PORNOGRAPHY AND MEDIA:
Toward a More Critical Analysis
Gail Dines and Robert Jensen
Because it is easy for discussions of pornography to drift off into the abstract, we start with the concrete and visceral:
After an intense three hours, the workshop on pornography is winding down. The forty women in the group work at a center that serves battered women and rape survivors. These are the women on the front lines, the ones who answer the twenty-four- hour hotline and work one-on-one with victims. They counsel women who have just been raped, help women who have been beaten, and nurture children who have been abused. They have heard it all and seen it all; no matter how brutal a story might be, these women have experienced or heard one even
more brutal. There is no way to one-up these women on stories of male violence. But after three hours of
information, analysis, and discussion of the commercial heterosexual pornography industry, many of these women are drained. A sadness hangs over the room.
At the end of the session, one of the women who had been quiet starts to speak. Throughout the workshop she had held herself in tightly, her arms wrapped around her body. She talks for some time, and then apologizes for rambling. There is no need to apologize: she is articulating what many of the women seem to be. feeling. She talks about her life, about what she has learned in the session and about how it has made her feel, and about her anger and sadness.
Finally, she says: "This hurts. It just hurts so much."
There is a moment of quiet as the words sink in. Slowly the conversation restarts and the women talk more about how they feel, how they will use the information, what it will mean to their work and in their lives. The session ends. But the words hang in the air.
It hurts.
It hurts to know that no matter who you are as a woman, you are reducible to a thing to be penetrated and that men will buy movies about that.
It hurts women, and men like it. Knowing that makes it difficult to avoid the hurt, even if one has found ways to cope with the injuries male violence in other places. It is one thing to deal with acts, even extremely violent acts. It is another to know what thoughts, ideas, and fantasies lie behind those acts. In imagination of a significant number of men.
In this essay, we analyze pornography as one would any media genre, by examining the system of production, the content, and the way it is used by consumers. We argue that the feminist critique of pornography, which grows out of the feminist movements to confront men’s sexual violence and connects to a broad critique of the commercial sex industry, is the most compelling way to understand contemporary pornography. Finally, the study of pornography involves a critique not just of gender politics but also of racism and capitalism; it is a place where
enmeshed systems of oppression can be seen clearly and confronted.
Before elaborating, some caveats and definitions. In this essay we use the term pornography to mean mass-marketed, graphically sexually explicit, heterosexual pornography in the contemporary United States-pornography that depicts actual (not simulated) sex between men and women (often with some woman-woman scenes) for a primarily male audience, the kind of material that one sees in the adult bookstores that exist in virtually every American city and can be purchased easily through the mail or obtained on the Internet. Although much of what we report here applies to pornography in other cultures, we make no cross-cultural claims; instead we examine the pornographic world in our society at this moment in history. We also do not address gay or lesbian pornography.
Again, although some points in this essay are relevant to an examination of those genres, each genre requires
a separate analysis.
STUDYING PORNOGRAPHY THE "PORN WARS“ AND BEYOND
Developing a critical media framework for the study of pornography requires an analysis of how pornography came to be of interest to academics and emerged as one of the most hotly debated topics in feminist media studies. Until the 1970s, debates over pornography typically usually involved liberal advocates of sexual freedom and conservative proponents of traditional sexual morality. The interested parties changed with the feminist critique of pornography, which emerged out of the larger struggle against patriarchal sexual violence during the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s. Feminist critics argued that discussions of pornography should focus
not on questions of sexual mores but on the harm to women, both those used in pornography and those against whom pornography is used. This argument led to what has become known as the “porn wars” in feminism.
Radical feminist activists and writers such as Andrea Dworkin (1981,1988), Catharine MacKinnon (1987), Diana Russell (1993, 1998), and Laura Lederer (1980) argued that pornography eroticizes domination and subordination, objectifies women’s bodies, and legitimizes sexual violence. These critics identified the harms connected to pornography, including the harm:
1. to the women and children used in the production of pornography;
2. to women and children who have pornography forced on them;
3. to women and children who are sexually assaulted by men who use pornography; and
4. in living in a culture in which pornography reinforces and sexualizes women’s subordinate status (Dworkin & MacKinnon, 1988).
By rejecting traditional obscenity law and adopting a civil rights approach, the feminist critique sought to
avoid censorship as a method of controlling pornography.
