Saturday, August 20, 2005

1995: The Porn Wars

Here's something I wrote when I was twenty, back in 1995.

Porn to Raise Hell
On February 27th, 1995 the George Washington University film board decided to show the porno film John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut. The board member who chose the film said that she wanted to stir debate about pornography, and certainly accomplished that. Enough so that the local news media was there to cover the controversial showing and all of the groups protesting it. And, as they say on the news, I was there!

When I strolled into the lobby of the University’s Marvin Center Building at around 8:30, I was soaked to the skin. It was a warm night for February, but still drizzling out and I had walked from the Metro, as was my habit. The Marvin Center looked like a train depot during Spring Break, with numerous confused looking kids wandering about trying to avoid making eye contact. Apparently, the porn aficionados and pro-porn activists were going to be watching the film on the first floor, while the anti-porn folks would watch the anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story upstairs in Room 405. When I arrived, neither film had started, so I milled about the lobby with the cameras, cops and various assorted jerk-offs, and one would suppose anti-jerk-offs. I was tired, wet, bored, strangely horny, and couldn’t smoke anywhere.

It was pretty obvious that the lobby was filled with kids from either faction having very little to do with each other. One could be “anti-censorship” or “anti-rape”, but not both. It was cast in those polemics. Both sides went to their respective showings quietly, without having discussed anything. Of course, it’s tricky for two people with tunnel-vision to see eye-to-eye.

I went upstairs where Posititve Force DC was preparing to show Not a Love Story and then follow it with an “open discussion from a variety of perspectives”. At least, that’s what the flier said. To their credit, PF did try to get some strippers to show up. I have to wonder if they wanted to get their input, or to “save” them though as most of the anti-authoritarians in attendance seemed to be from the “from-protesters-to-Protestants” school of radicalism. Moralism runs deep everywhere in America, and the punk parish is no exemption.

But, I’ll blame the tone of the event on Womyn’s Issues Now, the co-sponsors and a group apparently as much opposed to spell-check as porn. P.F. seemed to want to question the porn attitude towards women (that they have sex?) whereas Wimrn’s Issues Now wanted porn outlawed to stop rape.

I should note that, rather embarrassingly, one of the P.F. members had asked me to attend as a “representative of the other side”. I’m hoping that they didn’t see me as a porn enthusiast, but more the type who isn’t particularly threatened by media. I’ve probably seen three porn films in my life, and pretty much got the “point” after the first five minutes of the first one. So, I was there for the other side- the strippers were smart enough not to show up. This was going to be my chance to be the Malcolm X of porn. “We didn’t jerk off on Plymouth Rock! Plymouth Rock jerked off on us!” Ahem.

Anyway, Not a Love Story was a Canadian documentary about the pornographic industry in New York and was intended to question the images of women in porn. Subsequently, the film features many pornographic images and was rather controversial in Canada itself. Under the McKinnon-Dworkin laws, and probably the laws of karma, it was illegal there as well.

The film starts off well enough by interviewing various people in the porn industry and an articulate stripper who complains about the feminists who assume that she is stupid enough to be “forced” into her line of work. She claims to enjoy dancing and the attention that she gets doing it, but agrees to join the filmmakers in their quest to expose the entire industry.

The strong points of the film are its earliest interviews with the sleaziest pornographers they could find. It’s not easy to get pornographers to hang themselves with their own words; these aren’t people who pay a lot of attention to dialogue normally. These interviews were shot before the video revolution made it possible for anybody and their Women’s Studies instructor to appear in a porno film, and before rape was officially a porno no-no. Subsequently, the porn auteurs make themselves look worse than the filmmakers ever could. Tis better to keep quiet and appear a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

The film gets a pretty good anti-porn vibe going this way, but unfortunately blows it by turning the cameras on more radical feminists than pornographers. They could have probably found some psychologists to denounce pornography, but oh-nooooo! Instead, they interviewed dozens of activists against sex, but not one with a rational bone in their body. Pun intended.

So, after about 45 minutes of Women Against Pornography reading really bad poetry and telling us what men really want (a bit like having David Duke lead Talmud study) the film starts to take on a campy effect. The tragic violin music playing over fairly benign images of a woman licking a lollipop didn’t help much, although it did cause the Thurston Moore clone next to me to mutter: “Oh no! Oh my god!” throughout the film. The tone was also not helped by the feminist in the film who claimed that blowjobs are the “ultimate male fantasy” because “the man is in a position of complete power”. Sister, when your most favorite part is between someone else’s teeth, you’re not in complete power. As far as it being the ultimate male fantasy, how boring! My ultimate fantasy involves twelve candy-stripers with dildos and no underwear giving me and each other a thorough physical in the school gymnasium.

The film reached a point of ultimate unintentional self-satire with a couple that embodied everything that ever went wrong with second-wave feminism. The husband sat mute throughout the entire interview wearing a snappy Speed Racer scarf and a terrified look in his eyes, rather like that of a pet that has been caught urinating on the carpet. Meanwhile, she talked on and on about how rape is caused by porn, and strangely has nothing to do with sex. She claimed that rape happens because men hate women and read porn to better hate them. Her plan for ending rape was simple: make women “think things are worse than they actually are” and even though she’s a “man-hater” she makes the men she loves feel “not guilt, but shame” so they will learn to behave. Then they will stay in line out of fear, and not because they actually want to. And not urinate on the carpet, we can guess.

After the movie finished, I felt depressed. Not because I’d realized how horrible nudie-flicks, sex, and rape fantasies are, but because both feminists and pornographers claim to understand sex, and none of them know squat. How did it come to this? Nobody alive today has done as much to explain human nature as Freud, Masters & Johnson, or even Wilhelm Reich. Man can conquer the Earth, the moon, and the stars, but not his own need to get at those cute girly bottoms, and none of the writers in Psychology Today, Ms. Magazine, and Playboy have been able to explain that as well as even the Cramps have. It seems that strippers and drag queens best understand sexuality because they can approach it playfully. And why isn’t anybody playful about it these days anyway?

The movie was followed by a discussion group that I remained dazed through. What, me Malcolm XXX? Everyone there basically felt the same way, and with the more emotive people getting more respect than those with thought-out points, it reminded me of every anarchist organization meeting I’ve ever been to and felt a sinking feeling inside when certain regulars start to speak. It was a strange mix, actually; half anti-porn Catholics and half anti-porn radical feminists. A sexy bearded Catholic boy argued that banning porn wouldn’t actually be censorship because “if the Nazis had a weapon that they were using against the Jews, I’d want to take it away.” And with that, he activated the rule: If you have to evoke the Nazis, your argument is probably pretty flimsy. A cute young feminist with breasts practically exploding out of her tank top informed us that, “Studying art history from a radical feminist perspective, I’ve come to realize that all classical art is pornography. You have phallic fountains and reclining nudes in the symbolic rape position.” So, today the XXX theatre, tomorrow the Louvre apparently. Perhaps art history shouldn’t be studied from a radical feminist perspective. Perhaps the world should not be filtered through ideology.

The group discussed the issue for a half-hour longer. Apparently, the radical religious right and the radical feminist left could agree that porn should be outlawed; one side doing so “for the children” and the other “for women” and both speaking of their respective victims’ group in the same terms. I wandered out into the muggy Washington night feeling perhaps a bit colder than I would have otherwise.
-1995.

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