Anecdotal evidence about misogynist porn

Probably not what you're looking for, but bukkake is the latest greatest adventure in porn. It's a japanese form of pornography where scores of men line up to be fellated and each of them ejaculate on the woman's face until you can't see her face. I've never seen bukkake but it sounds pretty misogynist.

Also,the Bang Bus, where the whole point of the film is the degradation of women picked up on the side of the road and offered cash for sex in the bus while the driver films it. The degradation involves coercing the woman with cash to perform sex acts she is uncomfortable with whether they are anal sex, double penetration, or some other act. When she does agree (and they all do) she is ridiculed, sometimes urinated on, sometimes ejaculated on, and then ejected from the bus which pulls away as cash is thrown at her from the window with hilarious laughter in the background.

Pretty sexy stuff.

Other big items in straight porn are the following:

- glory hole movies wherein a woman gives a man a blow job through a hole in a wall (you get the picture)
- brutal rape is quite big
- 'squirting teens' is always a favorite
- the many men and one woman oral scenes as said above by someone else
- watersports - I also had to look this up - peeing on women and women peeing on men is quite big as well

There you go. Sad isn't it.

Female ejaculation is big too. I saw one recently where this woman was on a glass coffee table masturbating with a vibrator. There's a cameraman filming a cameraman who gets up really close to the porn actress who looks pretty out of it on drugs. The cameraman starts saying, "Nice, yeah, fuck that pussy, fuck yourself, you slut" when suddenly the actress stiffens and starts ejaculating. The cameraman backs off immediately and says, "holy shit that's fucking gross" and then you hear a bunch of men laughing in the background.

I've surfed around message boards, and just yesterday came across one where a young man was lamenting that his girlfriend didn't spew fluids when she had an orgasm. The rest of the guys on the board said it was gross anyway and not to worry about it.

If my posts are too graphic, I can edit them.

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[ 10 October 2005: Message edited by: disobedient ]

Hmmmm...I find it interesting that some acts are seen by some people as inherently degrading or misogynist. I can think of little that is inherently degrading, including DP and TP, though most anything can be made so in context, and some acts seem more likely to be associated with misogynistic potratyals, language, etc. than others. I've never seen bukkake, but it was brought to my attention in one of my favorite blog-type places of all time:

[url=http://www.improvisation.ws/mb/tpcs.html]True Porn Clerk Stories[/url]

The adventures of an anti-censorship feminist performance artist as she worked in a video store that happened to rent porn. Really, really thought provoking and funny.

From one post entitled "Wuss"

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…Which brings me to M. I never actually met M. She was a new clerk we hired who quit after one day. She left a note on the manager's desk saying that she couldn't stay because the job was too degrading to women.

When I told the story to my friend Jenny, she said "Good for her!" I was taken aback for a moment, because my reaction had been "What a wuss!" Most of the women at the store had said some variation on "What a wuss!" I had told the story to Jenny in anticipation of her saying "What a wuss!"

I think the right response is somewhere in between. Some porn is degrading. Hell, a lot of it is degrading very much on purpose. It's hard to look at the box for Young, Dumb and Full of Cum and think they had anything else in mind.

(On a side note, I hate it when people use the spelling "cum". I HATE IT. What, it's supposed to be dirtier that way? Just because it's supposed to be all raw and sexy doesn't mean you have to be an idiot about it. Jesus.)

But the more I've worked at the video store, the less I'm convinced that porn is inherently degrading, and the line between degrading and not gets blurrier.

For example, the [My Store] chain, (and by "chain," I mean four stores, three of which actually deal in porn) does not carry pregnancy porn. My internal reaction to that is "Good," but I couldn't tell you why. I know that pregnant women have sex. I know that some pregnant women have been frustrated by their partners' reluctance to have sex or queasiness over seeing them as sexual beings.

For that matter, it's arguably a good way for a resourceful mom to start off Junior's college fund. But we don't carry it because The Powers That Be find it inherently degrading and it's never been a point I've cared to argue. If I look at it dispassionately, though, I don't think it is. Or at least it's dependent on what the pregnant woman in question is beng asked to do.

