"Price of Pleasure" Update: The Dines-Jensen Freak Show Hits Boston University

Just a reminder that the enemies of free adult sexual expression aren't taking any time off.

This from the Boston University school indie paper The Daily Free Press, via Porn Newz:

Students analyze women objectified in pornography

Boston University students piled into the Photonics Center on Monday to view a documentary about sexual activity and aggression seen in pornography.

Students watched the documentary “The Price of Pleasure,” directed by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun, and discussed women’s rights in today’s society.

The Women’s Resource Center organized the screening in an effort to help educate students about how women’s rights are violated by some mainstream adult film industries. 


The documentary delves deeper into the media’s supposed justification of pornography.

According to the film, the media feels it is appropriate to film and distribute porn because the girls are paid to be objectified. In reality, the film argues the girls are not the ones profiting from being filmed – the producers and major corporations receive the majority of the profit.  The film says the adult film industry makes from $10 to 14 billion per year in gross sales.

The documentary argues that as the industry expands, so does its social acceptance.

Whether it is right or wrong for individuals to create porn, both men and women are starting to feel the pressure of the porn industry in their everyday lives, the film says.

The film also highlights negative aspects of the porn industry, such as allegedly blatant racism and abuse of ethnic groups seen in certain films.

Out of a list of randomly selected popularly rented porn titles, 82.2 percent of them were found to contain physical aggression, according to the documentary.  

Following the film screening, former adult film star and current dominatrix Princess Kali came to the stage to answer questions about her career in the porn industry.

Kali shared her views on how women in the porn industry are no different from many other careers in today’s society.

“People say women treat their body as a commodity,” she said. “How is that any much different than a football player?”

Event attendee and College of General Studies sophomore Ariana Katz said she thought the documentary was informative but not surprising.

“I’m not really shocked,” she said. “The themes from porn come from people’s interactions with each other.”

College of Arts and Sciences senior and discussion panelist Emily Partridge said the adult film dilemma is key to women’s rights.

“There does need to be a line drawn so that men don’t think it’s normal,” she said.

I guess that we should be grateful that the sponsors of this "debate" actually allowed an former adult star to give the contrarian view that adult performers actually might be fully formed human beings capable of their own free will...but that doesn't excuse the fact that the sponsors get free reign to continuously malign and distort actual performers.

Memo to the Women's Resource Center at BU: how about inviting some actual porn performers there to defend their own experiences??  Or, actual male consumers who don't fall into the predetermined trap of Bob the Guilttripper's memes of compulsive masturbators who only want to rape women??

And this "need to be a line drawn so that men don't think it's normal" meme....I suppose that Ms. Partridge would allow antigay fundamentalist activists to say the same thing about lesbianism amongst girls??  Or....homosexuality?? Or, even, reproductive rights??

I wonder....does BU have a civil libertarians office there??

Maggie Hays Goes Off The Deep End...Into A Shallow Manure Pit

There is madness, and then there is sheer insanity.

And then...there is Maggie Hays...the Don Quixote of antiporn "feminist" activists.

This woman is giving new meaning to the term "zealot". Actually, she's raised the bar for paranoia and mindless demogaugery so high that not even Olympic pole vaulters can even scale her heights.

If you think I'm kidding, just go over to her "official" blog Against Pornography and just try toattempt to make it through this recent screed she posted on the dire threat of the "porno-iarchy". At least, try to do so with a straight face.

Oh...and it comes complete with sterling endorsements of Stop Porn Culture, Bob Jensen's slide show, Melissa Fairley's pseudoscience, the usual crackpot, cooked up stats, and, as always is the case with Maggie, the standard boiled over the top boilerplate.

Oh...and while you are there, you might want to click on the tag she has marked, "'Sex Work' Advocates". And when you do, please note how many times Maggie actually links to authentic sex worker activists not totally dominated by her preferred ideology. (Hint: somewhere between the cities of Slim and None....more towards None's outer limits.) Gee, Mags...at least we here at BPPA do link your side freely and allow our readers to check out opposing views and think for themselves, rather than just feed them the spiked Kool-Aid/PowerAde. And at least, we actually ALLOW antiporn viewpoints to be expressed within comments.

A real piece of work, she is.

