One Gyrl’s Take on the Stop Porn Culture Conference
When I think of the international Stop Porn Culture (SPC) conference I attended in Boston last June, the first image that comes to mind is of a giant plastic foot with a slot in it for men to ejaculate into (Dr. Gail Dines discussed this during her presentation). The first phrase that comes to mind is humantoiletbowls dot com, the domain name of a mainstream porn site. And the first sound that comes to mind is that of a young boy gasping for breath as he is suffocated and raped by a trusted adult man addicted to pornography.
If what you’ve just read disturbs you, it should distress you even further to know that children are consuming porn at a younger age than ever before. Indeed, according to one of SPC’s presenters, the fourth most common word searched for by children is “sex,” (and what do you think shows up after such a search?); the fifth is “porn”. Where do you think your children are getting their sex-education, parents? Not from the “abstinence only” school curricula, that’s for sure.
Pornography is increasingly impacting our emotional health as well. Dear Abby had a sixteen-year-old girl write to her about porn addiction! Porn addicts have even been known to sing songs to their porn collections and stay home from vacation to masturbate to images. While we all were aware of the financial collapse, how many of us knew that men working at the Securities and Exchange Commission were jerking off to Internet porn, some as much as eight hours a day? And porn has increasingly come to (negatively) impact intimate relationships; some dub it the new “other woman.”
But, as is obvious to every woman alive, not everyone sees our porn-saturated society as a problem. As one of the founding members of Stop Porn Culture, Dr. Gail Dines, pointed out at the first SPC conference, while porn has become increasingly harsh, a feminist challenge to the porn industry has gone underground. Thus, SPC was founded in the hopes of bringing a radical feminist analysis of pornography back to the forefront of the feminist agenda. In order to combat porn, Dr. Dines suggests raising pornography consumption as a public health issue, much as was done with smoking. While this idea may be the most pragmatic way to challenge the industry, I’m saddened the exploitation of women required to make pornography does not in itself cause outrage. Perhaps male violence could be incorporated into a “public health” approach, but how likely this would be in a male-dominated society, I do not know. Yet, just the act of lessening porn production and consumption would have the effect of decreasing some violence against women, clearly a feminist goal.
Somewhat similarly, the topic of porn and capitalism came up among conference attendees. Several of the conference-goers I talked to seemed to believe if capitalism is dismantled, violent porn would cease to exist. I found this a rather odd assumption, since male supremacy is clearly present in non-capitalist societies. What reason is there to believe the images created by this imaginary society would be kinder and gentler to women? None, as far as I can tell.
These thoughts were echoed by the speakers on the panel regarding legal approaches to challenging the pornography industry. The first scholar, a woman from Durham University, stated that any new laws confronting pornography should be based on a feminist analysis of the industry as opposed to a moral one. The following presenter, Diane Rosenfeld, reminded us that the feminist community has a limited amount of monetary and time resources; we have to decide what the best use of these resources is: legal, education, etc. Rosenfeld also gave us a fairly recent example, the case of Abu Ghraib, where pictures were used to indict individuals for actions. But, when it comes to women, torture is a means to male sexual pleasure.
So, what did I take away from this feminist anti-pornography conference—in addition to overwhelming anger, that is? One of the main messages I got was that there are women fighting back; despite what the pornographers say, women will not be cowered into silence. Even if half the male population gets off to our pain, we will not go down without a fight. We will not give in to your phallic-like missiles, knives, and guns because we have justice on our side.
July 12th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
The Ms. Magazine blog has posted two parts of an ongoing interview of Gail Dines by Shira Tarrant, who declares herself emphatically not anti-porn. It may appear Ms. is giving free rein to both sides of the argument, but the moderators have seen fit to censor at least two of my comments, so far. The first was the product of extreme exasperation, so I thought perhaps that decision could be justified, but at this point, I think they are trying to drive me away.
This was the first comment, which would have followed this one:
I had quoted a passage from Gloria Steinem, from the beginning of the chapter Erotica vs. Pornography in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, since my attempt to draw a distinction between erotica and pornography was met with derision and insinuations the distinction I drew was capricious and inaccurate. This was what I quoted from Ms. Steinem:
The second censored comment, on Part 2, would have followed this one:
July 13th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
The Ms. blog entries about the Gail Dines interview are fairly quiet today, only one new comment. Since it has been over 24 hours since my last attempt, back on Part 1 in response to notorious pornography industry flack Sheldon accusing Gail Dines of taking money from “a fundamentalist Christian outfit that wants abortion outlawed,” I presume I have been censored again.
