So while I’ve been off enjoying a break and then enduring flooding, anti-porn author Gail Dines has continued to wave her promotional flag, heavy as it is with assumptions and untruths. Unfortunately The Guardian likes to give her lots of space to do this. Her latest salvo was from the AVN expo in Las Vegas. Aside from her usual generalisations, she offered this particuarlly offensive paragraph:
One of the seminars at this year’s expo is called In the Company of Women. Here academics will mix with pornographers to share ideas on how to develop niche products targeted to women. I’m sure there will be lots of talk about how women can be empowered by watching porn, because the pornographers, being the savvy businessmen they are, like nothing more than telling women that porn is actually good for them. This is their “trick”, and one we must resist if we want to replace the plasticised, formulaic and generic images of the pornographers with an authentic sexuality based on our own experiences, longings, and desires.
Gail Dines seems to think that the porn industry is exclusively run by men and that attempting to create erotica for women is some kind of dirty capitalist trick to fool women.
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As a woman who has worked for ten years to create alternative porn that does depict our own experiences, longings and desires, I feel pretty pissed off at this ridiculous claim. And no doubt all the other female directors and webmasters and happy porn performers would agree. I originally discovered this article via British filmmaker Petra Joy who wrote:
It negates the existence of any female porn directors, events such as the feminist porn awards and also the (increasing) number of women who enjoy watching porn. This article therefore victimizes and patronizes all women. It is an angle on porn which is very dated, stuck in the eighties, rather than embracing all the new trends in porn.
What about the women who choose to express themselves in porn or the women who watch and enjoy porn because it inspires them or turns them on? Gail says we do not exist and all porn is bad when she has only seen the tip of the iceberg. If you go to the most commercial adult event on the planet such as the AVN show, don’t be surprised if you get the ultra mainstream and commercial end of the stick.
Meanwhile, Violet Blue has pointed me towards an opinion piece in Salon which says that many women aren’t “pornified” as the commentators would suggest. They make their own decisions and many aren’t very interested in porn at all.
Those of us in our 20s and early 30s who were the first to come of age with free hardcore porn at our fingertips were said to be taking pole-dancing classes, waxing our nether regions and sticking our tongues down each other’s throats for show. We were supposedly “having sex like men” and “screwing like porn stars.” Our sexual coat of arms would feature a “Girls Gone Wild” T-shirt, a stripper heel and a MacBook live-streaming hardcore action. There is some truth there — yet many young women are remarkably unfamiliar with actual porn, and a gulf still remains between the sexes in talking about it.
Given that the article by Gail Dines relates an unsupported anecdote about women using pubic hair to avoid sex, Salon makes a good point. There’s plenty of moral panic about the idea that women are being persuaded to do porny things in the bedroom against their will, but is it really true? Where’s the evidence?