We recently stopped carrying bukkake, also because it's degrading. When I first started working at the store, that one seemed like an easy call for me. Bukakke involves a circle of men with a woman in the center. The men jerk off, covering the woman in semen. It's hard to think of a way that that wouldn't be degrading. It certainly was hard for me. Until, of course, I saw the box for Gay Bukkake. Yup. Same deal, only it's a man in the center. I realized that I found straight bukkake degrading, but gay bukkake merely incredibly disgusting. Did that make me a sexist, or was I penalizing straight men for being straight? So except for the disgusting part, I had to pencil in a new opinion.

Occasionally I get caught up in the principle of a thing, and when my manager mentioned the no-more-bukkake decision I actually started to argue with her. It took me a couple of minutes to ratchet my brain down from the logistics of it and remember that I loathe having to look at the bukkake boxes and having them out of the store would suit me fine.

So I backed out of an ethical debate and went against my newfound principles for my own comfort.

What a wuss.

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Skdadl, to be honest, I too would be uncomfortable posting personal experiences and thoughts on porn only to have it hijacked by men telling us/me that we are this that or the other. Totally counterproductive and for once, can we have a thread in which women, and women only respond to this? That would certainly be refreshing as too many times a personal experience is tossed aside as something untrue. It's hard to take and annoying and honestly? sometimes threatening. It's hard to have a man tell you how you, as a person and a female, should be viewing porn.

[ 11 October 2005: Message edited by: Stargazer ]

skdadl, I'd suggest that, if you'd like to change the frame of this thread, you edit your initial post to reflect that change. Simply change the first ground rule to indicate that it's a women-only thread.

[ 11 October 2005: Message edited by: writer ]

I've started two successful women-only threads in the feminism forum already. Some guys have grumbled elsewhere, but I haven't been told I was breaking any rules. Don't really know why we need to bug audra about this. But that's your call, I guess.

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I have no powers here beyond general civil consensus.

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Good enough!

Okay, I've got a story about something that would not be thought of as especially mysogynistic or pornographic, but which had a profound affect on me as a child, teenager and, perhaps, even today.

My brothers and I walked to the candy store from my grandfather's cottage. When we got there, my brothers started to snicker while looking at a magazine they had pulled from the newsstand. I was, I dunno, six or so. They were three and five years older.

Anyway, I was curious. I went over, and they took great delight in pointing at the women. The "article" featured pictures (from a movie?) of men and women dressed in skins - cavemen, I guess. The men had tied the women up by the wrists so that they were hanging, put the captured women on some kind of catapault - stretcher, etc. The women were vaguely distressed, as I remember. The scenes were somehow sexually charged, and threatening.

Around the same time, my brothers had started showing me Playboy magazine regularly. As I looked at these images and the ones of primitive men torturing primitive women, I was told again and again that this is the way it would be when I was a woman. This is what I would have to be. This is how I'd have to look. And this was my place.

Meanwhile, my mother didn't look like that, and she kind of hated her body for it. My older sister did look like that, and guys were really weird with her (including my brothers).

I really, really, didn't want to be a woman.

So ... nobody physically hurt, maybe, but damn, I can't quite get over the scarring. Not about sex. About oppression. And, generally, that's all I see with most straight porn. Not a real turn-on.

Skdadl, I'm trying to send you a PM but your message box is full. I want to share something with you but I absolutely refuse to post it in public.

Thanks so much Skdadl.

DP and TP aren't exactly shocking. I'm sure we all know a few people who have participated in at least a DP.

posted by The Baboon ...

First: Why are you posting in this thread?

Second: Did you not read the first post about this thread is only for women?

Third: Are you deliberately choosing to not respect the women-only request?

Fourth: The content and nature of your post demonstrates why female babblers need to exclude men from posting, not reading, certain topics.

"Sorry" would have sufficed.

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posted by The Baboon: I could have sworn that the original post merely specified that the first ten posts had to be by women. It did yesterday anyway. I guess it's been edited. My bad. Still, no need to break "sorry, you have a penis so you aren't allowed to participate in this debate" into four points.

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It was a collective decision of the women who were participating in the thread. The first post was edited to reflect that. Why are you still posting?

Now go away. Any further posts of yours will simply be ignored.

I will break the women-only rule to say that what I objected to most about the previous male poster's statement was its content, not the identity of the person speaking. I don't understand what he said, but I don't think I would really want to understand it. I expect a base level of intelligence in posts on particular threads. When I see a post that goes below that level of intelligence, I don't make a conclusion about whether an entire group of people shouldn't be permitted to contribute. I just say, "whatever!", and move on.

