i just saw someone reblog your post that was kind of outlining something you wanted to write about the reflection of what porn means about society and i would love to read that. you're absolutely correct that most analysis of porn and society come from swerfs and terfs and they're absolutely terrible if you look beyond surface-level anything. oh but also please never make me read the phrase "regular degular people fornicating" ever again lol
So…thank you for waiting. The first thing I’d like to say is…*clears throat*
TERFS/SWERFS absolutely suck and their awful rhetoric and invasive presence obstructs discussion of women’s right. TERFS are the footwomen of the patriarchy and absolutely brainwashed, useless voices.
Now that that has been said…
Regular degular poeple fornicaiting. :D
Okay enough silliness, here’s my point. Usually critique of porn comes in two main flavors: “Porn is terrible and inherently sexist, a perverse product of patriarchy” and “All porn is good, actually and critiquing it is prudish and un-progressive”. And I would like to, as usual, submit that the actual truth is somewhere in the middle:
Porn is entirely neutral, and what porn looks like in a society has everything to do with the content of the people’s minds. The content of their minds is heavily influenced by that society’s social mores, habits, etc.
TL;DR - porn is a product of culture. if the porn is bad, that’s the culture’s fault.
The idea that porn is bad and wrong, all of it, is nothing but an extension of the sexual shame colonizers have been peddling along with their sham Christian moralism and oppression for centuries. Our culture fancies itself very open, free and liberated- hence porn and violence can be found in spades bc ~FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION~ but literally everywhere you look, people have complexes about sexuality that are deeply rooted in sexual shame. I want to note here that repression almost ALWAYS causes not an overall lessening of the repressed subject, but a diverted (perverted here is a relative word) and intensified expression of that subject elsewhere.
As a sex worker, when I came into the fetish world, I had the assumption that fetishes in general were like, a conscious type of self exploration done in the spirit of play. What I found was that ‘fetish’ is sometimes that but generally an unconscious mess of psychological expression that people think they don’t need to be critical of because it’s fantasy. To keep this short, most of the fetishes that could have a cathartic or expansive effect on a person’ are actually just sort of like, dead-ended expressions of the world we live in instead of being creative ways beyond it.
Ultimately these ‘fetishes’ and ‘fantasies’ are really anything but. They aren’t fanciful non realities at all- they’re actually sexualized versions of the oppressions we all know and suffer. And that’s horrible.
The issue with porn, then, is that it reflects the minds and desires of the average person involved with its making and consumption. And in a world where (mostly but not all straight, mostly but not all ((but really really mostly here)) white) men disproportionately have voice, power and resources, then they are who porn is about and for.
‘Porn’ is terrible becuause a society with this kind of power imbalance is terrible.
THere’s an aspect of the mind/body where like…anything you like or are attracted to, there’s a part of you that can eroticize that feeling of attraction into something that may be experienced as more and more sexual the more it’s repressed/ignored. If you think of love as attraction, and attraction as neutral, then you can understand how, then, the very things our patriarchal society loves, celebrates and represents can end up eroticized into sexual fantasy and content. If power is good, then expressions of power feel good, somewhere in the mind/body. If violence is good, then expressions of violence feel good. If maintaining male dominance is good, then expressions of male dominance feel good. The simple fact is that if an individual is taught that expressing some quality *is good*, that thing is remembered as so because of the positive reinforcement.
Somewhere in their mind, the conditions of that moral quality are associated with feelings of pleasure, positive stimulation, excitement, arousal (think neutrally here as ‘increased excitatory interest’), and feelings are felt by the body. In a certain way, then, the production/creation of porn based on patriarchal male desire and its offspring (fetishization of feminine subjugation, fetishization of racism, fetishization of gender roles, fetishization of sexual shame as a domination tool, fetishization of abuse etc), creates a feedback spiral that ends up ritualizing and reinforcing those things.So we lose a huge opportunity for healing and growth as a society when either of the following positions are taken:1) Porn is bad (sinful, dirty) and shouldn’t exist– this will only further repression and reinforce sexual shame.
2) Porn is good and also 100% fantasy/meaningless fun. Critiquing or questioning it is oppressive, prudish– this is what people with unresolved mental issues say to keep from having to examine what their porn consumption/fantasies are saying
The fact that pretty much all porn that exists in main (and many side) streams is fetishization of exploitation, celebration of male dominance, the degradation of the feminine or eroticized personal trauma is really really telling. But we can’t do anything about that in terms of helping people grow into a healthier way of experiencing/expressing sexuality if we go ‘Porn is bad so let’s get rid of it! Shame shame! Criminalize!’
Speaking for experience, people, specifically men, can actually be trained away from harmful porn and harmful positive associations (being turned on by violence is not, actually, ideal) and to something more relative. Of course they can- recovery is human, people change and relearn things. The complication here though is that the porn industry and the broad presence of mainstream and even indie porn exist within a capitalist market. Capitalist markets are by their very nature a) exploitative and b) manipulative, focused on controlling and exacerbating the consumers needs and desires. So the porn itself, its content and marketing, will overtly to explicitly imply to its viewers/buyers that they need it, that it is good the more you consume, that its extremity and ‘extra’ness is what makes it good, and that it is an addictive indulgence.
I have a lot more I could say about this but it would have to go all into fetish, content and psychology so I also want to say this: Understand that this is not a situation in which men actually benefit. In fact it gets them to perpetuate their own trauma, their own internal oppression. Encouraging them to mistreat their bodies, to have a dysfunctional view of sexuality, to degrade the feminine (something ALL people have) via the degradation of women– this by extension harms their minds deeply. Porn as it is is simply a recycling and eroticization, and extension of society at large. Thus it of course simultaneously revels in the exploitation of the feminine and turns men into tools of sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic oppression, coding into them the positive reinforcement of social mores so that they support and perpetuate them.
Lastly: The idea that what one fetishizes/consumes doesn’t say anything about them is FALSE and its often a subconscious expression of the mind aimed at resolution. Whether its fanfic, art or videos it’s all porn and yes, ones fantasy mind is actually a manifestation of their mind in general. The world of fantasy is meaningful, actually.
