trans – medi(t)ations

a blog by joelle ruby ryan

09/23/10

Next month, the Womyn’s Club at the University of New Hampshire is sponsoring a conference on pornography, sexual violence and misogyny.  I am looking forward to the opportunity to have meaningful discussions about what I see as one of the most important social justice issues of our time: the growing cruelty and sadism of the contemporary pornography industry.  It is also a vitally important public health issue, and is leading to a variety of health problems including sexual addiction, intimacy problems, depression and more.  One of the things I hope that we are able to counter at this conference is the way in which discussions of pornography are often framed in relation to “freedom of speech.”  I have to laugh at those on both the right and the left who like to wrap themselves in the United States constitution and drone on about the glorious history of “rights” of free expression in our country.  I guess I live in a different United States than they do.

Freedom of speech in the United States is chiefly about the rights of the dominant classes to create speech that is utilized to justify, maintain and perpetuate the status quo.  Through the media, the courts, the education system, religious institutions etc., the powers that be have staked their claim to dominance via the creation of speech to exalt themselves and demonize “the other.”  This “free speech” has been used to justify countless atrocities in American history: genocide, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, concentration camps for Japanese Americans, women as chattel slavery, denial of civil rights to people with disabilities, disenfranchisement, gay-bashing, hatred of gender variance, class domination, the destruction and rape of our Earth, war-mongering, nuclear proliferation, imperialism and colonization, xenophobia and immigrant-bashing, hate crimes, body/beauty fascism, Christian theocracy, and rape, abuse and sexual exploitation.  Freedom of speech, like the American dream and the myth of meritocracy, are central cultural ideologies that we all are indoctrinated with from cradle to grave.  These mythologies function to preserve the power and privilege of the hegemonic social groups.

The answer to speech you find offensive is more speech.  How many times have we heard this hollow platitude?  While I agree that speaking out is not only necessary, it is a moral imperative, that still conceals the power differentials involved with speech.   So, let’s dispense immediately with the notion that this speech happens on anything even remotely resembling an equal playing field.  Just because we (supposedly) have the right to speak, does not mean we have the right to be heard.  Let me repeat: just because we have the right to speak, does not mean we have the right to be heard.  The deck is stacked against us.  People of color activists, economic justice advocates, feminists, queer and trans firebrands, eco-warriors etc. have to fight for every utterance, every revolutionary phrase.  The more radical we are, the more we are ignored.  In this time of mind-numbing conformity, hyper-consumerism and late capitalism, visionary voices are continually pushed to the margins.  For the most part, mainstream media and malestream America are not listening to the voices of radical feminists.  They are too busy listening to the pornographers and how great they are because they are preserving sexual “freedom” and protecting our “freedom of speech.”  Movies like The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Middle Men glamorize pornography and make the male producers of it into folk heroes who are out to protect our civil liberties.  Fooey.  These men are chiefly concerned with one thing: lining their pockets, and they do not care how many people they harm in the process.

To protect something means, implicitly, that that which is being protected always already existed.  Free speech as it is bandied about in red, white and blue rhetoric always existed for the ruling-class, white, heterosexual, upper-class men.  It has existed, sporadically at best, for everyone else.  Free speech as a concept is about as useful as free trade as a concept.  “Free” trade is set up to benefit the colonizer at the expense of the colonized.  It is s system designed to facilitate a particular relationship between nations and between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Free speech similarly exists to produce and reproduce hierarchies of power and privilege that grant speech to the dominant class while simultaneously providing the illusion of free speech to the oppressed/targeted class.

Pornography is an ideological system under patriarchy that disseminates hate speech against women, people of color, LGBT folks, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups.  The specious notion that pornography is chiefly about free speech or academic freedom was and is a smokescreen to deflect attention away from it as a human rights issue, a feminist issues, a public health issue, a capitalist issue, and a workers’ rights issue.  Criticizing the increasingly sadistic cruelty that characterizes the vast majority of pornography does no make one automatically anti-sex, anti-sex worker, or anti sexual representation.  And it certainly does not make one pro-censorship.  Part of the game of the free speech crowd is to instill fear that if we criticize the brutality of pornography too forcibly or too loudly, the power of the state will step in and start censoring images.  This is another specious claim that attempts to keep lefties in line with the pro-pornography industry.  In another blog, I will discuss how being anti-porn and pro-sex worker are not contradictory positions, but in fact highly compatible.  The powers-that-be in the porn industry delight in the perpetuation of the “Sex wars” because as long as we feminists are busy fighting each other, we will not be busy fighting the pornographers.  The time for such divisions is over.  The eradication of the current pornography industry must be seen as a primary human rights issue of our time.

