Wednesday, April 18, 2012

talking porn with college students: dos and dont's

Last week, I went to attend a talk about porn at a college in town. Specifically about the negative effects of porn: "how pornography shapes and reflects cultural norms that support sexual violence in our society." I was running late, but wanted at least to take part of the post-talk discussion to put in my five cents about how porn in fact also can have positive effects, but I was stopped at the door by a student. Because I had missed the opening disclaimer that explicit material would be shown, I could not enter the room. I wanted to pass on my card to the speaker and asked the student if she were his assistant; she offered to pass on the card but explained she was not an assistant, but a "survivor."

Suddenly it dawned on me: this wasn't just any talk about porn. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and this was a talk for survivors to help them pin the larger enemy in society. This was a talk intended to release that same kind of aha-moment that anti-porn activist professor Gail Dines recalls experiencing when she read legendary anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin, known for perpetuating Robin Morgan's infamous claim that "pornography is the theory, and rape the practice."

There is in fact no proven link between porn and rape, and Dines' line of reasoning is easily debunked. But the time and place to argue that isn't necessarily in front of a bunch of college students who've been assaulted and raped. My five cents would have been completely inappropriate. What theses students needed was to feel like Dines did when she read Dworkin:
When I read Andrea Dworkin's work my life was turned upside down. All of a sudden I could make sense of my life and understand why I was treated the way I was. I broke free of all the ideological myths that patriarchy delivers to women and for the first time, I felt like I could really see the world.
I can sympathize with the desire for this kind of aha-experience to explain mistreatment and violence. But there is something disturbingly wrong about such simplistic "teaching" misleading students into thinking there is this easily explained cause for the violence they've experienced, and that porn can be so easily dissected.

The problem with talks about porn is that they tend to either dismiss it entirely or endorse it completely. As I've said, I have a problem with people who're unwilling to address the potentially negative effects of porn where women's bodies and sex are misrepresented. Sure porn, popular media, art, what have you, aren't the only things that affect us. But they do affect us. There is in fact substantial research documenting the positive effects of porn, even hardcore porn.

In my own work, I focus on women's re-visioned and transformed porn — feminist porn. In my forthcoming book and in various posts (for a starter, see here and here), I have written about porn that has empowered and inspired me. Porn that has encouraged me to take charge of my body and self-image: to claim, own, enjoy and explore my body and sex on my term.

There is porn can do this. Because art, image, text, words, narrative: they affect us.

What I would recommend, is teaching students to develop awareness about how various media affect us, and provide students with critical tools with which to analyze all media, including porn. The goal being to empower students to face all media with a critical lens through which they may recognize the specific messages various media seek to impress upon them, be they positive or negative.

One-sided talks about how porn "shapes and reflects cultural norms that support sexual violence" do not empower students; it deludes them into thinking they can make sense.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...