The latest round of porn-bashing from the ostensibly liberal media comes in the form of a Washington Post editorial by Pornified author Pamela Paul. Apparently triggered by the news University of Montreal study that turned up no link between porn consumption and pathological behavior, Paul comes back to the porn wars after several year ready for a fight.
Paul wants us to know that porn is dangerous addictive stuff that is damaging society. Her evidence – the anecdotal reports of the self-described porn addicts she interviewed for Pornified (selection bias, anyone?) and, that favorite cudgel of the anti-porn movement, the studies of Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant. She then drops one of her favorite shocking assertions: when Zillmann and Bryant took their findings to an ethics committee, it was found that they had clearly demonstrated that exposure to porn was so harmful, that all further direct laboratory studies using exposure to porn were forbidden from that point forward.
This latter point is taken up as the basis for a column by the rather clueless Tracy Clark-Flory, a writer for Salon's feminist column Broadsheet. Clark-Flory admits that Paul "seem(s) to have an agenda of (her) own" and talks about her "ambiguity" about porn, but nonetheless, seems to be perfectly fine with passing along the claims by Paul, and Zillmann and Bryant without comment.
Now where to begin with all this? First, a quick note on the University of Montreal study that triggered the article. I've been aware of this study for several months, and yes, I agree with the criticisms of it – only 20 subjects, same age group from one college campus, no control group; that's not a good study, which is why I don't quote it. (I do want to note, however, that blogs like Jezebel that made much to-do about the flaws of that study were very quick to laud Melissa Farley's latest study on the evils that johns do, with seemingly no concern about its methodology or research ethics – funny thing that.) The most I can say about it is that it squares with the established body of research that has so far failed to find any overarching negative effect of porn exposure on psychologically normal men.
Now, as for Pamela Paul, she makes a big to-do about her interviews with self-described porn addicts, but a purely anecdotal study of a group that is selected for having a problematic relationship with porn doesn't tell you anything about the role of porn in the lives of all men, or even most men. But if we're going to bring out anecdotal books, why not give equal weight to David Loftus' Watching Sex? Which found men reporting that porn plays a much less problematic (and sometimes even positive) role in their lives, in stark contrast to the claims made by anti-porn activists (who often don't even talk to, much less study, male porn consumers). (Audio of interview with Loftus here.) However, until the claims made in both Pornified and Watching Sex are the subject of a controlled, methodological study, any such claims must be only seen as provisional.
The meat of this critique, and something I've been meaning to write about for some time, concerns the pornography research of Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, who's studies on the behavioral effects of pornography are a mainstay of anti-porn literature. What seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, however, is that Zillmann and Bryant were deeply biased toward what can only be described as a deeply conservative view of gender relationships (the "virtue" of women, etc) and engineered this bias into the questionnaire they used to evaluate the "sexual callousness" their subjects supposedly picked up from exposure to pornography. Their assumptions about what constitutes “sexual callousness” include: the belief that having multiple partners is more natural than life-long monogamy, placing a low value on the institution of marriage, seeing nothing wrong with non-marital sexuality, belief that repressing sexual desire is unhealthy, and having less desire to have children. In other words, being sex-positive makes you “sexually callous”!
Zillmann and Bryant had been called out by a number of writers during the 1980s and early 1990s for the political biases and its negative influence on their research. Notably, see the debate between Ferrel Christensen and Jennings & Bryant in the pages of Journal of Communication (link and link). The responses by Zillmann and Bryant really give their game away as to where they are coming from in terms of sexual politics, and their contempt for Christensen's sex-positivity is palpable. Note also the response by Daniel Linz and Edward Donnerstein (link), who do not seem to have a dog in the porn wars of the time, but nonetheless clearly point out Zillmann & Bryant's political engagement with the anti-pornography side and, most damningly, the fact that they simply ignore research that contradicted their own when discussing their findings. Additionally, Alison King's 1993 essay "Mystery and Imagination: the Case of Pornography Effects Studies" (partial link here), is an excellent critique of 1980s porn effects research, with a particular focus on the work of Zillmann and Bryant.
Getting back to Pamela Paul, its not surprising that she's such a partisan for Zillmann and Bryant, considering she seems to be working from a similar set of sexual politics. While I don’t know her exact political leanings, based on what I’ve read of “Pornified” and interviews I’ve listened to, she seems to show a strong neo-conservative streak, an impression that's only strengthened by the fact that the overwhelming concern of her writing centers on the strength of marriage and family, and potential threats to that institution. Though she’s not overtly part of the religious right or making religious arguments (albeit, she does have good things to say about religious right anti-porn activism), she does work from a host of traditionalist assumptions about men and women. That women ultimately want to be in a faithful, emotionally supportive, monogamous relationship with a man, and that men basically need to be hammered into the role of faithful partner, something undermined by porn. Call it "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" feminism, if you will.
This brings me to one Pamela Paul's tallest assertions, apparently based on an interview with Jennings Bryant, in which he claims that the results of his study showed such clear and overwhelmingly negative effects that they were blocked by an ethics board from conducing further research where subjects were directly exposed to pornography. Paul implies that this has been the case ever since Zillmann & Bryant's original study. A simple search of the academic literature would dismiss this whopper of a claim (one I've seen a number of antis repeat over the last several years, BTW), and one really has to wonder about Paul's qualifications as a journalist for not even checking this story.
In fact, quite a bit of porn research was done throughout the 1980s, notably by the Linz and Donnerstein, the above-mentioned colleagues of Zillmann and Bryant, as well as Neil Malamuth. The results of all of this research was highly equivocal; Neil Malamuth (a wildly misunderstood researcher who is a strong believer in the idea that pornography has *some* behavioral effect) has conducted several meta-analyses of this research, and has led him to note negative behavioral effects only in the most violent subset of men and mainly from violent pornography (link), and this in combination with a certain set of pre-disposing psychological cofactors (what he terms "moderators") that he is currently engaged in studying. Most notably, Malamuth was not able to find any evidence that pornography promoted sexually aggressive behavior in psychologically normal men, something anti-porn crusaders like Robert Jensen and Gail Dines have been forced to admit time and again.
And this is not to mention the fact that pornography is routinely used in other areas of psychological research, notably studies of sexual attraction; for example, the controversial research on gender and sexual attraction by Meredith Chivers and Michael Bailey (link).
The story by Bryant, repeated by Pamela Paul, that research using pornography ceased following Zillmann & Bryant's early study is spun out of whole cloth, and is simply a dodgy cover for the fact that their alarming results were not, in fact, generally replicated. That a crusader like Jennings Bryant or Pamela Paul would float such a tale is par for the course. However, that somebody like a Salon columnist – Salon presumably being a journalistic source – would pass something like this along without some remedial fact-checking is truly shameful.
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Showing posts with label anti-porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-porn. Show all posts
Monday, March 8, 2010
Friday, April 24, 2009
The Kink.com Wars, Round II
This just in from my home city – the California Employment Training Panel nixes Kink.com technical staff's right to participate in free Bay Area Video Coalition technical training, something available to multimedia employees working for a wide range of for-profit and non-profit employers. The stimulus for this was a request for information by SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith, the process of which tipped off the state that Cybernet was a porn company, and apparently Cal ETP has rules against funding adult-sector employees.
However the real scandal came when Smith, far from contrite about having just deprived a number of multimedia workers of further job training, wrote a rather nasty hit piece in his SF Weekly column. Using none other than Melissa Farley as his only source for the article, he is quite pleased to have stopped "torture porn" company Kink.com from receiving supposed taxpayer funding. He then goes on to revive Melissa Farley's rather sickening comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib and the accusation that they pay poor desperate models to be abused. Topped off by the usual platitude found in so much anti-porn writing these days that Kink.com "passes itself off as hip".
Violet Blue has the full story here:
Some Background
For many years, San Francisco (by which I mean the city proper and not the whole Bay Area) has been a town with only one major daily newspaper (the San Francisco Chronicle), but with two competing "alt weeklies", The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. Bay Guardian is a local independent paper, has its roots in the 1960s, and is definitely leftist in its editorial leanings. Its articles are often politically slanted, but also, they wear their politics on their sleeve and you at least know where they're coming from. SF Weekly is part of the Village Voice/New Times Media chain, has a more liberal-to-centrist slant, at least superficially has less "spin" in its articles, but like many centrist news sources, often has real problems with hidden bias. Matt Smith has been the paper's main columnist on local politics and he quite openly has an axe to grind against the progressive faction in SF politics. The two papers have been at war with each other for over ten years, with the Guardian having recently successfully won a lawsuit against SF Weekly over undercutting practices used in getting advertisers.
As far as sexual politics go, over the last few years, the Guardian has leaned sex-poz (like the majority of the SF progressive community) and even sponsors the Sex SF blog. SF Weekly originally was also characterized by the relaxed attitude toward sexual politics characteristic of this area, but several years ago, took a decidedly different slant. In 2006 it ran an article bashing Cake parties (and borrowing heavily on Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs), followed soon after by another article by the same author bashing Maxine Doogan's fight against the SF "john's school" program. In 2008, the paper was a major source of opposition to to prostitution decriminalization initiative Proposition K. The have been quite outspoken through all of this in their opposition to sex worker rights activism, and frequently quote Melissa Farley as their go-to source for the bottom line about the sex industry. Smith's latest column simply continues in this unfortunate tradition.
For all its sex industry- and sex-poz-bashing, it is notable that SF Weekly, like Bay Guardian, runs back page ads for strip clubs and massage parlors, as well as escort classifieds.
A Heartening Response
The silver lining to this situation is that the response to the article over the last few days has been overwhelming negative, with more than a few people taking specific aim at the use of Melissa Farley as the article's source. The comments thread for article is up to over 60 comments, almost entirely anti-Smith. A number of (mostly) local bloggers have also weighed in taking Smith to task. In addition to Violet Blue's takedown of the article in SF Appeal, SFist, Sex SF, The Sword, Carnal Nation, and even the Reason magazine blog have since taken a smack at this piece. (Addendum: whippedandgagged.blogspot.com just launched to track other articles and posts responding to the article and controversy.)
My (main) response from the comments thread:
This, apparently is his only response to the whole controversy.
4/25: This just in – Mz Berlin, an SF fetish model who has done a lot of work for Kink.com has challenged Matt Smith to an open dialogue/debate and he apparently has accepted. What form this will take – blog, print media, or live public debate is still not clear.
However the real scandal came when Smith, far from contrite about having just deprived a number of multimedia workers of further job training, wrote a rather nasty hit piece in his SF Weekly column. Using none other than Melissa Farley as his only source for the article, he is quite pleased to have stopped "torture porn" company Kink.com from receiving supposed taxpayer funding. He then goes on to revive Melissa Farley's rather sickening comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib and the accusation that they pay poor desperate models to be abused. Topped off by the usual platitude found in so much anti-porn writing these days that Kink.com "passes itself off as hip".
Violet Blue has the full story here:
On Wednesday, SF Weekly's Matt Smith took his torture porn fantasies beyond the realm of safe, sane and consensual to gloat over how his actions caused Kink.com to get screwed out of legitimately earmarked BAVC job training funds, threatening a community training program that Smith, himself, has benefited from to the tune of 184 hours.Another rather yellow aspect to Smith's journalism is the issue of "taxpayer funding". His spin is that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the production of porn. First, the taxpayer dollars he mentions are a specific payroll tax that all employers in the State of California pay into, Kink.com included. This payroll tax goes to specifically fund employee training programs through various local projects, among them the Bay Area Video Coalition, who in turn provide training for employees to upgrade their skills. Until recently, multimedia employees of Cybernet (the umbrella company behind Kink, that also includes some non-porn production work) received this subsidized training the same as any other SF multimedia worker.
Here's the situation: Smith recently submitted an inquiry about Kink.com to the California Entertainment Training Program (ETP). He received a response from the ETP's general counsel, which said, in part:
"Since learning about Kink.com through your Public Records Act request, ETP has informed BAVC that it will no longer reimburse the cost of training the employees of Cybernet."
and then removed Kink from the list of subsidized applicants, kicking Kink out of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).
As tempting as it is to immediately scapegoat Smith for this, you can't -- after all, all he did is submit a public records request. It's not as though he attempted to incite a harmful scandal simply for the purpose of writing about it.
It's Smith's actions following his request that are deserving of scrutiny. The resulting article, "Whipped and Gagged," is infused with (unrepentant) and sensational anti-porn bias, with accusations that Kink is soaking up taxpayer dollars to create "torture based pornography" and "depicting sexualized torture". Despite the one-sided commentary and airtime Smith devoted to local anti-porn feminist Melissa Farley's two-year-old comments repulsively comparing Kink's product to Abu Ghraib, he certainly knew his way around Kink's websites and content enough to frill up the Fox News-style hit piece.
According to BAVC's Director of Training and resources, Mindy Aronoff, Smith more than nonconsensually screwed the pooch with his biased reporting. Aronoff stated, "Mr. Smith's lazy attempt to jump on the "bad government spending" bandwagon is dangerous in its disregard for this bigger picture and the economic realities of our state. His questions of government spending and censorship are an unfortunate case of reactionary sensationalism that could threaten the ETP program at BAVC."
[Read more]
Some Background
For many years, San Francisco (by which I mean the city proper and not the whole Bay Area) has been a town with only one major daily newspaper (the San Francisco Chronicle), but with two competing "alt weeklies", The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. Bay Guardian is a local independent paper, has its roots in the 1960s, and is definitely leftist in its editorial leanings. Its articles are often politically slanted, but also, they wear their politics on their sleeve and you at least know where they're coming from. SF Weekly is part of the Village Voice/New Times Media chain, has a more liberal-to-centrist slant, at least superficially has less "spin" in its articles, but like many centrist news sources, often has real problems with hidden bias. Matt Smith has been the paper's main columnist on local politics and he quite openly has an axe to grind against the progressive faction in SF politics. The two papers have been at war with each other for over ten years, with the Guardian having recently successfully won a lawsuit against SF Weekly over undercutting practices used in getting advertisers.
As far as sexual politics go, over the last few years, the Guardian has leaned sex-poz (like the majority of the SF progressive community) and even sponsors the Sex SF blog. SF Weekly originally was also characterized by the relaxed attitude toward sexual politics characteristic of this area, but several years ago, took a decidedly different slant. In 2006 it ran an article bashing Cake parties (and borrowing heavily on Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs), followed soon after by another article by the same author bashing Maxine Doogan's fight against the SF "john's school" program. In 2008, the paper was a major source of opposition to to prostitution decriminalization initiative Proposition K. The have been quite outspoken through all of this in their opposition to sex worker rights activism, and frequently quote Melissa Farley as their go-to source for the bottom line about the sex industry. Smith's latest column simply continues in this unfortunate tradition.
For all its sex industry- and sex-poz-bashing, it is notable that SF Weekly, like Bay Guardian, runs back page ads for strip clubs and massage parlors, as well as escort classifieds.
