I Used to Think Being Anti-Porn Meant Being Pro-Censorship. I Was Wrong.
I Used to Think Being Anti-Porn Meant Being Pro-Censorship. I Was Wrong.
By Sarah Ditum
April 5, 2015
The New Republic
“....Isn’t Sarah Ditum the feminist who hates Gail Dines?”
I am Sarah Ditum the feminist. I do not hate Gail Dines, so I was a little taken aback to see this statement on a comment thread. I knew where it had come from, however: Four years ago, Dines and I took part in a debate titled “Is Porn Hijacking Our Sexuality?” Dines, a veteran anti-porn feminist, argued for yes, and I put the case for no. In the end, I got the impression that we’d both slightly wrong-footed each other: I didn’t use the insinuations of sexlessness and prudery she’d anticipated, and her argument contained all the economic and ethical subtlety I’d foolishly assumed it would lack. The debate dragged out for over a year, then collapsed unsatisfyingly, and I wrote a grumpy blogpost about it which led lots of people (most of them, it has to be said, men) to declare me the winner.
I didn’t feel exactly like a winner, however. I knew that there were parts of the argument I’d fudged, especially (and shamefully) around the racism and sexism that are embedded in the grammar of pornography. I began to suspect that it was futile to criticize Dines’s use of cohort studies to demonstrate connections between porn use and misogynist attitudes—repeating over and over that there is no control group of men not exposed to the insistent chauvinism of pornography is, ultimately, not very convincing or reassuring. Though it seemed callow to admit it, I’d seen things in my research that shocked and upset me—real penetration of real women causing real pain. And there was one more thing, which happened more gradually: I heard from friends about the boyfriend who wanted to choke them, or the one who slapped them about in bed, or pressured them to do anal, or wanted to film it all. The pornographic vocabulary of sex as the violent debasement of the female body had seeped out from screens and into the lives of the women I knew.
Despite the official title of the debate, I’d been addressing a slightly different question all along: Essentially, I was asking “Why should we be able to censor anything?” Dines had a different question too. Hers, paraphrased, was probably something like this: “Why should the pornographers be able to repackage and retail sexuality as violence?” Her answer is that they should not be able to, and her solution doesn’t involve censorship at all: As she explains in her documentary Pornland, it’s one of public education and grassroots resistance to the porn industry, enabling individuals to discover “a sexuality … that is life-loving, life-affirming, and that we ourselves authored, not the pornographers.” It is irrelevant here whether or not you find that hopeful prospectus plausible (and I do: if humans have any power at all, it is surely the power to shape our own culture). What matters is that it is a politics of invention, not repression...."
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