Feminists For Pornography
Feminist porn, porn made by lesbians for lesbians, woman-friendly porn, yadda yadda etc...
NONE of this will advance the feminist movement. It gets lost amongst mainstream porn, reaches far wider than the target audience, and as a result makes no statement at all. It will not make the slightest dent in sexist society.
I used to think that porn would never go away (hmm, still inclined to think that actually) and so the only way forward would be to have more women involved in the making of it. It's bullshit. Women involved have generally had to conform to the abusive nature of most porn to make any money. The appeal of porn is that it DOES involve abuse or depict degradation. Same goes for lesbian and gay porn. (In most gay porn, the feminisation of the man is what makes him fit for degradation.)
Trying to use the medium of pornography to further a movement designed to end oppression simply won't work. Pornography is both made from, and feeds off oppression in all its sexist, racist, and homophobic forms. It IS oppression.
Of course people should have the right to view anything they want in the privacy of their own home, but you can only prioritise this in a society where actual abuse doesn't take place. We do not live in such a society and consensual images are indistinguishable from non-consensual ones.
Give it up Feminists For Pornography. Focus on human rights, not human "needs".
NONE of this will advance the feminist movement. It gets lost amongst mainstream porn, reaches far wider than the target audience, and as a result makes no statement at all. It will not make the slightest dent in sexist society.
I used to think that porn would never go away (hmm, still inclined to think that actually) and so the only way forward would be to have more women involved in the making of it. It's bullshit. Women involved have generally had to conform to the abusive nature of most porn to make any money. The appeal of porn is that it DOES involve abuse or depict degradation. Same goes for lesbian and gay porn. (In most gay porn, the feminisation of the man is what makes him fit for degradation.)
Trying to use the medium of pornography to further a movement designed to end oppression simply won't work. Pornography is both made from, and feeds off oppression in all its sexist, racist, and homophobic forms. It IS oppression.
Of course people should have the right to view anything they want in the privacy of their own home, but you can only prioritise this in a society where actual abuse doesn't take place. We do not live in such a society and consensual images are indistinguishable from non-consensual ones.
Give it up Feminists For Pornography. Focus on human rights, not human "needs".
posted by jo22 at 3:49 PM
13 Comments:
You said, "The appeal of porn is that it DOES involve abuse or depict degradation." That's not its appeal to me. Are you speaking from your own experience?
You said, "In most gay porn, the feminisation of the man is what makes him fit for degradation." You didn't really mean to say the feminine is fit for degradation, did you? I guess you mean to say that is how the viewers of gay porn see it. I'm not gay, but I don't think they're thinking about women while watching their porn.
Does everything have to be about advancing the feminist movement?
Congratulations on your first troll Jo! I think this one is of the drive-by variety.
"Does everything have to be about advancing the feminist movement?"
No. Just feminism.
Me too Laurelin :) It was just that "pornstudent" didn't read the post very well - it was about some porn that describes itself as "feminist". Then he asks that question. Doh.
Oh and pornstudent, if you really are a pornstudent, try looking up "rape porn" on google, then "woman-friendly porn" and see how many hits they get.
What appeals to you or me is by the by.
OK, I've done the searches. "rape porn" has 1,960,000 pages indexed at Google and "woman-friendly porn" has 226 pages. It's troubling that there are so many web pages showing for "rape porn".
But, on the brighter side, there are 15,000,000 pages for "porn star".
I use overture to find about how many times words are searched for. Happily, "rape porn" doesn't show, "feminist porn" does.
Pornstudent says:
It's troubling that there are so many web pages showing for "rape porn", but let's change the subject or, better still, let's forget about it altogether.
Jo, I'm with you on what will and will not advance the feminist movement. In particular, Feminists for Pornography are concerned primarily with protecting their own personal 'interests', which wouldn't be such a bad thing if those interests also served the rest of womankind.
I found a way to find what people are searching for at Google. It doesn't give numbers but has graphs showing searches in relation to each other. "rape porn" gets a lot of searches; many more than "feminist porn". I also compared them to "lesbian porn" to get another perspective.
Sorry for getting off topic, jo. We disagree on whether all porn involves abuse or depicts degradation. If it does, then there is no such thing as feminist porn.
Thanks pornstudent, I looked at the graph. It is an understatement that "many more" people look up rape porn.
So, according to that graph, South Africa has the highest incidence of rape porn searches.
Interesting.
Shit. I just compared "rape porn" searches with "child porn" using that google thing.
I'm going to cry now.
The Regions graph shows the percentage of searches for "porn rape" of all the searches done in a country. It doesn't mean South Africa has the highest incidence of rape porn searches, but that of all the searches done in South Africa, a larger percentage of them are for rape porn.
Click on the (normalized) link to find an explanation of the graphs.
Yeah ok, bit off-topic now.
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