So a while ago I wrote a brief (compared to my older writing) rant about the “great pornography debate. There was nothing wrong with it, but now that I have entered the industry myself after a fashion, I have more to add and would like to polish it up a bit. So here is the revised version, to start things off on at least partially the right foot.
[Here when I say "pornography" I am referring only to porn created and featuring consenting adults of legal age; nothing including children, animals or unwilling participants is covered under what I am discussing.]
To begin, let me first give “pornography” a concrete definition, one I did not decide upon.
por nog ra phy 1 : the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement 2 : material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement 3 : the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction
This, really, can mean anything. Porn doesn’t have to involve nudity; using an example, one might not find a certain image of a pretty girl on her back in a field arousing, but if you are a foot fetishist and she has lovely soles pointed at the lens, this point may change. My meaning is that we don’t get to decide what other people can find sexually arousing. With this, rational people should be able to agree that just because someone else’s porn seems disgusting (example: scat) or weird (example: furry) or whatever, doesn’t make its appeal invalid. We need to open our minds to recognize other people’s sexual desires. Now, this seem to clash with my initial statement that I won’t be talking about child porn, bestiality, etc.; this is because if you are rational, you should be able to recognize that forcing someone (or something, if it is a pet) into sexual situations is generally not an acceptable action. I’m not denying that they hold sexual appeal to people, because that would be outright incorrect. However, since I have my own feelings on CP and bestiality (and other situational material such as actual rape recorded) and group them separately, I’m keeping them apart to avoid a can of worms being opened. I hope I’ve properly expressed why I made that decision.
Now, having said that, I have no problems whatsoever with lolicon, shota, or drawn bestiality, which may well include furry art. I have no issue with any form of drawn pornography, because frankly that’s fucking stupid. Regardless of what’s being done in the picture, it’s only art. It’s a drawing, it’s fiction. I’ve heard it said, “what if the artist is using an underage human model they have abused or saved child pornography to make their art, as a reference?” – and that seems like a weak defense, because you cannot generally know what reference is being used. I have no doubt that pictures have been made using illegal material as a reference, but unless you’ve got both the original and the art, you can’t know for sure. Even then, the drawing is not the issue – the material is. No children are harmed when some Japanese dude writes a doujinshi about raping little schoolgirls, no matter how repulsive some people – who are not me – may find it. You can’t really argue that because it just doesn’t make any sense; who’s being harmed? Nobody. And if nothing else, do you really want to take away an alternative to actual rape or procuring child porn, from people who don’t even have control over their own desires? Being attracted to children isn’t exactly an excuse, and being a pedophile – that is to say, to be attracted to children – isn’t actually doing anyone any harm provided you don’t use children as an outlet. If some guy is jerking it to crazy lolicon art in his house, are children being hurt? No. For fuck’s sake, it’s only a drawing. Calm down.
To return to my main idea: porn involving live humans, be it video or stills. In many places, in many contexts, I have heard pornography being condemned as immoral or demeaning. I don’t want to delve into the separate issue of personal morals, so let’s leave that aside for now. No, what I’m looking at here is the word “demeaning.”
demean: to lower in character, status, or reputation
Sure, it’s easy to say that porn is degrading to women – but why should that be so? First, a reputation is hardly something most people are in control of, because your reputation is entirely composed of what other people think of you. Most people will have had, at some point or another in life, experienced problems with their reputation, at the very least during their high school years. It’s often completely composed of fabricated or out of context information, and you generally don’t know the full extent of it because people don’t want to let you know exactly how they feel about you. So, if being a nude model or porn star makes other people think poorly of you, is that really your fault? Are you to blame for the things going through another person’s head, for their own personal biases and prejudices? Hardly. Once people make a judgment on you, it can be very hard to alter that regardless of what you do/say or how false the information they have may be. Oh, no, people disapprove of nudity and pornography; the thing to remember is that they are generally always going to be either masturbating and pretending they don’t or horribly repressed. It’s hypocrisy and bullshit in action, behind a nearly nonexistent veil. It’s ridiculous. A nameless hypothetical holier-than-thou woman might criticize women working in a strip club and the men who visit the place, but when they go home to play panty Pogs to the thought of a musclebound bagger at the grocery store, she’s a hypocrite. And I guarantee this occurs, because we all know how much people love to judge each other and pretend they’re someone different when they really are not.