My third censored comment would have followed this one:
I found out where Sheldon probably got his information. Good old Violet Blue. She posted on her blog a screen shot of the whois listing for the Stop Porn Culture website.
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At the time she wrote that, unless she photoshopped the listing, Skyward-bound Productions was the registrant and administrator, though that says nothing about the owner or financier, and in her blog post she does not say who owned the site, referring to the webmaster. Sheldon quoted her linked San Francisco Chronicle column, where she says, “Stop Porn Culture is registered and owned by Skyward-bound Productions.” However, she does not mention abortion at all in either piece, so it is not clear how Sheldon arrived at the conclusion that rather small web design company owned and financed Stop Porn Culture, and he does not explain his reasoning. I imagine it is supposed to be self-evident, but especially since the listing is obsolete, I think he and Violet Blue merely jumped to self-serving conclusions. The current registrant is Lierre Keith, who has been made aware of this. I also requested information from Skyward-bound Productions about any connection with Stop Porn Culture, but I have not yet received a response. The proprietor is Christian, but after reading some of his forum I got no impression he is a rabid fundamentalist who wants to outlaw abortion. He ran for local office in his town. One would think if abortion was such a big issue for him, that would figure prominently in his postings on his forum, but I could not find any mention of it.
Another bizarre reversal on the Ms. blog was posted by “sex worker” Jill Brenneman, who took a man to task for objecting to the term sex-positive, suggesting the more accurate term would be pro-porn. She says,
Mislabeled, huh. Like my distinction between erotica and pornography was dismissed as a misuse of language. I think that title fits just fine, perhaps not so much to women who prefer to think of themselves as sex workers, but certainly to defenders of the industry such as Sheldon. Also, I know of no feminist who opposes the rights of women in the pornography industry. Some feminists, including myself, think such women have a right to a way out.
Perhaps what really annoyed Ms. Brenneman was the quote Mr. Silver posted from a talk delivered by Rebecca Whisnant at the conference “Pornography and Pop Culture: Re-framing Theory, Re-thinking Activism” (Boston MA, March 24, 2007)
I would not have thought Ms. Magazine would fall into that trap, but in light of what is going on, perhaps I was naive about that.
Another ironic twist is what happened the last time I thought the Ms. blog was censoring me, on the entry Meet the New Kid on the Block: Male Studies. I received this on May 7 in response to my query ten days earlier:
I had to guess at the punctuation, since some of those I surmise were semicolons got garbled in the transmission. Now it appears the moderators wish to chase me away. Is this what mainstream feminism has come to? They allowed plenty of comments in defense of Gail Dines, but mine are apparently too sharp, pointed, angry, exasperated, sarcastic? What? If Lierre Keith or Gail Dines gives me definitive information that shows this allegation by Sheldon is full of crap, I will attempt to post that, and if that is censored, I will raise hell.
July 13th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Gail Dines posted her opening speech at the conference on her blog
July 14th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Sheldon Ranz is in his full glory today, accusing Gail Dines of being a closet prude, repeating his borderline slanderous, obsolete at best, claim about who maintains and finances the Stop Porn Culture website on Part 2, and stating that Jersey Jaxin had a falling out with Shelley Lubben, so her profile was taken down. Funny, the link I posted still works. I wonder if Sheldon has been made aware that the Ms. moderators have censored more than one of my comments.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
My censored comments are no longer censored. I do not know what happened or why, but it appears several more comments from previous days have also suddenly appeared. Perhaps the moderators were trying to prevent the discussions from turning into train wrecks, then decided censoring comments was not helping matters.
Sheldon has not responded to my request for evidence. It is possible he has not noticed it, since Part 1 has had no comments since Tuesday.
July 17th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Sheldon did respond at 6:43 PM, but at the time of my previous comment, his comment had not been approved. He cited another site organized by Violet Blue, http://ourpornourselves.org, which has a page devoted to Stop Porn Culture. Curiously, it seems a bit more objective than the pieces I linked above, even stating
Neither is there any mention on that page of Stop Porn Culture taking money from its website hosts or designers, nor of abortion.
