Local Builders Merchants and their saucy calendar, ‘Flirtations’ July 22, 2008

Those who know me might be surprised to learn that I have a delightful calendar showing topless ‘glamour’ models on my kitchen wall. What, they might wonder, is a self-proclaimed feminist doing with such offensive material on public display? Well, my friends, it was a present from my partner, who was gobsmacked to discover the local builders merchants giving them away, and thought I might be amused. In a grim, ironic sort of way. I put it in the kitchen to remind me that Building Stuff is for Men. Real Men. With red blood and lots of testosterone*, who like looking at pictures of naked, oiled-up, surgically-enhanced ladies. Don’t you forget it.

*Actually, women have red blood and testosterone too. So do men who aren’t into naked glamour models.

Feminist Pornography April 15, 2008

There’s a fascinating article out on Alternet, about the efforts of feminist pornographers. (I know that some use definitions of ‘feminist’ and ‘pornography’ that make this term necessarily empty. If you’re such a person, substitute ‘feminist makers of sexually explicit films’, and read on– you may or may not grant that any of these people have managed it, but it’s worth thinking about what it would take to get there, and these people are doing interesting work.) It includes discussion of the Feminist Porn Awards (interestingly, these were initiated as a response to racism in pornography).  Also discussion of the many different ways that various directors understand what it is to make feminist pornography.  Audacia Ray focuses on working conditions.

According to Audacia Ray, director of the The Bi Apple as well as a sex educator and sex workers-rights activist, “Feminist porn is, for me, much more about the production end of things than it is about what is actually onscreen. It’s about the ability of the people performing the porn to negotiate what they’re doing.” For Ray, producing feminist porn involves paying performers above the industry standard, using condoms and covering the costs of HIV testing (neither of which are industry standards), getting input from her cast about what they want to do before they arrive on set, and avoiding surprising actors with last-minute requests.

Venus Hottentot discusses content:

“For me what makes it feminist is the story,” explains Hottentot. “[With Afrodite Superstar,] I wanted to create something about sexuality and self-esteem, and for me those were my first objectives in making this film. When I looked at what is going on with HIV/AIDS in the African-American and Latin communities, I felt like there needed to be a sexual conversation.” And it’s in that context that Hottentot tells the story of a young woman of color struggling to discover an authentic identity and sexuality in the mainstream hip hop industry.

Tristan Taormino combines both by allowing performers to decide the content:

Tristan Taormino places her cast of professional adult performers in charge of how, when, why, with whom, and how often they have sex, and then interviews them about everything from the racism in porn to what they like to perform. For Taormino, the collaborative aspect is a crucial part of what makes her work feminist. “I want viewers to get to know the performers and get a more three-dimensional character, as opposed to [a] one-dimensional sex robot.” Creating context is also how Taormino responds to the dominant imagery in mainstream porn. “When something comes up that could possibly reinforce a dominant image — like, for example, in Chemistry 3 there was a bunch of rough sex — [it's] really important to, in my interviews with people, have them specifically talk about why they like rough sex, how they obtain consent, what their boundaries are, and how it relates to their sexual expression.

One particularly interesting thing that comes out in the article is that– if the article’s right– mainstream pornography is starting to pay a bit of attention to feminist pornography. One of the winners of the Feminist Porn Awards also won a mainstream award for Best Gonzo Release– particularly significant because this is a genre which has traditionally been amongst the most misogynistic. I really do urge you to read the article of you’re interested in feminism and pornography, whatever your views are. There’s a lot of complexity in the article. (The article is exclusively about feminist pornographers, so it’s not the place to go for a discussion of feminist opposition to pornography– but it doesn’t try to do that.)

Lingerie Superbowl March 17, 2008

More ranting at TV from Monkey.

