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Womens sexuality and pornography

Lou Haysom
Published online: 29 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Lou Haysom (2012) Womens sexuality and pornography, Agenda: Empowering women for
gender equity, 26:3, 1-7

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2012.736193

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 Womens sexuality and pornography

EDITORIAL
P
inning down the understandings of current feminist debates on
pornography may be long overdue for South African feminists
and feminism/s, the subject having not attracted much attention
since the 1990s. In South Africa post-1994, feminists paused for a
moment to reflect on what the new freedom of expression meant
under the new Constitution, and how the emergence of pornography from
the underground where it had been illegal under apartheid, possibly related
to womens rights and freedom. The agenda for liberation certainly had not
emphasised sexual licence imported from the North, but womens long-fought emancipation
and a non-racial and non-sexist participation in the nation as equal citizens.
The diversion and possible subversion of freedom of expression, as a celebration of the
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right to possess pornography and for local consumption and production to take place without
the threat of censorship and criminal penalty, was interpreted at the time as an opportunistic
use of democratic freedom by the pornography industry that would operate at the individual
level, and not enter the sphere of the body politic (Loots, 1996). The struggle for the recognition
of gender difference, freedom of sexual choice and the diversity of sexual identity were yet to be
fought in earnest using the Constitutions Equality Clause. The possible implications for harm to
women (and of course children and men) by pornography were not included in regulation as
some feminists and church groups would have liked. So while the impact, meaning and
practices of the pornography industry have been seen as peripheral, we may have misplaced
the importance of the shifting meanings attached to the term itself, of sex and of the growing
proliferation of pornography.
Recently, we have seen the suppression of our freedom to access of information, and we
have also seen a national outcry over the explicit sexual depiction of the President, and women
holding slut marches to demand the right to wear what they choose and asserting control over
their own bodies and sexuality. So some of the certainty over assertions around what may fall
within the body politic for national debate may need more probing and unsettling, not least
because we have also seen the rise of the disturbing murder of gays and lesbians and
transsexuals
because of their exercise of sexual choice and difference. Sex and sexuality and
who has the freedom to make the decisions around sex, in the last 18 years have arguably
become increasingly contested. We cannot also ignore that pornography can be easily and
possibly incorrectly implicated in moral degeneration, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the rise in
teenage pregnancies and toll on women through gender violence. Thus, in framing an issue on
Womens sexuality and pornography it may not be sufficient to state simply that pornography
is a site of sexual entertainment, that as in the North, it has also offered a source of empowered
sexual agency for women and men and that a high proportion of women are employed in its
production and are its consumers globally. Instead, it may be productive to question the place
and existence of pornography as a genre, its gender ideologies, its conventions of production
and how as an industry it uses sexism and racism, particularly as an ubiquitous and widely used
form of sexual entertainment in 2012. More than that, we can ask who pornographys main
consumers are, how pornography is read and understood, and lastly, we could also acknowl-
edge the unknown dimensions of the sex industry and the problem of the precarious conditions
of its workers.

Agenda 93/26.3 2012

ISSN 1013-0950 print/ISSN 2158-978X online
# 2012 L. Haysom
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2012.736193 pp. 1
7
 After all pornography has been a troubled area fraught with opposing ideas as to how
women should relate to the industry that has commodified and objectified and exploited
womens bodies for the vicarious viewing of sex for profit. Hard-line northern feminists in the
60s and 70s (for example Andrea Dworkin) took pornography as the patriarchal legitimation of
violence against women: an industry that created sexually explicit material for audiences that
would harm women. When video technology entered the picture it gave porn a vastly expanded
platform for production and consumption in the 60s and 70s. More recently the globalisation of
culture, the medias highway into ordinary lives, including porn, through internet, cellphone
and mobile technologies have made the almost instant availability of sexually explicit material
to viewers a different kind of dilemma, as it falls outside of regulation, exposing society to
dangers which some have argued calls for control and monitoring. Pornography is pervasive,
easy to find for those who want it and is no longer new. In the semi-public space created by
mobile technologies what goes viral reaches audiences exponentially, taking porn out of a
private domain, where individual freedom of expression and right to privacy is protected.
Even though the impact, and practices related to pornography (as part of a sex industry)
have not been either a critical feminist political issue on the ground, or on the agenda for
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development, we may profitably revisit the subject.

