I’ve put off writing this post for quite some time because I knew it would be a long and fairly mentally tiring one, but the time has come for me to tackle the subject that brought me into feminism. I’m of the opinion that there is absolutely no defense possible for pornography consumption, and that pornography is a force that operates only to the detriment of everyone who comes into contact with it. That includes men. I’ll talk a little bit about the abstract theoretical problems inherent in pornography, but it’s really the everyday human costs of the industry that I’d like to discuss, because that’s where people feel and see the negative effects of pornography on their lives and the world we have to live in.

It seems today that a large portion of the young people in this country think being into heinous porn is some kind of hip, countercultural statement, especially for women (more on that delusion can be found here). That idea is pretty tired; when I was a teenager (mid-1990s) a lot of the dudes I knew already thought watching gnarly porn was some kind of lifestyle choice you made to go along with your skateboard and your Circle Jerks t-shirt. They would watch it in groups and come to school laughing their asses off about how gross it was. Although I’m sure there was some masturbation going on somewhere, a lot of the cachet of watching porn at that time seemed to revolve around the weirdness of the representations of sex in most porn; back then it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, and it generally wasn’t as hardcore as it is now, so hardcore porn tapes struck people as bizarre, as wildly different from their own sexual experiences. It was like finding out about the weird shit people in other countries eat: it might be exciting, but the excitement came from the foreignness of it.

I had never really seen any of it. My exposure to pornography had consisted of finding a Penthouse in my uncle’s bathroom cabinet at age 7 and watching a few Emanuelle movies on Showtime when I stayed up all night as an adolescent. I had no idea what these dudes were talking about, I just knew it sounded fucked up and mildly interesting for that reason. Then I saw some. Some asshole friend of some dude I dated thought it was hilarious to put porn tapes on in front of girls to get a reaction out of them, which he did once when I was at his house. It doesn’t surprise me, when I think back on it, that this guy was one of the few dudes I knew who owned hardcore porn tapes. He was a serious asshole, and he hated women. He treated the girls he dated like valueless property, he constantly cheated on them and sexually abused them, and he was always asking my boyfriend why he “let” me do this or that. I hardly remember what was on the tape, but I knew I felt like I’d been slapped in the face after I watched it, and not just because this jagoff had put it on in an attempt to upset me.

I decided at that point that I didn’t think porn was cool, that I didn’t think it furthered whatever kind of iconoclastic vibe these idiots thought they were laying down, and that I wasn’t going to date dudes who were into it. I probably couldn’t have explained very well what my reasoning was at the time except to say that I thought it was gross and that only dudes who treated women like shit were into it. What can I say, I’ve always loved generalizations. They work really well when you don’t feel capable of or interested in explaining yourself.

Most of my male friends at the time were on my team about the whole thing; they thought porn was something 12-year-olds got excited about but that mature motherfuckers like themselves (late-teens pretentiousness is awesome) should have outgrown it. It was something their dads did. Lame! I’m sure they were lying in at least some sense, but I didn’t know it at the time. It didn’t matter. Using porn for anything but irony-laden entertainment was shameful in the early and mid 1990s, at least among my circle of acquaintances, so no one was copping to it.

Then when I was 19 I found a porn tape in a drawer at my boyfriend’s house (Buffy the Vampire Layer — no, I’m not kidding). I felt completely justified in taking it out to the driveway and breaking it with a hammer. It was akin to cheating in my mind, and I was enraged to think that I had spent 4 months dating someone who was clearly an asshole, as I had decided all men who were into porn were. He came out and screamed at me that I had no right to destroy other people’s property and that I couldn’t tell him not to watch porn.

Something had happened in the space of a few years. Young dudes who had prided themselves on how non-mainstream they were and who rejected the kinds of roles society wanted to force them into had found a way to adopt one of their fathers’ worst habits and reclaim the right to use images of women being exploited without shame or irony. The same dudes who had been shocked by these videos to the point of giggling and telling people about them in whispers at age 16, at 19 were so accustomed to hardcore porn that they no longer bothered discussing the more shocking aspects of the images they had seen but instead recommended titles to each other and bemoaned their girlfriends’ “jealousy” that threatened to impede their access to images of women being used. Male privilege had outstripped iconoclasm, as it always does.

Well, it wasn’t jealousy that motivated my inveighing against porn. I will readily admit that I didn’t think it appropriate that someone in a monogamous relationship ought to be looking at images of other naked women and masturbating to them, and I still don’t, but that wasn’t the major issue. The major issue, as inchoate as it was in my mind at the time, was that I was devastated to find myself stuck in a relationship with someone who was at best incredibly unthoughtful and unreflective, and who at worst thought of women — possibly myself included — as less than human. I was already an undeclared feminist at the time, but that event pushed me to start thinking about pornography and its effects on women’s place in the world and on people’s personal relationships, and it pushed me to start thinking about the relationship between gender issues and the general nature of authority and nonconformity. And we all know thinking about that leads to radical feminism.

That’ll be the end of the personal information.

To be continued…





