When White Males Attack: Larry Flynt, Racism and The Left

Right cos it's soo sad to be turned on by other people having sex?

Your a fucking cretin!

And it's hardly limiting, it's not like I tell my girlfriends to stop touching me cos i wanna wank over some porn.

I reckon you could do with a good spanking. I reckon you'd love it, all those repressed fantasies about being a bad girl.

if you wanna play psychoanalyst you can, actually maybe your desire to patholgise peoples sexuality is really just a kinky power fantasy. Will you spank me if i look at dirty pictures? Put me in a straight jacket?

who removed my fucking post!!!!

That was a piece of visual art, an autocritique of the dehumanising nature of pornography and it's general shityness!

lucy82 writes:

"I am not crazy or sexually abused, I want human rights, civil rights and good, healthy working conditions"

what are the terms and conditions of employment btw of sexworkers in the porn industry? men and women? i'm taking it that the term sexworker covers people working in porn? i mean concrete evidence rather than HISteria? how can we discuss exploitation without some clear information of the terms and conditions of employment? and please, no more ranting about abused child porn stars in indonesia or women taking multiple penetration from men using women as objects. i think that ground has been covered and discussed enough for anyone to make their own decisions.

terms and conditions of employment anyone? they must exist. anyone got fact rather than opinion gained from trolling google?

why, thank you for noticing after several people have mentioned this strange gap in the conversation several times. its true, there are only so many hours in a day and the fact that mine and dots comments in this debate were threaded through those of john and revol clearly only made them less noticable.

they say they're not crazy but dress sense never lies.

i'd be way happier if the women in front reading the paper did a sharp drop kick to the left and took the face off the christian freak objectifying women as victims of men (amongst other things) whilst on his knees..

is he not the sound man/

or is it a lampoon of anti porn feminists reading of texts?

could be now you mention it.

dissappointing if true. i thought he'd have a crucifix in that hand at least. something about the stance. in all my run-ins with the christian right, when seeing them on their knees i've never quite been able to tell whether they are praying or wanking.

it also worries me that the rhetoric of the christian right seems sometimes to eerily echo the rhetoric of anti-porn/anti-sexwork feminists.

now come on the picture is german. The guys more likely about to take his cock out and piss over himself than be praying.*

Yes it is disturbing how the christian rights language is very similar to anti porn feminists. They do not know what they are doing etc They are in the grip of satan. Infact I reckon you could easily switch gays for sex workers and it'd be the same.

*source Eurotrash, any episode.

would come as a bit of a shock to some of the straight punters would that although the grip of satan sounds mildly interesting..

wheres oisleeps innuendo when u need it?

Stop that

*promises to post something massively intelligent and insightful in the morning*

lucy - the working conditions of sexworkers are all over the map (much in the way that general working conditions are). in san francisco there's a unionized peep show, i know there are worker-owned sex houses (someone was talking about one on an anarcha list, in fact) and i know women who work together out of the same apartment, and of course there are "enlightened" employers of sex workers just as there are in other sectors.

and on the other side of the spectrum there are the kidnap/sex tourism industries (the philippines are notorious, at least in cali), usually connected to military bases, as i understand it.

but maybe that wasn't your question?

one of the interesting things i heard about back in the day, is that a huge percentage of sexworkers (like 90% or something) are women who work occasionally/infrequently out of their homes, and so operate completely under the radar of most people who are talking about sex work as an issue of houses, street walkers, strippers and other red-light-district folk. this is anecdotal.

the other thing that makes things murky is that there are women/people who date for compensation, who would never consider themselves sex workers, but who get dinner and/or gifts for dating people.

revol (et al) - i wish that you would stop mentioning dworkin and mackinnon. it's just poking the cages...

but MacKinnon is the "intellectual heavy weight" behind most of the anti porn stuff, was going to say it was Dworkin but that would be cruel.

Seriously it's MacKinnon's reworking of reductionist marxist leninist concepts of ideology that underpins it all. Remember under patriarchy women are incapable of giving meaningful consent, well obviously thats not including macKinnon and her mates.

revol - i'm not saying i don't understand why you use their names.

