[Depicted: a sign that says "we demand sex workers' rights"]
Kat Banyard is apparently a leading young feminist who is Intelligent! and Quiet! and Not Sexy In That Liz Lemon Kind Of Way Where Straight Dudes Can Congratulate Themselves On The Progressiveness Of Their Boners Without Actually Liking A Girl Who’s (Eww) Not Conventionally Attractive!* Or so her profile in the Guardian tells us. She would also like to tell us about the evils of the sex industry.
Fun facts! Here are the groups that are allowed to talk about sex work:
1) Sex workers
2) Former sex workers
3) Academics who have respectfully studied sex workers with proper care for their agency and voices
4) Psychics who can tell what the sex workers are thinking
5) Okay, I’m out of ideas
6) NOT KAT BANYARD
I am fucking sick and fucking tired of how sex workers’ voices are the ones that are continually and constantly ignored in the discussion of sex work. Clearly there is absolutely nothing problematic about talking over a bunch of mostly-marginalized mostly-women, believing you are more of an expert on their lives they are, and claiming to be a fucking feminist. Everyone else needs to shut the fuck up about sex work until sex workers are a part of the conversation. In deference to my beliefs on this matter, I am not going to talk any more about sex workers’ rights except to point everyone to Lori Adorable and Audacia Ray, and instead discuss this.
Banyard regards the sex industry’s male consumers as victims too. “I think their sexuality has been co-opted by a predatory sex industry, which distorts and exploits it for profit. A new generation of boys, the vast majority have watched hardcore pornography on the internet, so we have a generation of boys coming through whose first sexual experiences will be vicariously participating in prostitution. They are watching filmed prostitution and getting their ideas about sex from it. This is an industry dedicated to finding ways of getting men to come back and keep coming back for more, so it tends to be increasingly violent to keep upping that response.”
Another way of looking at it would be less charitable. Offered limitless choice, it turns out that what men really want is the most violent, degrading, misogynist porn imaginable. Does that tell us something about men?
Well, let’s see here. The first time I read porn on the Internet I was eleven; by the time I was thirteen I was writing porn, which was one of my major hobbies throughout high school . What horrific damage did it wreak on my sexual life?
Self-acceptance. The vocabulary to conceptualize myself as queer, a sadist, a submissive, rather than just knowing that something was weird about my sexuality. Greater familiarity with sexual anatomy and how to safely and pleasurably perform several sex acts. An appreciation for the diversity of human sexuality: some people were trans or poly or whatever, and that was cool. A better understanding than most people of how consent worked and the difference between fantasy and reality. Orgasms. Lots and lots of orgasms.
I’m not saying that it was perfect, but porn gave me a hell of a better sex education than school did.
“But Ozy,” you might say, “that’s different. You wrote fanfic, she’s talking about hardcore porn.” So? The principle is the same. I see no obvious reason why reading about people fucking is a-okay but watching people fuck leads to the oppression of women, the destruction of healthy male sexuality, and the mass murder of small adorable kittens. When porn teaches people that women are naturally hairless, that sex usually ends in a facial, or that lesbians exist to get straight men off, the solution is not to ban porn; the solution is to make better porn. I’ve talked before about how a lot of porn is legitimately awful. That doesn’t mean that the concept of porn is awful.
Second, that thing about “the most violent, degrading, and misogynist porn imaginable”? Sure, you can find violent, degrading, and misogynist porn (hi, Bang Bus). But you know what? You can find balloon porn! You can find enema porn! You can find that one picture of dragons fucking cars! That doesn’t mean that all men get off to dragons fucking cars while getting an enema and sitting on a balloon.
There’s this odd idea anti-porn feminists have that violent, degrading, female-submissive sex is The Sexiest Sex and that if we don’t control men by banning porn they’ll all only be interested in violent, degrading, female-submissive sex. It kind of reminds me of the insistence of some homophobes that only constant homophobia keeps all straight men from running off and taking it up the bum from a big burly guy in leather. Most vanilla people aren’t interested in violent, degrading sex, just like most straight people are not particularly interested in sex with people of the same gender. You don’t have to try to keep them not interested, they just don’t.
