Major props for Iamcuriousblue for posting this to the BPPA; this is a perfect example of how antiporn fascists like Diana Russell cook the books to justify their biases.

“When a Scientist Stacks the Deck: A Review of Diana E. H. Russell’s Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm”
by Jen Durbin
Spectator Magazine #835 (Sept 30-Oct 6, 1994)

Imagine a literary scholar writing a book about the sonnet in order to give the general public, many of whom have never read a sonnet, an opportunity to make up their own minds about this verse form. This hypothetical scholar first defines “sonnet” as a poem about a horse. He and a dozen research assistants spend eighteen years sifting the canon of English literature for poems about horses. Some of these poems may have fourteen lines; others may not. The number of lines is irrelevant to his study. At the end of this period of extensive research, he publishes his findings: his long-awaited scholarly book proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that sonnets are about horses. He even includes over a hundred poems as evidence.

As farfetched as this hypothetical anecdote might seem, it provides a frightfully accurate analogy for Diana Russell’s new book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (Russell Publications, 1993). She calls her book a “scholarly work” (p. xii), but it breaks every rule of good scholarship, which, if it can’t be original and well written, should at the very least be unbiased and logical. As a teacher of pornography, I can sympathize with Russell’s opening statement: “I have come to dislike talking about the effects of pornography with people who have not seen it for themselves” (p.vii). If there’s one thing I dislike even more, however, it’s talking about pornography with people whose only exposure to porn has been a narrow band within the broad spectrum of pornographic material, carefully pre-selected by the anti-porn feminists.

Just like the fraudulent scholar who looked for horses everywhere, Russell begins by re-defining pornography so that she can pre-determine the results of her search. She sets out to look for “material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior” (p. 3). Not surprisingly, that’s exactly what she finds.

The 108 images she reproduces in her book come from the porn collections of such groups as OAP (Organizing Against Pornography) SVAW (Stopping Violence Against Women), WAP (Women Against Pornography), SOAP (Students Organizing Against Pornography), and of course WAVPM (Women Against Violence in Media and Pornography). The last-named group, which Russell helped to found, was established in 1976. It has taken her and her comrades in arms nearly twenty years to collect the violent images she reprints in her book. A serious academic study would have attempted to provide a more even-handed survey of the field. If it took dozens of women this long to collect a handful of violent images, just imagine all the benign or neutral images they must have viewed and then discarded in the course of their search.

Russell does attempt to contextualize her sample of pornographic visuals by introducing some statistics, but none of them are too impressive. For instance, in Penthouse and Playboy in 1977, “5 of the cartoons and 10 of the pictorials were sexually violent” (p. 9). Of course, it doesn’t take a scientific study to estimate that by far the bulk of the images in both magazines were just plain sexual, but who wants to analyze the most representative kinds of porn images anyway? Since no one has been able to prove that pornographic images are predominantly violent, Russell has decided to modify the findings of some existing studies to suit her purposes. She draws on the Canadian Criminologist T.S. Palys for some fairly significant percentages of sexually aggressive scenes in sexually-oriented videos. What she doesn’t say is that out of the 150 videos sampled by Palys, 58 were not x-rated, and 25 were specifically (not randomly) chosen for their violent content. It’s as if our literary scholar, finding that epics were far more likely to feature horses, decided to beef up his case by throwing statistics about epics in with his statistics about sonnets. Even worse, Russell barely mentions Palys’ main point –”the unexpected finding that ‘adult’ videos have significantly greater absolute number of depictions of sexual aggression per movie than triple-X videos” –a point that probably will not surprise regular viewers of R-rated and X-rated videos.

Among Palys’ actual findings, those ignored by Russell, were the following: “the triple X videos had a higher frequency of mutual (i.e. egalitarian) sexual depictions than the adult videos (72 versus 12.9),” sexual aggression was more prevalent in adult than in X-rated videos, and the aggressive depictions were significantly more severe in the adult videos.1 Palys critiques previous studies for leaving “concerned individuals with the potentially misleading impression that those who produce ‘pornography’ hold the monopoly on violent and sexually violent materials” (Palys, p. 33). One can only speculate about the reasons Russell chose to ignore his warnings about creating a “misleading impression.”

How does Diana Russell create the misleading impression that pornography is predominantly violent and degrading towards women? Let me count the ways. In the interests of brevity, I will cite only one instance of each tactic (or two if they are impossible to resist).

Faulty logic: On page 114 she writes, “Because it is important to know the proclivities and the state of mind of those who read and view pornography, I will start by discussing some of the data on males’ propensity to rape.” Spectator readers will be interested to know that as a group they are indistinguishable, in Russell’s mind in any case, from rapists. Wouldn’t it be a little more scientific/scholarly to start with a group of consumers of porn (using a group of people who don’t consume porn as a control group) if one were interested in analyzing the “proclivities and state of mind of those who read and view porn”?

Misleading rhetorical strategies: On page 20 she writes that there is “reason for great concern when those who feel aroused by pornography (or racism) become advocates or defenders of it.” Here she implies that defending one’s right to view or read arousing material is the same as joining the Ku Klux Klan.

Baseless claims: Russell cites a study by Malamuth, in which subjects were “randomly assigned to view either a rape version or a mutually consenting version of a slide-audio presentation.” She justifies using this study to pillory pornography because “the rape version of the slide-audio presentation is typical of what is seen in pornography” (p. 124). Of course, anyone who has viewed much pornography knows that the most common scenario features the willing, even nymphomaniacal woman, not the female victim of forced sex. Russell’s flawed premise allows her to pretend that rape is a typical feature of porn.

Misleading categories: Throughout the book, she lumps bondage in with violence. For instance, she reprints a cartoon featuring a smiling woman in a dog collar and leash (p. 23). How does Russell know the woman did not choose bondage? Another cartoon shows a woman tied spread eagle on the bed. The man who has tied her up asks, “Comfy?” Here’s Russell’s interpretation: “This cartoon perpetuates the idea that women enjoy bondage” (p. 36). Of course, many do. Need I add that throughout the book she makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts?

Faulty assumptions: And who’s to say that a man looking at the cartoons above or watching video sex scenes always identifies with the aggressor? Carol Clover, in her book about slasher films, Men Women and Chainsaws, has shown that males in the audience often identify with on-screen females, and vice versa. Indeed, in one of the studies Russell cites, researchers found that male college students and men living in inner-city housing projects found four categories of violence arousing. One of the arousing categories was “a female killing a male” (p. 146).

Lip service: At various points throughout the book, Russell will make a reasonable statement. For instance, she writes “What is objectionable about pornography, then, is its abusive and degrading portrayal of females and female sexuality, not its sexual content or explicitness” (p. 5). Elsewhere she admits that by the definition of simple causation, “pornography clearly does not cause rape, as it seems safe to assume that some pornography consumers do not rape women, and that many rapes are unrelated to pornography” (p. 119). However, since she does not provide any examples of sexual content that is not abusive or degrading, and since her purpose is to implicate pornography as one of the primary causes of rape, these brief admissions can be seen as mere lip service.

Ignoring the obvious interpretation of others’ findings: In making a case that viewers imitate what they see on screen, she cites the seemingly shocking statistic that “Among the junior high school students [in Jennings Bryant's study] 72 of the males reported that ‘they wanted to try some sexual experiment or sexual behavior that they had seen in their initial exposure to X-rated material’” (p. 126). This finding will assuredly be shocking to any reader who has taken Russell’s word about what “typical porn” is like, but anyone who has viewed porn for him- or herself might have a different interpretation: most 7th and 8th graders have not experienced sex, and it is not surprising that they would some day like to try intercourse (or, God forbid!, fellatio or cunnilingus), the real staple of heterosexual porn.

Failure to critique the studies she cites: She quotes from a study that confirms “that exposure to non-violent pornography causes masculine sex-typed males, in contrast to androgynous males, to view and treat women as a sex object” (p.132). The flaw in this study lies in the initial classification of the participants. The term “masculine sex-typed males” was defined as men who “encode all cross-sex interactions in sexual terms and all members of the opposite sex in terms of sexual attractiveness.” An astute reader–one who can translate jargon into plain English–will have noticed that by definition this group of men viewed women as sex objects before they even participated in the study.

Ignoring the findings or premises of others’ studies: Russell makes use of Dietz and Evans’ statistics about the increase in bondage and domination imagery on the cover of heterosexual porn magazines. She neglects to mention, however, that the authors of this study saw it as an “unobtrusive measure of the prevalence of the corresponding fantasy among consumers,” since “the imagery of pornography tends to correspond to the preexisting fantasy images of the consumer.”2 In other words, they posit that pornography is an effect, whereas Russell takes the opposite stance, arguing that it is a cause.