This radical feminist critique was rejected by some feminists, who argued that pornography was mere fantasy, a legitimate form of sexual expression, and/or an arena for female sexual agency, while others objected to the legislative initiatives on First Amendment grounds. Entire books have been written on this debate (Segal & McIntosh, 1993) and it is not our aim here to rehash the different positions. Rather, our intention in this essay is to articulate an approach to the study of pornography that is informed by radical feminism and cultural studies. While the academy has tended to set a radical feminist critique against a cultural studies approach, the two are compatible. Both approaches, in their founding moments, were concerned with social justice. Stuart Hall, one of the main contributors to the development of cultural studies in England, argued that cultural studies must have
an activist agenda that involves “a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect” (Hall, 1982, p. 86). Radical feminism, even in its academic forms, has always taken as part of its mission the struggle to change patriarchal structure that subordinated, oppressed, and ultimately destroyed women.
The activist agenda that links both cultural studies and radical feminism has to be reasserted in light of the path that cultural studies has taken in the United States. In its journey across the ocean, cultural studies underwent many changes, one of which was the weakening of an agenda that sought to highlight the role plays in supporting systems of domination. In its place is is an almost obsessive interest in the text and and reader agency that replaces a call for structural change in media production with a celebration of individual reader resistance. In British cultural studies, scholars were interested in the connections between media production, textual construction, and audience receptionto foster a sense of critical political involvement (Blundell et al., 1993). Central to the activist agenda of cultural studies in Britain was the study of political economy, the very area that U.S. cultural studies have largely ignored. For McChesney, the failure of cultural studies scholars to ask questions about the politics of production has led to research that is “unimpressive, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the crucial political and intellectual questions surrounding communication in the present time”(McChesney, 2000, p. 109). Applying McChesney’s critique to the study of pornography, we argue that study of this genre needs to foreground a discussion on the politics of production before we can move to textual analysis or questions of audience response. When looking at production, McChesney argues that we need to study how “media and communication systems and content reinforce, challenge, or influence acts are identical, as is the population acted upon, the existing class and social relations” (McChesney, 2000, p. 110). Gender relations can be as important as class relations and, as radical feminists argue, the focus has to be on the lives of the women who are used in the actual making of pornography.
PRODUCTION
The most important thing to remember about the pornography industry is that it is an industry. In abstracted debates about pornography, amid talk about “sexual expression,” we tend to forget that virtually all pornography is produced by a profit-driven industry that strives for maximal exploitation of labor, industry that strives for maximal exploitation of labor, in this case primarily women. The systems of sexism racism, capitalism, and First World domination unite to produce a steady flow of female bodies to the pornography industry, domestically and from international trafficking in women (Barry, 1995; Giobbe, 1995).
In many books and articles by pro-pornography feminists, the area of production is rarely mentioned. When production is discussed, the industry often highlights a middle-class woman who chose pornography as a “career path,” (most often Nina Hartley), or a woman who once performed in pornography before turning to the other side of the camera (such as Candida Royale), but these women are not representative of the thousands of women whose bodies are the raw material of the industry. We do not deny that some women stay in the sex industry for lengthy periods and make money-sometimes considerable amounts - of money-especially when they successfully leverage visibility in pornography to gain higher wages while dancing in strip clubs. But focusing on these
women is like arguing that worker-owned cooperatives are a good example of the capitalist mode of production. Yes, they exist, but the question is whether they are the norm.
One way of understanding the lived experiences of women in pornography is to look at the experiences of women who are prostituted. According to Evelina Giobbe, an activist and former prostituted woman, “prostitution is the foundation on which pornography is built . . . it is impossible to separate the two. The acts are idential, as is the population acted upon except that in pornography, there is a permanent record of the abuse that is later marketed and sold as adult entertainment” (Giobbe, 1995, p. 314). Giobbe found that women in pornography and prostitution were driven primarily by financial need. Studies of prostitutes reveal that the average street prostitute
sexually services about 1,500 men a year; the average starting age is fourteen; 60 to 70 percent of prostitutes
were sexually abused as children, most often by family members; and the average age of victimization is
ten (Baldwin, 1989, p. 123). Street prostitution is not the same endeavor as pornography in all respects, but
like prostitution, pornography is the selling of women to a predominantly male clientele.