The names are short hand. but when the "other side" has them as short hand for an entirely different set of characteristics, then using the short hand isn't helpful except to polarize the conversation - which IMO is boringly polarized already.

dworkin and mackinnon weren't stupid. they had smart things to say in analyzing some of the situations they looked at (although i read them so long ago i can't remember any of them - just remember thinking "oh, they're smart. so how the hel did they end up there?).

i think their "solutions" were part of the problem, but that's true of a lot of people who i might still be interested in talking to.

liberation - i'm with lucy (again). your "reason" for why you've ignored our posts makes no sense to me.

i could give a shit about your respect or disrespect, i'm more interested in what the hel you think you're doing as a feminist (i presume), who would on your own terms value what women have to say and think at least as much as men.

well they weren't stupid but I think they start from a very premise and so end up with some atrocious conclusions. Now I think the premise that underpins anti porn arguments is that "women are unable to give meaningful consent under patriarchy" and the elitist fissure that this creates is just ripe for MacKinnon and her mates to jump into.

my point is that it isn't interesting to get into arguments about whether they said that or not.

it is interesting to discuss how consent is complicated and manufactured and a lot of other things. making the consent conversation into a conversation about individuals and individual personalities is a lot less interesting.

yes thats what i would like.

but i think we need to start at the premise of the anti porn argument, and it is one based around "consent". Im not reducing it to individual personalities any more than i am when i have a discussion about Gramsci or Lukacs.

Hello Dot.

I will respond first to you, then to Lucy. Apologies again for not responding sooner. There was no intentional effort on my part to not listen to you, and only listen to the boys. To be honest, I'd much rather discuss these issues with you, if anyone, currently in the debate, as I respect your statements, and do not find you to be the bigoted misogynist that revol68 seems to be.

Thanks for calling revol on his use of Dworkin and MacKinnon's names. I question whether he has actually read them, or just the lies spread about them and their work. And I found his "comment" about Dworkin's weight just plain cruel and misogynistic. But it doesn't surprise me. I also appreciate your discussion about consent. In fact, consent is now a term that is being "rethought" given some of what I have written below. What Dworkin and MacKinnon have said about consent and patriarchy is not well represented by the shallow and obviously erroneous understandings of revol68.

I appreciate what you said about how you were impressed with their work, sometimes wondering "how they got there". I have studied their work in order to be able to answer that question (for myself), as I think it is an important one. Thousands of people, all across the West spend thousands of hours trying to understand the likes of Foucault (one of the easier of the postmodern philosophers, IMO) to Derrida (one of the more difficult, IMO). People generally speak about them with respect, not commenting on their size, as revol does about Dworkin. In general, white male political philosophers, which some would consider both Foucault and Derrida to be, among other things, garner a higher level of respect and admiration from men than do female (especially feminist) political philosophers, such as Dworkin and MacKinnon. The latter group is routinely trashed, as has already been noted on this thread, and those who trash them, more often than not, have not even bothered to read them, let alone CAREFULLY read them, as "carefully" as they might read Foucault and Derrida, or try to anyway!

I also appreciate your comments to Lucy82 regarding the complexity of the lives of "sex workers". I think privileged sex workers do not realise the conditions MOST "sex workers" endure, and it is well within their privileged status to "not know" and to "not care". But this saddens me. How many SouthEast Asian kids have to have dicks stuck in their mouths (or elsewhere) by US white businessmen "on vacation raping children" before "sex workers" and other anticapitalist non-sex workers take this up as a human rights violation? How many poor women, poor boys and girls, and incested boys and girls have to live out what they learned as kids (that love is sex, that sex is all they are good for) before privileged sex workers take this up as a humanitarian civil rights issue?

I know of a South American 16 year old girl who was on the streets since age 11, "selling" her body to men for "sex" and there are women trying to get her off drugs and off the street, but she still wants daily contact with her pimp. Now, to all readers, because she "wants contact with her pimp" and would likely "choose to go back to the streets" if these women were not helping her re-assess her life, should we, the collective we, turn our backs on the complexities of how she got onto the streets and into prostitution to begin with. Let's face it, there are plenty of homeless girls, but without pimps and johns, they wouldn't be prostitutes. The guy who comes up to them to "help them out" with a meal and a coffee, all the while intending to get her into his stable, is he a humanitarian? I'd like feedback on these questions.

Please ask me any questions you wish, and I am sorry if I have missed any to date. These threads can get confusing!

Take care.

liberation

Hi Dot.

I found a post where you posed some questions, so I'll get to those, then to Lucy's q's.

