Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, 2 Volumes
Edited by Lynn Comella, PhD and Shira Tarrant, PhD
Deadline: July 30, 2012

Co-editors Lynn Comella (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) and Shira Tarrant (California State University, Long Beach) are seeking submissions for a two-volume edited collection under contract with Praeger.

Description: New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography’s politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location for students, researchers, and professors across related fields. Our goal as editors is to showcase new and innovative research that examines the culture and politics of pornography in a global context, including but not limited to, questions of production, audiences, market niches, technological innovations, political debates and controversies, obscenity, free speech, public policy and the law. The editors seek well-researched facts and data in order to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of issues on the subject.

Author Guidelines: For consideration, please submit full chapters (5,000-7,000 words), a brief abstract, bio (75-100 words), and complete contact information. Submissions must include endnotes and bibliography, and adhere to Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Send submissions in .doc or .docx format to both contact emails below. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be considered.

The Editors are specifically interested in submissions on the following:

• Foundations and Controversies in Pornography
• Defining Pornography
• The History of Pornography
• Pornography and the Law: Historical Highlights
• Cultural Trends and Changing Ideas about Pornography
• Key Resources in Media and Cultural Studies of Pornography
• Consumption Practices: Who Is Using Porn?
• Global Porn Production: Practices and Revenue
• Sources of Porn: The Marketplace and Changing Supply Patterns
• The Porn Wars in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
• The Politics of Porn Literacy and Social Control
• Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Pornography
• Impacts of the Industry: Interviews with Porn Actors and Industry Workers
• Studying Pornography: Research Methods and Methodologies
• Impacts and Effects of Pornography
• Defining the Terms: Problems with Content Analysis and Ideological Bias
• Women Watching Porn: Issues in Data Collection and Self-Reporting
• Pornography and Global Sex Trafficking: Separating Myths from the Facts
• Pathologizing Porn: Questions about Addiction
• The Impacts of Pornography on Intimate Relationships
• Technology and Porn
• Obscenity, Surveillance and Free Speech: Current Issues in the Law
• Varieties and Genres of Pornography
• How the Adult Industry is Organized: Issues of Production and Revenue
• Masculinity, Violence, and Pornography: Correcting the Data
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Porn
• Porn Studies in Global Context
• Porn Use and Sexual Satisfaction

Deadline: July 30, 2012

Send To: Please send cc’d submissions to Lynn Comella at lynn.comella@unlv.edu and Shira Tarrant at Shira_Tarrant@yahoo.com. Include Praeger NVOP Submission in the subject line. Submission queries should be directed to the above.

I have quite a lot to say about his lecture. In fact, there’s so much to untangle that this post is split into multiple pages, which is a first for me. But it isn’t until all of the different threads are teased out that the larger pattern becomes apparent. So stick with me and see how it all fits together.

A Little Background

Jensen’s lecture was hosted by St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. It’s a Catholic college, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the name of the lecture series was “Defining You”, rather than something that conveys a message of “helping you define yourself.” Not that that has anything to do with Jensen directly, but it does set the stage for his perspective on porn.

There were about 90-100 people present. Almost all of them looked female, most of them appeared White, and there was quite an age range. Several college students came with their mothers, to judge by conversations I overheard.

I decided to record the lecture because I wanted to be able to quote Jensen accurately. Anything that appears in quotes below is what he said verbatim, although I cleaned up any extraneous ums and such. There weren’t many of those, however, since Jensen is an excellent speaker.

Gender Essentialism

Right at the start, Jensen began by thanking St. Mary’s College and the Women’s Resource Center for giving him an excuse to get out of Texas. Apparently, he thinks it’s important to make it clear that although he teaches at the University of Texas, he’s not a Texan. I’m a little curious about that, especially since he reiterated it at the end, as you’ll see later.

Jensen then explained that he wasn’t going to show any images of the porn that he planned to discuss. I think this was great since it’s important to make sure that the audience knows what it’s getting. But he took that as an opportunity to do something interesting. Here’s what he said:

“First is to let you know that I’m not going to be showing any images, no actual pornography. I get different kinds of reactions. Sometimes, the women in the audience breathe a sigh of relief. And sometimes, the men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”

He then shared a story of one time that he said the same thing and three “big guys” who had sat in the front row looked at each other and left.

I’ll take him at his word that a few men come to his talks with the expectation of watching porn for free. I don’t think it’s all that common, and I’m willing to bet my house that it doesn’t happen nearly as often as the frequency with which women feel anxiety at the prospect of  seeing explicit images or relief when they hear that they won’t. Leaving aside the possibility that some men might also feel relief or that some women might enjoy the sorts of porn he talks about, this was a pretty slick thing that Jensen did. He managed to imply that men come to his talks in order to see porn as often as women feel relief about not watching porn.

Of course, he didn’t say that in so many words, but to put those two ideas so closely together with the same qualifier (not, for example, saying that “every now and then, a few men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”), made it sound like those two things are comparably frequent. It’s like the patter of a three card monte dealer, distracting you so you don’t notice the sleight of hand. Since it made some of the women laugh, it looked to me as if he was creating group cohesion among the women at the expense of the men present. It also made me wonder how many of the women in the room were considering whether my motivation for coming to the lecture was to watch free porn, and what effects that has on Jensen’s audiences.

Attacking Men

After a brief disclaimer about why a man is talking about feminism, explaining that he’s using a feminist critique rather than a religious critique (an especially useful distinction to make at a Catholic university), and situating himself in the lineage of Dworkin and Dines, Jensen further built cohesion among the women at the cost of the men’s safety.