Citing irrelevant studies: She cites a study by Malamuth and Check, in which students viewed a “feature-length film that portrayed violence against women as being justifiable and having positive consequences (Swept Away or The Getaway)” (p.134). Their findings are of course irrelevant in a book called Against Pornography, since the films they used are rated R, and any actions taken by fired-up readers of Russell’s book are unlikely to be directed against The UA or Landmark cinemas.

Ignoring or glossing over points that run counter to her theories: She admits that “Psychologists James Check and Neil Malamuth have provided experimental evidence that pornography that is supplemented with sound educational information does not induce the negative effects that would otherwise occur” (p. 17). However, she ignores the ramifications of this finding: it is important to make porn more accessible, not less. Families who will not freak out if little Johnny or Jenny is watching porn will be more likely to have a chance to discuss the videos with their kids, and to use them as an opportunity to educate.

As a teacher, I of course believe in the power of education. And I believe that the best education succeeds not in transmitting the biases of the teacher into the minds of the students, but rather in teaching the students to ferret out faulty logic wherever it resides, and to open their minds to truth wherever it may be found. And the best education of all succeeds in opening the teacher’s mind too. In that spirit, I turn from my point-by-point critique of Russell’s methods in order to attempt to reach an unbiased perspective on the issues she raises. I don’t want readers to come away from this review article with the impression that I am just as biased, and just as likely to ignore evidence that runs counter to my pet theory, as Russell is.

There’s a little gold sticker on the cover of Russell’s book that reads “WARNING: Some of the visuals in this book may cause distress.” It turns out that I am not so desensitized to sexual violence that I was completely immune to that distress. Certainly the album cover depicting a just-raped woman next to the graffiti “Guns N Roses Was Here” disturbed me: I couldn’t help but think of the young fans of that group, who are being taught a less-than-subtle lesson about rape. Given my own personal history, I also was disturbed by the ad in Playboy (for Oui magazine) depicting an adolescent-looking nude girl in handcuffs above the caption “How one family solved its discipline problem.” I don’t think it’s possible to argue that Playboy caused the national epidemic of child sexual abuse, partly because incest existed for centuries before Playboy came on the market. But I do think it would be naive to argue that the media plays no role in the overall climate of misogyny in the United States today.

Given the fact that pornography is far less prevalent and accessible than television, advertising, mainstream movies, and billboards, why do radical feminists such as Russell focus their attacks on pornography? One argument is that the conjunction between sex and violence is especially compelling. To put it crudely, one might compare male viewers of video porn to Pavlov’s dogs: they are trained to ejaculate at the sight of sexual violence towards women. Russell cites a 1985 study by Donnerstein, in which participants were divided into three groups: one saw X-rated movies depicting sexual assault; the second saw X-rated movies showing only consenting sex; the third saw R-rated sexually violent movies. Then they all saw a reenactment of a real rape trial. “Subjects who had seen the R-rated movies: (1) rated the rape victim as significantly more worthless, (2) rated her injury as significantly less severe, and (3) assigned greater blame to her for being raped than did the subjects who had not seen the films [i.e. the control group]. In contrast, these results were not seen for the X-rated non-violent films. However, the results were much the same for violent X-rated films, despite the fact that the R-rated material was ‘much more graphically violent’” (p. 137). There is no question in my mind that if I had my druthers, the media would not pre-dispose potential jurors to underestimate a rape victim’s worth or her injuries.

Still, Donnerstein’s study also suggests that the degree of explicitness of the sex scenes in the movies was not a factor in the participants’ responses to the rape trial. Since the ratio of sexual assault scenes to consensual sex scenes is much higher in Hollywood films than it is in porn videos (for evidence, see the study by Palys above, or just pay attention when you go to the movies), the unavoidable conclusion seems to be that despite their protestations, writers such as Russell actually are attacking sexuality.

Intentionally or not, Russell is adding to the climate of misogyny. She notes for instance that “Negative consequences to males who exploit women in this situation [i.e. in bondage] are improbable since women who are violated while in bondage are unlikely to report such abuses to the police.” She is right: most sex workers know they will automatically be assumed guilty by the judicial system. But the more Russell contributes to a climate of sexual repression, the harder it will be to obtain legal redress for crimes against women who work in the sex industry.

It’s hard to object to her recommendations, since she provides none. She does not seem to be recommending that pornography be fought via the courts; in fact, she goes to some lengths to distinguish herself from MacKinnon and Dworkin, who needed to use a legal definition of pornography in order to write their legislation. She repeatedly claims to be against censorship, although it is true that she does so only in the context of defending her own right to free speech. A rave review just inside the cover, in which Nikki Craft writes that she was “moved to tear up several hundred Hustler magazines in convenience stores and throughout Santa Cruz,” might be interpreted as an implied recommendation. Anyone who reads this book out of context (of the feminist debate about pornography or the full spectrum of pornographic materials) is likely to take matters into their own hands, and the target will be a symptom (for instance Hustler magazine) of our social ills rather than an underlying cause (such as economic inequality between the genders).

In lieu of author’s recommendations, I will make a suggestion of my own. On the copyright page Russell prohibits reproduction of any part of the book, specifying that “the only exception to these rules applies to feminists dedicated to the fight against pornography, who are welcome to copy this material free of charge in pursuit of their anti-pornography work.” This is especially ironic in light of the fact that, by her own admission, she stole these images from the pornographers who held the copyrights in the first place. In her preface she admits to the following violation: “I did not attempt to obtain permission from the pornographers for several reasons. I didn’t want to support the pornography industry by giving them money. . . ” In light of the fact that one of the most popular tactics used against the porn industry is to tie up all its resources in legal battles in the hopes that the production companies will go bankrupt, I have a fitting response to Russell’s book to suggest: the pornographers whose images she has stolen should consider suing her for copyright violations. It would be interesting to see if the courts agreed that her “right to free speech” (which, according to Russell, “includes the right to publish the material necessary to show that pornography is harmful to women” p. x) overrides publishers’ and photographers’ and artists’ rights to fair payment for the reproduction of their work.

On a more serious note, I would like to say that a feminist writer who has done such important work in the areas of rape and child sexual abuse might have been expected to have chosen her target more carefully. Pornography is not the culprit here. If feminists are to make real strides towards stopping violence against women, we will need a more realistic assessment of the root causes of the problem, and a more effective plan for bringing about true social change.

1 Palys T. (1986). Testing the common wisdom: the social content of video pornography. Canadian Psychology, 27(1):27–35. (p 27–29)

2 Dietz P, Evans B. (1982). Pornographic imagery and prevalence of paraphilia. American Journal of Psychiatry 139:1493–1495. (p 1423; italics mine.)

You know you live in America when the victim of a virtual hate crime gets the punishment….and the perpetrator gets off scot free.

Apparently, the racist and misogynist antics of Phoenix right-wing shock jock Jon Justice isn’t enough to get him fired from his job at “The Truth”….but the actions of his targeted victim, Latina public defender Isabel Garcia, might be enough to cost her hers.

The update from ProfBW over at WOC PhD:

While Jon Justice continues to enjoy full privileges as a radio host after posting mock sexual assault videos in which he made racist comments about Latinas and immigrants while assaulting a piñata with public defender Isabel Garcia’s face pasted to it (see my original post for more), his efforts to have Garcia dismissed from her job as a public defender in Arizona have gone forward. Garcia is currently under investigation by the AZ state bar for participating in a protest against a book signing for a book that supports active discrimination against immigrants and subversion of their rights. “Justice” and others, have misrepresented the events to say that Garcia’s “toting of a severed piñata head of a police officer” constitutes violation of the bar’s code of conduct. Garcia was actually picking up the head after protesters split the piñata open in traditional form. She and others actively protested the incitement of anti-immigrant sentiment and abuse of immigrants and the Latin@ community in AZ which they felt were being exacerbated by the event and the author. Should the review board decide that Garcia is guilty of violating codes of conduct, she could lose her license to practice law in the state of Arizona and would also lose her job as a public defender.

The “police officer”, as I previously stated, happened to be Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arapio, who was in town pushing his latest anti-immigration book.

The message that a decision against Garcia sends, while Jon Justice continues to be on the air, is ultimately detrimental to everyone. What it says about the rights of brown people in Arizona and brown women in particular is clear: racism and sexism are not only irrelevant in Arizona they are supported by the state. No one benefits from living in a state where this is how outsiders and insiders alike view the legal apparatus. John Justice can simulate sexual assault on two separate occasions while making derogatory comments about Latinas, immigrants, and Chican@ culture, post them on his workplace website, and defend his actions through his workplace - radio show and workplace owned blog without consequence. Garcia loses her license and her job for participating in a protest and picking up the remains of a piñata.

