Well, I agree with your anti-censorship position.

The rest of the piece brings up a lot of interesting issues but, in general, I would challenge your normative position that erotic cruelty, humiliation etc.. are inherently “bad” in consensual sexual relations, any more than, for example, tragedy or violence or humiliation on stage or in films are bad.

One of the things that makes us different from animals is that we don’t just have sex. We have narrative and ritual with our sex. Some people like a romantic narrative with their sex, others thrilling, others shocking. The important thing is that all participants consent and enjoy it.

What I find much more worrying and artificial is the idea that sex shouldn’t have a narrative at all, that it is purely functional (for procreation) as the original anti-porn brigade, the religious, claim. All pornography (mainstream or the more interesting) challenges that.

In brief, part of the Bill sets out to ban various forms of ‘extreme’ pornography, including bestiality, necrophilia and some ’snuff’ porn.

None of which is problematic – the difficulty with the Bill, as with all forms of censorship, is that what is ‘extreme’ can only be defined in subjective terms, hence the fear that what will also be criminalised will be consensual BSDM images.

In that there is a distinction to be drawn between the porn produced for the BSDM market, which is as likely to cast males in submissive situations and pseudo-BDSM produced for the mainstream market in which women are invariably depicted in submissive roles.

What isn’t extant in porn is almost as critical as what is – to whit, respect, tenderness, human emotion, sensitivity.

Apart from in the growing market for ‘female-oriented’ porn, most of which is produced by female directors and, in the main, female-owed production companies – that’s markets for you – as more women get over the old sexual taboos and start getting into porn, the more the porn industry is starting to cater for their tastes, which tend to run far more to eroticism and sensuality then the old ‘in and out’.

I passionately believe -that physically and emotionally violent pornography is symptomatic of an endemic social paradigm wherein masculine power and cruelty is eroticised, and that this paradigm leads to sexual violence amongst many, many other atrocities.

Study after study has failed to establish any clear link between porn and sexual violence, hence the two studies showing that the increase in availability of porn in the US and Japan is correlated with a reduction of the incidence of rape and other forms of non-consensual sexual violence. As with the Reagan-era attempt to demonstrate a link between porn and rape, what the research shows is that what porn creates is masturbation and this serves as a palliative rather than a trigger in the majority of men.

Much as in the ‘signature’ case relating to this bill, the murder of Jane Longhurst, much was made of his admission that was ‘addicted’ to ‘extreme’ porn, much less attention was given to the fact that he had had ‘murderous thoughts’ since the age of 15 and showed signs of a pre-existing sociopathic disorder.

Rape, all other sexual violence, extreme female submission, double- and triple-penetration, humiliation, sexual cruelty – all of this fails even to make it into the draft bill, because it’s been normalised in western society.

Hardly – most of the more ‘violent’ material is still very much niche market and the dynamics of sexual behaviour are complicated – for example, its now becoming well documented that abstinence pledge programmes in the US cause unexpected modifications in sexual behaviour. Teenager girls who have taken such pledges have been show to be likely to delay their first experience of full vaginal intercourse by 18 months to 2 years, but are also four times as likely to have engaged in either oral or anal intercourse as an alternative than teenagers who don’t take the self-denial route.

It’s also not true to say that this is a ‘western’ thing either – try looking at what passed for erotica in 17th Century Japan, nor it is particularly modern, as you’ll quickly discover should you ever manage to get a pass to the restricted section of the British Library or the Bilbliotheque Nationale.

Another excellent post., with which I broadly agree. The problem is that the values of most porn films (the job of women is to pleasure men) are being increasingly refelected in wider society. Porn is a fiction, a show, and a pretty bad one at that, but people are taking it as reality. That’s what I find really depressing.

Excellent post.

I think the thing that seems to be missing from these discussions a lot of the time is the fact that porn is a business and, as such, is not simply the unmediated reflection of what “consumers” want.

There’s obviously a relationship between what people want and what they get – but the producers of porn set the agenda to an extent – and gear their productions towards making money. There is an ideology that goes with this, as well as with the owners’ relationship to workers in the industry.

I wonder if the owners interests somehow cut against allowing performers the kind of autonomy that would allow the “quality” to improve. Better to have a production line with tick boxes of pre-defined acts than, cough, giving performers their head, cough, and producing something that feels a little more human.

I don’t think that most men actively want violent sexual images (although I’m sure some do) – but perhaps there’s something about the industry that pushes a lot of it that way. I suspect a core part of this is the voyeuristic nature of porn where no human relationship is required – let alone consent – so sex becomes separated from the social and therefore porn that features love doesn’t fit the medium in the same way that porn that features ever more sensationalised imagery.

I think.

@ Unity – I think the article’s claim is that the wider fetishisation of male cruelty in society leads to sexual violence, and specifically not that porn does…

Jim Jay: I wonder if the owners interests somehow cut against allowing performers the kind of autonomy that would allow the “quality” to improve.

If you think about it, this can’t be true, because the barriers to entry are too low. The things you need to set up a porn company — such as still cameras, video cameras, websites — are all easily affordable by the average person in an industrialised country.

John B: I think the article’s claim is that the wider fetishisation of male cruelty in society leads to sexual violence, and specifically not that porn does…

I have friends who are into BDSM within a consensual relationship or setting, and they are not cruel or violent, in fact they are kind, helpful, decent people.

So if that’s the claim, I say it’s bollocks.

