isn't it my choice?: the illusion of free will
hi besties! today we're going to talk about the illusion of free will and women, especially in relation to pornography and sex work. this is a very nuanced argument that i will try my best to do justice, but know that one blog post is not going to be enough to fully synthesize the ideas that i'm tossing around. something i'll be talking about a lot in all of my blog posts is the idea of liberal feminism versus radical feminism, so i think starting there will help set up a comprehensive understanding of the arguments i'm making.
i am setting up liberal feminism and radical feminism in a framework that seems to posit that those are the only two that exist, but that is not the case. there are so many different 'types' of feminism, running the scale from conservative to liberal to alt-right to radical. liberal feminism is the most common feminism, though usually not labeled as liberal at all. in the mainstream, if you hear "feminism" from a major corporation, from a brand, from an instagram account with hundreds of thousands (millions!) of followers, liberal feminism is what is being discussed. perhaps the most palatable of all types of feminism, liberal feminism seeks to cultivate gender equality through legal and political reform. it essentially locates policy as the locus of misogyny. which, on the surface, really doesn't sound so bad. how could it?
radical feminism, however, locates the patriarchy as the locus of misogyny. radical feminism calls not for reform, but an entire overhaul, opting to dismantle the patriarchy and abolish male supremacy for the ultimate cause of women's liberation. it focuses on the root cause, as opposed to liberal feminism, which seeks to bandage existing issues. if a boat is cracked and water continues to leak in, drowning the ship, the liberal feminist gets buckets and continues to remove the water indefinitely. the radical feminist gets wood and nails and boards up the holes in the ship.
radical feminism is not palatable like liberal feminism is. liberal feminism emphasizes personal choice heavily. liberal feminism says to women, "it's your choice to shave your body hair!", "it's your choice to wear makeup!", "it's your choice to do porn!" liberal feminism ultimately assumes that choices are made in a vacuum, and so women do not need to make any hard choices; what they choose to do must be feminism by virtue of a woman making any choice at all. radical feminism refuses to do this, which turns many away from it. it posits that no, actually, your choices are not made in a vacuum. it interrogates the greater societal/cultural phenomena that drive women to make such gendered choices. radical feminism is often described as 'militant', and rightfully so. radical feminists understand and believe that for any real change to happen, then real change must be made.
and so, following this framework, perhaps the discussion of free will starts to become a bit more clear. if we think about the term "free will", a lot of the conceptualizations of it come from philosophy. philosophy is renowned for being written by old dead white men, who often hypothesized women as the "deformed male", or the "defunct man". and so the casual understanding of free will, one in which people are free to choose to do whatever they so choose, cannot completely account for the sex-based discrimination that women face and the complicated maze of misogyny. on one hand, yes, women can make any choice they want. however, this does not mean that their choices are inherently good or do no harm.
this is when one of the first big anti-porn arguments comes in. consuming porn and participating in the production of porn is detrimental to women. however, it must be said that for many women participating in porn, they are forced to do so under the threat of becoming homeless, not making rent, etc. (economic factors), or by the persuasion of a boyfriend, husband, or friend (social factors). sure, you can choose to watch porn, but what is porn doing to women in our society? i will be using Andrea Dworkin's speech, Pornography Happens to Women, to discuss some of the most hard-hitting points she makes.
"Dehumanization is real. It happens in real life; it happens to stigmatized people. It has happened to us, to women. We say that women are objectified. We hope that people will think that we are very smart when we use a long word. But being turned into an object is a real event; and the pornographic object is a particular kind of object. It is a target. You are turned into a target. And red or purple marks the spot where he's supposed to get you. This object wants it. She is the only object with a will that says, hurt me. A car does not say, bang me up. But she, this nonhuman thing, says hurt me—and the more you hurt me, the more I will like it. When we look at her, that purple painted thing, when we look at her vagina, when we look at her rectum, when we look at her mouth, when we look at her throat, those of us who know her and those of us who have been her still can barely remember that she is a human being." >>> perhaps one of the most impactful statements of Dworkin's speech, she speaks to the dehumanization and degradation that occurs in pornography. porn effectively transforms the woman into the object, and as such, a sentient object that begs for her own demise. her humanity cannot coexist with her violent objectification, an observation that porn consumers will never make as they consume the dehumanization of women for their own orgasm.
