Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (15 page)

It is possible to stand against censorship and still acknowledge that porn is a problem for men right now. It captivates them, because that’s what it’s designed to do, but it distresses them, too, and there needs to be an honest discussion about what porn does that goes beyond simple, impractical demands to ban all tits on film for ever. The script that young men in particular have been handed to learn about fucking from presents as normal a highly ritualised, aggressive heterosexuality played out by professionals who have to work hard to be good at what they do. It requires training, effort, and not a small amount of special equipment. There are people offstage making sure the lighting works and the talent stays hard.

The great genius of commercial sexuality has been to give the impression that this society is one of unprecedented erotic freedom while maintaining the impression that sex is almost always something violent and disgusting that men do to women. Hence the ubiquity of that pernicious little word ‘sexualisation’, which is used to describe everything from teeny push-up bras to music videos where the latest teen starlet to come off the Disney channel prances about in hotpants. Women should never be sexual: sex is something that is done to us, preferably as late and as infrequently as possible. At a certain age, we are ‘sexualised’, and then that’s it. There’s no going back. We are ruined, doomed to abject, knicker-dropping harlotry, and nobody will ever love us.

Sex is still phrased as violence, and rape as a logical extreme of that violence. The sex drive is understood as entirely male; women who pursue or demand sex are masculine and unnatural. So toxic and unstoppable is men’s sex-hunger that women must be appointed guardians of it – if they provoke men’s desire, if they dress in short skirts or low-cut tops, they have only themselves to blame if they get raped or assaulted.

The notion that fucking is something disgusting men do to women, and women who let them do it are somehow abject, remains scored in our sexual psyche, for all our claims to liberation. The received wisdom, duly transmitted in urban legend and the more vapid bedroom-advice sections of women’s magazines, is that men are actually turned off by sexual forwardness – the more straight women who are not numb between the legs pursue the thing we want, the less likely we are to get it. ‘She can’t be too flirty – I have to chase her’; ‘I want her to play innocent’; ‘I like to be in control’. That’s the type of talk that makes any sensible slut cross her legs at the anticipation of frustration now or in the future, when that pretty boy has finally opened up to you enough to make you an object of his most private self-loathing. 

Teaching men self-disgust is crucial to maintaining the architecture of modern misogyny. If sex weren’t dirty and degrading, there would be less reason to loathe women for letting you do it to them, no matter how much you want to. How could you possibly respect a creature who lets you take out your baser instincts on them, who even professed to enjoy it? How could you take seriously a person who shamed themselves in such a way? Women’s dignity is impossible when the only thing worse than being an object and instrument of men’s sexual shame is not being one.

UNPORNIFICATION

An incredible thing has happened. We live in an age of boundless information. Kids today are able to know more, much more, than any generation that has come before them. I’m writing this paragraph, for example, on a device no bigger than my open hand through which I can access, with a couple of finger-swipes, more data than my immediate ancestors ever conceived of in their days of hoarding books in island poverty, although I mainly use it to look at smutty webcomics and find my way to the pub. And yet, with all this hyperabundance of information, with all of these learning tools at our disposal, we have somehow managed to raise yet another generation that remains as ignorant and confused as ever about that most intimate of mysteries, human sexuality. How did this happen?

It happened because adults in this culture persist in seeing their own sexuality as monstrous, as terrifying and compelling and disgusting, rather than as a normal part of human development. It happened because we are unable to provide decent, adequate sex education in schools, or alternative models for sexuality beyond the sterile, the sexist and the crashingly heteronormative. If sex were food, we’d be unable to move for takeaways and fast food joints, living lives where the only nourishment offered or advertised was cystic chicken nuggets pumped full of MSG and aerated factory-line hamburgers that don’t have the decency to decay even if you leave them on a windowsill for a week – and then wondering why everybody was still so hungry all the time. Of course, there are times when all you want is a double cheeseburger drowned in barbecue sauce, but if you try to live on it, you get sick, and bored, and drained of energy; you have to eat more and more of the stuff to feel satisfied, but somehow you never really do, because what your brain and body need aren’t what your gut is being instructed to want.