Northern feminists contestation of pornography has largely shaped the terms and
responses to porn today, leaving us with an armoury of possible defences to fight patriarchy.
While radical feminists opposition to the sex industry positioned it as the eroticisation and
objectification of womens repression, the pro-sex feminists seized womens sexuality as an
important if not critical platform for womens activism that needed to be taken out of mens
control. At the same time liberal feminists sought to introduce regulation and censorship of
violent porn. The terrain of sex and sexuality, at the heart of the different positions that were
adopted, are a critically important area for womens sexual equality, not least because these
have often been the first area where womens bodies have been subject to state control, policed,
where voices have been censored and marginalised and moved out of sight of the mainstream
of public debate. So for most feminists winning the battle for sexual freedom in the private
sphere was not unrelated to the agenda for reproductive rights, the right to contraception,
womens right to have an orgasm, understanding of their bodies and the recognition of sexual
difference. Womens participation in the sex industry
including pornography - under the
defiant slogan our bodies our choice was perhaps not such a contradictory consequence of the
achievement of sexual freedom. Neo-liberal capitalism and individual freedom had given
women the licence to take part in production and consumption of pornography, an alliance that
has also seen women earn some of the best salaries earned in any industry
and at the same
time working in some of the most precarious and vulnerable work conditions. As unprotected
work sex workers organisation has raised the legal rights of sex workers and the profile of sex
work in the public and political spheres.
In a globalised world we have been exposed to and affected not only by the alliance of neo-
liberal capitalism and its positioning of womens individual freedom as primarily the sexual
freedom won in the North, but also seen its values adopted uncritically and inappropriately
without tracing its relevance to an African and developing context.
This issue of Agenda opens up the possibility of debate in the context of vulnerable and
contested sexualities and whether pornography contributes to perpetuating wider disempower-
ment. There has been little attempt to reconcile a single coherent position on pornography by
feminists. Yet as a well contested feminist subject, it is not to be underestimated as it divided
feminists into two sides in an ideological war, and it has similarly attracted feminists from
different and opposing positions in South Africa. Ironically, radical feminist opposition on the
basis that pornography is directly linked to gender violence has seen an uncomfortable alliance
with the rightwing censorship and moral majority camp that is responsible for opposing
contraception, freedom of choice on abortion, and for homophobia. Indeed, the reputed crimes
of pornography, as pro-sex feminist Wendy Mcelroy (1995) has argued, may need to be argued,
researched and indeed be guided by the activism of sex workers themselves, for serious
consideration. The genre, she notes, may be responsible for creating some of the worst forms of
literature or media that depicts sex for audiences, because of its low budgets, its treatment and

