Okay. Back to these thoughts and discussions. It’s mostly a day-off for me, but like any irritating intellectual, it’s actually quite relaxing for me to have the time to just kick back and work things out in my brain; ruminate a bit without time constraints.
I’m really glad we’ve been having the discussions, because they’re really helping to diversify and clarify my thoughts on the matter. (And by “the matter,” I don’t mean the overaching and huge issue or pornography, which I always vex people on all “sides” of the debate with by making clear that many years of thinking of it in passing, and many years of thinking on it, having experiences around it in a very concentrated matter still are not enough for me yet to feel sound in making any sort of broad prescriptions or conscriptions. By “the matter” I mean the specific issue of the conflict porn is posing for a lot of the young people at Scarleteen in their relationships.)
I am in agreement with many of the readers who have brought their thoughts to the table thus far in terms of the fact that it may well be self-esteem and sexual/interpersonal passivity that is the bigger issue here: bigger even than the porn, and I feel comfortable saying it’s a direr issue, period. Far more young women are at risk of dangers and inequities due to passivity or lack of self-esteem that profoundly limit or endanger the qualitiy of their lives than what dangers porn can pose, even to workers, and that’s interrelated, anyway. If we have scores and scores of young women with low or no self-esteem, who are more and more passive, those women are also in greater danger of being exploited in or via porn or ANY arena. Even if there was no more pornography whatsoever, no porn culture whatsoever, those women would still be greatly endangered.
This morning, one of my volunteers in one of those recent posts said something to one of the posters that resolanted with me, about porn triggering her body image issues. That very much helped me connect emotionally to the matter, because while I have not had body image issues triggered (my own body image issues are often more about concerns about my body working properly or optimaly than how it looks), I have had rape and abuse issues triggered. Spam email is actually my undoing sometimes.
Imagine, if you will, being a rape and abuse survivior. You wake up, toss some water on your face, take the dog out while the coffee brews. You grab a hot steamy cup, sit down in your office and open your email to see what’s on your plate for the day. And you are greeted (I’m not going to trigger anyone myself here, so I’ll be vague) with a line of language that is textbook abuser-speak, or which alludes to some from of sexual violence against women or girls. So, there you are, in what you presume to be the safety of your home, just going to do your work, and you get the panic attacks, the sick feeling in your stomach, the elevated breathing, that reminder of fear. More than once, I have hit upon a piece of spam whose language or approach managed to be so triggering and specific that it’s seriously ruined my whole day and made getting back to work a profound challenge.
Actually, over the years I have earnestly wondered if there was any sort of class-action suit which could be organized and won on this situation. If I don’t ask for these things to be sent for me, and the commentary — as most porn spam is — is written in such a way as to also be directed at me, and the content is what it is, is it not sexual harassment? By my way of thinking and my undertstanding of the harassment laws, it absolutely is. The beauty of a case like that is that you’d wind up connecting women who on very few issues could connect: a lot of right-wing women and left-wing women alike would be right there on the same page.
But I digress. And I’m just going to let my mind wander where it is inclined to go here, so please don’t interpret any of what I say as some sort of grand proclomation. Rather, consider these the observations and hypotheses of a given anthropologist, jotting notes for herself to try and make sense of what she’s observing.
The problem with trying to solve this matter when we’ve got low self-esteem, passivity and porn all coming together is that separating any of them completely becomes very problematic and very chicken-and-egg. For sure, we had issues of esteem and passivility in women before the great swell of pornography and the mainstreaming of some of it into culture. However, a great lot of that passivity and lack of esteem was both culturally and politically enforced, still. A lot of intentional pornography, in many respects, is just one more cultural enforcement or reinforcement of many.
