Under what circumstances is it acceptable to simulate non-consensual or violent sex?
Defining porn
Everyone has their own images of what porn is, their own definitions, and, it seems, objections to what they think is disturbing, yet likes what they like. “Do what you will,” seems to be the frowning refrain, “but this is what I think is too disgusting or violent to be permitted.” With such subjective definitions of pornography, how do we legislate or make personal decisions on which depictions of sexuality are acceptable for society at large? Are there types of pornography that are definable beyond “I know it when I see it,” and are demonstrably unhealthy to society?
“Anti-porn legislation and censorship has consistently been used to silence a broad array of people, including sex writers like me who create theoretical or political material,” says Clarisse Thorn, in an interview with the GMP.
Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin famously said “All penetration is rape” and reading a book of her life in NYC, where every man she encounters, it seems, rapes her or fucks her over some other way, you can see where she came up with that. She became a separatist feminist touchstone, a force against pornography, and even against sex. Robert Jensen is a contemporary anti-porn crusader and feminist who positions himself, according to Charlie Glickman’s article, in Dworkin’s lineage.
But the third wave reversed trends toward considering all men and all sex to be inextricable from the patriarchy, with feminist women themselves magically extricable from patriarchal society. We’re all in this together, and if we want to get it on with one another—pleasurably, respectfully, and consensually—then the answers to our problems with one another, in the bedroom if no where else, must be faced—together, and with the same open and honest spirit. Today’s feminist is as likely to share politics with Clarisse Thorn: to be sex-positive and to embrace, at least in theory, even our dark and seamy desires for one another. The other morning, a young feminist who had traveled to the area to attend a queer conference sat at my table, talking about coalition politics and sex positivity. She had never even heard of Dworkin.
Rape Fantasies
But it’s not because we don’t still have the societal problems Dworkin faced. Among feminists in the 1970s there was a wide range of response to a culture of rape, patriarchy, and violence against women. At one end of the spectrum were the anti-porn crusaders, including Dworkin. Near the other end, far from the academy, were realizations that simulation of rape allows control over the experience. Pat Califia and others were unapologetic about their desires, including those that set them at odds against other feminists and lesbians.
In a short story called “Rape Fantasies,” written by Margaret Atwood in 1977, women share stories of the fantasies they have of being sexually assaulted. However, in their fantasies, the uninvited stranger is not unwelcome, and the women in the stories are not powerless. These are stories of rape without lack of consent or genuine powerlessness from assault: they are rape without the rape. Like a controlled BDSM scene with a trusted partner, pornography, including romance novels, “smut,” slash fiction, conversation and “sexting” can provide safe places to play out violent fantasies, which are different from reality in that the so-called victim—the submissive, or bottom—actively consents, sets parameters, makes choices, and can end the scene at any time with a safe word or by closing the browser window.
One woman in Atwood’s story tells a comical tale of fumbling her self-defense materials from her purse while the obliging would-be rapist holds it open for her until she can spray him in the eyes with lemon juice. Atwood’s story underscores the reality that women recognize, today and in Andrea Dworkin’s time: that the threat of sexual violence, particularly against women, pervades our society. We’re all capable of being seen as real, whole, dimensional beings by others, just as we see ourselves, and also of being seen as targets, not human beings. How does a woman deal with the helplessness of her reality? How do any of us?
IMPACT Training
Also out of the 70s is a form of role playing that used to be called “Model Mugging,” and is now called IMPACT training. In an article published on this site this week, a martial artist and self-defense instructor describes his role in one of these classes. Wearing full body armor, he plays out such convincing assault attempt scenarios with the women in his class (and they are usually women, though IMPACT also offers classes for other groups of people including the GLBT community and people with disabilities) that they feel the fear of a real attack and learn to fight from this state. By making the scenes as realistic as possible, engaging the women’s real fear and adrenaline response, and playing out defensive maneuvers under these conditions, the women in the class learn to fight when they’re afraid, and do it effectively.
BDSM
Pretending to be the victim of an assault, repeatedly, in which you reverse the attack and subdue your would-be attacker is one way to respond to the threat of violence. But people have other reasons for desiring this scenario, and some people find it so exciting that they want to incorporate it into their consenting, adult sex lives. It’s a different way of gaining control over an overwhelming situation.