Dot writes: liberation -

besides the valid critique that has already been made of your post's occasional illogic

(for example, while you say "noone is for banning porn" it does sound like you are interested in banning porn, and you certainly sound like you're speaking for "women" as a class, vs. a specific subset of women who are victimized by brutal capitalist practices like kidnaping, etc.)

why are you ignoring the points that i have made, and that lucy82 has made, in order to address the points that men have made?

the reason that people keep talking about "why not other options to attack these same issues" whether that's women's lifestyle mags, sneaker sweatshops or whatever, is because the question of sexuality is insanely complex in this culture.

while sexuality is usefully addressed and questioned, that sense of nuance and complexity usually isn't apparent from the feminists who make porn their main issue (this is in my experience, at any rate).

(perhaps revol made that point in his looooong post, but i couldn't get through the whole thing. maybe tomorrow.)

(end of dot's post)

I am clearly behind in reading all the posts, and came here appalled by what I saw passing for real discussion by the likes of John and revol68, who seem to me to not really be interested in doing anything more than mental masturbation, using up perfectly good cyberspace to be rather vicious and mean, and not helpful, nor intelligent

I may have to go back to read all your posts, but please allow me now to start here, at this place, from where I jumped in. That is why I have posted as I have, in chronological order, from the place I came in on. I don't have time to read everything, and from what you say, neither do you!!

I think Dworkin has written some of the most complex stuff about sex ever written, in fact, and has been either not read and maligned, read and misunderstood and maligned, or, rarely, understood and simply disagreed with, respectfully. I see you in that last group, and that is a group I am happy to correspond with publicly. I'm not letting any asshole males get away with trashing feminists, though, nor with racist and classist perspectives unchallenged. Obviously this means I've got lots of work to do!

Please quote which passages of mine lead you to think I am advocating the banning of porn. These charges are thrown around like wastepaper, and usually the accuser is never held accountable. So, where do you hear me saying that, or inferring that?

liberation

Are you seriously putting MacKinnon and Dworkin in the same league as Foucault or Derrida?

People don't take Dworkin seriously cos her writing is a) awful b) so vague as to be essentially meaningless c) makes sweeping generalisations about peoples sexualities.

People don't take MacKinnon seriously cos her writings are just marxist leninist dogma dressed in feminist garb.

Lucy82 writes: are you working in the porn industry then liberation?

I am not free to discuss this matter openly, publicly. And I could make the case that it's entirely irrelevant. Can people meaningfully discuss the realities of slavery if they have not been slaves? I think so. It's called being sensitive to the realities of others, and seeing their lives for what they are by listening to them, and not having double and triple standards for how human beings ought to be treated, socially and civilly. I have been clear in being against industrialised and systematised exploitation, dehumanisation, objectification, abuse, torture, and murder. Now, what's the question?

I am fully aware of women who allegedly "choose" to be sex workers. Frankly, let them. I am concerned, politically, with the millions of women and children who do not "choose" to be sex workers, but who are, rather, coerced through capitalism or patriarchy to be in those industries or "lines of work", much to their peril. I am concerned that CEO porn pimps will not require condoms used in all porn films and shoots. I am concerned with those who ARE used (up) and abused in the sexxxism industries (porn, prostitution, stripping, sex trafficking, sex tourism, and sexual slavery worldwide). I rarely hear pro-sex workers discuss "those" people. Instead they (you?) work real hard to paint this rosy picture of an industry that is about as callous to humanity, including to men, as it gets.

I understand viscerally, emotionally, intellectually what it is to be sexually used and abused, systematically inside capitalist patriarchy, as do many other people. And men and women apologists for the sexxxism industries can talk all they want about how "liberating" sex work is. I know what's really going on, and as an ex-prostitute friend of mine said: "Ask those women how they feel about the work ten or twenty years after they are out of it." Drinkers and drug addicts tell themselves all kinds of things about how great their lives are, while they rot away. The same holds true for sex workers, IMO. I am open to debate, but not to accepting the sexual use of another person, through visual violation, objectification, exploitation, and degradation as "good" just because some people say they "like" it. Sorry. It's called having principles and living by them, and I do not accept the argument that "some people have the "right" to be heroin addicts because that's even the fucking point. People can and do kill themselves quickly and slowly in many ways, in ways provided by capitalist and patriarchal and racist institutions and systems of harm and exploitation. The point is that heroin addiction is dangerous, dehumanising, and deadly. Lots of people "choose" to use it. Lots of people think people who criticise its use are "arrogant" and tell those people to "mind their own business". I am speaking about institutions of harm, and I am working to transform those. How you see me as in any way the enemy of you, and revol68 as a "friend" is beyond me, and speaks to me of your misjudgment of people's intentions and actions. Revol68 has clearly revealed who he is here, and it ain't pretty. And by "pretty" I mean humane.

