WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN FEMINIST PORN

A COMMENT

BY TOVE LYSSARIDES 

 I believe that feminist porn will not get a proper chance to break with mainstream porn as long as we live in a patriarchal society. Therefore, creating so-called new norms in porn does not imply liberation. We must talk about other utopias and strive towards them. Instead of being stuck in the framework of porn, we should explore other ways of visualising attraction between human beings. We must talk about love and passion instead of penetrations and orgasms. 

 I mean, it’s not a bad thing to pay attention to what turns women on; I do think it’s important as well. The problem occurs when we find out that women’s sexuality might be just as misogynistic as men’s. For example: what if we find out that violence turns women on? Would that still be considered feminist porn? Not according to my ideas about feminism. 

 We must also ask ourselves whether feminist porn actually is successful in challenging our conceptions of how to have sex. Are we already so destroyed by our male-dominated and sexist society that we cannot think outside the box when it comes to deciding what’s sexy and what’s not? I believe this might be the case with feminist porn. Moreover, how are we to make sure that homosexuality, dark skin, body hair etcetera don’t become fetishes in feminist porn, too? What if anti-feminists start watching feminist porn?

 Pornography regards sex as nothing more than bodies in interaction - bodies acting in front of a camera in a way that supposedly should turn the viewer on. As a rule of thumb I think it's problematic to pay people for having sex, no matter how great the salary is or how good the working conditions are. Yes, I know that happy sex workers exist but as a radical feminist I still don’t think prostitution should be legalised or promoted because it has major consequences for women’s general position in society. The same thing goes with porn-actors. I urge women who wish to explore sexuality and the female body to find other spaces and frameworks than that of porn – for example feminist performance art. 

 To me it’s deeply worrying that societal norms on sex and sexuality have nothing to do with emotions and affections. Feminists should know that the present-day representation of sexuality is a social construct largely produced by a patriarchal society. We should therefore aim to challenge this. Focusing on what turns women on does not change the patriarchal understanding of ‘sexuality’. Therefore it does not make sense to call this ‘feminist porn’ – it is like promoting ‘feminist prostitution’. We must challenge the entire framework constructed by an anti-feminist society.