A Heartening Response
The silver lining to this situation is that the response to the article over the last few days has been overwhelming negative, with more than a few people taking specific aim at the use of Melissa Farley as the article's source. The comments thread for article is up to over 60 comments, almost entirely anti-Smith. A number of (mostly) local bloggers have also weighed in taking Smith to task. In addition to Violet Blue's takedown of the article in SF Appeal, SFist, Sex SF, The Sword, Carnal Nation, and even the Reason magazine blog have since taken a smack at this piece. (Addendum: whippedandgagged.blogspot.com just launched to track other articles and posts responding to the article and controversy.)
My (main) response from the comments thread:
Unfortunately, it seems that Matt Smith and SF Weekly has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the cranky and crank-ish neoconservative feminism of Melissa Farley. First with its jingoistic anti-Prop K stance last year and now with the rhetoric displayed in the article.An unfortunate response was made by one particular article commentator (who also seems to be connected with an anonymous flyer circulated around the Castro) demanding the article be dropped and Smith be pressured to retract the article. This call, of course, is hugely self-contradictory from a free speech standpoint and seems to have no support beyond the original commentator who circulated it. (And fact a few people on this side of the fence, myself among them, specifically have denounced it.) Nonetheless, Matt Smith has latched onto this comment and spun it into a "pornographers are trying to censor me" post on his blog.
To my mind, the relevant question about CETP is whether its being used as a form of corporate welfare or whether its truly a jobs-creation program. If its the former, then I don't think either Kink.com or, say, KRON should be getting that subsidy.
However, if it is genuinely a job-training program in multimedia, then it should make no difference whether the employee is going off to a well-paying job for a design firm or a porn company. (And lets get away from the red herring that this has anything to do with forcing the poor into porn modeling – we are talking about production-end jobs here.) You have moral problems with pornography? Well, too bad, a lot of people have moral problems with advertising (pick up a copy of Adbusters sometime) and I don't see a call for ending government funding for training to enter that industry. And your "first amendment expert" aside (who was using what was already a bad piece of legislation – the NEA attack on Karen Finley – as a defense of this), I really don't think its the government's business to channel trainees into one form of media over another, especially in a way that constitutes blatant viewpoint discrimination.
The absolute low point of this article is the inflammatory language calling Kink.com "torture porn" and repeating Melissa Farley's disgusting comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib (rhetoric that really dishonors the victims of Abu Ghraib). Farley-esque rhetoric about "giving people money if they'll agree to being on camera while being stripped, bound, impaled, beaten, and shocked" is pure nonsense. Kink.com films people practicing BDSM and many of the models for that company are local "players" from that same scene. Last I checked, BDSM was already something some people consensually seek out, in fact, its not unknown for someone to pay some of the advertisers in the back pages your newspaper to do *to them* some of the very things that are depicted on Kink.com. Ironic, that.
4/25: This just in – Mz Berlin, an SF fetish model who has done a lot of work for Kink.com has challenged Matt Smith to an open dialogue/debate and he apparently has accepted. What form this will take – blog, print media, or live public debate is still not clear.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Prohibitionism marches on
More bad news from the legal front – the long-running Extreme Associates obscenity case is drawing to a close, with EA owners Robert and Janet Zicari (aka Rob Black and Lizzy Borden) copping guilty pleas. Story here, here, and here. Reason magazine provides further background here.
Black and Borden face up to five years in prison for the "crime" of producing extreme porn that included violent imagery. (Though at least they're not facing a potential 50 years each, as they were under their original counts.) And unlike the earlier Max Hardcore conviction, this is entirely about the content of their videos – to the best of my knowledge, in this case there are no rumors of non-consensual incidents on the production end which some people offered up as a round-about justification for Hardcore's obscenity prosecution.
Whether or not this round of obscenity prosecutions is just a bad hangover from the Bush years remains to be seen. As the Reason article points out, Mary Beth Buchanan, the right-wing moral crusader who's leading the EA prosecution, is asking to keep her job under the current administration. And the dual choices of Eric Holder and David Ogden for the number 1 and number 2 spots in the Justice Department show no clear indication of what federal obscenity policy will look like for the next 4-8 years, though hopefully the fact that the nation is facing much bigger issues will reaveal moral crusades like this for the waste of resources that they are.
In other news, Iceland is poised to become the first country in the world to impose a blanket ban on the entire sex industry. Pornography is already completely illegal there (at least in theory), and the new Left government there is about to put in place Swedish-style laws against buying sex, and goes one further by also banning strip clubs. Thus, in one country at least, achieving the anti-sex industry trifecta that prohibitionists have been shooting for. All, as usual, justified by rhetoric claiming that all sex work drives human trafficking. Further background here. It is interesting to note that in the story I just linked to, Iceland is considered a desirable enough place to work that strippers were coming to Iceland of their own volition from places like the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. However, the fine upstanding social democrats now in charge of the country have decided that this is all exploitation without bothering to ask anybody who actually works in that industry whether they are being exploited.
Black and Borden face up to five years in prison for the "crime" of producing extreme porn that included violent imagery. (Though at least they're not facing a potential 50 years each, as they were under their original counts.) And unlike the earlier Max Hardcore conviction, this is entirely about the content of their videos – to the best of my knowledge, in this case there are no rumors of non-consensual incidents on the production end which some people offered up as a round-about justification for Hardcore's obscenity prosecution.
Whether or not this round of obscenity prosecutions is just a bad hangover from the Bush years remains to be seen. As the Reason article points out, Mary Beth Buchanan, the right-wing moral crusader who's leading the EA prosecution, is asking to keep her job under the current administration. And the dual choices of Eric Holder and David Ogden for the number 1 and number 2 spots in the Justice Department show no clear indication of what federal obscenity policy will look like for the next 4-8 years, though hopefully the fact that the nation is facing much bigger issues will reaveal moral crusades like this for the waste of resources that they are.
In other news, Iceland is poised to become the first country in the world to impose a blanket ban on the entire sex industry. Pornography is already completely illegal there (at least in theory), and the new Left government there is about to put in place Swedish-style laws against buying sex, and goes one further by also banning strip clubs. Thus, in one country at least, achieving the anti-sex industry trifecta that prohibitionists have been shooting for. All, as usual, justified by rhetoric claiming that all sex work drives human trafficking. Further background here. It is interesting to note that in the story I just linked to, Iceland is considered a desirable enough place to work that strippers were coming to Iceland of their own volition from places like the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. However, the fine upstanding social democrats now in charge of the country have decided that this is all exploitation without bothering to ask anybody who actually works in that industry whether they are being exploited.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Zack and Miri Get Banned in Philly
It seems that shooting porn has been a popular comedy theme over the last few years – The Amateurs, Slippery Slope, and I Want Candy all come to mind. Kevin Smith adds his contribution with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, coming out at the end of the month.
And it also seems that some of the advertising for Zack and Miri is now the latest battle in the new porn wars. Apparently, billboards for it have been banned in several places and a number of newspapers are refusing to carry the ads. So is the ad really raunchy or something? No, actually the ad only contains stick figures, with no added naughty bits or suggestive positions. It seems the big problem is the title of the movie itself, which contains the word --gasp-- Porno.
According to "child development expert" Diane Levin, the simplicity of the ad is part of the problem, since the fact that the ad contains stick figures means that its being marketed to children and is trying to sell them on the idea that "porn is an acceptable occupation". In case anybody is wondering who this person is, she's none other a Wheelock College professor (yes, that Wheelock College, which must have its own Department of Anti-Porn studies), and fellow footsoldier of Gail Dines and Jeane Kilbourne in the "progressive" battle against smut. Levine is co-author of "So Sexy So Soon", the latest in the century-old tradition of "lock up your daughters" lit, and in general is somebody who is milking the scare over "the sexualization of girls" as a stick to attack adult media. She's particularly off base with this one, as whatever you want to say about the inappropriateness of Bratz dolls and the like for young girls, Zack and Miri is clearly not being marketed to children, nor is mere exposure to the word "porno" going to damage them.
Now I will note that I actually have some sympathy for the idea there's some things you just shouldn't put on billboards displayed to the public, who are in most cases, not a voluntary audience. Time and place restrictions are acceptable under a general climate of free expression, and, in the case of private companies, they can refuse to carry whatever they want. (I'll leave the more radical question of who owns public space out of this for the time being.) A few years ago, the "torture porn" movie Captivity crossed what I think is a definite line when they put out some extremely disturbing ads on public billboards, and a lot of people have big problems with American Apparel billboards for analogous reasons. However, I am also against the total bowdlerization of public space – one cannot possibly remove from public display all things that are going to possibly be offensive to somebody, and in fact, that kind of bowdlerized public space would in turn be equally offensive to many others (like myself, for instance).
Its especially problematic in the case of newspapers that won't carry this ad, because they almost certainly will carry news stories, often very salacious ones, about porn. In these cases, its really amounts to point-of-view discrimination – Zack and Miri present making porn as lighthearted, comical, and, in some ways, normal. That's a view that clearly clashes with a moralistic view that porn is a road to ruin or "unacceptable". Of course, people have every right to that view and they have every right to push it (and, boy, do they), but trying to suppress the opposite point of view from the marketplace of ideas is wrong and unworthy of a news organization.
Ultimately, however, I'm not too worried about how Kevin Smith and his film will do. Smith is no stranger to controversy – some feminist and lesbian activists got their knickers in a twist over Chasing Amy, and the Catholic League went after Dogma, and both movies actually benefited from the controversy. Kevin Smith actually scored a minor propaganda coup when he showed up at a Catholic League protest against Dogma and helped them picket his own movie, apparently without being recognized. If Zack and Miri is the new front in the porn wars, I say, bring it on – lets expose the antis for the pinched humorless scolds that they so often are.
(H/T to The Legal Satyricon.)
Friday, September 5, 2008
People get testy when things don't go their way...
As in, here.
It seems the author has a problem wiht critique of the "fair and unbiased" anti-porn film "The Price of Pleasure", and of course, assumes we just attack the hell out of everyone involved with it, including SKL, who is/was a sex worker.
Ahem. Actually, I believe SKL's representation as a star of mainstream porn was what was in question, not her sex worker status? There is no question that SKL was involved with sex work, yet never pornography as her primary field, and never in "Mainstream" porn which is what the film is supposedly discussing? Thus, it is not unfair or wooo, horrible mean to assume that SKL is no expert on mainstream pornography. Her status as a sex worker is not in question. Her status as a veteran of porn valley is...and SKL is no such thing, thus, her being included in this "fair and unbiased" film about the mainstream porn is...well, biased.
Now, since I've already been accused by half the free world of being a horrible, sadistic rapist or whatever, I will go ahead and say this now: Gee, we get to be critical of anti porn films that pass themselves off as unbiased, and be just as critical of them as other folk get to be of porn. We get to question the creds and motivations of the people making and in these films, just like you get to question the creds and motivations of people making porn. SKL put herself out there as an authority on a subject, and thus, she is subject to questions and critiques...just as any other person who puts themselves into such a role is.
No one here doubts her feelings on sex work, or her expierences, or her views on her job or other such things. What we question is her status as an authority on pornography, especially mainstream pornography, which is what this film is supposedly dealing with.
Get it now? I certainly hope so.
It seems the author has a problem wiht critique of the "fair and unbiased" anti-porn film "The Price of Pleasure", and of course, assumes we just attack the hell out of everyone involved with it, including SKL, who is/was a sex worker.
Ahem. Actually, I believe SKL's representation as a star of mainstream porn was what was in question, not her sex worker status? There is no question that SKL was involved with sex work, yet never pornography as her primary field, and never in "Mainstream" porn which is what the film is supposedly discussing? Thus, it is not unfair or wooo, horrible mean to assume that SKL is no expert on mainstream pornography. Her status as a sex worker is not in question. Her status as a veteran of porn valley is...and SKL is no such thing, thus, her being included in this "fair and unbiased" film about the mainstream porn is...well, biased.
Now, since I've already been accused by half the free world of being a horrible, sadistic rapist or whatever, I will go ahead and say this now: Gee, we get to be critical of anti porn films that pass themselves off as unbiased, and be just as critical of them as other folk get to be of porn. We get to question the creds and motivations of the people making and in these films, just like you get to question the creds and motivations of people making porn. SKL put herself out there as an authority on a subject, and thus, she is subject to questions and critiques...just as any other person who puts themselves into such a role is.
No one here doubts her feelings on sex work, or her expierences, or her views on her job or other such things. What we question is her status as an authority on pornography, especially mainstream pornography, which is what this film is supposedly dealing with.
Get it now? I certainly hope so.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
New Antiporn Documentary: The Price of Pleasure
Well, the documentary we've been hearing about from the APRF crowd for the last – what, 4 years, at least – has finally been finished. This was the one that was being put together by Chyng Sun a few years back, and more recently by Robert Jensen and Miguel Picker. Website here:
http://www.thepriceofpleasure.com/
Trailer here.
The press kit promises, "Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations." But one look at the who the writers are (Chyng Sun and Robert Wosnitzer), not to mention the obvious slant even in the trailer, belies the idea that there's anything "honest and nonjudgmental" going on here.
Witnesses for the prosecution are, not unexpectedly, Robert Jensen and Gail Dines, but Pamela Paul, Ariel Levy, and Sarah Katherine Lewis are also brought in to further the case against porn and the sex industry. (And apparently the much-circulated video of the anti-porn statement by Chomsky is from this film also.) Interestingly, the documentary also feature some pro-porn folks, most notably, our own Ernest Greene, who, based on the trailer at least, seems to get some good points in, though I have no idea what his original interview versus what made it into the film is like. Joanna Angel seems to be treated to more of a hatchet job, where they select some "worst of" moments from her videos and use them to undermine her statements. Similarly, statements from fans are selected to come across as very self-incriminating.
If anybody's anxious to have a look at it, its scheduled to play in Austin, Montreal, and New York over the next several weeks, and it may play elsewhere after that. I have my doubts it will have anything like a major release (1-hour documentaries usually don't), but, is scheduled for video release next month from the Media Education Foundation, but like other MEF releases, are only available to educational institutions at $150-250 per copy. Like the Killing us Softly and Dreamworlds series (also from MEF), its likely this video end up having a long life life in women's studies and "media education" classrooms, fueling misguided outrage for years to come.
http://www.thepriceofpleasure.com/
Trailer here.
The press kit promises, "Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations." But one look at the who the writers are (Chyng Sun and Robert Wosnitzer), not to mention the obvious slant even in the trailer, belies the idea that there's anything "honest and nonjudgmental" going on here.