And in response to most of your other comments, mostly complaining about how I'm ignoring you, I have already answered them in earlier posts yesterday and today.

If you have anything else you'd like to ask me, please do. Otherwise, please leave me alone. If you wish to call me arrogant, fine, but what do you call revol68? (Charming?)

liberation

Regarding my statement: I also appreciate your discussion about consent. In fact, consent is now a term that is being "rethought" given some of what I have written below.

Even I found that comment arrogant!! It's not what I meant to say, and I'd like to clarify:

The case of the teen from South America reveals a fatal flaw in the arguments about "consent". These flaws are not only now being noticed.

For some time the issue of meaningful consent has been discussed in feminism, at least for the last twenty years. Audre Lorde spoke over that many years ago about "[using another person as we would use a Kleenex]" as no standard for humane behavior she could politically support, adding "[u]se without consent of the used is abuse". Which led others to ask, what constitutes meaningful consent.

Providing sex-addicted or sexually compulsive men with places to go to act out their addictions and compulsions to sexually abused, compulsive, or addicted women (and girls, boys, and young men) who were that way before entering the sexxxism industries, or who became that way after being used in them, is not many humanitarians' idea of a just society that cares about men and women.

My point is that there has been a very long discussion about this matter, within and beyond feminism, that capitalist patriarchy and its defenders would rather avoid dealing with, because to deal with it honestly would mean reassessing so much of what we do and what was done to us.

Hi revol68.

I find what you say useless to any real, meaningful conversation about feminism. So, from now on I'm ignoring you, until you have something constructive and responsible to say. I'll speak with others here about these matters, but your comments are not worth responding to. When you return with cited, actual passages from those you are histerically criticising, I will reconsider engaging with you. Your uncited remarks come across as juvenile. Your insults are petty. Your posts are filled with shite.

Have a nice day.

i did NOT say i was impressed with mackinnon and dworkin. i merely said they were smart about some things.

and to make the lines clear, i am much more on the side (since we appear to have to have sides - sigh) of revol in this thread. while he is off hand (a minor fault), you are taking the side of what i consider to be missionary-style moralism. the idea that you are not interested in debating the complexities of sex work, but only addressing it as a problem, the idea that you dismiss people who choose the work, the idea that you focus your arguments (until aggressively called on it) against men (who are easier targets for anti-porn activists)...

while i don't have time (i'm at work) to go back and find where you sound like you're for banning all porn - i can say that your tendency is to make sweeping general statements that do NOTHING to increase understanding, and everything to make yourself sound like an expert.

WARNING: I have been staring at this and writing and re-writing it on and off for hours, so YMMV.

Reticent as I am to get back into this, I think the problem is to look at this from the larger perspective of the shift in the forms of sexism and sexual domination since the 1960's.

Before starting, can I ask if everyone agrees that the basic question is as follows: is porn necessarily sexist and oppressive or is it just some porn that is sexist and oppressive? You could expand that to ask if sex work is necessarily sexist or just some sex work? Is that really the dividing line here?

My argument is basically that the porn industry, as an industry, makes a commodity of sex and it cannot but help deal in sexism and the reinforcement of the oppression of women. However, the conflation of the performance and consumption of sexual wage labor and sex as a commodity, either directly or through images, with concensual sexual relations, is both mistaken and correct. Why it is mistaken is obvious to me, since watching a stripper or porn, even to get you off, is not itself sex, but a relation between a consumer and a commodity. But it is also correct because IMO sex between concensual individuals is increasingly commodified and sexual relations have more and more been co-opted by capital for its own reproduction, not just in the reproduction of the laborer, but also as a core medium for the trafficking in commodities and itself as a much more varied range of commodities from Men's magazines and Beauty magazines to clothes, gym memberships, sex manuals, psycho-therapy for the frigid and the over-sexed, etc.

I actually agree that porn is not something separate from say the mass explosion of Maxim-type magazines and the "beauty" magazines, not to mention the incredible explosion of using sexualized images of women in advertising, sports events, entertainment, politics, etc. The massive increase in porn, its mass production and consumption, simply follows this trend, and is one adjustment capital made at first, in the 1950's to cater to a new mass audience of potential male purchasers (men making a much larger wage than in the 1920's or 30's) discovering sexual liberation (see my previous comments re: the beats and Playboy), but then also changing drastically in the period of burgeoning feminism and the women's movement in the 1960's and 70's. Prior to that, porn was simply not available, or even acceptable, on a massive scale.

