Presented on a debate meeting in Bergen, by Trude Håland, Oslo, Spring 1999
The feminist group Ottar in Oslo are concerned with the suppression and discrimination of women generally, but we are most known for our work against what we call sexual oppression or violence; prostitution, pornography and sexual harassment and rape. I am invited here to debate Cinemateket's decision to show pornographic material.
Cinemateket wants to show how porn is a part of a cultural context, like all the other films about sex, like "Fatal attraction" and "Nyfiken gul". They argue that sex is an important part of our lives, like food and cars.(sic) What they imply is that porn is sex. We have a different approach. We view porn as misogyny, as slavery and as violence.
Porn and prostitution - are indivisible
This industry is the third most profitable in the world after weapons and drugs. In the USA the porn industry is bigger than the film and record industry together. It is an enormous industry, with enormous machinery to protect its interests, including PR-consultants, journalists and media, and even academics.
Cinemateket has chosen to protect and support this industry by showing these movies.
Women in pornography as prostitutes rather than using terms such as "model, porn-actress or star". Diana Russell, long involved as an academic and activist in anti-pornography work, suggests that it would be more honest to refer to them as prostitutes, since they, like all prostitutes, are paid for the exploitation of their bodies. She also comments on "the extraordinary inconsistency" that prostitution is illegal in the USA, yet pornography is defended as free speech.
We agree with Russell. Women in pornography are paid for the exploitation of their bodies and also prostitutes are often used in pornography, and pornography is the biggest promotion and publicity place for prostitution.
Prostitution is not illegal in Norway, but here as well, some people try to maintain the same distinction.
What does pornography say about women? We have read a lot of porn-magazines, and what do we find:
- Porn reduces women's human values:
- For instance: We read about Serbs who can do more than war: "What girls have, the girls in Beograd also have." And what is that?
- We read about the sexiest car-mechanic in Norway. An 18-year-old girl who is spread out and presented as her cunt and ass.
- We read about the 19 year old girl from Ukraine who makes her debut in the porn film " The perversities of Barbara" were she is penetrated by three men at the same time (vaginally, anally an orally) as well as being chained and spanked.
- We read about and see pictures of terrified Swedish girls who "love" acting in S/M films.
We argue that pornography is degrading, that degradation is made sexual. And we are not exaggerating:
In porn magazines we find "the world's most fabulous heroin addict", "the worlds most sexy murder victim." We read about pregnant Russian women at low-price-brothels. We read about she or those who wants to be raped or fucked hard and brutally. Degrading and arousing.
All these examples are taken from main-stream pornography which you can buy in any Narvesen-store.
Pornography promotes a view that all women can be bought, they reduce women to cunts, tits and asses.
The connection between porn, and violence against women.
We often meet the argument that porn is only fantasy and has no connection to violence against women. May be so for some of the users. But not in any case for those women who are used, battered and penetrated in the porn. The movies are reality, the prostitutes are misused and abused by real men, photographers, pimps, John's (customers), editors, and owners. And even if the users believe that porn is only fantasy, they are in fact influenced by it, and the use of porn has an impact on their sex life.
Surveys show conflicting results, maybe it depends on what questions you ask and how you choose to analyse the answers?
Robert Jensen an American sociologist says:
"Isolating with any certainty the effect of one particular manifestation of misogyny (pornography) in a culture that is generally misogynist, is hopeless. In fact, the danger of pornography is heightened exactly because it is only one part of a sexist system, and because the message it carries, about sexuality is reinforced elsewhere. What is learnt from the testimony of women and men whose lives have been touched by pornography is how the material is implicated in violence against women, and how it can perpetuate, reinforce, and be a part of a wider system of women-hating.
Rather than discussing simple causation, we think of how various factors make something inviting. In those terms, pornography does not cause rape, but rather helps make rape inviting. Research can examine people's stories about their experiences with pornography and sexual violence to help us determine how close the relationship between the material and the actions is.
Jensen comments on examples were men are exposed to pornography and then asked about their views on rape. He writes:
First, the measures of men's attitude towards women, such as answers to questions about the appropriate punishment for rapists, do not necessarily tell us anything about men's willingness to rape. Men often do not view their sexually aggressive or violent behaviour as aggression or violence; it's just sex. (S. 103) So it's plausible that a man could endorse heavy penalties for rapists after viewing pornography because the sex in pomography and in the man's life, doesn't appear to him as rape.