The conflict has already encouraged hate groups to target woc bloggers defending Garcia as well as to circulate her picture on their sites. (you can do a google image search for evidence as I am not linking to them.) This targeting makes it clear that John’s [sic] behavior encouraged listeners to lash out against both Garcia herself and women of color in general and that is part of the social definition of hate speech.

ProfBW give out some addresses where you can send some real messages in Ms. Garcia’s behalf…I’ll just link you to her for the details.

Oh, hark!!  What is that incredible screeching sound I hear in the background???

Why…doesn’t that look like some British woman on a broomstick, flying around like some gnat at a horse’s butt??

Oh, noez…woudn’t that be some antiporn zealot named…what??  Bitchy-Who or whatever???  Oh, sooooo sorry, that would be Witchy-Woo??  My apologies.

And what exactly is she screaming about, anyway??  Would it be because I called her bluff and responded to Nine Deuce’s loaded push poll…..errrrrrr, inquiry on how “pro-porn” males like me should feel about how the product they defend harms women??

Oh, I see…she’s complaining that I didn’t respond directly at ND’s blog, that I kept my response over here.

Gee, I wonder why?? Because there was the distinct notion that if I responded there, then Witchy would have been able to fire more of her stink bombs at me from there??

Oh, wait….she says it’s because she just doesn’t want to come over here and read exactly what I wrote….too dangerous for a prim radicalfeminist to even look at this blog.

That’s pretty hilarious, Witchy….since you were so free to go over to Renegade Evolution’s blog and freely blast her congratulating her for getting fired from her volunteer job at the rape crisis center due to her chosen profession.

And Goddess knows that you weren’t scared in the past to come here and view this blog and comment on my words, or comment on words I’ve posted to other blogs.

Now…does that mean that if I decided to go over there to your blog and copy my answers there, would you be willing to post it without any alterations?? Like you would allow posts from other critics of your positions??

Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen.

Maybe now I see why you were so moved to lighten the shade of that stripper pic you stole from Heart and ND to whiten out the racism intended (and BTW, it didn’t work; you can still see the Black faces there); I guess that you need the light because your regular vision is so darkened by your myopia???

Ahhhh…never mind.  Fly far away, Witchy, and take your flying monkeys with ‘ya.  Your act is steadily tiring.

[Major props to Caroline at Uncool for smoking W-W out and smacking her down.]

All right, let us continue with our detailed fisking of Maggie Hays’ latest jousting of windmills. First part was here.

Porn Apologist: Advocating censorship is not a good thing. Pornography is free speech.

Rad Fem: Who’s talking about censorship here? You, not me. I’m talking of harms. Pro-porners often use the inaccurate word “censorship” to stigmatize any feminist work against pornography and to try to shut us up. Censorship or banning would never address the demand for pornography. Educating people on the harms and asking for an end to men’s demand for an industry that is predicated upon and produces sex-based exploitation and widespread aggression has nothing in common with censorship. Pornography is not free speech, it is hatred of women. The only freedom in pornography is the one for men to abuse women. In a male-supremacist, capitalist society, the First Amendment protects only those who can exercise the rights it protects. Where is women’s freedom of speech in all of this? Pornography keeps women and other people who have been harmed from exercising their rights to free speech.

Ahhhh…nice try there, Maggie…but I’d say that openly pushing for legislation that would effectively regulate sexual material and sexual media out of business by forcing them to endure impossible bookkeeping requirements (see the 2257 regulations), or force clients of sex work or consumers of porn to endure the threat of jail or “john schools” to humiliate or shame them for even having normal sexual thoughts, or even allow any woman under the guise of “civil rights” to sue anyone selling an adult video for triple damages for the thought crime of “degrading and harming women” for treble damages….that pretty much counts to most thinking people as censorship.

And I’d say that the First Amendment seems to be a bit different from your interpretation of it….since when did women become exempt from its protections?? Especially women who happen to disagree with your interpretation of what porn is and if it really does as much harm as you say??

Oh….and enough already with the “We are being CENSORED!!!!!!11ONE11!!” nonsense, Mags….when the government (or Blogger or WordPress) comes in and totally shuts down your blog, then you can make a case about being “censored”. Challenging the nonsense that you put out as untrue, biased, and slanderous is not censoring you; nor is saying that you should be held to the same standards of accuracy and decency as everyone else.

One more time: simply substitute “the homosexual lobby” ; the “homosexual agenda”, and “radical gays” in the proper places, and think about how this apes the Radical Right to a perfectly crossed T.

Porn Apologist: Feminists are often man-haters. That’s why they criticize porn.

Rad Fem: In a patriarchal society where misogyny is the norm, whenever you point out to the fact of male violence against women you’re accused of being a “man-hater”, while whenever a man says a misogynist comment or laughs at misogynist jokes he’s never accused of being a “woman-hater”. Feminists aren’t man-haters and they criticize porn because it is harmful and it is strongly linked to violence against women.

Now, let me see, Maggie…why on earth would we even think that you or some of your allies would be considered “man-haters”?? Gee, I don’t know…would it be because of rants like this???

I do not consider the “consent” I gave while under patriarchal delusions to have been legitimate. I believe that the males who took advantage of my training have as much responsibility to ensure that a woman is not submitting out of culturally instilled obligation as they do to ensure that she isn’t drunk or otherwise unable to give meaningful consent. But I understand that males will never behave in a manner that reduces the pool of “willing” women.

This is what makes men rapists. They will use any pretense as sufficient proof of consent, when the truth is that consent is impossible under patriarchy. That men and male-identified women continue to harp on the unverified existence of a few women on the planet who would seek out penile intercourse (which puts them at higher risk of STD’s than men, while simultaneously putting them at risk for pregnancy) in the absence of any training toward an obligation to engage in heterosexual PIV intercourse, is ridiculous to me. It’s not as if the men fucking those famed and fabled born-to-let-men-masturbate-into-them women aren’t also fucking a lot of women who’d reject them out of hand if not for the brainwashing.

A man’s not being a rapist in one highly unlikely circumstance (fucking a woman whose consent is not mitigated by social/individual coercion) doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not he’s a rapist in other more likely circumstances (that the woman he’s fucking is “consenting” to it out of obligation - to social norms or to economic interests). Because I believe the number of women not affected by socialization when making the decision to fuck men is very low, and because I believe that the men who are fucking those rare women are also likely to be fucking or to have fucked women who undeniably *are* affected by social training, I feel quite safe in saying that all men are rapists.

All men are rapists.

Now granted, not all radicalfeminists are quite as extreme as Justicewalks was there (well, there is Luckynkl)…but maybe a person reading this might have the slightest impression that there was at least a little bit of male bashing involved in indicting men for having erections and sexual thoughts?? As opposed to, like, violently assaulting women against their will?? But, I guess that even the latter is given a benefit of a doubt if the perpetrator confesses his sin and accepts St. Andrea and the Right Reverend Maggie and Bishop Bob as their personal savior and promptly reports to the proper authorities for castration and reeducation??? Even if he goes on to continue to violate women under the guise of “defending” them??

(Oh, Memo to Kyle Payne: to quote Bill Goldberg, your ass is next…right after I finish this fisk; you just don’t get to get away from your acts, fool.)

There is still a decisive difference between hating men who do abuse and violate women (and anyone else who violates and abuses anyone else, for that matter); and tainting ALL men with the lash of “rapist” merely because they have working dicks and fantasies in their brains. Just as there is a decisive difference between authentic radical feminists who actually believe in their theories and are willing to promote them with all respect for civility and debate; and unctuous, obnoxious, arrogant, vicious, and self-important cranks stealing the “radical feminist” label and using it as a crutch for their own personal myopias. You can guess which side I believe Maggie Hays to be on.

Porn Apologist: Isn’t it natural for men to watch porn? Pornography expresses sexual freedom and all men use porn.

Rad Fem: If it is natural for men to use porn, then how come some men have given up on their porn consumption and haven’t died? Not all men use porn. And pornography is not freedom; it is a mechanical, mindless, plasticized, inhuman, cruel and disconnected form of sexual imagery made by big corporations who only want to make big bucks. Besides, if pornography was so “natural” for men, why would it be so relentlessly misogynistic? Men have usually been socialized so differently from women that we can hardly claim anything about their nature. From an early age, males are typically trained to repress their feelings of sensitivity, care and empathy. It doesn’t have to be that way but gender roles both uphold and are maintained by male supremacist social order. And pornography typically reinforces gender, i.e. what it means to be “masculine” and what it means to be “feminine”.

Ahhh, Maggie, haven’t you said that nonsense about “Porn isn’t free speech; it’s violence against women” like about 50 times before?? Trust me, we get your point.

