pro-sex; anti-porn.

1. when i was in high school, a bunch of my friends were self-proclaimed otakus. they participated in the weekly anime club, where they gathered to watch (gasp) anime; their media consumption was dominated by manga and anime. in this environment, it was only a matter of time before someone (or several someones) showed up at school with porn.

okay, so drawings of a sex scene seem pretty tame compared to the shit you find online these days but the depravity of these comic books was striking. i never actually read the one involving tentacle-rape, though i heard... more than i wanted... about it.

but what stood out to me the most was that a culture that was so repressed could produce such depraved pornography. where did this come from? i wondered.

this question went unanswered for until several years later when a student in my acting class did a scene from jekyll and hyde. after the scene the teacher waxed philosophical, as she was wont to do. in her monologue she mentioned how interesting it is that the victorian era was one of the most repressed eras in western history, and it produced so much depravity: jekyll and hyde, dracula, frankenstein, jack the ripper...

and a realized what now seems obvious (to me): if you repress such an essential aspect of humanity that completely, it still needs a way to express itself. But because you aren't allowing for natural expression it become pressurized, far more intense and volatile than normal. So when it does become manifest, it will often be far more extreme than it would be normally.


2. in the early 80s a group of feminists abandoned more concrete activism in favor of an argument: pro-sex or anti-porn? Pro-sex said sexual freedom is an important part to women's freedom; anti-porn argued that porn was the cornerstone of female oppression.

for my part the whole argument is like, why even bother? #canhazusefulfeminism?

okay, yes the cornerstone of porn has been male dominance over women, with physical and verbal abuse present in a vast majority of porn videos. but the pornography industry makes billions of dollars a year; today it's ubiquitous. We assume that all men over the age of 12 watch porn regularly (even if this isn't true) and that a not inconsequential proportion of women do so as well. Books have been published documenting the negative effects of watching porn, but it makes money so, just as this industry juggernaut was undaunted by the 80s sex wars, production hasn't flagged.

but what's most distinct about that production is the way it moves towards extremism. from a producer's point of view it only makes sense:  there are only so many times you can film two people having  normal sex, what most real life human beings engage in. to be able to keep producing more videos, you have to keep upping the stakes, upping the sensationalism. the result is often intense violence and degrading depictions of women as men exert power over them.

which people watch.


3. while not entirely responsible (capitalism cannot be let off the hook) american culture's repressive attitudes about sex contributes to this.

okay, yes, i hear the protests: we talk about sex all the time. porn is becoming mainstream. sex is everywhere: on tv, in books, on the billboards. but this is a commodification of sex, meanwhile a good percentage of this country does not have access to birth-control because there is this group of people with considerable lobbying power who believe that abstinence works.

the contradiction is absurd: you are bombarded with sexual imagery from the first minute you're old enough to actually process what's on the tv, and then you are told: "this is bad, don't do it" (some terms and conditions may apply... like being married)

the best thing that annie sprinkle ever said (imo) was her indictment that we live in a sex-negative society and that this ultimately damages everyone because we do not have space to develop sexual identities independent of things like... say, violent tentacle porn. but you know what, guys? hey guys! newsflash! human beings have been having sex since human beings existed. and we were a lot less fucked up about it before we founded a religion that declared sex the "original sin".

so really, those 80s feminists got it wrong: it's not a question of pro-sex OR anti-porn. Ultimately these are the same thing: porn is a phenomenon fed by the sex-negatives attitudes of our society which in turn feeds the attitude, and so on and so forth in an eternal feedback loop. Only once we as a culture (not we, as feminists or we, as any other faction but we, as a nation) acknowledge this can we actually begin to change the way we treat ourselves and those around us and learn to respect this basic aspect of humanity.