Charlie Glickman maps the sexist anti-porn arguments of radical feminist Robert Jensen.
I recently attended a lecture by Robert Jensen, noted radical feminist, anti-pornography activist, and one of the producers of The Price of Pleasure, an anti-porn film that I’ve written about here and here. I went because I wanted to see what he was like in person. I’ve read some of his work, and I figured it would be useful to check his talk out.
I have quite a lot to say about his lecture. In fact, there’s so much to untangle that this post is split into multiple pages, which is a first for me. But it isn’t until all of the different threads are teased out that the larger pattern becomes apparent. So stick with me and see how it all fits together.
A Little Background
Jensen’s lecture was hosted by St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. It’s a Catholic college, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the name of the lecture series was “Defining You”, rather than something that conveys a message of “helping you define yourself.” Not that that has anything to do with Jensen directly, but it does set the stage for his perspective on porn.
There were about 90-100 people present. Almost all of them looked female, most of them appeared White, and there was quite an age range. Several college students came with their mothers, to judge by conversations I overheard.
I decided to record the lecture because I wanted to be able to quote Jensen accurately. Anything that appears in quotes below is what he said verbatim, although I cleaned up any extraneous ums and such. There weren’t many of those, however, since Jensen is an excellent speaker.
Gender Essentialism
Right at the start, Jensen began by thanking St. Mary’s College and the Women’s Resource Center for giving him an excuse to get out of Texas. Apparently, he thinks it’s important to make it clear that although he teaches at the University of Texas, he’s not a Texan. I’m a little curious about that, especially since he reiterated it at the end, as you’ll see later.
Jensen then explained that he wasn’t going to show any images of the porn that he planned to discuss. I think this was great since it’s important to make sure that the audience knows what it’s getting. But he took that as an opportunity to do something interesting. Here’s what he said:
“First is to let you know that I’m not going to be showing any images, no actual pornography. I get different kinds of reactions. Sometimes, the women in the audience breathe a sigh of relief. And sometimes, the men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”
He then shared a story of one time that he said the same thing and three “big guys” who had sat in the front row looked at each other and left.
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Some people will point out that men need to learn to lean into their discomfort when talking about sexism and porn, and I would 100% agree with that. But if the goal of an exercise is to show that discussions of porn are about “our own lives,” there are many, many ways to do that and build safety for all participants instead of just most of them.
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I’ll take him at his word that a few men come to his talks with the expectation of watching porn for free. I don’t think it’s all that common, and I’m willing to bet my house that it doesn’t happen nearly as often as the frequency with which women feel anxiety at the prospect of seeing explicit images or relief when they hear that they won’t. Leaving aside the possibility that some men might also feel relief or that some women might enjoy the sorts of porn he talks about, this was a pretty slick thing that Jensen did. He managed to imply that men come to his talks in order to see porn as often as women feel relief about not watching porn.
Of course, he didn’t say that in so many words, but to put those two ideas so closely together with the same qualifier (not, for example, saying that “every now and then, a few men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”), made it sound like those two things are comparably frequent. It’s like the patter of a three card monte dealer, distracting you so you don’t notice the sleight of hand. Since it made some of the women laugh, it looked to me as if he was creating group cohesion among the women at the expense of the men present. It also made me wonder how many of the women in the room were considering whether my motivation for coming to the lecture was to watch free porn, and what effects that has on Jensen’s audiences.
Attacking Men
After a brief disclaimer about why a man is talking about feminism, explaining that he’s using a feminist critique rather than a religious critique (an especially useful distinction to make at a Catholic university), and situating himself in the lineage of Dworkin and Dines, Jensen further built cohesion among the women at the cost of the men’s safety.
