The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (33 page)

CONSTANCE PENLEY

Constance Penley
is professor of film and media studies and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her major areas of research interest are film and media history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies
and editor or co-editor of the influential collections
Feminism and Film Theory, Male Trouble, Technoculture,
and
The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender.
She is the author of
The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America,
and the forthcoming
Teaching Pornography.
Her collaborative art projects include “MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” on which she was co-librettist. Penley is a 2009 winner of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award.

A
feminist teaching pornography? That’s like Scopes teaching evolution!” What could the Reverend Pat Robertson have possibly meant when he chose those words to denounce the course on pornographic film that I have been teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, since 1993? In a 1994 special of
The 700 Club
on “godlessness in public schools,” he made this remarkable statement, right after declaring my course, “a new low in humanist excess” (which I proudly plan to use as a blurb on my forthcoming book,
Teaching Pornography
). He compared a feminist teaching pornography in the early 1990s to science teacher John Scopes teaching evolution in the mid-1920s, in defiance of a Tennessee law that forbade teaching “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

Similarly agog over the idea of a feminist teaching pornography, was the head of Santa Barbara County Citizens Against Pornography (SBCCAP),
which operates out of local churches. He first called the UC Santa Barbara chancellor’s office, and was then successively passed down to the vice chancellor, the provost, the dean, and, finally, my department chair, demanding that I be fired and my course canceled immediately. He was astonished when this did not happen, but even more so when he discovered that I held a joint appointment in women’s studies as well as film studies. How can a feminist be teaching pornography?

Journalists, too, did not get it. “What do feminists think of your course?” was invariably the first question in any interview. I carefully explained to them that I was a film studies professor but also a women’s studies professor, and a founding editor of
Camera Obscura,
the longest-running feminist media journal in English. The reporters would then say, “Okay, well, what did
other
feminists think about your course?” Even after I told them I had received nothing but interest and support from feminists on my campus and around the country, they would go off and write that my course had been massively protested by feminists.

I regret that I did not have the chance to similarly confound the US Department of Justice (DOJ) with that seeming paradox of a feminist teaching pornography when I was proffered in 2010 as an expert witness in
United States v. John Stagliano,
a federal obscenity trial in Washington, DC. The DOJ had to subpoena the syllabi for my pornographic film course when I would not turn them over upon request. Not only did I not like the idea of having my classroom materials scrutinized by the government, I also did not want the prosecution to see how I go about teaching pornography as a genre and an industry, as film and popular culture. If they were to read my syllabus closely (or any of my research on women, pornography, art, and popular culture), they might be able to ascertain before the trial how I would testify. They would have understood how this feminist teacher of pornography could easily and with much authority defend the films on trial—Belladonna’s
Fetish Fanatic 5,
Joey Silvera’s
Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice,
and Jay Sin’s
Milk Nymphos
—for possessing (or not lacking) serious artistic and political (feminist) value, not to mention scientific value for having been shown and studied in a level one research university classroom. (Teams of my students helpfully transcribed the indicted videos, briefly turning my class into The Innocence Project for Porn.)

After all, the indicted videos (and one website trailer) created by the star directors of Stagliano’s company Evil Angel were basically women’s play parties, a popular sub-genre that you can see on HBO’s
Real Sex.
How did well-crafted films featuring women exchanging bodily fluids,
with a little light bondage, become the most obscene thing in the land, worth tens of millions to prosecute?

It would have been fascinating to have had the chance to put before the Supreme Court evidence for the artistic and political value of such materials, which can be revealed only by the kind of combined historical, aesthetic/textual, ethnographic, and industrial approaches found in my class. The judge made key appealable errors that would have assured a Supreme Court hearing, such as disallowing expert witnesses and suspending the obscenity statute’s holding that the jury deliberate on the charged materials in their entirety. But all this became moot when the case completely collapsed and was summarily dismissed without the possibility of appeal because of prosecutorial ineptness. At least that ineptness and the ensuing humiliation for the DOJ spelled the end of the Bush Obscenity Prosecution Task Force!

That a feminist would teach pornography not simply to denounce it, but to take it up as a serious topic of study in the humanities seemed baffling to all these parties for at least two reasons. From the 1970s and through the 1980s and 1990s, and now with the resurgence of antiporn feminism in the 2000s, the popular perception of feminism is that it is one and the same with the antiporn movement, even when that movement merges, then and unfortunately again now, with the forces of the religious right and conservative thinking about women and sexuality. The popular perception that all feminists are by definition antiporn is fostered by a media that loves reporting the sensational story of feminism once again, as in the nineteenth century, degenerating into a moral hygiene or public decency movement. This journalistic tack is admittedly juicier than trying to explain the complexities of feminist thought on sexual representation and its impressively wide and diverse range of views.

So, too, the opponents of porn do not believe a feminist could teach pornography because they think it cannot be studied, either because there’s nothing there to study (it’s so low a cultural form that it doesn’t even count as culture) or it is too dangerous to study. The local antiporn activists, for example, accused me of exposing children to pornography in my classroom, to the anger and dismay of my students who vocally spoke out against their characterization as children in letters to the editor of the local paper.