“Now it’s late at night and you’ve all had a busy day, so we’re going to have a little audience participation to make sure we’re all in the game. So the first thing I want to do is sort of chart the landscape of pornography with which we’re familiar, to get some sense of where we’re all sitting in the world. So the first thing I want to do to help us with that, is I want all of the men to line up own here and one by one, I want you to come up to the microphone and describe the pornography that you most recently masturbated to.”

lots of laughs, and nobody comes up

“No volunteers for that one? OK, that was a joke. Here’s the reason I said that, is to recognize that when we talk about a subject like pornography, we’re not talking about some abstract subject out there. We’re talking about our own lives. We know that that is the primary use that men put pornography to. I don’t say that standing above. I have my own experiences with that.”

As an educator, I can see how an exercise like this might be really useful, if enough safety has been built into a class. But this was a lecture, without any groundrules, expectations of confidentiality, or anything else that skilled teachers often do when exploring challenging topics. There also wasn’t any information given to the women about how to respond- were they going to tut tut us? Shame us? Laugh at us?

Telling the men that we’re going to come to the front of the room and make ourselves vulnerable without creating groundrules or group expectations of behavior made the experience even more unsafe. It certainly made the women laugh, which looked to me as if it helped them bond more. Whether that was Jensen’s intention or not, it exacerbated the sense that this was an us versus them experience. Further, creating group cohesion by denigrating or shaming some of the people in the audience is simply not how one creates a space for participants to feel safe enough to explore the edges of their comfort zones.

Some people will point out that men need to learn to lean into their discomfort when talking about sexism and porn, and I would 100% agree with that. But if the goal of an exercise is to show that discussions of porn are about “our own lives,” there are many, many ways to do that and build safety for all participants instead of just most of them. In addition, it’s not clear to me how this joke actually demonstrates the personal nature of porn. I can think of a half-dozen ways to make that point more clearly without demonizing men.

Sweeping Statements

Next, Jensen led a brief exercise during which he asked audience members to finish the sentence “Pornography is…” In order to give people “plausible deniability,” he invited us to respond either with the words that we think of or with words that someone else might use. That would have been fine, except that he specifically said:

“You can complete that sentence in the way that you believe pornography is, or you can complete the sentence as you expect someone you know would. Your brother, your father, your uncle.”

Not your sister, your mother, or your aunt. This creates an expectation of a dichotomy- there’s how you (presumably, a woman) will respond and then there’s how you imagine men will respond. Of course, there are some pretty clear gender-based trends in terms of how folks might answer, but they’re not universal. What message does this send to a young woman who thinks that porn is awesome? And for the men in the audience, why weren’t we invited to complete the sentence as the women in our lives might?

Implicit in these instructions is the clear message that Jensen was addressing the women in the room, rather than including the men. I absolutely understand the value of creating spaces for women to come together to explore these topics, but as far as I saw on the website, the event wasn’t listed as women-only. Further, neither of the two people associated with the university who made announcements (one of whom was a man) nor the person who introduced Jensen said anything about the event being specifically for women. And lastly, Jensen didn’t say anything along those lines, even though he certainly knew that some men were there (he and I chatted briefly about the fact that the time it was supposed to start was listed incorrectly on the website). So there was no reason for me to expect that I was intruding on a women-only space, or that Jensen wasn’t going to be addressing the entire audience.

In that light, the fact that Jensen was talking specifically to the women is especially significant. By doing so, Jensen deepened the split among the audience along gender lines, which exacerbates the sorts of sexism that he’s says he’s fighting. That’s especially ironic, given that he next explained that, in his view, “pornography is what the end of the world looks like” because he thinks that porn shows a world without empathy, without “decent human connection.” It seems to me that doing three activities that widen the chasm between men and women gets in the way of creating empathy and connection. If you want to help people build healthy relationships, shaming and vilifying are not particularly effective. And given that all three exercises were deeply rooted in the notion that men watch porn and women don’t, they reinforced gender essentialism, which I find particularly insulting.

Part of a Larger Pattern

All of this fits into a pattern of behavior that showed up over and over throughout the rest of Jensen’s lecture. It’s unfortunate, because he does have some really valid points to make. By choosing to frame his lecture in ways that reify the idea that “men are like this, and women are like that,” he might as well have done the whole Mars/Venus thing. In my experience as a sex educator, bridges are built when we start seeing the commonalities we share. I’m certainly not suggesting that we’re all the same, but rather, by talking as if the gender split is universal, Jensen did more to hinder the development of the empathy and connection that he says he wants than he did to create it.

facepalm

Utne Reader’s new article about Dirty Girls Ministries is getting a fair amount of notice. DGM is an organization dedicated to“helping women struggling with pornography and sexual addiction, which sounds laudable until you start looking deeper.

Like many sex educators and sexologists, I have a lot of problems with the ways in which “sex addiction” is framed. For example, the issue is usually discussed in the context of how many partners someone has or how often they have sex, rather than looking at the deeper motivations behind their behaviors. It’s also used to attack people whose sexual desires or practices fall outside the “norm”. (As if the “norm” has any meaning besides the strictly statistical.)  It’s often based on pseudoscience about brain chemistry, as well as sex-negativity, shame, and a lack of critical thinking. And while anti-porn perspectives don’t have to be anti-sex, they often are.

When I read the Utne Reader article, I was struck by how much shame is woven into the very fabric of Dirty Girls Ministries and its operations. Even the name resounds with the notion that masturbation makes women dirty, as does the title of the founder’s book Dirty Girls Come Clean. And it’s amazing how often this kind of rhetoric sneaks in. For example, the article says that

because of their below-the-belt explorations, [the online support group members] report feeling tainted, undesirable, and perverted.