Regarding the women's movement, there has been both accomodation (the mass marketing of 'feminist' commodities, aimed at women, supposedly as monikers of their independence and power or as 'liberating' in themselves, trying to get women into gyms, opening some layers of management and professions to women, the admission of women as sexual beings with their own desires for which products can then be produced) and backlash (90%, according to Revol68, of porn, but not only porn: the profusion of "femininity" and "feminine style", the mass sexualization of advertising, the elimination of welfare and child care supplements, privatization of social services like day care, the mass commodification of prepared food, esp via fast food and frozen meals, etc.) Exploitation and power remain asymmetrical by sex, and porn, like much else, both reflects and shapes that asymmetry, but the asymetry is not the same as it used to be.

This is a huge transformation that, having grown up in it, we don't always see. Some of it has meant there is no going back to the old crap really, but it also indicates that the female body, and the female body as sexualized fuck-object in particular, is a very, very hot commodity and image of commodities indeed, across the whole spectrum. Sexism isn't mostly like it was in 1950 or even 1970. Most women are far more independent socially than 50 years ago or 35 years ago and have far more resources. The failure to situate the porn industry, ie the commodification of women's bodies and body parts as sex objects for a primarily male audience of consumers of those images, within this process is IMO a mistake.

Young women and men grow up with a trememdous pressure to see this as 'normal' in a situation of declining resources and spaces from which to safely and constructively negotiate sexuality (as opposed to merely repressing it in the past). And contrary to opinions voiced here, this has a definite impact on people because it mirrors and gives a shape, in a distorted way, to the larger social attacks on women, justifying it as 'natural' and showing at the same time that 'playing ball' with the backlash is the only way ahead. The complicatedness of being an independent woman who may find the ground stripped from under her feet by the worsening conditions for many people does not stand as something against porn and the images of women in porn and in fact in much of the media overall, but as the other side of it. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost is a VERY interesting, if very middle class, book on this from a black woman's perspective, not about porn, but about the disrespect of black women by black men, including some interesting stuff on rap and black nationalism.

The issue of porn, and the presentation of women, is not so very different, in that is has a complicated relationship between fantasies and real life, between what is consumed and how and by whom. It is not a simple engagement where porn imposes itself on the viewer.

And just as people can enjoy "liberating" commodities, they can enjoy porn as "sexually liberating." But it is make-believe to talk as if capital had not largely adjusted to over the top sexuality as a new commodity, as a new marketing scheme. Its not just sexxx, its pu$$y. And capital loves pu$$y.

As such, it isn't about watching people have sex. that's a relatively recent phenomena for working class people, btw, contrary to the brilliant anthropological comments made with ZERO substantiation here, since until the 1950's, you mostly had to watch people inthe act, live, in an environment that morally was not even capable of talking about sex or even about contraception, and in which a woman talking about sex was automatically a whore. That is less the case now, and that is good, but it was the women's movement that did it, not porn, since porn as a mass commodity for men took off in the 1950's when women were still not supposed to talk about sex unless they were sex workers in the sex industry. But capital is trying to employ ALL women in the sex industry (some as productive and some as reproductive labor), to make being a woman into being about pu$$y, and porn plays into that.

Today, it is far more radical to refuse sexualization (as a man or woman) than to project sex images and the sexualization all relations, ie to become a sex object for public consumption (pu$$y) or a 'john' publicly on the make for sexxx. Then again, it was prolly more radical in the 1960's to not fuck all the Left activist men than to fuck em all, just as it was more radical to not try to fuck every woman in your path using your needs as a hardened revolutionary as an entry way to free pussy. What happens is that, as with all things under capital, what dominates in the market dominates ideas and mores, unless it is undermined. I am not arguing for us to become asexual or androgynous or stop having sex (of whatever sort you happen to like, as well), which is just another concession, but to consider that hyper-sexualization is no more liberatory than being able to buy 31 flavors of coffee at Starbucks or watch more black sports players. Is it better to not have segregated baseball and footbal? Sure. We always support the end of segregation or repression. But when does partial liberation become recuperation? for it most certainly does.

Overcmoming the current form of patriarchy will not happen banning porn or Maxim or by suing porn producers or by unionizing sex workers (the last of which I support as much or as little as I support any kind of unionization.) Rather, the problem is to find ways to oppose and refuse the general sexualization of public relations and therefore also of all private relations (not that some private relations are not sexual, but currently it is increasingly difficult for any private relations to not become sexualized.) Just as surely as presenting women only as and restricting them to "girlfriends, mothers, wives, grannies, whores, etc." and not as individuals and as women, was patriarchal and oppressive, so too is this.