These comments do nothing to deny the agency of women or suggest that women in the sex industry are dupes. Critics of pornography and prostitution are often told they implicitly are denigrating or attacking prostituted women; nothing could be further from the truth. The radical feminist movements (distinct from conservative religious movements) that critique the sex industry have always allied themselves with outreach groups for women. As is always the case, people make choices about their lives under conditions that include constraining and liberating factors. For example, students “choose” to take multiple-choice tests in class not necessarily because they believe the tests are a fair or sensible method of evaluation, but because they are willing to endure them on the path to earning a degree. Some may come to the conclusion that the tests actually are a meaningful measure of
learning. To suggest to students that they should question their own acceptance of the exams is not to deny
them agency, but to raise questions about the conditions under which they came to accept the exams. Any
serious evaluation of these issues about choice and agency must acknowledge and highlight these constraints and possibilities. When we poll women in our classes and ask how many have given serious consideration to prostitution or pornography as a career they chuckle, making the obvious point that because they have other choices they do not include such a “choice” on their list of career options. That does not mean all women who perform in pornography are dupes; it simply acknowledges the conditions under which choices are made.
These choices that women make mean large prof- its for the pornography industry. About $10 billion a
year is spent on pornography in the United States (LLane, 2000, p. xiv); estimates for worldwide sales are as high as $56 billion (Forbes, June 14,1999, p. 214). Sales and rentals of pornographic videos in the United States total more than $4 billion a year, and there were 11,OOO new pornographic videos released in 2000 (Adult Video News, December 2000, pp. 32-35). The market seems to absorb almost everything produced. When we interviewed adult-bookstore clerks and managers and asked them “what sells,” they said, simply, “everything.” The United States is a pornography -saturated culture.
In the twenty-first century, that saturation is achieved in part through the computer. At a panel on the Internet, entertainment executives focused on the perplexing question of why most dot-coms fail while pornography sites boom. Lany Kasanoff, chairman and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Threshold Entertainment asked:
Why was no one talking about the adult entertain- ment business? In other words, why not talk about one segment of online entertainment that has flourished where others have failed . . . [Pornography was first] in cable TV, it was first in home video and [it’s first] on the Internet . . . so you know what? Porn is great for all of us. We should all study it. (Brand- week, October 30,2000, p. 48)
This is not the first time pornography has been a leading innovator in developing new technologies. It has been credited with helping to drive the evolution of the camera at the turn of the twentieth century, the home video business, cable TV, and DVDs (Video Age International, November 1,2000, p. 3). Playboy was a major player in the development of the pornography Internet industry; its Web site has been around since 1994, making it one of the first national magazines to go digital. In August 1999, the site partnered with TheKnot.com, a New York based online wedding resource, to create Playboy BachelorParty.com, a complete online guide to help future grooms (lucky brides!). The pornographers are well aware of their power. As the operator of Bondagemistress.com succinctiy puts it, ‘Technology is driven by adult entertainment . . . because sex then sells the technology” (PC/Computing, January 24,2000, p. 64). Businesses that fail to follow this strategy pay a heavy price. For example, many entertainment analysts maintain that Sony, by refusing to license its Betamax technology to pornographers, allowed VHS to monopolize the market by the early 1980s.
Studies of online pornography demonstrate that significant profits can be made in this business. Data- monitor, a research company based in New York and London, found that in 1998, nearly $1 billion was spent by users accessing pornography through an estimated 50,000 pornography-specific sites worldwide, an amount that is expected to triple by 2003. Off-line, pornography accounts for 69 percent of the current $1.4 billion domestic cable TV pay-per-view market, compared with 4 percent for video games and 2 percent for sports, according to one study (Brandweek, October 30,2000, p. 48).
As if speaking to the pro-pornography camp, Andrew Edmond, president and CEO of Flying Crocodile, a $20 million pornography Internet business, has said that “a lot of people [outside adult entertainment], get distracted from the business model by [the sex]. It is just as sophisticated and multilayered as any other market place. We operate just like any Fortune 500 company” (Brandweek, October 30,2000, p. 48).
Indeed, many of these Fortune 500 companies have links to the pornography industry. General Motors, the world’s largest company, now sells more pornography films than Larry Flynt. According to the New York Times,"the 8.7 millions americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite” (New York Times, October 23, 2000, p. 1). The Times also reports that AT&T, the nation’s biggest communication company, offers to subscribers of its broadband cable service a hard-core pornography channel called Hot Network and owns a company that sells pornographic videos to nearly a million hotel rooms.
