Now, this is not an official review per se of Jensen’s book, since I have not had the “pleasure” of having read the book in full….Chris Hall over at Sex in the Public Square has more than satisfied that requirement over there. This post simply reflects my own personal reflections on not only Bob’s latest work, but his legacy of imposing mass sexual guilt and shame upon innocent men who do not deserve such….and his disruptive and destructive impact on progressive beliefs regarding sexuality and sexual expression.

I can clearly say, to begin with, that I and Bob Jensen do have some common interests.  Both of us are middle-aged self-styled progressives who basically grew up as outsiders who didn’t quite conform to the culture of “mascuinity”.  Both of us have a deep interest in promoting the interests of gender equality, and would both call each other supporters of feminism.  Both of us are genuine anti-racists and anti-fascists (though, as I will state shortly, I feel that in this issue, Jensen goes dangerously close to adapting sexual fascism).  And both of us are, for the most part, deeply involved in the deconstruction of sexually explicit material and its impact on the human culture.

Where we go our seperate ways, however, is in our individual trust in individual free choice, and in our radically divergent views about sexual expression being innately liberating or degrading….and how we thusly feel about the Left’s approach to such.

What I find most horrific about Bob Jensen’s theories about porn is the fact that he simply tends to ignore and bleach out the opinion that should most matter in such debates: that of the women who actually perform such acts on screen (or online); never mind those women who might actually enjoy such acts in their real lives.  In Jensen’s mind, such women simply don’t exist…either they are lying to please their male “degraders”, or they are merely paid tools of the “sexual exploitation industry”.  Oh, Jensen doesn’t forget to quote women performers in his “research”…..but only when it suits his purposes, and when their words can be twisted to serve his ideology. 

For example, this excerpt from Getting Off regarding a typical “gonzo” porn scene:

Jessica Darlin tells the camera she has performed in 200 films and she is submissive. “I like guys to just take over and fuck me and have a good time with me. I’m just here for pleasure.” The man who enters the room grabs her hair and tells her to beg the other man. She crawls over on her hands and knees, and he spanks her hard. When he grabs her by the throat, she seems surprised. During oral sex, he says, ‘Choke on that dick.” She gags. He grabs her head and slaps her face then forces his penis in her mouth quickly. She gags again.The other man duplicates the action, calling her a “little bitch,” Jessica is drooling and gagging; she looks as if she might pass out. The men slap her breasts, then grab her by the hair and pull her up. Later in the scene, “One man enters her anally from the rear as she is pushed up against the couch, The other man enters her anally while his partner puts his foot on her head. Finally one grabs her hair and asks here what she wants. ‘I want your cum in my mouth,’ she says. ‘Give me all that cum. I want to taste it.’ “
 

Remember, this is merely a scene where actors, in the midst of real sex, “degrade” the woman by having her gag on their penises, mildly spank her, pull her hair, etc..  However you may dislike the asthetics of the scene (and I’m not so down with gagging either, for that matter), there’s nothing to say from that scene that anyone is being forced or harmed….especially not Ms. Darlin.  It’s not necessarily a reflection of Jessica’s real private sex life or of her other porn projects.  But to Jensen, it is the standard MO for ALL porn, ALL the time; a woman being “degrading” herself for the pleasure of men, both the actual actors participating in the scene and the men who will view the scene and become turned on enough to masturbate to it.

Never mind the basic fact that the same man (or woman???) watching this scene may also get off on much less “degrading” scenes, such as two girls playing with each other, or a solo scene with a girl playing with sex toys, or a more conventional “couples” scene featuring more conventional sex.  Never mind that the female performer might even have a special kink for such “degrading” scenes.  Nope…for Bob, it all the same; this is what makes men ”get off”, and this is why men are so callous and violent and we live in such a “patriarchial” society.

