Feminists' Perspectives on Pornography

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My position on the subject of pornography is one of approbation; I
support and, more, endorse such material. This position is hardly
unique, but let me give you an example from my experience that
might serve to clarify.

About ten years ago I was hired as a consultant by the owners of
several sex theaters in the Time Square area of New York City. My
task was to help clean up some of the problems and elevate the
shows to a more acceptable level. I had previously worked for
Candida Royalle's Femme Productions (a company that produces
erotic videotapes for women and couples) and my reputation in
New York was solid and growing. I made some changes, created an
acting class for the stage performers, created skits for them that
brought humor and charm to the presentation of sex. And couples
and single women began to frequent the theaters where my ideas of
positive/holistic/naturalistic sexuality were being presented.

One evening there occurred an event that solidified for me that I
was on the right track. While far from an epiphany, I knew that
night the necessity of fighting for the right of women, and men,
to choose sex work as a legitimate expression of art and/or
commerce. Three couples came in to the theater. They were
Pakistani. The men wore Western business suits, their wives were
dressed in traditional Eastern garb. Each wife walked two steps
behind and to the left of her husband. Clearly these women did not
want to be in a theater where live sex acts were taking place but
equally clear was that in their culture they had no choice. The
women who were performing on stage at least had a choice. Perhaps
not the best choice but a choice nonetheless. To take away a
woman's right to choose what she does with her life is on all
counts wrong in my opinion. Such action denigrates all women and
says they are no more than children, are incapable of taking care
of themselves. Also, what is a wrong choice for one may be a right
choice for another. It is not the place of any individual, or
group, or religion or government to take away choice from any
individual. This is the greater evil; this causes the greater harm
to society.

And it is to society, to our culture and our civilization that we
must look for the source of the problem, not to porn, erotica or
sexually explicit material itself. To wit: Cartoonist C.C. Beck,
who created Captain Marvel, was once asked his opinion of
pornography. He was reported to have said -- though I can not
verify this quote -- that 'earth out of place is dirt'. He,
obviously, took an anti-porn stance, missing completely the
societal and cultural problems that allow for the extreme of
pornography, as well as any other extremes that we tolerate in our
entertainment such as violence. Beck reflected the popular
attitude of his time; he knew not to look beneath the surface
wherein there might be found truth, or at least evidence of
another postulation, one that placed expressions and presentations
of sexuality within the accepted framework of the society. Though
the research into societies that celebrated open sexuality began
with J.J. Bachofen in the 1850s it was not until more than a
hundred years later that this information came to popular
attention with books such as "When God Was a Woman" by
Merlin Stone published in the early 1970s. We now know that
societies governed by women who embraced open sexuality were the
first union of humans into tribes and clans, the beginnings of
civilization. We know also that when these societies came under
attack and then control by forces opposed to these 'Goddess'
concepts of open, joyous, spiritual sexuality, that
sexuality was repressed, sexual expression restricted, violence
celebrated and that dear held freedoms and rights -- not to
mention rites -- were taken away from the people. The question is
not what is wrong with pornography but what is wrong with a
society that represses the rights of the people including the
right to sexual expression/speech?

The talent, the actresses and actors, who make the movies should
have a say in what they do, should be acknowledged as adults who
are capable of making choices.

[Charles Ess sent the following response to one of the
historical/cultural theses mentioned by Taliesin. If this turns
into a new thread, we will start a topic on the Bachhofen/Stone
reconstruction.]

I spent quite some number of years more or less persuaded of
something like the Bachhofen/Stone reconstruction.  More work in
this  area, however, gradually convinced me that it is mistaken
on several  grounds - (a) the anthropological and archeological
evidence is far more  complex and ambiguous than Stone and
others in her school of  interpretation recognize; (b) the
simple dichotomy of "good"  pre-patriarchal sexuality vs. "bad"
patriarchal sexual repression also  doesn't hold up to close
examination - in particular, the attitudes  towards sexuality in
Judaism and Christianity are far more wide-ranging
and complex than this dichotomy allows for (see the Song of
Songs, for  marvelous counterexample to the notion that
agricultural societies  stigmatize and repress sexuality); and,
as a last point, (c) while the  feminist/liberationist intention
of this view of history is one I'm  thoroughly in agreement with
- it has been pointed out by such prominent  feminists as
Rosemary Radford Ruether that this dichotomy is itself an
echo of the Augustinian re-construction of a "fall" story, and
in this  way remains thoroughly contained within the ostensibly
repressive  ideology it seeks to escape.  (She goes on to point
out that building a  religion on a contemporary reconstruction
of ancient religion on the  basis of ambiguous and often
contradictory evidence, far from aiding the
feminist/liberationist cause, threatens it precisely by
centering it on a  foundation which is so easy to undermine -
both from the standpoint of  archeology and anthropology (only
about 1/3 of known hunting/gathering  societies come close to
something like gender equality, whereas one of
the most striking examples of gender equality can be found in
the early  Christian communities, and perhaps in the
pre-monarchical Israelite  societies) and from the standpoint of
noticing that such reconstructions  are notoriously liable to
anachronistic projections which have little to  do with the
ancient societies ostensibly held forth as paradigms.)

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