New Direction for the Porn Industries?
(via this article) no endorsement, recommendation, or referral to consume pornographic material implied
As a liberal I found that the porn industries posed troubling philosophical questions. Most concern some notion of exploitation and require concept frameworks developed within feminist philosophy in order to be analyzed with clarity.
As a liberal, I was an anti porn feminist in the style of A.W. Eaton.
Now as a socialist, I think these questions don’t exactly disappear, but the way forward is clearer. I believe exploitation is inherent in the wage labor scenarios of capitalism: destroy capitalism and you destroy the main engine producing the exploitation in all industries, including the sex industries.
Antiporn feminism connects inegalitarian pornography (hereafter
simply “pornography”) to harm in several ways. First, it distinguishes
the harms occurring in the production of pornography (e.g., the various
kinds of coercion, brutality, rape, and other exploitation sometimes
inflicted upon women in making porn) from those that occur postproduction. Second, among postproduction harms, some antiporn feminists distinguish the charge that pornographic materials themselves
constitute harm, in the manner of hate speech, from the claim that
exposure to such representations causes harm. [Concerning the latter,]
The basic idea is that pornography shapes the attitudes and conduct of
its audience in ways that are injurious to women. I shall refer to this as
the “harm hypothesis.”
I think under socialism (and with informed and proactive policy) the harms attendant on production have clear remedies.
I think the post production harms have remedies under socialism too, but the lingering conceptual issues obscure the path to figuring out the best policies: even with an abolition of wage-labor exploitation and psychological/physical violence associated with porn production (in a context of gender inequality), pornographic consumption here might still produce unacceptable harms of the sort Eaton is concerned to address.
I point to Anteros Media as a hopeful stimulus for further discussion about these issues: how can the industry go about “producing socially responsible fantasy material”? This kind of conversation is important because
1) in a world without socialism, it could lead to reforms (at the grassroots or policy levels) and/or improvements despite wage-labor exploitation
2) it stimulates grassroots level discussion about issues parallel to issues that feminism addresses. Producers, consumers, and participants engaging this kind of discussion about any sort of harm, now or under socialism, promises the discovery of remedies to those harms.
But one last thing: because I’m not a liberal anymore, I no longer feel compelled to identify as an anti porn feminist. The very context of gender inequality is itself an evil socialism will ameliorate (if not eradicate completely), so the harms that are dependent on this context will diminish with the rise of socialism—I know this is a controversial claim:
One of those most hostile to Marxism, Catherine MacKinnon, writes in her anti-Marxist diatribe, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, that Marx was interested in women’s oppression “only in passing.” She accuses Engels of sexism explicitly, stating, “The key dynamic assumption in Engels’ analysis of women’s situation, that without which Engels’ history does not move is (in a word) sexism.” Thus, she concludes, “The classical socialists believed first socialism, then women’s liberation,” as if Marx and Engels swept women’s liberation under the rug. MacKinnon never bothers to present documentation of these charges. Her own analysis locates the source of women’s oppression in the existence of pornography. And she regards the criminalization of pornography as a step toward ending women’s oppression–a right-wing conclusion which a broad range of feminists have rejected.
Nevertheless, even many feminists who have attempted to incorporate questions of class share a similar assumption about Marxism. Thus, Gerda Lerner criticizes what she describes as “the insistence of Marxists that questions of sex relations must be subordinated to questions of class relations.”
In particular, the feminist argument often goes, Marxism cannot (and does not seek to) explain the more personal aspects of women’s oppression because it locates the root of women’s oppression in class society. This is a caricature of Marxism, which assumes that Marxists only concern themselves with exploitation at the workplace. In reality, Marxists do not “rank” oppressions. But locating the economic roots of inequality is precisely the way to understand how seemingly quite different forms of oppression have come to play a crucial–and often interdependent–role in propping up the system of exploitation.
Far from ignoring the personal aspects of women’s oppression, Engels laid out for the first time the theoretical framework for understanding them. This should be obvious to anyone who has made the effort to read The Origin with an open mind. Engels incorporated into his analysis all aspects of women’s oppression–including domestic abuse, the alienation of sexuality, the commodification of sex, the drudgery of housework, and the hypocrisy of enforced monogamy. And most importantly, he emphasized the inequality between women and men within the family. Moreover, he did so in the Victorian era, when such ideas were far less commonplace than they are today in the aftermath of the women’s liberation movement. Locating the source of women’s oppression in class society in no way limits our understanding of the impact that it has had on the lives of individual women.
It should not be surprising that there are a fair number of errors in The Origin–if only because Engels was so far ahead of his time. The most important errors made by Engels, in fact, are those instances in which he accepts certain aspects of Victorian morality. Thus, after a scathing attack on enforced monogamy, he nevertheless guesses that socialism will bring with it a flowering of…monogamy, in the form of “individual sex love.” There is, of course, no way to predict what sort of relationships people will choose in a society in which sexuality is no longer alienated. Given the extent of sexual alienation present in today’s society, it is difficult even to imagine. Moreover, any analysis of gay oppression is entirely absent from Engels’ analysis, even though more recent Marxist theory has pinpointed the roots of gay oppression, like women’s, in the rise of the nuclear family.
Nevertheless, as the following passage makes clear, Engels’ method not only opened the door to understanding women’s oppression, but also put forward a vision of women’s liberation, which has continued both to inform and inspire successive generations of socialists since his time:
“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual–and that will be the end of it.”
