Porn As It Is

Pornography has escalated with the advent of photography, video film-making and the digital age of media. It’s become a part of mainstream media to the point that it’s starting to have a lasting impact on the objectification of women. In the past, women have been objectified, hurt, raped or beaten in passages of texts or drawings, but now it’s being digitally recorded in pornography and it's what will continue a cycle of re-victimizing women. When we’re watching pornography we are literally watching the historical exploitation of the violence and rape done so on women that has been recycled to a format for today’s culture. Not to mention that it’s also protected by first amendment rights, so if you think it’s going away soon, think again. The porn industry requires the lack of women’s freedom and it’s where sex is represented by power, where the harm inflicted on women becomes the pleasure for men.

Women are then turned into things that can be consumed and pornography is constructed around prompting sexual arousal. People learn to be receptive of it though; we’re not just passive recipients of media, we actually do become socialized by the media we consume. Things like attraction and desire are socially constructed and are impacted by the sort of messages we see or hear. So in porn (which is controlled by elite interests) it’s constantly training us as a society to react and view these vulnerable populations of women as consumable objects. Objectification is an important concept to understand about sexism with the commodification of women. Women are de-personalized and become objects so that people no longer have to feel guilty about consuming them. It’s no longer someone; it’s something. And it is usually necessary for the violence in porn to become invisible or hidden, so that it can further facilitate the consumption of women in porn where people don’t have to think about the oppression that’s involved. It makes the consumption of porn more pleasurable without that guilt, so it makes it easier to consume. However, this is not the case with a few porn categories as pointed out in the documentary produced by Ann Perkins–I mean Rashida Jones, called “Hot Girls Wanted,” where the violence and abuse become the central focus. The “forced blowjob” style of abuse porn have women subjugated into extremely mortifying and subservient roles; all for the pleasure of men.

What is pornography, but the ultimate consumption of the sexualization and objectification of the female body? It reduces women to processed meat, where they are no longer seen as a person, but they’re butchered into fragmented body parts. Women are no longer whole persons, but viewed as body parts for the consumer’s pleasure. Today women in the porn industry tend to be interchangeable, where we're given only certain types of women being commodified. In the documentary we watched in class, “Hot Girls Wanted,” we have a focus on what is called the “teenie-bopper” and this type of women embodies physical characteristics of youth and innocence.

One of the porn-stars the documentary follows is named Lucy Tyler and she explains how she plays a persona or character named Karly. She mentions how she must tuck in her nose ring and wear pigtails and pretends to have a spunky personality in front of the camera. There are other versions of the commodified women, usually they are tan, hairless, sometimes blonde, but they all adhere to certain body types. In pornography, it really comes down to these objectified body parts and not about the person anymore. It’s where the men are in control and women are performing submissive roles and what this does over time is it naturalizes sexual dominance over women. We see this throughout all pornography, save a few reverse niches and fetishes that are few and far between.

Pornography also has in it an explicit script that teaches us how we’re supposed to behave according to the gender we’ve identified with by again naturalizing the interaction between men and women. It consists of the male dominance asserting power over feminized and subservient women. We see in pornography that men want sex and women are there to get sex or have it taken from them. The message in pornography is advertising “man-to-man” language, where a fraternity of men are being nurtured. This leads men to experience superiority towards women and entitlement to them; making sex all about the power.

The public sphere is inundated with these constant reminders that women are to serve in distinct gender roles, especially in porn. It isn’t just about sexual gratification, because sexual attraction (or just sex in general) is being socially constructed so that getting “turned on” becomes about power; it’s about being able to dominant others and making them subservient. So porn has essentially made sex become power. It’s not just about biological reactions or expressing the intimate bonds we share, but it’s being socially constructed to normalize power relations, thus linking sexuality with dominance. And so if we see pornography from this perspective we can draw a line to the ramifications indicated in consuming porn. We can apply it to not just how we treat women, but also to other feminized groups in our society, which would be people of color or gay and lesbian people, we can examine this dichotomy between women and men in porn to assume that it’s not just about men vs. women, it’s masculinity vs. femininity.

Women have traditionally been associated with caring/nurturing roles in society and in pornography it is all about degrading women and humiliating women and demonstrating power over them. One of the porn-stars the documentary focuses on mentions how one of her very first scenes involved a company called “Latina Abuse,” which the documentary showed portions of a scene she was in that made up one of the most disturbing parts of the documentary, where you can see and hear her being dragged and forced into sexual submission. So again, sex is about power and in the pornography industry it’s where men are the ones in power, the ones who profit most from it and the ones who consume it. The women themselves are victims to pornography, because this is definitely not a women’s industry; it’s a male’s industry. And with that thought, it brings me to the subject of Belle Knox, who was also highlighted briefly in the documentary for being a Duke University student famous for her porn background and for publicly advocating women’s right for sexual empowerment and “autonomy”.

I will be using a clip of Piers Morgan interviewing Belle Knox asking her questions regarding her involvement with the porn industry as an artifact for explaining the objectification of women in porn.

