Your porn probably doesn’t pass the Bechdel test
In the last month, the porn debate among conservatives has reignited. A microcosm of a broader conversation of how muscular and libertarian modern conservatism should be, it has done wonders to line up both sides of the debate.
Many on the “opposed” side lament the degree to which activism on the subject has died since the 1990s. This is something feminists should lament, too.
During the 80s and the earlier segment of the 90s, christian conservatives and liberal feminists formed a make-shift, sometimes fractious, coalition to strike against the emerging porn industry. They made gains around registration and trafficking but ultimately lost. During the interceding years, conservative priorities shifted and feminism became simultaneously more libertarian and concerned with the welfare of sex workers themselves.
The latter development has been overwhelmingly positive. Feminist efforts to empower individuals working in the sex industry has occured to their significant benefit. The former development, the movement towards a more libertarian stance, has not. In recent years, there has been some backlash to the Sandbergist preoccupation with just getting women into the workforce and hoping the rest will follow. The overwhelming attitude with porn is to simply accept it can’t be stopped and we should respect the choices of those involved.
Porn is a multi-billion dollar industry where the overwhelming majority of executives are men. Irrespective of the gender of director, the same tropes typically hold: verbal and physical aggression is common, women are normally the main targets of aggression and negative responses to aggression are exceedingly rare — the portrayal of condom use, negotiation or verbally-initiated consent is similarly rare. It seems undeniably established in a manner to reinforce negative stereotypes around women, and to underpin justification for toxic masculinity in men. In any other medium, feminists would rightfully be up in arms at this sort of treatment of women being normalised.
Local efforts to regulate the industry at the production level have struggled. Indeed, attempts by LA county to legislate mandatory use of condoms in shoots led to much teeth-gnashing by those within the industry and a mass exodus to other parts within the state of California or other US cities.
In recent years, some schools in the United States have begun to introduce porn literacy training. There has been discussions around commencing this in Ireland. It seems irresponsible to me to treat our youth, with boys in particular typically marinated in easily-accessible internet porn from as young as 13 or 14, with a couple of hours of alternative messaging a week. There is undoubtedly a need to go further. A ban on production, and distribution would likely be both unconstitutional in most liberal democracies and operate to drive performers into a darker, less regulated sector. However, there are concrete steps we might consider taking which would both restrict distribution to children, most at risk of incorporating these stereotypes, and protect the livelihoods of those involved in the industry.
It’s called zoning.
In many countries zoning has been deployed to render opening strip clubs, lap dancing bars, and brothels as difficult to open and forcing those which do open to be distant from population centres. The same theories can be applied to porn production on the internet. The most straightforward method would be to require porn sites to run with a .xxx link and, in return, require ISP’s to default to forbidding browsers access these sites. Non-commercial properties could open up your internet, whether fully or during set times, to access these pages. You could then sanction ISP’s who allow porn to slip through the cracks and into the regular internet, or reach across and sanction the sites themselves for not defaulting to an .xxx link for the European market. GDPR has demonstrated our power in this domain.
You could go further. Pornhub is currently running a project deploying AI to classify the meta-data, such as sex positions at certain points, in their videos. There is a host of other meta-data we might require pornographic distributors generate so that regulators could create more enhanced filtering for what we even allow into the .xxx domain. We do not have to accept the degrading treatment of performers on our internet and if this incurs costs on porn sites in order to resolve this issue, then so be it.
We’re a society which has become increasingly preoccupied with women’s representation in media, whether in books or television or film, but porn remains comparatively closed off from the same treatment. Feminists need to become critical about what sort of porn they believe it is acceptable to distribute, what porn executives can pump into our psychosexual ecosystem, and begin advocating to have the tools to contain it deployed. Requiring that the industry treat the performers involved better is progress in some direction — but a more systematic beratement of women is ongoing and we’ve abdicated its dissolution for far too long.
by Charlie Dalton