The following quotes are taken from a rousing speech that radical feminist warrior Andrea Dworkin gave in the United Kingdom in 1996.  Prior to this quote she catalogues the horrors and atrocities that are documented in pornography and held up as sexy, subversive, edgy and pleasurable.  These include pornography that glorifies slavery and concentration camps, rape, racism, torture and murder of women, child pornography, porn of pregnancy and disability, and all manners of sadism and hatred of women.

“…This is the freedom that people are protecting when they protect pornography.  This is it.  If you want to defend it, know what it is you’re defending.  We are told that you pay a price for freedom.  What we have learned is that the men have the freedom and we pay the price.  The way that pornography works is very important because it actually creates inequality for women in any society in which it exists and is used…Pornography helps to create our civil inferiority.  And what that means is that we do not have citizenship as long as the pornographers have constitutional protection to do what they do to us.  In the United States the law protects them and the law leaves us to our own devices to try to survive.  We have no guaranteed rights of equality.  None.  But the pornographers have a so-called guaranteed right of speech….”

I take my hat off to all of the brave feminist activists, past, present and future, who fight against the racist, misogynist toxicity of the current media landscape.  We have a big fight in front of us, but more and more people are stepping up to say: enough is enough.  We will not allow pornography to steal away our humanity anymore.

It takes maybe a week to adjust to the 4pm gridlock in Jl. Double Six – and everywhere else – because of fools parking their 4WD behemoths on both sides of the road, and motorcyclists with the IQs of dog biscuits then double-parking on the outside of the aforementioned fools. When the inevitable truck arrives, the resulting infarction lasts for hours.

It then takes me another week to realise that my already woefully slow internet connection has been drastically degraded even more since I left. Yes – it’s the same lunatic, censorship-obsessed fringe element that we already have in China (and soon, Australia) – technically inept buffoons who think nothing of reducing the effectiveness of an entire county’s IT infrastructure in order to impose their own view of ‘morality’. I am saddened by the erosion of pancasila by extremists, but I guess that they feel that prevention of accidental erections is worth it.

But the real indicator that I am truly back in Bali is my re-connection with the quirky business practices here. My Indonesian friends, in the process of opening up a new shop, decide that some printed balloons might be a good promotional idea. I offer to source these. Silly me. I find a balloon shop. “No, we cannot print on balloons, we just sell them”. So I find a printer who tells me: “No problem, we can supply and print balloons.” I tell him that I will take fifty. “OK – you go out to buy balloons now?” he says. It’s not worth arguing about the logical disconnects in this conversation, so I go back to the first shop to actually buy the balloons, then come back to the printer. He scrutinises each balloon minutely and pronounces them suitable. He tells me to come back in three days and ushers me out of the shop. “Don’t you want to know what to print?”, I ask. He reluctantly agrees to record this, even though I can see that he regards this as useless information. As it turned out, it was.

I come back after the agreed period and he hands me my bag of unprinted balloons. “Can not print”, he says, “Balloons not flat. Stick in machine”. So I go back to the balloon shop, where they don’t want to take the balloons back. “Used”, says the man laconically. That’s OK, I think – everyone needs a bag of balloons.  I might accidentally stumble on a party somewhere. I ask him for a business card, just in case I am crazy enough to buy more balloons in the future. The card is double-sided, and one side says “Latex Balloons Printed Here”. I raise my eyebrows at him in a mute question. “Yes”, he offers. “We print balloons”. I breathe deeply and tell him I’ll take fifty. “You want 50 more?” he says, scenting another sale. “No, I want 50 printed“, I say, my voice rising a notch.  He looks genuinely remorseful. “Ahh, sorry. We cannot print on balloons, we just sell them”.

