Noli Irritare Leones

Long post at Hugo’s on the effect of porn on men. Actually, it’s rather an old post, but I’m giving up on believing I’ll have time to write properly about the things that were bothering me in the debate that emerged in the comment thread, so I’m just going to pull together links.

There are at least four different lines that people take, that I know of, in raising moral objections to porn. There are objections related to the meaning of sex, such as what you’ll find in this Catholic catechism. There are objections related to the effect on your relationship with your spouse, which is where this Feminist Mormon Housewives thread on women married to porn users heads. There are objections related to the effect on men’s minds, which is the question Hugo raises in his post. And then there’s the direction that Hugo’s comment thread immediately heads, which is a debate about how far women in porn (and in “sex work” generally) can be considered to be more exploited and coerced than free agents.

It’s the last that tends to grab my attention. Frankly, I don’t know how far women in sex work are coerced. I gather that, for actual prostitution, the answer is “pretty heavily,” and that women are routinely recruited as underaged runaways, trafficked, and stay in the business under heavy duress from pimps. But “sex work” includes everything from prostitution to stripping to phone sex to porn movies to posing for photos, and different businesses may well, for all I know, may have far different relations to the women (and men) who work in them. What I do know is that sooner or later, in any such discussion, someone will say something that bugs me, because of the implications it seems to have for attitudes about sex in general, power, consent, sexual harrassment, etc.

Here’s a very personal (and triggering) account of a woman who was in a porn shoot.

Here (found via Alas, a Blog) is a feminist argument against decriminalizing prostitution (or at least against decriminalizing it across the board – I think she’s OK with the Swedish model where the prostitutes are decriminalized and the Johns and pimps still stay outside the law).

Here’s a post on why women strip to pay the bills, by a former stripper.

Now, the thing that keeps coming up in these debates that troubles me: Someone will make an argument that women in porn (or whatever other kind of sex work is under discussion at the moment) are under duress and exploited. And there may be some argument back and forth about how far this is true, or how far it’s typical, or how far someone’s generalizing from one case to another, as one person references prostitutes trafficked from foreign countries (which basically seems to be a kind of trapping people into slavery), while someone else references Suicide Girls. But, sooner or later, someone will say, well, isn’t exploitation part of every sort of job?

And I’ll think, OK, say I have a job which is just like any other job, in that I wasn’t trafficked, am not held forcibly by a pimp, just need the money. But the job involves having sex with people. Suppose, just as with the jobs I’ve really held, I sometimes work with people who mostly like their jobs, but hate them on a bad day, and other times work with people who mostly hate their jobs, but are stuck in them to pay the bills. Isn’t it better to live a life of quiet desperation, where you come in to work on a computer and do things you hate, than to live the life where your job involves having sex, and you still hate it and are doing it because you have to? Isn’t being sexually intruded on in ways you don’t want inherently a worse thing than doing other things you don’t want? Isn’t having a job that makes you learn to hate sex a worse thing than having a job that makes you learn to hate computers? And doesn’t saying otherwise undercut the whole concept that sexual harrassment is a really bad, actionable thing?

None of this means that every person who’s in a “sex work” job is going to find that job worse and more exploitive than her available alternative. After all, being a stripper at a club where the bouncers have your back and enforce limits on the customers is probably a whole lot better, even just from the point of view of not being intruded on, than being a waitress as a restaurant that doesn’t have your back, and lets customers sexually harrass you with impunity. I can buy Mythago’s explanation here:

And, bluntly, at that age and with those looks, you’re going to get men leering at you anyway; might as well get paid for the trouble, and have huge, muscled bouncers around to beat the snot out of anyone who goes farther than you’d like. Why not? It’s way better than Wal-Mart.

What I’m not willing to buy is that having sexual intrusions that you really dislike be part of your daily work life is the same sort of bad thing as just having any old job you don’t like. That line of argument seems to me to lead toward Wendy McElroy territory on sexual harrassment. Here’s Wendy McElroy:

Let me begin by briefly defining what I mean by sexual harassment and by explaining where I stand on the issue. By sexual harassment I don’t mean unwanted touching, grabbing or any other form of physical aggression. That’s battery and assault and laws against them have been on the books for many years. All that was needed around 1980 was have those laws rigorously enforced.

Instead sexual harassment zealots created a new law, new policies — for example, to prohibit “a hostile working environment” in which women feel offended by the words and other non-violent behavior of co-workers. That’s what I mean by sexual harassment.

Notice how she’s left out the entire range of behavior in between a physical assault obvious enough to have always been criminal and words which only offend because the woman was so sensitive. She doesn’t even seem to be leaving room for actual quid pro quo sexual harrassment here – does she really think that was adequately covered before what she calls “the sexual harrassment zealots” raised the issue of how prevalent sexual harrassment was? Does a case like this one where a man was made to resign as head of Caritas Christi for hugging, kissing, and leering at his female subordinates and calling them late at night at their homes to ask them personal questions count? Because I have trouble believing anyone has ever held that to be legally battery and assault, and at the same time, I have trouble believing it’s unthreatening, when it comes from your boss.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 7:44 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.