While Knox seems to look like she is both socially and physically “free” to do porn and we may see her as a free agent to do with her body as she sees fit, she is still acting accordingly to the institutional discriminations women have undergone for centuries past. Here is a quote from the interview where Knox states her reasons for doing porn:

“For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. When I finish a scene, I know that I have done so and completed an honest day’s work. It is my artistic outlet: my love, my happiness, my home. I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality…It is freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.”

What this message says though is it helps justify the system of patriarchy our society revolves around and this makes us see the degradation and consumption from porn seem harmless and okay if women are willingly accepting of it. We see this also in advertisements (see Carl’s Jr. commercials) where women want to be the subject of sexual objectification and where women appear to be happy to oblige in the sexual arousal of men.

Not to discredit Knox, but in my opinion, I don’t think women exactly go into porn due to rationale thoughts of thinking “oh this going to be a thrilling and fulfilling career to get into,” because c’mon! I mean, thinking about the criteria mentioned in the documentary for instance, pornography seems like it is a very, very, very, very poorly paid career choice for women. The average career in porn is most likely less than 2 years (3 months and onwards becomes more and more difficult for newcomers to book jobs), it disproportionately attracts women from lower social statuses, who most likely don’t have any other option and it also has a fairly high disease rate with expensive medical bills attached to it. Not only that, but when you do get out of the industry, you are labeled a nympho and try finding a job where you don't get classified like a sex offender. Yeah, no thank you. It’s not a glamorous industry at all. Most of the women only make a few hundred dollars for every scene that they shoot and they can only hope to keep on getting more and more. It’s not at all a transparent decision that many of these women make, so I'm not convinced they recognize porn as this "empowering" career choice that Knox makes it out to be.

But the argument that Knox has about for being a women who chooses to be in porn has a lot of meaning behind it and says much about the kind of world we live in. For a lot of aspects of pornography that wasn’t covered in the documentary, there’s a heavy involvement with sex trafficking, where there are a many cases of women coming out of abusive relationships who most likely have had a history with domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction or child molestation.  These women usually come from low brackets of social classes, so for a majority of those women, it’s really difficult to say there’s much of a choice there. Especially with the sex trafficking that goes on with prostitution, where there’s literally not much of a choice at all for them. But excuse my rambling, this analysis is still based solely off the documentary and the interview. I will stay the course and focus on the women who do look like they are making a rationale choice in pursuing careers in porn, or at least they think they're making one.

Which leads me to my question that perpetrates from this artefact and what is structuring the choice behind Knox’s words? Especially the reason for why she feels so “empowered” while doing porn?

The rationale that goes behind Knox’s argument to go off into porn and one that I imagine goes for many of the other women in the documentary who chose to go into porn, is that it is a choice that is one based off of a patriarchal conception, where women’s only value is seen in their sexual availabilities. They've lived their whole lives where it’s really the only validation they’ve been granted to accrue any status for themselves. Piers Morgan and most likely every other news anchor that has interviewed Knox have positioned themselves into a stance of victim blaming as seen in the interview. Morgan mentions how he refuses to take up a moral standpoint, yet he also admits from the perspective of a parent how upset he would be if his 2-year-old daughter eventually decided to do porn at her age. He sort of shuns and shames Knox by the end of the interview when he brings in the subject of her parents and their reaction (or lack thereof), indicating that they don't approve or support her choice to work in porn.

We see this sort of shunning in the media towards women (especially in porn) all the time and for what? We’re blaming them for institutional constraints that have long preceded them before they were even born. I do think porn has a negative influence on our society but Belle Knox shouldn't be blamed for doing porn (although she shouldn't be praising it either); none of the women in the documentary deserve to be blamed for doing porn, because it’s not their fault they were raised in a culture that salutes and glorifies the hierarchy of domination (on a side note, the scene where Tressa or 'Stella' and her boyfriend are at a party and you literally see a guy riding someone in a dinosaur costume hilariously comes to mind).

Women live in a world of sexual objectification just as much as a fish lives in water; it’s all around us and everywhere we turn our heads. Advertisements depict women happily ready to cook or clean the house or as props for sexual arousal. Movies have men pursuing women, where women are the reward for a man's aggression to win her over with the most over-the-top romantic gestures. And of course pornography represents the sexualized culture of domination and women being perceived as inferior to men. It's practically inescapable. These are just a few ways of how we internalize the ideas of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a women and how we've defined sex into cultural norms. We’ve grown up in it, we’re raised by it, it’s instilled in our history, embedded in our culture and it’ll most likely stick around in our future. Men or women; we’re all just people trying to live life with the cards we’ve been dealt, so let’s not point fingers at anyone for being "young and dumb," just because it’s easier to explain that way. It’s more complicated than just being ignorant and it really is on us to help change the perception of how masculinity and femininity are portrayed in society. As bad as it seems, porn is just a small cog in a machine that's been running for quite some time.

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