The impression given by most industrially produced porn and its imitators, the one thing that most current mainstream pornography shares with the sexual script of advertising and the mantra of women’s magazines, is the insistence that sex, like every other kind of alienated labour, is serious business. No fuck-ups are allowed – if you’re not an expert from the get-go you’ll surely find yourself replaced with someone cuter and more exploitable. There can be no giggling, no mistakes, no fanny farts, no awkward squeaking sounds when bodies rub together. Bodies should work more like machines, machines that don’t get their feet caught in their pants or drop their stockings on the lit candle they thought would be romantic so a small fire starts. If an advert for organ donation comes on your Spotify shuffle playlist in the crucial thirty seconds, you mustn’t laugh. That would be unprofessional.

In fact, if there’s one thing pro-porn actors can teach the rest of us amateurs, it’s the difference between the type of sex you have because it looks good and the kind you have because it feels good. In between takes of the former a lot of fumbling around and logistical discussion takes place. The porn actors I lived with when I first started writing seemed to spend most of their time giggling as they worked out what they could put on expense accounts.

The New Jersey Porn Xpo is in the middle of concrete shopping-mall hell and there isn’t a single stall that can sell you an orgasm, although they give it a damn good try. The bored girl running the bucking bronco booth, a fairground ride in the manner of a rodeo bull shaped like an enormous squat phallus, seems mildly annoyed that nobody wants to ride her giant dick. In the midst of all this extravagance, the wild electric dong is turned off at the wall. The booth girl, draped over the saddle, closes her eyes.

Stoya, the porn star of the moment, is at her stall signing DVDs and fleshlights – custom moulds of her vagina that only a few porn stars are asked to sit for, quite literally. A queue of men trails down the aisle to speak to her, transfixed and shuffling as they might in the presence of royalty. Most are stammering, shy; some engage her in conversation about how she changed their life, their wives don’t know they watch her films, but she really seems to enjoy it so it’s all right, isn’t it? A few of them are young, most are middle-aged, a small number are as pushy as they can get away with in a venue with security on hand to watch out for the girls. Stoya is a consummate professional. ‘No one has ever said to me at a porn convention, “I fucked the shit out of your fleshlight pussy like a dirty whore!” Nobody’s been downright nasty. Walking out on the street, though, where people have no idea who you are, dudes will tell you – “Man, I’d fuck that pussy.” Bleurgh. That’s when men yell at you. When you’re in sneakers, when you haven’t showered in three days. Six days. Whatever.’

Stoya tosses on a floor-length white coat, slings her wondrous bag of vaginas over one shoulder and heads out for a smoke. I join her. The air in the car park smells of nicotine and warm tarmac, but it seems surprisingly fresh in its upfront unhealthiness. Indoors is deodorised, and that, I realise, is what’s been bugging me all along: I expect sex to smell. I expect an enormous hall full of sex to smell of something other than rubber and cleaning fluid. There is nothing organic here. Just hard-working people and the punters who pay their wages. The lingerie turns out to be tax-deductible, and I wonder briefly if I’m in the wrong job, but only briefly, as I have neither the stamina nor the charisma to be pleasant to everyone in the way that Stoya has to at gigs like these.

Stoya is not the first feminist porn star I’ve known, although a great number of the ‘professional’ women’s liberation workers I’ve met still choose to pretend that feminist sex workers don’t exist, like tooth fairies, or gay republicans. I should stress that I have never sold sex myself, mainly because I was advised against it by kind friends in the industry who suggested that my total lack of emotional boundaries and love of horrible grey knickers meant I should possibly stick to the day-job. But I am part of a community that includes many sex workers, many of my friends and lovers have sold and continue to sell sexual services, and when I am asked to speak about sex work as if my possession of lady parts and a public platform mean I know everything about sexual commodification it is those people I turn to.