I recognise a Ground-Hog Day when I see one, so I  quietly capitulate and go off to do something inspiring, pleasant and straightforward, such as paying the water bill. The nice man at the office looks at my previous bill, smiles and says that no water bills can be paid after 2pm. It is 2:01pm. My pleading leaves him unmoved. The next day, the same nice man says that, despite my having paid the bill there each month for the last four months, I now have to pay this one way out in North Denpasar somewhere. Bemused, I ask why. “Because it is overdue. Cannot accept here now.” He then adds helpfully that it was due yesterday. I stare at him. He smiles at me, and kindly writes down the address I should go to – a Jalan Bedahulu. My street directory shows me that there are about twenty-five streets of that name, all in one large block in Denpasar. The place is nearly half-way to Bedugul.  It would have taken about two hours to ride there in heavy traffic, so I do the right thing and go and have three Bintangs instead. I don’t care – let them chase me for the money, or cut off my water, or deport me – I will just go with the flow.

Strangely, despite the culture shock of transitioning back to Bali from Europe, I feel at peace being back. After all, it was partly the anarchy, the freedom and the lack of logic that brought me here from over-regulated Australia in the first place. And after today’s adventures, I really feel that I am truly back in Bali.

But I still wouldn’t mind getting my old, unthrottled, unfiltered excuse for broadband internet back. Maybe I will if sanity prevails once more amongst those who impose their personal and religious mores on the rest of us.

When I walked into my apartment yesterday and saw the television, at first glace I was positive that my roommate was watching porn. There were scantily clad bodies everywhere, dry humping, (barely) clothed crotch-shots and some close-ups of faces that were taken by pleasure. I stood in my doorway shocked and confused – porn on the living room TV in mid-daylight when I’m expected home? — but after a moment of clarity, I realized that what was on TV wasn’t porn – it was MTV.

We’re adults, and if we want to watch other people have sex – or be filmed while having sex; that’s our decision to make.  The real problems come from naughty videos on TV that are borderline pornographic and available to children. I don’t want my niece and nephew to see Miley Cyrus gyrating up against random dudes in booty shorts after getting out of a cage, and I don’t want them seeing close-ups of Lady GaGa’s crotch. The FCC is overly concerned with swearing, or Janet Jackson’s boob – but seem to have no problem overlooking dry humping on mainstream TV. There is a very distinctive difference between nudity and pornography.

Pornography is sexual, nudity is natural.

I am not anti-pornography, but pornography and pornographic images are for adult, not for children. I’ve learned a lot from porn, and I’ve had a lot of very drunken nights where porn was thrown on the ol’ laptop and hilarity ensued. I think that access to pornography – for adults, by adults – is something that should continue to be available to those who wish to consume it. While it should be regulated – actors should be tested weekly for STIs, sets should be monitored (as with any other production) to make sure that the actors are safe and acting on their own volition, and everyone involved needs to be 18+, but the notion that porn should be banned is kind of ridiculous. As with any other sex act, if it’s safe, sane, and consensual (and legal), I say go for it.

Many anti-porn groups rally that the women in these videos are being exploited. As a woman myself, I understand the basic concept of this, I always get hung-up on the fact that not only are the women consenting (in any kind of reputable video), but also that if we’re going to go along with the claim that women are being exploited, I think we must also accept that the men in these films are being exploited as well – it takes two to tango, remember? What happened to equality? The fact that it’s exploitive is what makes it so appealing – both for the people producing and for those consuming the material.

It’s also argued that pornography skews a teenager’s view of sex. While partially true, I like to think that most people who are watching porn realize that it’s entertainment and not exactly true-to-life. It’s like a person going to the hospital and expecting to be treated by Dr. House. Sure, there is a chance that pornography might make sex seem to be more of a wild and crazy adventure than it actually is, but most people will realize by the time they actually have intercourse that real sex is not like in the movies.

Pornography can be a good thing. But it’s only a good thing when it’s being viewed by educated adults – not my children who don’t know any better. (Note: I don’t actually have any children…thank god. I was just trying to make a point) The balance is screwed up in our society. We crack down on adults who choose to consume dirty videos, but make no effort to crack down on dirty videos that are in the realm of children. I’ll watch as much porn as I want, but never again do I want to walk into my apartment to find a half-naked Miley Cyrus on my television; that’s just wrong.

How do you feel about porn?

[Sidenote: I didn’t mention child pornography or people being forced into doing movies because those are not fair representations of the porn industry; those are violent crimes.]