime. She quotes Goldstein's research which shows that sex offenders often had a more sexually repressive upbringing than others, the causes of sex crime being mostly found in early childhood, more often than not pre-dating exposure to pornography. She argues that sex education can be used to prevent the practice of child abuse and the development of rapists. In the case of child abuse, teaching the child that its sexual organs are its own and that nobody, not even its parents, has a right to tell the child how they are to be used has been shown to be effective. In the case of rapists, Carol points out that it is in a sexually repressive culture that mysoginistic representations of women's sexuality are widespread. The sexually active woman is seen as 'bad' and therefore 'fair game', deserving of no protection - a view which has often been reflected in court judgments in rape cases where women dressed or behaved provocatively and are therefore considered to have caused the rape. Such an attitude does not derive from pornography, in which there is rarely any suggestion that a provocative or sexually active woman merits punishment. Similarly violence against women who have been unfaithful is not encouraged by pornography, in which, if a man came home to find his partner in bed with another, he would probably join in. Rather violence against the unfaithful woman is encouraged by the broader society which condemns sexually active women. The broader society also inculcates the belief that the male should provide for the family, a belief which, in the face of mass unemployment, often leads to the male venting his frustration and feelings of inadequacy on his partner, leading to an increase in domestic violence which can in no sense be ascribed to pornography. Where pornography does engage in representations of violence (and most of it does not), for example in S&M, then in fact it is often the woman who is portrayed as dominant. In arguing that pornography is especially degrading of women, pornography's critics overlook the fact that it is custom and the law which force pornography in Britain to be principally pornography for men. The major bookstores will not stock any pornographic material showing couples and the portrayal of erections is forbidden - though not necessarily strictly illegal the portrayal of the erect penis and of penetration by objects has been established by case law as 'likely to deprave and corrupt'. Carol argues that this bias in pornography would therefore be overcome by the repeal of the Obscene Publications Acts and the Video Recordings Control Act. At present, the law is so vague that almost anything could be considered to infringe against it, with the result that lesbian magazines are not allowed into the country by Customs and Excise or refused by stockists in Britain just in case they might break the law. In conclusion, Carol states:
We therefore submit that it is vital that all anti-pornography activism by the government and its agents should cease forthwith and be replaced with an honest, positive sex education campaign geared to reach even the youngest children to protect them from sexual abuse by adults and each other, and to prevent them from being corrupted by the dangerous anti-sex propaganda which is currently being promoted by the government, the police and the media.[The
Feminists Against Censorship website has "links to essays, announcements, campaigns, history, resources, and others who wish to promote the right to speak freely."]
Behind much of what we have looked at in the previous sections is the underlying assumption that pornography generally represents heterosexual sex. Underlying Dworkin's and MacKinnon's arguments is the assumption that hard core pornography is demeaning to women, shows women as submissive, as mere objects, encourages the mistreatment of women and that this is at its height in hard-core sadomasochistic pornography.
Dworkin, MacKinnon and others who share their views tend to assume that there is only one possible reading of pornographic images. Those of you who are familiar with contemporary research into the media, developed from the ideas of de Certeau and Fiske, will be keenly aware of their emphasis on the 'creative work' of the readers of media texts and on the unpredictability at the point of encounter between readers and texts:
....it needs to be accepted that pornography is not 'just' consumed, but is used, worked on, elaborated, remembered, fantasized about by its subjects. To stop the analysis at the artefact, as virtually all the current books and articles do, imagining that the representation is the pornography in quite simple terms, is to truncate the consumption process radically, and thereby to leave unconsidered the human making involved in completing the act of pornographic consumption.
Wicke (1993 p. 70)
That 'making' can involve making meanings far removed from the apparent preferred reading of the pornographic text. Turim (1993), for example, describes how underground pornography in the People's Republic of China 'merits first and foremost being considered as a form of political resistance'. That may be surprising, but is not dissimilar from one of the uses to which pornography was put in pre-revolutionary France, where the works of banned 'philosophes' smuggled in from abroad were not by any means all 'philosophy'!
Can a pornographic image have a single and unambiguous message about a woman's submissiveness? If a woman is having sex in the missionary position, should we therefore see her as 'submissive'? If she is on top, should we see her as 'dominant'? In an image of a woman penetrated vaginally by one man, performing fellatio on another and using her hands to masturbate two others, who is dominant, who submissive? Is that an image which panders to some sort of male myth of female insatiability, the myth that when she says 'no' she really means 'yes'? Or is it an image which belittles men because it takes four men to satisfy one woman?
