Jude Roberts has recently completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham on the Culture novels of Iain M Banks. Jude teaches at Birkbeck College and tweets at @tangendentalism.
Jude recently appeared on Newsnight as part of a panel discussing pornography. A full clip of the show is featured at the end of this post. She writes here on pornography, sex and being labelled Jude Roberts – porn user.
I’m happy to be labelled a ‘porn user’. I am a user of porn. Although the connotations of the word ‘user’ are somewhat unnecessary. I use porn in the same way I use other forms of culture – for stimulation and entertainment. These, after all, are what culture is for. And make no mistake, porn is a form of culture, just like any other. Just like TV, films, books, computer games, theatre and the visual arts, porn reflects and reflects on the ideas, concerns and attitudes of the culture in which it’s produced.
So why do we treat it so differently? Porn is held to a far higher standard in its representation of women in particular than any other form of cultural expression. Much of the representation of women in porn is incredibly poor, misogynist and cliché and in no way whatsoever do I defend it from those who say that that is unacceptable and must change. Similarly, much mainstream porn is utterly, unbearably racist and this too is intolerable and must change. But these criticisms, so often directed at porn, could so easily be directed at other forms of culture too. The representation of women in so-called ‘torture porn’ films like Hostel and Saw involves precisely the same objectification of the suffering female body and rather than ending with the objectifying ‘money shot’ end with women’s bodies literally cut up into pieces.
The difference between these two is not that women are being represented problematically in one and not in the other, but that one involves sex and the other doesn’t. As a society we are still deeply uncomfortable thinking and talking about sex. Whether this is a hangover from our religious past or part of the consequence of prioritizing the mind over the body in terms of value, we struggle to accept that to be human is, generally speaking, to experience sexual desire. By refusing to accept this part of ourselves we create a division, a hierarchy between things that are sexual and things that are not. We reject from our society those who engage explicitly with their sexuality. We accuse people of having nothing to their identity other than their sexuality if they speak about it. LGBTQI people still face extraordinary prejudice not only for their sexualities, but also for talking about them in public.
When the BBC replaced my title with ‘porn user’ they weren’t being malicious. They absolutely did not intend to strip me of my doctorate. In the heat of a live broadcast these things happen and I don’t feel slighted that my title wasn’t used. I haven’t got a PhD in porn (it’s in science fiction, although I do a lot of research and teaching on gender and sexuality in popular culture) and in many ways my presence on the programme had more to do with being a woman who was prepared to admit to both having been sexually assaulted and to watching porn live on television. Dr Clarissa Smith, who is an academic expert on the subject, was labeled simply ‘Clarissa Smith, Editor ‘Porn Studies’’ and Dr Julia Long, a radical feminist activist, was labeled ‘Author, ‘Anti-Porn’’.
However, it is unfortunate that the moment at which this slip happened is as I confirmed that, yes, I do watch pornography. Replacing my academic title with ‘porn user’ at just that moment feeds into the narrative that says that we can either be intellectual or we can be sexual, but we cannot be both. While this is often a particular problem faced by women academics – women, simply by virtue of our existence, being reduced to sex – it’s also a symptom of a society that refuses to engage with sex, that tries to exclude it from view and that is fundamentally afraid of it. Since the programme lots of people have got in touch to tell me how brave I was for doing it. I appreciate their support, but it shouldn’t be brave to talk about sex in public. Or indeed to talk about sexual assault.
One of the most hideous and truly awful consequences of our refusal to talk about sex is that sexual assault is also excluded from discussion. It is only possible for a child who has been sexually assaulted to be called ‘predatory’ in a society which fundamentally misunderstands that nature of consent. Sex education in this country is basic at best and often includes no discussion of consent: what it is, why it’s important, how to give and receive it and how to refuse it and accept its refusal.
‘No means no’ simply doesn’t cut it in a society in which it is considered seriously impolite to refuse when you are offered things. How many of us have unhappily accepted invitations to parties, dinner, the pub or a relative’s house simply because we knew that refusing would provoke a negative response? Imagine now that that invitation was never even explicitly stated, that the person making the offer simply assumed that you were willing, that in order to refuse you have to be the person to break the taboo against talking about sex as well as provoking the negative response triggered by a refusal.