And…let’s look at the divergence here: “male supremacist social order” is so pervasive that it literally forces all men to be induced to wank to THE EVOL PORN that socializes them to commit such horrors on women….but it’s not so pervasive that men can kick their porn habits and convert to the good side?? Ahhh, it can’t be both at the same time, Maggie: either it’s insurmountable, or it’s beatable.

Oh..and people have been making sexually explicit media long before porn became a billion (or even a multi-million) dollar industry; and people have even been making such content for free. How exactly does that jive with porn as an evil capitalist corporate plot, Mags??

Porn Apologist: But, I don’t look at the bad and extreme stuff. Misogyny is not really inherent in pornography. And pornography is neither violent nor racist.

Rad Fem: Violence is pervasive in pornography; it is normalized because it is made to look like “just sex”. Any proper and clear-headed study of the content of the best-selling porn titles will reveal that violence and contempt for women are pervasive in mainstream pornography, as a comprehensive 2007 media research based on top-selling porn titles listed in Adult Video news (results of the research are revealed in this video here) has proven. As for the racism, pornography typically portrays black women as subhuman, dirty, primitive “ebony hoes”, black men as savage, animalistic beasts, Asian women as slavishly obedient, and Hispanic women as “hot-blooded Latinas”. If you don’t recognize these stereotypes as horrifyingly racist, then I’m afraid I can’t help you. .

Now…not even the most diehard proponent of sexual expression or sexual speech has denied that there is an subsegment of porn that does play into a darker side of racism and violence and even outright contempt of women. Contrary to the rants of Gail Dines; most of us “pro-porners” — especially the more progressive wing — are well aware of how porn can be used to promote reactionary ideas and beliefs. That, however, is a cosmic leap from Maggie’s notion that violence and racism and degradation is not only inherent in porn, but that the sole purpose of porn is to promote violence and rape and degradation in the guise of sexual pleasure. To put is simply, that is sheer bullshit….and no quoting of the Top 50 list of titles from AVN will justify this bogus claim any more.

And here’s a question for you, Maggie: ever bothered to actually ask the porn actors and actresses of color whether they believe that the porn they produce ever promotes the stereotypes you claim that they promote?? I mean, is Angel Kelly or Ebony Ayes or Heather Hunter or Midori or Vanessa del Rio lying through their collective teeth when they say that they are into porn to dispell and break through such stereotypes?? And as for the myth of “Asian submissiveness”, two words in response: Ava. Devine. Enough said.

Porn Apologist: Look, women are objectified everywhere, even in the media. How is pornography different? I simply cannot imagine a world without the objectification of the female body.

Rad Fem: While mainstream media has clearly been invaded by soft-core objectifying pornography and that’s certainly not a good thing, hard-core mainstream pornography is worse. Women are not human beings in pornography, just things. . . Dare imagine a world that would not rely on the objectification of women, dare ask for justice and real sexual freedom within a new world where women would have the right to their own bodies without having to force themselves to have sex with men, where we would have true intimacy and mutuality, and where our lives wouldn’t be invaded and controlled by pornography.

First off, Maggie; you get the theory all ass backwards: the idea is not that ALL objectification is OK; just that sexual “objectification” is legitimate and natural in some aspect….as long as the person being subjected is still treated as a full human being. I know that that is an alien concept to you, Mags, but for most normal people not quite as trapped in anti-sex microcode as you are, it does make some sense.

And secondly….I thought that softcore porn was in fact just as obscene and degrading as hardcore; there’s not supposed to be any difference at all between the two (other than the degree of naughty bits being shown explicitly, that is).

And how nice of you to show us your favored vision of sex after the Revolution….so freed of “objectification” and violence and racism and all those bad things….and also freed of individual choice, of mutual pleasure, of full autonomy, and of any vestiges of real life. In short, even more objectifying and inhuman than even the “porno-iarchy” you claim to oppose.

Porn Apologist: Women look at porn too.

Rad Fem: While women’s use of porn has somehow increased since the Internet, the VAST majority of pornography users are men and the industry knows it (but they’re not gonna tell you). Porn producers, when interviewed at the Las Vegas porn convention, said most of the consumers of their materials are men. That is why porn is so endlessly misogynistic and degrading.

Oh, I get it….because the majority of consumers of porn happen to be men, and we all know that men are innately violent and evil and only want to rape and abuse women with impunity (because Dr. Hays SAID SO), then it would be right to assume that porn for men is inherently “misogynoustic” and “degrading”. (Not to mention, violent.)

Once again, note the biased linkage to one of Bob Jensen’s rant columns, where he does his usual out-of-context quotes from porn producers and columnists. I’m surprised that Maggie didn’t go directly to Gail Dines’s ambush of Nina Hartley and the AbbyWinters girls at this year’s AVN convention…but then again, she probably didn’t want the threat of a slander suit.

Porn Apologist: Hey, do you know that there’s also feminist porn available out there, that is to say porn for women?

Rad Fem: Women-made porn is a smokescreen to protect the largely (mostly) male-run, male-led pornography industry. It is only a small portion of the industry. The solution to ending the harms of pornography is not to create “feminist porn”. As I said before, “[m]isogynistic porn (which is the type of sexual material that most men want to see and masturbate to) isn’t going to go away so easily, and women and children will continue to be harmed. There are so many more urgent things and so many more struggles to overcome before we are able to live in a non-patriarchal society and maybe think about such things as any “egalitarian forms of erotic arts”!!! Indeed, thinking about such things before the overthrow of the whole patriarchy itself happens, is nothing other than capitulation! And it is insane! Considering and confronting the harms of pornography and prostitution to women and children, and working toward the building of a new non-patriarchal world, are paramount causes!!! As Gail Dines pointed out at the 2007 feminist anti-porn conference, we live in an “image based culture” (i.e. any thing, to be valuable, has to be made into an image) and the answer to stopping porn culture is not more images. Personally, I feel A LOT MORE FREE without having images or so-called “art” control my life and/or sexuality!”

Translation here for you non-zealots: “We gotta break some eggs in order to make a perfect omlett, and before we can even consider making “erotic material” that isn’t merely an apeing or the evil male-centered porn industry, we must eliminate porn FIRST…and that includes this phony “feminist porn” for women that is nothing more than a Trojan horse for men to justify raping and degrading women. Sex will just have to wait until after the revolution happens….so sorry.”

But don’t worry…after the Revolution comes and goes and women are freed of their patreiarchial and porno-iarchial chains (and their autonomy) and are allowed to have sex the way the Goddess intended them to, then mutual pleasure will abound and freedom will ring and we will be welcomed with parades and flowers!!! And of course, men will benefit as well from their freedom, too. (Mostly because those who don’t comply will be either “re-educated” or jailed or…what?? Dead??) I believe that your Maoist slip is showing here, Maggie.

Porn Apologist: If you don’t like porn, just don’t watch it.

Rad Fem: If this could only be that easy! Women have to interact with men who use pornography every day without knowing about the harms. I walk in the street and see soft-core porn on billboards. I cannot watch T.V. without stumbling upon a show or a film within which a joke on pornography is being laughed about. I cannot go to a party without seeing a bunch of guys laughing at the porn pics on their phones they’re showing to each others. The list goes on. . . Pornography is everywhere. What you’re saying sounds so much like saying “If you don’t like the president, then forget he is the president!” or “If you don’t like pollution, then forget it also comes from cars”.

Never mind the conflation (again) confusing soft-core billboards and mainstream TV shows talking about men and porn with viewing hardcore; or how any man downloading porn on their iPhones would even allow someone like Maggie Hays to become the House Voyeur and sneak in on their viewing habits (and BTW, Maggie, you do know that certain jurisdictions do actually make it a crime to show adult material in public venues using iPhones). Also, most opponents of pollution from cars don’t call for banning autos; just making them more pollution free; why can’t porn be made less violent and degrading?? Oh, I forgot…that wouldn’t jibe too kindly with Maggie’s vision of porn being wiped off the earth.

And I now post the final argument in Maggie’s arsenal of idiocy:

Porn Apologist: Porn was the only sex education I had. I can’t give it up.

Rad Fem: Then you have been sexually “educated” by what is the mainstream sex miseducation for men, a form of media within which women are stripped of their own humanity and portrayed as sexual objects, as things to be penetrated. How original! Wouldn’t you be more free without having the corporate pimps mapping out your sex life? Besides, even if you’re not causing harm to women you know, by not giving up on pornography, you believe that there are acceptable losses, “necessary victims” in order to satisfy your self-centered orgasm to the sexuality of cruelty, the sexuality of disconnection from truly meaningful feelings toward another human being. By creating the demand for pornography, you generate, maintain or condone the harms it causes as well as submit to the self-objectification it creates when it controls you, shapes your sexual thoughts into a twisted manner and when you become addicted to it. So, why not giving up and have your own dreams for yourself? Why not accepting that your sex (mis)education did not involve sexual justice and equality between sexes?. . .

