Attention: porn addicts

By Rebecca Spencer – Comment Editor

With international women’s day just passed I thought it was about time we talked about porn and reclaiming female sexuality. Feminist porn is creating a social sex revolution by refusing to continue the taboo of female sexuality and by putting power into women’s hands, both actors and audiences.

The porn sector brought in a staggering $98 billion in revenue in 2018. Pornhub’s videos were watched 92 billion times in 2016 with 64 million people tuning in per day and this number is rising each year. Effectively, porn is perhaps one of if not the most powerful source of social influence on the planet, with boys and girls having access to explicit material often from the age of 10.

So, what are the effects? With the top searches in 2016 as ‘lesbian’, ‘milf’ and ‘teen’ it is quite obvious that the objectification of women and fetishization of sexual orientation, incest and paedophilia has become normalised within society internationally. With top searched titles such as ‘destroy my teen p*ssy’, ‘long hard painal’, ‘assf****d for fame’ and ‘hot daughter squirts on daddy’ it’s pretty damn clear that something needs to be done to change this trend of available and encouraged sexual violence. But why does no one talk about it? Why do we think it’s normal for our boyfriends to be masturbating over a depiction of non-consensual sex? Violent, misogynist and abusive porn has been normalised under the justification that porn is a place we can go to express secret desires, without real-world consequences. As well as, using the excuse ‘but the abuse is consensual’, even though the actor has consented (presumably) abuse is still abuse and the depiction is often not one of consent, which ultimately contributes to socially accepted misogyny and encouraged violence and rape.

Can you believe in equality and watch porn? Yes… feminist porn.

It’s a pretty ignorant assumption that the production, accessibility and demand of violent porn does not have real-world consequences. Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, stated in her 2009 TED talk, ‘there is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex’. The trouble is, what you see in hardcore, wide spread porn today is abuse; choking, forced penetration, hitting, the list goes on… which ultimately perpetuates, normalises and justifies seeing women as little more than objects that are and like to be under the physical and mental control of men. Indeed, the British Medical Journal carried out research on ‘Anal heterosex among young people’ in 2014, discovering prevalent ‘normalisation of coercion’ and ‘accidental anal penetration’ in teen sex. Comments from young males were recorded such as ‘you just keep going till they get fed up and let you do it anyway’, exemplifying the real-world effects of forceful porn. Moreover, the recent release of the Ted Bundy tapes on Netflix, a serious killer and necrophiliac who admitted having an addiction to porn which lead to a sexual desire to kill and rape women, should send a harrowing message to the consumers and directors of porn.

Porn is made due to demand, so as much as porn is influencing it’s viewers and most importantly the next generation of men and women, the viewers level of interesting in a porn genre determines what type of porn is in demand and therefore made. What is going so wrong in society that the majority of porn demanded contains representations of violence and abuse? Laurie Penny highlights that within society, ‘most men have never been powerful. Throughout history, the vast majority of men have had almost no structural power, except over women and children’. It is suggested that men feel empowered through inflicting forced violence on women in a sexual nature because they’re fulfilling the identity of male. However, a study by Jenny M. Bivona indicates that 25 percent of straight porn searches by women are for videos featuring violence against their own sex and that 52 percent of women have had fantasies about forced sex with a man. Therefore, the problem of violence towards and objectification of women is being encouraged and reproduced by both genders. How can we change deep-rooted structural male supremacy when men and women’s brains are filled with and pleasured by depictions of submissive, abused women on a daily basis?

Feminist porn isn’t all slow-paced soft kissing, it attempts to represent female sexual desire and perspective. The point is not to get rid of violence completely, but to show the sexual enjoyment and consent of the female protagonist. Feminist porn also makes a point of objectifying the man and utilising women’s fantasies; a sweaty fireman roleplay as opposed to a naughty schoolgirl. In this way women in porn are turned into active subjects not passive objects and actors are well-paid and treated respectfully. The porn is made for the female gaze and it is making ground-breaking steps in challenging male sexual hegemony, you can even check it out at the Feminist Film Festival in Stockholm. However, feminist porn sites are rarely free and will therefore find it hard to ever be in true competition with the major free-market giants of misogyny such as Pornhub. Can you believe in equality and watch porn? Yes… feminist porn.

Image credit: Flickr