The second largest satellite provider, EchoStar Communications Corp., makes more money selling hard-core pornographic movies through its satellite subsidiary than all of Playboy holdings combined (New York Times, October 23,2000, p. 1). The chief financial backer is Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp. and owner of Fox Television Network, Twentieth Century Fox, the New York Post, and the LA Dodgers. Frontier Media, one of the most popular Web properties that features links to sites such as “Virgin Sluts,” and “See Teens Have Sex,” does business with In Demand, the nation’s largest pay-per-view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time Warner, Advance-Newhouse, Cox Communications, and Comcast. The financial connections between
mainstream companies and pornography highlight the degree to which pornography is not a marginalized
industry but rather a major player in the development of sophisticated, multibillion-dollar new media technologies. Where all this will end is unclear because we have newer and newer technologies that no doubt will use pornography to make them user friendly. Virtual reality is just around the comer and already the pornographers are investing in its development.
The analysis of the production of pornography shows us that it is a multibillion-dollar industry controlled largely by men and dependent upon the bodies of women. We can extrapolate a number of assumptions about the text from this reality but, as Kellner points out, it is not enough to assume content from the politics of production. What is needed is an analysis of the text to “fully grasp the nature and effects of media culture” (Kellner, 1995, p. IO).
TEXT
Despite the rise of pornography on the computer, video pornography is still the primary distribution vehicle for sexually explicit material in the United States and thus is the focus of this discussion of content.
Pornographic videos range from collections of homemade footage (amateur), to cheaply made movies that string together sexual scenes with no sto- ryline (gonzo), to efforts with larger budgets that approach Hollywood production values. There are many genres of pornography, including bisexual, transsexual, lesbian, and gay material. Bondage-and- domination pornography is sold in most stores as a separate category. Within heterosexual video pornography are a variety of subgenres: tapes featuring primarily oral or anal sex, various interracial combinations that usually play on overtly racist stereotypes, women who are depicted as being under the age of
consent, and pregnant women. It is no exaggeration to say that any relationship of unequal power will be
sexualized in pornography, including mental and physical disability (Elman, 1997).
Our analysis is based on a qualitative analysis of fifteen videotapes produced in ZOO0 and 2001, building on a similar study conducted in 1996 (Jensen & Dines, 1998). With such a small selection of tapes it is impossible to get a truly representative sample, but we specifically looked at videotapes that would be considered “mainstream” in the pornography industry; because the feminist antipornography movement is often criticized for focusing on the most violent material, we wanted to avoid being dismissed in that fashion. We visited pornographic stores and asked employees to guide us to the most commonly rented and purchased heterosexual tapes. So, for the purposes of our study, we let the market define pornography as what they sell in pornography shops, the material produced for the sexual stimulation of the mostly male clientele.
In a qualitative project such as this, the goal is not to make claims that can be generalized in “scientific” fashion to all of pornography. Instead of asserting “this is what all pornography looks like,” we simply claim that “when pornography looks like this (and research suggests much of it does), this is what we think is going on.” The goal is not definitive statements about an entire industry’s products, but observations that can open up discussion about the industry and the sexual ideology of pornography.
It is easy to identify the main themes of pornographic videotapes: (1) All women always want sex from men; (2) women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and; (3) any woman who does not at first realize this can be easily persuaded with a little force. Such force is rarely necessary, however, for most of the women in pornography are the “nympho- maniacs” men fantasize about: always on the lookout for sexual encounters and hyperorgasmic during sex. In pornographic videos evetyone-men and women-is portrayed as always sexual, but there are crucial differences. In virtually all pornography, men are the sexual subjects, in control of the action and
dictating the terms of the sex. Women are the sexual objects, whose job is to fulfill male desire. Women also tend to be more hypersexualized than men, that is, more quickly sent into a sexual frenzy.
Descriptions of two videos will illustrate these general points and provide examples of some of the specific conventions of pornography. The first is from “Hustler XXX Video #5,” a compilation of five unrelated sex scenes. The “No Limits” segment begins with the camera panning a woman in lingerie and high heels as she does a striptease. After she describes her fantasy about multiple partners, four men enter the scene and she begins performing oral sex on them one by one while they masturbate and occasionally slap her with their penises. They then lift her onto a couch and one man enters her vaginally from behind with other men standing in front of her receiving oral sex. This basic pattern continues as the men switch positions, including vaginal and anal intercourse. The men receiving oral sex often hold the woman’s head and thrust into her mouth. As one man moves between vaginal and anal penetration, the woman looks to be in pain, although it is difficult to know exactly what her facial expressions signal. He attempts to touch her clitoris, but she reaches down to push his hand away. He does it again, and she pushes it away again. At this point, she seems on the verge of crying. The scene
then moves to “double penetration,” in which two men enter her (vaginally and anally) at the same time.