Witnesses for the prosecution are, not unexpectedly, Robert Jensen and Gail Dines, but Pamela Paul, Ariel Levy, and Sarah Katherine Lewis are also brought in to further the case against porn and the sex industry. (And apparently the much-circulated video of the anti-porn statement by Chomsky is from this film also.) Interestingly, the documentary also feature some pro-porn folks, most notably, our own Ernest Greene, who, based on the trailer at least, seems to get some good points in, though I have no idea what his original interview versus what made it into the film is like. Joanna Angel seems to be treated to more of a hatchet job, where they select some "worst of" moments from her videos and use them to undermine her statements. Similarly, statements from fans are selected to come across as very self-incriminating.
If anybody's anxious to have a look at it, its scheduled to play in Austin, Montreal, and New York over the next several weeks, and it may play elsewhere after that. I have my doubts it will have anything like a major release (1-hour documentaries usually don't), but, is scheduled for video release next month from the Media Education Foundation, but like other MEF releases, are only available to educational institutions at $150-250 per copy. Like the Killing us Softly and Dreamworlds series (also from MEF), its likely this video end up having a long life life in women's studies and "media education" classrooms, fueling misguided outrage for years to come.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Against Intolerance: A critique of Diana Russell's Against Pornography
By sheer coincidence with the post about Against Pornography the other day, I was going through some of my very old files I had archived and came across this article Avedon Carol of Feminists Against Censorship had sent me in 1997.
It was a review and critique by Jen Durbin (a sex-poz Bay Area academic who was a correspondent of FAC at the time) of Against Pornography, and was a good overview of the weaknesses of that work. The article was published in Spectator, a winning mix of softcore photography, hardcore fiction, and insightful sex-positive/pro-porn writing. Spectator was the sexy offshoot of the perhaps better known underground tabloid The Berkeley Barb, though Spectator outlasted the Barb by some 25 years. The magazine was headed by Kat Sunlove, who is probably better known for her lobbying as part of the Free Speech Coalition.
The Spectator folded in 2005 and Spectator.net went under soon after, but thanks to the miracle of the Wayback Machine, its archive of articles (also here), spanning from the late 90s to mid-2000s, is still viewable and well worth checking out.
Anyway, without further ado:
"When a Scientist Stacks the Deck: A Review of Diana E. H. Russell's Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm"
by Jen Durbin
Spectator Magazine #835 (Sept 30-Oct 6, 1994)
Imagine a literary scholar writing a book about the sonnet in order to give the general public, many of whom have never read a sonnet, an opportunity to make up their own minds about this verse form. This hypothetical scholar first defines "sonnet" as a poem about a horse. He and a dozen research assistants spend eighteen years sifting the canon of English literature for poems about horses. Some of these poems may have fourteen lines; others may not. The number of lines is irrelevant to his study. At the end of this period of extensive research, he publishes his findings: his long-awaited scholarly book proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that sonnets are about horses. He even includes over a hundred poems as evidence.
As farfetched as this hypothetical anecdote might seem, it provides a frightfully accurate analogy for Diana Russell's new book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (Russell Publications, 1993). She calls her book a "scholarly work" (p. xii), but it breaks every rule of good scholarship, which, if it can't be original and well written, should at the very least be unbiased and logical. As a teacher of pornography, I can sympathize with Russell's opening statement: "I have come to dislike talking about the effects of pornography with people who have not seen it for themselves" (p.vii). If there's one thing I dislike even more, however, it's talking about pornography with people whose only exposure to porn has been a narrow band within the broad spectrum of pornographic material, carefully pre-selected by the anti-porn feminists.
Just like the fraudulent scholar who looked for horses everywhere, Russell begins by re-defining pornography so that she can pre-determine the results of her search. She sets out to look for "material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior" (p. 3). Not surprisingly, that's exactly what she finds.
The 108 images she reproduces in her book come from the porn collections of such groups as OAP (Organizing Against Pornography) SVAW (Stopping Violence Against Women), WAP (Women Against Pornography), SOAP (Students Organizing Against Pornography), and of course WAVPM (Women Against Violence in Media and Pornography). The last-named group, which Russell helped to found, was established in 1976. It has taken her and her comrades in arms nearly twenty years to collect the violent images she reprints in her book. A serious academic study would have attempted to provide a more even-handed survey of the field. If it took dozens of women this long to collect a handful of violent images, just imagine all the benign or neutral images they must have viewed and then discarded in the course of their search.
Russell does attempt to contextualize her sample of pornographic visuals by introducing some statistics, but none of them are too impressive. For instance, in Penthouse and Playboy in 1977, "5 of the cartoons and 10 of the pictorials were sexually violent" (p. 9). Of course, it doesn't take a scientific study to estimate that by far the bulk of the images in both magazines were just plain sexual, but who wants to analyze the most representative kinds of porn images anyway? Since no one has been able to prove that pornographic images are predominantly violent, Russell has decided to modify the findings of some existing studies to suit her purposes. She draws on the Canadian Criminologist T.S. Palys for some fairly significant percentages of sexually aggressive scenes in sexually-oriented videos. What she doesn't say is that out of the 150 videos sampled by Palys, 58 were not x-rated, and 25 were specifically (not randomly) chosen for their violent content. It's as if our literary scholar, finding that epics were far more likely to feature horses, decided to beef up his case by throwing statistics about epics in with his statistics about sonnets. Even worse, Russell barely mentions Palys' main point --"the unexpected finding that 'adult' videos have significantly greater absolute number of depictions of sexual aggression per movie than triple-X videos" --a point that probably will not surprise regular viewers of R-rated and X-rated videos.
Among Palys' actual findings, those ignored by Russell, were the following: "the triple X videos had a higher frequency of mutual (i.e. egalitarian) sexual depictions than the adult videos (72 versus 12.9)," sexual aggression was more prevalent in adult than in X-rated videos, and the aggressive depictions were significantly more severe in the adult videos.1 Palys critiques previous studies for leaving "concerned individuals with the potentially misleading impression that those who produce 'pornography' hold the monopoly on violent and sexually violent materials" (Palys, p. 33). One can only speculate about the reasons Russell chose to ignore his warnings about creating a "misleading impression."
How does Diana Russell create the misleading impression that pornography is predominantly violent and degrading towards women? Let me count the ways. In the interests of brevity, I will cite only one instance of each tactic (or two if they are impossible to resist).
Faulty logic: On page 114 she writes, "Because it is important to know the proclivities and the state of mind of those who read and view pornography, I will start by discussing some of the data on males' propensity to rape." Spectator readers will be interested to know that as a group they are indistinguishable, in Russell's mind in any case, from rapists. Wouldn't it be a little more scientific/scholarly to start with a group of consumers of porn (using a group of people who don't consume porn as a control group) if one were interested in analyzing the "proclivities and state of mind of those who read and view porn"?
Misleading rhetorical strategies: On page 20 she writes that there is "reason for great concern when those who feel aroused by pornography (or racism) become advocates or defenders of it." Here she implies that defending one's right to view or read arousing material is the same as joining the Ku Klux Klan.
Baseless claims: Russell cites a study by Malamuth, in which subjects were "randomly assigned to view either a rape version or a mutually consenting version of a slide-audio presentation." She justifies using this study to pillory pornography because "the rape version of the slide-audio presentation is typical of what is seen in pornography" (p. 124). Of course, anyone who has viewed much pornography knows that the most common scenario features the willing, even nymphomaniacal woman, not the female victim of forced sex. Russell's flawed premise allows her to pretend that rape is a typical feature of porn.
Misleading categories: Throughout the book, she lumps bondage in with violence. For instance, she reprints a cartoon featuring a smiling woman in a dog collar and leash (p. 23). How does Russell know the woman did not choose bondage? Another cartoon shows a woman tied spread eagle on the bed. The man who has tied her up asks, "Comfy?" Here's Russell's interpretation: "This cartoon perpetuates the idea that women enjoy bondage" (p. 36). Of course, many do. Need I add that throughout the book she makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts?
Faulty assumptions: And who's to say that a man looking at the cartoons above or watching video sex scenes always identifies with the aggressor? Carol Clover, in her book about slasher films, Men Women and Chainsaws, has shown that males in the audience often identify with on-screen females, and vice versa. Indeed, in one of the studies Russell cites, researchers found that male college students and men living in inner-city housing projects found four categories of violence arousing. One of the arousing categories was "a female killing a male" (p. 146).
Lip service: At various points throughout the book, Russell will make a reasonable statement. For instance, she writes "What is objectionable about pornography, then, is its abusive and degrading portrayal of females and female sexuality, not its sexual content or explicitness" (p. 5). Elsewhere she admits that by the definition of simple causation, "pornography clearly does not cause rape, as it seems safe to assume that some pornography consumers do not rape women, and that many rapes are unrelated to pornography" (p. 119). However, since she does not provide any examples of sexual content that is not abusive or degrading, and since her purpose is to implicate pornography as one of the primary causes of rape, these brief admissions can be seen as mere lip service.
Ignoring the obvious interpretation of others' findings: In making a case that viewers imitate what they see on screen, she cites the seemingly shocking statistic that "Among the junior high school students [in Jennings Bryant's study] 72 of the males reported that 'they wanted to try some sexual experiment or sexual behavior that they had seen in their initial exposure to X-rated material'" (p. 126). This finding will assuredly be shocking to any reader who has taken Russell's word about what "typical porn" is like, but anyone who has viewed porn for him- or herself might have a different interpretation: most 7th and 8th graders have not experienced sex, and it is not surprising that they would some day like to try intercourse (or, God forbid!, fellatio or cunnilingus), the real staple of heterosexual porn.
Failure to critique the studies she cites: She quotes from a study that confirms "that exposure to non-violent pornography causes masculine sex-typed males, in contrast to androgynous males, to view and treat women as a sex object" (p.132). The flaw in this study lies in the initial classification of the participants. The term "masculine sex-typed males" was defined as men who "encode all cross-sex interactions in sexual terms and all members of the opposite sex in terms of sexual attractiveness." An astute reader--one who can translate jargon into plain English--will have noticed that by definition this group of men viewed women as sex objects before they even participated in the study.
Ignoring the findings or premises of others' studies: Russell makes use of Dietz and Evans' statistics about the increase in bondage and domination imagery on the cover of heterosexual porn magazines. She neglects to mention, however, that the authors of this study saw it as an "unobtrusive measure of the prevalence of the corresponding fantasy among consumers," since "the imagery of pornography tends to correspond to the preexisting fantasy images of the consumer."2 In other words, they posit that pornography is an effect, whereas Russell takes the opposite stance, arguing that it is a cause.
Citing irrelevant studies: She cites a study by Malamuth and Check, in which students viewed a "feature-length film that portrayed violence against women as being justifiable and having positive consequences (Swept Away or The Getaway)" (p.134). Their findings are of course irrelevant in a book called Against Pornography, since the films they used are rated R, and any actions taken by fired-up readers of Russell's book are unlikely to be directed against The UA or Landmark cinemas.
Ignoring or glossing over points that run counter to her theories: She admits that "Psychologists James Check and Neil Malamuth have provided experimental evidence that pornography that is supplemented with sound educational information does not induce the negative effects that would otherwise occur" (p. 17). However, she ignores the ramifications of this finding: it is important to make porn more accessible, not less. Families who will not freak out if little Johnny or Jenny is watching porn will be more likely to have a chance to discuss the videos with their kids, and to use them as an opportunity to educate.
As a teacher, I of course believe in the power of education. And I believe that the best education succeeds not in transmitting the biases of the teacher into the minds of the students, but rather in teaching the students to ferret out faulty logic wherever it resides, and to open their minds to truth wherever it may be found. And the best education of all succeeds in opening the teacher's mind too. In that spirit, I turn from my point-by-point critique of Russell's methods in order to attempt to reach an unbiased perspective on the issues she raises. I don't want readers to come away from this review article with the impression that I am just as biased, and just as likely to ignore evidence that runs counter to my pet theory, as Russell is.
There's a little gold sticker on the cover of Russell's book that reads "WARNING: Some of the visuals in this book may cause distress." It turns out that I am not so desensitized to sexual violence that I was completely immune to that distress. Certainly the album cover depicting a just-raped woman next to the graffiti "Guns N Roses Was Here" disturbed me: I couldn't help but think of the young fans of that group, who are being taught a less-than-subtle lesson about rape. Given my own personal history, I also was disturbed by the ad in Playboy (for Oui magazine) depicting an adolescent-looking nude girl in handcuffs above the caption "How one family solved its discipline problem." I don't think it's possible to argue that Playboy caused the national epidemic of child sexual abuse, partly because incest existed for centuries before Playboy came on the market. But I do think it would be naive to argue that the media plays no role in the overall climate of misogyny in the United States today.
Given the fact that pornography is far less prevalent and accessible than television, advertising, mainstream movies, and billboards, why do radical feminists such as Russell focus their attacks on pornography? One argument is that the conjunction between sex and violence is especially compelling. To put it crudely, one might compare male viewers of video porn to Pavlov's dogs: they are trained to ejaculate at the sight of sexual violence towards women. Russell cites a 1985 study by Donnerstein, in which participants were divided into three groups: one saw X-rated movies depicting sexual assault; the second saw X-rated movies showing only consenting sex; the third saw R-rated sexually violent movies. Then they all saw a reenactment of a real rape trial. "Subjects who had seen the R-rated movies: (1) rated the rape victim as significantly more worthless, (2) rated her injury as significantly less severe, and (3) assigned greater blame to her for being raped than did the subjects who had not seen the films [i.e. the control group]. In contrast, these results were not seen for the X-rated non-violent films. However, the results were much the same for violent X-rated films, despite the fact that the R-rated material was 'much more graphically violent'" (p. 137). There is no question in my mind that if I had my druthers, the media would not pre-dispose potential jurors to underestimate a rape victim's worth or her injuries.
Still, Donnerstein's study also suggests that the degree of explicitness of the sex scenes in the movies was not a factor in the participants' responses to the rape trial. Since the ratio of sexual assault scenes to consensual sex scenes is much higher in Hollywood films than it is in porn videos (for evidence, see the study by Palys above, or just pay attention when you go to the movies), the unavoidable conclusion seems to be that despite their protestations, writers such as Russell actually are attacking sexuality.
Intentionally or not, Russell is adding to the climate of misogyny. She notes for instance that "Negative consequences to males who exploit women in this situation [i.e. in bondage] are improbable since women who are violated while in bondage are unlikely to report such abuses to the police." She is right: most sex workers know they will automatically be assumed guilty by the judicial system. But the more Russell contributes to a climate of sexual repression, the harder it will be to obtain legal redress for crimes against women who work in the sex industry.
It's hard to object to her recommendations, since she provides none. She does not seem to be recommending that pornography be fought via the courts; in fact, she goes to some lengths to distinguish herself from MacKinnon and Dworkin, who needed to use a legal definition of pornography in order to write their legislation. She repeatedly claims to be against censorship, although it is true that she does so only in the context of defending her own right to free speech. A rave review just inside the cover, in which Nikki Craft writes that she was "moved to tear up several hundred Hustler magazines in convenience stores and throughout Santa Cruz," might be interpreted as an implied recommendation. Anyone who reads this book out of context (of the feminist debate about pornography or the full spectrum of pornographic materials) is likely to take matters into their own hands, and the target will be a symptom (for instance Hustler magazine) of our social ills rather than an underlying cause (such as economic inequality between the genders).