Now, I might suggest that the reason they feel this way could be because of the deep stigma, secrecy, and shame that are attached to solo sex and female sexuality rather than the fact that they’re masturbating. William Stayton, a professor of human sexuality and Baptist minister offers a similar perspective:

“To feel that they’re addicted only means that they enjoy doing it and they don’t want to…Real sexual addiction is when someone has no control over it. Things that get blamed for addiction are often just things that people don’t like.”

Unfortunately, the message that heterosexual, monogamous marriage validates sex often leads to further problems:

Many girls in Renaud’s ministry think that once they get married, they will be free to express their sexuality and enjoy orgasms with a man. This causes some to take the fast track to the altar, only to find that after they’ve married, they still feel the same taboo urges. One forum commenter married at 19 in the hope that pious matrimonial intercourse would rid her of her sinful thoughts—only to find that during sex with her husband, she would have the same fantasies. “I cannot cleanse my mind of these images,” she says. “I try so hard to focus on my husband only, but my thoughts are so warped.”

There’s really very little that gets in the way of sex more than judging yourself while you’re doing it. One version of is is specatoring, or focusing on yourself from a third-person perspective and evaluating yourself instead of enjoying the experience. And while this quote seems different at first, there’s a real parallel between judging your body or sexual technique and judging your thoughts and fantasies. In both cases, the critical thoughts get in the way.

But then, this is how shame works. It makes us critical of ourselves. It makes us think we’re bad or dirty or sinful. It tells us that we have to try harder if we want to be accepted. And ironically, this kind of obsession often makes it worse because it brings our problem front-and-center. When we can learn to accept our difficult thoughts and develop mindfulness practices that encourage self-compassion, it’s often easier to let go of the painful patterns. The more we fight our Shadows, the stronger they become; when we embrace them and learn to listen to them, our Shadows often calm down.

It’s a problem that so many people and organizations that have the stated goal of helping people free themselves from the cycles they’re stuck in reinforce some of the ways of thinking that make those patterns stronger. It’s even more unfortunate that so many of them use language that reinforces the idea that sex is dirty, rather than helping people see that it’s the relationship to sex that might be a problem, rather than the sex itself. And it’s a tragedy that Dirty Girls Ministries is built on the sexual shame that has plagued us for so long. Regardless of their intentions, they’re feeding the problem instead of cutting it off.

If you find that your relationship to sex or to masturbation or to porn is problematic, I 100% encourage you to explore that. (This book is a good place to start, as is this and this one.) And I suggest that you do it from a place of self-compassion and without attaching blame to sex or masturbation. You might find that it’s a much smoother way to go when you don’t shame yourself.

If there’s one thing that we see rarely — if at all — in porn, it’s laughter. What strikes me about most pornography is that it’s always so deadly serious. A nervous giggle is permissible in a few instances (such as those ghastly “casting couch” videos that are evidently ubiquitous, in which “innocent newcomers” are interviewed and then fucked for the first time on camera.) But laughter during sex, a shared joyful recognition that getting naked and sweaty and contorted is frequently hilarious? Nope. For too many, porn reinforces the obligation to perform, which creates anxiety, which creates in turn a deathly humorlessness.

It reminded me of something that Linda Williams wrote in her 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, & the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Williams drew a lot of comparisons between the musical films of the 1940′s-1970′s like Singing in the Rain and Oklahoma! and the movies from the Golden Era of Porn. In particular, she pointed out that in both genres, the story and the acting were really just supposed to get you from one song & dance number/sex scene to another. People could be mediocre actors or the story could be banal, because the real purpose of the movie was to showcase the singing or the sex, respectively.

You can see these connections most strongly in some of the classic porn movies, especially the ones that Radley Metzger made, like Barbara Broadcast. In fact, his film The Opening of Misty Beethoven was based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, just as the musical My Fair Lady (with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison) was. But even in the porn movies that weren’t directly based on previous works, the sex scenes were the focus rather than the story, just like the dance numbers in more mainstream films.

I think that this comparison is just as relevant today, but instead of following the patterns of musicals, a lot of porn seems to follow the pattern of action movies. For example, did you see Tron: Legacy? The entire point of the movie was to go from one cool action sequence to another. And in most martial arts movies, the story just gets you to the next fight scene.

What makes this relevant is that the performers in action movies aren’t really expected to be able to act. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s entirely possible to have a thriving action movie career without being much of an actor, as long as you either have the skills (like Jackie Chan) or you look good in the role (like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix). If you can act on top of that, it’s even better but it’s hardly a requirement.

A lot of porn, especially the kind of porn that gets produced for the internet (short clips instead of a full length feature), is pretty similar in many ways. Folks are chosen because they have a certain look or because they can perform a particular act, such as double penetration, getting into a challenging position, etc. They aren’t expected to act, they aren’t asked to act, and much of the time, any acting they did would simply be edited out. That’s why the industry terms for them are performers or talent.

Now, other than the occasional newbie to the porn industry who only works with her boyfriend, many porn performers shoot their scenes with whoever gets assigned to them. They might not know who they’re working with until they arrive on set, they probably don’t know their real life name, and they may not even like them on a personal level. There generally isn’t much time to build rapport or intimacy when the director and camera person are waiting for you to get going, either. Of course, people will have their favorite co-performers, just as the baristas at your coffee house have their favorite co-workers. In both cases, a pleasant working relationship doesn’t mean you have much of a connection with each other on an emotional level, and there’s no reason to expect otherwise.