Today, the framework is different, wider, more complicated, but the attempt to confine that improvement involves the reduction of all women not to a single role or set of roles (some variation of child-bearing/child-caring, spinster or whore), but to a universal sex object and as needing to be, as required to be, perpetually sexually active, available, adventurous, to be whatever other role PLUS fuck object. In turn, men are expected, whatever else they may be, to be perpetually chasing pussy, and therefore in some twisted way, subordinate to not merely their "sexual drives", but to pussy. It even appears that women are now in more control sexually, and men who are constrained by having to get women's consent. The argument that strippers really have the power over their viewers, not vice versa, because the stripper consenually offers herself as an object, and only as much as she wants to (hence, the oppressed are actually made into willing, consensual subjects, even though the only real choice would involve: if you could do anything you wanted to, literally anything, would it be this?, not the forced choice of "what kind of wage labor would you like to do, given the specific limitations you face as X, where X might be male/female, Black/white/Mexican/etc., etc.) rides on this appearance, an appearance that of course can have some truth to it. in fact, most men are just subordinate to pu$$y, but in a much more complicated relation with actual women.

Breaking this can only happen in a movement that practically challenges, and hopefully overthrows, capital, and our individual efforts or refusal, while important personally, are pretty minimal, if necessary. Its like refusing TV or asking people to refuse it. I think 99% of TV is worthless and I would just as soon throw out the TV as keep it, but I also have an 8 year old who, since he doesn't have an X-box or any other game console, it already treated as weird, so I have a TV and a LOT of movies without commercials and cable to get nature shows and such, which he likes. And tossing out the TV wouldn't alleviate the inevitable boredom of this world, anyway.

Now, this does not prevent me from recognizing that porn or the sex industry trades in a particular degradation of sex and sexuality nor that it is predicated on the oppression of women. But that aspect is not absolutely required, it is just the extreme form in which the hyper-sexualization of social life and the particular way in which post-60's sexual oppression operates, and like all the rest it oppresses women asymmetrically to men, in part through unequal wages, for example, but also through asymmetrical treatment of the presentation of women's bodies, of sexuality, of gender roles, and so on. In other words, as an industry, it operates on propagating mostly mysoginist portrayals of women and women's sexuality as sexually arousing, ie it sells pu$$y, not sex. Admitting that 90% of porn is 'shit' (ie, downright mysoginist and racist from production, to wages, to working conditions, to how it portrays gender roles) doesn't disprove the point that it is asymmetrical, it proves it. It also misses the larger point about porn's role, irrespective of its relative level of mysoginy, inthe hypersexualization of post-60's capital.

To be fair, while it still plays into that, the best efforst of Nina Hartley, Carol Leigh, and Candida Royalle manage to be basically decent compared not only to the more popular and far more widely circulated stuff, including the much more reactionary and rapidly expanding "amateur" porn on the web, but even compared to a lot of Hollywood shit that is less sexually explicit, but more reactionary, from Pretty Woman to Species to Frankie and Johnny to some of my kid's cartoons. But exactly because it is not the rough stuff, it has a much smaller market share, especially than the rapidly expanding amateur stuff that is much more violent, mysoginist, pedo, etc (or like Hentai, which is mostly rape-fantasy stuff AND pedo.) So is it watching sex per se or is it the production of a particular kind of image of sex, ie the production of sex as porn?

Will some sex workers find that obnoxious and even offensive? Sure, just as some mothers and fathers found having the bourgeois family called oppressive obnoxious and offensive. Just as many workers find that talking about their job as 'exploitation' find it obnoxious. Just as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice find being called tokens obnoxious. There is a disjuncture between how something exists objectively, how it operates, how people experience it consciously and how people experience it unconsciously. So to most people being an anarchist or communist is no less stupid than being anti-porn. Do any of you intend to stop talking about how capitalist labor is exploitation because today most workers do not agree with you, instead prefering to talk about good vs. bad jobs, good vs. poor wages, good bosses vs. bad bosses, good vs bad porn, etc.?