These are not images that I particularly care to have but I think it is an important issue and I appreciate the opportunity to learn something.

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Originally posted by Tehanu:
[b]Back to the thread topic ...

Conversely I may remember that early exposure well, just because I found it exciting. There are two parts of my brain: the part that is disgusted by the acts that are performed on women in this type of written pornography, and the much less controlled part that is attracted to it. It's also very hard and guilt-producing when I, myself, am shocked by what can turn me on.

...

I'm not feeling very articulate here, and I'm pretty conflicted, so I apologize if this post doesn't make a huge amount of sense in terms of consistency.[/b]

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I think your post was very clear and sums up the way I feel too. That's probably a reason why porn is so hard to discuss without getting into conflicts.

I promise this will be my last post on this particular discussion. I want to apologize to alisea, and I realized fairly quickly after making my post that someone would make the point that she did. I wrote the post in a hurry as I was about to head out to catch a bus, which was a stupid thing to do. I should have just sat on it and waited longer to see if anyone else made that point, and perhaps found another thread to say it on if no one else said what I felt I needed to say. Nor did I make that point particularly well, looking back at what I said.

It was probably predictable that the first person to break an all-female-posters rule on a particular thread would be someone who was only posting to make a stupid and irrelevant comment. And it was certainly self-aggrandizing of me (that may not be the right word, but I'm not sure what is) to leap in and say that not all men are twerps like that, which has been said elsewhere already anyway. So I'm sorry for breaking the guideline that Skdadl set, and will accept any sanction that there might be for doing so. And I'm sorry for continuing to derail the discussion with my first post, as with this one.

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Originally posted by alisea:
[b]And obscurantist, why did you think that none of the women here were capable of making that point, if they had wanted to? [/b]

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[ 11 October 2005: Message edited by: obscurantist ]

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posted by swirrlygrrl: ... Anyways, the reaction to the content of the baboon's post bothers me - people dismissed that the fact that people participate in and enjoy such acts as irrelevant. Well, its not irrelevant to me.

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It wasn't the suggestion that 'real' people may enjoy fantasizing about or choose to experience those sexual interactions portrayed in porn that I found offensive, but the superficiality of the response. The point of the descriptions of specific DP and TP scenarios was that they seemed to be staged in a deliberate manner that was not respectful to the female participant and that her compliance was directed by male fantasies.

The topic is misogynist porn. It appears to me, at least, that the power dynamic in most porn consists of women serving or servicing or being subjected to men's sexual needs, urges and whims. My issue with overwhelmingly male-centered themes, is that even if the performers who portray such interactions were well-paid, union members who liked their work, this unbalanced representation of human sexuality is not healthy. The ideal, for me, would for a wider range of practices to be depicted. Should it not be important, even urgent to question what is absent, and why?

I found the earlier reference to a certain chain that refused to carry pregnancy porn quite provocative. One can only assume that it was same-old, same-old activities, only with pregnant women. Did management ban it because it considered that it was in bad taste? Only degrading when it involved [b][i]pregnant[/i][/b] women but not others? Well, I would watch a video of a gloriously pregnant woman astride her partner(s), male and/or female, exploiting the raging horniness that such a condition triggers.
But I suspect that this is not "mainstream" imagery.

I have seen porn made by women where consensuality and mutuality was explicitly portrayed without slowing down the varied enthusiastic sexual explorations that ensued.

No one should feel that they need to censor their fantasies. Ideally, everyone could enjoy opportunities to experience whatever sexual interactions that turns them on, in safe and non-coercive situations. And those possibilities would be shown in porn.

I felt bad after that post I made. The one about the girl being abused by her father. I felt bad because I realized that there are probably a few people with us in this forum who have gone through what I saw in that drawing. Reading a description of porn is for many people, like reading a description of past trauma. If you’re not feeling safe at the time when you read it, it can be a horrible experience.

I want to thank all the women here (Skdadl especially) who have worked hard to make this forum a supportive and safe environment for women to talk about these things.

