Porn - what women want?

Friday July 15, 2011

Suzy Dean argues that the campaign against ‘sexualisation’ of women, far from protecting them, defines them as incapable of making adult choices and is a backward step for equality.

Mary Whitehouse would have been proud. Cameron has made it a priority to ‘turn off the tide of filth’ surrounding children in the form of top shelf mags, music videos and inappropriate clothing. This new moral crusade against what he has called ‘sexualisation’ now appears to have been extended to women as exemplified by the discussion on Newsnight on 21st June.

Author Kat Banyard argued on the programme that female pubic grooming and porn is objectifying to women. Writer Laurie Penny went as far as to call the removal of pubic hair as ‘symbolic castration’. Janice Turner – another self-proclaimed feminist – recently blamed porn for high pregnancy rates and low rape conviction rates by portraying girls as “up for it”.

There are three key problems with feminists jumping on Cameron’s anti-sexualisation bandwagon. Firstly, it rewrites the role of women in society from being adults to the status of vulnerable children who need protection and shelter from sexual material. Secondly, it portrays porn actresses as exploited victims of a brutal industry rather than willing participants, and thirdly it suggests that porn is just for men when many women also take pleasure in viewing adult films.

Most women today balance the boardroom with a social and family life. The idea that women are personally affected by pornographic images treats them like children who cannot cope with something they might not like. Banyard argued that women ‘feel compelled’ to remove their hair and that sex culture has had a negative impact on women’s self-esteem. She implicitly suggests that women do not have the critical faculties to filter out what they find distasteful and do not have the robustness to deal with images of half dressed women with aesthetically pleasing bodies lest it might challenge their fragile egos. In reality women have no problem dismissing porn or anything else they do not like the look of – it comes with the territory of being a grown-up.

The adult movie industry is hardly the kind of profession one would want women to enter into, and socially we are free to question why this is a choice that some women make. However, some women do make this choice and to paint them as victims of ‘violent and brutal’ porn as Banyard termed it, is fantasy. The women involved are willing participants and have made an independent choice about their career. To suggest that women are not able to decide or are forced into it is to undermine their autonomy.

Viewing women as victims of a climate of sexualisation reinforces the idea that pornography and sexual material more broadly is only for men. In reality many women watch porn, so many in fact that porn made specifically for women is a booming industry, with entire channels and awards ceremonies dedicated to it. A recent poll found that more than 60 per cent of women watch adult movies. The idea that porn is something that only men enjoy is not only incorrect, it also treats women like characters from a nineteenth century novel, as creatures too pure to have sexual desire. In denying women’s ‘vulgar’ appetite for porn, feminists today are denying the reality that women’s sexual taste can be the same as men’s.

We should all challenge the idea that women are victims of sexualisation; damaged and hurt by instances of sexual imagery and pornography. Whether we like it or not some women choose to star in pornographic films and that is their choice to make. We should encourage women to make autonomous decisions about their lives. The sexualisation debate also denies the reality that women enjoy pornography as much as men do, a clear step backwards for equality. The attitude of feminists like Penny and Banyard mark women as being in need of shelter from the world and all its vices rather than capable of shaping it. This is an idea we all have an interest in challenging.

Suzy Dean is a writer and journalist