I’ve been contacted by Anne Sabo, an academic who is researching women’s porn, and the changing face of gender relations within pornography.
She’s co-hosting an academic conference at the University of Oslo in Norway in June entitled Heterosexual desire in gender equality discourse: A point of trouble?
Now, don’t let the title put you off. This is actually an important roundtable discussion about women and porn, new and alternative porn, feminism, female sexuality and all sorts of good academic-y, porny-discussy stuff. Never mind all that new Victorian, oh-so 2005 “raunch culture” business. Those Norwegians have well and truly moved on and are looking at the whole vast issue in a more expansive and accepting way.
Here’s some of the lecture topics:
* Cheap, tough, or exposed? Framings of young women’s sexuality in three generations
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* Masturbation: Female freedom, male loneliness?
* Turned on by Pornography – Still a Good Girl? Young women’s talk about pornography
* Invisibility and desire: Masculinity and the soft-porn approach to gender
* The Vanessa sexzine and PostPorn film production: a feminist DIY approach to porn
* The Perils and Potential of Porn from a Gender Equality Perspective (Anne is the keynote speaker)
Now, if you HAD to go to an academic conference, wouldn’t you just love to go to this one? Especially since Anna Span was going to be there?
The blurb at the bottom of the conference page makes for fascinating reading and raises a lot of important questions.
I like this last bit:
“Erotica and pornography have been accused of solidifying a phallic patriarchal order. However, isn’t it possible that these discourses could attempt to show resistance to this order, to break out and away from it, only in different ways than the discourses of feminism and gender equality? Seeing the significance erotica and pornography play as discourses on sexual desire, would we not cut ourselves short if we dismiss them rather than consider their potential to expand the room and possibilities for desire?”
Good point.
From what I can gather, the title of the conference relates to questions about whether what arouses hetero people (especially women) gets in the way of gender equality.
“The challenge for today’s women is, it seems, to embrace and promote their sexuality as strong independent subjects without appearing to submit to the media’s exploitation of their bodies as sexual objects. An even “worse pitfall†would be to confess relying on erotic fantasies that play on traditional subject-object relations between men and women.”
The blurb at the bottom goes on to question whether it’s possible to form a new female sexuality without those “pitfall” fantasies. For some reason that bit stuck out at me because it raises that whole “official feminist sexuality” issue. Is it so bad to indulge in those “old fashioned” fantasies? Especially if they result in female pleasure? Do we have to reconstruct our fantasy lives to be politically correct?
It’s actually a huge question because so much of what turns people on is subjective and politically incorrect (and one person’s stroke material is another’s horror movie). The whole thing is, in the words of the Norwegians, “problematic”.
But it’s well worth discussing.
In any case, I hope the issues broached in Norway make their way to the US, Britain and Australia. It will be nice to see more academia broaden their approach to feminism and porn beyond the well-worn boundaries of Dworkinism vs Hefner.