2 AGENDA 93/26.3 2012

 exploitation of sex as its subject, and its historical status as forbidden, illicit and off-limits. Moral
panic around pornography, needless to say, frequently raises the spectre of danger, disease and
trafficking of women
but these may more often than not have served agendas that are not ready
to engage the possibility that sex work should be decriminalised or to advocate for womens right
to sexual and reproductive rights and control (see for example the paper on the moral panic
drummed up around trafficking and sex work during the FIFA World Cup in Agenda [Gould, 2010]).
Pumla Gqola, drafting the concept note for the issue, notes the contradictions in the global
porn industry where Hugh Hefner as the founder of Playboy, has regarded himself as a feminist,
as well as the critical place of a feminism/s response to pornography that highlights the need for
womens African sexualities to find more coherent understandings and outlets through the
prisms that are offered by feminist scholarship and gender analysis. Given both the perturbing
and provocative silences around porn, the evident contestations of porn as both harmful and as a
site of liberation, and womens widespread participation as producers and consumers of porn,
this issue has drawn a mixed collection of academic contributions and perspectives. Writers
speak to a need for the continued unpacking of how porn is understood, consumed and produced
and its impacts on social practices around sex and how the pornographic gaze has represented
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bodies and sex. Agenda is grateful to Lillian Artz, whom we approached to organise a feminist
discussion on pornography and feminism in South Africa. The Open Forum in this issue titled
Porn Norms: A South African feminist conversation about pornography indeed opened up a
productive discussion which has helped to frame some of the more important concerns for
feminists. Artz writes that for many feminists, control over our sexuality and our bodies, one of the
oldest struggles by feminists, is not necessarily compromised by pornography in itself, but by the
unchallenged double standards where womens sexuality is treated as dangerous and in need of
social control, while mens entitlement to sex is unquestioned. Unequal access to power has led
to the inevitable criminalisation of womens sex work. Mens sexual appetites are unbridled and
encouraged, their right to control womens sexual behavior and dress sanctioned by social values
and patriarchal authority. Social double standards have been at the heart of the sluts marches in
South Africa and elsewhere. Womens rights to healthy sexuality, free from the dangers of
disease and sexual violence is difficult to imagine in the real world where we experience the
amongst the highest rates of sexual violence in the world, although a positive and more powerful
imaginary - one yet to be seen - may indeed have a role in constructing such representations.
Artz writes that women in the Porn Norm conversation struggle to identify where porn is
harmful to women (child porn being an area of concern raised repeatedly)
and many speak for
a pro-sex view that does not seek to censor but gives women the space to talk with unfettered
freedom to the subject of sex and sexuality within the context of womens struggles for health,
livelihoods and freedom to work towards constituting empowered sexualities. Unequal sexual
citizenship, including the potentially damaging nature of the capitalist patriarchal marketplace
were raised as implicitly understood.
The popularity of Hugh Hefners porn empire can be problematised from a southern
viewpoint as it represents the top end of a globalised industry which has put out tentacles into
every corner of the world. The appeal of porn to women
as consumers and as its stars and
workers
also needs to be understood in local terms. Domique Rizos argues in her Article in this
issue that for feminists there is the contradiction that the achievement of sexual freedom has
been aligned with a neo-liberal agenda and that individual freedom may in reality exist within
terms that are curtailed by broader social and gender inequality under patriarchy. In an analysis
of the rise of raunch and lad culture in the context of two magazines, the American Playboy and
the South African FHM, she compares the use of pornographic representation and convention
by the magazines and their use of what are often racist and sexist ideologies to reach their
market. She questions whether raunch culture is liberatory given the use of worn stereotypes
and conventions which reinforce mens preferred image of womens traditional subordinated
roles. She notes with concern how the increasing social acceptance of pornography has seen it
fall under the classification of lifestyle.
It should be noted how in a development context northern feminists prioritisation of their
sexual rights in feminism has come under criticism from feminists in the South, precisely
because neo-liberalisms agenda has peripheralised and silenced women and further

Womens sexuality and pornography 3

 marginalised the struggles against poverty and gender equality (Morton, 2003). Rizos points out
that while women as porn stars claim feminist empowerment in raunch culture, we only need to
interrogate the exploitative conditions and terms that pornography involves as a site of
production to ask whether this is true.
Gqola, in her concept note for this issue suggests that on the continent sexuality is seen as
one of the most compelling areas of freedom for women
that possibly women are indeed
seeking to exercise their freedom and for their sexual agency to be understood
and not
exploited. Spivak (ibid) has suggested that the values that have give women licence to demand
sexual freedom, has not meant the uncomplicated extension of sexual and other freedoms in
development terms
rather, poverty and the disappointment in the failure of independence
struggles to offer poor women the resources needed to feed their families tend to have more
resonance.
How we view the sex industry and how we research it need to be informed and guided by
South African-driven agendas for healthy sexualities and an awareness that sexual practices