Football. It doesn’t matter which kind - soccer, superbowl, or Aussie rules - it’s jealously guarded as the preserve of males, both to watch and to play. Women - we all know - can’t kick a ball, can’t catch a ball, throw like girls, and don’t know the offside rule. Well, all that has now changed, thanks to the LIngerie Superbowl. As the name suggests, this is football, played by women, dressed in their underwear. Yes, you heard me - gaze at a pitch full of near-naked beauties grappling with a ball. You might even get to see one of the players have her bra ripped off in the struggle, and run down the field, tits a-bounce, to score a topless touchdown. (This happened last week.) Would someone like to tell me when normal telly turned into one long soft porn spectacle aimed at the heterosexual male (or some socially constructed version thereof)? The equation WOMAN = SEX is writ large all across our screens, no matter which channel we turn to. You wanna be a footballer, little girl? Fine, but you’ve got to have model looks, bronzed skin, large breasts, long shiny hair, and you’ve got to play in your undies. You want to be a singer? Ok, but you need to take off most of your clothes and writhe around like a stripper. Want to be a news presenter? Sure - just keep yourself looking young and lovely. No-one wants to see some old hag reading the news. And don’t get me started on ‘Girls Gone Wild’. Hasn’t anyone heard of female talent? - Oh hang on, that means ‘attractive women’ (at least in some parts of the UK). One step forward, two steps backwards, people.

That’s Amore March 17, 2008

The first in a series of posts where Monkey rants at TV.

I’ve watched my fair share of dating shows over the years and none has really qualified as highbrow entertainment, but MTV’s latest offering - That’s Amore - really breaks through the wrong side of the trash barrier. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything this offensive (and as a seasoned nethead, I see a lot of offensive things). The concept will be familiar to those acquainted with your average dating show: X number of attractive young women move into a big house where they vy for the attention of one man, and perform tasks to either win a date or be removed from the competition. The number of contestants is whittled down week by week, until only one attractive young woman remains, and wins the man. Or some money. Or some money to go on a date with the man. So far, so run-of-the-mill. But That’s Amore takes it to a whole other level. Treading a fine line between mainstream TV entertainment and soft porn (oh wait, there’s still a difference?), That’s Amore is less dating show and more Lads’ Mag wankfest. The young women on That’s Amore embody the worst of a certain kind of stereotypically feminine behaviour. They shriek at each other, call each other ‘bitch’, say mean things about each other behind each other’s backs, all the while trying their hardest to impress ‘Domenico’ - the man-prize on offer at the end of the competition. The ‘challenges’ set before the bitching beauties include such gems as ‘dressing up in a sexy French maid-style outfit and cooking a chicken’, then ‘cleaning the kitchen as sexily as possible’ (cue, lots of pouting, and crawling on work surfaces with arses thrust skyward), and ‘diving into a pool of meatballs and spaghetti whilst wearing bikini bottoms and t-shirt’, which initiated a wrestling match between two of the contestants. Determined to win Domenico’s affections, a few of them have resorted to dirty tactics, which include waiting until all the other women have left the vast bedroom they share, then sneaking into Domenico’s sleeping-quarters for a morning romp in his bed. Perhaps these people are not real. Perhaps they are all actors. (I fervently wish that were so.) But real or staged, the show is a disgrace. We like to think our behaviour is freely chosen, but - heavy issues about what counts as freedom aside - that’s not strictly true. More often than not, we do what the cathode ray tube tells us. If TV says it’s normal to do x, we do x. I, for one, would prefer TV not to be telling women that it’s normal or ok to pitch yourself against other women in a degrading scuffle for male attention. I would also prefer TV not to be telling women that the way to win the man is to take part in some plastic, Hefnerised version of female sexuality that involves sexy maid outfits, bronzed tans, and housework. Finally, TV, if you’re listening, you can stop telling men to expect women to engage in bikini-clad catfights to win their affections. Life is not one big scene from Porky’s. Jeesh, people.

A New Carnival January 28, 2008

And by ‘new’, I mean it’s the first ever Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution.  We here at Feminist Philosophers have a diverse range of views on these issues, and we know our readers do, too.  So, some of you will be fans of this carnival and others not so much.  But we thought we’d let you know about it, not least because our very own Monkey has something in it.  Congratulations, Monkey!

