Pro-porn?

Joining the Why? Bandwagon.

I'm going to be the somewhat moderate voice here. For a long time I simply called myself "not anti-porn." I never really felt, even during my deeply feminist days, that porn was the problem. I'd used it before with lovers, and alone did the usual poor student's trawling of the Internet for interesting freebies. I bought a membership to a BDSM-related site I liked, and through that found myself actually helping with a redesign of a small site. I even contributed a text story to go with a set of images on the site to which I had a paid membership.

But I didn't really think of myself as pro-porn in the sense a lot of anti-porners use the term either. The mainstream porn I used had all been stuff I used to enhance sex with a former lover, and all of it was from his collection. The BDSM stuff and woman-made stuff was far from mainstream porn (and no, I never had a membership to Suicide Girls, the site anti-porners love to use as a blanket reason why there supposedly is no such thing as really non-mainstream porn.)

I was getting into feminism. Hearing critiques of mainstream porn that, honestly, made a lot of sense. That it was stereotypical. That it was focused on men's pleasure and men's fantasies. That for many women it's a shitty job. That women can easily be pressured into things they don't really want to do, and that pressure wrt sex can be far scarier than pressure in other jobs. That much of women's pleasure is faked.

I stopped consuming mainstream porn. I didn't want to look at it. My mind was so saturated with anti-porn arguments that even my favorite pieces of porn, images that I'd previously felt sure depicted actual sexual pleasure on the parts of the participants, began to look fake to me. Soon after that, any moans sounded like moans of abuse or pain to me. I found I couldn't look at all.

A while after that I stopped consuming porn altogether, even some of the stuff made by people I'd talked to myself and knew weren't lying about their work being a labor of love. I felt I couldn't tell any more if they were deluded, buying into patriarchy, mentally unstable, lying.

I was having problems in general with my libido. Any images or thoughts of BDSM made me think of violence, immediately filling my head with thoughts of domestic violence and of men using women. I could barely get off at all, much less look at anything. Whenever I did it came with a lot of shame -- I've always been a sadomasochist and those were still, usually, the mental images that finished me off -- despite my wanting to vomit at the same time at what I no longer seemed capable to think of as anything but "violence."

Things changed when I thought long and hard about whether to purge my hard drive. I'd made a commitment to not consuming mainstream porn, and I couldn't swear none of it was. Since I'd mainly been an internet scavenger for freebies, I had no idea what might ultimately come from the Industry and what might not, other than a few things I could clearly source. I could keep all the stuff from the indie sites, but that seemed like a copout.

I felt like I'd reached a moment of truth: toss it all since I no longer knew what I could actually use... or keep it all.

I was very proud of my collection of porn -- much of it is quirky and reflects my personal taste. Very little of it is generic stuff that I've settled for because it's not to my taste but okay for a wank. A lot of it is artistic. Most of it is interesting and odd. Throwing it out seemed like a terrible waste and a radical break with my past.

I kept it all.

I realized that, yes, in many ways that "mainstream vs. non-mainstream" division isn't a magical feminist solution to the Porn Problem.

I realized that I wanted to use porn, and that if I was going to use any of it, I was going to use all of it that I liked, thanks.

When I gave myself that permission, my libido came back. Because suddenly I no longer saw women's liberation as a matter of what got me hot. I wasn't saving anyone by not consuming porn, or by finding interesting fault lines on which to limit my consumption. I was killing my own sexual drive, because I was viewing the whole issue as "I must sacrifice my sexual spark for the good of Woman, since my sexual spark (sometimes) kindles to pornography and (often) to violent sexual fantasy."

I still don't yet love the term "pro-porn." It still smells a bit to me like an appelation that anti-porners stick on people who disagree with them, as pro-"life"rs stick "pro-death" on pro-choice people.

But "anti-anti-porn" isn't it either. It's not just that I don't like people deciding Porn Must Be Eradicated. It's that I think it's okay to make it. It's okay to use it. It's okay for it to be flawed and sexist and weird sometimes, even... because anything else can be.

Feminism is about fighting sexism, but no one calls for an end to Hollywood because there are some really sexist movies out there.

I'm pro-porn like I'm pro-movie: Make shit. Do shit. Get called on it when your shit is sexist. Hopefully, make less sexist shit later (what counts as "sexist" in my book is probably very different than what counts in most people's where porn is concerned), though I'm not expecting any more out of mainstream porn than I am out of Hollywood.

That's it.