and sexual negotiation - are at the heart of HIV/AIDS prevention. We ought not deny
pornographys existence anymore than we can shut down practices that do not fit with our
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view of the world, our ideas about sex or sexual practices. As Zethu Matebeni writes in the
Conversation Queering Porn, pornography is as much as any other practice of literature/
cinema/media mediated by class, race, gender and also difference. Deconstructing the
pornographic gaze is painful because it has and can evoke a confrontation of the deeply
exploitative colonial subjection and abuse as porn stereotypes rely on heteronormative
patriarchy as well as draw on racism and sexism to entertain. It is suggested that we can
seek to reinvent and create new spaces for sex and sexuality to become spaces of exploration
and celebration and thereby negate the demand for the eroticisation of repression that so much
mainstream pornography replicates for audiences. How sexualities are embedded in hetero-
normative patriarchal discourse can make us aware of the possible potential of freer sexualities
to emerge, and of the need to subvert porns repressive scripts. Matebenis conversation with
queer porn artists Jabu C Pereira and Ignatio Rivera, raises the health and safety issues that
workers in the porn industry confront. It was queer porn artists who set down rules for condom
use, a practice not previously enforced, endangering countless sex workers health. Matebenis
conversation therefore opens up discussion of pro-sex feminism and as the only piece which
speaks directly about pornography production (set outside of the mainstream industry) makes
an important contribution to the issue.
Looking at the virtual world and the potential to stretch the borders of what we currently can
understand as pornography, Elizabeth Picarra offers a feminist guide in the world of the sexual
avatar in the internet game called Second Life. She argues that the rules on pornography in
Second Life have precluded abuse by participants and she asks if such a parallel world where
sexualities and sex/es choose to exist in a space where boundaries between reality and fiction
are dissolved, may resemble the utopia contemplated by cyber-feminist and theorist Donna
Haraway.
Exploring the consumption of pornography by school-going youth in this issue, Pamela
Ramlugen reports on a study that elicited the unexpected response from participants in her focus
groups on youth sexuality that they often watch pornography to prepare themselves for life and to
rehearse and learn how to do sex. Ramlugen points out that the absence of desire and sexual
pleasure from sexuality education denies youth the ingredient necessary for a healthy sexuality.
Porn is found easily on cellphones and on the internet by the youth in the study and their attitudes
to what they learn is instructively that they are afraid of being left behind or of being found to be
ignorant about the subject, one which requires of them an unknown as yet agency. Pornographic
media can therefore be seen to questionably be filling an important gap for this group, meeting a
need they have identified for themselves as necessary for self-development. Ramlugen notes the
gender stereotypes and sexual roles reproduced in the porn movies youth watch will not educate
them and they will fail to be informed about reproductive health, sex and biological difference as
well as safe sex and HIV/AIDS prevention and contraception. Her Briefing raises the question for
us around how the uncritical consumption of porn by children and youth can be mediated and
why much more research is needed in this area.

4 AGENDA 93/26.3 2012

 It may be useful to point out some of the dangers in seeking to close down pornography
because it represents a danger to women and children. McElroy (1995) notes the problem that
radical feminists argued for the force of the law to be introduced in order to compensate women
and men who had been harmed by pornography. She warns such a law would have effectively
opened the door to rapists being set free simply because they had watched porn, without any
further evidence being necessary. The attempt to regulate and censor pornography has also
been troubled in Canada where a regulation to stop the import of texts that are harmful to
women was introduced has been mostly used against feminist, gays and others, thus backfiring.
As South African feminists in Artzs Porn Norm discussion note, and a point that is also raised
by Picarra in her article, the move to prevent the airing of porn on pay tv channels proposed by
COSATU and other groups were not welcomed by pro-sex feminists as attempts to censor
sexually explicit material (that is harmless) have worked against womens interests.
In South Africa a call for regulation of pornography in the newly post-apartheid state which
set aside censorship laws under the freedom of expression clause of the Constitution was made
by feminist researcher Diana Russell in 1996, but ignored. Russells reasons for regulation were
that she believed that her research demonstrated a link between gender violence and
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pornography. While her recommendations were not taken up by the democratic government,
Russell (1997) warned of the vulnerability of the population to exploitation by unregulated
pornography production and consumption. While pro-sex feminists may not share her platform,
the silence by social researchers and feminists on porn since the 90s has left us in the dark about
the size of the industry, how it is constituted, its practices and its politics, keeping it an area of
consumption, culture and media that is indeed obscure. Anne Maynes review in the issue of
Porn Inc, an Australian publication, makes no apology for not seeing porn as liberating, and
offers an analysis of the more worryingly invasive social dangers of porn inc, seen in its global
dimensions. She describes activist attempts to limit the influence of pornography and the
expose of the international industrys links to trafficking, the drugs and pharmacy industry and
documentation of the abuse of women, men and children in both the production and
consumption of pornography. Maynes review revisits the question of whether the freedom
of expression can be exercised as an absolute right without it being at someone elses expense.
There are new areas that need to be flagged for feminist research and activism on pornography
in South Africa. In the 18 years since pornography became legal its terrain has shifted
we have
seen its normalisation, and an extension of its availability through electronic technologies. The
mainstream global industry is no longer the exclusive subject of concern as new forms of
mobile and DIY production have proliferated
that offer perturbing questions as to when porn
is harmful, as Artz writes. There are indeed examples which may echo the warning by Andrea
Dworkin (1981) that porn is the theory and rape is the practice.
Picking up on the problematic and harmful social constructions of sex, Christopher Harpers
Perspective is this issue of Agenda reflects on township youths ideas about masculinity and
sex. Their cellphone recording of gang raping a young disabled girl became viral pornography.
He argues that the youths actions seem to suggest a search for peer approval of violent
masculinity (that backfired as the police used the cellphone footage to track them down) may
evoke repugnance. However, that such social constructions of masculinity hold any status
among men is everyones responsibility to acknowledge and to name as a problem. Social
activism by men against violence against women means working as a social collective so the
emulation of violent sexualities for peer approval finds no affirmation and no takers among
men. The producers and consumers of porn, no longer fall into such neat categories either, and
as Artz points out, this raises new questions around consent, especially in the dissemination of
informally produced mobile porn and the informal sex trade.
Pornography like the broader sex industry is not regulated (except by the Sexual Offences
Act and the Film and Publications Act). Nor, as those who have written about the work of porn
production and other forms of sex work (see Richter and Chukuvinga, 2012), does the law afford
sex workers protection from exploitation or abuse, rather it is a case of the reverse.
Porns claim to offer sexual freedom in fact may hold little relevance for womens actual
long-term pursuit of control over their own bodies and sexuality in South Africa. The need to
find ways to reposition sex and our bodies as being in our own hands, particularly for young