When we refuse to discuss sex in public we do much more than reinforce a national stereotype. We create an environment in which talking about sexual assault is deemed a sexually provocative act. We also contribute to this when we treat sexual assault as a special category of violence, perpetuated exclusively by men against women and utterly incomparable to any other form of physical violation. It’s not. Being raped is by far the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me. I still struggle with the consequences of it at times, even though it happened over ten years ago. But the awfulness of rape doesn’t exceed the awfulness of murder or torture or other equally violent assault. We treat sexual assault as a special category of violence not because it is more violent than others, but because it involves sex. Victim-blaming – the ways in which our culture tells victims of rape that they, and not their attacker, are responsible for their sexual assault – is in part a consequence of the taboo against talking about sex. To stand up in public and speak about sexual assault is to speak about sex in a society that finds any discussion of sex unseemly.
In this context, talking about my use of porn and my sexual assault on television may have been brave. It may not have a great impact on my academic career – time will tell on that I guess. It may mean that I can’t tell if the stranger looking at me on the tube is wondering about what kind of porn I like to watch or, much worse, if it was watching ‘rape’ fantasy porn that lead to my sexual assault or if they’re just wishing I’d give them my seat.
It was also something that I felt able to do as I benefit from a lot of the ways we categorise people, even as I deal with the negative consequences of some others. I am white, I am young (but not too young), I am cisgendered – meaning my gender identity aligns with that I was assigned at birth – I am middle class and I have had a significant amount of education. These things are not trivial. Sitting on a sofa in the Newsnight studio with nine other white, cisgendered, 21-55 year old, middle-class people talking about pornography was a tremendous privilege. Knowing that I can and will be heard is a privilege. We might have had a much different conversation with a wider array of participants, but beyond the basic necessity of being asked, agreeing to participate in such a debate, requires a degree of confidence that you will be able to speak and be heard and not be utterly reduced to your sexuality – something that happens to black people and trans* people even more commonly than it happens to women.
The conversation about porn needs to be broader and more inclusive in lots of ways. The criticisms leveled at porn frequently reduce all porn to that produced by a few production companies for the mainstream mass market. The mainstream market in this case – and for every other form of culture – being dominated by products targeted at straight, white cisgendered men. Much like the vast majority of mainstream cinema releases, tv programming, advertising and hobby/activity-related magazines – leaving aside the substantial ‘womens’ magazine market which is, in itself a substantial contributor to negative representations of women – mainstream porn is produced on the assumption that the desires of straight, white, cisgendered men are simply more important than everyone else’s. In addition to sidelining everyone else’s desires, perspectives and agency, this reduces the complex desires of its target market to tiresome cliché and stereotype.
But not all porn is the same. There is a significant proportion of pornography produced for gay men. Given that this genre of porn exclusively features men, it’s difficult to see where this fits into arguments about porn leading to or causing violence against women. Independent, ethical and feminist porn producers, individuals and companies are taking considerably more of the porn market each year and through their engagement with a substantially wider range of sexual identities, gender identities, body types and sexual activities are rethinking what porn looks like and what it is for.
Within this context, porn exploring women’s desires and sexual fantasies is taking precedence like never before. This includes fantasies of non-consent. The majority of studies of women’s sexual fantasies places the number of women who acknowledge having fantasies involving non-consensual sex at somewhere between 30 and 50%. Given the difficulties of speaking about sexual desire at all in our society, even more pronounced for women, and the particularly taboo nature of this fantasy it’s reasonable to assume that these percentages are on the low side, but even if they weren’t, that 30% of women have this fantasy makes it something worth discussing.
Sexual consensual non-consent – an agreement between participants that within a specific context and for pre-agreed activities one party will ‘give themselves up’ sexually to the control of another – is similar to other extreme physical activities. When we go on a rollercoaster or jump out of an aeroplane or propel ourselves down a ski-slope we are trusting in the people who made or operate the equipment to care enough for our well being to ensure our safety, while we get to experience an extreme of emotion, boosted by adrenaline, that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to feel. We do this because as human beings we are curious and excited by testing our limits and, as long as our safety is ensured, there is no reason why we shouldn’t explore the boundaries of our sexual experience as much as anything else.
