Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray is leading the UK’s largest ever study of women’s experiences and views of online pornography. Here she discusses what we know already, what we need to know more about, and how you can get involved.
In October last year the www.womenonporn.org project was launched, and looks to be the largest ever survey of UK women’s views and experiences of online mainstream pornography. The survey closed in December with over 2,000 respondents from across a range of ages, ethnic backgrounds, and opinions on pornography. The analysis will be completed in full by the end of this year, but so far what is becoming clear from the data is that the traditional ‘knowledge’ about women and pornography bears little resemblance to the experiences of many women today. Empirical work on pornography has largely focused on the relationships, views and practices of men as pornography’s primary consumers and producers. Combined with this, the notoriously divisive porn wars in feminism have helped to obscure access to the range of views, practices, and experiences of pornography amongst women. The disagreements between and amongst feminist about pornography have a fraught and lengthy history. These debates are not new, and the positions are most commonly broken into a pleasure/danger binary – where focusing on one means refusing the possibilities of the other. Researchers interested in violence against women and girls have commonly focused on the dangers of pornography, whilst those focusing on the pleasures have rarely acknowledged the ways in which pornography is implicated in men’s violence. Today, the positions that characterise the debates have become identities: divided into sex positive and it’s often unnamed but obligatory counterpart, sex negative. Such positions function in the pornography debates to hide or even disallow a critical voice to exist within either framing. Our experiences are reduced to being for porn or against it, positive or negative, and honest conversations about our relationships to pornography have become too scary to have. This has led to a large gap in knowledge about the full range of experiences of pornography – with little room for a discussion of the contradictions, the tensions, the conflicts, that exist for many when we think about porn as a practice rather than an ‘issue’. The conceptual work that does exist outside of these polemical positions is largely from writers of colour – particularly women of colour in America. What this work reveals is how, when one is struggling to gain access to their own representation, there is no easy narrative of ‘agency’, ‘choice’, ‘limitation’, or ‘freedom.’ Instead we need to look to what Celine Parreñas Shimizu, calls “between the spaces of structure and agency”, to see how, or if, pornography might in some ways expand women’s ‘space for action’ at the same time as constraining it. To think through whether this space is as an individual property or whether it exists in relation. To consider what it means if it is both. Given the ways in which women of colour theorists have managed to find a space for ambiguity here, the lack of attention paid to lived differences between women in empirical work may have contributed to the stalling of the debates. It may be that an attempt to step away from this kind of complexity in women’s relationships to pornography underlies the empirical focus on men’s consumptions and relationships. Whatever the reasons, the absence of in-depth work with women is notable, given the vast amount of theoretical work on women’s relationships to pornography; work that routinely focuses on alternative or feminist pornographies, including a focus on written pornography, rather than women as in relationship to popular mainstreamed porn. In this theoretical literature, pornography is most often posited as a useful vehicle for the expression of women’s sexual subjectivity – often to the detriment of addressing the ambiguity that one finds in women’s actual accounts, the ambivalence in their attitudes, and the multiplicity of their positions. These three descriptions, ambiguous, ambivalent, and multiple, do more to express women’s actual positions than any other terms used across the debates. It appears, at least on initial review of the data, that for a lot of women who use online pornography, this is not (or not only) a simple story of empowerment and enjoyment. There is a distinct ambivalence running through women’s consumption of pornography that cannot be easily explained away by appeal to the ‘taboo’ of female sexuality or female masturbation more broadly. Approximately ¾ of the respondents to the survey have watched online pornography by themselves to masturbate, with ¼ never having watched online pornography at all. There are important differences based on race and age that are rarely explored in pornography research, and really interesting information given by the women who do not watch pornography about their reasons and experiences. The majority of the porn being accessed is visual, not written as is often suggested, and the sites being used seem to be mostly the same mainstream ‘tube’ sites that are popular for men, not feminist or alternative pornographies. We need to be able to talk about this, about the range of women’s experiences of pornography without trying to close each other down or advocate for our own positions. Women on Porn begins from this place, seeking to address the absence of knowledge on women’s relationships to pornography, to put our perspectives and experiences in conversation with each other rather than attempt to level them out or shout them down. As a woman I interviewed earlier this month asked: “What are the conversations about porn we need to be having that we don’t want to have?” Wherever those conversations take us, women’s voices need to be forefront. It’s not too late to take part, with interviews will be running until the end of June. To get your voice heard, visit www.womenonporn.org.
