Speaker will present feminist side to "great porn debate"
By Maria Gallucci
March 10, 2008
This Tuesday, a collective of Athens-based groups hope to introduce another perspective to the pornography debate: the feminist’s.
In response to the Feb. 21 “Great Porn Debate” at Ohio University, which featured adult film star Ron Jeremy and a Christian minister, Jan Griesinger invited anti-pornography educator Rebecca Whisnant to speak on campus.
“Not for Sale: Feminists and Pornography” will be held Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Baker Center Ballroom. A reception will follow in the Women’s Center at Baker.
“Their perspectives do not put the experiences of women central,” Griesinger said, referring to Jeremy and minister Craig Ross. Griesinger is the former director of United Campus Ministries (UCM) at OU and is involved with the Susan B. Anthony Womyn’s Land Trust in rural Athens County.
People within the pornography industry have a particular perspective because they use women’s bodies to interest men and turn a profit, she said. Religious points of view tend to focus on pornography from a concern for sexual morality and don’t necessarily centralize the experiences of women, she said.
Whisnant previewed some of her ideas in a phone interview on Saturday.
“The feminist anti-pornography perspective is profoundly distinct from either of those perspectives that we usually see or hear,” said Whisnant, a philosophy professor at the University of Dayton and co-editor of “Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography.”
“The nature of our objection to pornography is the way in which it eroticizes and sexualizes dominance, violence and humiliation, usually (though not always) directed against women,” she said.
Whisnant’s book explains that the ill effects of prostitution are not based on the morality of the adults and children used within it, but rather on the behaviors and choices of those who use and consume prostitution and pornography.
The feminist perspective puts disadvantaged women and children at the center of the debate, Griesinger said, adding that pornography reinforces the belief maintained over centuries that the needs of men are primary and that women exist to serve the needs of men.
“Not For Sale” defines prostitution as a multi-billion-dollar global industry that includes adult and child pornography, stripping, phone sex, international and domestic trafficking, and prostitution tourism, among others forms.
According to the book’s introduction, “Prostitution and pornography also undermine all women’s safety and dignity by legitimizing the objectification of women, and by training men and boys to desire and expect compliant sexual servicing from women and girls.”
Whisnant’s presentation at OU will include a slideshow of graphic images of contemporary pornography, a collection she created with colleagues Robert Jensen and Gail Dines.
“If you’re looking at an image just to get off, it’s not as though… you’re analyzing what this means or what these images are saying; it’s just something that you pick up and use,” Whisnant said.
Viewing such images on a big screen is an important shock to get people critically thinking about pornography, said Janet Carleton, the digital initiative coordinator at Alden Library who organizes events for Women’s History Month in March.
Whisnant’s presentation is an observation of International Women’s History Day, which fell on March 8, she said. She hopes the event will add another dimension to the discussion on pornography and will encourage people to open their minds.
“It seems that pornography in general has infiltrated our everyday lives, our society and media,” she said. “Everything is hypersexualized, and we get used to it.”
While Whisnant’s perspective finds the vast majority of mainstream pornography to be destructive and “women-hating,” others believe that prostitution and pornography are legitimate, liberating and empowering fields of work.
During the February debate, adult film star Jeremy said that pornography financially empowers women and can safely bring fantasies to life.
Though Whisnant said she does not look down on women’s particular choices to participate in or use pornography, she believes the best way for feminists to respond to the exploitative nature of the industry is to challenge it.
“I don’t see the effort to make one’s own pornography or to be in pornography as necessarily part of that effort,” she said. “That’s not to say I condemn those women; it’s just not what I see as an effective strategy for countering a very powerful and destructive industry.”
GRIESINGER SAID SOME perspectives find pornography and prostitution to be legitimate choices offered to women and not always forced decisions. She does not believe this is always the case, however.
“It is not by and large graduates of OU that are going into the pornography industry,” she said. “It’s women whose choices are very limited.”
Griesinger said it is important to recognize how women’s bodies are made central in the economy and in profits, and to ask, for example, who decides stripping will provide more income than working at McDonald’s?
Whisnant added that women with more opportunities and greater economic equality tend to be more difficult to recruit into prostitution.
“Really in prostitution we see reflected and refracted pretty much every social-justice issue that you could possibly imagine,” she said. “Not only sexism and patriarchy, but racism, Western imperialism, militarism, predatory capitalism — it’s all sort of wrapped up in a bundle.”
Griesinger noted that prostitution and pornography can also distort how men and women define a healthy and equal sexual relationship.
“When you’re overdosed and doused constantly with images where somebody is dominating somebody else, you lose all your perspective on what a good relationship is,” she said.
Whisnant added that college campuses are key locations to disseminate the feminist critique of pornography because many young men and women today have grown up in a culture where pornography is mainstream and normalized.
“I think it’s especially important for these young people — as they’re on the front end of their own life process of having relationships and exploring sexuality — to think very seriously about the version of sexuality that pornography and pop culture is selling them,” she said.
In her vision of a utopian society, she added, sexuality would not be an industry.
“It’s something that people explore and create on their own, by themselves, in their relationships and in their communities,” she said. “I think that sexuality being commodified and being made into this corporate product is not healthy or helpful to anyone.”
“Not for Sale” is sponsored by UCM, Susan B. Anthony Womyn’s Land Trust, Athens Area National Organization for Women, Athens Branch American Association of University Women, Circle of Friends, Herstory Celebration Committee, OU’s LGBT Center, OU’s Women’s Center, OU’s Women’s Studies Program and Sexual Assault Prevention.
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