The zeitgeist loves porn, sometimes so much that I wonder if third-wave feminism was born in the Playboy Mansion, where it fell out of a cake and opened its mouth. A ban was laughed off in the European Parliament last week, even as a new survey from the Internet Watch Foundation says 76% of British women (and 60% of men) are disturbed by violent or extreme pornography.
The current lie is that watching, or making, pornography is an inherently feminist act. Don't mess with my masturbatory autonomy, these advocates moan; this is not only convenient for a wander round my sexual consciousness, sister, but civilised. Except this is only naked hyper-capitalism – pornography is written up as just another consumer product, and by women too.
The comic Fern Brady, for instance, writes in Comment Is Free that most blow-job scenes are "overly long" and lesbian scenes must be "better". This was within a feminist critique of mainstream porn, except it sounded like an exasperated television review stripped of all empathy for the performers: do better, porn people; arouse me and soothe my liberal anxieties, too. (Is such a thing even possible?) Perhaps Brady should contact customer services for an apology? Because you mustn't bore the sisterhood when it is frotting over your psychological or economic imperatives.
Except the problem with porn is not sexuality, which – with a few obvious exceptions – we should never seek to govern or suppress. The problem with porn is money. Porn is not the unfettered expression of female sexuality. If you believe this absurdity (which I do not): whenever you suppress porn you suppress women.
Porn advocates like to say that porn is banned in Saudi Arabia, so if you wish to ban it elsewhere, you are, essentially, Saudi Arabian. Or you are Egyptian. Or you are a Mormon. Because they hate women, and you don't hate women, do you, oh Western liberal feminist with one hand in your pocket and one down your pants?
Tales of exploitation
Porn is the unfettered expression of money, and therein lies the problem, and the reason why intelligent feminists, when faced with the porn industry, misunderstand where solidarity lies. Porn is a $100-billion-a-year global behemoth with a marketing department which tells women that when they see another woman chomping on a penis, they should both be grateful for the opportunity. To consume it is not to agitate for better working conditions for performers; that is denial. To consume it is to beg for more.
Freedom is the line, and it is a foul distortion of freedom; freedom for the wolves, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, is not freedom for the sheep, even if they are nude. Censorship, you cry. We must protect anal sex and face-slapping from censorship! Except this is the opinion of an idiot who has freebased on hyper-capitalism, and finds the dopamine kick of porn too precious to question. Because the freedom to watch a woman gag on a penis that has recently prodded her anus is not a freedom I particularly cherish, even if this means I have, for one moment, common cause with the Saudis. Not even the Saudis, or even the Daily Mail, get everything wrong.
Tales of exploitation, coercion and suicide in performers are too many to ignore. Too many teenage boys commit criminal acts that can only have been inspired by watching pornography. Too many performers were raped when they were young – last week, it was Traci Lords who testified.
There is good porn, but too little of it, and it is against the current, even as the nominations for the Eighth Annual Feminist Porn awards, run by the Canadian sex shop Good For Her, were announced last week. I have visited the sets of the feminist pornographers Petra Joy and Erika Lust and their work is righteous and even lovely – even if it looks so odd among the ordinary trash, it barely seems like porn.
Feminist pornography does not persuade teenage girls to post photographs of themselves online, and commit suicide later, or inspire "revenge porn", where former lovers post (private) explicit images online. But I have also seen a woman gravely used on a so-called feminist porn shoot – she consented to a particular sex act, and a stranger arrived and photographed her for his Facebook page. Did she consent to this? Who knows? Her mouth was full. And so I fear that "feminist porn" is less a movement with momentum than a marketing tool that will eventually be stolen by the mainstream, its nemesis.
I long to call for the abolition of paid-for pornography, or to at least ban anything not approved by a committee of authentic feminist pornographers; let the pimps and the money men gag on the dust of reality for a change. But lust, greed and sloth prevent us. The promise of instant access to every fetish is simply too seductive to ignore in the global century.
And so, if we must have it, why not treat it as some of us do dead meat, and ask where it came from and how was it made? And if we can't do that – then what? Get rid of it. Because if you are to watch pornography, you have a duty to question its provenance. We must vote with our feet, even if we are lying down. Anything else is monstrous.
Follow Tanya Gold on Twitter: @TanyaGold1.