And you know what? Even if you like violent, degrading, and misogynistic porn, that doesn’t mean you’re a violent misogynist who wants to degrade women. I mean, not unless you think every toppy BDSMer who likes women is a violent misogynist who wants to degrade women, in which case… props for consistency I guess? It is an observable fact that many people of all genders can enjoy hitting people in the bedroom and know that hitting random people is still wrong, can have rape fantasies while being deeply respectful of consent and boundaries in the real world, can think it’s hot to call a woman a slut and still treat her as their equal. The problem is not the fantasies; the problem is the inability to respect consent and distinguish reality from fantasy.
Finally, I had to keep myself from writing “Kat Dennings” about ten million times, so I’m going to finish up with a picture of Kat Dennings because YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD. 
*The official policy of NSWATM is that NSWATM is in support of all kinds of boners, but finds it highly tiresome when people feel the need to congratulate themselves on how non-oppressive their boners are and when conventionally attractive women are presented as Not Sexy. (Also that “boner” is now officially a term that applies to all genitals.)
Photo– msmornington/Flickr.
Other photo– Matt Sayles/AP.
About ozyfrantz
I don’t get why it’s so hard for people to distinguish between porn as a concept and porn as it exists in mainstream culture. I mean, I know that written porn gets ignored, and fanfic particularly dismissed (hmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that those are both areas often dominated by women?), but literally EVERYTHING GOOD about my approach to sex and sexuality (actually, pretty much all the same things you listed) was learned from or supported by written pornography, including my introduction to and acceptance of progressive/queer/feminist visual porn.
It just occurred to me that treating porn like a monolithic Evil That Must Be Exterminated functions the same way anti-choice people’s insistence on banning abortion works, or the same way the ‘war on drugs’ works – when you ban something that people REALLY WANT, you don’t do anything except give the people who have it the power to set whatever price and conditions they want. If you give people better options, they will take them!
But to do so in this case would require specific, targeted efforts to limit people’s ability to produce the kind of porn that actually is dehumanizing and exploitative. And that’s a lot harder than just saying “porn is bad!”, as it means taking a look at our cultural practices that accept the degradation of women in other situations, often a lot more subtly. This shit doesn’t exist in a void, yo.
There is one form of written porn that isn’t completely ignored: Steamy Romance Novels, You Know, The Kind With Really Explicit And Detailed Sex Scenes In Them. The problem is, romance novels in general are treated as a lesser form of writing than pretty much everything else–partly because they’re generally written by women, and the book-publishing-and-critiquing industry has a serious hate-on for female authors in any genre.
As for mostly written by women….
Well, the author names on the books are generally female-sounding, but I’ve noticed that the racier the content, the less information given about the authors and the more the names sound like pseudonyms. I suspect some of those really racy authors are actually men writing under female pseudonyms. No, no proof, just a hunch. Those stories may be more a product of male minds than we want to believe….
Eh, one of my closest friends is pretty involved with Romance Novels in her work. Actually, until she started Law School this past fall, it WAS her work. It’s a pretty female-dominated field. Most authors tend to employ pen names and obfuscate their bios because of the stigma that still goes along with the industry. When growing up (not long ago) I had a childhood friend whose mother was a romance novelist, and it was the sort of thing that was whispered around town. It wasn’t life-changing and there certainly weren’t town hall meetings called to “stomp out the smut”, but there was an ever-present danger of being outed and attracting the sort of negative attention that forced families to move in smaller towns.
My friend was actually drawn to the industry of romance novels specifically because of the female-centric voice in regards to the erotica. Nothing is ever perfect, but there does exist the entire, HUGE industry of peddling to female sexual fantasy that often gets ignored when we discuss pornography. I’m sure it could (and probably has) been broken down and explored far more effectively than I could in a few paragraphs.
A lot of people don’t understand that the kind of porn people get off to isn’t necessarily something they would actually want to try in real life, which is weird considering I’m pretty sure everyone watches porn on the internet. Anecdotal evidence: I like the dragons fucking cars pictures, but I have no desire to become a dragon and put my schlong in a tailpipe. Tailpipes have too much nasty brown stuff in ‘em.
Really? She actually knows that men like the most misogynistic porn? Even if that is true, how should she possibly know that?
It occurs to me that maybe a mainstream cultural tradition of erotica might be a good thing.
‘You cannot commidify consent’
OR CAN YOU? Even if that is true, how could anybody possibly know that?