Sheldon Ranz and Violet Blue take exception to the current web host, bluehost.com, allegedly owned by homophobic Mormons, which happens to be the second outfit on a list of web hosting companies recommended by WordPress. I suppose by that logic, I should boycott WordPress.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Sheldon ramped up his mudslinging in response to me pressing him.
I attempted to respond, but surprise, surprise! My comment is still in moderation.
I do have some sympathy for the moderators, but how they can think it is appropriate to allow Sheldon to sling his mud while censoring me really makes me wonder whose side they are on. Can it be Ms. Magazine thinks Sheldon Ranz is an unbiased expert on the pornography industry? Or is it just my comments are too heated or inflammatory, so unlikely to lead to any kind of resolution of the “sex wars?” Sheldon calls himself a “liberal feminist.” I think he is a liberal, fine, but I want nothing to do with his brand of feminism.
There have been only three approved comments since Friday, one being what I quoted above from Sheldon. Perhaps there have been more comments held up in moderation, or perhaps people are waiting for Part 3.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Found via a Facebook friend, Quotes from Jenna Jameson in her book How to make love like a porn star, a cautionary tale. It is not a pretty picture.
July 20th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
My long comment is still in moderation, but the link to that YouTube video above was approved at the Ms. blog. There was a trackback to Part 2 from last week I had not noticed, from none other than Violet Blue, who highly recommended that “refreshingly balanced article.” So I had to try to comment about that.
Who knows if that will pass the standards of the moderators. I see one comment posted after mine has already been approved, so I am betting mine will not be. Who knows. The comment that was approved was by one of the Ms. bloggers on her own entry, so of course that would go through right away.
Another ironic twist is that while I was roundly ridiculed for protesting pornography on one of the disappeared incarnations of the Randi Rhodes forum, I was never censored or even warned by the moderators there.
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:41 pm
The previous comments got approved today. The entries are eerily quiet otherwise. Part 3 will presumably be out shortly.
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:47 pm
This article is more than a bit unfair and even more unbalanced. Porn is no more addicting than any other subject that someone can derive pleasure from, be it drugs, alcohol, etc. It has already been proven that abstinence only curricula doesn’t work, and that all it does is keep the information from teenagers who are going to have sex. Abstinence only is the equivalent of not potty training a child and then expecting him to not use the bathroom. Sex and the desire for sex is a biological function, a response to the body entering the age where, when our species was young, reproduction was the most feasible.
I completely agree with Abby’s take that pornography gives a distorted view about what sex is about, because it does. I also agree that pornography is mainly consumed by men, but definitely not entirely. Pornography is just as demeaning to men, especially minority males, as it is to females. As a man I am also offended by your assertion that men always enjoy sex, all the time. Many male pornographic actors end up taking erectile dysfunction medication in order to perform in scenes, and female actors are, on a whole, paid significantly more in the porn industry.
And that is what it is, an industry, a job, a job that requires being comfortable with certain things but a job none the less. Does everyone enjoy their job, no, does that make it exploitation, no. You act as if every porn actress wasn’t a porn actress they would be an astrophysicist or a doctor, while in truth most would be a waitress or something like that. I would wager any amount of money that if you asked them would they prefer to be a porn actress or work at McDonald’s they would say Porn, because most jobs are just as demeaning but pay less.
July 24th, 2010 at 12:34 am
Who said “men always enjoy sex, all the time?” You jump to a lot of conclusions, Harry. Pornography may be demeaning to men, but the point of pornography is that women are sex objects for male pleasure. There is no equivalency. Most jobs may be demeaning in one sense or another, but the point of most jobs is something other than to reduce women to sex objects so men can get off on it. Again, there is no equivalency. Your argument is straight out of what some call postmodern hell.
All people have skills and talents. Not everyone gets a chance to develop them. If women in the “industry” were offered that chance, I have strong reasons to believe most would jump at it. The point is, the devaluation of women in this culture creates the context in which it seems becoming a prostitute or pornography “actress” is the best some women can aspire to. These are not jobs; they are traps.
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Gail Dines has a brief article on CounterPunch published yesterday, complete with a link to Amazon to buy her book Pornland, The Stepford Sluts.