Womens sexuality and pornography 5

 women, calls for direct feminist responses by women to the dehumanisation and commoditisa-
tion of themselves. Gillian Schutte reclaims womens bodies back from the alienating grasp of
the othering of the porn industry
celebrating women who speak and bring sex to the fore as
unashamedly sexual
a part of our lives that is neither hidden or submerged
or shamed, an
area of our lives that belongs to us. Her interview with Myesha Jenkins, an older women whose
erotic poetry and writing is the subject of the discussion, is a telling reminder that it is our
perception of sensuality, erotica and sexual pleasure that can move us towards a less sexually
repressive society.
Matebenis conversation Queering Porn for example highlights why respect for sexual
appreciation asks that we deconstruct the gaze that stereotypes white/black and male/female
bodies as sexual prototypes in various demeaning ways. Contemporary cultural literacy calls for
us to not only question the pornographic gaze in the South but to also ask how it can be
constituted in less harmful and damaging ways, and for sexual difference and diversity to be
seen and understood as co-existing with many other forms of difference.
Ross Trusscotts review in this issue of The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South
Africa brings into relief the observation that In South Africa, it remains an issue of profound
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alarm that while sexual identities and sexual practices were historically policed, in the post-
apartheid democracy peoples lives continue to be vulnerable and jeopardised by violence
because of sexual difference and sexual preference. Sexuality and sex cannot, therefore, be
seen to be either neutral nor unencumbered but complicated by contestations of the meanings
of bodies and what form their representation can and should take. Truscotts review examines
the concerns raised in the book around the meanings and positioning of sexuality by the post-
apartheid nation and the perverse tendency to revert to the proscriptive meanings that operated
under colonialism and apartheid that do not evoke the guarantee of freedom of sexual choice of
the Constitution, but instead often reflect homophobia and gross inhumanity.
While this issue has attracted work that contributes to our understandings of current
meanings of pornography, its production by media and by porn artists and around the
unsettling of the rules of mainstream porn, writers also offer a cross-cutting viewpoint that is
critical of the acceptance of the debasement of women in what they see as pornographic
representations performed in music and that is widely consumed as popular culture.
Questioning freedom of expression, Annika Rudman appeals for offensive and pornographic
popular lyrics to be recognised as being in direct conflict with womens equal right to equality,
as they deface and erase womens right to dignity. Her question forces us to ask why songs that
have lyrics that denigrate women have not created dissent or opposition. Her article analyses
the hearings of cases brought before the Broadcasting Complaints Commission and she argues
that it is problematic that regardless of how extreme the abuse of women in the songs are,
this as an issue only if children are in the audience
without reference to the wider social
message of such broadcasts on the public airwaves. Maud Blose in her Profile questions the
direction of the popular township genre Kwaito which she writes celebrated the post-apartheid
liberatory moment but has critically neglected womens rights to equality - their exclusion has
seen them in hypersexualised back-up roles and as performers using their bodies as their only
means of expression and freedom. She questions the uncritical acceptance by fans of Kwaitos
more recent lyrics now that it has reached a global audience and commercial success. Fans
opinions on womens sexual exploitation and neglect in Kwaito may help shake the idea that
audiences are uncritically accepting of women abuse.
As Kwezilomso Mbandazayo writes in her review of Sylvia Tamales African Sexualities: A
Reader, in this issue, African womens diverse sexualities have survived histories of colonisa-
tion and conquest. In post-independence Africa their resilience, resistance and struggles for
freedom and equality are no less important when it comes to sexuality. Although a discussion
of pornography elicits many points of contention and understanding among feminists, its harm,
Artz, writes, is not so much that it is about sex and womens commoditisation, or even
subordination. Pro-sex feminists rightly point out that there are sites of exploitation that are of
more concern. They claim the right to have a voice in forums to ensure the spaces for agency
that do exist around sex and sexual citizenship remain open. Blaming porn for the social
excesses of our time may be incorrect and may in fact do more harm by concealing deeper

