Wanderlust

It’s rainy and miserable in Boston, so I’m spending the day working on trip logistics and writing letters. I find it really really hard to motivate to ride my bicycle in the rain. I had the good fortune to attend a Harvard femsex class last night – it was porn night, which the idea is to look at different kinds of porn and erotica to demystify and destigmatize them. There were lots of different videos and magazines, including a Playboy from 1979.  I’ve been thinking a lot about the connections between pornography, sexuality, and sexual assault – directly after class, everyone migrated to a Take Back the Night rally, already in progress. 

As I mentioned earlier, when I was in Providence I went to hear Michael Leahy present on “Porn Nation”, which was essentially a multi-media presentation about how he thinks pornography affected him and the impact it has on society.  Others have deconstructed Leahy’s presentation (which he does on college campuses across the country, usually sponsored by campus Christian groups) – some critiques here and here – but there are a couple of things I found particularly troubling. Right at the beginning, in the middle of a montage of clips illustrating the increased sexualization of the mainstream media, was this “Fewer people are making informed decisions about their sexualities.” Huh?  Based on what?  One thing that I’ve been surprised at on this trip is how much it seems like we actually ARE making strides in arming people with the tools and information they need to make informed decisions about their sexualities, in spite of the rise of abstinence only education.   

Leahy talked a lot about how porn had been his sexuality education, and that the way women are “objectified” in the porn he viewed negatively impacted his relationships with women and reduced his capacity for intimacy.  Now, there is definitely a pretty strong case to be made that there is, indeed, pornography that objectifies women. This argument about “whether or not porn is bad” has been going on since the dawn of time (and raged particularly furiously since the dawn of VHS). Anti-pornography feminists have argued for years that pornography promotes sexual assault and violence against women in general.  What I disagree with is the conclusions that anti-pornography activists and Michael Leahy draw from their analysis of how porn impacts society.

If porn was Leahy’s only sex education, and taught him to have unhealthy attitudes towards sex, I think that’s a pretty strong argument for better porn and more sex education. There are lots and lots of people out there who didn’t find their particular turn-ons represented in mainstream porn films, so they’ve made their own – Good Vibes has their own production company, and they stock a HUGE range of porn – (warning –NSFW (which means not suitable for work, in case you were wondering)). While I certainly respect Leahy’s realization that pornography was a negative influence in his life that he needed to get rid of, I strongly disagree with his assertion that pornography is inherently harmful.  I think the prevalence of sexual assault and domestic violence in America speaks much more to the lack of education for women AND men about setting boundaries and respecting them than it does to the toxic influences of pornography. 

When I was Providence we talked a lot about the lack of connection between the Movement Against Sexual Assault and the Sex-Positive Movement. Anne, one of the Brown Femsex facilitators, talked about the importance of connecting women’s sexual empowerment with stopping assault, but how rarely it happens in practice.   I also spent some time reading Spread, a magazine by and for sex workers, at the Femsex meeting last night. It included an interview with a Canadian woman whose name I don’t remember who works for sex worker’s rights and reproductive justice, and she commented that both movements are founded in the idea of women’s sexual autonomy – that every woman should be able to do what she wants with her body free of coercion. Just as some people believe that a woman would never choose to have an abortion unless she was coerced, many people believe that women would never choose to engage in sex work unless they were coerced.  It seems to me that all these issues – pornography, abortion, sexual assault, sex work – have at their core the question “Who makes decisions about women’s bodies?”

Going to the Take Back the Night rally directly after Porn night was really interesting.  In Femsex, one thing we talked about a lot in my class was power and control in fantasy and reality – the difference between rape fantasies and actually being raped. I think we’ve come a long way in recent years in destigmatizing sexual assualt and spreading the notion that if one party does not explicitly consent to a sexual act, that constitutes a violation of boundaries. Yet in spite of that, we’re still fighting in many states to get emergency contraception provided to all sexual assault survivors. Although sometimes it feels like I’ve been to a million Take Back the Night rallies, there are always stories that move me.  It literally fills me with rage to feel lucky to not have experienced sexual assualt.  One of the most powerful parts of Femsex, for me, was creating space where the class members could talk about times their boundaries were violated. For many of the students, it was the first time that they’d ever talked about what happened. It seems practically unfathomable to me to carry around that knowledge, that burden, for so long, and it was incredibly powerful to see women literally sigh in relief after sharing their stories, knowing they no longer had to carry them alone.

One of the things I’ve been realizing on this trip is how many people are out there thinking about, writing about, and talking about issues of women’s sexuality and empowerment.  I’m definitely looking forward to graduate school in the fall and spending time reading what other people have to say – a lot of my thoughts right now feel half-formed and incoherent. 

If you have recommendations on books to read, people to listen to, places to go, I’d love to hear about them.