[Via www.SexBlo.gs’s Carol L. Thanks!]

Caitlin Hall tackles the question of whether pornography objectifies women. She titles her piece "Porn does anything but objectify women." I think this may overstate her case. She reasonably argues that porn objectifies sexual acts rather than the individuals in them. She also points out that the men in porn are no less anonymous and emotionless than the women. This doesn’t really substantiate her assertion that porn does not objectify the models or actors therein.

I’ve always taken exception to the assertion that "erotica" and "pornography" represent different ends of a continuum. I’ll get deeper into this another day, but suffice to say that I tend to put erotica in the broader, and wider, field of literary or artistic expression, while putting porn on a continuum with advertising.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t inherently object to advertising but its purpose is more expressly to create desire and/or dissatisfaction with the status quo. It tends to be oriented towards an individual decision maker. It also, in most forms, tends to objectify its models and/or actors to the same degree that pornography does. To that extent at least, and to the extent that women appear in porn, then one can argue that women are in fact objectified in porn. (Actually a more accurate early-20th-Century term might be "alienated" rather than objectified but here in the 21st Century that’s quibbling.)

Hall suggests complaints about objectification of women relates more to the tendency for (visual) porn to be heavily oriented towards male satisfaction, often to the exclusion of women’s satisfaction:

Maybe the problem is that pornography is unquestionably targeted toward men – the woman’s pleasure is always incidental, the man’s always instrumental. Admittedly, a large proportion of porn involves sex acts that are only physically gratifying to the man involved. But that’s not really so surprising – it’s a case of art imitating life. Because the people who consume porn are overwhelmingly male, the object of most such films is male orgasm – on- and off-screen.

Link: University of Arizona Daily Wildcat editorialist Caitlin Hall

This cartoon from Gloria Brame’s blog illustrates this point rather well. Current porn really does offer little in the way of satisfaction for many women.

[cached version]

... although a similar (if less visually effective) illustration might show a woman engrossed in a romance novel while her partner rolls his eyes at similarly objectified acts of controlled male initiative designed to trigger equally symbolic touchpoints in women.

But I digress.

Hall concludes with a correct assertion that women are equally degraded by an (ironically) paternalistic attitude that they’re incapable of voluntarily appearing in porn.

Women (and men) who insist that pornography dehumanizes women to the point that it is quite literally impossible to make an informed decision to appear in it do far more than pornographers to dehumanize women. As McElroy points out, they would have women be reduced to the status of children, in which free choice, absent coercion, is no longer sufficient – in fact, in which "free" choice is quite literally impossible.

It’s hard to believe that anything could be more dehumanizing than that.

I’m inclined to meet her about 90% of the way and say that to the extent that women now have the social and legal rights to own and express their sexuality it is perfectly legitimate for them to do so in ways that might cause feminists of previous generations to blanch. This applies to a striking majority of women in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere. To the extent that these women haven’t always had those rights, and to the extent that some still do, then traditional difference feminists still have a point. A much diminished one, true, but still a point.

I happen to believe that to the efforts of early feminism continue bear fruit — to the extent that now-dowdy/cranky types like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon kicked up a fuss about the treatment of women as objects into the late 20th Century continues to reverberate — women will more and more be able to enter and later exit the sex industry as they see fit, with consequences no greater or less than those encountered comparable non-sexually freighted industries such as advertising, telemarketing, hospitality, and entry-level retail.

Come to think of it, that’s my 2 cent reply to Week Two of the Sexy Saturday Question series. [Update: Sexy Saturday Questions has gone dark. —fl]