The entries on the Ms. blog have been quiet for several days, after I responded to Sheldon affirming that I am “sex-negative” by saying I could ask for a definition, but since there could be no possible common ground on the meaning of that insult, why bother? Another entry was posted critical of Hugh Hefner, but curiously, nobody ventured to defend him.
August 16th, 2010 at 7:33 am
One critical issue to prostitution and pornography that gets swirled into maximum confusion is the meaning of consent. Nobody will defend selling a woman as a sex slave, unless she has a say in it. Suddenly that makes it just another choice, to those who think some women sell themselves as sex slaves of their own free will. Leaving aside the blatant contradiction inherent in that concept, if one is concerned with more than technical legal issues, I think a feminist approach demands an examination of why a woman would make such a choice. Is it really a free fully informed unpressured choice between reasonable alternatives?
In rare cases, that may happen, but I contend the vast majority of women who choose sex slavery as a career do not see a reasonable alternative, so the choice is constrained, uninformed, and made under pressure. This is consent? Consent contaminated to such an extent is meaningless, yet this is supposed to be a fact of life, that men are entitled to buy sex or watch images of sex slavery.
It is argued, this is comparable to wage slavery, and it is true enough that many jobs are a meaningless grind, endured for the paycheck. This is a failure built into the economic model. If it were otherwise, if the economic system enabled everyone to thrive by developing their best talents and skills, no woman would have to face the desperation of seeing no reasonable alternatives. This may seem hopelessly impractical, but what does the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness really mean when so many people can aspire to no more than being cogs in the corporate machinery?
Since the economic model is what it is, the question is raised, why blame the victims? Why are prostitutes criminals, while those who buy them are just bad boys being boys? The reverse has been tried, with promising results. One may think I am suggesting buyers or makers of pornography should be criminals, since the consent of the women is questionable. To deal with the symptoms of prevalent economic and value systems while leaving them intact is bandaging the problems at best. I think it makes more sense to treat pornography as an extremely costly luxury than as a law enforcement nightmare, unless the women are getting physically injured or underage. I draw that line because that is where informed consent is impossible. Perhaps if the buyers of pornography had to pay enough tax so the cost was comparable to a work of erotic art, they might consider buying art instead. This is far from an ideal solution, but if the economic and value system are taken for reality, I think it is better than treating pornography and prostitution as normal facts of life. Ultimately I insist the solution is to provide women better alternatives, but that would require profound revisioning of prevalent theories of value. My first blog entry was devoted to that subject.
One section of the much older Free Soil Party Bill of Missing Rights says,
What is the point of education, if not to provide an opportunity for fulfilling and meaningful employment? But of course, the powers that be do not see it that way.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
This was my latest response to Sheldon, who reacted to my thoughts about logic by saying my theory of knowledge sounded like nihilism.
August 30th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Jennifer Drew posted to the Global Sisterhood Network today an illuminating article from The Irish Times on increasing violence experienced by prostitutes.
I quoted that sentence about the link between increased aggression and more degrading demands from younger men with the universal availability of hard pornography on the third segment of the Ms. blog interview of Gail Dines, asking Sheldon if he cared to comment. Certainly he and other pornography apologists find the link possible to ignore; I predict he will claim the link is unproven, or that the increased violence experienced by prostitutes is unproven. Sheldon is very big on proving things, as a major fan of Mr. Spock, the supremely logical science officer in the original Star Trek series. Apparently his confusion of my philosophy with nihilism arose from his conflation of knowing things and proving them.
Last Friday Gail Dines posted a direct response to Shira Tarrant, to defend her assertion that pornography is racist. The fireworks show no sign of abating, as the whitewashers of the pornography industry attempt to defend it by saying not all pornography is sexist or racist. Why is that relevant, and why is it these apologists refuse to recognize that what they call non-sexist, non-racist pornography, if it indeed qualifies as such, should be called something else, such as erotica? Why would they not wish to disassociate depictions of “shared sensuality,” as Gloria Steinem put it, from clearly sexist and/or racist depictions of the sexual abuse of women? These apologists shy from making such a distinction because they prefer to claim the opponents of pornography are sex-negative prudes who think any depiction of sexuality should be banned! Some people do believe that, but they are generally religious fanatics, not feminists.