Finally, two of the men pick her up by the hair and guide her to the ffoor, where on her knees she performs oral sex on them all. She uses her hands and mouth to bring all of them to orgasm, and one by one they ejaculate into her mouth and on her face. As the camera closes in on her face, she smiles.
“Delusional” is a release from the Vivid studio, whose videos are considered the upscale end of the hardcore market. The plot concerns Lindsay, who, after discovering her husband cheating on her, has been slow to get into another relationship, saying she is waiting for a sensitive man. A case of mistaken identity leads to her first step back into sex with a woman, which leads to another sexual encounter with the woman and a man. In the final sex scene, the lead male character, Randy, professes his love for Lindsay: “I just want to look out for you.” They embrace and after three minutes of kissing and removing their clothes, Lindsay begins oral sex on Randy while on
her knees on the couch, and he then performs oral sex on her while she lies on the couch. They then have intercourse, with Lindsay saying, “Fuck me, fuck me, please” and “I have two fingers in my ass-do you like that?” This leads to the usual progression of positions: She is on top of him while he sits on the couch, and then he enters her vaginally from behind before he asks, “Do you want me to fuck you in the ass?” She answers, “Stick it in my ass.” After two minutes of anal intercourse, the scene ends with him masturbating and ejaculating on her breasts.
These sexual scripts-vaginal and anal penetration, a focus on women performing oral sex on men, and ejaculations onto women-are standard in contemporary heterosexual video pornography. The participants move through the various positions with little variation. In most videos there are woman-woman scenes, filmed in similar style, usually with dildos to replace the missing penis. Scenes like these are typical of the range of the typical “mainstream” hardcore videos. The Hustler tape represents the rougher end of the mainstream market; although there is no overt violence, the woman in the tape is manipulated, pushed, pulled, and positioned to provide maximal male pleasure. Some of the penetration seems to be painful for her, and no attempt is made to edit out such expressions. The Vivid video attempts a coherent storyline and a sense of intimacy. But concentrating on those differences can obscure the similarities in representational conventions that make it clear that pornography
is created to satisfy male sexual desire. Both videos represent a predictable pornographic mindset in which
male pleasure defines sex and female pleasure is a derivate of male pleasure.
One example of this mindset is evident in the way oral sex is performed by men and by women. First, the scenes of men performing cunnilingus, if they appeared at all, were much shorter in duration than those of women performing fellatio. Men remained unemotional and unresponsive while performing cunnilingus, while women performing fellatio responded as if having a penis in their mouths brought them as much satisfaction as it did the man. Also, cunnilingus scenes almost always were set up in such a way as to maximize visibility of the woman’s vagina; men usually position their heads off to the side, rather than directly over the vagina. Fellatio scenes, on the other hand, are constructed and photographed to center on the woman’s technique of providing pleasure for the man.
During intercourse, sexual positions are used to maximize visibility of women’s bodies. For example, indescribing one of these positions (called the “reverse cowgirl,” in which the woman is on top of a man facing away from him) a pornographic video director has said: “Very unnatural position. The girls hate it. It kills their legs, you know. But it shoots beautifully, because everything’s opened up to the camera. It’s very convenient” (Stoller & Levine, 1993, p. 133). The male body was not scrutinized in this way. The camera did not linger on the male body, nor did men present their bodies for the viewer. Men removed their clothes only when necessary for sex, and the penis was not explored with the obsession that the camera investigated the vagina. The camera rarely focused on the penis, except at the point of ejaculation, when recording the evidence of the male’s pleasure was crucial.
