Empathy and Choices: Rethinking the debate on pornography 

Feminists who critique pornography are really prudes at heart, just afraid of sex. How do we know this? Because propornography forces tell us so.

In one sense, that's actually true. As a man who has worked in the feminist movement, I am afraid of a certain kind of sex. I'm afraid of much of the sex commonly presented in contemporary mass marketed pornography. I am afraid of sex that is structured on a dynamic of domination and subordination. I am afraid of the sex in pornography that has become so routinely harsh that men typically cannot see the brutality of it through their own erections and orgasms. I'm against this kind of sex because it hurts people in the world today, and it helps construct a world in which people, primarily those most vulnerable, women and children, both girls and boys, will continue to be hurt.

How Bad?

Here's one kind of sex that I'm afraid of. It comes from the film Gag Factor #10 released by J.M. Productions, which boasts that it pushes the envelope in pornography and offers "the best throatfucking ever lensed." The company's website has pictures and video clips under the heading "this week's victim," with the promise of "new whores degraded every Wednesday."

In one of the 10 scenes from Gag Factor #10, released in 2002, a nagging wife is haranguing her husband and asking why he is so lazy. "Why can't you do anything?" she asks, going on to insult his intelligence and criticize him because he doesn't read. She asks him if he even can read. The camera focuses first on her mouth as she peruses a book by Henry Miller, then to her husband's eyes, which look increasingly angry. The film cuts to the woman on her knees as he yells, "Shut the fuck up."

As he rapes her, forcing oral copulation, he says, "I want those tears to come out again, baby. I want to choke the shit out of you." At the end of the brutal attack, he walks away and says, "Don't give me any more shit."

In the industry, Gag Factor is called "wall-to-wall" pornography (sex scenes strung together without plot), which is typically the roughest form available in mainstream pornography shops. This scene is more overtly misogynistic than some but not idiosyncratic. The sex and the language in what the industry calls "features" (movies with some nominal plot and characters) typically is not as rough, though the message is the same: Women are for sex, and women like sex this way.

We live in a world in which a woman can be aggressively throatfucked to facilitate the masturbation of men. We all live in the world with that woman in Gag Factor #10. She is one of us. Imagine if she were your child, someone you had raised and loved and cared for. Imagine that woman is the child of your best friend, or of your neighbor, or of someone you work with. Imagine that you are the one who, once the camera is turned off, will hand her a towel to wipe herself off. You can't know for sure what she is feeling. But try to imagine how you would feel if it were you. That's empathy.

Pornography doesn't encourage men to empathize with women; it erodes men's capacity for empathy. We are constantly told pornography is about fantasies. But that scene is not fantasy. It happened. The women in pornography are not a fantasy. They are people, just like us.

After that scene was put on tape, it was sold and rented to thousands of men who took it home, put it into VCRs or DVD players, and masturbated to orgasm. That also is real. Men fantasize when they masturbate, but the men who are masturbating are not a fantasy. Thousands of men have climaxed to tapes of women being aggressively throatfucked. Those orgasms happened in the real world. Those men's sexual pleasure, in the real world, was being heightened by images of women being aggressively throatfucked, in the real world.

Choices, Hers and Ours

At this point, some will say: "Whatever you or I may think of those activities, she chose to do that. She's an adult. Who are we to condemn her choice?" I agree. We shouldn't condemn her choice and we shouldn't condemn her, we should empathize with her. And we should think not just about her choice but about the choices of the men who pay for these tapes and create the demand for aggressive throatfucking videos.

From research and the testimony of women who have been prostituted and used in pornography, we know that childhood sexual assault (which often leads victims to see their value in the world primarily as the ability to provide sexual pleasure for men) and economic hardship (a lack of meaningful employment choices at a livable wage) are key factors in many women's decisions to enter the sex industry. (For a good summary of this evidence see Margaret Baldwin's article "Split at the Root: Prostitution and Feminist Discourses of Law Reform," 5 Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 47, 1992.) We know how women in the sex industry, not all, but many, routinely dissociate to cope with what they do. We know that in one study of 130 street prostitutes, 68% met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. (For details on this, see the work of Melissa Farley, "Prostitution, Violence, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.")