So with all of that being said, one result of that is that there isn’t so much room for (as Hugo puts it) “connection, spontaneity, genuine creativity, and…the chance to be silly”. Sure, if something funny happens, performers might laugh about it, and that might make it onto a DVD’s extras, but expressions of joyful connection or playfulness aren’t as likely to occur because there’s no relationship to give them context. Those more tender moments are most likely to emerge during sex when we feel safe and comfortable with our partners. When we trust them to laugh with us instead of at us. When we know them well enough to know that they aren’t likely to misunderstand. By the nature of how porn is produced (not to mention having a bunch of people standing around waiting for you to do your thing, stopping every few minutes so makeup can be put on your butt to take off the glare, and having a camera between your legs), it simply doesn’t happen all that often.

This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I’m suggesting that the only way to have good sex or passion or connection is within a relationship. But if two people who don’t know each other are going to make room for spontaneity, they’re going to need to be able to talk about it, both in advance of having sex and during it. There are so many possibilities for how sex can work that there will need to be some negotiation along the way. And there simply isn’t much room for that in most porn. I’ve often wondered if this is part of why a lot of porn follows the same basic formula- it makes it easier for performers when they know what they can expect. Of course, it also makes the product more consistent, in much the same way that hamburgers at McDonald’s will taste the same no matter where you are.

The original Gonzo performer

In a different world, porn performers might be able to act well enough to create the impression of connection, spontaneity, creativity, and silliness. After all, actors in other genres do it all the time. But that’s the difference between porn performances and acting. They’re very different skills and not a lot of the people who have the acting chops are trying to get hired for porn. As long as porn is stigmatized and being in porn is a career killer, there aren’t going to be many people in the business who can act.

So if the nature of the industry makes genuine playfulness unlikely and attitudes towards sexual performance create a barrier for people with more acting skills, there isn’t going to be a whole lot of the kind of on-screen connection that allows for the humor and playfulness of sex. It’s no wonder with all of that that the sex in porn is so darn serious.

Fortunately, there are some folks making sexually explicit movies that feature performers who have more connection or real-life relationships, like Tony Comstock. And a lot of the up and coming queer porn being made makes room for the individuality and spontaneity that creates room for passion and pleasure. And I have to say that some of the classics of porn were made with a very different feel. I’ve always liked the goofiness of Alice In Wonderland, a musical comedy. After all, when Alice drinks the potion at the beginning of the story, why would her clothes shrink when she does?

In the meantime, it’s good to remember that learning to have sex from watching porn makes as much sense as learning to drive from watching an action movie. And as Amanda Marcotte points out, partners often know “when you’re doing something because you saw it in a porno.” So if what you see in porn turns you on, enjoy it. But remember that porn doesn’t represent how real life sex work and it certainly doesn’t show you how to have a great relationship. Thank goodness that the real world has much more room for laughter, silliness, joy, and love.

Not surprisingly, some people argued that the walking a woman around in public, nude or tied up, or that having a woman on the ground drinking out of a dog bowl isn’t sexual. Personally, I’d be more willing to buy that if it wasn’t being filmed for a porn site. I don’t define sex as whether there’s penetration or whether there’s genital contact. My definition has a lot more to do with intention and desire, which is why I consider a peepshow dance behind a glass window (like they do at the Lusty Lady) to be sexual, while a doctor’s visit isn’t. While intention and desire are difficult to define if you’re looking for a legal standard, I think that since the intention is to create sexual arousal, nudity + being filmed for a porn shoot = sex, regardless of the legal definition. (This article by the fabulous Greta Christina is a fantastic look at how we define sex based on how it feels rather than the specific act, btw.)

A couple of people took things to the logical extreme and said that there isn’t any reason to not have sex in public other than a socially constructed taboo. In fact, one of them went so far as to say “What I do with my body is absolutely my own business and nobody else’s. Whether someone else chooses to watch is their business. The OP is hypocritical: either sex is ‘dirty’ and needs to be hidden, or it’s not. You can’t have it both ways.”

I’ve been thinking about these ranges of responses and decided that rather than replying in the comments, there’s enough there to warrant another post.

First off, I do fully understand that laws regulating sexuality are consistently used against sexual minorities much more harshly than folks in the majority. Queers, kinky folks, poly people, sex workers, and many other groups of people who fall outside certain lines are targets of unfair application of sexual regulations. Although I’m not sure how that applies in this context since, as far as I know, it’s not as if the streets of wherever Public Disgrace goes are full of people being led around naked on leashes. The argument that cultures vary and things that are acceptable in one place aren’t in another would carry more weight with me if the activities shown on Public Disgrace were commonly done by the people who live there. Since they aren’t, I can only conclude that the local culture doesn’t actually condone it, even if there isn’t a law specifically about it.

I also firmly disagree that it’s an either/or. Yes, mainstream western culture generally sees sex as dirty or shameful and forces people to hide sexuality. Sexuality is overbounded in this world, which means that the boundaries are both too tight and too rigid. My observation is that some people react to that by wanting to get rid of boundaries. The person who called me a hypocrite sounds a lot like that- if sex isn’t dirty, then it doesn’t need to be hidden.

I’ll admit that I had a phase of my life when I said similar things. Fortunately, I think, I’ve outgrown those overly simplistic ways of thinking about it. After all, is it ok to have sex in a hospital room when people are recovering from surgery? On the table during Thanksgiving? On the stage during a theater performance (assuming you’re not the performers)? My answer is,”not without the consent of the people in the hospital room/at Thanksgiving dinner/in the audience.” While what you do with your body is your business, it is not only your business when it affects other people. Boundaries and consent are how we navigate that.

I’ve come to see that we need firm, flexible boundaries to protect us while also giving us room to move. Boundaries are like our skin- they keep things out, they keep things in, and they are an essential part of our well-being. The problem isn’t that boundaries exist.  Problems arise when our boundaries are too tight, too loose, too rigid, or too porous. And consent is directly related to our boundaries because consent is part of how we communicate them to other people.