Jensen is also known for using the typical antipornradicalfeminist tactic of quoting porn producers out of context to justify his theory that porn is getting more and more “degrading”…..but he ignores some basic facts that as much as the “gonzo” market has grown; it is still quite a small portion of the overall sexually explicit media.  The overwhelming majority of porn produced in the US (well, outside of the gay male porn market) consists basically of either (1) solo sex scenes where a woman strips and masturbates, either with toys or their own hands; (2) couple scenes where a woman engages in sex with her boyfriend/significant other/husband or a male actor; or (3) conventional girl/girl scenes where two or three women play with each other. You can’t simply reduce the diaspora of adult sexual media to simply Slutbus or BangBus without also mentioning Naughty America or Brazzers….never mind Danni’s Hard Drive or Playboy or Penthouse or Burning Angel.

Porn may in fact be a “mirror”, as Jensen explains in his book, but it is much more diffuse and reflective than his trumped-up conclusions and cooked biases would imply. All it implies is that male sexual desire is pretty diverse and sometimes not too pretty…just as female sexual desire can be; and that attempts to regulate such desires will forever be futile. It would be far fruitful for activists like Jensen who say that they are so concerned with the treatment of women in porn to actually suppport such women with better health care or better workplace conditions or a more equitable share of the profits — you know, that old-style economic progressivism — but apparantly, all that gets lost in the blinding wave of banishing porn  and guilt-tripping men for having erections and desires unredeemed by “feminist” analysis.

And it is this form of sexual shaming that is the fatal flaw of Getting Off, that which ultimately makes it, however progressive Jensen’s intentions may be, a reactionary analysis more worthy of the Christian Right, but without the actual acknowledgment and baited respect for the humanity of those “sluts” and “whores” they denigrate. It’s one thing to say that men who do commit acts or cruelty to women should feel deep shame and remorse for their actions; it’s quite another entirely to shame an entire gender for crimes they did not commit; all because they have sexual desires that don’t fit into some narrow ideology. That Jensen acts as a “feminist man” and a “progressive” in doing this doesn’t make the damage any less noteworthy; just because a man may get a hard-on seeing a hard penis in a woman’s vagina does not automatically make him a misogynist, any more than being White makes one a KKK racist, or being an Arab makes one a terrorist, or being Black and liking hip-hop makes one a “gangsta”.  If there is anything that progressives and Leftists must stand for, it should be that accountability should be held for ACTIONS, not merely the desire to commit such actions.

But don’t take my word for it……I’ll let Eric Patton’s former girlfriend “Colleen” sum it up:

I know he says it’s not his part to say whether or not this is ACTUALLY demeaning to women, which is a nice little tale after pages of saying that it IS demeaning to women. His mention of wanting to threaten to have two “of the biggest guys in the room” double-anal rape the boy to see if he likes it is ALSO very telling, for a few reasons: 1. The boy is apparently not gay, so this act would be rape, and therefore not at ALL comparable to consensual  ADP [anal double penetration [1]]; 2. In private, a female participant in a DP would not be taking their clothes off in front of a group — in pornography, yes, but this is no different than any OTHER type of porn, including lesbian-produced girl on girl porn. It’s a cheap shot, totally unnecessary, and betrays his feelings on the matter. If he feels that ALL porn is degrading, he should just say so instead of picking one of the most extreme subjects as a showcase.

I really do find this bullshit from the Left about how porn is demeaning to women tiring and frustrating, especially when it comes from a 48-year-old male. Somewhere in the back of their minds they have an acceptable list of things that can be done to women, and a list of things that cannot be done to women, and IT’S NO FUCKING DIFFERENT than the sexual repression that comes from the Right.  It’s the “Oh, these poor women have no choice but to fuck for money, and they’re victims of our society and of a sex and humiliation-hungry patriarchy.” . . . I made $200/hour fucking men for money. I chose who and where, and I was absolutely worshipped by most of these men, who were looking for release, comfort, acceptance and kink. For a woman like myself to make a living by offering her body as an altar to men, or for a woman like those in pornography to make a living by acting while fucking is the kind of powerful feeling that you cannot get by conforming to the standards of the Left OR the Right, who both think they have a right to dictate what a woman’s sexuality should be.

