{"id":1909,"date":"2010-05-05T12:54:21","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T02:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.msnaughty.com\/blog\/?p=1909"},"modified":"2010-05-05T12:54:21","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T02:54:21","slug":"naomi-wolf-talks-porn-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/05\/naomi-wolf-talks-porn-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Wolf Talks Porn… Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NaomiA couple of years ago I expressed disappointment that Naomi Wolf had come out and declared “modesty” in the form of religious veiling to be feminist<\/a>. Before that I was sick of her endlessly recycled article on porn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now she’s touring Australia and is once again talking porn, this time in an interview<\/a> in the Sydney Morning Herald. I waded in, begrudgingly and emerged with mixed feelings about what she had to say.<\/p>\n

Put briefly, Naomi Wolf still thinks porn is bad, mmmkay. Her reason for this is that “it’s definitely affecting young women and men’s sexual development deeply, deeply, deeply.” She argues that seeing porn from an early age is changing the way young people have sex and that it is not encouraging women to embrace their sexuality properly. She bases this mainly on anecdotal evidence, tales of female students fronting up to doctor’s offices with anal fissures after a first date. She says: “Young women do compare themselves to pornography and they do have porn running in their heads when they’re in sexual situations. I’m not a prude, but I don’t think that’s good for their sexual confidence or confidence in their bodies.”<\/p>\n

I’m conflicted about these kinds of statements because I do acknowledge the concern there. Mainstream porn can send a lot of negative messages about body image and sexuality and we need to be talking to young people about it.<\/p>\n

What I’m uncertain about is whether all these frightening anecdotal stories of girls being fucked over by ignorant porn-loving guys are true on a large scale. Are young people really imitating what they see in porn? Have anal and facials really become de-rigeur? Or are today’s young people actually more sex-, tech- and porn-savvy than that? Where’s the actual research?<\/p>\n

One of the things that’s never mentioned during these “teens look at porn!” panics is the idea that, alongside all that easy access to porn is a simultaneous easy access to information<\/em>. Girls in my day (and Naomi’s) weren’t able to find porn within a few keystrokes but we also weren’t really able to easily find information about sex. Cosmo “101 positions” articles and Dolly sex advice columns were about the best we could do.<\/p>\n

Now things are different. Your average teen can easily look up information on any aspect of sex (type “sex advice into Google”). There is a vast amount of sexual information available on the internet, including sites like Go Ask Alice<\/a> and Scarleteen<\/a> that are specifically focused on young people. Add to that the many feminist sites discussing porn and sexuality and even sites like Make Love Not Porn<\/a> which seeks to counter misconceptions about sex and porn.<\/p>\n

So while I’m happy to acknowledge that it’s a problem if teens are using porn as sex education, I’m wondering if they’re really the startled ingenues everyone assumes them to be.<\/p>\n

And I guess the question is: if we are worried about how young people use porn, what’s the response? I’m all for education and communication, talking about sex and the way that sex is depicted in porn and in society as a whole. Naomi’s solution, unfortunately, is abstinence: <\/p>\n

Research shows that pornography desensitises; if you consume it a lot, you need more or more extreme or more and more intense images in order to get the same sensations over time… The best thing we can do is try to persuade young women and men that it’s not good for their sex lives, it’s not good for their self-confidence, and they’ll have better sex if they choose not to let this stuff shape their sense of sexuality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My question is: what research? Are we talking the same research done by those earnest Christians who are out to prove that porn is “addictive”? Because their philosophical position and Naomi’s end up in a similar place: Porn is bad, mmmkay. (See my previous post on Dirty Girls Ministries<\/a> to see just how similar their arguments can get.)<\/p>\n

Naomi was asked about where non-mainstream and queer porn fits in. Interestingly, she acknowledges that some porn can be liberating and self-affirming but then she quickly skirts around the issue, returning to her main argument that it is desensitising. It’s not surprising she brushes past the topic because I think it’s one of the great sticking points in her case. <\/p>\n

There are plenty of people who are enjoying non-mainstream porn and discovering new aspects of their sexuality through erotic imagery and writing. Porn can revive relationships and help women to orgasm for the first time. It can showcase different sexualities, different body types, different techniques and different experiences and this can be very reassuring to see. Porn like the films of Tony Comstock<\/a> can also affirm the beauty of the sex act and the way it expresses love and intimacy. I simply can’t accept that fact that porn is, in essence, a completely negative thing that will always impact badly on a person’s sexuality. This assertion is just not true.<\/p>\n

It really keeps coming back to the idea that porn is this giant, heterogeneous thing, something that only ever shows hetero sex where the woman is submissive or abused. Sure, there’s far too much of that out there and we do need to be talking about it and discussing its merits or lack thereof. But to dismiss the whole idea of porn as automatically damaging is far too simplistic an argument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago I expressed disappointment that Naomi Wolf had come out and declared “modesty” in the form of religious veiling to be feminist. Before that I was sick of her endlessly recycled article on porn. Now she’s touring Australia and is once again talking porn, this time in an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald. I waded in, begrudgingly and emerged with mixed feelings about what she Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14,20],"tags":[912,551,915,618],"class_list":["post-1909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-porn","category-raunch-culture","tag-feminism","tag-naomi-wolf","tag-porn","tag-porn-addiction"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}