CAPTIVE DAUGHTERS: Conference on Pornography and International Sex Trafficking

Off Our Backs, Jul/Aug 2005 by Mantilla, Karla

* Jensen sees two big mistakes that are frequently made: 1) the idea that whatever any women say or do is okay; and 2) the idea that any choice is good.

* The pornography industry earns $10 billion per year while Hollywood earns $9.5 billion per year.

* In 1988, the greatest weapons pornographers had were the free speech wars-it was a powerful trump card. But that has been supplanted by rhetoric of sexual liberation. But how can you think of liberation in a world of double penetration? (Double penetration is now common.) How did that practice become liberation? How did sexual practices such as throat fucking or blow bangs (orally servicing three to ten men) become liberation?

* At talks about pornography, most men don't want to engage-some percentage of men in the audience use pornography. Jensen asked them to reflect on how they achieve sexual pleasure. Men don't see degradation or that the way they have learned to be sexual is in question. Sex is important to people and fear is a very powerful motivator not to look at it. We must provide a model for what is beyond that fear.

* Lots of men do see women this way. For lots of men, women are three holes and two hands.

* For women, it is hard to come to terms with how men see women.

* If we are asking men to give up one kind of their identity as sexual beings, then we must be on the other side with alternatives. Self-esteem is attached to sexual lovability. It is not reasonable to ask people to shed their identity without having something else there they can replace it with.

* Few people really deeply feel that pornography is liberation.

The Harms of Gay Male Pornography-A Sexual Equality Perspective

Reported by S.M. Berg

Presenter:

Christopher Kendall is a professor of law at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and author of Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination.

Main Points:

Kendall effectively narrowed an area fraught with complicated identity politics into its most basic unit, the actual contents of gay male porn. Most of his speech focused on the issues raised in the 2000 Supreme Court of Canada case Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Canada. Several lesbian and gay groups, including one directly involved with getting Canadian law to recognize the harms of heterosexual pornography years prior, attempted to justify gay porn as liberating and integral to constructing healthy gay identities. Canada's highest court decided unanimously that the fact that pornography is gay-oriented does not in and of itself make the depictions egalitarian or harm-free.

Key to making his case was giving specific examples and examining what they suggested about gay male sexuality. If gay pornography is free speech, suggested Kendall, then what would a paraphrasing of the speech look like? It turns out that it looks a lot like the same old homophobic, humiliating pornography for heterosexuals that eroticizes domination and sexualizes violence between a hypermasculine "top" and a feminized "bottom." Instead of breaking down hetero-normative gender binaries, gay pornography reinforces oppressive sex roles regardless of the actual gender of the participants.