Where this gets complex is that consent has a lot of nuances, or at least, it does once we let go of the legalistic interpretation of it. One challenge is how we assess whether there is consent. My standard is that someone has to actively say “yes.” Consent isn’t simply not saying “no”, especially when it comes to sex. It might be given non-verbally, but it still needs to be given in a clear and unambiguous way.

Another potentially sticky point is whether active consent is necessary in a given situation. I hold sexual consent to a higher standard than I do for many non-sexual activities. This goes a bit against what this commenter said:

If you’re familiar with free speech and expression law, the ability to avert one’s eyes is fundamentally important — our cultures are so diverse that many people encounter public events they find deeply offensive every day, but the law (and here, I think it’s in accord with ethical principals) expects the offended observer to accommodate, not vice versa.

While I think that’s useful around most other aspects of social interaction, such as art, music, or just some person on the street exhorting people to repent, I think there are some good reasons to place more of the burden of accommodation on people who want to have sex in public.

I’ve written quite a bit about the topic of sexual intrusion (e.g. this, this, and this). As a sexuality educator, a former sexual assault crisis intervention counselor, and someone who has had many survivors of sexual assault in my life, I have a lot of experience with the impact of sexual intrusion of people’s lives. When I talk about sexual intrusion, I’m not just talking about sexual assault, although that’s a big piece of it. I’m also talking about the ways that sexual energy is forced on people without their consent, such as men harassing women on the street or not taking no for an answer. And yes, while I certainly know that it happens in all gender combinations, that has been the predominant pattern.

Unwanted sexual attention, energy, and contact is epidemic in this world and I don’t think that adding more laws or enforcement is going to change it. A deeper understanding of how to navigate consent is essential if things are going to shift. I would love to live in a world in which people could be paraded naked in public on a leash and not have that be triggering or traumatic to anyone. To be clear here, I’m not worried about what people find distasteful or unpleasant or offensive. I’m talking about things that a significant number of people find deeply painful, often because of traumatic experiences they’ve had. I believe that people who have had these experiences deserve the safety of knowing that they can be in public and not have sexual interactions forced upon them.

folks enjoying Folsom St. Fair

It’s worth pointing out that context matters in this. For example, if you go to Folsom St. Fair, you can expect to see naked people being led around on leashes in public. What makes that different from a Public Disgrace shoot in a city plaza is that you can reasonably be expected to know that the rules are different during the fair. One of the reasons I’m glad that events like Folsom St. Fair exist is precisely because they give people the opportunity to have these experiences, both as witnesses and as participants in a setting where that’s OK. It’s a great way to make room for people to have that while also creating safety for the folks who need and deserve it. That’s why I have no problem with the Public Disgrace shoots that happen in settings where everyone has made an informed decision to participate or be present.

Context is relevant because context shapes our expectations. When someone is just walking down the street on the way to the store, for example, I don’t think they would reasonably expect to see a naked woman on a leash unless that’s a common experience in that culture. And while it’s true that the ability to avert one’s eyes is an important part of living in a diverse society, by the time you realize that there’s something you don’t want to see, you’ve already seen it. For people who have experienced sexual trauma or intrusion, that can be incredibly painful. I don’t think it’s fair or compassionate to say that it’s their responsibility to look away and wash our hands of it.

As I’ve said before (see this, this, this, this, this, and this, for example), I think that it’s important to give attention to the consent, pleasure and well-being of the people involved in or affected by a sexual interaction. And if someone is going to publicly engage in a sexual act that is likely to be triggering to many people, it’s fair to say that it will have an impact on their well-being. Of course, some people will point out that rabid homophobes could use some of these same arguments to keep queers in the closet. But the difference is that queers getting to do the same things in public that heterosexual people do (kissing, holding hands, having photos on their desks, etc.) is about social justice and equality, which trumps people’s discomfort with queers. Until and unless someone can show me how a woman walking around naked on a leash serves a purpose that is more important than the well-being of people who have experienced sexual trauma, I know which one I will prioritize.

My hope is that we can someday live in a world without sexual violence and intrusion. As as part of moving towards that, I think it’s worthwhile to recognize that whenever we have an injury, we need to bring extra care and support to the wound in order to help it heal. Generally, once things mend, we can be less cautious. Given that so many people are survivors of so many types of sexual assault and intrusion, I think it’s important for us to be particularly careful about public sex. And I think that the burden of responsibility should be on the folks who want to do it to make it safe for others, not on potential witnesses to avoid it or look away. My understanding is that Public Disgrace does this when they they shoot the actual genital contact scenes, and I think they need to apply those standards more widely than they do.

Even without this particular aspect to it, the argument that people should be able to look away doesn’t hold water in this instance since the entire point of the shoot is to garner people’s reactions. After all, if everyone in the background didn’t care or looked away or had no reaction, do you think there would be any impetus to make Public Disgrace? I think that it’s fair to say that that since the tagline is “Beautiful girls, bound, fucked, and humiliated in public”, one reason for these shoots is to elicit reactions from witnesses. The expectation that people can look away if they want is negated by the desire to capture their responses.

I know quite a few nudists and from talking with them, I can say that almost all of them would actually prefer to not be a spectacle since they just want to be able to be nude in public without anyone getting upset. The difference in intention is a big piece of the issue of consent. If your intention is to do your thing and not impact other people, then I could see the argument that they don’t need to look, which is exactly what my nudists acquaintances say. But when your intention is to get them to react, their active consent becomes paramount because your goal is to draw them into the experience. That’s the point at which things change. The desire to bring other people in and interact with them makes their consent important.