Anti-porn mothers and teenage sons

xposted from my blog

The infamous Heart of womensspace has been getting hacked and harrassed in comments and other such. Her website's message board has been shut down by hackers, purportedly for the following post (not sure who it's by, but I seem to remember something almost identical posted at Biting Beaver's, so I suspect it's her):

I have three sons, ages 16, 15, and 12. I was also in an abusive marriage for ten years in which my 15 year old was a frequent target of my x husband. These boys had a rough time of it, as did we all.

After I left my husband my children acted out for a short time, we all spoke of feeling relief and feeling safe yet there were still some rough spots as I got the hang of trying to do it alone.

Several years ago my accountability program found that the computer had been accessing pornography. Turns out it was my middle son. To date he has been 'caught' accessing pornography many times since then. He was 13 I think when this started.

I banned him from the computer, but after a few months I would allow him to be on it for short periods of time. Each and every single time my son would access pornography within days (and sometimes hours) of being allowed back online. He was aware that he would be caught because the computers are monitored but he chose to do it anyway.

Most recently my youngest son allowed my middle son to play with his PSP. Brandon (the middle child) used it to immediately access pornography online. The child is now banned from computers, video games and so forth. I've talked until I'm blue in the face, I've grown angry and yelled, I've cried when I was alone and when I was in front of him. I've had him read Dworkin, my site, and other places (namely OAG's site) and I still can't unseat this problem. He can recite feminist literature all day long, he can understand the tenets, the ideas behind it, how it links together but he will not allow this knowledge to stand in the way of his porn use.

I don't think I'm looking for advice (I've tried everything I could think of so far) but more a place to simply be sad. I can clearly see why he's looking at pornography, I've figured all that out readily enough, but I can't seem to make it stop.

I know, that as soon as my child leaves my home and moves into his own place that he will be looking at porn immediately. I know that I am raising a problem for women. I know that this child will one day grow and will fully absorb the messages that porn sends to men. I know that my child masturbates to degradation of my people (when I use that phrase I mean womyn) and that with every orgasm he will further solidify his own hatred of and superiority over, women.

I know that there will likely come a day where my son coerces a young woman into sex (rape) and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it. I look into the eyes of my son and they still sparkle like they did when he was a baby, but he's not a baby anymore, he's growing into a man and that man will have trained himself to degrade women before he leaves my home.

As a radical feminist who puts women first I cannot begin to determine what I should do with regards to this issue. My heart breaks because there is nothing I can do to protect the womyn he will come into contact with.

I have three boys. One of them is lost to me and as a mother and a radical womyn this breaks my heart in a way I can scarcely express. I don't know if it says something terrible about me, but you know what haunts me late at night? More than anything else? I know, in my heart of hearts that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would have had that abortion.

I also find myself blaming myself over and over again, even though that radical womyn inside of me stands up and yells that I'm placing blame in the wrong place. I'm not sure what I intended to say with this message. I began writing it this morning and put it away again and finally decided to finish it this evening. I think that maybe I just wanted to share, I keep trying with Brandon and I keep failing. He simply doesn't care. When he wants to jerk off, everything goes right out the window.

Nothing ever justifies hacking, "invasions," threatening blog comments. They are never called for, never wise, never acceptable.

But there is something really wrong with some of these women, if they think that forcing their sons to repeat Dworkin's theory will stop them from using porn. If they fear their sons turning into rapists and cannot allow them to make their own decisions about their bodies, their fantasies, and what they do when they masturbate.

I have no idea whether this boy is using porn guiltily, convinced that his mom's radical theory is right and that his penis is an uncontrollable force. I hope (and suspect) that he realizes she's out of touch with reality and is using this porn in part to rebel.

But I've dealt with enough hearing that my sexuality is crazy, violent, destructive to know that even when you don't believe it, hearing people say it gets into your mind and your soul and makes you feel sick inside. And you hate yourself for desiring.

I know this particular person and clique don't represent feminism and aren't even worth the time of day. But I think we need to be aware of what some of our theory lends itself to. I think the sane, thoughtful anti-porners need to wrestle with this, struggle with it, understand why the people on the other side fear inducing sexual shame.

And I think we need to realize that, as much as we love to remind the ignorant that feminism isn't about hatred of, mistrust of, or violence toward men -- sometimes those of us who are prone to it can use the theory to look at men, or men's sexuality, or men's penises, as something worthy only of derision and fear.