When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I really felt uncomfortable with and uneasy about porn. I believed it was something that "all men watch" and "all men like". I didn't yet realize that there are lots of different kinds of porn out there, and so I believed that the mainstream porn I'd seen represented "all men's desires". Given that I didn't look like women in mainstream porn and I didn't want to act like women in mainstream porn, this made me suspect that I couldn't possibly be awesome in bed; so I couldn't help feeling pressured and threatened by porn's very existence, because it seemed to be fulfilling "all men's desires" in a way that I couldn't. (I felt even more uneasy when I first came across SomethingAwful's hentai game reviews around age 18. The reviews were so funny that I laughed out loud, but I also literally cried—right in a public computer lab, actually.)
But I accepted that the men in my life watched porn, and I made it clear that although I didn't want to hear about it, I didn't mind—that I certainly didn't expect them to give up porn while dating me.
Except one. I dated one man who insisted that he didn't use porn, and I believed him. Keep in mind that I had told him I didn't mind if he used porn, so his insistence that he didn't came entirely from him, not me. And then one day I was going through our computer's search history looking for something I'd been reading the day before, and I came upon rape-fantasy porn. And I was heartbroken.
Way beyond the fact that the man I loved had outright lied to me—which, I think, legitimately entitled me to be angry—my reaction went something like this:
A) The only man I've ever met who I thought truly didn't like porn was lying to me, which means I can't trust men who say they don't like porn, and probably indicates that men who have told me they don't like rape porn were lying too.
B) Porn indicates real preferences, right? So what this means is that all men secretly crave to rape women, but that they are either too afraid of the legal consequences or care too much about the women they love to actually do it.
In other words, I thought something like: I can't trust men to be honest about their sexuality, and their sexuality is scary and predatory.
This was a highly overwrought and almost totally wrong read on the situation! But that's how I felt at the time. I couldn't figure out a way to talk to my boyfriend about the porn without causing a fight (it was a rather non-communicative relationship, and I'm glad it's long over). So I never talked to him about it, and it took me years to unravel all the incorrect assumptions I had wrapped up in my reactions to porn.
In the circles I run in today, saying that I've got sympathy for anti-porn feminists is kind of like saying I've got sympathy for the devil. But the truth is, I've got quite a lot of it. Don't get me wrong: I emphatically do not support censoring porn. I screened some documentaries on feminist and alternative porn when I curated my sex-positive film series. And I often point out that, despite what anti-porn feminists say, there's absolutely no evidence that porn increases sexual violence. In fact, there's reason to think that increased porn access reduces sexual violence.
These issues have been highlighted lately with the release of Pornland, a book by anti-porn zealot Gail Dines. I haven't read it, but from the reviews and excerpts and interviews I've seen, it's obvious that Pornland is breathtaking in its lack of evidence. (My personal favorite coverage is this interview, in which Dines' own former research assistant—who is now a porn performer—disputes Dines' claims.)
So how can I have sympathy for anti-porn feminists? Only because I remember how I felt just a few years ago. I remember that I felt so confused about my own sexuality; I remember how resentful I felt, that sex seemed so easy for men—that the world seemed to facilitate their sex drives so thoroughly, particularly by providing all this porn!
I remember how hurt I felt by porn, because I believed that it represented "what men want", and that therefore I was "supposed" to act like porn women—even though the way women acted in porn didn't appeal to me at all. I remember how scared I felt, when I believed that rape porn reflected "all men's desires", and concluded that "all men secretly would love to commit rape". The porn that I'd seen felt as though it set the standard for my sexual behavior, and I hated that standard, but I didn't see a way out. Because even with all my liberal, sex-positive sex education, there were serious flaws in my knowledge about sex. Not to mention the fact that I hadn't yet wrapped my mind around the concept of fully-negotiated, 100% consensual rape fantasy sex.
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