Why there's so much bad porn (and why we perceive even more)
Amber of Being Amber Rhea makes some good points clarifying the difference between pornography and misogynistic porn (which, constant protestations to the contrary) aren't the same thing.
Saw this post [note: you may have to manually scroll down. --fl] from Echidne, and it inspired me to jot down some of my thoughts on the matter.
Is it just me or does this seem like yet another case where it's anybody's fault but the individual men who generalize about women and think of women as their inferiors?
"If she hadn't been wearing that short skirt..." "If she hadn't been drunk..." "Well, she shouldn't have gone up to his apartment..."
It's never his fault, is it? Somehow the focus gets placed, well, everywhere but where it needs to be. Once again, it becomes the woman's fault. The porn actresses in this case. Making men think generalizing thoughts about all women.
Now, maybe I am misreading Echidne and she is not blaming the women specifically. That's what I would like to think, and based on what I've read from her in the past I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that I misunderstood.
But even so - okay, if not the women, then... whom?
Perhaps the industry is to blame, for producing films, and the films make the men think xyz about all women? Porn causes generalized, negative perceptions of women?
I disagree. Some porn may reinforce these attitudes in some men, but ultimately the attitudes aren't caused by porn.
Misogynistic porn (note this is not all porn) is a symptom. Men having generalized notions about women isn't caused by porn - it's caused by something deeper and much more pervasisve. It comes from the longstanding, institutionalized sexism and misogyny that permeates our society. And we've got to dismantle that.
While not really even willing to give the researcher one-size-of-porn-fits-all idea the benefit of the doubt I think there are a couple of factors to consider that make those kinds of conclusions easier to draw.
1) If a lot of "nice" people think it's not nice to look at porn (and many believe that) then that's going to skew the market towards more misogynist consumers.
2) The non-misogynists who *do* consume porn (and there appear to be *a lot* of those) tend to provide less feedback to producers than their more brass-balled and iron-hearted fellow consumers. That means producers are likely to get more reinforcement from misogynistic consumers.
And then here's where I think you can run into amplification problems...
3) While there are some enthusiastic, positive pornographers, there are a lot more bored ones and quite a few angry/misogynistic ones. If there is a vocal subset of misogynistic customers looking, and misogynistic suppliers willing to provide, then they're going to encourage each other.
and finally...
4) On a subjective level, if you're doing research and you sit down to watch a few dozen randomly-selected porn DVDs, most of them will be unexceptional (and thus there'll be nothing to say about them,) one or two might successfully push you into erotic overdrive (making you less inclined to take detailed notes) and at least one or two are going to just totally piss you off, knocking you out of any kind of erotic reverie and into cold, critical attentiveness... and guess which ones you're going to wind up writing about?
Bottom line: Amber is right, of course, that not all porn is misogynistic, and also right that neither the misogynistic subset of consumers or providers represent the entire group. But when you think about it it's easy to understand why the bad apples stand out so starkly: rotten eggs float.
I think one possible solution would be for the sex-blogosphere to spend more time actively speaking out in favor of the fraction of good work they like and encouraging others to check it out.
Update: In an (I think) unrelated post Tony Comstock of Comstock Films provides a better analysis.
Hysterionic reporting on the porn industry, especially the grossly inflated size of the porn industry has given rise to the popular notion that the industry is a beheomuth that nearly perfectly serves the erotic entertainment needs of the public. A phrase you'll hear time and time again in "the bizz" is, "With 10,000 titles a year, there's something for everyone!"
Looking from the outside, the existence of title like DIRTPIPE MILKSHAKES (volumes 1 and 2) lends credence to this idea. After all, if a $13B/year industry is making dozens, perhaps even hundreds titles a year devoted to such exotic sexual interests as women eating semen out of other women's anuses, then certainly there must be something out there for people with more pedestrian tastes - things like convincing, well-crafted depictions of mutually pleasurable sex.
But while there's no shortage of anal creampie themed videos, gaping anus themed videos, and other things to unsavory to mention on this blog, finding well-crafted sexually explicit films that convincingly depict mutual pleasure is all but impossible. As I said to Stacy Grenrock Woods in Esquire a couple of years ago, it's easier to find a well-made fishing show than a well-made sex film.
Porn's supposed to be this mult-billion dollar a year business, so big and dangerous there's an entire department at the DOJ devoted to it; and it churns out thousands and thousands of titles each year, seeming to serve every nitch fetish, but it can't seem to serve the wide-spread and basic desire that many people have to see a well-crafted depiction of two people who really seem to be enjoying having sex with each other.
People know in their gut something's not right. People know there's a disconnect. People know that what they want to see isn't some specialized nitch, it's a basic human desire. Yet it goes unserved. Why? To me the answer is quite simple.
The restrictions on the distribution of erotic images (as in you won't be able to find MATT AND KHYM at Walmart, Blockbuster, etc.) has restricted the business to making money in a very few, and not especially lucrative ways. Porn margins are razor thin, and the result is that "the industry" vastly overserves niche sexual interest markets, where issues of production quality, or even simple honesty in packaging will be overlooked, while it vastly underserves sexual interest with broader appeal, but much higher expectations.