So although I’m glad that the various commenters gave me more to think about, I stick by my original statement. For the scenes that include public bystanders, I think that Public Disgraces has a responsibility to ensure their informed consent and well-being before beginning their shoots. And if anyone involved with Public Disgrace or Kink.com would like to reply, either in the comments below or privately, I definitely welcome that.

I’m also a big fan of sexual fantasy. I think that there’s no such thing as an inherently dangerous or bad fantasy. The kinds of questions that I think are important are: How do you feel about your fantasies? Do they support your sex life? Do they get in the way of your relationships with yourself or other people? The actual content isn’t something I’m concerned with, unless it’s causing distress for the person having the fantasy or their partner(s).

And I think that porn can be a lot of fun. It can inspire fantasies and can offer an opportunity to imagine things that you might not have thought of. Having said that, it’s a terrible substitute for sex education and I would love to see more sex-positive critiques of the genre.

So with all of that, I’ve been sitting with writing something about the Kink.com site, Public Disgrace. If you’re not familiar with it, Public Disgrace is a website featuring young women having sex in public, often with groups of participants and observers. Some of the shoots take place in bars, restaurants, or at Kink.com’s building in San Francisco, while others were made in countries where the laws against sex in public are different than those in the US. It’s these latter shoots that I want to focus on. (Here’s an example of one of those scenes. Very NSFW.)

Now, I totally understand the erotic thrill of sex in public. A lot of people have fantasies about that, or have had sex in semi-secluded locations, with the possibility of getting caught adding to the excitement. And I also know that some people have fantasies of being displayed or shown off to strangers, or of being watched by strangers. One of the reasons that folks might choose to go to a swinger’s event or a sex party is that they get turned on by having an audience.

But the problem that I have with Public Disgrace is that the shoots that take place in public settings are forcing the observers to participate in the experience, and that’s not something I can support. I can’t support it because I believe in consent. I believe that the consent of all of the participants in a sexual experience is important. Not just the people having sex, but also the people watching it.

I have no problem with the scenes that take place in bars or similar locations, assuming that everyone there knows what they can expect and that nobody else can just wander in. I have no problem with scenes that include people acting as if they’re bystanders, but in reality, they’re performers. And I have no problem with the fantasy of being shown off or having sex or being spanked in public. But when you actually have sex in front of people who did not choose to be in that situation, I think it crosses a line. The fact that these scenes are made in places where it’s not illegal is, in my opinion, irrelevant. The ethics of the situation aren’t dependent on the local legislation. After all, there’s a difference between what is legal and what is ethical.

In addition to being problematic for being non-consensual, Public Disgrace plays into many of the anti-BDSM propaganda and phobias. While folks who are actually in the BDSM world understand the difference between the ways that S&M works in reality and the fantasy portrayals of it on camera, many people outside those communities simply don’t. And I’m concerned that this misrepresentation of how the vast majority of kinky folks enjoy themselves is going to exacerbate the stereotypes that they already face. Folks who are outed as kinky are at risk for losing custody of their kids, losing their jobs, social censure and ostracism, and more, simply because of their desires and practices. While I certainly have no desire to coddle anyone’s fears about any community of erotic affiliation, from a political/activism perspective, Public Disgrace is not the representation that the S/M world needs.

For that record, these two concerns would be an issue for me whether the sex that was being shown included bondage and spanking or was 100% vanilla. The issue of consent and how sexual communities are represented to outsiders isn’t only about BDSM. If someone wanted to make porn about swingers having sex in public, my response would be the same.

I’ll admit that I’ve been hesitant to write this. I certainly don’t want to add fuel to the anti-porn and anti-BDSM fires, because I think that both porn and BDSM can be just great. But I also can’t avoid speaking out about the problems that I see from within the sex and porn industry without becoming complicit in them. While Kink.com has been a great supporter of sex-positive communities, that doesn’t negate the fact that some of their actions are simply not OK. One of the most important distinctions between BDSM and abuse is that BDSM is consensual. Even when the fantasy or the role play is of being forced or taken against one’s will, there’s an underlying foundation of consent. I expect the same from Kink.com and I’m disappointed by the fact that it’s not there in all of their scenes.

I would be happy to hear from anyone involved with Public Disgrace or Kink.com, either in the comments below or privately. I invite your input and would be happy to talk about this with you further. And I also welcome anyone else to share their thoughts about this topic.

I’ve written a follow-up post in response to many of the comments below. If you’re interested, here it is.

Porn Research is a new project that wants to find out about people’s relationships with porn and how they feel about it, without assuming anything one way or another. It’s not the first time that someone has tried to find out about how viewers experience porn. For example, David Loftus’ book Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography describes what his research came up with and it’s not what you usually hear in the media or in porn debates. But this project is open to people of all genders and since porn has changed quite a bit in the last few years, it’s definitely worthwhile to get updated research.

Here’s a snippet from their site. If you want to take the survey, click on the link and get started. They estimate that it’ll take 20-30 minutes to complete and it’s a mix of multiple choice and open ended questions.

Our project is concerned with the everyday uses of pornography, and how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Pornography is of course a highly topical issue, subject to many opposing views and ‘strong opinions’. And we are not saying that there are no moral or political issues.  But we are saying that the voices of users and enjoyers have been swamped.  In fact, there is very little research that engages with the users of pornography, asking how, when and why they turn to it.

We want to gather the thoughts and responses of people who have chosen to use pornography of their own accord.  We believe that there can be many different and complicated reasons for looking at pornography.  We also don’t believe that all the materials that go under that label, ‘pornography’, are the same – only to be distinguished by how ‘extreme’ or ‘explicit’ they are.