In lieu of author's recommendations, I will make a suggestion of my own. On the copyright page Russell prohibits reproduction of any part of the book, specifying that "the only exception to these rules applies to feminists dedicated to the fight against pornography, who are welcome to copy this material free of charge in pursuit of their anti-pornography work." This is especially ironic in light of the fact that, by her own admission, she stole these images from the pornographers who held the copyrights in the first place. In her preface she admits to the following violation: "I did not attempt to obtain permission from the pornographers for several reasons. I didn't want to support the pornography industry by giving them money. . . " In light of the fact that one of the most popular tactics used against the porn industry is to tie up all its resources in legal battles in the hopes that the production companies will go bankrupt, I have a fitting response to Russell's book to suggest: the pornographers whose images she has stolen should consider suing her for copyright violations. It would be interesting to see if the courts agreed that her "right to free speech" (which, according to Russell, "includes the right to publish the material necessary to show that pornography is harmful to women" p. x) overrides publishers' and photographers' and artists' rights to fair payment for the reproduction of their work.
On a more serious note, I would like to say that a feminist writer who has done such important work in the areas of rape and child sexual abuse might have been expected to have chosen her target more carefully. Pornography is not the culprit here. If feminists are to make real strides towards stopping violence against women, we will need a more realistic assessment of the root causes of the problem, and a more effective plan for bringing about true social change.
1 Palys T. (1986). Testing the common wisdom: the social content of video pornography. Canadian Psychology, 27(1):27–35. (p 27–29)
2 Dietz P, Evans B. (1982). Pornographic imagery and prevalence of paraphilia. American Journal of Psychiatry 139:1493–1495. (p 1423; italics mine.)
It was a review and critique by Jen Durbin (a sex-poz Bay Area academic who was a correspondent of FAC at the time) of Against Pornography, and was a good overview of the weaknesses of that work. The article was published in Spectator, a winning mix of softcore photography, hardcore fiction, and insightful sex-positive/pro-porn writing. Spectator was the sexy offshoot of the perhaps better known underground tabloid The Berkeley Barb, though Spectator outlasted the Barb by some 25 years. The magazine was headed by Kat Sunlove, who is probably better known for her lobbying as part of the Free Speech Coalition.
The Spectator folded in 2005 and Spectator.net went under soon after, but thanks to the miracle of the Wayback Machine, its archive of articles (also here), spanning from the late 90s to mid-2000s, is still viewable and well worth checking out.
Anyway, without further ado:
"When a Scientist Stacks the Deck: A Review of Diana E. H. Russell's Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm"
by Jen Durbin
Spectator Magazine #835 (Sept 30-Oct 6, 1994)
Imagine a literary scholar writing a book about the sonnet in order to give the general public, many of whom have never read a sonnet, an opportunity to make up their own minds about this verse form. This hypothetical scholar first defines "sonnet" as a poem about a horse. He and a dozen research assistants spend eighteen years sifting the canon of English literature for poems about horses. Some of these poems may have fourteen lines; others may not. The number of lines is irrelevant to his study. At the end of this period of extensive research, he publishes his findings: his long-awaited scholarly book proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that sonnets are about horses. He even includes over a hundred poems as evidence.
As farfetched as this hypothetical anecdote might seem, it provides a frightfully accurate analogy for Diana Russell's new book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (Russell Publications, 1993). She calls her book a "scholarly work" (p. xii), but it breaks every rule of good scholarship, which, if it can't be original and well written, should at the very least be unbiased and logical. As a teacher of pornography, I can sympathize with Russell's opening statement: "I have come to dislike talking about the effects of pornography with people who have not seen it for themselves" (p.vii). If there's one thing I dislike even more, however, it's talking about pornography with people whose only exposure to porn has been a narrow band within the broad spectrum of pornographic material, carefully pre-selected by the anti-porn feminists.
Just like the fraudulent scholar who looked for horses everywhere, Russell begins by re-defining pornography so that she can pre-determine the results of her search. She sets out to look for "material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior" (p. 3). Not surprisingly, that's exactly what she finds.
The 108 images she reproduces in her book come from the porn collections of such groups as OAP (Organizing Against Pornography) SVAW (Stopping Violence Against Women), WAP (Women Against Pornography), SOAP (Students Organizing Against Pornography), and of course WAVPM (Women Against Violence in Media and Pornography). The last-named group, which Russell helped to found, was established in 1976. It has taken her and her comrades in arms nearly twenty years to collect the violent images she reprints in her book. A serious academic study would have attempted to provide a more even-handed survey of the field. If it took dozens of women this long to collect a handful of violent images, just imagine all the benign or neutral images they must have viewed and then discarded in the course of their search.
Russell does attempt to contextualize her sample of pornographic visuals by introducing some statistics, but none of them are too impressive. For instance, in Penthouse and Playboy in 1977, "5 of the cartoons and 10 of the pictorials were sexually violent" (p. 9). Of course, it doesn't take a scientific study to estimate that by far the bulk of the images in both magazines were just plain sexual, but who wants to analyze the most representative kinds of porn images anyway? Since no one has been able to prove that pornographic images are predominantly violent, Russell has decided to modify the findings of some existing studies to suit her purposes. She draws on the Canadian Criminologist T.S. Palys for some fairly significant percentages of sexually aggressive scenes in sexually-oriented videos. What she doesn't say is that out of the 150 videos sampled by Palys, 58 were not x-rated, and 25 were specifically (not randomly) chosen for their violent content. It's as if our literary scholar, finding that epics were far more likely to feature horses, decided to beef up his case by throwing statistics about epics in with his statistics about sonnets. Even worse, Russell barely mentions Palys' main point --"the unexpected finding that 'adult' videos have significantly greater absolute number of depictions of sexual aggression per movie than triple-X videos" --a point that probably will not surprise regular viewers of R-rated and X-rated videos.
Among Palys' actual findings, those ignored by Russell, were the following: "the triple X videos had a higher frequency of mutual (i.e. egalitarian) sexual depictions than the adult videos (72 versus 12.9)," sexual aggression was more prevalent in adult than in X-rated videos, and the aggressive depictions were significantly more severe in the adult videos.1 Palys critiques previous studies for leaving "concerned individuals with the potentially misleading impression that those who produce 'pornography' hold the monopoly on violent and sexually violent materials" (Palys, p. 33). One can only speculate about the reasons Russell chose to ignore his warnings about creating a "misleading impression."
How does Diana Russell create the misleading impression that pornography is predominantly violent and degrading towards women? Let me count the ways. In the interests of brevity, I will cite only one instance of each tactic (or two if they are impossible to resist).
Faulty logic: On page 114 she writes, "Because it is important to know the proclivities and the state of mind of those who read and view pornography, I will start by discussing some of the data on males' propensity to rape." Spectator readers will be interested to know that as a group they are indistinguishable, in Russell's mind in any case, from rapists. Wouldn't it be a little more scientific/scholarly to start with a group of consumers of porn (using a group of people who don't consume porn as a control group) if one were interested in analyzing the "proclivities and state of mind of those who read and view porn"?
Misleading rhetorical strategies: On page 20 she writes that there is "reason for great concern when those who feel aroused by pornography (or racism) become advocates or defenders of it." Here she implies that defending one's right to view or read arousing material is the same as joining the Ku Klux Klan.
Baseless claims: Russell cites a study by Malamuth, in which subjects were "randomly assigned to view either a rape version or a mutually consenting version of a slide-audio presentation." She justifies using this study to pillory pornography because "the rape version of the slide-audio presentation is typical of what is seen in pornography" (p. 124). Of course, anyone who has viewed much pornography knows that the most common scenario features the willing, even nymphomaniacal woman, not the female victim of forced sex. Russell's flawed premise allows her to pretend that rape is a typical feature of porn.
Misleading categories: Throughout the book, she lumps bondage in with violence. For instance, she reprints a cartoon featuring a smiling woman in a dog collar and leash (p. 23). How does Russell know the woman did not choose bondage? Another cartoon shows a woman tied spread eagle on the bed. The man who has tied her up asks, "Comfy?" Here's Russell's interpretation: "This cartoon perpetuates the idea that women enjoy bondage" (p. 36). Of course, many do. Need I add that throughout the book she makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts?
Faulty assumptions: And who's to say that a man looking at the cartoons above or watching video sex scenes always identifies with the aggressor? Carol Clover, in her book about slasher films, Men Women and Chainsaws, has shown that males in the audience often identify with on-screen females, and vice versa. Indeed, in one of the studies Russell cites, researchers found that male college students and men living in inner-city housing projects found four categories of violence arousing. One of the arousing categories was "a female killing a male" (p. 146).
Lip service: At various points throughout the book, Russell will make a reasonable statement. For instance, she writes "What is objectionable about pornography, then, is its abusive and degrading portrayal of females and female sexuality, not its sexual content or explicitness" (p. 5). Elsewhere she admits that by the definition of simple causation, "pornography clearly does not cause rape, as it seems safe to assume that some pornography consumers do not rape women, and that many rapes are unrelated to pornography" (p. 119). However, since she does not provide any examples of sexual content that is not abusive or degrading, and since her purpose is to implicate pornography as one of the primary causes of rape, these brief admissions can be seen as mere lip service.
Ignoring the obvious interpretation of others' findings: In making a case that viewers imitate what they see on screen, she cites the seemingly shocking statistic that "Among the junior high school students [in Jennings Bryant's study] 72 of the males reported that 'they wanted to try some sexual experiment or sexual behavior that they had seen in their initial exposure to X-rated material'" (p. 126). This finding will assuredly be shocking to any reader who has taken Russell's word about what "typical porn" is like, but anyone who has viewed porn for him- or herself might have a different interpretation: most 7th and 8th graders have not experienced sex, and it is not surprising that they would some day like to try intercourse (or, God forbid!, fellatio or cunnilingus), the real staple of heterosexual porn.
Failure to critique the studies she cites: She quotes from a study that confirms "that exposure to non-violent pornography causes masculine sex-typed males, in contrast to androgynous males, to view and treat women as a sex object" (p.132). The flaw in this study lies in the initial classification of the participants. The term "masculine sex-typed males" was defined as men who "encode all cross-sex interactions in sexual terms and all members of the opposite sex in terms of sexual attractiveness." An astute reader--one who can translate jargon into plain English--will have noticed that by definition this group of men viewed women as sex objects before they even participated in the study.
Ignoring the findings or premises of others' studies: Russell makes use of Dietz and Evans' statistics about the increase in bondage and domination imagery on the cover of heterosexual porn magazines. She neglects to mention, however, that the authors of this study saw it as an "unobtrusive measure of the prevalence of the corresponding fantasy among consumers," since "the imagery of pornography tends to correspond to the preexisting fantasy images of the consumer."2 In other words, they posit that pornography is an effect, whereas Russell takes the opposite stance, arguing that it is a cause.
Citing irrelevant studies: She cites a study by Malamuth and Check, in which students viewed a "feature-length film that portrayed violence against women as being justifiable and having positive consequences (Swept Away or The Getaway)" (p.134). Their findings are of course irrelevant in a book called Against Pornography, since the films they used are rated R, and any actions taken by fired-up readers of Russell's book are unlikely to be directed against The UA or Landmark cinemas.
Ignoring or glossing over points that run counter to her theories: She admits that "Psychologists James Check and Neil Malamuth have provided experimental evidence that pornography that is supplemented with sound educational information does not induce the negative effects that would otherwise occur" (p. 17). However, she ignores the ramifications of this finding: it is important to make porn more accessible, not less. Families who will not freak out if little Johnny or Jenny is watching porn will be more likely to have a chance to discuss the videos with their kids, and to use them as an opportunity to educate.
As a teacher, I of course believe in the power of education. And I believe that the best education succeeds not in transmitting the biases of the teacher into the minds of the students, but rather in teaching the students to ferret out faulty logic wherever it resides, and to open their minds to truth wherever it may be found. And the best education of all succeeds in opening the teacher's mind too. In that spirit, I turn from my point-by-point critique of Russell's methods in order to attempt to reach an unbiased perspective on the issues she raises. I don't want readers to come away from this review article with the impression that I am just as biased, and just as likely to ignore evidence that runs counter to my pet theory, as Russell is.
There's a little gold sticker on the cover of Russell's book that reads "WARNING: Some of the visuals in this book may cause distress." It turns out that I am not so desensitized to sexual violence that I was completely immune to that distress. Certainly the album cover depicting a just-raped woman next to the graffiti "Guns N Roses Was Here" disturbed me: I couldn't help but think of the young fans of that group, who are being taught a less-than-subtle lesson about rape. Given my own personal history, I also was disturbed by the ad in Playboy (for Oui magazine) depicting an adolescent-looking nude girl in handcuffs above the caption "How one family solved its discipline problem." I don't think it's possible to argue that Playboy caused the national epidemic of child sexual abuse, partly because incest existed for centuries before Playboy came on the market. But I do think it would be naive to argue that the media plays no role in the overall climate of misogyny in the United States today.
Given the fact that pornography is far less prevalent and accessible than television, advertising, mainstream movies, and billboards, why do radical feminists such as Russell focus their attacks on pornography? One argument is that the conjunction between sex and violence is especially compelling. To put it crudely, one might compare male viewers of video porn to Pavlov's dogs: they are trained to ejaculate at the sight of sexual violence towards women. Russell cites a 1985 study by Donnerstein, in which participants were divided into three groups: one saw X-rated movies depicting sexual assault; the second saw X-rated movies showing only consenting sex; the third saw R-rated sexually violent movies. Then they all saw a reenactment of a real rape trial. "Subjects who had seen the R-rated movies: (1) rated the rape victim as significantly more worthless, (2) rated her injury as significantly less severe, and (3) assigned greater blame to her for being raped than did the subjects who had not seen the films [i.e. the control group]. In contrast, these results were not seen for the X-rated non-violent films. However, the results were much the same for violent X-rated films, despite the fact that the R-rated material was 'much more graphically violent'" (p. 137). There is no question in my mind that if I had my druthers, the media would not pre-dispose potential jurors to underestimate a rape victim's worth or her injuries.
Still, Donnerstein's study also suggests that the degree of explicitness of the sex scenes in the movies was not a factor in the participants' responses to the rape trial. Since the ratio of sexual assault scenes to consensual sex scenes is much higher in Hollywood films than it is in porn videos (for evidence, see the study by Palys above, or just pay attention when you go to the movies), the unavoidable conclusion seems to be that despite their protestations, writers such as Russell actually are attacking sexuality.
