Fiona Vera-Gray’s new book, Women on Porn, joins a recent slew of volumes grappling with questions about women and sex in the wake of #MeToo and the ferocious cultural backlash it unleashed. Most of these books foreground women’s perspectives and experiences, and Vera-Gray’s is no exception.
But what is notable is how her focus on the personal experiences of women who consume porn is used to try and sidestep divisive debates about its ethics. There are big questions lurking here. Contemporary feminism is now dominated by a clear pro-sex, porn-positive stance. But it wasn’t always that way—and some believe it is time for a fresh critical reckoning.
To see why, it helps to go back to the issues that historically divided anti-porn feminists from their sex-positive, porn-accepting counterparts. The former camp, indebted to early campaigners like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, sees porn as morally abhorrent and socially corrosive for its sexist violence. From this perspective, porn incites, validates and sexualises the subordination of women to men, both reflecting and also helping to reproduce the noxious ideology that undergirds patriarchy. According to this view, the problem with porn is not limited to whatever direct harm is inflicted on the women involved in its production; it goes far beyond that, to include the impact of its consumption on society.
By contrast, the pro-sex feminist camp, inspired by pioneering figures like Gayle Rubin and Carole Vance, came to criticise the anti-porn movement for seeing women primarily as victims of male violence, rather than as potential agents and protagonists in their own right, entitled to sexual autonomy and pleasure. For these sex-positive feminists, the anti-porn crusade aligned far too easily with censorship campaigns and an insistence on sexual conformity, thereby re-enforcing patriarchal gender roles at the expense of women’s sexual liberation.
While both sides could agree that non-consensual sexual violence in the production of porn was reprehensible, and that getting off on images known to depict real acts of assault was wrong, the pro-sex camp nevertheless defended an open attitude towards porn, seeing it as a necessary counter to sexual repression. It is this latter, sex-positive, let-all-flowers-bloom approach to porn that has become progressive orthodoxy among feminists today.
It is in this context that the figure of the porn-watcher—both then and now—acquires a controversial political charge. For the anti-porn crowd, this person is typed as a sexist, predatory male, inclined to objectify women and enjoy all that rape culture has to offer. Meanwhile, sympathetic renderings of this figure—like the portraits of ambivalent, pleasure-seeking women we find in Vera-Gray’s book—can be read as seeking to undermine or complicate the claim that porn consumption is harmful to society. It is for this reason that, “Hey, women watch porn too!” has often been framed as a rejoinder to concerns about the negative effects of porn consumption on society—as though women cannot be misogynists or help to uphold the patriarchy.
What if porn is both a tool of the patriarchy and a pillar of female sexual liberation?
By suspending ethical judgement about the porn consumption reported by her 100 female interviewees, Vera-Gray might be argued to have sided with the sex-positive, porn-tolerant camp. Interestingly, however, many of those interviewed seem to feel the tug of the older, more critical views of pornography, showing that the pressing ethical questions at the heart of feminism’s porn wars are still alive and well, even if our appetite for articulating them has waned in the shadow of the progressive, porn-tolerant consensus. (None of the women interviewed describe an easy, straightforward relationship to pornography. Most report regularly navigating through morally offensive material to access their preferred content, while many also describe their own tastes as being, in some measure, morally problematic for them.)
So, what if porn is both a tool of the patriarchy, the consumption of which makes us complicit in sustaining a culture of violence against women, and also an important means of sexual liberation for some? This is the sort of tough question that emerges from the lived experience of women today. It should be possible to be sex-positive and porn-sceptical (or porn-negative with respect to mainstream content), many of those interviewed seem to want to say.
While the critical tools needed to carve out such a position may not readily be found in classic feminist debate, there is, happily, a new crop of excellent work—by Amia Srinivasan and Katherine Angel, among others—pointing us in new directions. This work takes seriously the ethical questions that remain even when sex—and its often-degrading pornographic representation—is consensual. Contemporary feminism eschews these questions at its peril.
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