6 AGENDA 93/26.3 2012

 areas of need. This issue has drawn a diversity of academic research which we hope will
provoke discussion and pose new questions and point to new areas of research. Richter and
Chakuvinga (2012) writing in a recent issue of Agenda, for example, have noted how little
research has been done on sex work, about the conditions of work, exposure to HIV/AIDS and
health, reflecting that the sex industry and pornography need to be researched in a framework
that addresses not only gender, but also class as well.
In conclusion, Rizos notes that pornographic media have become widely accepted socially,
with problematic consequences as sexualised depictions of children submitted by parents for
publication in porn magazines in sexually cliched poses, are seen as a sign of social success,
and worse, a form of social progress. Not unrelated is the proliferation of advice given to
women as to how to be even sexier, more desirable, which can extend from how they may
need to go for Tightie whities (a lotion sold for tight vaginas) (Khan, 2012), virgin vaginas,
breast jobs, vaginal designs, or emulate northern models with light skin to satisfy their
husbands sexual needs. Bringing a South African feminist prism to the practices and
conventions that surround pornography may help to unsettle the erroneous idea that this
subject is only for northern hetero-sexual men, as Hefners empire would have it
and
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encourage debate around the shifting and multiple meanings of sex and how these contribute
to the creations of new gender inequalities and can also open up demands for equality.
Feminists need to identify and question the harmful practices in pornography
as a global
industry that has an interest in perpetuating the myth of unrestrained sexual freedom, and
possibly exploitation, as well. Its visual conventions have had the capacity to set-up hyper-
sexualised images of women as the seemingly only viable image of womanhood to have wide
social relevance. Sex (and the feminist theories of sex) remain on the development agenda,
constituted, as much in resistances to domination and global hegemony and the policing of sex,
as in the wide social acceptance of an aesthetics that allows for the existence of desire and
eroticism. We may then begin to embrace practices that do empower healthy agency and sexual
choices.
Thank you to Pumla Gqola the guest editor of this issue and Lillian Artz for feminist
collaboration in this issue of Agenda.

Lou Haysom
(Managing Editor for Agenda)

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Gould C (2010) Moral panic: human trafficking and the 2012 Soccer World Cup in Agenda, 85.
Khan S (2012) Tightie whitie vaginas, Mail and Guardian, Lifestyle, August 23.
Loots L (1996) Pornography and the body politic in Agenda, 31.
McElroy W (1995) XXX: A Womens Right to Pornography, New York: St Martins Press.
Richter M & Chakuvinga P (2012) Being pimped out
How South Africas AIDS response fails sex workers in
Agenda, 92.
Russell D (1997) Pornography: Towards a non-sexist policy in Agenda, 36: 58
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Womens sexuality and pornography 7