Intentionally or not, Russell is adding to the climate of misogyny. She notes for instance that "Negative consequences to males who exploit women in this situation [i.e. in bondage] are improbable since women who are violated while in bondage are unlikely to report such abuses to the police." She is right: most sex workers know they will automatically be assumed guilty by the judicial system. But the more Russell contributes to a climate of sexual repression, the harder it will be to obtain legal redress for crimes against women who work in the sex industry.
It's hard to object to her recommendations, since she provides none. She does not seem to be recommending that pornography be fought via the courts; in fact, she goes to some lengths to distinguish herself from MacKinnon and Dworkin, who needed to use a legal definition of pornography in order to write their legislation. She repeatedly claims to be against censorship, although it is true that she does so only in the context of defending her own right to free speech. A rave review just inside the cover, in which Nikki Craft writes that she was "moved to tear up several hundred Hustler magazines in convenience stores and throughout Santa Cruz," might be interpreted as an implied recommendation. Anyone who reads this book out of context (of the feminist debate about pornography or the full spectrum of pornographic materials) is likely to take matters into their own hands, and the target will be a symptom (for instance Hustler magazine) of our social ills rather than an underlying cause (such as economic inequality between the genders).
In lieu of author's recommendations, I will make a suggestion of my own. On the copyright page Russell prohibits reproduction of any part of the book, specifying that "the only exception to these rules applies to feminists dedicated to the fight against pornography, who are welcome to copy this material free of charge in pursuit of their anti-pornography work." This is especially ironic in light of the fact that, by her own admission, she stole these images from the pornographers who held the copyrights in the first place. In her preface she admits to the following violation: "I did not attempt to obtain permission from the pornographers for several reasons. I didn't want to support the pornography industry by giving them money. . . " In light of the fact that one of the most popular tactics used against the porn industry is to tie up all its resources in legal battles in the hopes that the production companies will go bankrupt, I have a fitting response to Russell's book to suggest: the pornographers whose images she has stolen should consider suing her for copyright violations. It would be interesting to see if the courts agreed that her "right to free speech" (which, according to Russell, "includes the right to publish the material necessary to show that pornography is harmful to women" p. x) overrides publishers' and photographers' and artists' rights to fair payment for the reproduction of their work.
On a more serious note, I would like to say that a feminist writer who has done such important work in the areas of rape and child sexual abuse might have been expected to have chosen her target more carefully. Pornography is not the culprit here. If feminists are to make real strides towards stopping violence against women, we will need a more realistic assessment of the root causes of the problem, and a more effective plan for bringing about true social change.
1 Palys T. (1986). Testing the common wisdom: the social content of video pornography. Canadian Psychology, 27(1):27–35. (p 27–29)
2 Dietz P, Evans B. (1982). Pornographic imagery and prevalence of paraphilia. American Journal of Psychiatry 139:1493–1495. (p 1423; italics mine.)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Fair Use, 2257, and Double Standards: A response and challenge to NoPornNorthampton
Adam Cohen of NoPornNorthampton dropped by to comment here recently. As much as I vehemently disagree with NPNH and their allies, on many levels and on many issues, I do welcome his willingness to come by and debate. I will note that this blog is always open to those critical of our position. Likewise, I challenge Adam Cohen and others in the anti-porn blogosphere to show the courage of their convictions and do the same, something they are often not open to doing.
To start out with, Adam Cohen has posted a response to Renegade Evolution's long-standing contention that the anti-porn slideshow used by Stop Porn Culture and similar material on anti-porn websites (including NPNH), which show explicit pornographic images in order to critique them, are in violation of Federal "2257" documentation laws. Cohen counters that the legislation contains a clear exemption for "noncommercial or educational distribution" of such material, basically allowing a "fair use" exemption to 2257.
(At this point, I also want to point to an excellent post on this subject by Elizabeth at Sex in the Public Square. Elizabeth also respectfully takes issue with some of Ren's contentions about fair use and 2257.)
I think a lot of this debate flounders on confusion as to what the legal status of 2257 is at this point, having been amended and greatly expanded last year, only to be struck down in the Sixth Circuit Court. So what is actually covered by 2257 at the moment is unclear.
The original version of 2257 did not have broad application to "secondary producers", however, the amended version did. The "educational" exemption that NPNH cites may very well be in effect per the original version, however, "secondary producer" provisions in the amended legislation call this into question.
Adam Cohen accuses us of trying to censor anti-porn speech. That's not the intention of any of the writers at this site (or any other sex-positive activist site that I can think of). While I can't speak for everybody here, I'm actually very against the amendments to 2257, BUT, if this is to be the law, then the law MUST apply equally to all – no special dispensation for being on the "side of the angels". One of the major objections to the "secondary producer" provisions of the 2257 amendments is the potentially harmful effect that it will have on the sex-related blogosphere, who under the provisions of these amendments, might be considered "secondary producers" of internet porn and charged accordingly if not in possession of a full compliment of 2257-related documents. But the anti-porn folks, apparently, are supposed to get a free pass to show this material without such restrictions. This is nothing less than viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple, and if the 2257 laws are enforced this way, it only compounds the already-problematic free speech implications of such legislation.
To use a specific example, one of the sites we have on our blogroll, SugarBank,* is a prime example of the kind of site that would probably be targeted as a "secondary producer" under the amended legislation. Yep, its a pro-porn site with an abundance of porn imagery found within. However, its quite clear from reading the site that the images are used as a basis for discussion and critical commentary on various pieces of pornography and about the porn industry. Certainly not the kind of discussion and critique that NPNH and the like would agree with, but that goes without saying. Should the government get the expanded 2257 regulations it wants, what do you think the likelihood that a site like SugarBank will be granted the kinds of exemption and latitude that NoPornNorthampton and Stop Porn Culture seek for themselves? Should such an enforcement pattern come to pass, I'd go so far as to say that this would provide a strong legal basis for challenging the constitutionality of these 2257 provisions, on the grounds that they legislate unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
And this doesn't even begin to cover laws about not taking reasonable precautions to shield minors from material that's not age-appropriate. This is something John Stagliano is facing jail time for, yet this is also something that Stop Porn Culture and NPNH don't even begin to make such an effort to do when they show explicit images. Again, if you support such laws and the reasoning behind them, then why do you hold yourself above them? A case of "do as I say, not as I do", perhaps? Nor does this even begin to cover the ethical implications of using images of porn performers as poster children for a kind of anti-porn politics that, odds are, the performers in the images would not even remotely support if asked.
So, Adam, since you apparently have an interest in all this, and since you've posted explicit images on the NPNH site yourself on a few occasions, care to join me in opposing the expansion of 2257 to secondary producers, or at least support a broad exemption for ALL fair use and critical commentary of porn? Even sources that are highly favorable to the images in question? If not, I call hypocrisy on that!
* As an aside, let me once again give my highest recommendation to SugarBank and its proprietor, Sam Sugar – it you haven't checked out this site, you definitely should!
To start out with, Adam Cohen has posted a response to Renegade Evolution's long-standing contention that the anti-porn slideshow used by Stop Porn Culture and similar material on anti-porn websites (including NPNH), which show explicit pornographic images in order to critique them, are in violation of Federal "2257" documentation laws. Cohen counters that the legislation contains a clear exemption for "noncommercial or educational distribution" of such material, basically allowing a "fair use" exemption to 2257.
(At this point, I also want to point to an excellent post on this subject by Elizabeth at Sex in the Public Square. Elizabeth also respectfully takes issue with some of Ren's contentions about fair use and 2257.)
I think a lot of this debate flounders on confusion as to what the legal status of 2257 is at this point, having been amended and greatly expanded last year, only to be struck down in the Sixth Circuit Court. So what is actually covered by 2257 at the moment is unclear.
The original version of 2257 did not have broad application to "secondary producers", however, the amended version did. The "educational" exemption that NPNH cites may very well be in effect per the original version, however, "secondary producer" provisions in the amended legislation call this into question.
Adam Cohen accuses us of trying to censor anti-porn speech. That's not the intention of any of the writers at this site (or any other sex-positive activist site that I can think of). While I can't speak for everybody here, I'm actually very against the amendments to 2257, BUT, if this is to be the law, then the law MUST apply equally to all – no special dispensation for being on the "side of the angels". One of the major objections to the "secondary producer" provisions of the 2257 amendments is the potentially harmful effect that it will have on the sex-related blogosphere, who under the provisions of these amendments, might be considered "secondary producers" of internet porn and charged accordingly if not in possession of a full compliment of 2257-related documents. But the anti-porn folks, apparently, are supposed to get a free pass to show this material without such restrictions. This is nothing less than viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple, and if the 2257 laws are enforced this way, it only compounds the already-problematic free speech implications of such legislation.
To use a specific example, one of the sites we have on our blogroll, SugarBank,* is a prime example of the kind of site that would probably be targeted as a "secondary producer" under the amended legislation. Yep, its a pro-porn site with an abundance of porn imagery found within. However, its quite clear from reading the site that the images are used as a basis for discussion and critical commentary on various pieces of pornography and about the porn industry. Certainly not the kind of discussion and critique that NPNH and the like would agree with, but that goes without saying. Should the government get the expanded 2257 regulations it wants, what do you think the likelihood that a site like SugarBank will be granted the kinds of exemption and latitude that NoPornNorthampton and Stop Porn Culture seek for themselves? Should such an enforcement pattern come to pass, I'd go so far as to say that this would provide a strong legal basis for challenging the constitutionality of these 2257 provisions, on the grounds that they legislate unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
And this doesn't even begin to cover laws about not taking reasonable precautions to shield minors from material that's not age-appropriate. This is something John Stagliano is facing jail time for, yet this is also something that Stop Porn Culture and NPNH don't even begin to make such an effort to do when they show explicit images. Again, if you support such laws and the reasoning behind them, then why do you hold yourself above them? A case of "do as I say, not as I do", perhaps? Nor does this even begin to cover the ethical implications of using images of porn performers as poster children for a kind of anti-porn politics that, odds are, the performers in the images would not even remotely support if asked.
So, Adam, since you apparently have an interest in all this, and since you've posted explicit images on the NPNH site yourself on a few occasions, care to join me in opposing the expansion of 2257 to secondary producers, or at least support a broad exemption for ALL fair use and critical commentary of porn? Even sources that are highly favorable to the images in question? If not, I call hypocrisy on that!
* As an aside, let me once again give my highest recommendation to SugarBank and its proprietor, Sam Sugar – it you haven't checked out this site, you definitely should!
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Enough, the law is the law.
This is what needs to be stopped.
Call to action, please redistribute widely.
The Stop Porn Culture Slide Show Training Program includes a script, tips for conducting the session; it also includes the power Point Visual presentation, which contains pornographic material. They are saying that this slide show falls under the preview of Fair Use.
However, as it can now be watched, downloaded, viewed, reproduced, and yes, even sold. the creators of Stop Porn Culture, or anyone and everyone else who wishes to showcase, distribute, or otherwise use the material in the slide show is in violation of Federal Law 2257.
Never mind that not a one of the performers featured in this “educational tool” were asked their opinions, or for their consent, nor were the companies that originally produced the images…but now see, there are questions of a Federal Law which applies to Pornographers, and as these people have essentially made themselves such, the law also applies to them.
Any person exhibiting pornography, even if it is free, is beholden to 2257, this includes SPC, and those who run this seminar. You will note, at the end of the presentation, there is a claim of copywrite over images already subject to copywrite, and used without permission.
You will also note, their attempts to keep this material out of the hands of minors are scant at best.
I encourage everyone to write a letter of protest the organizers of the SPC Training Program, inform anyone and everyone you know who is pondering doing one of these sessions of the lack of 2257 compliance and lack of consent on the part of the performers and owners of the images, and if necessary, alert legal authorities to the use of this slideshow where ever it may occur.
Oh, and I am curious, are people CARDED before attending one of these events? Viewing the slideshow on line? If not, then anyone and everyone involved in this program is guilty of showing pornography to minors…oddly enough, John Stagliano is in court for such things… do the same laws not apply?
Enough.
If Pornographers must comply with 2257, so must their adversaries
Call to action, please redistribute widely.
The Stop Porn Culture Slide Show Training Program includes a script, tips for conducting the session; it also includes the power Point Visual presentation, which contains pornographic material. They are saying that this slide show falls under the preview of Fair Use.
However, as it can now be watched, downloaded, viewed, reproduced, and yes, even sold. the creators of Stop Porn Culture, or anyone and everyone else who wishes to showcase, distribute, or otherwise use the material in the slide show is in violation of Federal Law 2257.
Never mind that not a one of the performers featured in this “educational tool” were asked their opinions, or for their consent, nor were the companies that originally produced the images…but now see, there are questions of a Federal Law which applies to Pornographers, and as these people have essentially made themselves such, the law also applies to them.
Any person exhibiting pornography, even if it is free, is beholden to 2257, this includes SPC, and those who run this seminar. You will note, at the end of the presentation, there is a claim of copywrite over images already subject to copywrite, and used without permission.
You will also note, their attempts to keep this material out of the hands of minors are scant at best.
I encourage everyone to write a letter of protest the organizers of the SPC Training Program, inform anyone and everyone you know who is pondering doing one of these sessions of the lack of 2257 compliance and lack of consent on the part of the performers and owners of the images, and if necessary, alert legal authorities to the use of this slideshow where ever it may occur.
Oh, and I am curious, are people CARDED before attending one of these events? Viewing the slideshow on line? If not, then anyone and everyone involved in this program is guilty of showing pornography to minors…oddly enough, John Stagliano is in court for such things… do the same laws not apply?
Enough.
If Pornographers must comply with 2257, so must their adversaries
Friday, April 18, 2008
Radical feminism or radically bad faith? APRF's attempt to silence RenEv
Its likely that most of the readers of this blog are also readers of Renegade Evolution's blog and already know about this latest dustup. Nonetheless, I do want to post about it here, both as an expression of solidarity with Ren, and to point to how this fits in with the larger context of the "porn wars".
Basically, a student group at William and Mary College, in the wake of the controversy there over the Sex Worker's Art Show, set up a debate on porn and sex work between, on the anti-side, Samantha Berg (probably somebody who needs no introduction by now) and John Foubert, a "pro-feminist" professor of psychology at W&M, who basically comes across as an even more clueless version of Robert Jensen. (He wanted the Sex Worker Art Show banned from campus holding that the slight nudity in the show would directly cause men to go out and rape – I shit you not that this fool actually claimed this.) On the other is Jill Brenneman (who spoke at W&M earlier this month) and Renegade Evolution.
