The "no-sex" class: women who like porn
As long as we're talking about porn for women, Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog quotes from a review of Clarissa Smith's book One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn ($55 in hardcover so it might have photos?)
Says Smith: "Women who admit to enjoying porn do feel guilty about enjoying sex without the love and romance and do worry that they're sluts.
"They think they shouldn't be enjoying it so, on that basis, we still have a long way to go."
McCabe seems worried that instead of women feeling guilty because porn objectifies women they're instead worrying that it makes them sluts. I was going to start out by suggesting that it's not only men who are influenced by men's "no-sex" class misperceptions about women since. Since I'm trying to reach men, about what I accept as a male-originated paradigm, I'm reluctant to get very far into women's participation in it. I do think it's pretty obvious that women are affected by it, even influenced by it. But in her response to the quote McCabe brings up (intentionally or not) an excellent point along those lines:
I do wonder if these responses are influenced at all by the fact that they were explaining their liking of porn to a third party, for publication? We do live in a tangled mess of ideas about women enjoying sex.
Yes, it does seem that to the extent Patriarchy makes all the rules, and to the extent that men are invested in the bad-for-them-too "no-sex" class paradigm then women -- if they want to participate in heterosexuality at all -- are going to feel obliged to play, even to become invested in, the not-really-interested game. Enough so, of course, to worry about being branded as "sluts" for having ever had a sexual thought in their head that wasn't directly tied to a solitary long-term partner (special dispensation if he folds laundry.) Enough to feel guilty if they do. Enough to worry they'll be branded a "slut" if their "number" is too high. Enough to feel guilty if it is. Enough to worry about both if they download and masturbate to porn. Enough to feel guilty if they do.
Actually, I guess I feel ok talking about that after all because I can measure it in terms of men's impact on women. Especially since I'm pretty sure that when (not if) men get over this cockamamie notion that women are incapable of independent, self-started sexual desire and dependent therefore on men to "kick start" them (or maybe just kick them) then we'd stop pressuring women to feel guilty in the first place.
What I *don't* feel comfortable talking about, or maybe just not ready to get into, is the way the "no-sex" paradigm co-opts people like McCabe, taking what may be a legitimate concern that women are objectified in porn and turning it into further evidence that "nice girls don't..." with the corollary that only abnormal, "wild," or debased "girls" do. Which from our paradigm-sodden men's perspective just powerfully closes the circle. Instead of breaking it.
Talk about "a tangled mess of ideas about women enjoying sex!"
The reason I'm not comfortable really getting into it yet because I don't yet know how to propose a way *out!* (I do think there is one.) Until I figure it out then talking about it just amounts to "damned if you do and damned if you don't." Which is sort of the situation we're trying to get *out* of.
[By the way, if you've got suggestions for ways out, or anything else to do with your take on the "no-sex" class paradigm, believe me when I say I'm all ears. Sometimes I feel like a small metaphorical python trying to swallow a very large paradigmatic pig. I might get it down on my own, but I could sure use a big push. --fl]
Update: In a comment Jess McCabe added the following clarification. You can read the whole thing in, well, the comments but here's an excerpt:
Just to clarify, I think I must have managed to get two ideas mixed up in that post. I wasn't suggesting that women should feel guilty for liking porn in any circumstance.
I was trying to say that the idea that porn objectifies women is a legitimate argument against it.
Separately, I was trying to say that it is very wrong that women feel guilty for liking porn because they think it makes them "sluts" (a word I would really like to erase from the English language!)
One of the trickiest things about writing -- maybe one of the most interesting too -- is that people often pick up on a sentence or paragraph we quickly wrote just to transition to, say, a point we're really interested in getting to. And one of the best things about the internet instead of, say, books, is that we have an opportunity to follow up with each other to clarify and converse. (Thanks, Jess.)
I'm a 39 year old woman who has been in slash (guy on guy, frequently) fandom since X-Files was actually good, which is to say, about 10 years. Most of the porn I consume is text-based--NC-17 stories and the like, usually featuring two (or more) hot men. Slash fandom is heavily weighted toward women. This can lead to some questionable plot (or anatomical) points (the amazing, self-lubricating anus that shows up in some stories, for example), but it also leads to a group of women who (mostly--I'm not an official Speaker for the Slashers) conciously identify as being pro-porn. They create it, distribute it, and consume it.
