Is it just me, or do the assumptions feminists make about pornography simply not make sense?
You're probably aware of most of the feminist arguments against porn, so I won't bore you with all of them. Primarily, though, they focus around three points:
In this article, I intend to disprove all three points, as well as showing how the hidden assumptions behind some of them blatantly contradict the stated feminist agenda.
First off, let's tackle the concept of coercion. While I'm not going to deny that some women are coerced in this manner (for instance, Linda Lovelace), I will most vehemently oppose the three underlying assumptions - that all women are so coerced, that only women are coerced, and that what appears to be coercion always is an unwanted use of force. It is simply insane to assume even for a moment that out of the vast body of pornographic material, every last woman is being forced to participate. In fact, it's ludicrous to assume that even most of these women are being forced. To even be able to consider either of those concepts, a couple of underlying assumptions must be made.
The first of these, which the more radical feminists usually have no problem swallowing, is that The Patriarchy is full of men who are just itching to dominate women into being their sex puppets, as well as men who are more than willing to look the other way while the first group does so by blatantly illegal means. I'm not talking about a few people here; there would have to be literally millions upon millions of men in on this conspiracy, including almost every law enforcement agent in the country. The problem with this assumption is that the numbers simply don't hold up; with any group that size, there will be dissent which will lead to the story getting out in a public and undeniable form. Since there's been no such leak, either no such group exists or it's small enough to keep itself policed. The only such stories which have surfaced concern tiny groups, which are at best organized extremely loosely.
The second assumption, which is at the same time crucially central to the issue and yet so deeply buried as to never be stated, is that women can be coerced in such huge numbers as to support the entire porn industry. Think about what the coercion argument is really saying: "Big bad men are forcing weak women to act out men's sexual fantasies, in numbers sufficient to support a multi-billion-dollar industry." In short, for the whole Coercion Conspiracy to work, women would have to be so weak-willed that men could dominate them in such numbers...an assumption that is precisely opposed to feminist dogma.
Now, on to the assumption that only women are coerced. One need look no further than a tiny selection of sadomasochistic porn to see men in apparently coercive bondage. In fact, this leads nicely into the third assumption, which is that what appears to be force necessarily is force. Yes, sometimes it is - granted. However, the more apparently coercive the pornography is, the more care its producers have to take to make sure they can cover their own butts if someone challenges it. Ask yourself this: if pornography was so unilaterally coercive, why on earth haven't feminists been making solid accusations and attempting to press charges...and winning? In other words, the Coercive Conspiracy simply doesn't exist outside of radical feminist rhetoric.
The second charge here is that pornography depicts and encourages sex crimes. There have been numerous studies on exactly the question of encouragement, and the results are very clear: there is no correlation between accessibility to pornography and the frequency of sexual crime in an area. None. Period, end of story. As for depiction, well, some porn does depict crime - but I refer you to the coercion argument above; depictions are almost unilaterally consensual in nature for simple legal reasons. The only crime that usually takes place in the majority of "hardcore pornography" is prostitution, because the participants are actually receiving money for having sex, which satisfies the legal definition of that crime. (Okay, adultery is another possibility - but this is a far cry from the charges I've heard from radical feminists that typical pornography depicts serious and even lethal violence to women. It just ain't so.)
Finally, the question of pornography as a method of objectifying women in the eyes of men. I'm not even going to touch the underlying assumption that men are ignorant sots who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, because frankly I really don't need to do so. I do, however, feel the need to address the rhetoric I've always heard that if Jane Doe strips for Playboy or stars in a porn flick, then she is demeaning All Women by doing so. I just can't fathom this line of reasoning; how does Jane showing her curves or engaging in sexual activity reflect on even one woman besides Jane herself? Yeah, someone might see her performance and consider her to be a slut, but that just doesn't translate to All Women. I mean, how can someone possibly see Jenny McCarthy pose nude with Santa Claus and conclude that all women want to put some nookie in Santa's stocking? After all, isn't the whole point of the feminist movement that women are free to make their own choices in life? It seems to me that feminists should be encouraging women in the choices they make, instead of simply trying to supplant The Patriarchy as the force that tells women what they should be doing. When you think about it, though, that's exactly what these radical feminists are trying to do. They're discouraging behavior that doesn't fit their agenda; it just so happens that their agenda is different from that of The Patriarchy.
However, I'm digressing. Back to objectification of women; it seems to me that pornography is just a red (or should that be pink?) herring, and that the problem actually lies elsewhere. The unpalatable truth is that women objectify themselves on a daily basis, and they teach each other to keep doing so. If women want to stop being seen as objects of desire, they're going to have to modify some of their own behavior and assign fault where it truly lies. Forget Playboy and Penthouse; go after Cosmopolitan! Women are taught by each other that their only valuable assets are their bodies, which is the main reason men like me take such notice of them. (Do you really expect me to believe that a woman who walks around in an outfit that's more like a second skin than anything else isn't deliberately trying to display her body? And if she's not displaying it to get attention from men, then why is she so obviously calling attention to her curves? These are not rhetorical questions, nor are they theoretical matters. I see this every day in my line of work, frequently enough to recognize it as a general trend.)
The ugly truth about pornography's relationship to woman-as-object, at least from the feminist perspective, is that pornography exists because men like to look at women. It's the symptom, not the cause...and people need to get over the mistaken concept that men wouldn't objectify women if pornography didn't exist. Porn exists because there is a market for it, one that women themselves have manufactured (or, at the very least, helped to manufacture) over the years. Of course, I'd be lying if I said I was especially surprised by the concept that women can't fathom the notion of accepting responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. After all, the vast majority of the human race in general can't grasp that idea; why should women be any different?