"Pornographers use every attribute any woman has. They sexualize it. They find a way to dehumanize it. This is done in concrete ways so that, for instance, in pornography the skin of black women is taken to be a sexual organ, female of course, despised, needing punishment. The skin itself is the fetish, the charmed object; the skin is the place where the violation is acted out—through verbal insult (dirty words directed at the skin) and sexualized assault (hitting, whipping, cutting, spitting on, bondage including rope burns, biting, masturbating on, ejaculating on)." >>> Dworkin puts into words the reality that all women have faced at some point: the sexualization of seemingly innocuous things. beyond this, pornography (and the men that create it) compartmentalizes women into parts: their skin, their lips, their hair, their feet, their stomachs, their thighs, their eyes, their mouths, their hands, and so on and so forth. this compartmentalizing breaks the woman down from person into parts. when compounded with other axes of oppression, like racism, ableism, fatphobia, etc., it becomes glaringly evident that the bodies of women who don't fit patriarchal beauty standards are forced into submission through overt sexualization/fetishization.
"In fact we are told all the time that pornography is really about ideas. Well, a rectum doesn't have an idea, and a vagina doesn't have an idea, and the mouths of women in pornography do not express ideas; and when a woman has a penis thrust down to the bottom of her throat, as in the film Deep Throat, that throat is not part of a human being who is involved in discussing ideas. I am talking now about pornography without visible violence. I am talking about the cruelty of dehumanizing someone who has a right to more." >>> here, Dworkin directly calls out pro-porn argument that tries to conceive porn as "art", or as "beautiful", or as "deeper than the visual". there is no way to intellectualize or formalize porn. the aforementioned compartmentalization of women's bodies is incongruent with the ability to believe that pornography is about ideas. the misogynistic optics of pornography very clearly display constant images of subordination and objectification.
"In pornography, everything means something. I have talked to you about the skin of black women. The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-supremacist society, the skin of white women is supposed to indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then, does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want. The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin. She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her price a little higher." >>> this piece of Dworkin's speech talks to the concept of intersectionality, and ultimately reveals that all women are oppressed on the basis of their sex. men are ultimately aware of their misogyny and misogynoir, but as they are socialized to view women as not even complete people, it is easy for them to commodify and consume women, especially the women that they have deemed "more worthy." but in this, men projected their perceived worthlessness on her, exploiting the female body for their own pleasures. in this quote, Dworkin alludes to the idea of choice heavily, and makes the point that, despite her self-proclaimed desire to want to be used, in reality, she is breathing breath into her own destruction.
if you want to read more of this speech, or more of any of Andrea Dworkin's work, you can do so here.
and what about the men that consume this porn? let's look at a study done by John D. Foubert (which you can find here).
"Students from two research universities completed items measuring the frequency of their using different kinds of pornography, and measures of their willingness and intent to intervene to help a bystander who might be experiencing sexual violence. Hierarchical logistic regressions showed that for men, violent/degrading pornography use, but not explicit but non-degrading pornography use, was significantly associated with reduced bystander willingness to intervene, but not associated with bystander efficacy."
essentially, men who viewed violent pornography were more likely to not intervene when a bystander was experiencing sexual violence. congruent with Dworkin's speech about pornography, the results of this study show the very tangible reality that pornography dehumanizes women. when men consume violent pornography, films that objectify, compartmentalize, and brutalize the female body, they are less likely to act compassionately toward bystanders experiencing sexual violence.
the reality of it all is tragic. the truth is that porn will never go away. the truth is that while male domination rules our society, controls our vaginas, and imposes on our uteruses, women will never be seen as equal. i mean, that's what this whole blog is about. but as Andrea Dworkin said, pornography happens to women. women can choose to be in porn. they can choose to consume it. they can choose to watch it with their boyfriends who have fried their dopamine receptors to shreds and can only get hard when watching the exploitation of objectified women. but when women choose these things, are they choosing for themselves? or are they choosing for the male validation that comes in masses, in the form of approval, of compliments, of money, of presents? these choices of exploitation are rewarded tenfold, and that isn't a coincidence. as long as patriarchy and male dominance continue to rule the world and women, those choices will never be truly free. they'll always be made under the delusion that you're choosing to do porn for yourself, for your own empowerment, for your own pleasure. but when those choices are made, men are once again granted the ability to objectify, sexualize, degrade, humiliate, dehumanize, and abuse, without ever lifting even a finger.