Proposed changes to UK law on ‘extreme’ pornography January 3, 2008

The proposed Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill mentioned in the previous post also criminalises ‘extreme’ pornographic images. Under the new Bill, one may be jailed for up to three years for possessing such an image.  The Bill states that an image is pornographic “if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal”. An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following -
(a) “an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life;
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals;
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse;
(d) a person performing or appearing to perfom an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal,
where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real”.
A common feminist complaint about laws on pornography is that they are always open to interpretation. The new proposals are no exception. What counts as an act that is or appears to be likely to result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals? Having sex on a kitchen counter, with one’s bottom perilously close to a lit stove, is surely an act that is likely to result in serious injury to one’s anus. But an image of such wanton activity is surely not what one might call extreme pornography. What about fisting? Doctors often tell us that fisting - both anal and vaginal - can result in serious injury to the anus or genitals. Yet there are (many?) people who regularly enjoy consensual bouts of such activity. Will photographs of their fun be deemed criminal? One may also be puzzled as to why it is only likely injury to the anus, breasts and genitals that renders a pornographic image extreme - why are other body parts excluded?

Also troubling is the reference to images which only appear to be real. Suppose, e.g., that a film depicts a scene of kidnap. Must the viewer think that the scene shows a real kidnapping event? Surely most kidnapping films show actors staging a kidnap, and most viewers of such scenes understand this. Must the scene appear lifelike? But then what if a lifelike scene is entirely computer-generated? 

The Bill also excludes an image from being extreme and pornographic if it forms part of a classified work - i.e., a film which receives a classification certificate from the relevant authority - providing that the image hasn’t been extracted for the sole purpose of sexual arousal. In other words, images that would otherwise be criminalised as extreme and pornographic are allowed, so long as they occur as part of a classified film that has some purpose other than sexual arousal. Notice that it is ok for one to get off on such images so long as this is not the purpose for which they were produced. The implication, of course, is that there is something wrong with producing material designed purely for sexual arousal. One might wonder why this is so.

Further criticisms of the Bill are offered here.

Kara Walker’s art December 23, 2007

Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage
Through the South and
Reconfigured for the Benefit of
Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May
Be Found,
By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker,
Colored
January 12 – February 23, 1997

Picture and Text from The Renaissance Society, the University of Chicago.

Walker has an exhibit at the Whitney, in NYC, through Feb. 3. The art is often beautiful despite its exceptional portrayal of very ugly racist and sexist stereotypes. The picture above was intentionally chosen (at least in this context) to leave to readers the decision of whether to view some profoundly challenging work.  Thus:

Walker’s work is often said to appropriate and subvert stereotypes, but that might be a little misleading.  She herself at least at times takes her art to present stereotypes as they infect us all.  She is quoted by Newsday as saying, “I want people to respond and to be aware that if a goody-two-shoes like me can have all of this going on her head, then nobody’s safe.”

She has been very controversial; though she has been awarded a McCarthur “genius” award, she was sharply criticized by some African Americans as promulgating negative stereotypes, perhaps even to get money from bigots.  Her comments on presenting positive images of black people are again quoted by Newsday:

Walker, for her part, questioned the very notion of a positive black image: “Every image produced of ‘us’ is mediated - filtered through the grounds of years of misrepresentation, bitterness and suspicion,” she scrawled on one of the beautifully illustrated diary pages on display at the Whitney. She doesn’t think it’s possible to mold new, untainted forms. We can only deconstruct those that already exist and uncover their ongoing corruption.

She’s a feminist you might want to know more about.

Sex Wars VS Farm Wars December 8, 2007

Brownfemipower has a powerful post comparing the feminist energy devoted to the porn industry with the lack of feminist energy devoted to the farm industry.   

I know that there’s more than one way to get fucked.And I only hope there will be a time when feminists fight for thirty years about the best way to end violence against farmworkers.

Naked On The Internet August 31, 2007

Sex in the Public Square reviews what sounds like a very interesting book. There have, of course, been loads of things written about sex and the internet. What’s interesting about this book is that it focuses on women’s experiences. It’s based on interviews with 80 women, including bloggers, internet daters, sex workers, and pornography consumers, among others. One interesting fact I got just from the review, which ties in well with some previous posts on tampon weapons: Adult oriented credit card billing services rejected porn sites featuring menstruation while accepting pretty much everything else.  There’s an interview with the author, Audacia Ray, at Feministing. There she talks about how important it was to her to capture the relationships between the internet, women’s sexuality, and women’s agency: “the ways that the Internet can be both freeing and restrictive, often for the same women at different times”.  Could be some good examples for folks working on autonomy.