Yeah…why the hell not??? Why not admit that your personal, private orgasms are not really your own, that rather than reflecting your own fantasies and personal autonomy, they are just inventions of the “porno-iarchy” developed to imprison you to the evil of male oppression and rape?? Why not just give up those selfish and “self-centered” physical pleasures and join the real movement for group “intimacy” and fulfillment that only “radicalfeminism” (radicallesbianism???) can provide?? Why not just give up all that baggage of “male power” and “submission” to cruelty and disconnection from “meaningful feelings” (True LOVE?!?!?!) that authentic intimacy stripped of all that bad lust and power can bring???

Oh, now I finally get it. Maggie Hays is simply a combination of John “Men from Mars; Women from Venus” Gray and Pat Robertson wearing a “radicalfeminst” cloak.

Thanks, but no thanks, Ms. Hays…I and most sane and less whacked out men and women would rather remain on good old Earth, with all its diversity and color and freedom. Ban sexism…not sex.

OK….enough dilly dallying around; time to shake the trees and rake the leaves; mow the grass and kick some…..ahhhh, I mean, debunk some Maggie Hays lies.

You may remember that I commented that Maggie’s bombast about the “porno-iarchy” was only the SECOND whackiest post she had done on the subject.

As long winded and long that essay was, it doesn’t compare in sheer lunacy to an earlier essay that the Grand Sage of Antipornography Feminists had posted which supported to debunk what she perceived as “Bullshit Pro-Porn Arguments,” which she proposed that antiporn feminists could dispatch “With Confidence”.

Problem is, though, that most of Maggie’s inventive straw arguments that she claims to overthrow are simply inventions of her own cracked mind, pretty much used for the usual buttressing up of her standard boilerplate agitprop about porn’s capital offenses against “women and children”.

I will use the same methods and syntax as Ren Ev did in her debunking of the “Porno-iarchy” blast; but the words spoken by me are mine alone.

And no, I did not ask permission to paste this from Maggie’s blog; unlike her, I know what Fair Use is.

And a-waaaaaaaaay we go:

Begin with a photo of a broken record; then Maggie starts up:

See this? Yeah, that’s a broken record. I chose this image for this post because I sincerely believe that all the pro-porners, pro-prostitutionists, pro-sexploitation folks, pro-hate speech & pro-”sex work” activists (or whatever you rad fems wanna call them) sound like a fucking broken record with all their “same old shit” reactionary arguments that do nothing whatsoever to help women as a class, arguments that, on the contrary, bolster the patriarchal anti-woman status quo. Thus, I have decided to write a a list of the porn apologists’ bullshit arguments.

Ahhh, Maggie, dear…bad analogy; most of us now use CD’s and DVDs and iPods and mp3 players, now. Get with the program, please.

I’ll get to the delicious irony of Maggie Hays calling anyone out as “reactionary” and talking about “women as a class” soon enough.

I know these are all parts of the same broken record we hear every day; I know that some people (especially some men) are so stupid and stubborn in defending such a widespread violation of women’s bodies in order to maintain their own selfish sexual pleasure, I know all this. I also know that the pro-pornstitution folks are not only folks we meet online. The pro-porners we meet online are so easy to avoid or dismiss when we want to ignore them (thank fuck for that) while the pro-porners we meet offline are most often our co-workers, classmates, friends, even sometimes partners and so on. These offline people who defend porn aren’t so easy to avoid and, more or less often, we find ourselves in a conversation on pornography with them at some point.

It usually happens like this: They suddenly bring up pornography or prostitution for whatever reason, as part of a “joke” that we don’t find funny at all (but rather sad — as we do know that there’s a terrible sexual slavery going on out there and people keep on denying it) or simply because they’ve been influenced by pornified pop culture. Then we feel like we cannot tolerate these pro-porn arguments any longer so we start informing them on what we know about the sexual slavery industry. But, unfortunately, we’re feeling so upset that we just stop talking. There is just so much to say and we don’t know where to start. And, on top of that, there they go! Talking the same old reactionary bullshit arguments we’ve heard ten thousand times again and again, sounding like the same old broken record. . . And we start losing our confidence. . . so we stop talking.

Therefore I prepared this handy “Porn Apologists’ Bullshit Arguments List and How to Respond to Them with Confidence” collection in order to help myself and other rad fems to challenge those apologies confidently IRL. I constructed it as a dialog:

Just call it “The Official Maggie Hays Talking Points for Shouting Down Critics of Their Ideology” list, I guess. Perfect for witnessing those on the fence.

The list then starts rolling: I shall debunk each one as they come. “Porn Apologist” is the role played by the hypothetical “pro-porn” strawman argument; “Rad Fem” refers to Maggie’s response. (I’m also keeping all the links they use to their biases sources alive, just to prove the point.)

Porn Apologist: Women freely choose to sell their bodies in pornography and in prostitution. How can you criticize the women’s consent to be in porn?

Rad Fem: Contrary to myths, radical feminists have never criticized women’s involvement in the pornography industry as performers. Instead, we focus on the difficulties within which they make their choice to participate. Documentaries and articles on pornography in the mainstream media (which generally pick a very small number of performers out of the so much larger number of porn performers out there) typically show pornography performers as “happy women who have made a totally free choice”. However, the reality of the circumstances within which the vast majority of those women entered the porn industry are very much different from this whole mainstream media glamorization crap. A lot of thorough research on prostitution (based on interviewing hundreds and hundreds of prostituting women) has shown that child sexual or physical abuse or neglect, poverty, economic hardship, past experience of battery or rape, trafficking, socialization to the sexist and racist pornified culture, etc. are key factors for women who enter the ’sex’ industry. Feminists do not condemn the women who are in the industry, but we empathize with them. We understand that they are terribly exploited and harmed in this industry. As one woman who used to prostitute said that, while she was in prostitution, she would have yelled from the roof-tops how wonderful being a prostitute was, but that, while now she’s still healing from her prostitution experience, she has “found that the worse thing of exiting prostitution is seeing the real reasons [she] became a prostitute. Seeing it could of never been a choice. It was just a way to self-destruct.”[sic]

Hmmmmm, never criticized women’s involvement in porn, Maggie??? Really?? So this wouldn’t be considered criticism of women performers, in your mind:

“Look at the industry’s biggest star, Jenna Jameson, who appears to control her business life. However in her book [How To Make Love Like A Porn Star] she reports that she was raped as a teenager and describes the ways in which men in her life pimped her. Her desperation for money also comes through when she tried to get a job as a stripper but looked too young — she went into a bathroom and pulled off her braces with pliers. She also describes drug abuse and laments the many friends in the industry she lost to drugs. And this is the woman said to have the most power in the pornography industry.” — Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, Article Pornography is a Left Issue (2005).

[transcribed from "Jenna Jameson: Porn Star Myth" from AgainstPornography.org]

Who cares that Jenna has publically in the same biography that Bob and Gail quoted so lovingly made clear that she has never been coerced by anyone within the porn industry, and that all the choices she made within the industry — including the bouts with drug abuse — were solely her responsibility, not the industry’s?? In the mind of the antiporn “feminists”, it’s all the same.

Oh….and how can Jenna’s career in porn directly be related to her rape as a teenager?? Osmosis?? Karma?? The notion that only women who suffer such traumas as rape are the ones ending up in porn, if not becoming successful?? OK, then what does that say for women like Nina Hartley, who has, by my last recollection, never been raped?? Or women like Vicky Vette, who only started out in porn in her late 30s…and whom has also never been raped as a teen or young adult??

And no, Maggie…simply quoting a former prostitute-turned-radical antiporn antiprostitution activist (however her personal experiences should be respected and acknowledged) as if she represents ALL porn performers (never mind that Rebecca Mott never did porn to begin with, BTW) just won’t wash either.

But then again, when you are as much of an ideological zealot as Maggie is, nuances like the diversity of experiences and respect for individuals don’t tend to enter the picture.

And once again, notice the way that Maggie conflates porn and prostitution as the same entity. For the last time (today), Mags: Prostitution is when you pay someone to have sex with them; Porn is where you pay to SEE someone have sex WITH OTHERS or WITH THEMSELVES. There is a difference.

Porn Apologist: Women in porn make a lot of money anyway.

Rad Fem: Some research and testimonies have suggested that most strippers, prostitutes and pornography performers do not make a lot of money. Although some do, the idea that all of them make a lot of money is another part of the pornographers’ and the mainstream media’s propaganda. Most female porn performers do not get rich, particularly due to their brief “shelf lives” — male consumers often want to see new women being exploited — so even if pornstituted females initially command a high rate per scene or per movie, their market value as “fresh meat” declines rapidly. Thus, even if there are a few really famous porn “actresses”, the vast majority of the women in pornography leave that business feeling exploited, pained and ashamed by this terrible experience or after being considered “overexposed” by the consumers and producers. So, the pornography industry keeps using and discarding female bodies after having used those human beings as if they were pieces of meat. There have been words coming from people who have been involved in the industry to testify of this brutal reality. Besides, even if these women get paid for performing in porn, does it mean that it should excuse the extensive physical, psychological and emotional harms done to them? So, once a woman has been paid, the torture committed against her body is expiated, huh? Well, that’s an incredibly cruel and unfair way of reasoning! No amount of money whatsoever should excuse any harm done to a woman’s body.

Well…let’s see. Now, there are the few contract girls and former Playmates/Pets/Honeys who can make a ton of money through websites and feature dancing as well as porn performing, and some, with decent financial planning and a sense of what they want to do, can even thrive enough to get rich. And then there are the many in the majority who get in, get their hits in for enough to supplant their middle-class lifestyles, and then get out to do less strenuous and more mundane tasks for a living. How they actually leave the business, though, is mostly a reflection of how they entered the business and what attitudes and objectives and goals they went into the business with. Obviously, some experiences are more traumatic than others; but to say that “torture” and “physical, psychological, and emotional harm” should be considered the default experience for ALL porn performers is nothing short of libelous to the many performers who don’t share Maggie’s ideological bias.

And what a bias she does show, too. The one source that she cites to prove her position that porn is innately evil: An article from AgainstPornography.com citing quotes from Traci Lords (and remember, SHE lied about her age to get into adult videos), to the antiporn documentary Not For Sale, to even Shelley Lubben’s blog. (That would be Shelley Lubben, the former starlet turned born-again Christian. You were saying, Maggie, about your movement rejecting Christian Rightists???)

Also….see Ernest Greene’s breakdown of the typical porn pay structure taken from here:

In het porn, female players can and do charge by the specific act. A few make big bucks, but most have pretty standard rates. Lesbian porn, as distinct from girl-girl material made for male audiences, is mostly pro-am for small production companies and it commands the dead-lowest rate, somewhere south of five hundred dollars per scene.

I can’t resist wondering aloud if the poster here who suggested that straight guys who don’t like their rates should just bend over and spread for other men would make a similar suggestion to lesbians. Somehow I very much doubt it.

Pro GG with no extras (vanilla licky-licky with fingers and a small toy or two) brings in anywhere from six hundred bucks to a grand, depending on the performer’s current popularity. Use of an anal toy kicks that up another couple of hundred.

A BJ-only boy-girl is rarely more than five hundred for the girl.

A vage-only boy-girl for a female performer is typically around seven hundred, with a few players being able to command a thousand. Twelve hundred is the going rate for anal with one male partner, though fifteen hundred isn’t outrageous for someone with an established name. A first anal or a first BG might run up to five thousand dollars, but that trick only works once and only for a fortunate few who come in as former Penthouse Pets or whatever and can command a premium for existing name value.

Stunt sex – DPs, ATMs, ATOGMs, double anals, double vages, cream pies, gang bangs and so on obviously escalate the price, sometimes into the thousands, but there are plenty of female players who do stunt sex for a lot less. However, you can bet that whatever they’re making, they’re making more than the guys they’re doing it with.

This is not because, as someone on this thread has suggested in a display of breath-taking ignorance, there is such a glut of male talent just clamoring to get in here they’re practically a dime a dozen. That would be good for a laugh if it weren’t such a blatant insult to the few men who actually do try to make the cut. In fact, the reason you see the same dudes over and over and over and over in video after video is because they are the ones who not only will have sex for the camera, but can do so with predictable results. That is a very small group of men. Sure, lots of horny dudes think they’d make great porn studs. About one male civilian under thirty in every ten I meet asks me if I thought he could be then next John Holmes. It takes me two questions to sort them out. Does he have a dick that’s at least ten inches long fully erect? Can he get it fully erect, keep it that way for an hour and then have a visible ejaculation in front of a room full bored men with no other source of stimulation, visual or otherwise? If the answer to either is negative, he has no chance.

In other words, Maggie, it isn’t just a matter of Average Man with HYOOGE Dick reporting to the studios with his dick hard and having a woman picked off the streets to plow into. And it’s just a bit more than just evil looking men in trenchcoats riding along in SUV’s and Hummers tracking down young women and locking them up in dungeons to have their way with them. There are still consent forms and procedures and HIV/STD tests and pre-shoot preparations before anything even begins to happen.

Let’s continue:

Porn Apologist: Pornography is not prostitution.

Rad Fem: The fact is that pornography IS prostitution, plus a camera.

See the last paragraph responding to point #1 above. Plus….if porn is prostitution with the camera, then would married couples having sex for free but taping their “sexcapades” for their own pleasure be considered prostitution, or porn?? Or both??

Porn Apologist: Look, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It should be legalized and regulated. That would make it safer.

Rad Fem: Prostitution is NOT the oldest profession, pimping is! Countries where prostitution has been legalized have become Number One destinations for traffickers. There is no evidence that legalization in any way benefits women in prostitution — indeed it simply legalizes the harm caused to women. Prostitution is inherently a form of violence against women and a violation of women’s human rights and dignity as persons. The belief that prostitution is “sex work” is being a direct cause for the widespread international and domestic trafficking of women and children for prostitution. The Netherlands (where prostitution is regarded as “just a job like another”) remains one of the primary destinations for victims of human trafficking (as again recently reported in the article “Home Office goes to Amsterdam for prostitution ideas” in politics.co.uk) and half the window brothels over there have been closed since 2006 because of an exponential rise in organized crime and money laundering and also the trafficking of women and children. Legalization is, in effect, a failed experiment.

Oh, this be prime bullshit here….let’s break this one down, shall we??

Never mind that “trafficking of women” is far more likely to occur in areas where prostitution is expressly criminalized (ever heard of Thailand, Maggie?? Indonesia??? The Cayman Islands???) and where attitudes about porn and women and sexuality are the most conservative and reactionary and explicitly “antifeminist”….and nearly as zealous about “protecting women from pornography and prostitution” as Maggie is. And forget about the basic fact that the same people who are most likely to support criminalization of sex work and sexual media tend to be the biggest consumers of porn and the ones most likely to be busted doing the same damn activities they would put others in jail for…or worse. See Senator Larry Craig, Senator David Vitter, former Governor Eliot Spitzer, Jimmy Swaggart, et.al.

Now, it should be noted that Amsterdam does have currently a more conservative government that is now in the process of questioning their more liberal stance towards sex in general….but that in no way justifies Maggie’s view that legalization is so failed and that her beloved “Swedish Model” is the only solution to the problem. (And also note that New Zealand has its own experiment with legalization that is five years old; the book is still out on that one, I’d think.)

And of course, the idea that legalized brothels in Amsterdam have anything whatsoever to do with the lives and professions of porn performers and sex workers in the United States — most of which operate out of their homes in private with their own websites and mom-and-pop productions, is a mystery that only Maggie can solve in her own special fashion. Not even the legalized brothels in Nevada, all of Melissa Fairley’s and Bob Herbert’s slanders notwithstanding.

Porn Apologist: Sexuality is good. Why are you anti-sex?

Rad Fem: Being against pornography and prostitution does not equate being against sex, FFS. Sexuality is just a part of being human and may involve a lot of strong feelings of affection and connection to another person when a sense of genuine care is involved. But pornography is stripped of any empathy and it fuses sexual desire with the degradation and abuse of women. Being against pornography does not mean being against sex, it simply means having recognized that there is a sexual world of imagination based on equality & respect and that goes beyond sexuality as simple “domination/subordination”.

This be another good one: the old “We’re not prudes, we really do LOVE sex…just OUR kind of sex” meme that is thrown up constantly in the “You’re victimizing us!!” frame. As porn literally speaking simply means the depiction of sex acts between human beings, the question certainly can be asked of Maggie and her allies: Is there any explicit depiction of sex involving a man and a woman together that you wouldn’t consider to be “degrading” and “abusive” to women?? I mean, loving couples can indeed have anal sex, or oral sex, or pretend to play dominant/submissive roles or role play, and single women can indeed masturbate using dildos and vibrators for their own pleasure. But being against that doesn’t make you any more of a prudish, anti-sex bigot…now doesn’t it???

If the shoe fits comfortably, Maggie, why not just wear it with pride??

Porn Apologist: Only conservative right wingers criticize porn. Are you a religious zealot?

