In the Australia last week, Nikki Gemmell excelled herself in a display of the Sacred Babble. In my mind it is like island hopping. She visits this illogical conclusion here, jumps to that phony correlation there, and then hops over to a false assumption somewhere else. There is no connection between these islands of feminist fantasy, except that they were all visited by Gemmell.
She begins with quoting a Dr. Strasburger who “guarantees” that if a 14-year-old boy has internet access in his bedroom, then he is looking at porn. And if you find a boy who is not looking at porn? That’s right, it’s a meaningless, empty guarantee of nothing.
This, apparently, led the American Academy of Pediatrics to write a new policy.
My, oh my. Just how high falutin’ and hoity toity is that: a policy, no less.
The main recommendation (hang on! recommendation? I thought it was a policy!) is that children should spend no more than two hours a day online. Now that, of course, will bring porn access to an abrupt halt. Or is two hours the recommended level of daily porn? Or have we moved on to a new logical island?
And, of course, no 14-year-old girl, with internet in her bedroom, would ever look at porn. And also, of course, any 14-year-old boy who sees porn is immediately corrupted beyond repair.
We are then transported to a “post-feminist” world. Does she mean Patriarchy is dead? Do we no longer require quotas for female politicians or CEOs? Have we reached the magical equality in opportunity, entitlement and outcome?
You know we haven’t. And, you also know that Gemmell doesn’t think we have either. Perhaps the word “post-feminist” sounded just that bit more intellectual. But, in this post-feminist world, she knows “enlightened” parents who have taught their boys to be new men: “tender and kind, tolerant of difference…respectful of women, not afraid of them.”
Who, you might ask, taught these enlightened parents?
No time for the answer. These new men (or are we back to boys?) have “been raised with a healthy dose of that all-important buzz phrase, EQ. Emotional intelligence.” Ah, if only my parents had given me a dose of buzz phrases. I could be positively vibrating with verbal diarrhea.
So, how good is this “EQ?” Next to fucking useless, it turns out. Give them an unsupervised screen and these boys’ Emotional Intelligence vaporises as they spiral into the black hole of porn.
Gemmell then takes us on a personal insight into the effects of porn on teenage girls. A man used porn to seduce her. She found it “fascinating at first, then repellent.”
Why did this lead to sex? Well, what else could a fair damsel like Gemmell do? After all, she was seduced. Therefore, Gemmell’s responsibility was removed like a boy’s “EQ.” He was “the man,” so he did “the seducing” while she lay helpless on her fainting couch. Her being repulsed would have only added to her helplessness.
The ploy of the likes of Gemmell is to try to paint those who would disagree with her into a corner. Any criticism is not just, by default, to approve of pornography, but of the worst kinds of pornography. Not only that, but it is to approve of porn being peddled to 14-year-old children. Further, you approve of these young boys being taught to hate and fear women by that pornography, to such an extent that those boys will oppress women when they are older.
Let me take a moment here to make a few comments of my own in regards to teenage sex and pornography.
Most mature adults will look back on their first sexual encounters, whether alone or with others present, as clumsy. This does not make it any of it wrong. Our first attempts at talking, walking, writing and all other forms of communication would fall into the same category. So yes, young men may well watch pornography at that age and come to some pretty clumsy conclusions.
So first of all, lets just take a step back.
In days of yore, it was called “don’t let your kids get with the wrong crowd.” Today, thanks to the internet, the wrong crowd don’t need to use the front door. Pornography is only just one of the many “wrong crowds” that have new avenues to children, thanks to the internet. From online gambling (legitimate pursuits) to radical terrorists (illegal pursuits), there are many aspects of life, well beyond the maturity of children, that are only a few clicks away. But Gemmell elevates the issue of pornography above all others to add to the general moral panic concerning “female oppression.”
But her view of pornography is as clumsy as a child’s.
First of all, pornography covers all aspects of sex. This would include gay sex (male or female), sex with animals, females dominating males physically and emotionally, and other “genres” that fall well outside of Gemmell’s definition: “It’s about men exercising control over women – who are always available.”
But even when considering heterosexual encounters, even fourteen year olds understand the difference between videos and real life. For most young men, their first attempts to get girls their own age to dance with them at the local club will dispel any notions of “always available.”
However, having said all these negative things about pornography, Gemmell is suggesting that “we” should champion feminist porn “where the woman is empowered.” She calls for “…different pornographic scenarios that embrace tenderness, vulnerability, reality.”
This isn’t just her idea. According to Gemmell, the philosopher Alain de Botton calls for a “new pornography”. She goes on to quote him as saying “Ideally, porn would excite our lust in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever.”
I’m reminded of those complaints made of the lack of reality in mainstream movies. For example, when characters drive in a major city to a skyscraper building and they get a park right outside the front door. The criticism is valid, in the sense that in real life, parking is at such a premium in cities that this would almost never happen.
The alternative, though, is for the audience to sit there for half an hour while the character drives around, negotiating one way streets whilst refusing to pay the extortionate prices of inner city carparks, trying to find a parking zone that will allow sufficient time for him to get to the aforementioned skyscraper, do what he has to do, and get back before getting an exorbitant fine. Hopefully, when he gets inside the building something a bit more interesting happens.
So, what would feminist porn look like? For example, perhaps there would be a pool-cleaner who comes to a woman’s house to clean her pool while she is sunbaking. Perhaps he actually cleans the pool (“working hard”) whilst not objectifying her. Perhaps they could even discuss de Botton’s latest book (“being clever”) or engage in some light, politically correct, banter (“being witty”).
Perhaps they might “embrace reality” and accept that most pool-cleaners don’t have sex with their clients. Instead he might hurry up to get the job finished because pool-cleaner pay is shit and the only way to make a living is to clean as many pools in a day as he can.
And the actual sex?
If there is any at all, it will, of course, require continual repetitions of “enthusiastic consent.” This, of course, will be difficult to convey. How does the woman inform the viewer that she is not just under the “control of men” by being in the video? How does she show that she is not merely regurgitating the lines of a script, written by her Patriarchal director or producer?
What would give the viewer the impression that she unreservedly, through her own volition, actually wants to have sex with the male actor that she has only just met with the camera, lighting and sound crew, and of course the viewers, all watching?
Of course, the real concern centres not on feminist porn itself, but the “we” who would champion such a thing. That is, the state. What happens when the government gives us pornography that no one would watch? How long before the likes of Gemmell would be advocating that such porn become mandatory at schools?
How long before someone can “guarantee” that fourteen-year-old boys will be watching feminist porn? How will the likes of Gemmell “guarantee” that the result will be “enlightened” young men with EQ, and not brain fried Stepford boys or worse?
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