The point, to be really explicit, is not that we are attacking sex or raising children or work, but that in this society, those activities take place in social forms that are alienated, alienating, oppressive and exploitative. At the same time, we cannot refuse them, but have to struggle to see where we want to engage in those activities in ways that are not alienated and exploitative, where our daily practice opens onto better ways to do those things, ways that accord with living with dignity and respect. sometimes that means refusing, sometimes that means reshaping, sometimes that means simply screaming 'No! No more!' without any "constructive" alternative. There is no magic external space from which we can do this, but only because we are exploited, oppressed, etc. Hopefully we assist that process by making a thorough-going critique that allows people to see more clearly the content and form of their own activity in the world, instead of telling them what to do (and hopefully they do the same for us and we do it for each other.)

So does it tell us whether to consume porn or not? Should we attack consumers or workers? No more than I would attack smokers or tobacco workers. But I have no mercy for the corporations, for the industry itself. and like tobacco, it is not just bad because it is capitalist, but because it poisons us in a specifically nasty way, just like products predicated on or propagating racism or anti-gay bigotry, and as such is not merely exploitative but oppressive. That doesn't mean, however, that every consumer or worker in the industry is a bigot or a mysognist. If that was the case, then we would not be able to talk to workers in many industries, from arms to tourism. the problem is not to chastize or convince, but to grapple with why sex and its enjoyment take this form at this time, and if it matters. I think it does, and I think that the porning of sex is very non-neutral, but only in so far as I find the sexing of everything else non-neutral as well.

Chris

I've been reading over this thread and I have to admit that the expression "more heat than light" kept springing to mind. I think that some people on both sides have been expressing themselves in quite unpleasant and personal ways, which only succeeds in polarising debate, pushing people into adopting caricatures of their own arguments.

I'm not in favour of a state ban on pornography. Neither do I think that there is anything inherently wrong with people filming each other having sex. I found the original site faintly obnoxious with its haranguing tone (the woeful exchange with Chomsky being a case in point) and its use of terms like "sexxx". I don't think that accusing my opponents of arguing from "privilege" is particularly useful. I'm not anti-sex, in fact I like it a great deal.

That said, I do think that the sex industry, as it actually exists in our capitalist society does damage above and beyond the usual exploitation inherent in all industries. That includes the widespread use of slave labour and of extremely emotionally vulnerable people. I think that some of the responses to this point have been glib and ultra-left (I realise that term is probably seen as a compliment around here). This may have escaped some people's notice but we do focus a lot of our attention on particularly exploited workers in other fields, including sweatshops. Yes improving the conditions of super-exploited workers doesn't solve the exploitation inherent to wage labour, but is anyone seriously arguing that therefore we shouldn't campaign on sweatshop issues or on, say, the huge problems facing immigrant workers? That we should just shrug our shoulders and say that we are concerned with abolishing the totality of the labour/capital relationship?

That said, even if labour conditions in the sex industry were improved so that they reached the "norm" of capitalist exploitation, I still think that it brings with it additional problems.

Most obviously it encourages and helps reproduce sexist attitudes in society. Strip clubs, brothels, porn magazines all encourage men to view women as objects, reducing them to their sexual availability and they encourage women to view themselves in the same light. I am not saying that sexually explicit material inherently does this, I am saying that in sexist capitalist society that is what the actually existing sex industry does and that we should oppose this.

Pornography isn't the only type of published material which has this effect. Somebody pointed to women's lifestyle magazines earlier in the thread and they were spot on. I'd say that men's lifestyle magazines, with their soft porn content and sneering attitude towards women and much larger circulation than porn magazines are pretty damn malevolent to. But there is no contradiction between noting and opposing these forms of sexism while also opposing the sexism of the porn industry. Nobody, hopefully, is arguing that we should only oppose sexism in one arena.

I don't think that it is it all helpful to blame workers in the sex industry for this and I'm in favour of unionisation and organisation - which by the way quite apart from the benefit to the workers themselves I think is likely to be an important way of challenging some of the misogyny pushed by the industry. I'm against state bans because in general they serve to strengthen the state apparatus and will usually be used to victimise progressive causes rather than their supposed targets. That said you can be against something without calling on the state to ban it. Opposing the sex industry as it really exists is about changing attitudes first and foremost.

irrationally - while i agree with what i understand to be the tendency of your post - the difference between "the most exploited" in sweat shops and sex workers is that the people who have been arguing the anti-porn/sexwork line have consistently refused to address that not all sexworkers are (or consider themselves) the "most exploited." okay, that's one of the differences. of course there are more - the main one being the intensity of heat around sexuality.