"I think one possible solution would be for the sex-blogosphere to spend more time actively speaking out in favor of the fraction of good work they like and encouraging others to check it out."
Heh, there's an outing/endevor a certain Renegade will not be participating in...
not a bad idea at all though,
[I know you enjoy extreme sex in real life, RE, and I know a lot of people might blanch at the porn you might enjoy. And while "extreme" doesn't necessarily mean "good" either -- as the average $400-million-dollar-box-office Mel Gibson gorefest tends to demonstrate -- "good" doesn't have to mean "bland" either. Thanks. --fl]
Thanks for the kind words, figleaf!
[You're welcome, Amber. --fl]
Fig:
I hope I was not giving the impression that extreme porn alone = good and that non extreme porn = bland...not my intent at all. I've seen some artsty/erotic NOT extreme porn in my day that was very well done and interesting, I know it is out there and probably, in truth, what more people would find appealing as far as porn goes... I was just kind of saying the stuff I personally like is probably not at ALL what most people (esp women) would like, so I would have little to offer such a list ;)
[That's what I thought you meant. Sorry that didn't come across in my previous reply. I do want to challenge the idea that this or that this or that would bother women more than men, or more women than men. I think it's more accurate to say that more women than men will who are bothered will *admit* they're bothered, while more men than women will feel comfortable admitting they're turned on by it *if they are.* Thanks, RE. --fl]
Back in one of my blog posts in August, I mentioned some pornographers I though were doing some really good work.
I actually have posted some samples of stuff that I consider good porn on file sharing forums. Maybe I'll put some links to a few of these on my own blog.
[Great. Thanks for the link, IACB. --fl]
While not really even willing to give the researcher the benefit of the doubt
You mean Echidne? You're saying you're sure she's placing the blame on the women involved in porn? Echidne's generally a pretty strong and sharp feminist blogger.
If a lot of "nice" people think it's not nice to look at porn (and many believe that) then that's going to skew the market towards more misogynist consumers.
And then, once the ads are skewed misogynist (and the spam ads are pretty much all I personally see of Internet porn - they do seem to skew very misogynist, and have the effect of driving me away from the product), then that's self-perpetuating. The scary thing is, the consistent misogyny of the spam ads has to mean that there's a real market for that, that there are enough people who prefer to have contempt for the women who turn them on for sites to be happy to cater to them, and not even feel the need to bother looking for non-misogynist customers.
But when you think about it it's easy to understand why the bad apples stand out so starkly: rotten eggs float.
I think there's something about certain kinds of bad sex (the kind where a woman like me seems to be despised by the man who desires her) which inherently makes one instance of that stand out over ten instances of more ordinary sex. If someone were to refer me to a supposedly vanilla porn site, and if I were to browse that site and find that only 5% of its offerings looked as if they were made by people who hated women, I'd probably go away from it thinking of it as a woman-hating site.
I think one possible solution would be for the sex-blogosphere to spend more time actively speaking out in favor of the fraction of good work they like and encouraging others to check it out.
I've concluded that my own boundary doesn't allow me to be OK about viewing any DVD where I know people were obliged, in real life, either to be penetrated or to produce real life arousal, in order to produce the product. Since I think this means that all the DVDs I watch, even those with simulated sex scenes, will get defined as not being porn, I don't have much to contribute to the discussion. I do know, though, that the ads I get tend to reinforce Tony Comstock's point, and make me think that a lot of what's out there involves extreme acts with the women presented as degraded sluts (with both the extremeness of the acts and the degraded sluttiness of the women being made part of the draw), rather than, say, stuff that resembles the scenes I'd find erotic in mainstream movies, but is just more explicit.
Also, the presentation of the women as degraded sluts for wanting the acts is just as much a part of what makes the porn ads unappetizing as the acts themselves. Sure, "double penetration" doesn't sound appealing to me, but it's not as if I'd consider an interracial sex scene bad, abnormal, or degrading, if some normal movie served one up. And those, also, are presented in the porn ads as a form of degradation of the women involved, just as much as are the unusual acts.
[Quick note: "You mean Echidne?" No. I had the impression from Amber's post that Echidne was citing yet another researcher but since I was responding more to something Amber said I didn't follow the links back. More later. --fl]
[Ok, where was I? Oh yeah. First of all, I think that porn ads in spam are a *very* poor metric of what's really going on out there. Considering that spam is primarily driven by scammers their messages say more about the susceptibility of their intended marks than about majority tastes. Second of all, I'm glad you picked up on the downward reinforcement I implied (but didn't make clear) in my post. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
It all depends on how you define "porn." Take Dworkin and MacKinnon's defintion, for example - what they define as pornography is misogynistic and harmful to women. Does that mean that ALL porn is harmful to women? No, but anything that isn't just falls outside of their definition. It's something else. Historically, pornography was made by men for men. Perhaps porn made by or for women, or by or for men and women, is a new category altogether.
[Actually I'm pretty sure MacKinnon objected even to consensual homosexual male porn but yeah, in general a lot of people (maybe too many) define "graphic porn" as anything with violence in it and "visual erotica" as that which doesn't. Thanks, Shakes. --fl]