My own experience of pornography is that soft-core porn could well be seen as more demeaning to women than hard core, since soft porn tends to show women passively exposing themselves to the male masturbatory gaze, whereas the hard core pornography I have seen shows women as sexually active, actively seeking sexual pleasure.
MacKinnon and Dworkin seem to consider that sadomasochistic images concentrate on violence against women. Whilst there are certainly many such materials which do portray violence against women, the majority show men as submissive. 'Dominatrix' magazines show male slaves doing menial tasks around the house, taunted and abused by women. Prostitutes, such as Cynthia Payne and Lindi St Clair, have told us how many men enjoy being beaten, bossed around and dominated by women Other men will spend a weekend dressed in an oversized nappy being bottle fed and rocked to sleep by women 'carers'. I recall hearing a prostitute recounting on television how one of her regular clients always arrived with a box of cream buns he had bought on the way to visit her. He would stand at one end of the room opposite her standing at the other. Stripped to his socks, he would carefully remove the ribbon tying the box of buns, then proceed to take careful aim and throw them at her. He then dressed, paid and left. If there were, say, a video of that scene, would it be 'pornographic'? would it be arousing? To most of us, I guess, it would be perhaps funny, perhaps simply mystifying.
There has been some evidence quoted in the press that President Clinton genuinely did not consider that he was committing adultery when getting a blow-job from Ms Lewinsky. In some US states, oral sex is bizarrely classified as sodomy. In the UK, the mere representation of an erect penis, regardless of what might be done with it, is considered likely to deprave. The range of expression of human sexuality is so wide and so strange that it is virtually impossible for a single individual even to begin to understand what any given practice or portrayal of that practice might mean to anyone else:
... debates over eroticism and pornography tend to prove only that one person's erotica can be another's porn and, somewhat similarly, that one person's perversion can be another person's norm.
Williams (1993 p.51)
The question of norms is one which dominates where the moral right is concerned.. Claims that pornography leads to anti-social behaviour lend grist to their mill, but, essentially, their viewpoint is that pornography is, quite simply, 'wrong', 'immoral'. But, of course, it is not only the organized moral right who impose their norms of behaviour on others and norms are by definition not value-free.
So we find that in the notorious 1990 'Spanner' case fifteen men were sentenced at the Old Bailey for engaging in consensual acts of sadomasochism in private. Eight were given custodial sentences of up to four and a half years. They failed to have the sentences overturned on appeal, sentences which were higher than many of those meted out to the male perpetrators of sadomasochistic assaults on women. The case was finally taken to the European Court of Human RIghts, where it failed. If these men wished to inflict grievous bodily harm on one another what business is that of the police or the courts? The sentence appears simply to be an expression of what the judges considered to be the prevailing morality - in terms of the grievous bodily harm inflicted, how does this case differ from boxing? Boxing, however, is considered perfectly acceptable We find moral judgements reflected also in the concentration of police raids on gay pornography or, for example, the fact that the state of Illinois bans 'she-male' literature, in which in fact many of the she-males featured in the photographs are fully clothed. (Further details of the Spanner Case and its implications may be found at The Spanner Trust, part of the SKINTwo Online website.
Frances Scally (in Matrix (1996 : 75)) argues that the imposition of such moral norms, which are in part predicated upon a view of women's passivity and weak libido, reflects a fear of self-knowledge. For her, pornography is a means of breaking down such gender assumptions. It provides her with knowledge which allows her to explore and affirm her sexuality and individuality, and the unrestricted right to express ourselves sexually is, in her view, one vital component of true liberation.
Pornography may be used simply to satisfy curiosity about other people's sexual practices, in that respect not unlike the voyeuristic curiosity which leads us to be fascinated by 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries; it may be used as a source of amazement, not at all unlike our fascination with other behaviour we find peculiar - eating bicycles, for example, or climbing the north face of the Eiger alone; it may be used as the source of sexual fantasy; it may be used to cause sexual arousal to satisfy the sex urge through masturbation; it may be used to enable a male to provide a sample of sperm; it may be used to allow us to find different methods of sex which we might like to experiment with.