We know that any meaningful discussion of choice can't be restricted to the single moment when a woman decides to allow herself to be sold sexually, but must include all the background conditions that affect not only the objective choices she faces but her subjective assessment of those choices. What matters is not just what is available but how she perceives herself in relation to what is available. We know that in anyone's life, completely free choices are rare, that every choice is made under some mix of constraint and opportunity.

But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the specific woman who was used in Gag Factor #10 made a completely free and meaningful choice to participate, with absolutely no constraints. That could be the case, but it does not change the fact that many women in the industry choose under difficult conditions. And as long as the industry is profitable and a large number of women are needed to make such films, it is certain that some number of those women will be choosing under conditions that render the concept of "free choice" virtually meaningless. When people buy or rent a videotape or DVD, they are creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being hurt, psychologically and/or physically.

So, the choice to buy or rent pornography is complicated by two realities. First, at any given moment, consumers have no reliable way to judge which women are participating in the industry as a result of meaningful free choice. And second, even if those consuming pornography could make such a determination about specific women in specific films, the demand for pornography that their patronage creates ensures that some women will be hurt.

Given that conclusion, there is only one decision that men (and I say men, because the vast majority of pornography consumers are men) who claim to have even minimal standards of moral and political responsibility can make: They must not buy or rent pornography. We must not create the demand that creates the industry that creates a world in which vulnerable people will be hurt.

Men who use pornography need to confront the depravity of their own pleasure. Men have to feel that sense of desperation that comes from understanding that depravity, articulating it in a way that leads to action not paralysis, hope not despair, resistance not capitulation. Men have to face what pornography does to us. To be a pornography user is to be a john, someone who is willing to buy women for sex, someone who sees sex as a commodity, someone who has traded his own humanity for an orgasm. Someone who has lost the capacity for empathy.

Those realities are not easy for women to face either. I can't speak for women, of course, but I assume that it is not easy to be a woman, knowing how pornography portrays women and their sexuality and knowing that men like it. Put bluntly, in pornography, women are reduced to three holes and two hands. They are not really sex objects (which at least implies they are human), just simply things to be penetrated.

Men have some difficult realities to face. So do women. I understand how painful those realities can be, because I have struggled, and continue to struggle, with them, and I have talked to many other people about their struggles. When we talk like this, a predictable rejoinder is that we are trying to impose strict sexual rules on others. As one prominent propornography feminist scholar, Linda Williams, put it in a recent interview, "Really, who are (activists) to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?"

I agree. No one can tell others where their sexual imaginations should go. Imaginations are unruly and notoriously resistant to attempts at control. But our imaginations come from somewhere. Our imaginations may be internal in some ways, but they are influenced by external forces. Can't we have a conversation about those influences? Are we so fragile that our sexual imaginations can't stand up to honest human conversation? It seems that propornography forces live with their own fear of sex, the fear of being accountable for their imaginations and actions. The defenses of pornography typically revert to the most superficial kind of liberal individualism that shuts off people from others, ignores the predictable harms of a profit seeking industry that has little concern for people, and ignores the way in which we all collectively construct the culture in which we live.

I'm afraid of the sex that pornography creates because it hurts people, but I am not afraid of talking about an alternative to the cruelty and brutality of the pornography industry. I need that conversation. I know the direction I want to move, but I stumble on the way. I have made mistakes that have hurt others and hurt myself. I can correct some of those mistakes on my own, but none of us can do this completely on our own.

So, can we start talking about how to move our sexual imaginations toward respect, toward empathy, toward connections based on equality not domination? Can we give up enough of our fear of the unknown to try to imagine together what that might look like?

We have given the pornographers far too much power to construct our sexual imaginations. This is not just about taking back the night but taking back the whole day, taking back the culture's imagination, taking back the way we see men and women and sex. If we do not, I fear that the light inside us will dim and our hopes and dreams will be increasingly shaped by the pornographers.

I fear that our hopes for a desire based on equality, maybe even the dream of equality, may not survive.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a founding member of the Nowar Collective and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge) and author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and eCitizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu