– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women.
A couple weeks ago, I read an op/ed piece written by a woman named Julie Bindel, who is a self-described anti-porn feminist, but who also says she doesn’t favor censorship.
While the headline of the piece, Without porn, the world would be a better place, certainly suggested to me that she might be a bit more conflicted on the question of porn-censorship than she cares to admit, I was willing to give Bindel the benefit of the doubt. After all, it’s absolutely possible to be anti-porn and anti-censorship at the same time.
You can be against censorship and choose not to watch porn, while encouraging other people to not watch it, as well. There’s nothing pro-censorship about that combination of behaviors, and I suspect a large number of very reasonable women fall into that particular camp with respect to porn.
Read on…
What eventually led me to call bullishit on Bindel’s claim, however, came later in the same article, where she asserts that – no fooling! – other anti-porn feminists aren’t pro-censorship, either, including her better-known compatriot, Gail Dines.
“Dines and I both spoke at an anti-porn conference in London earlier this year, which was picketed by women and men arguing that we aimed to ban and censor pornography,” Bindel writes. “Slogans on placards included, ‘Anti-porn is the theory, regression and censorship is the practice’, and ‘Porn is sex between consenting adults for consenting adults’. But none of the anti-porn feminists I work with would advocate state censorship, rather they call for better sex education, and awareness-raising about the harm caused by porn.”
The line emphasized in bold above almost made me fall down laughing. NONE of the anti-porn feminists she works with are in favor of the censorship of porn? Not a single one?
Look, Gail Dines may be PR-savvy enough to avoid saying that she “favors state censorship” of porn, but she makes absolutely no secrets about what she would like to see happen to the entire industry which makes porn.
To wit, in article by Nisha Lilia Diu of The Telegraph published this week, Dines flatly asserts that to address the “harms” done by pornography, “the only solution to this is closing down the porn industry.”
Yeah, that doesn’t sound at all pro-censorship, does it?
Doubtlessly, Dines and her ilk would argue that what she meant by this statement is she wants the porn industry to be shut down as a result of the public boycotting its products – a global cultural epiphany stemming from the entire world reading her book, presumably.
Sure, you can parse Dines’ words to find a way that they don’t support “censorship” of the adult industry, but let’s be clear about what “closing down the porn industry” means.
It means that women like Angie Rowntree won’t be making her movies anymore, movies that in no way resemble the sort of porn Dines is constantly bemoaning. It means no more Girlfriends Films, no more from Tristan Taormino, no more watching the work of Candida Royalle, no more Erika Lust – the list goes on and on. It also means no more work for the thousands of performers, camera operators and others who earn their living in this business, women and men alike.
What Dines and people like her have studiously avoided mentioning, and perhaps cannot allow themselves to realize, is that the “porn industry” is a mighty big place, and we’re not all peas from the same motherfucking misogynistic pod.
To Nisha Lilia Diu’s credit, her article is far more balanced than its primary source. At one point, Diu directly challenges Dines, saying we know that some women watch porn. Dines response? A flat “No.” When Diu insists women do watch porn, and statistics show women represent up to a third of porn viewers, Dines digs in – but adds a caveat.
“No,” Dines says. “Not gonzo.”
First off, Dines is simply dead wrong about that. There definitely are women who watch gonzo porn. For that matter, there are women who wouldn’t watch “couples porn” or “feminist porn” if you strapped them into the chair from Clockwork Orange and stapled their eyelids open; it’s just not their thing.
It’s also so there are women out there who enjoy sex acts that freak me right the fuck out, quite frankly. Some women like to be choked during sex. Others like having their ass cheeks smacked with a wooden switch until their butt looks like a California highway map. I wouldn’t let a man do either of those things to me at fucking gunpoint, but you know what? I don’t have to like it for it to be OK that other women do like it, because I’m not their God, their dictator, or their Mistress – and neither is Gail Fucking Dines.
Realistically, that’s what this all boils down to for anti-porn feminists, too: Porn just isn’t their thing. I don’t know what their thing is, exactly, but clearly it isn’t porn.
If I believed that Dines and Bindel were actually anti-censorship, and would actually object to the porn industry being shuttered by law due to their staunch free-speech support even of expression they don’t approve of, I could happily ignore the circular reasoning, baseless assertions, flawed science and relentless appeal to pathos of which their arguments are made.
The problem is I don’t believe them, and I don’t trust them…. And neither should you.
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