If we have a partner who we know has triggers due to rape or abuse, or due to an eating disorder or self-image disorder, we’re going to do our level best NOT to trip those triggers, right? And if we’re not up to adding those extra cautions and considerations in our lives, then we’re going to elect not to choose or be with partners who need them. If we ARE that partner, then we should be actively choosing ONLY partners who ARE able to make those considerations, or whose behaviours and nature are such that they’re already a good fit. That isn’t, for the record, about any abuse, assault or disability being our fault: it’s about the fact that it’s still up to us to choose to be in relationships that are best for us, healthiest for us, even if it’s a shitty situation that what someone else did to us makes us have to even need to have these things be issues.
That said, what do we do when we have a growing population of young women who have low self-esteem and are inclined (as well as in some regards, encouraged) to passivity, and a generation of young men (when we’re talking opposite sex relationships, which is the only context in which these conflicts have appeared thus far at ST) whose sexual upbringing/conditioning, habits and choices in some aspects of sexual behaviour not only trip those triggers, but also sometimes sexualize and/or celebrate tripping them?
Too, what about the development — or continuance, let’s be smart and sound and acknowledge that in many respects, porn right now hasn’t really added any new, lousy elements to the mix, it’s just magnified them and made some of them more pervasive/obvious — of a culture as a whole, and one which, per still being dominated by men is in some respects, most directive to them, that celebrates and/or sexualizes tripping those triggers?
What about the fact that a great, great portion of the populace’s sexuality is still so juvenile (and I don’t mean that as a snark, I’m speaking developmentally) as to have taboo doing the most driving at the sexual wheel? When what’s arousing or sexually exciting is still what’s bad/naughty/conflict-based, isn’t it perhaps obvious that — especially with women over the last 100 years slowly making more gains towards equality — a profound taboo at play is going to be things like a stronghold on the age-old whore/madonna motif, keeping women off balance, having some degree of ownership of women (regardless of what is shown in a given piece of pornography, there is also a certain ownership/possession involved when one collects porn, and/or can simply view/sexually involve themselves with a woman how and when they want to based 100% on them, and not the woman), reducing women to less than they are, encourging passivity when it has become more of a choice than a mandate? (And for some women, the taboo is theirs as well, if and when they elect to play/play into that?)
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I was optimistic in thinking this would be but three entries. If y’all don’t mind the focus on this for a bit more right now, I’m going to save some additional thoughts and questions I have at this point for a little bit later today.
I may have even spun myself off up there in a direction that isn’t productive or sound, but I don’t think so (especially since it’s also brought me to some other thoughts I know are productive which I’ll share some time after I make a nice fire, make some breakfast, do a phone interview and get a nice, long walk in). Need more time to mull it over. Talk!
December 5th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
(By the by, if any of you who have been engaged in these conversations have any thoughts to bring to the table with the Scarleteen posters — and we just had another with this issue-and-yet-not-this-issue again today — by all means, please.)
December 6th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
This porn discussion is always interesting. In my case, I was exposed inappropriately to porn at a very early age in a very skeevy household where sexual abuse was occuring. I was too young to process it, and I feel as if porn colonized my sexuality and desires. It makes me feel split off from myself, and what I don’t like about it is that dissociative feeling I get. What I don’t like is that it imprints fantasy upon one. When having sex with a partner, I really don’t like being shut off in my head in fantasy-land. I don’t think that’s healthy sexual connection. To make matters worse, that early porn was definitely sadomasochistic in nature, and it wasn’t intimate, it wasn’t sexy, it was almost…clinical. That’s what turns me off porn. It feels clinical, impersonal.
Sure, people can argue that I should not have see porn as a child–indeed, I should not have. But even the most vigilant parent is going to fail to keep porn away from their kids, with how accessible it is now. Kids are going to seek it–it’s sex, it’s forbidden! I think the only way parents can cope with this very modern problem is to give their children straightforward information about sex, about intimacy, about what real sexuality is about. That way, at least they can come away with some information that can counter the often unrealistic sex as portrayed in porn.
I don’t relate to the argment about porn women making me feel insecure about my body–I really don’t like the porn asthetic at all and if anything, looking at them makes me feel sexier, and less contrived. I just can’t watch porn because I worked in the adult industry, and I know too much about how so many of the women working in porn live their lives.
My two cents.