This is why I have little patience for these kinds of authors, and this kind of essay. It’s disingenuous and abhorrent. Hopefully this helps you a little, but really, I cannot and will not participate in discussions with people like this. By the way, it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t give you a straight answer regarding porn in a utopia. Of course there will be porn in a utopia, but he will then be forced to consider — what does that porn look like? Will it involve — GASP! — women enjoying DP? Goodness, heavens, gracious! How could that be?

 I’d much rather live in that utopia where men and women are allowed to make their own choices about who and how they fuck, then to live in Bob Jensen’s desexualized alter-reality any day of the week.

Tags: Bob Jensen, leftist puritanism, porn and the Left, sex performers, The Feminist Sex Wars

Those who have read this space know fully well my opinions and feelings about Robert Jensen and his antipornography activism, as well as his repeated attempts to slander and convict men of merely having sexual feelings and desires that he considers too “masculinic” and “antifeminist” (meaning the antipornradicalfeminism of the likes of Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Sam Berg).

What really galls me, however, is that far too many self-styled progressives and leftists, so unconscious of their own sex ignorance and loathing about sexuality, are so willing to fall for his sophistic analysis and deep guilt-tripping disguised as “feminism”.

Case in point: Jensen’s latest tome on the evil threat of porn as the tool of “masculinity”, titled Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, recently recieved a major endorsement from the executive editor of the progressive news service Alternet.org, Don Hazen; who explained in an introduction to a posting of an excerpt from Jensen’s book how he was converted from a traditional liberal libertarian point of view to Bob’s APRF vision:

Part of my thin king on pornography has been shaped by seeing what is on the Internet myself, and part, by reading Robert Jensen’s powerful and provocative book, excerpted below: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Jensen has convinced me that something as powerful as the porn industry and its sexual extremism must not be kept under the rug due to liberal shoulder-shrugging about the First Amendment. The porn industry should not enjoy our collective denial in terms of its real-world impact on women — and men — simply because we might be berated by first amendment purists or be uncomfortable grappling with complex issues of sexual expression.

Never mind the fact that the actual “real world impact” of explicit sexual expression might be a bit more diverse and much less “extreme” than what Hazen sees through Jensen’s rose-colored spectacles…or that there would be no mention of “First Amendment extremism”  or fears of “First Amendment purism” when the subject turns to things like opposing federal snooping and wiretapping of innocent citizens, or opposition to the war in Iraq, or organizing unions or even gender discrimination…..nope, in the mind of Hazen and the others who run Alternet,  Jensen and the APRF (aka, the “feminist”) point of view is the only logical and true vision.

And what a narrow and tunnelled vision that Hazen and Jensen support, too.  To buttress his notion of how far low porn has become, Hazen whips out the old tired and true “gonzo” card, as if this is the only form of sexual expression that exists these days:

One phenomenon in porn is the ascension of Gonzo films. There are two styles of films — one are features that mimic, however badly, the Hollywood model of plot and characters. But the other, Gonzo, has no pretensions, and is simply the filming of sex acts, which, Jensen writes, while also occurring in features, are “performed in rougher fashion, often with more than one man involved, and more explicitly degrading language which marks women as sluts, whores, cunts, nasty bitches and so on.”

The Gonzo films, which have come to dominate the industry, also emphasize the newer trend of sexual acts, which include: double penetration — anal and vaginal — and ass to mouth, or ATM, where anal sex is followed by stic king the penis in the women’s mouth. In addition, many of these films include men, often in multiple numbers, ejaculating into the faces and mouths of the women performers. The women usually swallow the semen, but also can share it mouth-to-mouth with a female partner. For Jensen, the most plausible explanation of the popularity of these acts is that women in the world, outside of pornography, don’t engage in these acts unless forced. “Men know that — and they find it sexually arousing to watch them in part because of that knowledge.”

