Saturday, March 6, 2010

A Lesson In Anti-Porn Liberal Hypocrisy From AlterNet

It is pretty funny to see how liberals who are the most exercised about the innate evils of "mainstream porn" (or, as they also put it, "male-oriented porn") attempt to square their personal squicks with their political rhetoric.

Lately in some portions of the liberal-left press, much has been written or posted online about finding the perfect "alternative" to "mainstream porn", as a means of avoiding or sidestepping the heated issue of censorship, while attempting to replace such allegedly harmful, disgusting, and misogynistic material with content regarded as more "progressive", more "humane", and more "sexy".

As usual, the repository AlterNet is among the primary boosters of this strategy, allowing for the likes of Robert Jensen and Gail Dines to go off on the evils of porn, while simultaneously allowing others to promote "alternative" forms of erotica.

Unfortunately, to that end they sometimes will tend to cut corners and undermine the original founders to their political agenda.

Such a case I discovered today, when going through my Twitter account and discovering a reccommendation to an article that was posted last week to AlterNet titled "Is Hardcore Porn Played Out? A Site Showing Real People's Orgasms Give A Sexy Alternative".

The article, credited to a writer named Cherry Trifle from SeXis Magazine, consists of an interview with the owners and founders of a site called Beautiful Agony, which features basically porn shot from the neck up, promoting "real people having real orgasms", and specifically emphasizing shots of the performers/participants's faces when they come. The site basically invites participants to submit for pay their own videos, which are then published at their paysite.

In the interview, BA's founder, Richard Lawrence, explains why he developed his site and how he feels it to be different from "mainstream porn":


Cherry Trifle: You say that these videos are documentary, rather than performance…

Richard Lawrence: I think one of the biggest problems with the porn industry is that it doesn’t do a good job with its responsibility as a sex educator; which it is, regrettably—and not just for adolescents. Plenty of grownups have more sexual experience, in fact way more, through porn than with partners. As hardcore porn becomes more mainstream, people are developing these ridiculous notions of what women like, or what men like, and what people look like, or what is acceptable sexual behaviour.

I recently met a woman in her late 20s who told me she didn’t like anal sex, but had been doing it for years because she thought it was expected of all women, just as she’d seen in all the porn DVDs. And isn’t it incredible that not all women like to have five guys come in their face at once? In gonzo porn, it’s shown that all sex acts have their price, and so does every woman, as the host picks up a “random girl” from the street and peels off $100 bills in the back of a van. In fact, through running Agony, I have come to despise [traditional] porn rather than just be bored with it; porn could do so much to enhance sexual relationships, yet overwhelmingly, [porn] works against them through the depiction of sexual practices without context or informed consent.

There is a whole other side to Beautiful Agony that many people overlook, the section called “Confessions.” In these interviews or self-filmed revelations, the “Agonees” tell us—usually very frankly—all about their sex lives, and their stories are often remarkable.
One of my favorites is the well-spoken 20-something who decided to try out her new sex toy on the commuter train home, only to find that the lock on the bathroom door didn't quite work, much to the astonishment of an older lady passenger… After listening to a few of those stories you start to take a bit more notice of, well, things.
Notice how Lawrence simply restates most of the antipornfeminists' major critiques of "mainstream porn": that it disregards emotion and "love" for the quick facial; that it depicts sex outside of "context" (presumably, of love or emotion, as if lust or sexual pleasure isn't a legitimate emotion in and of itself);  that it degrades the performers by not requesting their "informed consent" to perform those acts; and that it reduces sex to a commodity to be exchanged for quick cash.

The only difference between Lawrence and Gail Dines, though, is that rather than censor porn outright as Dines and other antipornradfems would support, Lawrence would rather people discover and find his site as a supposedly healthy, "progressive" alternative that would improve human sexual relationships...though with the implied hope that if enough people do cross over, "mainstream porn" would wither away and die on its own.