If you’re someone who behaves that way, you’re hiding terribly from the truth of the matter. It makes no difference whether the fuel for your orgasms is someone you saw on BangBus or on the actual bus on your way to church – you’re getting off to stimuli and you’re right here with all the viewers of pornography all over the world who you so quickly condemn.
Allow me to move to the next point – men. Women and men of pornography. While I am sure the numbers are quite imbalanced, there is definitely plenty of pornography centered around men out there. Male cammers, male professional porn stars – who do you think is fucking those “demeaned” women – and male models. I hear nothing about them being degraded or demeaned by their work, and that is an example of sexism. Just as the man is fucking the woman, the woman is fucking the man. It goes both ways, and you can’t say he’s demeaning her just by doing that unless she’s demeaning him right back – demeaning him real hard.
So, why is pornography degrading to women? They’re displaying their bodies to enormous numbers of men and women – anyone with a TV, a magazine or a computer with internet access – and making them come. They’re fully aware of this. They know that, probably every day, people are getting off to their image, to their body, to their lips and breasts and a number of other things. Explain to me the way in which this is degrading – because to me, it sounded like a really good way to boost your self image and feel incredibly sexy. I’ve read the same from many models and performers, and it’s how I feel about the issue. I don’t do what I do for attention or for pleasure, I do it so I can pay rent and buy food and stuff – but I’ll be frank, it’s pretty awesome to know that my naked body is good enough to warrant payment. It’s fucking flattering, and I don’t see the problem. Men (sometimes women, too) get off, they get enjoyment, and I get money and physical confidence. Who’s losing here?
While I’m asking that, why do I never hear about it being demeaning to men? Why is it only the women who are being ‘tainted’ by this line of work, who are somehow now worth less in the eyes of these people, when men are equally involved? If nothing else, it’s sad to see that even if men were being demeaned, which they are not, nobody would even give a fuck. This is part of a greater problem that enforces very negative sexual stereotypes associated with being a man, and tied in a way to the problems with men refusing to report sexual abuse. Men are just supposed to be “better”, to be “stronger”, or what have you. They’re not able to be demeaned, or hurt; they’re just men with cocks and that’s swell. But those women, they’re whores, every one of them. What?
I’ve been told that an issue with pornography is that it is not empowering. This baffles me, to be honest. I don’t find many mainstream jobs to be particularly fucking empowering and nobody’s rushing to complain about that. Not everything needs to be empowering, for fuck’s sake. Working at a fucking grocery store isn’t empowering – let’s picket the nearest Asda! Pornography serves a single and very simple purpose with its many and various kinks and fetishes: to make you come. To make everyone come, in fact. It’s not going to discriminate, there’s something out there for everybody. That’s all it exists for, the only reason it’s here. Orgasms are its business, and business is fucking good.
It gets better. While I do feel the way I feel about jobs having to be empowering (namely that it’s shit) I happen to disagree entirely with the idea that being in porn is not empowering. It’s not supposed to be empowering, it’s supposed to be deeply sexual and assist you in getting off. But then I thought about it, really thought, and I realized: I am not entirely sure what “empowered” means. I looked it up on the Merriam-Webster site and found that it actually has no entry for that word.
I had a brief laugh in the face of feminazis (note that I distinguish between feminists and feminazis, the main difference being that one is reasonable and the other is not) everywhere and looked it up on a different dictionary website. Here is what I found:
em pow er 1. To invest with power
Strikingly simple and to the point for a word which causes me to automatically roll my eyes every time I hear it. To empower, to invest with power. Easy. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and let me tell you something. Displaying your naked body to countless people, both male and female, and knowing that you are responsible for bringing them repeatedly to orgasm is a very powerful thing. Knowing that people you have never met fantasize about you, knowing that you are a bringer of passion and arousal, is a very intense and positive thing.
It may, in fact, be empowering.
