Porn

[garlicbum]

Giving this another punt, since we seem to be doing civilised controversy quite well atm :)

I used to be fairly cool about porn, though never much of a fan. Now I feel:-
? Too much bullying & exploitation is used in its making
? It promotes too many rape-like fantasies
? Sexual objectification spills over into real life
? Porn gives boys and girls weird expectations of sexual relationships.
I'm sure there's more; just typing off the top of my head.

However, I am persuaded that sexual representation in the arts is not always porn. I've seen it said the Victorians invented porn - and think I agree. It was the Victorians who simultaneously labelled sexuality "dirty" and went looking for it in secret. Women and men have always enjoyed sexy art; it wasn't porn because it wasn't considered shameful.

I believe there is still a healthy stream of sexy art, but have a hard time separating it from porn. I've no idea how one would remove the Victorians' legacy of smuttiness from our appreciation of human sexuality. Dammit.

As a feminist, what do you feel about porn? How have your ideas on it changed?

Chimpanzee "prostitution"; or is it pair-bonding? Interesting stuff...

It is interesting! If we're looking at chimpanzees for insight to human behaviour, let's not forget the very fabulous, matriarchal, sex-positive bonobo.
They shag for fun. Oestrus not required. Which, one might say, makes them more like humans than the trog chimps.

Back on the bonobos! I have just been doing some reading on bonobos, what a great life, a matriachal society, way to go

So it would seem that bonobos share much in common with us, with their genes being 98% identical to that of Homo sapiens, they have sex because they like it, they share, they show empathy and the males derive their position in the pecking order through the matrilineal line. The males do not show aggression towards females and babies.

So does this prove that women were socialised and later indoctrinated to not like sex? Why? to whose advantage? The chimps are trading bananas for sex, so that would imply that prostitution is linked to the need to eat (economic) but why women? Is it biology?have men always been better at provisioning food? but in human civilisations that wasn't always the case until we settled the land and started creating a surplus through the development of agriculture.

So if men paid for sex and porn in bananas would it make it ok? Is that then the natural order of things, is it biologically determined, or is the sex industry a different type of exploitation? Violence born out of hatred or exploitation born out of the need to eat?

If you can convince women that they don't like sex, they won't bother looking for it elsewhere, hence men can be reasonably sure that the children they are supporting are their own. FGM and footbinding have the same end result.

I think we need to be very wary of extrapolating from other species but do bonobos have any concept of fatherhood? If everybody is shagging everybody, the males won't know which babies are theirs.

We really can't look to biology for lessons in morals.

I don't think the behaviour of other primates necessarily "proves" anything; we're also very chimpanzee-like in some of our behaviours. (Gang raids on the next troupe/tribe, gang-rape just as examples.)

Hmm.

Chimps pair-bond and fight over food (and engage in prostitution, possibly). Bonobos don't. I've seen theories that the human brain contains all the parts of both species, but imagine it's probably a bit more complex than that. They haven't finished analysing bonobo DNA yet: they only started this year! The fact that they did trog chimps way before bonobos just goes to show .... that biologists are more interested in aggressive, pair bonding species??

I want to be a bonobo :)

I have a vague awareness that the last remaining bonobo are in Congo, which has been a warzone for years. Maybe it's just been safer to study chimps?

You couldn't make this up...

Eh?

The first imaginary friends were female the very earliest religious represenations show great big fat fertile goddesses: it took human beings quite a while to work out the link between sex and babies, so women were initially regarded as magical, powerful etc because they produced new human beings! Subsequently, men wanted to make sure that they had women under control, as breeding stock. Hence patriarchy.

"PATRIARCHY IS A HISTORIC CREATION formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500 years to its completion. In its earliest form patriarchy appeared as the archaic state. The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified even prior to the creation of Western civilization. The development of agriculture in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal "exchange of women," not only as a means of avoiding incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more women could produce more children. In contrast to the economic needs of hunting/gathering societies, agriculturists could use the labor of children to increase production and accumulate surpluses. Men-as-a-group had rights in women which women-as-a-group did not have in men. Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. Women were exchanged or bought in marriages for the benefit of their families; later, they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were part of their labor and where their children were the property of their masters. In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. " Lerner, The creation of patriarchy.

For me it all just comes down to one thing, men exploit women for power and wealth accumulation, in competition with other men, to control property rights through assured progeny, they high jack women's sexuality and exploit their free labour and then sell it back to others at a profit. So advertising food mixers and peddling porn are two sides of one coin!

But the porn peddlers are selling hate speech against women. And society is fine with it.

And that is a very concerning dynamic.

IMO.

Thanks, Beach, that's my whole problem with it. Objectification that facilitates hate-filled behaviour - and vice versa. If anyone doesn't like "hate" they could try "contempt". If anyone still won't face it, they could try asking your average, fun-filled, porn-using guy to pose around naked while women slag off his looks, then let people shove things down his throat and up his bum while still insulting him. And slap him around a bit. Tell him he "loves it".

I agree Beach, it is hate speech against women, one of the very many problems I have with it.

However to what degree is society fine with it? At what point did hate speech and contempt towards women become socially sanctioned? Men are socially conditioned, conditioned to consume amongst other things.

Hatred is not born out of biology it's conditioning. There is a dialectic between social conditioning and to what degree we shape the social environment, how we view it, react to it and how we are shaped by it in turn. (probably been reading too much Hegel!)

The same as the this Maddona whore complex,good wives stay chaste, made that way through indoctrination, economics and unpaid labour whilst poor women are kept in slavery (through government policy, re education, benefits etc) to be exploited in a different way, through sex work, poorly waged and forced labour (read about mexican women working in Louisiana.) these women have lower social status because they are of a lower socio/economic group.

Because our social status is our economic status and it is the labour we undertake, the value we confer upon all people is based on class, both means of exploitation and the way in which it is justified. How many times do you hear the sex positives say "well if she wants to earn money, well if she has a family to feed" That is a justification of exploitation not a defence of free choice IMO.