Not All Porn: Why the good parts don't matter

[AskBasil]

This is one of the best articles I've read about porn. It just says everything so well

stoppornculture.org/2014/10/21/notallporn-why-the-good-parts-dont-matter/

Beach you miss my point about the Disney Princesses. The imagery that girls are exposed to from very very young, is one of perfect looking girls who need men to save them and look after them. That teaches them their place in society and how they will be valued, long before porn ever starts to influence them.

ARIEL - Refuses to accept the limitations of the underwater life she is born into. Journeys to the surface, falls in love with a human and overcomes great adversity to marry him.

ELSA - Has such magnificent power that she can control the weather at will. The only thing that ends up making her able to control such power is the love of her sister, not any mere man.

POCHAHONTAS - Challenges an entire, entrenched patriarchal culture by refusing to marry the man she is told to, instead going off with the foreign invader. Ends with him begging her to leave her home and go with him to his, but her deciding to let him go without her as she can do perfectly well on her own, thanks very much.

etc. etc.

I'd say you're seeing what you want to see. These films are of course rooted in some offensive and anachronistic notions of royalty and class (that's what the whole "princess" thing is, after all). But within that context, they largely show empowered women REFUSING to accept their place in society, challenging convention and insisting upon determining their own destiny.

The one exception is probably Sleeping Beauty, but then that was made in the 50s. Interesting to see how the whole Princess schtick has changed since then.

I think the concept of being entertained by cruelty is not new. (It's only a few hundred years since seeing someone murdered by the state was a Good Day Out.) But (again) trends in porn follow what's going on in the rest of culture, they don't lead it. Over the past 15 years or so, if not longer, we have been accustomed to watching people's pain and misery as something entertaining. Think about all the reality TV programmes which basically display people with mental health problems as a laughable freak show. People are encouraged to perform their pain - if they start out relatively functional, or if they just happen to be particularly good at something, they are pressured to reveal past traumas (which they may well have overcome and not need to revisit), to cry and puke and scream and lose their tempers on camera. There are whole sections in bookshops dedicated to what the polite book store calls 'difficult lives' and some of us call 'misery memoirs' - all those 'No Daddy, Not The Pickaxe' books which have always seemed, to me at least, remarkably accessible and punishment-free wank material for sadists. There's the proleporn mags like Take A Break and Love It, with their screaming coverlines about child abuse, loss, murder, rape - 'Hubby Beheaded Our Children' etc - if it's a choice between explaining that and 'Best Oral Sex Tips' to your six-year-old in the newsagent I think the latter is probably less likely to traumatize.

My point is that porn is used as a scapegoat, often by people whose agenda is not the protection of women at all.

This is FWR though. Feminist criticism of porn is out of concern for women and girls. As well as boys and men.