There’s one major thing missing from this critique, as there nearly always is from feminist criticism of porn – the admittance that the women that appear in it are doing so of their own free will, and that, shock horror, a good proportion of those that appear in it actually enjoy doing so. Yes, some of them are doing so because they have drug habits, and yes, some of them are in the porn industry because it was the last place they had to turn to, and others have been introduced to it when at their most vulnerable, but certainly the vast majority now are doing so out of free choice, or to make money so they can go through college, etc. We can argue about whether it’s the best place for them to be doing so – but it won’t do to ignore the fact that this is about choice just as much as anything else.

I could take issue with most of this post and its atypical feminist outrage tone, which really grates, incidentally, and I consider myself more than sympathetic to feminist argument, at least of the moderate variety, but this part instead will suffice:

“Rape, all other sexual violence, extreme female submission, double- and triple-penetration, humiliation, sexual cruelty – all of this fails even to make it into the draft bill, because it’s been normalised in western society.”

Probably because, with the exception of double penetration and humiliation (subjective, but I find “bukkake”, choking and slapping extremely unpleasant and humiliating and won’t watch anything with the last two in), all the other things mentioned are still incredibly rare in porn and you’ll have to go out of your way to find those niches. I’m not ashamed (all right, I am a little) to admit I watch a fair amount of pornography, and I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed a staged rape in porn, extreme female submission or sexual cruelty. All three occur far more in mainstream films than they do in most pornography. It depends what you mean by triple penetration, whether we’re talking 2 men and a dildo, but that also is very rare, mainly for the obvious reason being that it’s rather difficult for three men to have sex with a woman at once, or at least penetrating her all at once. It also hasn’t been normalised in western society – rather, it’s been normalised in mainstream pornography, and that is the real issue we should be discussing, and one that you do mention, being the lack of tenderness in pornography, and how that impacts on sexual urges, especially among the easily impressionable young, who see such porn and then get the idea that such sex is either natural or aspirational. This doesn’t just affect men incidentally – recent polls suggested that young girls are growing up with the idea that catering to their sexual partner’s every whim is something they must do, and pornography and patriarchy cannot be wholly blamed for that.

I do of course agree with your anti-censorship view, but back up Nick and Unity’s arguments otherwise.

Cabalamat: As I, too, have a lot of friends (including myself and my housemates) who are into the fetish/BDSM scene, I have tried to word the article carefully to exclude that element of sexual play. In fact, I believe that some of the role-play within specific BDSM erotica/play is about as far from normalised gender paradigms as you can get – the power relations are fantasised, and partners of both sexes can play dominant or submissive.

Septicisle – I’m afraid I, too, watch a fair amount of pornography and, from my experience, depictions of violent and cruel acts within the pornographic idiom aren’t rare at all. Maybe we’ll just have to disagree!

-’recent polls suggested that young girls are growing up with the idea that catering to their sexual partner’s every whim is something they must do, and pornography and patriarchy cannot be wholly blamed for that’

By ‘patriarchy cannot be blamed for that’, do you mean that men cannot be blamed? Women and those who raise them are almost equally involved in patriarchy, even if their privilege within the system is not the same. And young girls, more and more often, are also exposed to porn and to pornographic conceits – like young boys, young girls have sexual desires and will seek these things out, although there is not as much of a tradition of shared or open porn consumption.

Scepticisle:

There’s one major thing missing from this critique, as there nearly always is from feminist criticism of porn – the admittance that the women that appear in it are doing so of their own free will, and that, shock horror, a good proportion of those that appear in it actually enjoy doing so.’

I felt I ought to respond to this separately. The ‘porn artists enjoy it!’ argument is rather a fallback position of the patriarchal pro-porn league – yes, sex workers of any kind are people too, often people who really need the money, which is why things like the IUSW and other sex artists’ unions need to exist. However, whether or not the models are there of their own free choice is rather missing the point.

The point is that images like this – damaging images – are being produced and influencing massive sections of the population, and those images need to be critiqued, just as any mass media needs to be critiqued.

That porn actors and actresses are there by choice, however limited that choice may be, is rather a given. If it were an industry standard that they were all sex slaves forced into humiliating themselves on film, we’d have a much more clean-cut debate on our hands!

That in turn then also opens up the other obvious argument – that without pornography, which is an outlet for sexual frustration, there’d be a lot more sexual assaults. Those who make this argument often point to Japan, where although there is curious censorship of genitals for instance, pornography, explicit manga etc are freely available, the crime rate is far lower than in Western states which take a different approach. It’s not one I wholly endorse, but if we’re going with the idea that pornography is always going to be damaging, as you appear to be suggesting, then there’s more than room for that retort too.

As the article states, this is a sticky issue – and the sticking point is exactly where the damage starts and how we can be sure any intervention is successful.

Sexual and psychological violence are, of course, damaging, counterproductive and completely preventable evils. I think we all agree on that, but the fundamental questions continue to be missed by the tendency to ideologise conclusions.

Is pornography the cause or the product of the illness, or is it just another link in the chain of psychological attitudes and social patterns? Is the commoditisation of personal behaviour an exchange of economic benefit at the expense of participants (on either or both the production and consumer sides)?

I think the traditional approach of polarising the debate into right/left arguments is flawed by the intractible conflict between those two interpretations of old liberal principles. I can also clearly see that the contradictions between these will be resolved and replaced as the march of technology impacts on the art and commerce of pornography to become ever more democratised.

Ultimately it is more satisfying to be a participant in the action than a member of the audience, but nobody can hold the stage indefinitely because the crowd will always want more.