I felt bad after I made that post. I felt like I had made things worse; like by posting what I had seen, I had almost repeated it. I felt like I had done it too, because I described it; there for anyone to read, for anyone to be hurt by. Maybe that’s what it feels like to open up about abuse? Maybe it feels like “I’m the bad one. Because I’m the one saying all the bad things”

For heaven's sake, ignore him, or we'll derail this one the way innumerable others have been. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm one of the folks who called him out, so I may be responsible if this does get derailed ...

Swirrlygrrl, tehanu, and others ... what you wrote resonated hugely with me. And like you, swirrrlygrrl, I'm not entirely anonymous here, so I'm not going into any details that I wouldn't share with a megaphone in the Grand Parade at noon.

I've never felt guilty *in the broad context of my life* about my approach to sexuality and desires. But I've *often* felt guilty -- or people have tried to make me feel guilty -- in feminist circles.

[ 03 November 2008: Message edited by: alisea ]

skdadl, I don't want to get bogged down in my relationship with my brothers here, so I won't answer the questions you've asked. My point was, a nine year old and eleven year old grabbed a magazine with pedestrian soft-porn in it that was within easy reach. They then used it to hammer in a very unpleasant message I'd been receiving from pretty well everywhere else about sex, gender and dominance. And I was six.

I have issues with the focus on porn we've seen in the feminism forum of late. When it comes to misogynist porn, I see the whole wide world out there, not just the images on tape and in books and magazines.

The Surreal Life is back on air. A commercial in heavy rotation on Much More Music blithely refers to Omarosa - a woman who is black - as a bitch in its voice-over. Normal life continues.

I remember being on the membership committee for the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association when an SM magazine applied. It clearly stated that all models were over 18. In all the pictures, everyone seemed to be having real, genuine fun. It was also clearly gay-, lesbian- and bi-positive, though most of the material was straight.

It reminded me a bit of those role-playing games people do in the forest, pretending they live in Middle England, taking on funny names and odd vocations (like wench).

Anyway, other committee members said that the some of the models could be younger than 18. I asked if there was a specific, provable case. There was more grumbling. I then picked up some of the association's big glossy magazines and flipped through them.

I said something like: "I bet you she's under 18. Look how sexy she is. What do you think they intended with that shot? What are young women going to be more affected by - this SM magazine, or all these images of sexy come-on 14-year-olds used to sell product? If we're not going to allow this applicant through for the reason stated at this meeting, I'd suggest we look at some of our current members more closely, too."

The SM magazine was accepted.

As a writer, I've published sexually explicit material some would call porn. I've read from it, and had men and women tell me they were turned on. Some of the dynamics I was writing about were unhealthy, to say the least. It was disturbing to hear that others could find them stimulating. Of course, I'd written the scenes to be that way.

And I've had reviews in feminist publications slam me for it.

So. What's porn? What's misogynist porn?

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As a young woman, I was taken to see a film that my boyfriend and his friends thought to be marvellous. It was called Charlotte, and was directed by Roger Vadim. I will always remember it because it was my first exposure to the idea that there is something edgy and artistic about the portrayal of murder mixed with sex. Sex murder, or whatever it ought to be called. We all know about these kinds of murders. In fiction the victim, like the famous O, is gloriously abject. Is this anything more than a pornographic fantasy? Last year, when I was reviewing fiction by new authors, there were a couple of books in this genre, the approved term for which used to be `high-brow pornography.' At any rate, I was surprised, a quarter of the way through Judy MacDonald's Jane, when I realized that this was what I was reading. The press material and the dust jacket had used words like `provocative, suspenseful, and dangerously sensual,' and I had read that the author describes herself as `anarcho-social-feministy.' Nothing had prepared me for sexual slavery, torture, and multiple murder.

I am not eager to know more about the inner life of sadistic sex murderers, nor do I really wish to understand their masochistic, equally murderous, slaves. I am not fascinated by the floating frontier between sex murder and fantasies of sex murder. Perhaps, if murders of this kind didn't actually happen, then I would feel that the writing and publishing of this kind of fiction served to explore one of the more unfortunate corners of human nature without actually harming anyone. Since, however, murders of this kind do happen, all too often, and since we do not know for sure what effect reading this kind of literature has on people, I for one would prefer not to see this kind of novel on the Canlit shelves. I cannot justify imagining someone's murder as an erotic event.
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