Are You a Woman Who Views, Reads, or Listens to Pornography, Erotica, Romance Novels, and/or any other Sexually Explicit Materials?

If so, please share your experiences!

Complete a Short Survey (30 min or less) and Contribute to a Scholarly Understanding of Women’s Experiences with Sexually Explicit Materials

My name is Kari Hempel and I am a female psychology graduate student who is doing my dissertation research on women’s experiences with sexually explicit materials. For too long women’s real experiences with these materials have been ignored. My goal is not to judge anyone’s experiences, but to accumulate surveys from as many women as possible around the country about their positive, negative, and/or mixed experiences with sexually explicit materials, and to present the differences and commonalities in a scholarly, respectful fashion.

Your Participation is Completely Confidential

Any identifying information that is asked for in the completion of this study will be kept completely confidential and will be destroyed once the study is complete.

You Qualify for Participation If:

• You are a woman (at least 18 years old)
• You currently view, read, or listen to any written, audio, visual, or audio-visual material that is sexually explicit (including but not limited to films, magazines, novels, and audio-recordings)
• You currently live in the United States

To Participate Go To:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/womens_experiences

If you have any questions or concerns, please call or email me. I am happy to address them!

Kari Hempel, MA
503-208-4083
karihempel@yahoo.com

When most people talk about the women in the porn industry, they’re talking about the performers. There’s usually an assumption that all the other people, from the camera crew to the editors to the folks in the offices & warehouses, are men. That’s not the real story, and porn researcher Dr. Chauntelle Anne Tibbals recently published her study Sex Work, Office Work: Women Working Behind the Scenes in the US Adult Film Industry, to offer a look at the experiences of the women behind the scenes in the porn world.

Did you know that only 1200 of the estimated 6000 people who work in southern California’s porn industry are performers? I didn’t, but it makes sense- there’s a lot that goes into making movies. Dr. Chauntelle conducted over 250 hours of ethnographic observations and lots of informal interviews at a company she refers to as “Fascination Films” in the interest of anonymity in order to find out more about who the non-performer women in the porn industry are and what their experiences tell us about sex work in general.

I’m not surprised to find that many of them experience the stigma of sex work, even though they’ve never been paid to have sex. There’s a commonly-held idea that anything associated with sex stains anyone who touches it. And that’s especially true when we’re talking about women- many of my female sex education colleagues have experienced similar things, although it’s usually to a lesser degree.

As most folks know, opportunities happen the most when you know someone on the inside. That’s true in every industry, which is why so many people spend all that time on networking. And there can be even more emphasis on interpersonal connections in the porn industry, largely because the stigma associated with it has shaped a very tight network. The fact that the LA porn world is geographically closely-knit also encourages a close network.

I suspect that there’s also a screening mechanism in place- it’s easier to hire from within because you know that you’re working with someone who isn’t going to freak out about the products or the industry. Of course, that doesn’t mean that’s the only way women enter the business, and Dr. Chauntelle describes how some women got their foot in the door, too. In fact, at Fascination Films, there has more employment and advancement opportunity for some women than they might expect in the mainstream business world. Or, as Dr. Chauntelle puts it:

The adult film industry network contributes to a different (gendered) workplace experience than that described by both Acker (1990) and human capital theory (Becker, 1962; Mincer, 1958). Rather than being pressed into a (masculine) standardized mould where worker potential is determined only by hours logged and degrees attained, women workers at Fascination Films are afforded a measure of occupational opportunity and advancement that allows for uniquely gendered lived experiences. Given that Fascination Films represents many other typical aspects of the adult film industry, it stands to reason that other organizations in the same industry may engage this network in a similar fashion. (page 19)

There’s a fantastic section on the history of women in the porn industry which anyone who’s genuinely interested in porn (as compared to the folks who avoid anything that might conflict with their preconceived notions) will get a lot from.

Since this paper focused on one company, so I’d love to know about the experiences of women at other companies. It’d be interesting to know how much this research reflects one company’s culture versus a larger trend. And I’d also like to know how many of the 4800 people in the industry who aren’t performers are women. But there’s only so much time one researcher can do. Are there any grad students out there who are looking for a topic?

The irony of my still being on the schedule while Tristan was removed isn’t lost on me. As Toby Hill-Meyer points out, I also have porn connections. They’re not as direct as Tristan’s, but I work at Good Vibrations and we sell porn. We also make porn, although it’s not like most of what comes out of LA, and I train the GV staff on how to talk with customers about porn. So yes, I definitely have connections to porn. But I think that there’s more to unpack around this situation and I think that it comes down to sexual shame.

The main response from the university is that since OSU is a state school, they get their funding from the taxpayers and so they need to avoid using that money for “controversial” speakers. Now, I’m sure that this is at least a piece of the puzzle, as this commenter pointed out here and here. I’m still not convinced that part of the motivation for this decision isn’t because someone in the administration got squicked. But even if we take it at face value and accept that this is only about having a “controversial” speaker be paid out of the wrong fund, it’s still about sexual shame.

It’s about shame because the school is worried that they’ll be punished for starting a discussion about sex. Silencing a conversation that makes you uncomfortable or that you think is “inappropriate” is usually about shame. (That’s separate from saying that a conversation needs to happen at a better time or place, which is about boundaries.) And I have to wonder what it is about a presentation called “Claiming Your Sexual Power” that makes it more controversial than, say, having Playboy recruit on your campus. I’m sure that the school didn’t pay to bring Playboy in, but it sure is interesting to look at which things the administrators are worried will cause a backlash.