This shows that it is not as simple that pornography cause rape, the connection is much more complicated. All the same we claim that porn works as the wedge of the ideology which says that women are for sale, that women are whores, that women are without human value.
Freedom of speech
In Oslo Cinemateket had to withdraw the three reported films, after political actions and noise, but here in Bergen they do not give in.
One can wonder why Cinemateket stubbornly refuses to withdraw the films. They act as if they are the knights of the free speech.
The debates on freedom of speech in Norway usually are concerned about the freedom to extend hatred. Racism, hatred against black people, or pornography, hatred against women. Unfortunately so-called intellectuals often use their resources to fight for the freedom to spread hatred rather than fighting against the hatred itself. In this particular case Cinemateket chooses to show rape and abusement, rather than fight the porn-industry. Whatever motives Cinemateket claims to have, in reality they play the role of "useful fools", or as staunch supporters of porn industry.
Anyhow, for women and blacks, their lives and freedom of speech are already heavily limited by racism and misogyny
A couple of years ago Sønnøv Skrede who is one of the speakers at Cinematekets meeting in Oslo and Bergen wrote her master thesis on pornography in film. She compared porn-films to musicals. This thesis did not discuss the contents and function of pornocraphics, it was only concerned about the filmatic expression, as if porn exist in a social vacuum. Accidentally all those writers who divorce pornography from reality are proponents of porn.
This fits nicely into the trendy post-modernistic ideology. Nothing is inter-related, there are no causalities. Nothing is general, all political questions are individual. The world is exposed as a more or less entertaining theatre, in which we can not (or need not) act consciously, but instead act as spectators, at a cool distance and with an ironic smile. There is no surprise that feminists around the world view the post-modernism as dangerous for the women's movement.
On liberalisation of pornography and prostitution
The porn industry has run a long and fairly successful campaign on making pornography accepted in the right circles of this country. And until recently, Norway has been quite special regarding people's view on these matters. The Scandinavian model is both acknowledged and hated throughout the world.
Porn is misogyny, and when the feminists in the 70ies and 80ies campaigned against porn and prostitution, the women's movement won many victories. We had a new Act on pornography in the 8ies, which in fact is quite good, the main problem is that it is not used.
These victories were bad for the porn and prostitution industry. In the early 90ies, porn and prostitution started a new era in Norway, establishing brothels, offering telesex, and topples waitering. Also the porn magazines changed their image, they had female editors - earlier and present porn models should promote the porn industry. And it worked. One of the magazines, Lek, increased its number of copies from 3 to 30 000, and the other magazines followed. Journalists ran as horny dogs after these editors, and made them celebrities.
The price to pay for acting as editors was of course that they still had to perform as porn-models. Women in porn are always whores.
Now the campaign has developed to relax the porn regulation, the censorship and to support porn liberalism. Seksuallovvbruddsutvalget (the committee preparing changes in the laws on sexual violence) pointed to this campaign and the same tendencies can be seen at the Filmtilsynet (the Norwegian committee on film-censorship).
They ordered a Gallup on the question of censorship. To their surprise, 72% of the Norwegian people support the censorship on porn. The Filmtilsynet interpreted the numbers in their own way: women are most negative to pornography, elderly people are more negative than younger, and those who seldom visit cinemas are also more critical than frequent cinema users. Filmtilsynet interprets this as a support for showing artistic films with erotic elements.
The decision of Cinemateket to show porn is a part of the liberalisation campaign.
Who are we to believe?
We have been, and still are in a debate on prostitution, brothels and how to make it illegal to be a john. Then we always are confronted with prostitutes and porn-models who claim they love their job, and don't want to be interfered by opponents, and especially not feminists. They also claim their free choice.
On this kind of argumentation, we answer; well, first of all we don`t believe those sunshine-stories about whores who love their job. All scientific work on this issue, says something else. Or if so are, porn and prostitution aren't just about the victim of the situation, prostitution is making all women victims.
I would like to end with a citation of Gail Dines, from the book "Pornography, the production and consumption of inequality"
"My experiences as an activist, have shown me the enormous gap that exists between those who work in academe and those who live in the real world of economic an sexual exploitation. The academic discussions over the nature of the pornographic text, the problems of definition, the polysemic qualities of pornography, the work of Annie Sprinkle, and so on, are utterly removed from the lives of the women who are the casualties of this multi-billion-a-year-industry. By refusing to deal with the realities of pornography, the pro-pornography academics have chosen to defend a multi-billion-a-year-industry and to ignore the ways in which pornography is implicated in the oppression of women.
Now, that's a real choice."