> At 02:43 AM 12/8/2005, Travis Fast wrote:
> >Ok this site provides a pretty good cross section of mainstream
> porn for
> >the 20-30 year old het norm crowd. Check it out and decide for
> >yourselves. And there is not just a good deal of sexism but a
> good deal
> >of racist undercurrents to boot.
> >
> >WWW.THEHUN.COM
>
> has anyone said there's no sexism? my point was: Yoshie asked a
> question about why no response to the ZNET piece. My response: it
> blow chunks. Not be/c there's no sexism in porn, but because the
> claims they make about just a couple of things, some kind of horrid
> degradation of women where if you took all the videos that use
> cunt, bitch, whore, etc. off the shelves, there'd be none left...
>
> hello?
I agree with you that it is not true that "[t]ake away every video in which a woman is called a bitch, a cunt, a slut, or a whore, and the shelves would be nearly bare" (at <http://www.zmag.org/content/ showarticle.cfm?SectionID=91&ItemID=9272>). But that only means we need a different criticism of sexism in porn than theirs.
Let's say lustful women in search of porn land on WWW.THEHUN.COM. How many of them will get really turned on by porn there? Not very many, probably. The website is clearly for straight men, as it positions them as spectators for whom women -- some of them vanilla, others a bit kinky, a few exotics like Blacks, Latinas, and Asians -- are put on display. It's like men are shoppers in a supermarket in which colorful images of women are displayed like fruits they can pick up. Surely women in search of porn deserve better than this. There are some pornographers who actually try to cater to women, but they are a tiny minority.
The thing is, when we see inferior products in almost any other genre of commodities -- cars, houses, clothes, movies, books, etc. -- or when institutions (schools, workplaces, etc.) either actively exclude women or fail to make efforts to recruit them, we criticize them (sometimes in depth) and demand better products, better labor standards and safety regulations for workers who make them, protest against gender discrimination and oppression, etc. It seems to me that pro-porn feminists are spending too much time battling anti-porn feminists, leaving insufficient time to demand better products and working conditions. Fighting against censorship is still important, but I'd say that we should reverse priorities.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>