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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