The Price of Pleasure: Porn, Sex, and Silence - Part I

This weekend I stumbled upon a 2008 documentary by filmmakers, teacher & scholar, Dr. Chyng Sun, Ph.D, Miguel Picker, and Robert Wosnitzer, 'The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, & Relationships'.      

While the entire film is definitely worth a thoughtful review and is certainly not for everyone (for instance my domestic partner clamored for it to be shut off almost immediately after pressing play) and even its trailer comes with a disclaimer of: "This trailer contains scenes of sexual activity and aggression from pornographic videos."  (So it is really important to mentally prepare yourself prior to watching it, definitely don't watch it at work or with unprepared impressionable youth around, and if your TV/monitor is view-able at street level, you'd be wise to close the curtains).  

Unfortunately due to time constraints I am personally unable to dissect the entire film, which is good, it's up to the viewer to do that on their own, and will instead only focus on a few highlighted points brought up by observing this truly fascinating and objective documentary.  It was really something that Sarah Katherine Lewis said that resounded the most with me.  For the low income uneducated female a choice between working the fast food or big box chain store circuit and dabbling in sex-work is an easy and understandable choice to make and is nothing less then a failure of the labor market.  Which means it's also an economic failure.  It's also a coerced choice, a byproduct of patriarchal predatory capitalistic rule in a kyriarchal oligarchal plutocracy plutonomy.  It's no choice. 

Even Noam Chomsky said we needed to "...eliminate the conditions where women can't get decent jobs."  And appeared to evaluate pornography as being one of the most depraved acts one could do to a person, equating it to abuse for food.  

Certainly it appeared to be the case for the "Queen of Bestiality", Bodil Joensen who was portrayed in the 2005-2006 UK series The Dark Side of Porn episode 5 of season 2 in "The Real Animal Farm".  Joensen seemed completely cornered by external life events into earning a living wage by engaging in what bestowed her her royal tittle.  Joensen is a tragic figure that should be mourned for her inability to experience human love, not celebrated for a coerced debauchery as a consequence of that fact.  

Emma Green recently wrote about how "...Most people favor legal restrictions on porn, and an even greater number are morally uncomfortable with watching it."   

This is during a time when porn's gone mainstream and is on demand, so do we sense on some level the porn addicts that can put themselves in debt?--question the effects it'll have on our budding generations's sexuality and personal relationships?  Do we all understand on some level how porn can make violence against females - a 'normalized' fetish?  How it's all of us that are extorted for monetary profits at the expense of the fabric of common decency towards each other?  And if that's how most of us feel, why would we continue to remain silent bystanders?    

Susan Griffin published in 1982 her book 'Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge against Nature' and in the opening of her chapter on silence had this to say about not saying anything:

"Our silence. The silence and the silencing of women. The creation of authority in the image of the male. Of god in the image of the male. Rape. The burning of witches. Wife-beating. Laws against women speaking in public places. Against women preaching. The imprisonment of suffragists. Force-feeding. Harassment on the public streets. Scorn for the women who dares to act like man. A woman's love for another woman, unspoken, hidden. Our invisibility in history. The manuscripts of Sappho burned, the writing of women never published, lives of genius spent obscurely, or in domestic labor and child-rearing; the life of the mother, of the housekeeper, unimagined and unrecognized. Woman's word pronounced full of gile. A woman's testimony held suspect in court.

These several centuries of the silencing of women are a palpable presence in our lives -- the silence we have inherited has become part of us. It covers the space in which we live; it is a blank screen, and onto this screen a fantasy which does not belong to women is projected; the silence of women the very surface on which pornography is played. We become other than ourselves.

And the story does not end with this forced silencing. Just as silence leaves off, the lie begins. This lie is not only the lie the pornographer tells, but the lie a woman begins to believe about herself, or even if she does not believe it, the lie a woman tries to mimic. For since all the structures of power in her life, and all the voices of authority -- the church, the state, society, most likely even her own mother and father -- reflect pornography's fantasy, if she feels in herself a being who contradicts this fantasy, she begins to believe she herself is wrong. Wordlessly, even as a small girl, she begins to try to mold herself to fit society's image of what a woman ought to be. And that part of her which contradicts this pornographic image of womanhood is cast back into silence."