As Jerome Tanner, porn film maker explains, “One of the things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, is so many fans want to see much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems that everybody wants to see a girl doing a double penetration or a gang bang. … It’s definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don’t know where it is headed from there.”

Mitchell Spinelli, interviewed while filming Give me Gape, adds: “People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass. It’s like “Fear Factor meets ‘Jackass.’” Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.” 

Now, aside from the total fallacy of quoting porn producers and insiders as the literal Gospel in saying what men who buy these videos (or who simply download them, legally or not, for free) really want from them; there is the total and complete ignorance of what exactly “gonzo” really is. Actually, the term simply describes sex videos that feature sex unemburdened by plot; nothing about the particular acts involved. A film featuring a single couple engaged in conventional sex without plot would be considered “gonzo; as much as a video of an mulit-person orgy featuring traditional fucking and sucking.

Now…there certainly in within the genre of “gonzo” the more extreme and exotic subgenre which does include some of the acts that so inflame (arouse???) Jensen and Hazen; including double anals, double vaginals, bukkake, creampies, facials, and AtM. It is certainly open to debate whether women performers are being ”coerced” into performing them, or whether these particular acts are being promoted as  things women should do in private (forgetting, of course, the possibility that some women might even — horrors — LIKE such acts done to them in private).  But to conclude from that that fans of such acts are merely expressing their total hatred for the women performers — nay, heaven forbid, ALL women — merely by watching and getting off on viewing such acts is simply bizarre.  The “extreme” market is just that; one market in a field of many in sexual media; and hardly representative of the majority of the hardcore sex genre. The overwhelming majority of sex videos are those featuring either (1) single women stripping and masturbating, usually with sex toys;  (2) women having sex with one or two other women (i.e., “girl/girl” or “Hot Lesbian Action”, never mind if they are really lesbian or bi, or merely curious); or (3) a single woman having sex with her significant other (boyfriend, husband) or a male friend that she already knows and respects enough.

Of course, since Jensen has already clearly stated that he considers even the more conventional images of women in porn to be innately “misogynistic” because even the softer images degrade and dehumanize women by reducing them to “sex objects” and “fucktoys”, I guess that any discussion of the heavier and kinkier brands of “gonzo” are basically totally moot…or simply agitprop to convert the more gullible liberals and “leftists” to his agenda.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Robert Jensen essay without the obligatory detailed description of a “typical” gonzo scene, as well as him (and by proxy, Hazen) imposing his (their) ideology on the performers, whatever they may actually think.  Quoting again from Hazen’s intro:

Jensen clearly decided in writing his book that the often overwhelming reality of the behavior and values of the porn industry must be experienced by the reader, at least in written form, to understand what the issues are. Thus, in the book, he describes porn scenes, quotes dialogue in the porn films, and includes interviews with porn actors to help capture what they are thin king. Some of this is a little hard to take. Here is one example:

Jessica Darlin tells the camera she has performed in 200 films and she is submissive. “I like guys to just take over and fuck me and have a good time with me. I’m just here for pleasure.” The man who enters the room grabs her hair and tells her to beg the other man. She crawls over on her hands and knees, and he spanks her hard. When he grabs her by the throat, she seems surprised. During oral sex, he says, ‘Choke on that dick.” She gags. He grabs her head and slaps her face then forces his penis in her mouth quickly. She gags again.The other man duplicates the action, calling her a “little bitch,” Jessica is drooling and gagging; she looks as if she might pass out. The men slap her breasts, then grab her by the hair and pull her up. Later in the scene, “One man enters her anally from the rear as she is pushed up against the couch, The other man enters her anally while his partner puts his foot on her head. Finally one grabs her hair and asks here what she wants. ‘I want your cum in my mouth,’ she says. ‘Give me all that cum. I want to taste it.’ “