Modern feminism lumbers under an uncomfortable inheritance from the women’s activism of the 1980s that stressed sex work as damaging on point of principle. Stoya’s feminist mother ‘was not there on the day that the women threw the bras into the trashcans outside the Miss America pageant, but she ran with that crew. She was one of the bodies out there on the streets, holding signs. And that’s wonderful,’ she tells me, three days after the porn convention, in a small hipster cafe where every bearded laptop-scrabbler is sneaking surreptitious looks of longing at our table.

‘My mother’s view of the word that she imparted to me was: you’re a person. You have a vagina, but you’re a person first, you can do anything you want. But when I said I wanted to take ballet classes, you could see her gritting her teeth. She tried very hard to stick to what she’d said. But then there were performances, make-up, and she had her own ideas about how women ought to be. She had physically put herself at risk to open up women’s rights!

‘Some ladies have a chip on their shoulder [about sex work]. I respect that chip. But while that chip was probably necessary to get us to the point we are now, it’s a prejudice. I’m immensely grateful that we’re now at the place where I can have that choice, where I want to wear high heels, and make-up. I want to do pretty things. I want to sell my body professionally.’ Stoya’s mother remains uncomfortable with her decision to do porn. Her granny, however, is perfectly happy, and even allows Stoya to use her name as a professional pseudonym.

When a lot of feminists say they hate pornography and prostitution, what they mean is that they hate the transactional nature of sex, the patriarchal equation whereby every party remains convinced they’re the one getting screwed: he pays her and she services him. In this equation, sex is work like anything else women do, low-paid or unpaid but work nonetheless, and approaching it for its own sake is frowned upon. What on earth would that get you, except laid, and what decent woman really wants that? Rich women who don’t give a damn about exploitation in any other industry are moved by the plight of prostitutes. They alone are truly abject and must be rescued from their sinful way of life even if there’s no alternative but begging. Surely begging is better, working twelve hours a day in a sweatshop is better, anything is better than fucking for money, because everyone knows that work is good for you and sex is bad for women. And so making sex work legal can’t possibly happen – even if it saves lives, keeps prostitutes safe from the threat of arrest and imprisonment, and makes it easier for them. What kind of message would that send to children?

Using the phrase ‘sex work’ rather than ‘prostitution’, something many sex workers insist upon, reframes the debate. Instead of asking what it is about sex that is so bad for women, we can start asking what it is about work that’s bad for everyone. That’s a dangerous question. To argue that sex work is a job ‘like any other’ is not to argue that it is benign, on the contrary. Most jobs are awful, and the fact that some sex workers would rather not do what they do for a living implies nothing more than that: the gas-station attendant and the shop girl would probably also rather not have to do what they do all day, although they are obliged to put a smile on it and insist that they love their work.

And yet we continue to be told that there is something in particular about prostitution that threatens women – not just the women who do it, but all women. If a woman or girl is selling sexual services somewhere in the world, the overall cost of women’s consent will be depreciated, and we all know that the power to refuse or permit intercourse is still our greatest asset. If withholding sexual consent is still many women’s only way of bargaining for better conditions, in marriage, in relationships or in the family, then it’s easy to see how sex workers might be undermining that bargaining power – as might any woman who gives it up too easily, for money or for pleasure. As long as we accept a world where sexual consent is still women’s biggest bargaining chip, sex workers will suffer for our sins.

We cannot know what sex work is really like, or how prostitutes really suffer, the refrain goes, because how could they tell us? In fact, since the Internet made anonymous, self-published accounts of sex work feasible on a mass scale, hookers and strippers and porn stars and pro-dommes have been telling us just that, in their tens of thousands. When abolitionists can no longer pretend that sex workers are not speaking, the standard claim is that they have been so abused and traumatised by the work they do that their ideas do not matter and should not be respected. In other contexts, feminism is supposed to be about listening to women who have been abused and asking what they need, rather than telling them they’re brainwashed whores with no idea what’s good for them.