That universal component of the pornographic script-the ejaculation onto women called the money, cum, or pop shot-offers insight into the ideology of pornography. What does the cum shot mean? One possible answer comes from “Taboo VLII,” a video from the earlier Jensen and Dines study, in which a man refuses the request of a woman who he feels is untrustworthy to have intercourse and tells her, “I don’t fuck sluts. I jerk off on them. Take it or leave it.” He then ejaculates onto her breasts. If this is an accurate description of the meaning of the cum shot, then ejaculating onto a woman is a method by which she is turned into a slut, something-not someone-whose
purpose is to be sexual with men. That assessment was echoed by a veteran pornographic director and actor,
who said: “I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have. We try to inundate the world with orgasms in the face” (Stoller & Levine, 1993, p. 22).
With this analysis in mind, we ask a simple question: Is pornography pornographic? That is, is the laterial we collected at the pornography store pornographic in the critical feminist sense, a site of the social subordination of women? To answer that, we borrow from Andrea Dworkin’s (1988, pp. 266-67) discussion of what we call the elements of the pornoraphic:
1. Objectification: when “a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold.”
2. Hierarchy: a question of power, with “a group on top (men) and a group on the bottom (women).”
3. Submission: when acts of obedience and compliance become necessary for survival, members of oppressed groups learn to anticipate the orders and desires of those who have power over them, and their compliance is then used by the dominant group to justify its dominance.
4. Violence: when it becomes “systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence.”
In the videos we analyzed, the first three elements are present throughout. The objectification of women in pornography is a foundation of the genre, the gender hierarchy that pervades the wider culture is, if anything, more intense in the pornographic world. Acts of submission are common in even the rough-end tapes, though more obvious in the coarser material described earlier.
As indicated, most mainstream pornography does not include graphic depictions of violence, which leads many to assert that such pornography is not violent. Yet there is a subtle violence throughout. Slapping and pulling hair are common. Women’s bodies are jerked around to accommodate male desire. And there is violence in the kind of sexual intercourse that common in pornography-the hard, repetitious pounding by the man into the woman for several minutes at a time, sometimes vaginally and anally at the same time. Although women in pornography are
pected to simulate an orgasmic state during all sexua1 activity, it is not unusual for women to stop the moaning during anal sex or double penetration. In several videos, it seemed clear that the women were in pain and had to focus on carefully positioning their bodies to get through the scene. This is violent treat- ment of women’s bodies.
Such routine, normative violence can be seen in the video “Blow Bang #4.” The video includes eight different scenes in which a woman is on her knees in the middle of a group of three to eight men and performs oral sex on them. At the end of each scene, each of the men ejaculates onto the woman’s face or into her mouth. To borrow from the description on the video box, the video consists of: ‘‘Dirty little bitches surrounded by hard throbbing cocks. . . and they like it.”
In one of the scenes, a young woman dressed as a cheerleader is surrounded by six men. For about seven
minutes, “Dynamite” (the name she gives on tape) methodically moves from man to man while they offer
insults that start with “you little cheerleading slut” and become harsher, For another minute and a half, she
sits upside down on a couch, her head hanging over the edge, while men thrust into her mouth, causing her
to gag. She strikes the pose of the bad girl to the end. “You like coming on my pretty little face, don’t you,”she says, as they ejaculate on her face and in her mouth for the final two minutes of the scene. As the sixth man ejaculates onto her face, now covered with semen, Dynamite closes her eyes tightly and grimaces. For a moment, her face changes; it is difficult to read her emotions, but it appears she may cry. After the last man ejaculates, she regains her composure and smiles. Then the narrator off camera hands her the pom-pom she had been holding at the beginning of the tape and says, “Here’s your little cum mop, sweetheart-mop up.” Dynamite buries her face in the pom-pom. The screen fades, and she is gone.
Analyzing the pornographic text provides us withan understanding of the ways pornography, as both a form of representation and a practice, strengthens rather than subverts dominant patriarchal systems. Although one cannot read all the conditions of production from the text, it is crucial to remember that the video documents actual events; all accounts of the industry, including those favorable to it, make it clear that the cameras record actual sexual activity, not something staged. Put simply: the thrusting into Dynamite’s throat and her body's reaction happended in the world, not just on screen
The last domain of analysis for a cultural studies is an examination of consumption, for, as Kellner argues, “to carry though a full cultural studies analysis, one must is an examine how diverse audiences actually read media texts and attempt to determine what effects they have on audience thought and behavior” (Kellner, 1
COMSUMPTION
No matter what the effects of pornography on men’s behavior might be, it is important to ask a simple question
What does it mean that we live in a world in that men will buy these kinds of books, magazines, videos, and computer programs to spark their sexual activities and help them masturbate? The simple factis millions of dollars of such material is sold every day and that in one year 11,000 new tapes are made that have men ejaculating onto women, tells us something the world we live in.
