Reading assignment
Published by Kyso Kisaen April 28th, 2007Those of you who are not regular readers of Twisty Faster will still want to pop on over for this one.
In such a society, where a woman is a member of the oppressed sex class, her performance of sex in a film which is then consumed by paying customers to satisfy their prurience, this is not even remotely a politically neutral act. Porn — gay, straight, bi, live-action, animated, or ‘feminist’ — is the graphic representation of the oppression of the sex class. Until the sex class is liberated from male oppression, porn can be nothing else, no matter how many fun feminists claim it empowerfuls them…
When you’re already oppressed, it is, in fact, impossible to volunteer for oppression. A woman is a member of the sex class whether she “chooses” it or not…She may believe otherwise, but her belief does not alter the fact that patriarchy — a social order predicated on an oppression to which she is already subject — is real and in effect and entirely beyond any unrestricted control she may wish to exert and only too glad to welcome her as a team player and sign her up for the rewards program.
Someday I’ll be that sharp.
12 Responses to “Reading assignment”
- 1 Pingback on Apr 30th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
- 2 Trackback on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Twisty is my hero. Maybe if I work hard and blame frequently enough, one day my brain goo will be even half that sexy.
We can only aspire. She has the street cred that comes with having all the girly bits removed, which I think gives her a moral high ground on this sort of thing. She’s been exempted from sexbotting in the most dramatic manner possible and is therefore in a unique position for blaming. Also I imagine some of the ‘fuck you’ she exudes comes at least partially from surviving cancer, and can not be imitated.
At either rate, she’s not fucking around.
Although I feel that it’s always dumb to try to simplify a $57 billion industry into several paragraphs, I couldn’t disagree more with Twisty’s overgeneralization of the porn industry. The fact is, she’s talking about an extremely diverse industry that she obviously knows very little about.
A small but growing percentage of porn is very, very female-empowering. I’m not talking about most alt or just about all mainstream porn, which of course oppresses women (and judging by this article that’s all Twisty knows of the industry) - I’m talking about porn made for women that includes rounder, more natural looking women, a noticible lack of breast implants, no unecessary gynecological shots, many or mostly women-dominated scenes, and no “money shot” at the ends of the scenes (check out Candida Royalle’s work for starters if you don’t believe me); I’m talking about political pro-femme porn that supports fatter, hairier, and “normal” non-mainstream-type women who direct their own photo shoots (vegporn.com is a good example); I’m talking about progressive gender-bender BDSM porn like the meninpain.com stuff. This type of porn is liberating for women both in the industry and outside watching it.
In summary, if you think mainstream porn oppresses women, you’re right. If you think porn in general oppresses women, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s important that women recognize this so we can support the projects that are empowering to women.
Sorry Kyso, but as a feminist sex worker who works constantly - and selectively - to preserve and promote my political beliefs, I cannot help but feel offended by Twisty’s blatant overgeneralization and ignorance of the porn industry.
Sexual objects au naturale are still sexual objects.
Tess, you’ve missed the point of Twisty’s post. Entirely. You can disagree all you want. It doesn’t make you right.
What the Patriarchy wants most is for women to enact their assigned role of sex hole(s). It doesn’t care much how you do it.
If you want to participate in an industry that reinforces women’s status as objects worth nothing more than their sexual usefulness, be my guest. Just don’t pretend it’s a feminist endeavor.
Tess:
If you had read the whole essay and not just the bit re-posted here, you’d know that Twisty is familiar with Candida Royalle’s work to some unknown extent.
My working theory on porn is this:
1) Capitalism depends on exploitation.*
2) The porn industry is based in capitalism.
3) The porn industry is sexually exploitative.
Unoppressing porn cannot exist in capitalism, and women (i.e. the sex class) will be oppressed by it as long as the patriarchy exists.
*That pesky profit motive inspires not the goodwill in our fellow humans.
Hey, as long as you’ve got a corporeal body, and especially if you’re sexually active, you are a sex object to someone. Regardless of gender.
and if you think that this is a completely bad or evil thing, there is something very wrong with you. We are all, to some extent, sex objects.
Is being a sex object to an individual is different than being a member of the sex class? I think there’s a difference there. My lust for individual guys (or their failure to conform to my standard of sexxy) does not affect how they are dealt with by everyone else, whereas every woman everywhere can tell you about that time they were harassed/dismissed/ignored or whatever for not behaving sexbot enough (or, in polite company, ‘feminine’ enough).
And that’s where I have to express skepticism on Tess’s claim that she can use teh pr0n to selectively promote her political beliefs, or that it’s even helpful. There are way huge-er problems and more immediate problems with porn than the body-image thing. My biggest problem with it is that I can’t look at a mainstream porn or go to an ordinary strip club without thinking about the girls who may be there not because they want to or because it’s better money than factory work or because they’re paying their way through school, but the ones that are there because they’ve been trafficked, or are stuck there to support a drug problem, or who may be sexually assaulted or forced into prostitution or any one of the thousands of horrible things that are just a hop skip and a jump away from that pole. Tess is going on and on about hairy natural women and woman dominated scenes and fucking great, whatever, I’m not going to watch that either but OK. But I heard nary a peep about say, raising awareness about human trafficking or getting sex workers the legal protection they need that a lot of them just don’t have. Maybe she just forgot to mention it, I don’t know.
But I have to take the Twisty view on someone who goes on about how doing this thing is “liberating” or “empowering,” two words that raise giant red flags in my mind. Getting all defensive because you like being an object and being all huffy because someone else reminds you that hey, there’s a whole few thousand years of oppression here that make your liberating kick kind of a dicey one helps no one. If Tess there is not using her empowerment to raise awareness for those women who lack that luxury and instead is patting herself on the back for filming some sex between women who don’t shave, then she’s more part of the problem than the solution. Taking umbarage to a post that points out, correctly in my opinion, that women are the sex class and that this is the basic problem with any porn and whining that your tiny little slice of obscure porn is totally not that way and no discussion of the big picture can be valid without giving a big old heap of acknowledgement to you is analagous to those guys that show up on feminist blogs going “but what about the tiny fraction of men who are falsely imprisoned for rape?”
If there were no patriarchy, or at least a weaker patriarchy, then sex work would be a choice like any other and could be as empowerful as you wanted. But there is a patriarchy, and it can’t really be ignored.
You can disagree all you want. It doesn’t make you right.
Because Twisty is always right, and if you disagree with her you’re a fucked-up tool. We know the drill, thanks.
How gay porn has anything to do with the sexual exploitation of women is beyond me.
Patriarchy is built on a culture of dominance and submission, which porn (including gay porn) eroticizes. Gay porn is the exploitation of the sex class the same way that homophobic violence is patriarchal misogyny. It’s misogyny by proxy.