When Sam heard that she would be facing Ren in the debate, she had a hissy fit and demanded that the student group drop Ren as a speaker. The reason – Ren's infamous offhand comment from about a year ago that radical feminists who were hassling other sex-positive and WOC bloggers should "Fall under a truck and die choking on your own blood." Sam, in true drama queen fashion, claims this proves that big bad Ren is a clear threat to her physical safety. At present, the student who organized the debate is trying to talk some sense into Sam Berg, but there is some danger that Ren will be uninvited, as Sam was apparently invited earlier than Ren, hence Sam's threats to pull out apparently have some leverage.
To say that this is utter bullshit is to state the obvious. First, the "fall under a truck" comment is clearly just an angry statement rather than a direct threat, and one that Ren actually apologized for. (Unnecessarily, IMO, but that's Ren's prerogative.) Second, for anybody who's followed the radfem side of the blogosphere porn wars, Sam Berg's reputation as a loose cannon precedes her. She's well-known for her off-the-wall, creepy, and, surprisingly for someone who's supposed to be all about being 110% pro-woman, often rather misogynistic statements about those she's opposed to. Notably, describing sex workers like Ren as “I’m hot, bi-sexee, and willing to fuck and suck anything for money”. Or strippers as "women smiling while hanging upside down from a pole like a painted negro in a minstrel show dancing for peanuts". (OK, slowly backing away....)
The thing is, this is not a new pattern with the anti-porn feminist crowd. In the 1980s, Dworkin and MacKinnon would debate men like Alan Dershowitz, but would routinely refuse to debate sex workers and sex-positive feminists. The reasons for this were entirely propagandistic, a way of conveying the impression that they represented women, and only men opposed their politics. Later, when the issue of opposition by sex workers and other feminists became unavoidable, MacKinnon and other radical feminists would come to use the kind of tactics we being used by Sam Berg, claiming that the presence of such activists presented a physical danger to themselves and other women.
In 1993, students affiliated with Catherine MacKinnon forcibly removed Carol Jacobsen's video and photo exhibit "Porn'Im'Age'Ry: Picturing Prostitutes" (along with works by Veronica Vera and several other artists) from a conference on prostitution at University of Michigan Law School (MacKinnon's haunt) with the rather dubious claim that the exhibit was pornographic and presented a direct danger to the women at the conference. (That many of the same issues are still being played out 15 years later with the Sex Worker's Art Show is rather telling.) The films were shown at UM only after a lawsuit against the University by the ACLU.
In 2001, Janice Raymond of CATW successfully pressured NYU to have Jo Weldon, at that time an active sex worker, removed from a panel discussion on trafficking. The reason? Because Weldon was a sex worker and not on the same page as CATW, and that since CATW didn't have a sex worker or ex-sex worker from their camp on the panel, Weldon's presence "experiential advantage" biased the discussion against CATW. Note that CATW's tactics involving a last-minute demand for a change in speakers is very similar to what is happening to Ren here.
I also want to point to Witchy-Woo's recent rather off-the-wall broadside against Anthony Kennerson, over nothing in particular except that she wanted to bring up how much she hated him. (I've also been a similar target of abuse by this UK clique of radfems, with a long history of trying to bait Anthony and myself by calling us "cowards". I can't speak for Anthony, but my refusal to engage with them has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that there's really nothing to be gained by arguing with a pack of rabid, hostile ideologues.) Not that I think this has any direct connection with the W&M events, but it fits this larger pattern. Once again, in the context of a rare display of sort-of-unity between radfems and sex-positive feminists, a radfem takes it upon herself to call out a man who is rather peripheral to the whole discussion, who on this issue was more or less on the same side, just for the sake of, once again, creating a "radfems vs men" two-minute hate. I think its rather interesting to contrast a group of radfems going out of their way to pick a fight with a man versus another radfem avoiding debate with a woman who has proven she can effectively call their position into question. I think this has everything to do with the way radfems have been trying to frame this debate for the last 25 years. However, I think the time has long since passed since they can get away with trying to hide the fact that they have managed to piss off not just men and not just "johns", but an awful lot of feminists, women, and sex workers – in other words, many of the very people who they claim to be helping.
Basically, a student group at William and Mary College, in the wake of the controversy there over the Sex Worker's Art Show, set up a debate on porn and sex work between, on the anti-side, Samantha Berg (probably somebody who needs no introduction by now) and John Foubert, a "pro-feminist" professor of psychology at W&M, who basically comes across as an even more clueless version of Robert Jensen. (He wanted the Sex Worker Art Show banned from campus holding that the slight nudity in the show would directly cause men to go out and rape – I shit you not that this fool actually claimed this.) On the other is Jill Brenneman (who spoke at W&M earlier this month) and Renegade Evolution.
When Sam heard that she would be facing Ren in the debate, she had a hissy fit and demanded that the student group drop Ren as a speaker. The reason – Ren's infamous offhand comment from about a year ago that radical feminists who were hassling other sex-positive and WOC bloggers should "Fall under a truck and die choking on your own blood." Sam, in true drama queen fashion, claims this proves that big bad Ren is a clear threat to her physical safety. At present, the student who organized the debate is trying to talk some sense into Sam Berg, but there is some danger that Ren will be uninvited, as Sam was apparently invited earlier than Ren, hence Sam's threats to pull out apparently have some leverage.
To say that this is utter bullshit is to state the obvious. First, the "fall under a truck" comment is clearly just an angry statement rather than a direct threat, and one that Ren actually apologized for. (Unnecessarily, IMO, but that's Ren's prerogative.) Second, for anybody who's followed the radfem side of the blogosphere porn wars, Sam Berg's reputation as a loose cannon precedes her. She's well-known for her off-the-wall, creepy, and, surprisingly for someone who's supposed to be all about being 110% pro-woman, often rather misogynistic statements about those she's opposed to. Notably, describing sex workers like Ren as “I’m hot, bi-sexee, and willing to fuck and suck anything for money”. Or strippers as "women smiling while hanging upside down from a pole like a painted negro in a minstrel show dancing for peanuts". (OK, slowly backing away....)
The thing is, this is not a new pattern with the anti-porn feminist crowd. In the 1980s, Dworkin and MacKinnon would debate men like Alan Dershowitz, but would routinely refuse to debate sex workers and sex-positive feminists. The reasons for this were entirely propagandistic, a way of conveying the impression that they represented women, and only men opposed their politics. Later, when the issue of opposition by sex workers and other feminists became unavoidable, MacKinnon and other radical feminists would come to use the kind of tactics we being used by Sam Berg, claiming that the presence of such activists presented a physical danger to themselves and other women.
In 1993, students affiliated with Catherine MacKinnon forcibly removed Carol Jacobsen's video and photo exhibit "Porn'Im'Age'Ry: Picturing Prostitutes" (along with works by Veronica Vera and several other artists) from a conference on prostitution at University of Michigan Law School (MacKinnon's haunt) with the rather dubious claim that the exhibit was pornographic and presented a direct danger to the women at the conference. (That many of the same issues are still being played out 15 years later with the Sex Worker's Art Show is rather telling.) The films were shown at UM only after a lawsuit against the University by the ACLU.
In 2001, Janice Raymond of CATW successfully pressured NYU to have Jo Weldon, at that time an active sex worker, removed from a panel discussion on trafficking. The reason? Because Weldon was a sex worker and not on the same page as CATW, and that since CATW didn't have a sex worker or ex-sex worker from their camp on the panel, Weldon's presence "experiential advantage" biased the discussion against CATW. Note that CATW's tactics involving a last-minute demand for a change in speakers is very similar to what is happening to Ren here.
I also want to point to Witchy-Woo's recent rather off-the-wall broadside against Anthony Kennerson, over nothing in particular except that she wanted to bring up how much she hated him. (I've also been a similar target of abuse by this UK clique of radfems, with a long history of trying to bait Anthony and myself by calling us "cowards". I can't speak for Anthony, but my refusal to engage with them has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that there's really nothing to be gained by arguing with a pack of rabid, hostile ideologues.) Not that I think this has any direct connection with the W&M events, but it fits this larger pattern. Once again, in the context of a rare display of sort-of-unity between radfems and sex-positive feminists, a radfem takes it upon herself to call out a man who is rather peripheral to the whole discussion, who on this issue was more or less on the same side, just for the sake of, once again, creating a "radfems vs men" two-minute hate. I think its rather interesting to contrast a group of radfems going out of their way to pick a fight with a man versus another radfem avoiding debate with a woman who has proven she can effectively call their position into question. I think this has everything to do with the way radfems have been trying to frame this debate for the last 25 years. However, I think the time has long since passed since they can get away with trying to hide the fact that they have managed to piss off not just men and not just "johns", but an awful lot of feminists, women, and sex workers – in other words, many of the very people who they claim to be helping.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
A few things: Boston, A Semi-Open Thread, Ernest-rant on as it suits you...
So I have been reading and taking to heart a lot of what Ernest has been saying here lately. As y'all know, I respect the work he and Nina have done wrt to AIM and countless other things, the way they've dealt with the Dines/Jensen set...and I also realize they are knee deep in this kind of thing, along with their jobs and other concerns daily.
But I do think he is right in that the APRF set is far more dangerous than most people give them credit for, partially because a lot of folk think they are wingers than no one is going to listen to or take seriously...
Only people are, and they do. And he is right. Tons of these folk are in violation of 2257, people can now get College Credit for attending Wheelock Anti-Porn events, they are writing books, speaking at universities everywhere, and getting a whole lot of press...
Meanwhile, we're sitting here blogging.
I mean yeah, I have a fair amount on my plate sex workers organizations wise here lately, and Atlanta and Chicago coming up, plus daily life and job stuff going on, but this? This is important to me. And I think Ernest is right that we can't really sit around and hope the industry itself does something (aside from Ron Jermey), and making noise and getting heard is not going to be pretty or nice or easy....but I think it should be done. And why yes, I realize that since I am ON the east coast going on up to Wheelock and making noise is easier for me....but...
See, I am a relative nobody. A loud, abrassive nobody, but a nobody. And just one 5'2" female person. On the fringe of the industry. On the East Coast. I have alerted some like minded folk and hopefully they can make time. But yeah...Boston? Wheelock? I think I can do that.
So yeah, any advice you have, Ernest, or ideas for what (should anything happen) should be mentioned, so on, feel free to impart them.
And yes, IACB, I will take my video camera.
But I do think he is right in that the APRF set is far more dangerous than most people give them credit for, partially because a lot of folk think they are wingers than no one is going to listen to or take seriously...
Only people are, and they do. And he is right. Tons of these folk are in violation of 2257, people can now get College Credit for attending Wheelock Anti-Porn events, they are writing books, speaking at universities everywhere, and getting a whole lot of press...
Meanwhile, we're sitting here blogging.
I mean yeah, I have a fair amount on my plate sex workers organizations wise here lately, and Atlanta and Chicago coming up, plus daily life and job stuff going on, but this? This is important to me. And I think Ernest is right that we can't really sit around and hope the industry itself does something (aside from Ron Jermey), and making noise and getting heard is not going to be pretty or nice or easy....but I think it should be done. And why yes, I realize that since I am ON the east coast going on up to Wheelock and making noise is easier for me....but...
See, I am a relative nobody. A loud, abrassive nobody, but a nobody. And just one 5'2" female person. On the fringe of the industry. On the East Coast. I have alerted some like minded folk and hopefully they can make time. But yeah...Boston? Wheelock? I think I can do that.
So yeah, any advice you have, Ernest, or ideas for what (should anything happen) should be mentioned, so on, feel free to impart them.
And yes, IACB, I will take my video camera.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Melissa Farley's latest + Bound Not Gagged blog-in, 9/17
We only occasionally blog about non-porn sex work topics here, but this is simply a matter of focus on issues around porn. Other issues around sex work are important to pay attention to as well, though, and the issue of whether its OK to produce commercial porn using real human beings ultimately rests on the issue of whether its OK to pay for sex at all. The latter is coming under increasing attack, as illustrated by the publicity surrounding the release of a new report on Nevada prostitution.
Melissa Farley, Nevada Brothels, and the effect on the legal sex work debate
Recently, radical feminist anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley published a report called "Prostitution and trafficking in Nevada: making the connections". Many readers are probably familiar with Farley's "research", since it is often used as a stick to beat proponents of any kind of legal sex work over the head with, whether that's legal prostitution, stripping, or porn modeling. The story goes that sex work is inherently a horrible form of abuse and that "90%" of all sex workers show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, want to leave prostitution, but are prevented from doing so by drug addiction, economic desperation, or some pimp basically keeping them as a coerced sex slave. These data were gathered mainly from urban street prostitutes and from very marginalized prostitutes in developing countries, but the findings are generalized to be applicable to women in any and all situations of sex work.
Farley's study of Nevada brothel prostitutes claims similar findings as for her earlier findings about street prostitutes, this time claiming a figure of "81%" (of a total sample of 45 brothel prostitutes) who want to leave prostitution, most of whom are supposedly prevented from doing so. This has been quite a coup for Farley, because she now has been able to claim that even in a controlled, legal setting, she still has been able to find damning evidence against the effects of prostitution. The report has gotten an enormous amount of attention in the press, most notably in a series of op-eds by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who seems to have bought completely into Farley's views on sex work. (Herbert's columns get a much-needed fisking in this post at Sexinthepublicsquare.) These columns, as well as a similar op-ed by Guardian columnist and dyed-in-the-wool radfem Julie Bindel, have gotten a lot of circulation around the liberal and feminist blogosphere, and a lot of people who were more or less on the fence on the issue have now come out against legalization of prostitution, for greater enforcement and penalties against customers, in other words, for the so-called "Swedish Model" of prostitution law. In an ironic turn, Bitch PhD even came out for the Swedish Model in a column on none other than Suicide Girls, a site that, while not exactly entailing prostitution, does entail a mild form of sex work that radfems like Farley would ultimately like to see penalized as employing prostitution. (Not to mention the exploitative reputation of SuicideGirls even among many of us on the pro-porn side.)
As the above example illustrates, I have yet to see many liberals or moderate feminists fully advocate the criminalization of strip-club customers or porn producers, or even make the connections about how their newly hardline stance on prostitution might ultimately implicate areas of sex work they consume or are otherwise involved in. Such implications are quite clearly on the long term agenda of anti-porn abolitionists, however, as the Captive Daughters report I blogged about last month makes clear. The fact that many of the leading sex work abolitionist individuals and organizations have their roots in the 1980s feminist anti-porn movement is no coincidence. The prostitution anti-legalization argument is getting some support now even among relative "liberals", and its only a matter of time before such arguments will be employed against porn and stripping.
