... It’s like saying “oh, when you talk about fast-food, you also have to mention the fantastic taco truck in Red Hook whose food is all homemade with slow-cooked ingredients.” No, dammit, I don’t. When there are millions of Red Hook taco trucks serving billions of people daily, then I will call them fast food. But that taco truck is not even remotely in the same fast-food universe as McDonalds. Same thing with porn. What’s being served up in millions of places to billions of people should be the focus of our discussion.At which point I put far too much time and effort into an extended reply to be deterred by a spam-filter that seems to really hate me, so hey, now it's a blog post:
I get the fast-food analogy, but I think it's misleading here: what matters is not simply the *magnitude* of the effects, but also the susceptibility of each cultural-influence mechanism to positive interventions that avoid unintended negative side-effects. At the end of the day, cultural critique isn't supposed to be like complaining about the weather, but rather like complaining about global climate change: it's supposed to be a vehicle for (or at least a spur to) *ameliorative action* rather than just griping. (I don't mean to say you're just griping; bear with me!)
So: mainstream porn is bad, both for body-image reasons (here porn has a lot of company, e.g. basically all fashion mags and mainstream 'women's magazines'), as in this post, and for misogynist sexual-script reasons, as you've noted in the past. Ok. And the effect may be large, simply because there's so much out there. Ok.
But the question is how effective cultural critique can be in either discouraging folks from consuming it or helping them resist its negative influence. Moreover, the cultural critique must avoid exacerbating the related, also bad-for-women cultural messages of women's-sexuality-is-shameful, women-ought-to-be-'pure', women's-bodies-don't-belong-to-them-alone, etc. And my worry is that critiquing the consumption of mainstream porn in our culture implicitly calls up or may subtly reinforce those bad messages too, *unless* care is taken to specify what *makes* mainstream porn bad (the misogynist *content*, rather than the pornographic *form* of explicit sex depicted for prurient interest).
My evidence for this claim about cultural causation is anecdotal but directly on point: the fact that so many women, both in the 'feminist sex wars' of the 80s and now the periodic feminist blogosphere sex wars of the 00s, feel like their own choices, self-expression, and even identity are being attacked or undermined by anti-porn writings that, on the surface, are completely *pro*-woman, pro-autonomy, etc. To my mind, this suggests a need to fine-tune one's culture-jamming to a degree that, yes, would be absurd and would sound concern-trollish vis-a-vis fast-food.
In short, I strongly suspect that broadly-targeted 'I blame porn' messages have:
A- almost no effect on het-male porn consumption, and not much more effect on het-male porn 'cultural programming';
B- perhaps some moderate impact on het-female porn consumption, but very little on *total* het-female consumption of bad body-image / sexual-script cultural exposure (again, those lady-mags!);
C- a good chance of doing as much to reinforce the related patriarchal anti-female-sexuality/self-ownership messages that are the often-bundled implicit uptake from these cultural artifacts as they have of defusing the body-image or women-objectified messages. Of course every person is influenced differently; we have to speculate in terms of likely tendencies.
By way of contrast, my not-very-considered position on Cosmo/Vogue/Shape/People (and fast food!) is basically "I blame them!"; I don't think there's much of an argument in those cases parallel to the one I'm making here regarding porn.
Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or concern-trolling, or confusing blogs with Hypatia: the Journal of Feminist Philosophy, but I really think there's something very specific and very troubling about the way that good-faith and explicitly pro-woman, but anti-porn, arguments *always* seem to generate misunderstandings, drawn battle-lines, and community divisions that long outlast and far outweigh the particular issue.
(Well, I did have a productive day aside from this.)
