Please note: This piece discusses my personal sex life and sexual fantasies in a fair amount of detail. Family members and others who don't want to read about that stuff, please skip this one. This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

Is it valid to criticize rough-sex porn for perpetuating misogynist images of women?

Or, to look at the question from the other side: Is it possible to critique rough-sex porn without marginalizing kink?

If you've been around the porn wars, you've almost certainly run across a particular form of anti-porn critique. "Erotica may not be inherently bad... but look at how misogynistic so much commercial porn is! Look at how it portrays degradation and violence against women as sexually pleasurable! Women being slapped and treated roughly during sex! Women being called sluts and whores and sex toys! Women being given forceful deep-throat blowjobs that make them choke and gag! Is that a vision of women and sexuality we want to accept?"

I was reading one of these screeds the other day (somebody linked to it in a Facebook conversation)... and I started spewing out a seriously annoyed mini-manifesto/ rant.

You know who finds that imagery hot? You know who gets turned on by images of women being slapped and roughed-up? You know who gets turned on by images of women being called sluts and whores and sex toys? You know who gets turned on by images of women having hard cocks forced down their throats until they choke and gag and cry?

Me.

I do.

And I am bloody well done with being told that I'm a bad person, or a bad feminist, for finding this imagery hot.



I am a kinky person. I am a consensual sadomasochist. And I am bloody well done with having my desire to see kinky imagery, consensually engaged in as an acted-out fantasy, treated as a desire for actual, real-world degradation and oppression of women. I am bloody well done with having kinky sexuality marginalized by well-meaning concern trolls who supposedly have my best interests at heart.

When critics point to rough or kinky sex in porn as evidence of its misogyny, I think they often fail to realize that they're marginalizing kink, and people in the kink community. Including -- need I say it? -- women in the kink community. Kink is already seriously marginalized: plenty of people see it as sick and sad at best, abusive and destructive at worst, self-evidently and by its very nature. Kinky people are already made to feel ashamed and guilty about what we do and what we like to think about. And it troubles me greatly when progressive, feminist people -- people who are normally sensitive to a fault about marginalized communities, people who would passionately decry any attempt to say that (for instance) gay and lesbian sexuality is inherently sick and sad -- are this tone-deaf about how their ideas are contributing to the guilt and shame and demonization of yet another sexual minority.

(And yes -- the fantasies depicted in rough and kinky porn are consensually acted out. The myth of people being forced into the porn industry is just that -- a myth. There are plenty of people who are willing to do this work for money. There's no earthly reason for porn producers to force anyone into it at gunpoint. Sheesh.)

Okay. So that's the manifesto/ rant. Which I was all ready to make the focus of today's column.

But then I started thinking. (Always a danger.) And I started asking myself, "Is it really that simple?"

*

Here's the conundrum.

I do, in fact, think it's valid to critique popular culture -- including porn -- for the cultural messages it conveys, about gender or anything else. Regardless of whether those messages are being conveyed intentionally or unconsciously. Hell, I do it myself all the time. I criticize movies, TV shows, music videos, advertising, etc. -- and porn -- for perpetuating sexist and misogynistic imagery.



For instance. As a film critic and social critic, I might point out that action movies commonly perpetuate some very common sexist tropes: e.g., weak helpless women who need rescuing by strong male heroes. Now, someone who likes action movies might reply, "Hey, it's just a fantasy that I enjoy. I'm not saying that I want a world in which strong men rescue weak helpless women, or that the world is really like that. It's just an escapist fantasy." And yet I think it's valid for me to critique this trope and how common it is -- even though it is just a fantasy, consensually participated in by the actors as well as the audience. The fantasy is exactly what I'm critiquing -- that, and how ubiquitous it is.

So how is that different from someone critiquing rough or kinky porn for perpetuating sexist imagery of women?



Or similarly, as a film critic and social critic, I might criticize the "Sex and the City" movie for depicting women as vapid consumers whose emotional lives center on possessions. But someone who likes that movie might say, again, that it's just a fun fantasy that doesn't imply anything about the people who made it or the people who enjoy it. Why is it valid for me to critique these depictions of women in "Sex and the City"... but it's not valid for someone to critique, say, "Rocco: Animal Trainer 5" for depicting women as subjugated sex toys who exist to be used roughly by men and have cocks forced down their throats until they gag?

So if I'm going to defend my social criticism of the fantasy images depicted in action movies or "Sex and the City" -- even if those images aren't meant to say, "This is how the world ought to be," or even, 'This is how the world really is," even if those images are simply saying, "This is a fun and entertaining thing to think about as a distraction" -- why is it not valid for someone else to critique the fantasy images depicted in rough or kinky porn?

I want to be very rigorous here. I want to be sure I don't reach my conclusion first and then contort my ethical thinking so I can get there from here. I don't want to have my rationale be, "I like kinky porn, therefore it's okay; I don't like "Sex in the City," therefore it's not." I don't want my ethical thinking to just be a rationalization of my personal likes and dislikes.

So I've been thinking about this carefully and at length. And here's what finally occurred to me. (Or, to be more accurate: Here's what finally occurred to Ingrid. I chewed over this idea in my head for days without a solution; I ran it by nearly a dozen people who all came up with interesting questions and thoughts, none of which actually resolved the conundrum... and Ingrid thought about it for ten minutes and came up with the answer. I love being married to a philosophy major.)

Here's what it is.

The problem isn't with critiquing kinky or rough-sex porn for perpetuating misogyny.

The problem is with critiquing rough-sex or kinky porn for perpetuating misogyny... simply because it's rough or kinky.



The problem with the "rough or kinky porn perpetuates imagery of women as sexual victims" trope is that it shows absolutely no awareness of consensual kink. It shows no awareness of kink as a consented-to activity among equals, in which fantasies of inequality or non-consent are played out with the willing and enthusiastic agreement of everyone. It shows no awareness of the complex layers and meta-layers of kinky fantasy and the acting-out of fantasy: the ways that kinky people can experience themselves simultaneously as victims/ perpetrators and as caring, affectionate partners giving each other what we most dearly want... and the fact that we often enjoy porn which acknowledges that experience and caters to it. It shows no awareness of the fact that there's oodles of rough and kinky porn in which women dominate men. (Not to mention rough and kinky gay male porn -- Loki knows there's plenty of that -- and by-lesbians-for-lesbians porn -- there's not a ton of that these days, but the rough stuff definitely makes up a solid chunk of what there is.) It shows no awareness of the fact that plenty of women enjoy these fantasies every bit as much as men... and that while men are more likely to be consumers of video porn, including rough or kinky video porn, women are avid consumers of these fantasies in other media. (Most notably fiction -- especially in the blurry and increasingly non-existent line between romance novels and erotica.)

And it shows no awareness of how this reflexive criticism of rough and kinky porn plays into the marginalization of kinky people.

If people want to critique sexism in porn, I'm all for it. I've done it myself, more than once. And if people want to critique sexism in rough or kinky porn, I'm all for that as well. But the critique needs to be better-informed, and more nuanced, than just, "Look! Women being dominated and humiliated and slapped around! It's so sexist!" It needs to not just reflexively say that any depiction of rough or kinky sex in which women are the bottoms is sexist... simply because it is rough or kinky sex in which women are the bottoms, purely on that basis alone.

Thanks to Ingrid, Ben, and the folks at the Center for Sex and Culture salon for helping me think this one through. This was a tough one, and I couldn't have gotten here alone.