In between obsessing over how nineteenth-century Russian serfs lived and reading about slave raids on the Crimea, I’ve been thinking lately about MacKinnon’s argument that porn, supposedly unlike other films, is real, that “what you see is what she got”, as she so eloquently puts it. It makes me wonder if she had ever actually watched porn. Because, I mean, “she” (of course, to MacKinnon, the one who gets it is always a she) didn’t get the triply repeated cumshot, or the shot-over-a-couple-days-but-edited-together long sex scene, or, for that matter the awful music or dubbed grunts, which “she” may also not have made. And certainly “she” didn’t get what we see any more than the actor who does their own stunts gets what we see. Which is just to say, film, porn or not, follows certain pseudo-linguistic and aesthetic conventions that let us weave together a scenario out of a bunch of still frames and a soundtrack spliced together. The actual porn happens, in a meaningful sense, in our heads, not on the screen. It also maybe doesn’t make sense that she would equate porn with reality there while at other times insisting that the images porn presents of women are in fact false. Are they real or not? Did “she” “get it” or was she framed?
Rape is bad. I’m all for there being less of it, even none of it. But blaming rape on pornography seems not only a clear case of scapegoating, but (and this is a problem endemic among anti-porn feminists) to deny agency to rapists in a way that clearly undermines other feminist projects in dangerous ways. Moreover, the continual looking-for-reasons that this is an example of is a culturally dangerous sort of Othering. The rationale seems to go something like this: So-and-so has done something bad that I could never picture myself doing. Since I couldn’t do it, and it was bad, there must be something wrong with So-and-so that caused So-and-so to do this Bad Thing.
Of course the Bad Thing that So-and-so did may not be as obviously and unanimously wrong as rape. So-and-so may have hit someone, may like eating foods that aren’t healthy, may be gay, or may not feel comfortable speaking in public. But as with the rapist-pornographers, since we can’t, and don’t want to, see ourselves doing what he has done, we feel compelled to go around busying ourselves, looking for a cause, and reconstructing So-and-so into something decidedly, and comfortably, different from ourselves. Because, of course, in a different situation we could never do anything like what So-and-so has done, and isn’t that satisfying to know?
I’m going to leave this unargued, but some, maybe even most, anti-porn feminist literature seems motivated by a desire to bind, display, and objectify those women in the sex industry to a degree perhaps greater than porn ever did.