The conversations I have about porn with other slashers is very different than the conversations I have with women at large or with men. For one thing, I don't have to worry about other slashers thinking negative things about me for liking stories about guys having sex with one another. There's this whole set of defaults (gay = ok, women can be interested in various explicit forms of sexual expression, kink is in the eye of the beholder, etc.) that I don't have to establish before having a conversation about whatever's interesting me. Some of the conversations we do have include: does concentrating on man-on-man sexuality exclude women by definition, and is that misogynistic? do we impose socially expected male-female roles on our characters based on who bottoms? why does Stargate: Atlantis fandom lend itself so well to alternate universe stories (AUs) where the characters turn into friggin' (sometimes literally) penguins (definitely literally)?
So maybe you should check out livejournal slash communities to get an idea of what some pro-porn women like to discuss. You'll find a wide variety, from things that I find completely uninteresting (Harry Potter fandom) to things I adore (Gay Porn for Girls Studios). And you'll find loads of women happily making, discussing, praising, dissing (usually over quality issues), linking to, writing follow-ups for, organizing, and reading tons of written porn.
[Yup, the slash porn (I think it started with Star Trek-based Kirk/Spock hookup fantasies but as you say it can now pretty much any two guy/guy media characters) is the full-grown red-headed stepchild of the porn/anti-porn debate. It doesn't fit *anybody's* model of what porn "should" be: it doesn't objectify women (since women rarely appear in sexual situations) and it appeals -- ok, fiercely arouses -- women without generally appealing to men (since women rarely appear in sexual situations.) Thanks, Calli. --fl]
In regards to the slut thing, and the no-sex class, we get that from out mothers. They got it from their mothers ... and so on.
There's the old stereo-type of the son who brings home his new girlfriend, and his mother really doesn't like her because she seems a bit "fresh". That stereo-type didn't come out of thin air.
Yes, the patriarchy makes the rules - but it was the matriarchy who actively enforced them.
Things are changing now, on both sides, and while I don't think its going to be a fast change ... well, its going to happen.
There is a vast difference between the things my friends and I teach our daughters (and sons!) and what our parents taught us. Yay for that!
[I agree that the Patriarchy is a co-ed enterprise in the sense that a) many men don't from it enough to make it worth it to them to support it if they were offered an alternative and b) many women do. But! I'm not, however, suggesting that when mothers police their *daughter's* sexuality they're benefitting from it. But they're participating in and thus perpetuating it. One way or another, as, say, Twisty Faster has put it, without fundamental social changes Patriarchy would persist if every man on earth disappeared tomorrow. Thanks, Frances. --fl]
McCabe seems worried that instead of women feeling guilty because porn objectifies women they're instead worrying that it makes them sluts.
Just to clarify, I think I must have managed to get two ideas mixed up in that post. I wasn't suggesting that women should feel guilty for liking porn in any circumstance.
I was trying to say that the idea that porn objectifies women is a legitimate argument against it.
Separately, I was trying to say that it is very wrong that women feel guilty for liking porn because they think it makes them "sluts" (a word I would really like to erase from the English language!)
This is both horrifying and worrying. What it might show is that these women are perhaps participating in this objectification process - because they are happily getting off on porn, which presumably includes women at least some of the time, while judging the women who are making it as "sluts". Maybe that does say something about the effect of porn, or maybe it's just magnifying something that is there in our society already.
I don't think women should feel guilty for enjoying porn, and I feel desperately sorry for them in terms of their attitudes towards themselves. I really try not to get into women-blaming when it comes to this kind of issue, because it is so difficult to escape the social conditioning we are all subject to that we shouldn't be surprised when people don't, but maybe they should feel at least a little bit guilty for the judgments they are making about the women appearing in that porn!
[Thanks for the clarification, Jess. When I get a chance (probably not till tomorrow) I'll promote your comments as an appendix to the main post, with a clarification that the quote from your page was itself a quote from somewhere else. Thanks again! --fl]
Just write that book already. This is awesome stuff.
[I'm starting to block it out, Amber. Thanks for the encouragement! --fl]