Farley's methods
Just how reliable Farley's findings actually are is an open question. Admittedly, I have not seen a copy of Farley's Nevada prostitution report. (Basically, its a self-published thing by Farley – there is no electronic copy to download and an OCLC search does not show it to be deposited in any libraries. One has to buy a hard copy from her in order to even see the thing.) Farley states (in a September 7th TV interview on the LV news program "Face to Face") that she uses the same methodology as she did for her earlier studies, so presumably, many of the same criticisms of her methodology in those studies applies here. To quote from the Ronald Weitzer (2005) critique of Farley's methodology:
Farley reports (in the "Methods" sections of her various papers, for example, here) that she uses a combination of "structured interviews" and questionnaires to elicit information from her subjects. However, the raw findings are not reported, but rather, Farley distillation of those findings. Thus, when we are confronted with statements like "92 percent stated that they wanted to leave prostitution" (an answer that's open to some interpretation, in any event), we have no idea exactly what question or questions were asked and whether there this was subject to interpretation by Farley. Nor do we have any idea as to how Farley chooses her interview subjects. The findings may or may not be valid, but there's a lack of transparency in her methods that casts doubt upon them. And in the case of Farley's Nevada report, the fact that the thing is self-published would seem to indicate that there's been no independent peer-review of this study, a fact that does not speak well for it.
(I also recommend having a look at this recent comment (scroll down) by Jill Brenneman regarding her experiences with Farley back when she was still in the radical feminist camp. The comments on how Farley would elicit information and coach ex-prostitutes on their statements are very illuminating.)
One method of evaluating Farley's findings is simply to compare them to the findings of other researchers who have done similar work. As it happens, other researchers have had entry into Nevada's legal brothels and paint a picture a much more nuanced (if not entirely rosy) picture of Nevada brothel work. Notably, Kate Hausbeck and Barbara Brents have published a number of journal on the topic and are in the process of coming out with a book of their own on the topic, "The State of Sex: The Nevada Brothel Industry". (Brents also states in the above-mentioned "Face to Face" program that she strongly disagrees with Farley's conclusions, based on her own 10 years of research in Nevada borthels. The full interview with Brents from September 5th is no longer up on the Face to Face site, unfortuntately.) Also, Alexa Albert, who recently published an ethnography titled "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women".
That Farley seems to have a knack for coming up with a litany of horrors not reported by other researchers, combined with the lack of transparency in her methodology raises questions as to how much Farley's findings represent the ugly truth about prostitution and how much, as has been shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifaid about Margaret Mead, is a talent for finding what she wants to find.
(Update, 9/17: Barabara Brents, one of the above-mentioned authors, has reviewed Farley's book here. Sure enough, it suffers from the same lack of methodological transparency as her earlier papers, and "presents none of the elements contained in social scientific peer reviewed research.")
Some responses
The "Nevada Model" of legal, controlled brothels has never been a popular one among sex worker's rights activists, as it places far to much power in the hands of brothel owners and corrupt local law enforcement, provides only limited protections for sex workers while limiting their freedom of movement and disempowering them in other ways. According to Alexa Albert, the brothel system has not succeeded in getting pimps out of the equation, and in the past, the brothels even required the women to have pimps as a condition of employment. (Farley's accusations go beyond anything claimed to date by other authors, however, claiming that brothel prostitutes are literally prevented from quitting and leaving if they so choose.) And, in any event, the legal brothel system is largely irrelevant in the larger context of Nevada prostitution, since it in no way legalizes prostitution where it actually takes place, namely, in Nevada's cities, particularly Las Vegas.
Nonetheless, Farley's study is being used as propaganda not for reforming the Nevada system and other poorly regulated forms of legal prostitution, but for paternalistic Swedish-style laws, that, while in theory decriminalizing sex work, nonetheless make it much more difficult for sex workers who are there by choice to actually make a living and at the same time, increasingly criminalizes sex industry customers, even those involved in entirely non-violent, consensual transactions.
So where are the voices of sex workers, especially Nevada ones, in this debate? Largely shut out of it, except as reported by academics and social workers who claim to speak for them. However, the sex worker blog Bound Not Gagged is planning a response this coming Monday evening, 9/17, starting at 6PM EST, which will be a response to Farley and the abolitionists in general. I encourage everybody to check it out, and contribute information if you have it.
Also, Ronald Weitzer came out with an absolutely excellent paper this month in the journal "Politics & Society". The paper is called "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade". It describes the sex trafficking issue as one that, while having a basis in reality, clearly has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. The extent of sex trafficking is exaggerated and sex work as a whole is conflated with it. Sex workers are being cast universally as unmitigated victims, while customers are entirely demonized, and all of this being done to advance the political agenda of a particular set of moral entrepreneurs, in this case an alliance of religious conservatives and radical feminists. The paper also exposes many of the myths and exaggerated claims of the prostitution abolitionist movement. Highly recommended, needless to say.
Melissa Farley, Nevada Brothels, and the effect on the legal sex work debate
Recently, radical feminist anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley published a report called "Prostitution and trafficking in Nevada: making the connections". Many readers are probably familiar with Farley's "research", since it is often used as a stick to beat proponents of any kind of legal sex work over the head with, whether that's legal prostitution, stripping, or porn modeling. The story goes that sex work is inherently a horrible form of abuse and that "90%" of all sex workers show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, want to leave prostitution, but are prevented from doing so by drug addiction, economic desperation, or some pimp basically keeping them as a coerced sex slave. These data were gathered mainly from urban street prostitutes and from very marginalized prostitutes in developing countries, but the findings are generalized to be applicable to women in any and all situations of sex work.
Farley's study of Nevada brothel prostitutes claims similar findings as for her earlier findings about street prostitutes, this time claiming a figure of "81%" (of a total sample of 45 brothel prostitutes) who want to leave prostitution, most of whom are supposedly prevented from doing so. This has been quite a coup for Farley, because she now has been able to claim that even in a controlled, legal setting, she still has been able to find damning evidence against the effects of prostitution. The report has gotten an enormous amount of attention in the press, most notably in a series of op-eds by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who seems to have bought completely into Farley's views on sex work. (Herbert's columns get a much-needed fisking in this post at Sexinthepublicsquare.) These columns, as well as a similar op-ed by Guardian columnist and dyed-in-the-wool radfem Julie Bindel, have gotten a lot of circulation around the liberal and feminist blogosphere, and a lot of people who were more or less on the fence on the issue have now come out against legalization of prostitution, for greater enforcement and penalties against customers, in other words, for the so-called "Swedish Model" of prostitution law. In an ironic turn, Bitch PhD even came out for the Swedish Model in a column on none other than Suicide Girls, a site that, while not exactly entailing prostitution, does entail a mild form of sex work that radfems like Farley would ultimately like to see penalized as employing prostitution. (Not to mention the exploitative reputation of SuicideGirls even among many of us on the pro-porn side.)
As the above example illustrates, I have yet to see many liberals or moderate feminists fully advocate the criminalization of strip-club customers or porn producers, or even make the connections about how their newly hardline stance on prostitution might ultimately implicate areas of sex work they consume or are otherwise involved in. Such implications are quite clearly on the long term agenda of anti-porn abolitionists, however, as the Captive Daughters report I blogged about last month makes clear. The fact that many of the leading sex work abolitionist individuals and organizations have their roots in the 1980s feminist anti-porn movement is no coincidence. The prostitution anti-legalization argument is getting some support now even among relative "liberals", and its only a matter of time before such arguments will be employed against porn and stripping.
Farley's methods
Just how reliable Farley's findings actually are is an open question. Admittedly, I have not seen a copy of Farley's Nevada prostitution report. (Basically, its a self-published thing by Farley – there is no electronic copy to download and an OCLC search does not show it to be deposited in any libraries. One has to buy a hard copy from her in order to even see the thing.) Farley states (in a September 7th TV interview on the LV news program "Face to Face") that she uses the same methodology as she did for her earlier studies, so presumably, many of the same criticisms of her methodology in those studies applies here. To quote from the Ronald Weitzer (2005) critique of Farley's methodology:
What about Farley’s own research procedures? Much is left opaque. In one study, Farley and Barkan (1998) interviewed street prostitutes in San Francisco. No indication is given of the breadth or diversity of their sample, or the method of approaching people on the street....No information is provided as to how these locations were selected, or whether alternative locations were rejected for some reason....Finally, though Farley lists the topics covered in the interviews, none of the actual questions is presented. It is especially important to know the exact wording of questions, especially on this topic, because question wording may skew the answers.
Farley reports (in the "Methods" sections of her various papers, for example, here) that she uses a combination of "structured interviews" and questionnaires to elicit information from her subjects. However, the raw findings are not reported, but rather, Farley distillation of those findings. Thus, when we are confronted with statements like "92 percent stated that they wanted to leave prostitution" (an answer that's open to some interpretation, in any event), we have no idea exactly what question or questions were asked and whether there this was subject to interpretation by Farley. Nor do we have any idea as to how Farley chooses her interview subjects. The findings may or may not be valid, but there's a lack of transparency in her methods that casts doubt upon them. And in the case of Farley's Nevada report, the fact that the thing is self-published would seem to indicate that there's been no independent peer-review of this study, a fact that does not speak well for it.
(I also recommend having a look at this recent comment (scroll down) by Jill Brenneman regarding her experiences with Farley back when she was still in the radical feminist camp. The comments on how Farley would elicit information and coach ex-prostitutes on their statements are very illuminating.)
One method of evaluating Farley's findings is simply to compare them to the findings of other researchers who have done similar work. As it happens, other researchers have had entry into Nevada's legal brothels and paint a picture a much more nuanced (if not entirely rosy) picture of Nevada brothel work. Notably, Kate Hausbeck and Barbara Brents have published a number of journal on the topic and are in the process of coming out with a book of their own on the topic, "The State of Sex: The Nevada Brothel Industry". (Brents also states in the above-mentioned "Face to Face" program that she strongly disagrees with Farley's conclusions, based on her own 10 years of research in Nevada borthels. The full interview with Brents from September 5th is no longer up on the Face to Face site, unfortuntately.) Also, Alexa Albert, who recently published an ethnography titled "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women".
That Farley seems to have a knack for coming up with a litany of horrors not reported by other researchers, combined with the lack of transparency in her methodology raises questions as to how much Farley's findings represent the ugly truth about prostitution and how much, as has been shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifaid about Margaret Mead, is a talent for finding what she wants to find.
(Update, 9/17: Barabara Brents, one of the above-mentioned authors, has reviewed Farley's book here. Sure enough, it suffers from the same lack of methodological transparency as her earlier papers, and "presents none of the elements contained in social scientific peer reviewed research.")
Some responses
The "Nevada Model" of legal, controlled brothels has never been a popular one among sex worker's rights activists, as it places far to much power in the hands of brothel owners and corrupt local law enforcement, provides only limited protections for sex workers while limiting their freedom of movement and disempowering them in other ways. According to Alexa Albert, the brothel system has not succeeded in getting pimps out of the equation, and in the past, the brothels even required the women to have pimps as a condition of employment. (Farley's accusations go beyond anything claimed to date by other authors, however, claiming that brothel prostitutes are literally prevented from quitting and leaving if they so choose.) And, in any event, the legal brothel system is largely irrelevant in the larger context of Nevada prostitution, since it in no way legalizes prostitution where it actually takes place, namely, in Nevada's cities, particularly Las Vegas.
Nonetheless, Farley's study is being used as propaganda not for reforming the Nevada system and other poorly regulated forms of legal prostitution, but for paternalistic Swedish-style laws, that, while in theory decriminalizing sex work, nonetheless make it much more difficult for sex workers who are there by choice to actually make a living and at the same time, increasingly criminalizes sex industry customers, even those involved in entirely non-violent, consensual transactions.
So where are the voices of sex workers, especially Nevada ones, in this debate? Largely shut out of it, except as reported by academics and social workers who claim to speak for them. However, the sex worker blog Bound Not Gagged is planning a response this coming Monday evening, 9/17, starting at 6PM EST, which will be a response to Farley and the abolitionists in general. I encourage everybody to check it out, and contribute information if you have it.
Also, Ronald Weitzer came out with an absolutely excellent paper this month in the journal "Politics & Society". The paper is called "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade". It describes the sex trafficking issue as one that, while having a basis in reality, clearly has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. The extent of sex trafficking is exaggerated and sex work as a whole is conflated with it. Sex workers are being cast universally as unmitigated victims, while customers are entirely demonized, and all of this being done to advance the political agenda of a particular set of moral entrepreneurs, in this case an alliance of religious conservatives and radical feminists. The paper also exposes many of the myths and exaggerated claims of the prostitution abolitionist movement. Highly recommended, needless to say.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The definitive takedown of NoPornNorthampton
Those of you who have been following the blogosphere porn wars are surely familiar with the rise of NoPornNorthampton as a major clearinghouse for antiporn writing. The context of the real-world political battle that NPNH emerges from might be less clear to readers, though rival sites MoPornNorthampton and TalkBackNorthampton have been pretty good about exposing "The horror that is NoPornNorthampton".
Now a Hampshire College student, Murial Barkley-Aylmer, has written a senior thesis, an ethnography of the porn wars in Northampton, from a clearly pro-queer and sex-positive perspective. Its an excellent piece of work, covering the porn and censorship battles in Northampton, MA from the early 1960s up to the present and presenting a thorough history of the players in the present battle, including the folks behind NPNH and MPNH. (Though, oddly enough, TalkBackNorthampton isn't mentioned anywhere, which is the one oversight I'd quibble with in this thesis.)
It pretty much pegs exactly what Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter are all about, and describes how they "shopped around" for several avenues of anti-porn argument before siding up with the radical feminist one, a perspective that, not surprisingly, they were completely unfamiliar with until they got into this battle.
One interesting piece of Northampton history she manages to dig up is a forgotten episode from 1989 that might very well be titled "When Radfems Attack". This describes how anti-porn radical feminists managed to shut down Womonfyre, a lesbian feminist bookstore through a combined boycott, "direct action" campaign (eg, vandalism and targeted shoplifting), and threats of more direct violence (eg, firebombing). Ironically, this was a business that had previously managed to survive earlier attacks by religious right types. The crime that this bookstore was being punished for? Carrying feminist porn and erotica – On Our Backs, Annie Sprinkle, that kind of thing.
(I think this and a number of other violent incidents from back in the "sex wars" give lie to the idea that a really extreme and crazy form of radical feminism is something that solely exists as internet chatter. Anti-porn radical feminism was a very violent and scary movement back in the 1980s when it had the critical mass to be so. This is the reason so many of us, coming from various ideological perspectives, spend our energies critiquing what's otherwise such a fringe movement.)
Here's a radio interview with Barkley-Aylmer that serves as a really good overview of the thesis:
Bill Dwight Show, WHMP, August 14, 2007 (MP3).
(Interview starts at 12:00 minutes.)
Here's the thesis itself. To give credit where credit is due, NPNH is actually hosting the PDF of the thesis. Very big of them considering the work is very critical of them and pretty on-target:
NoPorn Northampton: An Interdisciplinary Ethnography Following One City’s Struggle with Pornography, by Murial Barkley-Aylmer (PDF).