Elizabeth, over at Sex in The Public Square, had some great things to say about this:

Regardless how you feel about pornography, this should trouble all of us. Colleges and universities self-censor out of fear. OSU, like other public institutions of higher education, is no doubt facing serious budget cuts. Anything that causes the state’s legislature to further restrict their funds is cause for concern. In this case, though no complaint appears to have been made, the University chose to pre-emptively cancel a potentially controversial speaker despite her expertise in the context of the Modern Sex conference.

When experts are rejected because their work is controversial, we should be worried not only about sexual freedom but also about academic freedom more broadly. There are places where evolution is the hot-button issue, or where the politics of Israel and Palestine is the main cause of political concern. We can’t ignore this instance of self-censorship simply because it has to do with sexuality. Once “we can’t afford to offend the legislature” becomes a widely accepted rationale for canceling or refusing to fund programs, we can expect to see many more threats to the foundation of public higher education in general.

From sexinthepublicsquare.org (share this quote)

This is also about shame because what makes Tristan “controversial” is that she

1. makes porn;
2. has performed in porn;
3. doesn’t have academic credentials; and
4. is a woman who talks about sex.

Any of these things might make someone who doesn’t know Tristan think that she doesn’t have the chops to be a keynote speaker at a conference, especially the bit about the academic credentials. But really, the only way that a PhD would make her less controversial would be if she studied and wrote and lectured about porn without actually being a porn producer. (And for the record, she totally has the chops.)

I’m confident that part of why I’m still on the schedule is that I’ve never performed in porn or produced it. Personally, I don’t see why that automatically makes me more eligible to speak at a conference, but that seems to be how things are. Meh. As I recently wrote, one of the rules of shame is that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally. That certainly seems to be what’s going on here.

I’m also pretty sure that part of it is that I have a doctorate and I’m certified as a sex educator. To an extent, these sorts of credentials are shorthand for “respectability”, at least for some people. And while I certainly worked hard to earn them and I’m proud of my accomplishments, some people see them as a signal that I’m better qualified to talk than others. This is pretty common- Dr. Laura’s PhD is in physiology but she doesn’t let that stop her from talking about all sorts of unrelated stuff. At least I mostly limit my teaching to topics that are related to my doctorate. But then, sex is a pretty big area.

I’m also curious to know how much of OSU’s response was influenced by gender roles. Women who talk about sex, especially their own sexual experiences, are likely to be slut-shamed or seen as less important than men. Men in sex education are often seen as suspect, especially if they’re cisgender and heterosexual. (If you don’t believe me, take a look at the gender breakdown among sex advice columnists. Or imagine what would have happened if Dr. Ruth had been Dr. Henry.) That breaks down when you’re in the rarefied atmosphere of research, science, or academia, but it creates a weird dynamic in which women are more likely to go into the field of sex education and are more likely to be able to make a living at it, yet they are still much more likely to be shamed or invalidated for it than men. So I can’t help but wonder how much this came into play.

Unlike many sex educators, I don’t talk about what kinds of sex I personally do or enjoy. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with that- in fact, I think that the world needs people who talk about their sexual practices because it models comfort with sexual topics. And at the same time, I’ve also taught classes on sexuality at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (for clergy of various denominations), John F Kennedy University (for students in the somatic psychology program), and the California Institute for Integral Studies (as a continuing education course for therapists). Part of how these opportunities come my way is that I don’t talk about my sex life in public. That’s not the only reason that I keep my personal life to a need-to-know basis, but it’s one of the big ones. Having a PhD wouldn’t be enough to outweigh the stain of publicly talking about my sex life, and I don’t even need to deal with the slut-shaming that my female colleagues do.

Unfortunately, this is a choice that a lot of sex educators are faced with. We can be out of the closet, in which case, certain opportunities are lost. Or we can choose to be partially in the closet in order to get teaching gigs, and hope we don’t get outed. And that is because of sex-negativity, sexual shame, and erotophobia.

The irony here is that keeping ourselves in the closet doesn’t create objectivity, even if that’s the intention. The traditional pursuit of academic objectivity tends to obscure bias and confuses being factual about observations with being distant from the phenomenon or community being described. All distance ensures is distance; it does not ensure objectivity.¹ Some folks have proposed an emphasis on trustworthiness and authenticity, rather than objectivity². Both of these terms presuppose a relationship between the speaker and the listener; by bringing myself to your attention, I offer you the opportunity to decide where I stand.

While this kind of authenticity often works well for sex educators who do workshops like these, it gets in the way if you want to get a gig at a university. And it’s especially hard at a public university, which clearly creates an even bigger privilege for students at private colleges.

The upshot of all of this is that it doesn’t really matter whether the underlying motivation is an administrator’s squeamishness or an anticipation of a backlash from the legislators who fund the school. It’s still comes down to a reaction to sexual shame. And it’s especially unfortunate for this to happen to a conference that this laudable mission:

This conference is organized and led by OSU students with faculty and staff support. We hope to challenge participants to examine the individual and collective struggles inherent to the entanglements of sexuality with the social and cultural systems of sex, gender, race, and class.  The emphasis of this conference will be on communicating and understanding diverse perspectives around sexuality through workshops, guided facilitations, lectures, and film screenings.

I’d love to see Tristan back on the schedule. She has lots of valuable insight to offer and she’s a fantastic speaker. And whether the root of the issue is the erotophobia of someone in the OSU administration or simply a (not entirely unfounded) fear that a legislator’s sex-negativity will come back to haunt the school, I think they need to get some chutzpah and deal with this better.

1 Scriven, M. (1998). The meaning of bias. Paper presented at the Stake’s Symposium on Educational Evaluation, Urbana, IL.

2 Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (2000). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 163-188). Thousand Oak, California: Sage.