When last we met we were talking about my efforts to stick it to the man via our student magazine. The upcoming issue is themed around sex and I’ve been doing my bit to relate it to ethicalism. Just because it’s a guilt-free, joyful pleasurefest doesn’t mean I can’t turn it into a baffling ordeal of moral dilemmas. I’ve been looking at porn.
By which I mean I’ve been examining the issue. It’s a controversial one, with opinions ranging from “It objectifies and degrades women, representing and reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes” to the equally articulate “Phwoar.” As ethical types we need to figure where we stand.
First, if we’re going to talk about it we should acknowledge that porn encompasses a range of things across a range of mediums and shouldn’t be thought of as one big amorphous blob. There’s a difference between violent porn that mimics sexual assault and refers to its performers as sluts, and a couple posting their homemade video online because it floats their boats. Second, we should acknowledge the role we play as potential consumers. If we buy a banana we choose between Fairtrade, organic or evil and our choice supports one standard or another. If we use porn we support the industry that produces it and the behaviour it exhibits.
Let’s start at the top. There we have our industrial porn, where massive companies churn out a massive amount of work. There we have the largest production company in the US raking in about $100 million a year. There we have men and women who risk contracting sexually transmitted diseases and women whose bodies are surgically mutilated and pumped full of silicone as parodies of beauty. There we have people paid to have sex, people we would refer to as prostitutes and likely look down on if they weren’t being filmed or photographed for our viewing pleasure. There we have a caveman view of gender politics: The men are studs, the women sluts to be used. Viewers, as consumers, let this happen.
Below that we have the kind of softcore that’s become acceptable almost by stealth. Top shelf magazines covered their nipples in the mid ‘90s to move down a shelf in the halfway respectable form of Maxim and Nuts and eighteen other kinds of copies. Walk into a newsagent’s, you’ll find these magazines on show, their covers filled with women wearing nothing but a square inch of gaffer tape where it counts. Their headlines tell us how up for it they are, just like the women on the cover of last week’s. And because they have articles about cars and Playstations and the odd bit of TV we can pretend they’re just blokes’ magazines; nothing to do with the objectification of women, just the male equivalent of Cosmo. Except Cosmo never called me an up-for-it slapper looking to get laid according to your fantasies. Readers, as consumers, let this happen.
Below that, influenced by the output above it, we have the pornification of mainstream culture where fishnets are marketing tools, where young singers pose for albums covers like they’re gagging for it, where Katy Perry writhes naked in her videos and twelve-year-olds wear Playboy T-shirts. And here we have the twist: that sex is selling like it always has but now we pretend it empowers these women, now they’re liberated and strong and sexually confident despite looking the same as the exploited, stereotyped, degraded women of a 1970s Pirelli calendar. We let this happen.
These hierarchies of porn are linked to each other and to continued gender inequality. We can’t have an equal society where this stuff exists. We can’t become a country where women are no longer treated as sex objects, where sex itself is free from gender bias and abuses of power when every morning three million people turn the front page of The Sun to have a look at a pair of tits.
As it stands, the ethics of porn are pretty grim. But in theory at least, porn doesn’t have to be exploitative and demeaning, it doesn’t have to be unethical. Porn is just nudity and sex filmed and photographed, and nudity and sex are fine and dandy and gender neutral. Porn doesn’t have to exploit people, like banana growers don’t have to exploit people. There could be ethical porn – fair trade porn – where both sexes are treated equally, where no one’s demeaned or humiliated, where no one’s taking money for sex, or if they are it’s as a genuine lifestyle choice instead of for crack or from daddy issues or from society telling them just that’s how it goes for good looking girls. But that seems unlikely. As ethical types and as potential consumers, we’ll have to float our boats someplace else.
Photo credit: The Zero
