The Politics of Porn

Dubbing the fight against pornography “the next civil rights movement,” speaker Gail Dines implored her Fong Auditorium audience last week to “get out in the streets” to fight the crisis. Dines, who told me she considers herself a “radical feminist,” is a professor of sociology at nearby Wheelock College, where she studies the relationship between pornography and mainstream culture.

In a talk sponsored by Harvard Men Against Rape and the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, Dines asserted that we live in a “culture completely hijacked by corporate culture.” The degree to which we have been victimized is so great, that we cannot even see the ways in which pornography has infiltrated our lives. Expressing similar sentiments at the Feminist Anti-Pornography Conference earlier this year, Dines despaired: “Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with the droppings of the pornography industry. Our lives are overwhelmed by images that scream misogyny.”

To convey this message, Dines did a bit of bombarding herself, presenting a slideshow chock-full of the most vulgar kinds of pornographic images and spitting the word “fuck” several dozen times (this was, no doubt, to show she was no prude). A major theme of the evening: Pornography has invaded our culture to such an extent that even a woman’s behavior is altered by it. Porn causes a woman to feel immense pressure to conform to an unattainable standard of beauty and sex appeal. Dines blames everything from hard-core pornography to mainstream magazine covers of models who are “blonde, female, and white…with a ‘fuck me’ look on her face.”

Dines’ shock-and-awe tactics made for an entertaining two hours, but she is hardly a beacon of insight on the subject of porn and culture. Hers is the wearying rhetoric of the worst sort of feminism, a strange collision of puritanical morality and radical politics. She’s right that American society is increasingly sexualized (though we remain much more publicly chaste than many other Westernized countries), but to attribute a loosening of female sexual mores to porn is illogical, sexist, and degrading. For those who ascribe to Dines’ school of thought, a woman who beautifies herself or pursues men is motivated subconsciously by porn culture, not out of a natural desire to be physically attractive or raw sex drive. Dines went on to provide a slew of examples of this sad condition—for instance, any woman who gets a bikini wax does so out of her wish to “look like children.” Thong underwear is equally upsetting to her.

The good professor has ignored that the visage she describes as the “’fuck me’ look” might mean exactly what it seems—that a woman just wants to have sex. While a society devoid of meaningful sex would be troubling, Dines dares to deny women agency to make that choice. Some porn may be gross, but it has not caused a cultural pandemic. On the contrary, one could argue that it is the loosening of sexual mores—female and male—that has given way to the growth of the pornography industry.

Dines told her Harvard audience not to study academic writing on this subject, because it is out of touch with reality. This is a funny assertion, as this activist’s own methodology leaves something to be desired. Aside from numbers on the amount of money that is spent on pornography each year, Dines’ presentation was completely without statistics. She provided only protracted anecdotes about celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith (whom she wistfully explained “died of a broken heart”) and in-your-face images. She cited a lack of interest and funding for the absence of any real data, which is convenient.

To the degree that Dines managed to be at all compelling, it was in her appeal to the victimization of women who star in porn. Too many male consumers of pornography, she suggested, fail to realize they are “jerking off to someone else’s misery.” To drive this message home, she presented a photo of a woman’s face covered in semen. Yet, like her other assertions, this is not grounded in fact. American women are not sold into pornography as slaves—though engaging in porn may come to be a decision a woman regrets, she is not without options. People enter the pornography industry because it is lucrative, not because they are forced into it. Dines’ concern is tantamount to worrying over the burger-flippers of the world, who are victims of the fast-food industry.

What’s troubling in all of this is that Professor Gail Dines is not just some fringe radical—she represents an entire movement of anti-pornography activists who wage war on the rights of individuals and corporations to take part in commerce. Indeed, there is a type of pornography that is disturbing to view—efforts to prevent young children from viewing this, for instance, is a worthy goal. Beyond that, however, one does best to pursue a libertarian approach to porn.

Comically, activists like Dines will persist in their quests, fearing we are on the brink of a pornography-induced apocalypse. “Laugh now,” Dines warned her Harvard audience, “but everything I’ve predicted has come true.” We’re quaking in our boots.



Lucy M. Caldwell ’09 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.