Thorn writes, in the introduction to Violation: Rape In Gaming: “I have been writing and speaking about S&M for several years. As a feminist concerned with sexual assault, I have also been trained as a crisis counselor for assault survivors. Feminism and S&M may appear to be at odds, but they can be integrated by people with respectful communication skills and careful boundaries. In fact, feminism and S&M should be integrated, given that studies show about a third of women say they have rape fantasies.”
Video games
People watch horror movies, slasher films, they kill countless people in video games. We don’t censor much violence from children, except for sexual violence. So these entertainments in which we do not actually hurt anyone, only pretend to: what function do they serve in preserving cultural values around violence and sex? What do children and adolescents learn from pornographic violence in video games, and is it healthy or maladaptive?
Acting out rapes in video games could help soothe feelings of shame, or it could just water the seeds of later violence. I just don’t know,” admits Ben Keeler, who studies the effects of mentoring on boys and young men. “The act of experiencing a hyper-realistic portrayal of a rape, in which a boy is the perpetrator in a virtual video game context, might actually make him realize how bad the act is in real life. I saw a talk from a video game designer behind all the Grand Theft Auto games, and he said that many players came up to him and told him how emotional it was for them to make a decision, at one point in one of the games, whether or not to execute a man in front of them who was pleading for his life.”
Such an education could result in more or less sympathy for the victim, and the research is unclear. On one hand, common sense suggests that viewing pornography increases actual violence toward women. But in fact, “in at least a couple studies, it had the opposite effect: soothing or managing destructive thoughts with an outlet, of sorts,” says Keeler. Another perspective is that “any time we inflame emotions through external stimuli, we’re just making it easier for those emotions to flare up later.”
It’s lousy sex ed
Our politics are formed by our times, and our feelings and lived experiences get channeled into the pathways available. No one in the 1970s was addicted to video games. Yet young people experience a world even more saturated with porn than I did in the 1970s. To see my first images of naked women, I had to sneak down to the garage to see Dad’s stash of Playboys. Today, any 12-year-old has access to countless internet images. That they’re unreal, or unrealistic, only means that before people are mature enough to develop ideas of what bodies and sex are like based on reality, they’ve developed them based on animated gifs in sidebars, and the top results of 12-year-old inquisitives on Google. The very soft porn I had access to pales in comparison to the categories of rape-oriented video porn available online today.
“I think pornography can be liberating —it can be a window into a new way of thinking about sexuality,” says Hugo Schwyzer in an interview with the GMP. “It can help end the isolated sense that our fantasies are uniquely perverse. It can open us to new possibilities for pleasure. There’s a lot of porn that’s fun, joyous, life-enhancing.
“There’s also a lot of porn that’s monotonous, exploitative, and unimaginative. At its best, good porn centers consent, mutual pleasure and radical acceptance of a wide variety of bodies. Most of the best stuff is found well outside the mainstream.”
An experienced lover watching a porn knows which acts are for the camera, and are rarely performed in real life. Just as young people today complain that their lovers seem to have learned their (ineffective, even misogynistic) techniques and patter from watching porn, if porn today contains depictions of rape in which prior consent is not evident, will young people assume that this is the normal way to proceed? Will they categorize rape, “babysitter porn,” and gang bangs as simple and essential categories of sex, including “MILFs,” “facials,” and every other fetish catered to by porn websites? Or will their world be so different from ours that they no longer care how affected their sex has become, or what new taboos fascinate them?
Where does porn cross the line?
Actors’ consent
It comes down to two factors, in the words of most of the writers in this series on Men and Pornography, intention and consent. “Porn made with non-consenting actors is unacceptable. That includes porn made with children, and porn made with people who have been coerced,” says Thorn. So what about depictions of non-consent? If you watch a video depicting rape, on the presumption that the actors are paid and consenting, does that make you culpable if the actors were underage or coerced? If Thorn and others agree that porn is, in Hugo Schwyzer’s words, “as much about the intent of the producer as the perception of the person who watches it,” then how can it be objectively judged?
