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Porn Does Anything But Objectify Women
 

By Caitlin Hall for the Arizona Daily Wildcat

When it comes to pornography, it seems there are two kinds of women: those who hate it, and those who won't admit to watching it. But it is nearly impossible to find women willing to stand side by side with the legions of men who openly love porn.

Often we're told that an obsession with porn is a sign of a bad upbringing. But there are scores of men who watch porn and like it, and who've also been raised well by good parents - men who lead happy, productive lives.

So why are women so gung-ho against porn? Could it be that, contrary to our intuitions, we're the ones who are being raised wrong?

I remember the first - and only - women's studies class I took at the UA, in which I learned that pornography was the commercial manifestation of an oppressive patriarchy, an allegory of women's subjugation, exploitation and marginalization. I remember reading and hearing again something I'd read and heard many times before: that the women who choose to make a living in pornography are victims - that they are, in fact, dehumanized to such an extent that they are unable to identify themselves as victims.

It is a version of this mantra that drives many women's aversion to porn - the idea that the genre "objectifies" women (a word that is often used, but rarely defined). But in what sense are women objectified by porn?

It's true that pornography "objectifies" sexual acts - that is, it removes them from the realm of personal experience and subjective emotional reaction. Though the men, women and positions may vary from film to film, the true object - sexual expression - remains the same. However, when we hear complaints about porn, they're almost never made on the basis of the objectification of sex acts themselves, let alone on the objectification of men, who similarly appear without name, history or emotion.

Maybe the problem is that pornography is unquestionably targeted toward men - the woman's pleasure is always incidental, the man's always instrumental. Admittedly, a large proportion of porn involves sex acts that are only physically gratifying to the man involved. But that's not really so surprising - it's a case of art imitating life. Because the people who consume porn are overwhelmingly male, the object of most such films is male orgasm - on- and off-screen.

That perhaps belies the root of the relative status of men and women in porn: Women don't buy pornography because it's geared toward men. And it's geared toward men because women don't buy it. It's a catch-69.

Another more radical view holds that women are objectified by porn in a way that can be revealed only by historical examination - that is, through the lens of what many women see as an ongoing and age-old battle of the sexes. On this view, women who choose to perform sex acts for money do so because they've so internalized their status as victims that they are incapable of appreciating the fact that their profession demeans, dehumanizes and humiliates them. Because of that, many so-called "gender feminists" argue that it is effectively impossible for women to meaningfully consent to money-based sexual exchanges (and many would go further to apply this to all sexual exchanges).

Wendy McElroy responded to this claim in her book, "Sexual Correctness": "The touchstone principle of feminism used to be, 'a woman's body, a woman's right.' Regarding date rape, feminists still declare, 'No means no.' The logical corollary of this is, 'Yes means yes.' Now, modern feminists are declaring that 'yes' means nothing."

Women (and men) who insist that pornography dehumanizes women to the point that it is quite literally impossible to make an informed decision to appear in it do far more than pornographers to dehumanize women. As McElroy points out, they would have women be reduced to the status of children, in which free choice, absent coercion, is no longer sufficient - in fact, in which "free" choice is quite literally impossible.

It's hard to believe that anything could be more dehumanizing than that.

Caitlin Hall is a molecular and cellular biology senior. She can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu. Please write to her and thank her for her well thought out article...She did a great job, didn't she?