I just finished reading Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, which Jamie wrote about earlier this week, and man, what a viscerally unpleasant thing to read. Not because it’s a bad book—it’s pretty good, in its brutal way—but because I found it difficult to read so much description of gross, degrading, misogynistic pornography. It also forced me to ask myself whether I should stop using the porn altogether (Damn you, Robert Jensen!).
I won’t quote the really bad stuff, but consider this tame-ish passage, in which Jensen describes one of the DVD extras from 65 Guy Cream Pie, starring the notoriously “nasty” Ariana Jollee:
When it’s all over, Jollee goes into a bathroom, which viewers can see on the behind-the-scenes feature of the DVD. After six hours and 65 men, as she roams the bathroom looking for the appopriate cloth to wipe herself off with, Jollee talks to the man operating the camera:
Jollee: Oh my God, wow. You ever see anything like that? What did you think?
Cameraman: I think you wore those guys out.
Jollee: They wore me out. I won’t fucking deny that. Look at me. I’m about to pass out.
[She pauses briefly and then looks at the man with the camera, with a very vulnerable expression.]
Jollee: Good gangbang?
Cameraman: Yes, it was very intense. Very good.
Jollee: Thank you. I tried.
This nastiest of the filthy women in pornography, this woman about to turn 22 years old, turns to a man who makes his living in the pornography industry and asks for his approval, asking if her sex with 65 men was a a “good gangbang.” The questions—not her question, but larger questions that her comment suggests—hang in the air, unaddressed. What kind of world is this, in which a 21-year-old-woman has sex with 65 men in one day to produce a movie that thousands of other men wil masturbate to for years to come?
I have some significant theoretical qualms with Jensen, who is a down-the-line radical feminist, but the basic thrust (if you will) of his book seems pretty unanswerable to me. Most pornography is made for men—millions and millions of them—who are aroused by scenes of women being degraded and dominated.
It’s awful from just about every angle (if you will), and although we can argue, if we want, about whether or not it should be legal, there’s really no argument about whether or not it’s damning evidence of what a fucked-up, woman-hating society we are. Or, if that’s too strong, it’s evidence of how many millions of American men really hate women, and of how little the rest of our society cares, because if we cared as much as we should then we’d be thinking and talking a lot more honestly, and a lot more often, about what we need to do so that far fewer of our men are getting off on dominating and degrading women.