Rad Fem: Radical feminists have, for a long time, opposed Christianity by recognizing it as patriarchal religion. Mary Daly, for example, is a prominent radical feminist writer of the feminist critique of Christianity. Radical feminists usually see Christianity as patriarchal and oppressive to women. So, no, I’m certainly not religious and I’m very much of an atheist. Perpetuating the myth that radical feminists “are siding with religious zealots” just because we oppose pornography has always been one of the favorite pro-porn tactics of the so-called “sex poz” lobby.

Oh, Maggie, just stop it!! We are well aware that there has always been a grand tradition of Puritanism amongst not only the Left, but of secularists and atheists; no one group is immune to anti-sexual discourse and ideology. And just because “radfems” may reject the explicit piousness of organized religion and the specific rhetoric of direct slut-blaming of women (particularly “feminists” who defy the supposedly Christian role of the woman as wife and mother) for the social ills of society, doesn’t mean that they aren’t capable of confiscating antiporn and anti-sex rhetoric for their own purposes.

And as for the alliance between radicalfeminists and Christian/Islamic Rightists: well that is so well known to be dismissed; from the passage of Catherine MacKinnon’s famous Indianapolis antiporn ordinance in the mid 1980’s through a Republican majority council; to the Meese Commisioner’s Pornography report which basically appropriated the Dworkin-MacKinnon doctrine of “porn degrades women by reducing them to sex objects” (while rejecting their methods of attacking porn through “civil rights” ordinances, preferring the old school form of obscenity enforcement and jail sentences); to the Bush Administration’s funding of “anti-trafficking” activists like Fairley (with the full approval of leading antiporn feminist activists like Donna Hughes, who even called Dubya a positive force, regardless of his overall antifeminism).

Porn Apologist: If there weren’t any porn, there’d be more rape.

Rad Fem: Do we ever suggest that the availability of loads of films showing children being beaten up would reduce child physical abuse? Of course not, because we know it’s not the case. So why would it be different with pornography? Few rapes get reported to the police and correlational studies only based on reported rapes have limits. While a few studies have shown a decrease in reported rapes, many other correlational studies, as shown here, have shown dramatic increases in sexual violence with the availability of pornography. Pornography has no “catharthic” effect whatsoever. Also, this “catharthic effect” porn apologist excuse quite sounds like a threat: “We need pornography or we will rape more!” Blah-the-fucking-blah. . .

By the numbers here:

1) Aside from the lunacy of comparing depictions of children being beaten with images of consenting adults having sex, there is this nagging fact that actually taping the act of children being beaten is evidence of a crime (corporal punishment aside). Besides, no one has seriously argued that actively censoring depictions of children being beaten would in any way reduce the rate of child physical abuse (as opposed to, I don’t know, prosecuting the abusers themselves, maybe???)….so why should porn be held to that standard??

2) “Correlational studies”, Maggie?? Yeah, right….you think that we wouldn’t notice that your “correlational studies” are all tainted by bias towards your position….and all of them have been thoroughly debunked by more reputable research?? (No wonder you attack them as “anti-woman”, ehhh??)

3) And of this “carthartic effect”: the only such theory that I’ve heard from is that porn induces men to sexual arousal (Ahhh..duuuh!!!!), which is quickly relieved through masturbation (which, in case you haven’t heard, Maggie, rapes no one but the offending hand); thusly, porn offers a safe relief valve for sexual arousal that would otherwise be resolved in less safe ways (through the next door neighbor or the nearest alter boy or simply whomever’s availaable at the moment). But of course, masturbation is nothing more than a male-centered means of imprisoning women to the patriarchy/”porno-iarchy”..so that’s gotta go, too!!

And once again…consider the source that Maggie uses….which includes some activists once again from the Religious Right.

Porn Apologist: Pornography has no effect whatsoever. It’s only a fantasy.

Rad Fem: So why do corporations spend billions of dollars each year on mass-mediated advertising if not precisely because they know ads have effects on people? Why would it be different with pornography? Pornography HAS effects, negative ones! Besides, as I said before, “an industry which relies on the suffering of half the population in order to keep catering to its ever-expanding demand is not fantasy!” Fantasy is in the head. Pornography is mediated and mass-marketed. I feel a lot more free not having my fantasies being controlled by pornography. . . Freud argued that the sexual abuse that his female patients had been experiencing in childhood (and had been telling him about) was just a fantasy. Freud knew that child sexual abuse was pervasive in his time, but he kept on denying it as “fantasy” (Source: Testimony of Jeffrey Masson, author of The Assault on Truth, in “The Los Angeles Hearing, Los Angeles County Commission for Women, April 22, 1985″; in Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin Eds., In Harm’s way: The pornography Civil Rights Hearings; 1997.)

Ahhh, Maggie, but you forget that fantasy only becomes known when it leaves the head and is expressed through media, whether written, celluloid, video, or pixels. And why should porn take the hit for what advertising does in general: exploit general fantasies and emotions for the purpose of selling products. The only difference with porn is that sex IS the product they are selling as fantasy. Actually, porn is much closer to mainstream media in that it attempts to play on emotions that human beings already have. Comedy makes us laugh; drama makes us cry; action movies make us rise to the end of our seats in anticipation of what happens next (or what will blow up next; and so on. Why are the typical fantasies of getting filthy rich, or powerful enough to blow whole groups of people up considered less hazardous and damaging than porn?? Could it be because of all that SEX?!?!?!

And on the point of bashing Freud for denying the existence of sexual abuse of children: Aren’t there people a bit more qualified than Jeffery Masson (who happened to be Andrea Dworkin’s life partner and a former playboy himself prior to being converted to an antiporn activist) to
analyze Freud’s take on child abuse?? Does that mean that ALL accusations of child abuse (of girls, of course…Maggie could care less about boys being abused, except when it serves her cause) should be taken as proven as true, in absence of any evidence??

Porn Apologist: Where is the harm in porn?

Rad Fem: The first people who are harmed are the prostituted women constantly used, abused and discarded by the industry. Then, the harms extend to the women outside of the industry. The easiest way of making violence invisible is by sexualizing it, making it appear as “just sex” to the viewer. Pornography makes rape, sexism and racism sexy. It makes force look like a thrilling sexual experience to men. Pornography desensitizes its users to female degradation, it makes them believe that women enjoy all sorts of pain and humiliation. Pornography increases the belief in rape myths. Pornography is pure woman-hating propaganda! Many women are coerced by their boyfriends and husbands into sexual acts they do not want because of those men’s pornography use. Pornography also increases the violence perpetrated against prostituted women. As reported by former prostitute J.W. in Massachusetts, for instance, she “considered the men who were into pornography to be the most dangerous and potentially violent since that is what aroused them”.

This mighty rant assumes a variety of myths: 1) that women who perform in porn are innately forced into it against their stated will; 2) that the depiction of people having sex automatically in itself promotes rape, racism, and misogyny independent of the influences of the overall outside culture, the State, the church, and other social and cultural institutions; 3) that penetration of a woman’s vagina by anything resembling a penis or a penis itself not directly motivated by “intimacy” or procreation amounts to prima facie rape, and that any sex act not motivated by the same emotions preapproved by Maggie’s ideology automatically counts as “degrading”, “humiliating”, and “violent” in and of itself; and 4) that the very act of persuading women to even engage in sex with men (even trustworthy boyfriends, husbands, and significant others) is in itself an invitation to rape; as if otherwise, women would have no need for sex in the first place. And you still say that you are not fundamentally anti-sex, Mags???

The idea that watching a woman willingly engage in sex increases the belief that she “enjoys” being sexually assaulted against her will is a figment only in Maggie’s imagination….and the most hateful antifeminist, woman-hating man as well. Only those who would hate sexually assertive women enough to want to punish them for inciting such desires would even come close to believing that consensual porn amounts to “woman-hating propaganda”.

And…we all know that women and girls are certainly not capable of exercising power sexually against men…now don’t we???

OK….that’s enough fisking for now….we will continue this tommorow.

Don’t worry…I still plan to put the fisk on Maggie Hays, and that will be forthcoming…but I just saw a story that really does piss me off.

This courtesy of Elizabeth Wood at Sex In The Public Square:

Question: Your town has a million dollars in its reserve fund. The plan is to spend it on paying off a bond that financed the town’s water treatment plant. Suddenly, the plan changes. The mayor has learned that a strip club in the area has come up for sale and he wants to buy it and shut it down. He arranges the financing through an anonymous third party because he knows that the club owners would never agree to sell to the town. According to the local newspaper the city manager describes it like this:

“We knew they would never sell it to us, but a third party, who does not want to be identified, offered to buy it for us. Just before noon (Tuesday) we closed on the property, and the keys were turned over to us. They (former Cafe Risque owners) won’t find out until (today) who really bought it.”

The mayor announces this radical change in spending priorities at a standing-room-only meeting at City Hall. Which of the following do you think happened at the meeting:

Answer: If you guessed C you get a gold star.