“Now it’s late at night and you’ve all had a busy day, so we’re going to have a little audience participation to make sure we’re all in the game. So the first thing I want to do is sort of chart the landscape of pornography with which we’re familiar, to get some sense of where we’re all sitting in the world. So the first thing I want to do to help us with that, is I want all of the men to line up own here and one by one, I want you to come up to the microphone and describe the pornography that you most recently masturbated to.”
lots of laughs, and nobody comes up
“No volunteers for that one? OK, that was a joke. Here’s the reason I said that, is to recognize that when we talk about a subject like pornography, we’re not talking about some abstract subject out there. We’re talking about our own lives. We know that that is the primary use that men put pornography to. I don’t say that standing above. I have my own experiences with that.”
As an educator, I can see how an exercise like this might be really useful, if enough safety has been built into a class. But this was a lecture, without any ground rules, expectations of confidentiality, or anything else that skilled teachers often do when exploring challenging topics. There also wasn’t any information given to the women about how to respond—were they going to tut tut us? Shame us? Laugh at us?
Telling the men that we’re going to come to the front of the room and make ourselves vulnerable without creating ground rules or group expectations of behavior made the experience even more unsafe. It certainly made the women laugh, which looked to me as if it helped them bond more. Whether that was Jensen’s intention or not, it exacerbated the sense that this was an us versus them experience. Further, creating group cohesion by denigrating or shaming some of the people in the audience is simply not how one creates a space for participants to feel safe enough to explore the edges of their comfort zones.
Some people will point out that men need to learn to lean into their discomfort when talking about sexism and porn, and I would 100% agree with that. But if the goal of an exercise is to show that discussions of porn are about “our own lives,” there are many, many ways to do that and build safety for all participants instead of just most of them. In addition, it’s not clear to me how this joke actually demonstrates the personal nature of porn. I can think of a half-dozen ways to make that point more clearly without demonizing men.
Sweeping Statements
Next, Jensen led a brief exercise during which he asked audience members to finish the sentence “Pornography is … ” In order to give people “plausible deniability,” he invited us to respond either with the words that we think of or with words that someone else might use. That would have been fine, except that he specifically said:
“You can complete that sentence in the way that you believe pornography is, or you can complete the sentence as you expect someone you know would. Your brother, your father, your uncle.”
Not your sister, your mother, or your aunt. This creates an expectation of a dichotomy—there’s how you (presumably, a woman) will respond and then there’s how you imagine men will respond. Of course, there are some pretty clear gender-based trends in terms of how folks might answer, but they’re not universal. What message does this send to a young woman who thinks that porn is awesome? And for the men in the audience, why weren’t we invited to complete the sentence as the women in our lives might?
Implicit in these instructions is the clear message that Jensen was addressing the women in the room, rather than including the men. I absolutely understand the value of creating spaces for women to come together to explore these topics, but as far as I saw on the website, the event wasn’t listed as women-only. Further, neither of the two people associated with the university who made announcements (one of whom was a man) nor the person who introduced Jensen said anything about the event being specifically for women. And lastly, Jensen didn’t say anything along those lines, even though he certainly knew that some men were there (he and I chatted briefly about the fact that the time it was supposed to start was listed incorrectly on the website). So there was no reason for me to expect that I was intruding on a women-only space, or that Jensen wasn’t going to be addressing the entire audience.
In that light, the fact that Jensen was talking specifically to the women is especially significant. By doing so, Jensen deepened the split among the audience along gender lines, which exacerbates the sorts of sexism that he’s says he’s fighting. That’s especially ironic, given that he next explained that, in his view, “pornography is what the end of the world looks like” because he thinks that porn shows a world without empathy, without “decent human connection.” It seems to me that doing three activities that widen the chasm between men and women gets in the way of creating empathy and connection. If you want to help people build healthy relationships, shaming and vilifying are not particularly effective. And given that all three exercises were deeply rooted in the notion that men watch porn and women don’t, they reinforced gender essentialism, which I find particularly insulting.