Now, there's nothing wrong with encouraging alternative visions of erotica or supporting alternative means of sexual media, and I begrudge Mr. Lawrence nothing on his vision of erotica. What bothers me, though, is that like the antiporn radfems, he takes a very distorted view of what "mainstream porn" actually is and consists of, taking the widely maligned "gonzo" style as representative of the ONLY popular form of the genre of explicit sexual media.

Apparently, Mr. Lawrence wasn't around when Candida Royalle came out with her "feminist porn" label of hetero hardcore (via her Femme Productions series) which featured very real performers having very real orgasms and the same deemphasis on facials in favor of PIV shots (although, she had plenty of below the waist shots). And what about the recent rise of "alt.porn", which also bucks the trend of "gonzo" by offering girls that defy the supposed "male-oriented" stereotypes of big fake boobs and fake orgasms?

My real issue, though, is in the distortion that was used by AlterNet in posting the article at their site to begin with.  The actual SeXis site is far, far, more inclusive regarding sexual ideology....in fact, none other than Nina Hartley has a regular Tuesday podcast there.....and last time I checked, she was still taking facials and doing at least some anal. Indeed, the original title for the interview was slightly different from the spin that AlterNet took: Capturing The Face Of Orgasm: In & Out With Robert Lawrence, Founder of Beautiful Agony.

Whether it was the AlterNet publisher's decision to use the more...shall we say, direct byline for reproducing that interview, or whether Ms. Trifle gave them the approval to alter the title; it certainly sounds as if AlterNet distorted the article to support their agenda of going after "mainstream porn" while sidestepping the calls for "censorship:.

And the AlterNet agenda is not so veiled by other articles referenced in the piece, with titles such as:

"There's More To Sex Than Just A Cum Shot: What Men Need To Unlearn From Hardcore Porn"

"Why Men Fake Orgasms"

"You Like That, Baby, You Like That? Has Porn Made Men Bad At Sex?"

"Why I Quit Working In Porn"

Not exactly the "men are beasts and rapists" rhetoric of Maggie Hays and Kathleen Barry, but not that respectful of their free choices and ability to respect women, either.

Perhaps the folks at AlterNet would prefer to actually talk to and listen to a few men who are into "mainstream porn" before they decide to pass their judgments.

1 comment:

  1. When I first saw this post, I thought Anthony was talking about last month's "mainstream porn"-bashing article on Alternet. Specifically, Why I Had to Stop Making Hardcore Porn, which unfortunately gathered some laudatory press at Good Vibes Magazine and Ms Naughty's blogs. (I left my two cents about it at the Good Vibes post.)

    Why I Quit Working in Porn", also from SexIs, is actually one of the few porn-positive articles that Alternet picked up. Its about working as a Prague glamour porn photographer, and has much good to say about the models there, but the strangely non-specific nature of the article and the mismatch in details with the author bio over on SexIs makes me suspect the article might simply be a piece of fiction dreamed up by a freelance writer wanting to sell an article to a sex magazine.

    As for this latest article, my first reaction upon seeing it that the interview was with Richard Lawrence was about glass houses and stones. For those not familiar with him, he's head of a company called Feck (which also runs the more explicit I Feel Myself), which is part of the emerging Melbourne-based Aussie independent porn milieu, alongside with GMedia (Abby Winters) and Gonzo Media (Girls Out West). Now if you were to take the word of Liandra Dahl, from her now-defunct blog a couple of years back, Lawrence and GMedia producer Garion Hall were the worst thing to ever happen to women's sexual self-expression. Not that I agree, but Lawrence really wants to toss around the "I despise other people's porn" canard around, he's just as vulnerable.

    This, and a lot of the behind-the-scenes grousing between Feck, GMedia, and a few upset former models wouldn't amount to much, but for the fact that it was picked up by a crusading right-wing journalist, who's managed to get the Abby Winters offices raided and, more recently, Garion Hall hauled up on obscenity charges. The latter going to trial this month and may well determine whether porn will be legally produced in Victoria state at all. If not, that maybe the end of Abby Winters and Aussie porn, as there really aren't other places in Australia with more liberal laws. So while Lawrence can bitch all he wants about the evils of hardcore porn, the fact is that anti-porn laws will drag his ass down too, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from it.

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