But beyond basic consumption, we must ask questions about how men use pornography, about its affects on behavior. Does pornography, particularly material that explicitly eroticizes violence, result in actuual violence against women, children, and other vulnerable people? Pornography’s supporters and researchers argue there is no conclusive evidence for such a claim. Other researchers contend the evidence points to certain effects with some groups of (Malamuth, Addison, & Koss, 2000). No one insists that pornography is the sole causal factor in sexual assault obviously occurs without pornography use. The question is whether the use of pornography can be considered a sufficient condition for triggering a sexual assault. In her review of laboratory tests and the testimony of women and men, Diana Russell argues that pornography is a causal factor in the way that it can: (1) predispose some males to rape or intensify this desire; (2) undermine males’ internal inhibitions against acting out desires; (3) undermine some males’ social inhibitions against acting out rape desires; and (4) under some potential victims’ abilities to avoid or rape (Russell, 1998, p. 121).
One underlying question is the level of certainty needed in establishing a casual link before society can or should act (Boyle, 2000). The limitations of social science and laboratory research suggest that definitive proof of a causal relationship between pornography and violence-at least at the level necessary to satisfy most social scientists and policy makers-is beyond the capabilities of the methods. Many feminists have argued that attention to the lived experience of men and women-both those who use pornography and those against whom pornography is used-makes the connection clear and provides the evidence necessary for collective action.
So, while acknowledging the complex theoretical and methodological debates around media effects and making no assertions involving causality in a strict sense, we will use narratives to describe the ways in which pornography is implicated in sexual violence in this culture. Pornography alone doesn’t “make men do it.” Rather, pornography is part of a world in which men do it. And we can look to people’s stories about pornography use to understand that. Through the public testimony of women, interviews with pornography users and sex offenders, and other researchers’ work, the following conclusions should be uncontroversial:
1. pornography can be an important factor in shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality;
2. pornography can be used to initiate victims and break down their resistance to sexual activity;
3. pornography can contribute to a user’s difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality; and
4. pornography can provide a training manual for abusers.
How is pornography an important part of shaping sexual views? Here we switch to the voice of Robert alone:
I saw my first sexually explicit magazine in grade school. My friends and I begged, borrowed, and stole
pornography throughout our childhood, hiding it in attics and garages and bedroom closets. Pornography was the first place I learned about the mechanics of sex-it was not the only place I heard about sex, but it was the primary curriculum for my sex education.
I continued to use pornography sporadically throughmy teens and twenties. I was not an obsessive user. I was a fairly normal kid and young adult. Most of the men I knew used pornography in the same way. And it is one of the ways in which we learned what sex was about, and what women were for. I am not a violent person; as a teen and young adult I was less macho and traditionally male (less aggressive, competitive, etc.). But I did learn to understand sex, and my relationship to women, in large part from pornography. Put more bluntly, pornography was one of the places where I learned to fuck women.
For some men, pornography is more central in their lives. It becomes a way to groom young people for sexual abuse, and it makes it difficult to separate sexual fantasy from reality, as this account from an interview subject in a study of convicted sex offenders and self-identified pornography users shows (Jensen, 1998). One man began grooming his step- daughter for abuse when she was eight years old. He used pornographic videos to break down her resistance and persuade her that sex between a parent and child was acceptable. And he played the videos while he abused her:
[The movies] played a big role, because I was fantasizing that. . . my stepdaughter and myself were actually engaging in the samebeha;ior hat was on the tape. So, it was more like I was having my own private orgy right there, with the tape, too. And also, it was something for my daughter to concentrate on. It made it more exciting for me.
When he would have sex with her without the videos.
I’d be thinking about some women I saw in a video. Because if I was to open my eyes and see my step-daughter laying there while I was abusing her, you know, that wouldn’t have been very exciting for me. You know, that would bring me back to the painful reality that I’m a child molester, where [instead] I’m in this reality of I’m making love or having intercourse with this beautiful woman from the video. . . . It was just this beautiful person who had a beautiful body, and she was willing to do anything I asked.