Part of a Larger Pattern
All of this fits into a pattern of behavior that showed up over and over throughout the rest of Jensen’s lecture. It’s unfortunate, because he does have some really valid points to make. By choosing to frame his lecture in ways that reify the idea that “men are like this, and women are like that,” he might as well have done the whole Mars/Venus thing. In my experience as a sex educator, bridges are built when we start seeing the commonalities we share. I’m certainly not suggesting that we’re all the same, but rather, by talking as if the gender split is universal, Jensen did more to hinder the development of the empathy and connection that he says he wants than he did to create it.
This was previously published at Charlie Glickman, PhD.
Read more on Men and Pornography on The Good Life.
The Men and Pornography series is the product of the joint call from elephant journal Love and Relationships and The Good Life on The Good Men Project.
Image credit: Katherine Sandoz / Facebook / Twitter
About Charlie Glickman
Great post, Charlie. Effectively countering the vilifying language endemic to commenters on both ‘sides’ of the gender debate (i.e. gynocentric feminists and androcentric MRAs) is one of the biggest challenges facing gender egalitarians.
Yeah, well, that figures.
That said, his crusade is lost. The internet has changed everything. There’s no going back into the bottle for that genie.
The resources now required to bottle back up the pornography genie are beyond the resources that any western government would be willing or able to throw at the problem. We cannont contain child porn, there’s no way we’re going to contain mainstream porn.
The ideological battles can continue ad infinitum, but the war is already lost.
That said, man bashing will be sport for decades to come. Porn will just be one more rotten tomato to throw.
So it goes…
I haven’t heard of Robert Jensen, but the gender essentialist, divisive behaviour you describe is certainly familiar to me — from both sides of the aisle and in all sorts of contexts. It always bothers me, so thanks for raising the issue!
Also my thanks for raising the issue in such a erudite and coherent manner.
It’s always a joy to read these essays on ‘The Good Men Project’.
That’s very gratifying to hear, Aula! Thanks! I get a great deal from reading The Good Men Project, too.
Doesn’t he know women look at porn?
Why are so many anti-porn crusaders so detached from what men think, do, see, like in porn??
His argument would be that porn is predominantly consumed and made for men. This makes it a male-dominated industry. Although you’re right on the clear fact that women consume porn, I think he is right in asserting that the pornography industry largely is produced for men.
And while I’m not sure I totally agree with “detached”, I think the answer to your question is that they view porn as a single type of output. They view all types of pornography the same. I think this is a mistake.
A brilliant article, rad fems constantly ignore their own sexism. A man who claims to be a feminist (Explain that one) simply adds misogyny to ignorance.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we’re all the same, but rather, by talking as if the gender split is universal, Jensen did more to hinder the development of the empathy and connection that he says he wants than he did to create it.
well mining and more importantly maintaining a grievance (whether real or not) is a profitable business.
fine article
correction: maintaining a sense of grievance
Hi Charlie. Thanks for the piece. I’ve just finished Jensen’s “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity” and am not surprised by the content of his lecture. I found his book to be quite simplistic at times, embodying all of the more depressing elements of gender separatism that we’ve all come to know and love. In the book he talks about doing away with any notion of masculinity and manhood. Not a redefinition of it, but an absolution of the gender binary; apparently, to achieve a singularity. I’m not sure what his utopia would look like…?
However, I found that the arguments for his views were quite valid. I often was nodding my head, yet I wanted to reject his conclusions. I found myself then questioning this reaction. Isn’t this exactly what Jensen is talking about? He claims that us men will find it difficult to accept and give up our privilege, and that we may get angry when we are challenged on the ways we use women and pornography. To your accusation of sexism during his talk, he would state that you were merely whining because you had been justly robbed of your power that you thought should be granted you by virtue of your sex alone. I’m not sure I agree, but it has given me pause for thought.