Travelodge, porn, objectification July 27, 2007

Comment here, from Zoe Williams, on Travelodge’s decision to remove the ‘adult’ channels from its services.

Interesting assumptions on the part of both Travelodge and Williams. In the first instance the company appears to assume that:

•  women fall into the ‘family’ category of the clientele
• the ‘business’ category of the clientele are men
• these are the pornography users

On Williams’ part:

• the culturally standard attitude towards pornography is to see it as ironic
• that pornography is homogeneous, both in kind and in consequence (suggested by her question: ‘How degrading is porn, then, and for whom?’. Answer, surely: ‘it depends on the pornography’. Even if one thought all pornography degrades women, one might think that there may be differences, according to the porn, on how it degrades, or how much it degrades, or which specific individuals, in addition to all women, are degraded by the particular piece of pornography).

I was also intrigued by her comments on objectification, in particular:

‘The rhetoric of objectification relies on the idea that it’s one-way traffic, that only men objectify, and only women are objectified’.

This may well be the way that ‘the rhetoric of objectification’ is presented. But even if one accepted the alternative that she proposes (’So, say women do objectify men to the same degree, on the same grounds as they themselves are objectified’ [NB: given cultural norms about sexual attractiveness, I think this unlikely - see, e.g. the differences in what is taken to be an asset in the article in this post]) one might think that context mattered in a way that made it worse for women than men. Namely, in a context of gender inequality, ‘equal’ objectification, to the same degree and on the same grounds, may mean different things, or have different consequences, for men and women.

This kind of view is argued for by Leslie Green - his paper “Pornographies” (8 Journal of Political Philosophy, (2000), pp. 27-52) addresses the meaning of objectification for both women, and gay men (the meaning being quite different in each instance, he argues, due to the different cultural backdrop).

Perhaps these kinds of considerations are pertinent to the wonderings about why some objectifying body furniture (bits of women’s bodies) seem creepy whilst others don’t (hand door knockers)?

Anyway - no more pornography in Travelodge.

“Naked Feminist”, Part 2 July 2, 2007

Stoat, in comments, has alerted me to my cultural ignorance!  “The Naked Feminist” is the title of a potentially very interesting documentary about women in the pornography industry:

 The Naked Feminist challenges the mythology surrounding women in the porn industry head on through a series of candid interviews with pornstars, academics and feminists. This 58 minute documentary film seeks to strip away the ideological straitjacket surrounding the decades old ‘porn v feminist’ debate by demonstrating that strong, inspirational women are found in all walks of life - including pornography.   

A different take on labiaplasty June 20, 2007

Sarah Mundy, who runs a site called “All About My Vagina”, offers some very different thoughts on labiaplasty, which we discussed earlier here and here. The question, again, is where women get the idea that their labia are “wrong” and need surgery. Mundy is not convinced that pornography is the source of this. She says that the many, many women she hears from have generally not seen pornography. Mundy’s theory (not sure what I think of it) is that the anxiety comes from the fact that women acquire their idea of what their genitalia look like in childhood, and then are horrified by changes at puberty.

Interestingly, Mundy also cites anecdotes from women (including herself) who have come to realise that their labia are normal after seeing pornography. (If use of homogenised, surgically altered labia in porn is recent, this could be a phenomenon of the past.) Importantly, she points out that women are very quickly “cured” by simply seeing some photographs showing the variety of normal female genitalia. Sounds like a good case for some very explicit sex education. (An insane fantasy, of course, in the US.)