From the north Georgia paper the Independent Mail we have this description of what happened in Lavonia, a small town off of I-85 in the northeast corner of the state. :

The news resulted in cheers and a standing ovation from the crowd, who then followed the mayor out to the Cafe Risque site. There, all of the signage was removed from the building by a tractor, dragged to the center of the parking lot and burned in a large bonfire as more onlookers clapped and cheered.

It is appalling that a town would spend its money shutting down a sexually-oriented business rather than spending on infrastructure. The town spent just shy of one million dollars. In the original plan, spending that money would have saved over a million dollars in future interest payments on a bond that had been issued to pay for upgrading a water treatment plant. Instead it spent the money to destroy a business that no doubt paid taxes into the towns revenue stream.

It is even more appalling that the townspeople would react in manner of the villagers-with-pitchforks-and-torches ritual of burning the businesses signs. What does it mean when a group of people is so morally outraged by the thought of men paying to look at naked women, or of women dancing naked for money, or of men and women interacting erotically outside of the proverbial marriage bed that they will build themselves up into a frenzy and burn parts of a building?

The backwards priorities of the town of Lavonia are shocking and the pleasure taken by the townspeople is evidence that this is not a matter of a single-mindedly misguided politician. The “protect the children/family values” rhetoric juxtaposed against the irresponsible spending of taxpayer dollars could not be more obvious.

I’m curious. Are there citizens of Lavonia who are as outraged by this as I am? Or do the townspeople in this Independent Mail photo represent all of you? I suspect they don’t. I suspect that there are more reasonable voices in your town. I’d love to hear them.

Oh, but this is soooooo beautiful…..who cares about investing on cleaner water (and in the process, lowering the taxes of the citizens of that town by decreasing the level of debt); oh hell to the noooooooooez, we’ve got to get rid of them damn SLUTS and dem QUEERS and all that nasty UNGODLY SEXSEXSEXSEXSEX!!!!!!111111ONE11!!! I know…let’s buy up that damn place and burn that sucka DOWN!!!!

But what’s that….the owners won’t sell??  Forget ‘ em; we can use third parties to buy their property out from under them!!  Or claim “eminent domain” and take what we want anyway!!

Now…I wonder what the rest of the townfolk will say when they realize that the entire reserve fund which would have been used to upgrade their water treatment plant has been pissed away on a crusade against a business which had been generating revenue for the town??

And…what will happen when the original owners of the strip club see what has happened and promptly files their lawsuit against the sale of their club against their will….not to mention the damages done to their facility??  Will the Lavonia witchhunters be willing to pay that out of the reserve fund, too??

Talk about your EF5 tornado hitting the sewage plant moment when that happens…..the recall petitions should already be flying.

BTW…Kochanie over at Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex has a detailed follow-up which includes all the financial background on this “sale”….and ponders this question:

After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town’s bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?

I believe we can guess the answer, now can we???

Oh, WOW….Maggie Hays is getting her zealot freak on again.

First off, Mags…did you get permission from Twisty to steal from her tagline??

Secondly…..“porno-iarchy”?!?!?!?! Don’t you know that “porno” as a suffix and a noun went out with the 70’s?? Wouldn’t “porn-iarchy” be a better term???

Now, I’m not going to fisk through the entire thing, since Ren Ev has already done so magnificently. But, let’s just go through some highlights:

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the misogyny, degradation, abuse, and racism that are inherent and blatant in the content of mainstream pornography.

Which means the all the misogyny, degradation, abuse and racism that take place outside of “mainstream pornography” — that is, in the wider world — are perfectly OK with you, Maggie?? As long as they all can be blamed on “the porno-iarchy”??

I blame the porno-iarchy for all the harms caused by pornography to women and children (and sometimes to men) in this unjust male-supremacist society.

Oh…so she actually admits that some men might be harmed by porn?? I thought that all men who used porn were simply innate rapists??

And change “male-supremacist” with “secular” or “Godless” society…and then tell me there’s much difference between this and the Religious Right.

I blame the porno-iarchy for so many women and girls having to make themselves look “sexy” or “fuckable” to men in the goal to achieve a false sense of “empowerment” (been there myself when I used to go clubbing).

As if women weren’t doing such before porn became popular?? And what about the idea that the reason some women might dress to make themselves “fuckable” or “sexy” to men (or, perhaps, to other women) might be because she’s actually looking for sex for her own pleasure??

Oh, but of course not….everybody knows that sexual pleasure not redeemed by “deep intimacy” or “radicalfeminist” politics is simply male-defined and invented by the “porno-iarchy” to enslave women in their own selfish orgasms!!! It must be true because Maggie said so!!

I blame the porno-iarchy for the fact that so many women and girls have to force themselves to have sex when they don’t necessarily want to in order to please their boyfriends and husbands.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the fact that so many women and girls are sexually coerced into sexual acts (coming from the ‘domination/subordination’ pornographic mind) they do not really want to practice.

Oh..and who are you to determine whether women want to or not want to engage in such “domination/subordination” practices?? Even when the woman is in the dominant position?? Of course, even if a woman says outright that she chooses for herself what position she favors, we all know that in a “porno-iarchy”, there is no such thing as mutual consent or even pleasure; it is all nothing short of rape…even if the individual participant insists she was never coerced and that she was never raped; and that she actually wanted to do it.

And….why, Mags, is it only women who are forced to have sex against their will?? Do you assume that men don’t have the same right of refusal when women insist on getting it on??

Oh, I forgot…men are simply coarse animals who can’t control their sexual instincts (unless given the proper radfem treatments of “john schools” and Bob Jensen/Kyle Payne/John Stoltenberg/Richard Leader seminars where they are taught that their penises are nothing short of dangerous weapons to be castrated for the good of society). Therefore, they aren’t capable of self-control….right??

Again…substitute “homosexual” for men and “ex-gay treatment centers” for “john schools…” and you are precisely into crackpot Paul Cameron/NARTH territory. How fitting for a “progressive feminist”.

I blame the porno-iarchy for blaming the victims of rape (saying that’s “her fault, she’s responsible for what happened because blah, blah, blah. . .”) and not the rapists.

Oh, nice one, Maggie…too bad that you can’t find one single example of a leading “pro-porn feminist” ever blaming a woman for being raped. On the other hand, I could find countless examples of antiporn “feminists” going so far as to say that women who dress “sexy” not only deserve to be raped or beaten; but that their very existence triggers men to rape innocent women in response. But…it’s all about the ‘porno-iarchy”, not the scapegoating, slut-shaming, hateful slanders of your side.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the (usual) censoring and demonizing of radical feminists in the malestream media.

I blame the porno-iarchy for accusing us of “siding with religious zealots”.

I blame the porno-iarchy for not letting us rad fems educate enough people on the harms of pornography ’cause of the malestream media being tied to the pornography industry, ’cause pro-porners are endlessly trying to silence us and ’cause of ‘leftist’ liberal stubborn pornography-protecting mind (as Gail Dines & Robert Jensen say ‘Pornography is a Left Issue‘, not a right-wing one)

Too easy, Mags….I don’t see anyone shutting down Gail Dines’ workshops or attempting to censor Bob Jensen’s slideshows or beating down antiporn activists. (Unless you consider Maxine Doogan an antiporn activist, that is. Errrr…OOPS.) And last time I checked, wasn’t Wheelock College a “malestream” institution?? What about the Justice Department, which has funded plenty of Melissa Fairley’s studies that you use to buttress your arguments?? Or the significant support from the Bush Administration that your side has received??

And please….you just don’t get to define what the Left is or should raise as issues, given your close ties to the Farthest of the Right.

I blame the porno-iarchy for some women defending pornography and prostitution in the name of ‘feminism’.

I blame the porno-iarchy for the pro-pornstitution ‘feminists’ being unfairly magnified by malestream media.

I blame the porno-iarchy for slandering us, radical feminists, and totally misrepresenting our views or simply not understanding why we’re so angry at the pornstitution industry (because of the HARMS!!!).

Because only tried and true, pure, antiporn “feminists” like Maggie Hays are assumed to be telling the truth; everyone else is merely apeing the “porno-iarchy” in deep denial of the real “HARMS!!!!”) And of course, the “malestream” media simply eats the “pro-porn” lies up….note the big fat $400 MILLION contract that Nina Hartley just received to promote her book on talk radio…..ahhhhh, wait, hold up…..that wasn’t Nina??? That was really that anti-porn feminist activist Rush Limbaugh?? Oh…never mind, so sorry.

The rest of it I will defer to Ren Ev, since she debunks so well.

Actually, this was only the second most whackoid rant that Maggie has produced…the winner I will tackle with a full fisk anon. Hint: Think of broken records and building sock sand castles to knock down.