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Dr Emma Williamson shares her reflections on the recent Thinking Futures event at the University of Bristol, which debated what justice means for victims of gender based violence. What does justice look like? This was the question asked at last week’s Thinking Futures event run by the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. The event was part of the wider Thinking Futures programme which celebrates research from the University’s Faculty of Social Science and Law, and supports the national ESRCs Festival of Social Sciences. We chose the topic of Gender, Violence and Justice as it coincides with current research looking at Justice, Inequalities, and Gender Based Violence being conducted in partnership with Women’s Aid, England, and Welsh Women’s Aid. The event, held at the Church Above The Shops, was introduced by Thangam Debbonaire, MP for Bristol West. Thangam brought to the evening her experience of working with the perpetrators of abuse, whether individuals or collective within processes and systems. She reminded us of the need to challenge and change those behaviours and the ideas from which they come. Thangam also recognised the long and on-going history in Bristol of women fighting gender based violence, from the early Women’s Aid movement, to Rape Crisis, to Integrate – all of whom were represented on the evening. Geetanjali Gangoli, from the Centre for Gender and Violence Research was first to speak, highlighting findings from a recent study conducted for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary (HMIC) on so called ‘honour violence’. Geetanjali highlighted the barriers faced by Black and Minority Ethnic Women when trying to challenge abuse which might be categorised as honour based. She recognised that for some of the women in the research other relatives, including male relatives, were sometimes the ones to encourage victims/survivors to seek justice through the police and official systems. Geetanjali also discussed the difficulty of challenging abuse which might be condoned by families and communities, and the importance therefore of thinking about what justice means in wider and community based context. Layla Ismail was next on the podium, both in her capacity as director of Refugee Women Bristol, and in her role for FORWARD, the national charity concerned, for many years, with the issue of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or ‘cutting’. Again, the importance of community justice was raised. – To stop this particular abuse, adult survivors of FGM should be given the space to talk about their experience and the impacts it had had, in the hope that it would be a catalyst for social change. Young women in Bristol, supported by FORWARD, have been at the forefront of work on this issue nationally, and it was a pleasure to hear about their success in changing attitudes. In terms of our initial question, what does justice look like, justice here looks like no more FGM/cutting. As well as inspiring the audience, Layla also challenged the multiple and sometimes contradictory oppressions which women might face. In this case the abhorrence society directs to FGM whilst condoning within popular media similar plastic surgery procedures. These contradictions do not go unnoticed within those populations where FGM has been an issue. Following Layla was Rowen Miller from SARSAS – Somerset and Avon, Rape and Sexual Assault Service. Rowen was talking about sexual violence and justice, and what it feels like, from a survivor’s perspective to walk into a court of law, to take steps to seek formal types of justice. For most it feels like walking into the lion’s den. Rowen highlighted the importance of empowering survivors following assault to make they own decisions about how they wish to proceed, and the systems they have put in place to assist with this, including acting as a go-between for survivors who might want to report anonymously and the police. As with all of the speakers, Rowen offered us hope about the growth which is possible for survivors following experiences of gender based violence, and the importance of supporting, standing alongside and behind, survivors to their sources of justice, whatever that is. The final panel speaker of the evening was Marianne Hester. Marianne focused more on domestic violence as one part of the wider gender based violence continuum. She highlighted the failures of formal justice to offer ‘justice’ in the sense of convictions for crimes, and discussed the alternatives we might then wish to explore. If formal justice on a population level, on the whole, doesn’t work for victims/survivors then what are the alternative available to us? Following the panel presentations, the chair opened up the discussion to the audience. Initially reluctant, understandably, the audience come forward with a wide range of ideas about what justice might look like: rough justice, social justice – social change, restorative justice – in its true and safe form, empowerment, and resistance. As well as people’s experience of working in the field of gender based violence, people also talked about their experiences of abuse and the formal justice system. We would like to thank all of the audience members for creating a safe space and atmosphere where survivors felt able to speak, and to those speakers for sharing their experiences with us. Injustice was not being able to face the perpetrator, in court, and tell him what he did. Injustice is over five years fighting a perpetrator who twists the system to drag you, as a victim/survivor, through the courts repeatedly. Injustice is being told by a therapist that if you choose to report an incident to the police then you cannot continue to receive their help. So, taking the injustices which unfortunately inform our ideas of what justice might look like, for this group justice was about a wider recognition of gender, and other, inequalities. It is recognising misogyny as a form of gendered hate crime, and of finding new ways to challenge it. It is challenging schools to implement relationship and respect education – despite the government not making it mandatory. It is fighting for the support services needed to allow victims/survivors to seek the help they need, and to stand alongside them in their struggles to stop it happening in the future to others. Above all justice was what victims/survivors think it should be. In a week when the US elected a president who admitted sexually groping women without asking (many would call that sexual assault) – justice is living in a society that says that is not okay and stands together to change it. For further information about the Centre for Gender and Violence Research: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/research/centres/genderviolence/ Anyone interested in talking to the research team about experiences of abuse, as part of the Justice Project, please contact us via the project page or email: [email protected] This blog was originally posted at: http://policystudies.blogs.ilrt.org/2016/11/17/gender-violence-and-justice-what-does-justice-look-like/ Welcome to our Blog for the BSA Violence Against Women Study Group!
This is an arena for members of the Study Group to share their experiences with others who are also working to end violence against women and girls. The blog is a safe, supportive, inclusive, feminist space, where we can share ideas, news, critiques, and discuss the research process. But impact does not end there; this is an online resource, which also extends to the wider international community. |
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