Internet Porn Wrecks Aussie Marriages June 8, 2007

Here’s an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the effect of online pornography on relationships. The Herald looked at academic articles, previous surveys on internet porn use, and conducted a survey of its own. The results are intriguing, and relevent to feminist discussions of pornography. I’ll mention just one though:

According to the survey, where men used lots of internet pornography, the depictions of sexual interaction very soon come to “inform” the couple’s sexual practices. To pull a quote from one interviewee: “It [sex] became more ‘porn’ style - pulling my hair, no kissing, slapping around a bit, all stuff I was initially OK with. And always he wanted to come in my face. There was no real intimacy, no thought about what I might like.”

Having taught Rae Langton and Jen Hornsby’s uses of Speech Act theory, students are often sceptical that the authority felicity condition for subordination can be met - that is, they doubt the claim that porn has authority in informing male notions of sex and sexuality. At best, they think it has only a moderate influence, and even then, only over teenage boys who very quickly drop ‘porn’ style ideas about sex.

It seems to me that this article says lots to undermine that scepticism - and it even refers to connections between the increase in the pornography’s depiction of anal sex and ordinary demand for it drawn in Haggstrom-Nordin, Hanson, and Tyden’s  (2005) paper “Associations between pornography consumption and sexual practices among adolescents in Sweden” - The International Journal of STD and AIDS. Vol16, No 2. 102-107. (As a matter of fact, Elisabet Haggstrom-Nordin’s work on pornography and sexual practices are often good for empirical sources).

Treating things as people June 1, 2007

There have been some recent articles (e.g. Rae Langton’s “Sexual Solipsism”, Philosophical Topics 1995; Melinda Vadas’s “The Manufacture for Use of Pornography and Women’s Inequality”, Journal of Political Philosophy 2005) discussing possible connections between treating people like things and treating things like people. S just sent me a link to a 2004 story about a Japanese ‘boyfriend pillow’ (really boyfriend arm pillow). A quick google reveals that a ‘girlfriend pillow’ was later released, but this took the form of a lap wearing a short skirt. Interesting cases to consider as possible instances of treating things as people. And far less creepy (despite the dismemberment) than the Real Dolls. Another interesting case to consider is that of the cardboard cut-outs of loved ones given to families of some US soldiers in Iraq.

More on pornography and labiaplasty May 29, 2007

Further to Jender’s recent post on labiaplasty, Lih Mei Liao and Sarah Creighton have recently published a study in the British Medical Journal looking at the causes and effects of cosmetic labia/genitoplasty (here if you’ve got Athens). They interviewed healthy adults who had undergone surgical reductions in “normal” labia to find the reasons given for wanting this procedure. They found pornography was often implicated. To quote from the BMJ press release:

“Patients consistently wanted their vulvas to be flat with no protrusion beyond the labia majora, … some women brought along images to illustrate the desired appearance, usually from advertisements or pornography that may have been digitally altered.”

They also suggest that the increase in numbers having this surgery is leading to a further increase in numbers wanting the surgery. They argue that the increased numbers of cosmetically altered labia contribute to the narrowing of our ideas about what counts as “normal”, leading women to feel greater concern about their own bodies, thereby increasing demand for labiaplasty. Apparently, numbers of procedures on the NHS have doubled in the last five - since the NHS won’t perform cosmetic surgery in the absence of psychological trauma, it suggests these procedures aren’t mere whimsy.

Also interesting is that Reuters reported on this article and its contents (here). However, they didn’t file it under “Health and Science” and “Lifestyle”, but under “Oddly Enough”, their section for jokey and bizarre news events.

Labiaplasty to impress the girls May 28, 2007

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon does an excellent job here on the astounding argument that women get labiaplasty to impress their female friends. Among other things, she points out that the author clearly has some rather odd ideas about what women do when they get together. (Marcotte’s post also includes a photo featuring some costumes to bear in mind for the next Halloween party you get invited to. Who would have expected such helpful tips from the Feminist Philosophers?)

Labiaplasty is actually a very useful teaching example for feminist philosophers: (a) It’s really hard (for reasons Marcotte mentions) to make the standard student argument that everything women do about their appearance is done for other women; (b) It at least seems to be a pretty clear case of porn shaping even women’s ideas of how they should look (whether it does so via their own viewings or via men’s comments). The reason for my qualification is that this article quotes one doctor who says shows like “Nip, Tuck” are cited by his patients more often than pornography is.