Finally, one woman’s story, told during public hearings on an antipornography ordinance in Min-neapolis, illustrates how men sometimes model behavior they see in pornography. This woman described her husband’s increasing interest in pornography as their marriage progressed. Out of a sense of duty, she accompanied him to pornographic movies and sex shows, but objected when he wanted to live out some of the pornography-based fantasies he had about group sex:
He told me if I loved him I would do this. And that, as I could see from the things that he read me in the magazines initially, a lot of times women didn’t like it, but if I tried it enough I would probably like it and I would learn to like it. And he would read me stories where women learned to like it. . . . To prevent more of these group situations, which I found very humiliating and very destructive to my self-esteem and my feeling of self-worth as a person, to prevent these I agreed with him to act out in privacy a lot of those scenarios that he read to me. A lot of them depicting bondage and different sexual acts that I found very humiliating. About this time when things were getting really terrible and I was feeling suicidal and very worthless as a person, at that time any dreams that I had of a career in medicine were just totally washed away. I could not think of myself anymore as a human being. . . . He would read from pornography like a textbook, like a journal. In fact, when he asked me to be bound, when he finally convinced me to do it, he read in the magazine how to tie the knots and how to bind me in a way that I couldn’t get out. And most of the scenes. . . where I had to dress up or go through different fantasies were the exact scenes that he had read in the magazines. (MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1997, pp. 110-14)
Numerous women have testified to this type of experience with pornography. Again, these accounts do not prove that pornography causes abuse-they only make it clear that pornography is part of some abuse.
CONCLUSION
Linking a radical feminist critique with a critical cultural studies approach that foregrounds political economy highlights the ways in which pornography is a form of violence against women. Political economy, like radical feminism, is concerned with “commercial and material issues and . . . with issues of social justice” (McChesney, 2000, p. 115). Both radical feminism and critical cultural studies are radical movements that cut to the heart of systems of domination and hence rarely are welcomed by the official culture.
This should not be surprising, given the roots of the feminist critique of pornography, and feminism more generally, in women’s accounts of their lives that challenge official versions of reality. The original work of analysts such as Dworkin (198 1) grew out of those stories that real women told each other, and the movement then took those stories to the public in the testimony for various attempts at passing the civil rights ordinance (MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1997). Other kinds of evidence were used in these political struggles but there is a lesson for feminism, and perhaps for liberatory movements more generally, in this. The key source of the power of the antipornography critique is that it is rooted in, and has never lost touch with the lives of ordinary people. Any analysis has to be built on more than-just narratives, but those narratives remain at the core.
On the surface, the fate of the radical feminist critique of pornography seems rather grim. The movements civil rights ordinance has, for the time being, been defeated in legislative and judicial arenas (Amercan Bookksellers Association v. Hudnut). In the academy pro-pornography/anticensorship perspectives dominate the discussion (e.g., Strossen, 1995). Economically, the pornography industry is healthier than ever.In public discourse, the only antipornography action that gets serious attention in the mainstream antifeminist, usually grounded in conservative religious objections that include not only objections to pornography but attacks on lesbian/gay rights and action of any conception of secuality outside heterosexual marriage/
The success of the critique is, for the moment, below the surface, precisely because the official culture leaves little space for its discussion and the social movement that gave voice to those views is currently in hibernation. In our experiences of discussing the femininist critique with students and members of the general public (men and women, but primarily women) at lectures and workshops, the critique resonates as much as ever with people for a simple reason: It helps many people understand their experiences. To assert that does not mean it explains all people’s experiences; given individual variation, no socidpolitical analysis ever does that. Instead, we simply observe that a significant percentage of women find it helpful to use the feminist critique not only to understand the use of pornography by men in their lives but also the larger sexual system in which they live.
REFERENCES
American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, ordinance judged invalid, 598 F.Supp. 1316 (S.D. Ind. 1984); judgment affirmed, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985); judgment affirmed, 106 SCt. 1172 (1986); petition f& rehearhg denikd; f a S.Ct. 1664 (1986).
Baldwin, M. (1989). “Pornography and the Traffic in Women,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 1(1), 11 1-55.
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Dworkin, A., & MacKinnon, C. A. (1988). Pornography and Civil Righrs: A New Day for Women’s Equality. Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography. (Also available on- line at: http://www.nostatusquo.corn/ACLU/dworkin/other/ ordinancelnewdaymw.htm.)
Elman, R. A. (1997). “Disability Pornography: The Fetishiza- tion of Women’s Vulnerabilities,” Violence Against Women 187-95.