NPNH gives their response here:
Hampshire College Thesis Explores Northampton Porn Debate; Our Comments
(NPNH's rebuttal is the usual mix of NIMBYism and extreme sexual conservatism dressed up as "progressive" and not really worth responding to. One point that is worth responding to, the charge that NPNH "bombards with information" and NPNH's counter that they build a strong case by presenting evidence. The problem with NPNH is that the information they present is an often-contradictory mish-mash of far-right, radical feminist, and pop psychology writing presented mostly without analysis or insight. Its the shotgun approach to argument – throw out enough charges and hope that some of them stick. This kind of "presentation of evidence" does not, in fact, amount a strong case of any kind.)
MPNH has a point-by-point comeback here:
NPN Responds to Hampshire Thesis: A Point-by-Point Rebuttal
And, an excellent comeback by Bill Dwight about the "adjustable philosophies" of Adam Cohen:
Bill Dwight Show, WHMP, August 21, 2007 (MP3).
(Runs from 19:00–30:00 minutes.)
Finally, Barkley-Aymler's conclusion is worth quoting, because its such a great "why I'm anti-anti-porn" statement:
Now a Hampshire College student, Murial Barkley-Aylmer, has written a senior thesis, an ethnography of the porn wars in Northampton, from a clearly pro-queer and sex-positive perspective. Its an excellent piece of work, covering the porn and censorship battles in Northampton, MA from the early 1960s up to the present and presenting a thorough history of the players in the present battle, including the folks behind NPNH and MPNH. (Though, oddly enough, TalkBackNorthampton isn't mentioned anywhere, which is the one oversight I'd quibble with in this thesis.)
It pretty much pegs exactly what Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter are all about, and describes how they "shopped around" for several avenues of anti-porn argument before siding up with the radical feminist one, a perspective that, not surprisingly, they were completely unfamiliar with until they got into this battle.
One interesting piece of Northampton history she manages to dig up is a forgotten episode from 1989 that might very well be titled "When Radfems Attack". This describes how anti-porn radical feminists managed to shut down Womonfyre, a lesbian feminist bookstore through a combined boycott, "direct action" campaign (eg, vandalism and targeted shoplifting), and threats of more direct violence (eg, firebombing). Ironically, this was a business that had previously managed to survive earlier attacks by religious right types. The crime that this bookstore was being punished for? Carrying feminist porn and erotica – On Our Backs, Annie Sprinkle, that kind of thing.
(I think this and a number of other violent incidents from back in the "sex wars" give lie to the idea that a really extreme and crazy form of radical feminism is something that solely exists as internet chatter. Anti-porn radical feminism was a very violent and scary movement back in the 1980s when it had the critical mass to be so. This is the reason so many of us, coming from various ideological perspectives, spend our energies critiquing what's otherwise such a fringe movement.)
Here's a radio interview with Barkley-Aylmer that serves as a really good overview of the thesis:
Bill Dwight Show, WHMP, August 14, 2007 (MP3).
(Interview starts at 12:00 minutes.)
Here's the thesis itself. To give credit where credit is due, NPNH is actually hosting the PDF of the thesis. Very big of them considering the work is very critical of them and pretty on-target:
NoPorn Northampton: An Interdisciplinary Ethnography Following One City’s Struggle with Pornography, by Murial Barkley-Aylmer (PDF).
NPNH gives their response here:
Hampshire College Thesis Explores Northampton Porn Debate; Our Comments
(NPNH's rebuttal is the usual mix of NIMBYism and extreme sexual conservatism dressed up as "progressive" and not really worth responding to. One point that is worth responding to, the charge that NPNH "bombards with information" and NPNH's counter that they build a strong case by presenting evidence. The problem with NPNH is that the information they present is an often-contradictory mish-mash of far-right, radical feminist, and pop psychology writing presented mostly without analysis or insight. Its the shotgun approach to argument – throw out enough charges and hope that some of them stick. This kind of "presentation of evidence" does not, in fact, amount a strong case of any kind.)
MPNH has a point-by-point comeback here:
NPN Responds to Hampshire Thesis: A Point-by-Point Rebuttal
And, an excellent comeback by Bill Dwight about the "adjustable philosophies" of Adam Cohen:
Bill Dwight Show, WHMP, August 21, 2007 (MP3).
(Runs from 19:00–30:00 minutes.)
Finally, Barkley-Aymler's conclusion is worth quoting, because its such a great "why I'm anti-anti-porn" statement:
"To oppose all pornography, delineated from erotica by a self-imposed checklist, is to impose one’s own personal boundaries, sexual preferences and sex-political views on other sexual beings, without respect for individualized needs and positively-experienced pleasures. Regardless of who or what anti-pornography activism seeks to target, this indiscriminate condemnation always negatively affects those individuals who live their sexual lives farthest from the sexual norm. Nevertheless, to applaud all pornography, without concern for sexual violence, industry working conditions, and sexually transmitted infection is to esteem the right to free speech over the value of human life."
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Psst...it's illegal...
There is an interesting topic being discussed over on Jill B's blog, and as it is a peeve subject of mine, I thought I'd bring it up here...
Why yes, it would be the use of pornographic images on anti-porn blogs, and the fact that unlike pornographers, the anti-porn folks, along with utterly ignoring the performers whose images they use, are also not at all in compliance with 2257...
Nikki Craft, Melissa Farley, so on, so forth? I seriously doubt they have the legal documentation required to be on file for the images used in their anti-porn arguments....
Curious, no?
Why yes, it would be the use of pornographic images on anti-porn blogs, and the fact that unlike pornographers, the anti-porn folks, along with utterly ignoring the performers whose images they use, are also not at all in compliance with 2257...
Nikki Craft, Melissa Farley, so on, so forth? I seriously doubt they have the legal documentation required to be on file for the images used in their anti-porn arguments....
Curious, no?
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Why I'm anti-anti-porn, Part 2
This being the next in my occasional installments of "Why I'm anti-anti-porn". The last one about issues involved in the production of porn, where I think there are real concerns, and where I think the critiques of porn production fall flat. I've realized that there was one aspect of the antiporn feminist critique that kind of "bridges" the critique of porn production with porn as an expression issue, and one that I didn't address in my last essay.
This idea was a large part of feminist anti-porn rhetoric, summed it up in this quote by Andrea Dworkin from “Letters from a War Zone”:
Essentially, this argument is an attempt to take some of the piss out of the free speech/free expression arguments for porn by pointing out that what's shown in pornography are real acts performed on real women, hence, either free expression arguments don't apply, or, perhaps more broadly, the concept of free expression itself is a red herring, since expressions and acts can't meaningfully be differentiated. (The latter strong version being essentially Catherine MacKinnon's argument, in a nutshell.) In its most extreme form, there's the urban legend that rapists make pornography of women being raped, that this is sold as commercial porn, and that this action is protected because porn is given free speech protections.
What this speaks to is a profound confusion as to what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't.
First off, some clarifications. I realize by saying "First Amendment", I'm being US-centric here – I am ultimately talking about the broader concept of free speech protections that would apply to varying degrees in liberal democracies anywhere. However, the US, generally speaking, has very strong free speech protections relative to other countries and a very highly developed body of law around just what falls under First Amendment protections and why. And yes, I'm also aware that under current First Amendment law, there's an exception for "obscenity". It’s an idea that I think is archaic and will eventually meet its demise, but right now, it is what it is. I'm also aware that what's "obscene" varies from locality to locality (another anachronism in the Internet era), but that in most areas, the overwhelming majority of commercially available pornography doesn't rise to the legal standard of "obscenity". Given that, one can safely say that most commercially available porn today is broadly protected by the First Amendment in most parts of the US.
To say that the First Amendment protects the final product of pornography as expression, however, does not mean that anything that therefore anything that takes place in the production of pornography is given legal carte blanche. The full consent of the performers must be given and the performers must be of legal age to give consent. If porn is made using any performer who is coerced, then that's an act of rape. If a performer is underage, it’s statutory rape. The status of porn as expression doesn't change that.
And the legal status of the final product is affected as well. Obviously, one cannot go out and sell child pornography, for example. Neither can one simply go out and legally sell a video of an actual rape. The rights to buy and sell the image of any performer or model is covered in a contract known as a model release, an agreement between the performer and producer to be able to release the model's images in exchange for payment. Like any contract, if it’s agreed to under duress, that contract is null and void and it’s a crime to distribute those images.
There is one area where First Amendment law does protect something that might otherwise be illegal. That concerns the actual act of performing in pornography, which has been treated as prostitution by some overzealous prosecutors. The Los Angeles County DA actually tried to shut down the LA porn industry this way in the mid-80s, charging several performers as prostitutes and a producer, Harold Freeman, as a pandererer. An important case in free speech law emerged from this event, California v. Freeman. It says, basically, that if you pay somebody to have sex with you, that's prostitution and therefore illegal. If you pay somebody to have sex in front of you (whether it’s live sex or in pornography), that's expression and therefore protected by the First Amendment. It’s a rather fine legal point, and personally, I support simply decriminalizing prostitution and other kinds of sex work (both for the buyers and sellers) overall. (Technically, this precedent is only law in California, but no other prosecutor has attempted to challenge this precedent. In much of Europe, Japan, and Australia, where prostitution is legal or quasi-legal, this distinction is moot. Whether Swedish laws banning the buying of sex change the legal status of porn is an interesting question, though very little porn is produced in Sweden itself.)
Admittedly, there are areas that are borderline and where the law hasn't always provided the protections that it should. Such is the case with small number of pornographers who produce porn after obtaining the barest thread of consent from the models. One such scam is a "bait and switch" where models are hired for ostensible nude or glamour shots, and then told when they arrive that it’s a hardcore porn shoot and pressured into going through with it. I'll name and shame one website that's accused of doing this – Bang Bus who's rather shameful practices were exposed in a Miami Weekly article in 2004. And, of course, there's the infamous Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild fame, who's tactics of isolating and pressuring very drunk women into both softcore and hardcore performances are well-known. I'm unclear why there hasn't been legal recourse against these idiots – perhaps the women victimized by these people don't seek out such recourse, or perhaps the law in this area is underdeveloped. It’s clearly an area where reform needs to take place, both in the law and in the industry itself. As is so often the case when it comes to problems in the porn industry, these problems are not a speech issue, but a labor issue. Attacking free speech protections for pornography does not directly address the problem and causes all kinds of collateral damage.
Next in this series, I'll address the issue of the content of porn and its supposed effects.
This idea was a large part of feminist anti-porn rhetoric, summed it up in this quote by Andrea Dworkin from “Letters from a War Zone”:
“The pimps and the normal men have a constitution that says the filmed rapes are "protected speech" or "free speech." Well, it doesn't actually say that--cameras, after all, hadn't been invented yet; but they interpret their constitution to protect their fun. They have laws and judges that call the women hanging from the trees "free speech.”
Essentially, this argument is an attempt to take some of the piss out of the free speech/free expression arguments for porn by pointing out that what's shown in pornography are real acts performed on real women, hence, either free expression arguments don't apply, or, perhaps more broadly, the concept of free expression itself is a red herring, since expressions and acts can't meaningfully be differentiated. (The latter strong version being essentially Catherine MacKinnon's argument, in a nutshell.) In its most extreme form, there's the urban legend that rapists make pornography of women being raped, that this is sold as commercial porn, and that this action is protected because porn is given free speech protections.
What this speaks to is a profound confusion as to what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't.
First off, some clarifications. I realize by saying "First Amendment", I'm being US-centric here – I am ultimately talking about the broader concept of free speech protections that would apply to varying degrees in liberal democracies anywhere. However, the US, generally speaking, has very strong free speech protections relative to other countries and a very highly developed body of law around just what falls under First Amendment protections and why. And yes, I'm also aware that under current First Amendment law, there's an exception for "obscenity". It’s an idea that I think is archaic and will eventually meet its demise, but right now, it is what it is. I'm also aware that what's "obscene" varies from locality to locality (another anachronism in the Internet era), but that in most areas, the overwhelming majority of commercially available pornography doesn't rise to the legal standard of "obscenity". Given that, one can safely say that most commercially available porn today is broadly protected by the First Amendment in most parts of the US.
To say that the First Amendment protects the final product of pornography as expression, however, does not mean that anything that therefore anything that takes place in the production of pornography is given legal carte blanche. The full consent of the performers must be given and the performers must be of legal age to give consent. If porn is made using any performer who is coerced, then that's an act of rape. If a performer is underage, it’s statutory rape. The status of porn as expression doesn't change that.
And the legal status of the final product is affected as well. Obviously, one cannot go out and sell child pornography, for example. Neither can one simply go out and legally sell a video of an actual rape. The rights to buy and sell the image of any performer or model is covered in a contract known as a model release, an agreement between the performer and producer to be able to release the model's images in exchange for payment. Like any contract, if it’s agreed to under duress, that contract is null and void and it’s a crime to distribute those images.
There is one area where First Amendment law does protect something that might otherwise be illegal. That concerns the actual act of performing in pornography, which has been treated as prostitution by some overzealous prosecutors. The Los Angeles County DA actually tried to shut down the LA porn industry this way in the mid-80s, charging several performers as prostitutes and a producer, Harold Freeman, as a pandererer. An important case in free speech law emerged from this event, California v. Freeman. It says, basically, that if you pay somebody to have sex with you, that's prostitution and therefore illegal. If you pay somebody to have sex in front of you (whether it’s live sex or in pornography), that's expression and therefore protected by the First Amendment. It’s a rather fine legal point, and personally, I support simply decriminalizing prostitution and other kinds of sex work (both for the buyers and sellers) overall. (Technically, this precedent is only law in California, but no other prosecutor has attempted to challenge this precedent. In much of Europe, Japan, and Australia, where prostitution is legal or quasi-legal, this distinction is moot. Whether Swedish laws banning the buying of sex change the legal status of porn is an interesting question, though very little porn is produced in Sweden itself.)
Admittedly, there are areas that are borderline and where the law hasn't always provided the protections that it should. Such is the case with small number of pornographers who produce porn after obtaining the barest thread of consent from the models. One such scam is a "bait and switch" where models are hired for ostensible nude or glamour shots, and then told when they arrive that it’s a hardcore porn shoot and pressured into going through with it. I'll name and shame one website that's accused of doing this – Bang Bus who's rather shameful practices were exposed in a Miami Weekly article in 2004. And, of course, there's the infamous Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild fame, who's tactics of isolating and pressuring very drunk women into both softcore and hardcore performances are well-known. I'm unclear why there hasn't been legal recourse against these idiots – perhaps the women victimized by these people don't seek out such recourse, or perhaps the law in this area is underdeveloped. It’s clearly an area where reform needs to take place, both in the law and in the industry itself. As is so often the case when it comes to problems in the porn industry, these problems are not a speech issue, but a labor issue. Attacking free speech protections for pornography does not directly address the problem and causes all kinds of collateral damage.
Next in this series, I'll address the issue of the content of porn and its supposed effects.
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