Wendy McElroy argues that pornography
McElroy (1995)
(See also Wendy McElroy's Site for Individualist Feminism, and Individualist Anarchism)
But none of these motives for using pornography necessarily leads us to imitate, or even approve of, the behaviour we witness. Sandra Lee Bartky writes of the 'unfortunate situation' of the feminist who has masochistic heterosexual fantasies, suggesting that such a woman is '"entitled" to her shame over the gulf between her erotic fantasies and her feminist aspirations (Bartky (1990) p. 60). I would argue, in contrast, that such a woman is 'entitled' neither to shame nor guilt, but rather to the lowering of ignorance about the nature of fantasy, and hence to the lowering of personal anxiety about the sources of sexual excitement. For pornographic fantasy has no straightforward connection with what would be presumed to be its 'real-life' enactment, unless it is stylized 'enactment' (as in consensual sado-masochism) under the fantasizer's own control.
Segal (1992a) p. 71
In so far as women are subordinated in our society (and a wealth of statistics demonstrate that indeed they are), there seems to be little evidence that pornography is the root cause. Referring to the legislative proposals from the anti-pornographers, which, as we have seen, she considers fundamentally misguided, Segal says:
.... such legislative proposals cost nothing and do nothing to provide real remedies against men's violence. State funding for women's refuges; anti-sexist, anti-violence educational initiatives; and, above all, empowering women more fundamentally through improved job prospects, housing and welfare facilities, would seem to be the only effective ways of enabling women to avoid violence.
Segal (1993 p. 18)
And Segal goes on to point out that it is precisely those areas where the circulation of pornography is limited, for example in states of the US with a preponderance of Southern Baptists, that gender inequalities are at their greatest. Furthermore, in Sweden and Denmark, where there is no censorship, there is also greater gender equality than in Great Britain or the US, as well as lower levels of violence against women.
If women organise instead of agonize, we can alter the shape of the [sex] industry on terms more suitable to our own uncharted pleasures. At least we can expand our historical experimentations in female sexual pleasure, and demand more power to come.
McClintock (1992 p. 131)
A sentiment powerfully echoed by Gayle Rubin in Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: an Analysis of Anti-Pornography Politics:
Instead of fighting porn, feminism should oppose censorship, support the decriminalization of prostitution, call for the abolition of all obscenity laws, support the rights of sex workers, support women in management positions in the sex industry, support the availability of sexually explicit materials, support sex education for the young, affirm the rights of sexual minorities and affirm the legitimacy of human sexual diversity. Such a direction would begin to redress the mistakes of the past. It would restore feminism to a position of leadership and credibility in matters of sexual policy. And it would revive feminism as a progressive, visionary force in the domain of sexuality.
(1993: 40)
The adult film industry is huge. Whilst in many aspects it is still linked to organized crime, it has also become vital to certain 'legitimate' economies, such as the San Fernando Valley, where, in 1999, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, investment in feature films declined by 13% while the production of adult films rose 25%. The adult film industry is estimated to contribute between 10,000 and 20,000 jobs to the area, bringing in some $4.1 billion per annum. Every year across the US, some 700,000 adult videos are hired, women, incidentally, making up around 40% of the adult video rental market. Porn star Jenna Jameson hosts a prime-time TV show, anal queen Alicia Klass appears in an ad for Virgin. $1 billion of the $7.8 billion spent on-line last year is estimated to have been spent on Internet porn and the market is expected to grow at 20% per year. Porn production companies are floated on the stock markets.
Whilst still contentious, no doubt, it begins to look as if porn is entering the mainstream, indeed some would say 're-emerging into' the mainstream after a couple of hundred years of having been forced underground. If I, at the end of these articles, should be required to come down for or against pornography, then it seems to me that by and large this re-emergence is to be welcomed, especially in the light of Rubin's points quoted above. I am not persuaded that most pornography is harmful, but, even if I were, then I would conclude that less harm would be done by its being legal and open than by its repression and criminalization.
An Historical Conspectus and Evaluation of Patriarchal Ideologies and Attitudes and the Policing of Domestic Violence - dissertation by Pamela Chanberlain
Feminists Against Censorship website
Statewatch database - monitoring the state and civil liberties in the European Union
Liberty Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain
US Libertarian Party and the Blue Ribbon Campaign
American Civil Liberties Union
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Legal Column Archives of Ford Marrin Esposito Witmeyer & Gleser, L.L.P. US-based law firm with some interesting on-line papers on Internet regulation
Media violence
EU legislation
Internet regulation
Regulation of the media in the UK
Bulletin Board on Film
Censorship - bulletin boards on a variety of film censorship topics; mailing
lists; numerous articles on film and other censorship in the UK
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