Porn doesn’t always look like what we think of as porn. It includes smut, video games, even fertility goddesses. It includes worlds of sexually explicit “slashfic,” fan-created stories, much of it created and consumed by women. “This is why, when Gail Dines argues that the internet has made men addicted to porn, and influenced men’s sexual fetishes until they make perverse demands on women, who themselves never enjoy porn and thus are free of sexual fetishes, I laugh until I can’t breathe,” writes Noah Brand.
“I don’t see a big difference between porn and erotica, or between porn and romance novels for that matter—except that they have different target audiences. In that sense, I suppose that I think of ‘porn’ as ‘visual media showing explicit sex, which is usually (but not always) aimed at stereotypical heterosexual cisgendered men,’” says Thorn.
Thorn promotes “fair trade” pornography, including a growing industry practice of including post-production interviews with the actors in which they are evidently consenting to the action in the scenes they filmed. Does this essentially change the product? Is it still effective rape porn as well as being “good”? Or does it still promote suffering?
What if the victim isn’t even an actor, but was never more than pixels, imagination, and programming? Are anime porn and video games in which rape is a possible player action okay? Do we even know why people are drawn to depictions of rape? While a rape in a video game may be arousing, what thoughts and actions do they actually stimulate in gamers? What about porn addiction: does that count as suffering?
Hugo Schwyzer says “the issue is less how much is consumed or spent than it is how it impacts the user. As with any addiction, when it interferes with your life” is when you know you have a problem with porn.
Thorn says, “The bottom line for me is that I am unwilling to censor art, even if we don’t call it ‘art’—and yes, I think porn and games can both be art!” She thinks it would be great if more pornographic videos, but also video games and other media appended post-production interviews with the actors to demonstrate their consent (while acknowledging that even these can be scripted.) But at least this would bring consent into porn, even—especially—when the scenarios get their thrills from the image of non-consent.”
When porn depicts rape, identification with and sympathy for the depicted perp and victim remain complicated. Even a single viewer’s perspective may veer from one actor to the other, depending on the action and the viewer’s state of mind. The answer to depictions of rape in video games and porn is not to try to eliminate it, but to understand what it feeds in those who seek it out.
“I think that attempting to force sexual fantasies into a narrow, politically correct box is a mistake. I’m an S&Mer and I have zero interest in being told that I ought not fantasize about violent sex, or that I ought not consume media that contains violent sex. But at the same time, narratives and metaphors can have a genuine and important impact on how humans think, especially if people aren’t critical about the context. I believe we should find a middle ground through education and awareness.”
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The Men and Pornography Series on The Good Life
Porn Star Philosophy, By John Dwyer
What do porn stars communicate through their tattoos?
pleasureland, a Poem by Rick Belden
One man’s pleasureland is another man’s nightmare.
A LOLcat Perspective on Purr-nography
Marcat LOLliams iz in ur porn stash, hazzing opinions, taking catnaps, and chasing shiny spots.
A Brief History of Porn, By Noah Brand
Erotic art has existed throughout human history. (Even before the internet.)
Fear the Towel, By Nathan Graziano
What goes down when the towel goes up at male strip clubs?
Women in Porn, By Elle Lynn Stanger
Suburban wife, mother, and sex worker Elle Lynn Stanger talks about the women and men who make and use porn.
How to (Not) Become a Male Pornstar, By Chris Wiewiora
Ever watched porn and thought, ‘I could do this, easy’?
Our Porn, Ourselves
Charlie Glickman maps the sexist anti-porn arguments of radical feminist Robert Jensen.
Pornography Ended My Marriage, By Kristin S. Luce
Is porn a good thing?
Confessions of a Recovered Porn Addict, By Ben Belenus
To prepare myself for writing today I watched some Internet porn.
Would the Buddha Look at Porn?
The porn industry causes suffering, says Keith Andresen, on why he abstains.
Why We Crave Porn, By Josh Merel
Although we treat porn as a commodity, it is actually a deeply desired human interaction.
The post The Utility of Violent Porn appeared first on The Good Men Project.