(which is why, revol, it's not the same to talk about the MacDwork team as it is to talk about gramsci and other theorists.)

i also have a problem with your comment, irrationally, that extremely emotionally vulnerable people get involved in sex work. what about the postal workers who go crazy and start shooting people? emotionally vulnerable people shouldn't have to deal with the public (and don't even get me started about the kind of people who become cops). but more to the point, the sex workers i know sure as hel didn't appreciate people acting like they knew what was better for them than they did. for that matter, neither do i, and i imagine you don't like it either.

chris - i think the lines you're drawing around the commodification stuff are arbitrary and false.

everything is commodified these days. in the bay area, beautiful men are also commodified, which can be because there is a fairly wealthy gay male population here, and also because men are learning to objectify themselves the way that women have been encouraged to (i.e. if they buy the product, they get to imagine that they look like the guy in the ad). this can be a good thing if it makes us start having more nuanced conversations about power and consent (instead of essentialized ones). in other words the point is not to distract from sex work, but to have a deeper understanding of how sex clarifies some of the discussion about power, and muddies other parts. people have been responding to the commodification of our lives since the public relations industry started after WWII. i highly recommend Century of the Self (at least the first and third episodes), for more on that.

(btw chris, i sure as hel am not reading through the whole post you wrote. y'all need to take pity on us attention-deficit folks.)

both irrationally and chris - another note on commodification/objectification...

it is a cliche that many people hire sexworkers not to have sex, but to talk. the closest professional comparison to a prostitute in this culture is the therapist. why aren't people up in arms about people who you hire to pretend to be your friend? i.e. the power dynamic between sex worker and client is a lot more complicated than anti-SW people give it credit for, and that is another reason why sex workers choose the trade.

the point of making this a discussion about power, of continuing to talk about consent, is that THIS SHIT IS COMPLICATED, and we are all implicated - not in some bullshit moralistic way, but because we all have power and we all don't have power (to put it as simply as i can).

k, speaking of posts that go on too long.

come on, everyone i know has an in-joke about how much Foucault looks like a mediocre bond villain, and derrida's style is the most comprehensively mocked (in reactionary circles) in all contemporary philosophy.

unfair. derrida, for a start, catapulted numerous women to fame and infamy among academia: Spivak, Cornell and so on...and anyone who actually knows what either man was on about should also be able to drop names like Kristeva and Iraguay (sp?), not to mention a peripheral figure such as Susan Sontag.

how carefully do you need to read Dworkin? most of the stuff i've read by her (on that website with loads of her writings on) has been rather to the point, agit-prop-ish. foucault isn't much tougher, but derrida designed his texts, ground up, to reward close readings. few philosophers have exalted in language like he did. i have never read anything by mckinnon.

on what planet is that not seen as a human rights violation? not mine. child prostitution is one of those things that the guardian and the UN just love to wring their hands about.

ah yes, there's nothing western society loves more than a child molester!

yes, the root causes. now some of us do not count porn as a cause of this stuff, and you have yet to even attempt to prove otherwise. please, justify the amount of time we're wasting here and stick to the subject.

That's a fair point.

I quite accept that there are people near the top end of the porn industry (and maybe other aspects of the sex industry) who make a lot of money, like their jobs etc. I'm not interested in "pathologising" such people, in fact I have relatively minimal interest in them beyond my more general problem with pornography and the reproduction of misogyny. Not every sexworker is a slave or a junkie and some are relatively highly paid. However we are talking about in industry in which abnormally terrible conditions are unusually prevalent, which leads to issues arising which are different than those which exist in "ordinary" capitalist industries.

My actual comment was that the sex industry involves the "widespread use" of slave labour and of extremely emotionally vulnerable people, which I stand by. To give an obvious example the correlation between heroin addiction and prostitution in my home city is very high, a clear case of pimps and johns preying on the emotionally vulnerable and financially desperate. I am not suggesting that either label fits every sexworker. As for telling people what's better for them - we're socialists in a world where currently only a minority are socialist, we do that every time we agitate around pretty much anything. I'm not in favour of talking down to people or of "pathologising" them, but I'm also not in favour of accepting the wider validity of every subjective experience.

i hear you. my point is not that every subjective experience is equally valid on some metalevel, but that it is on a microlevel.

to come at this from a different direction - if one of the issues with people who have had difficult lives is that they have been subject to people making decisions for them (whether nominally "for their own good" or not), then more of the same isn't going to address the problem.

but this is more of a situational issue.

Well of course actually you are. What bad could happen to you if you answer either "yes" or "no" to this?

I think it's entirely irrelevant, for the reasons you give - but you told people who disagreed with you "YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT" unless we had experienced it.

Good posts from redtwister + Irrationally