You are right to paint him in the same vein as Andrea Dworkin and I would be curious to know if he came off as arrogant and cynical about men as he does in his book. But I also know that what he had to convey about the ways men use pornography and contribute to the continued objectification of women really resonated with me. What irks me though, is – unlike Dines, who explicitly confined her examination of porn in “Pornland” to one specific type of porn – Jensen seems to homogenise pornography, or rather judge it all by the worst of it. This is silly. He seemingly rejects any form of sexual expression which doesn’t entail a full spiritual (in a non-theistic sense) offering, decrying sex for pleasure/fun/curing boredom.
There is a lot more I would love to write in response to Jensen’s thoughts. I think it is great that he has caused such a reaction in us, for his ideas are provocative and deserve discussion.
Apologies for my rambling. I’ve had a few wines.
Charlie, I find it particular interesting how microscopic your analysis was of the entire event. When you provided background, you took some amount of issue that the lecture series was titled “Defining You”, where you would have liked it to be more about “helping you define yourself”. I can understand your sensitivity to the title. No one wants to be defined through someone else. So my question is do you also monitor the messages from porn regarding how it defines men and women and sexual roles and relationships? There is a lot of stuff in pornography itself through the realm of fantasy that as a woman, reads to me, as defining what my sexuality should look like, what my body should look like, what sexual acts I should be engaging in, to be considered sexy. Do you speak up against those things as well? I find in a lot of porn that women are usually largely focused on and described for their body parts or their sexual behaviors. I think this can happen to men too in porn but I think we can agree that it’s largely something that is more so, done to women. Porn after all, while having a female market, still largely caters to men’s fantasies first right? Such phrases and names like “good girls”, “bad girls”, “sluts”, “whores”, “bitches” exist in porn on a regular basis. These are very much words that define roles women should play or not play based on what a particular man’s fantasy is at any given point. Do you believe these to be healthy ways to describe women or unhealthy ways? Do you think that describing women in this manner in porn is really any better then a lecture series titled “Defining You”?
You mentioned how many people were present in the audience. You also mentioned their race and ages. I have also found in porn that the industry largely caters to a white male audience where women are largely white women. While porn stars of other ethnicities exist, it is not to the degree that white, young women seem to be upheld to a standard of attraction. What are your thoughts on that?
Although, differing from your experience with the ages of the women in the audience, I find that while some older women exist in porn, porn largely focuses on younger women. Younger women is where it’s at. That is mostly what most men want. Younger, white women. If you don’t agree with this, let me know.
You even poked fun at Jensen for making a joke about getting out of Texas. Really? Because it’s uncommon for lectures to start off their lecture making a joke? I currently have moved to Florida, but I am originally from New Jersey. I love telling people I am from NJ. That’s where my heart is. Should anyone else be offended because of that? Should Florida people be insulted? I don’t think so.
You didn’t enjoy Jensen’s joke about the three “big guys” that came to one of his lectures. Fair enough. I can understand not liking a joke that insinuates that the only reason men come to his lectures is to see porn. On the flip side of that, I see men make jokes about porn all the time among themselves or infront of women. I hear men regularly say things like, “Of course I look at porn, I’m a man right?”, usually followed by a smile. Which leads me to believe that a lot of men sexually identify themselves and their masculinity, often times, through pornography. Perhaps instead of specifically targeting Jensen as a lecture on porn, maybe we should ask ourselves why men as a whole make jokes about porn. To feel better about using it? To feel more like men that are like other guys? I don’t know. But I know jokes made about porn and men isn’t just something Jensen does. It’s something I regularly see men do.
You saw Jensen’s exercise in asking the men to come up to the microphone to talk about the type of porn they watch as an exercise in shaming men or laughing at them. But I think Jensen was making a point about how honest men are about what they are doing behind close doors. We talk a lot about porn on this website but I still don’t think that most people are truly honest about what they are doing in those moments all by themselves with the door closed tight when they are looking at porn. And I think Jensen was trying to highlight that. I don’t think men are truly honest about the kind of porn they are watching and how much they are watching it with people, especially the women in their own lives. I don’t think Jensen was trying to shame men, I think he was trying to showcase the lack of honesty about what exactly people do behind closed doors.
