This is an interesting item, especially on the tail end of discovering that the poster girl for today’s feminist anti-porn charge — Gail Dines — has had her own (now former) research assistant publicly oppose Dines’ anti-porn arguments.
After working with her former boss and mentor for an unspecified amount of time, female research intern Beth Brigham completely disagrees and now openly disputes the claims of leading anti-porn feminists. Brigham and has since worked in porn and so now can speak firsthand about what’s true in Dines’ porn statements about porn and its performers, and what is not.
While clearly the most vocal the anti-porn views (such as Dines’) may not be fact-filled, the way women relate to porn (or not) is sincerely charged with very valid emotions and our own experiences. Clarisse Thorn writes a very balanced and provocative article for Carnal Nation explaining why she’s pro-porn, yet doesn’t entirely write off the anti-porn feminists.
Thorn’s perspective makes sense, helping us to understand what seems to many of us like a bizarre extremist mindset. It is, but the main reasons why, Thorn tells us, has much to do with a lack of sex education. They may see pro-porn women as wrong, and refuse to talk to or engage with us, but in Sympathy For the Anti-Porn Feminists she explains,
(…) So how can I have sympathy for anti-porn feminists? Only because I remember how I felt just a few years ago. I remember that I felt so confused about my own sexuality; I remember how resentful I felt, that sex seemed so easy for men—that the world seemed to facilitate their sex drives so thoroughly, particularly by providing all this porn!
I remember how hurt I felt by porn, because I believed that it represented “what men want”, and that therefore I was “supposed” to act like porn women—even though the way women acted in porn didn’t appeal to me at all. (…read more, carnalnation.com)
This great article reminds me of female sex academic The Sexademic’s awesome blog post, Porn is More Boring than Offensive (sexademic.wordpress.com).