I’m also bothered by the anger directed against plastic surgery, and other beauty-related stuff. It’s certainly a huge issue, what with the whole body image problem, eating disorders, and disproportionate, and the superstimulus leads to people thinking they are ugly even when they are average and people like the way they look. However, there seems to be this never-questioned narrative of surrender to biology, that all people MUST love their body and never hope to transcend, etc. And of course these people cast our subtle technology as chopping up one’s body with knives. How might the slander the nanotechnology of the world to come?
Frankly I don’t see how Sex and the City hurts men. Mostly that it eventually mutated into utterly horribleness.
Can ANYbody create a test as to whether a sexual relationship is exploitative? She seems kind of like an Oppression Essentialist.
Interested by her non-angry-ness. That’s unusual.
I don’t think I need to remind people that our larger sexual culture is pretty messed up too. Consent is often an afterthought, as is sexual health and safety. Many young people deliberately get drunk before hooking up and having sex at all is equated with irresponsibility. There of course is the pro traditional chastity groups who insist that there be no sex outside of marriage. Few people have ever actually done that, even within the religious subculture that pushes that idea, but hypocrisy doesn’t slow them. They try to block anything that could reduce the problems the sexually active might face. If 10 more people get aids it’s worth it if 1 person lives up their ideal. Often the only voice of opposition is well, Bang Bus and company who seem to revel in the sense of irresponsibility and degradation.
I agree whole-heartedly. It’s like society thinks that violence is awesome and OK and totally never traumatizing ever ever, but sex is Dirty and Wrong and something we should never even imply happens in media for anyone under 18.
There’s a related, equally-bizarre idea that a violent scene from Japanese anime is somehow less violent or more “age-appropriate” if you digitally edit out all the blood. That actually creeped me out as a kid–this guy just had his arm pretty badly mauled, why isn’t he bleeding? Is he a vampire?
Yeah, or the Golden Compass where the bear fight has not only no blood, but no red-colored wounds.
There is also a tendency to assume that all violence is the same. I note this in movie ratings a lot, there is no difference between war tragedy, general action movie, romantic warrior hero, The Dark Knight, and bizzaro gorefests.
I am a sex worker, and sometimes I’m ‘allowed’ to be a feminist. Actually I’m not, despite being a woman I am largely excluded from feminism because of my job
which is pretty fucked up
I like my job, I am good at it and I make no apolopgies for it. If others have a problem with my chosen career they can bugger off. I don’t need to be ‘saved’, I certainly don’t have a pimp and I do pay tax.
I’m lucky to live in a state where my job is classed as legal – insulting in itself, it’s my body and if I choose to rent bits of it to people then that’s my decision.
There are academics here – Australia – who speak about sex work/ers without ever having spoken to any, they refer to us as prostituted women. One has claimed that we are so victimised that we don’t even know we’re victims.
sorry that’s a bit disjointed but this issues bugs the crap outta me – don’t like porn? then don’t watch it, disagree with sex work? then don’t be a sex worker, or utilise our services
How can you be so victimized that you don’t realize you’re a victim?
I’d think that part of being a victim is not wanting something to happen, and having it forced on you. It’s usually pretty easy to tell (with some exceptions, like if you’re excessively drunk, or high, or in other ways impaired) whether or not you’re having something forced on you.
Either they’re saying that you have Stockholm syndrome, or ‘so victimized’ is really code for ‘so stupid.’
I apologize for this: it’s probably going to sound like “wakka wakka wakka wakka.”
“So victimized that they don’t know they’re victims” is an adaptation of Marxist false-consciousness theory away from communism and into puritanical tut-tut liberalism.
Marxist false consciousness theory is essentially that poor, working class people are made complicit in their own exploitation by the false promise that they will eventually be able to enter the middle class. Like how people who will never make more than 30k a year are convinced that raising taxes on the very wealthy will hurt them, because they might maybe someday make that money eventually.
The problem with false consciousness theory as it applies to feminism is that:
1) There is no implied cultural promise that, if women suffer being women long enough, they will then become men.
2) False consciousness theory is enormously degrading to its subjects, in a way which is typically not acceptable to feminism.
That said a lot of academic sorts are trained in Marxist / Marxian theory, so it’s an easy tool to bring to bear whenever handy.
I feel that there is probably a parallel case with women, but it’s not really the same thing: rather, women are told “this is your place in life, this is the boundaries of what you can do / accomplish.” Men, too, for that matter, although the boundaries are “think / feel” rather than “do / accomplish.”
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My rant on a similar subject.
http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/the-nasty-face-of-feminism-no-one-wants-you-to-see/