Fantasies of sexual non-consent are crucially fantasies. This means that when we’re talking about porn that caters to these fantasies we are not talking about images of genuine non-consent. Images of genuine non-consent aren’t porn any more than sexual images of children are porn. In both these cases the images are evidence of violent crime and ought to be treated as such. In contrast, enjoying the illusion of a loss of control, usually at the hands of another extremely attractive and desired person or persons and being ‘forced’ to endure multiple orgasms and other sexual delights is about as far from genuine non-consent as you can get. Porn which explores this fantasy from an ethical perspective almost always includes a section at the beginning featuring the ‘victim’ explaining that they are consenting and usually extremely excited at having the opportunity to fulfill their fantasy and often includes section at the end reflecting on the experience.
In addition to this, one of the significant benefits brought by the internet is the opening up of access to the means of production and distribution of culture. It has always been possible for individuals and small self-funded groups to produce and distribute their own work, but with widespread online access it has become considerably easier in recent years. Youtube has become a place for aspiring musicians to post videos of their performances, e-books have made self publishing a genuine route to developing a readership and with it potentially a deal with a hard copy publisher. Similarly, amateur porn has expanded massively and people uploading videos of themselves engaging in an enormously wide range of sexual activities has significantly broadened the possibilities for what we can see.
To reduce all of these explorations of sex and sexuality to ‘extreme hardcore pornography’ involving aggressive men perpetrating violent sexual acts against passive women is to duplicate the same obliteration of women’s (and other non-straight or non-cisgendered men’s) desires and perspectives that porn is so often accused of. Engaging in genuine detailed critique of those poor representations is vital. To do this we must talk about sex.
Censorship is not, and will never be, a good response to poor representation as it invariably ends up being used by those in positions of power to enforce their views and prejudices onto those who are not. Leaving aside the fact of the poor success rate of internet filtering – the British library’s external wi-fi filtering system recently blocked access to Hamlet on the basis of its violent content – it is also certainly the case that a blanket censorship of pornography makes no distinction on the basis of quality of representation. The solution to bad pornography is not, to quote Annie Sprinkle, to make no porn, but to try to make better porn. This is what those outside of the mainstream of pornography are trying to do.
The real and pressing issue to do with pornography is its production. The anecdotal reports of those who have worked in mainstream porn suggest that the lack of understanding and respect for consent that exists across our society is also prevalent in the big porn production companies. This too is a symptom of our discomfort with sex. Laws and legislation relating to working environments are very clear about contractual agreements. In order to be required to perform an act by your employer you must have agreed to do so in writing in advance and you must be allowed to do so free from harassment. There is no reason why these laws should not be enforced on a porn set any less than they would be enforced in an office or in Tesco’s. Treating any form of work that involves or engages with sex as if it ought not to be covered by workplace legislation contributes to an environment in which porn performers can feel pressured or coerced into activities that they didn’t sign up to. The implication here is that by working as a porn performer you give up your right to withhold consent, by agreeing to sexual activity in exchange for pay at all, you are asking for whatever you get.
Working in porn is different to working in any other industry for the same reason that rape is treated differently to other violations of person, for the same reason that porn is held to a higher standard than all other forms of culture, for the same reason that it is brave to admit to being a porn user – because our society is utterly, deeply, pathologically afraid of sex. The only way for this to change is for all of us to speak, to learn to feel comfortable discussing the extraordinary range of sex and sexual activities that human beings enjoy, to teach children and teenagers that sex is something wonderful and fun when it’s pursued consensually and to judge representations of sex, whatever context we find them in, on the basis of their quality, rather than just their existence.
So yes, I am happy to admit to being a porn user, but given that none of us is simply one thing, that we all inhabit multiple identities, reducing anyone to their sexual activity is deeply problematic. I am, in addition to being a porn user, a teacher, a daughter, a mediocre but enthusiastic ice skater, a girlfriend, a formula 1 fan, an activist and an academic, along with a whole raft of other things. Choosing the most pertinent of our identities to emphasize can be difficult – knowing which parts of ourselves are most relevant in a given context requires understanding the context fully, something which we are rarely able to do. However, it is significant that being prepared to talk about our sexuality and desire often comes at the expense of being given the opportunity to talk about anything else. Under the circumstances of the Newsnight discussion perhaps ‘academic and porn user’ would have been a better label, although I must admit I find ‘Dr Porn user’ rather appealing.
A full clip of the show can be found on youtube:
[…] Roberts speaks of her experience here in this blog post where she states: “Replacing my academic title with ‘porn user’ at just that moment feeds […]