Jensen writes, “In researching the porn industry, one of the most difficult parts is writing about the women who perform. Men see women in porn films as objects of desire (to be fucked) or ridicule (to be made fun of.) When porn performers speak in public they typically repeat a script that emphasizes that they have freely chosen this career because of their their love of sex and lack of inhibition.” Nina Hartley is one former porn star who frames her experience in the porn industry as empowering — a feminist act of a woman ta king control of her own life. But Jensen notes that while “we should listen to and respect those voices, we also know from the testimony of women who leave the sex industry that often they are desperate and unhappy in prostitution and pornography but feel the need to validate it as their choice to avoid thinking of themselves as victims.”

The fact that Jessica Darlin is actually an actresses enacting a scene in a movie, which involves a particular theme, and openly states that she has no problem whatsoever doing such scenes (of course, she must either be lying or under the spell of that evil male choking and spitting on her!!); seems to be lost on both Jensen and Hazen;  certainly they would not think that when Michael Douglas and Glenn Close did that sex scene in the elevator in Fatal Attraction, they were really representing the real feelings of women and men, would they???

And we all know about how Jensen and other APRF’s really feel about Nina and other women who do happen to defend their right to make porn…right, Sam???

Oh….and Nina’s not a “former porn star”, Bob…she is still quite active in making and producing video; and has even enjoyed a sort of renaissance in the subgenre of older mature sex performers (also known as the “MILF” and “Cougar” subgenres).  But I’m sure that she can defend herself better than I ever can….if you would ever allow sex-positive criticism of Jensen in your site, that is.

Moving along, we see Hazen practically spill his own seed in tribute to Jensen’s brilliance:

So that you understand, Robert Jensen is a true radical. His positions on masculinity, race and pornography are way out of the mainstream. He thinks that concepts of masculinity make men less than human and should be junked. “Men are assumed to be naturally competitive and aggressive, and being a “real man” is therefore marked by the struggle for control, conquest and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants and takes it.”

In writing his book, he turns to one of the most vilified feminists, Andrea Dworkin, as his guide. One of Dworkin’s books, Intercourse, enraged many readers. “In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women’s subordination to men. (This argument was quickly and falsely simplified to “all sex is rape” in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin’s already radical persona.)” But Jensen embraces Dworkin for best understanding pornography and notes that “her love for men was so evident.”

[...]

Jensen’s book is a serious effort to deconstruct pornography and connect it to the society in which it grows and, in some ways, dominates. He addresses in detail the arguments that justify porn and the research that may connect porn to violence. His narrative, interwoven in the book, is about a lonely journey to shed the straight jacket of masculinity, and the pain and lack of acceptance that goes with the territory as he relentlessly pushes his ideas into the public domain.

In the end, the book grapples with a fundamental question. “If pornography is increasingly cruel and degrading, why is it increasingly commonplace instead of more marginalized? In a society that purports to be civilized, wouldn’t we expect most people to reject sexual material that becomes ever more dismissive of the humanity of women? How do we explain … increasingly more intense ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?” Jensen concludes: “… this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here it is the assumption that the U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact the U.S. is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation.”

Robert Jensen is on a quest. And he has taken a major step forward in his journey in producing a book that the reader can’t run away from or casually dismiss. It is filled with facts, data, intelligent observation and analysis, as well as examples of the raw product of an industry gone gonzo. I know this may sound like a cliche, but I guarantee that after reading this book, almost no one will think about pornography in the same way again.

I’ll just let you wander through and behold the magnificance of such bullshit for a while. You wonder then why progressive activism in the US is in such horrible shape???

And then, Hazen turns the floor over to Bob for an excerpt from his book….and it it so typical classic Jensen sex-hate and loathing.  And well deserving of another fisking….but that will be anon. 

[Cross-posted to the Blog of Pro-Porn Activism] 

Tags: Bob Jensen, leftist puritanism, porn and the Left, sex performers, The Feminist Sex Wars