I am also very interested in your mention of men being laughed at or shamed. No one should be laughed at or shamed. I understand that men want respect, to be valued you and not to be laughed at or mocked. Those are fair wants and desires. But don’t you think women want the same thing? Do you think women feel respected when their men or men in general are looking at “ Cheerleader Sluts: Volume 100”? DO you think women feel respected when women are being called “dirty whores and bitches”? Do you think women feel respected when porn largely compromises young, white, big breast women?
I know for myself that pornography causes shame in me. Shame that I don’t live up to what men really want women to be. Shame that I won’t be forever young. Shame that I don’t have a perfect body that a lot of men clearly wish women to have. Shame that I don’t meet the expectations and wants of what men really wished women were. But rarely do I see men actually care about that kind of shame. Rarely do I see men get or understand how much porn itself shames and belittles women and sexuality. Rarely do I see men try to understand how it feels to be a regular woman in this world in the face of billions upon billions of images of every sexual taste and woman a man could want. LIke we are just ice cream flavors to be picked based on what men want most out of us.
You aren’t the only one afraid of being shamed or laughed at. You aren’t the only one that gets humiliated. I just wish you were more fair in acknowledging the ways pornography itself can shame and humiliate. Not just Jensen, a man that speaks up against the industry because he doesn’t agree with it and sees something in it he doesn’t like. Jensen is one man. But porn is a multi-billion dollar business rooted in things that tell women they simply aren’t enough or good enough.
Yeah I get it. Jensen is the big bad wolf attacking pornography. But what does that make porn then? Equal and fair and wonderful? It treats women well? It treats the idea of femininity and sexuality well? It treats men well? Is Jensen really the biggest problem here? Is he even a problem?
You don’t like how men and women and sexuality has been represented by Jensen.
I don’t like how men and women and sexuality are represented by porn.
So many men had a positive response to your article here on Jensen.
But a lot of men often disagree with me regarding porn.
What I have learned is that men are very self aware and sensitive to the things that make them feel shamed, humiliated or disrespected but I don’t think most men are ready yet to give that same response in return to women regarding the issue of pornography or things women face. When I try to express these same feelings, that you’ve expressed, these same discrepancies that I see in porn, that you’ve seen in Jensen and his lecture, men largely are vocal or silently disagree with me. They think porn is largely good. But surely, just like so many men have argued with me, that all porn isn’t all bad, then surely, with Jensen, I am sure you can see and even understand and relate to some of his points too right?
I understand and relate to you wanting a fair discussion on porn and not wanting your gender attacked or belittled. I want that too. But a lot of men around here seem to be very aware of injustices they suffer and very dismissive of women when they try to express the injustices they face, especially when it comes to the topic of pornography. And this article highlights that even more for me.
But don’t worry Charlie. No matter what Jensen says, you guys still win. You got a billion dollar industry that caters to your dreams of what you want women to be. You got an entire industry that self defines who women should be in their sexuality and looks . You got a billion dollar industry where it’s okay to humilate and shame women and call them names. Where it’s even considered positive because it draws orgasms for some. And if someone is having an orgasm to something, it’s not ever negative. It’s okay to treat women in all kinds of ways in porn simply because it’s porn. And if as woman, you feel humilation or shame seeing the way women in general are depicted through porn, that’s your problem. You’re just insecure or a prude. Or because other forms of porn exist that other people might describe as “respectful”, that means how women are largely depicted in porn is okay. But Jensen, how dare he have a lecture that is titled “Defining You”, that caters to mostly white women, of all ages, where some mom’s apparently dragged their daughters too, that made a joke about getting out of Texas, who asked men to come up and talk about their porn likes……. Yeah okay I get it. Jensen didn’t address the issue or treat men with the respect *you* would have wanted. DO you really think most porn largely treats women with the respect and love they want?