From the religious perspective, it is not only bewildering that a feminist would teach pornography but also a betrayal of an alliance between antiporn feminism and the religious right that began in the early 1980s.
During a forty-five-minute phone conversation with the head of SBCCAP (a woman, by the way, was the nominal head but a man did all the talking), he gradually realized that this feminist had no intention of leading a new sexual temperance movement but planned to teach pornography as a genre and an industry, as film and popular culture, within a rigorous critical studies media curriculum. I think he understood—and rightly feared—that studying pornography, making it studiable, would put it on the spectrum of all other forms of film and popular culture, thereby normalizing it, maybe even revealing it to be more benign than some of those other cultural instances.

I was astonished to see how the SBCCAP leader’s desperation made him show his hand: he confessed that churches can no longer get people to oppose pornography on religious or moral grounds so they need the scientific studies coming out of universities about pornography’s harms to make any headway in getting it outlawed. That’s why he was so dismayed when he realized that my kind of human science-based research and teaching would not give his group the university-vetted tools it needed to make “scientifically” supported arguments about pornography’s harms, its deleterious social effects.

After having made a disappointing visit to the women’s studies program in failed hopes of finding natural allies against me, he tried to find other such allies among the noted “porn effects” researchers in the communication department of the social science division, just down the hall from me. Edward Donnerstein and Dan Linz told him they were glad that I was teaching the class because they thought it offered an historical, textual, and institutional context to their quantitative lab studies. (The porn effects professors and I had some interesting discussions, by the way, about our respective disciplinary approaches when I found out they were using violent exploitation films like
Tool Box Murders
as stand-ins for pornographic films in their lab studies to measure the effects of pornography on levels of male aggression. I was also startled to see that they were making their own films for testing by taking an existing porn film and re-editing it to remove any narrative, dialogue, or character—testing with a film that exists nowhere in the natural world.) In a final disappointment to the SBCCAP head, as he was heading out down the hall following his frustrated attempt to enlist the social scientists against me, they told me they gave him this parting shot, “By the way, you’ve been misusing our data all these years. It doesn’t mean what you want it to say.” The antiporn activists had been citing their lab studies to claim that exposure to explicit sex makes men more aggressive and causes them to violate and degrade women. But Donnevstein and Linz insisted that
their studies showed no correlation between exposure to explicit sex and increased aggression, although they found a slight correlation with exposure to samples with a more Hollywood mix of sex and violence. And what did this religious antiporn activist offer as his credentials for speaking against the harms of using pornography and teaching pornography? He proudly told me that he’d never even seen an R-rated film.

Neither the good reverend, the religious antiporn activist, the journalists, or probably the federal prosecutors could understand why, on this issue especially, a feminist would be allied with science, a.k.a. secular humanism. “The Evolution Tree,” an illustration on the cover of Christopher J. Toumey’s fascinating anthropological study,
God’s Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World,
shows how a belief in biological evolution, with its roots in “unbelief,” branches out into the evils of communism, hard rock, humanism, alcohol, abortion, homosexuality, sex education, dirty books, and “wom/child lib,” among other moral atrocities.
¹
The solution is not to go after each evil one by one but to chop off the biological evolution trunk with the axe of scientific creationism. As Toumey shows, the creationists (or intelligent designers, as they have currently refashioned themselves) believe that the only way to counter establishment “bad” science (based in unbelief) is with their “good” science (based in a literal reading of scripture and an ingenious interpretation of the fossil record). I do not want to overwork the comparison between antiporn activist scholarship and creation science but I do think they are similar in their resistance to theory- and evidence-based science in the name of a superior science based in anecdote, dissident testimony (from recovering porn star “victims”), and biblical views of the proper role of sex and sexual relations. As Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show in this volume, “Although some recent writings such as the
Everyday Pornography
collection edited by Karen Boyle are presented as though they are academic work, antiporn feminism has generally become increasingly and more openly hostile to scholarly work than in the past. . . . Porn is described as an ‘intellectual game’ for academics working in environments which ‘have been primed to almost robotically generate certain kinds of objections.’” As Boyle puts it, “If you give examples of what women at [antiporn] slide shows say, or feel, or think, academics will say, ‘That can’t be true because it hasn’t been researched,’ or ‘Show me the evidence of that.’” Here, any feminist adherence to research-based evidence is seen as no more than an act of false consciouness, an academic betrayal of feminism.

So how do the antiporn activists, whose scholarship is driven by ideology/theology, deal with the challenge of scholarship based in historical,
textual, institutional, or ethnographic study? When they pay attention to these methods at all, they discount them by saying that mere textual analysis does not consider institutional issues; that it isn’t grounded because it doesn’t take its direction from victims and activists; or that it is safe scholarship, crafted to not make waves in the academy. In turn, how do creation scientists deal with the challenge of the fossil record? They say this geological evidence can’t be trusted because it has gaps in it, is not vertically sequenced in the assumed evolutionary order, or, the ultimate denial: the creator put those very ancient-seeming artifacts there to test our faith in a young earth whose history can be solely explained by the Flood that happened in the first few days of creation. And most damningly, as with climate change research, they say that scientists are only studying what the establishment will fund them to study, not anything that might threaten elite received wisdom. It would take a great deal more anthropological and rhetorical research to understand why the antiporn activist scholars and creation scientists feel such a strong need to make their arguments in the name of science, even if it is a science on their own terms. Did the head of SBCCAP adequately address why the religious antiporn activists are so fiercely attached to having the imprimatur of science—because people ultimately believe more in science than religion?