Ms. Lauren, I know you love your boy Keith as much as I love me some Anderson, but I think it’s time to let him go:
To quote:
Paris Hilton claims she was punched in the face yesterday morning at a nightclub in Hollywood [pause] ‘Course she’s had worse things happen to her face …
And we all know what he’s talking about.
There’s a lot to say about this, and I’m not really sure where to start. First is the idea of humiliation, even in consensual sexual activity. Paris Hilton is about as “empowered” as a person can get — she’s rich, white, American, (in)famous, etc etc. Her sexual actions have been, by all accounts, fully consensual. I didn’t see her notorious video, but have certainly heard about it, and it sounds like she was enjoying herself.
And yet having someone ejaculate on her face is “worse” than being punched.
What’s going on when having male body fluid on a female face is seen as inherently demeaning and aggressive? What’s going on when consensual sexual activities which don’t cause physical pain are deemed “worse” than being painfully physically assaulted?
I’m not going to dispute the relative truth of the idea underlying what Keith argues. A lot of people do construct a man ejaculating on a woman’s face as a greater humiliation than a punch. And despite that (or, more likely, because of it), it’s a staple of hetero porn. Ejaculate soils her; having that ejaculate in her vagina may dirty or contaminate her, but having it on her face humiliates and assaults her. And that humiliation and violence is negatively eroticised — that is, it’s erotic because it’s something so humiliating that she couldn’t possibly enjoy it, unless she’s a complete whore. This is a far-reaching eroticism, too — any casual consumer of mainstream porn can probably tell you that the “money shot” is a basic requirement these days, not a narrow preference ghettoized into fetish sites. It’s how your average porno ends. The humiliation is what makes it hot. It intrinsically ties sexual pleasure to humiliation. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, and was certainly encouraged by real men’s desires, but it also serves in constructing those desires.
There’s a fine line between mainstream, consensual porn and the kind of overtly violent rape porn that Punkass Marc wrote about a while back (major trigger warning). That should give even the most pro-porn among us pause.
Now, I’m not entirely “anti-porn,” and nor am I “pro-porn” (but I’m certainly not neutral on the subject, either). I don’t support wide bans on pornography, but I do think that pornography, in its current incarnation, is exceedingly harmful to women. I’m with Amanda in the idea that porn is more a symptom of patriarchy than a cause of the disease (and no, I’m not looking to bring the 500+ comment shitstorm at Pandagon over here, so if you have issues with other aspects of Amanda’s post, leave comments at her place). I’m not sure that, absent patriarchy, porn would remain harmful. I’d like to think that pictures of naked people, or of people having sex, could still be erotic even if there wasn’t a disempowered sex class for sexual activity to be carried out on. And I also think that if we completely got rid of porn tomorrow, patriarchy would almost definitely continue on its merry way.
But porn does matter, for our sex lives and for our daily interactions. Lauren’s comment at Pandagon really resonated with me in that regard:
I once dated a guy for a long while who had an extreme dislike for porn — wouldn’t watch it, didn’t like it. I could breathe in the bedroom knowing he wasn’t bringing in any plasticized, violent shit in there with him.
I can relate. And it’s not because I think that naked people are bad, or because I personally hate porn (confession: I’ve looked at it, and gotten off on it); it’s because, as someone who’s viewed “mainstream” porn, I’ve found it impossible to ignore the deep levels of woman-hatred in it. Porn doesn’t create the woman-hatred, but it certainly replays it and feeds into it, and does so in a forum which is already taboo and therefore in a position to display that hatred more graphically. Men who don’t watch porn are a relief; when I find out that someone I’m seeing does watch porn, it always puts me a little bit on edge. A lot of porn, it seems, along with many social conservatives, places sex firmly in the category of “dirty,” and specifically as something that women are dirtied by. The difference, of course, is that porn-creaters embrace its dirtiness, while the social conservatives warn us about it. You don’t hear a whole lot of abstinence-only education programs lecturing men that every time they have sex, they’re giving away petals on their precious flower. You don’t see a whole lot of porn eroticising the degradation of men (save for in a few fetish communities, and on several sites catering to gay men — but it should be pointed out that the eroticisation of degrading the “bottom” in gay porn is at least in part erotic because you’re treating him like a woman). The assumption that women are degraded by sex — and especially by male-dominated sex acts — is inherent in both world views.
And this is why Olberman’s comment bothered me: because he’s buying into that same paradigm, using it to slut-shame Paris, and through that reminding all women that our sexual status is more valuable than our physical safety. Something that makes us “whores,” even if it’s consensual and not painful, is worse than something which leaves us physically bruised. The fact that this view isn’t uncommon — and was used as a cheap joke on a “progressive” television segment — speaks volumes.
Thanks to Jessica for the link.