Ironing Out the Kinks

posted by Jess Sains

This Thursday, May 8, a new bill became law, it outlaws the ownership of “extreme pornography”. As defined by the new Bill this includes pornography which shows an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life, an act which results in or appears to result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals, an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse or a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal.

This is highly unusual, of course, in that it is normally the makers of such things that are prosecuted about it, not those that partake of it. So, if I am, as the BBC put it recently, a bit “kinky” in my sexual preferences I may well now be subject to prosecution. Some people may be engaging in such ‘acts’ in consenting, willing and happy circumstances. This may even be the case for pornographic performers, who are paid to ‘act’ and are not being physically or psychologically harmed in any way.
On the other hand I can hear the voices of Dworking and MacKinnon telling me that all pornography is harmful to all women. Whether it be page three or “snuff” movies pornography makes women in to objects to be used, abused, and possessed by men. This is not a direct sense of “harm”, such as violence or such as Jane Longhurst mother (who has campaigned to make the bill law) might want us to believe porn has on women, but a pervasive and highly detrimental harm to all women in society. An abstract harm which at times manifests itself as a physical one.

So here is the big question for me – as that rather spilt personality I am – an anarcho-feminist: can I justify banning something that does harm to women?

Whenever one mentions “harm” in such a way any student of politics of philosophy will no doubt think of John Stuart Mill and his “harm principle”. Mill claimed in On Liberty that:

“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Mill says governments cannot ban “victimless crimes” such as gambling (it is my choice to gamble, I harm myself), but is pornography a victimless crime?

Though Dworking and MacKinnon have done feminism no favours with their forthright views, they do have a point. Every woman is subject to a physical scrutiny and sexualisation that men are not whether it be Daily Mail articles which observe more about female Apprentice contestants clothing than their business acumen or their weigh of pop stars, or blatant breasts exposed on page three. But is this down to pornography or is pornography a symptom of the system that created it?

As a feminist, as an anarchist and as a woman my answer is this: when I begin from an unequal position I cannot be expected to embrace a form of sexuality which keeps me in that position. Pornography is a symptom of a society built of hierarchies, a piece of a system built to control, to keep compliance. But this control is just a pervasive in Sex and the City or Disney films where success is ultimately about conforming, being beautiful, being rich and having a man.

I live in hope, then, that as individuals, with choices and views and thoughts, we all watch Snow White and see it as “propaganda”, that we can can do the same for news coverage or for pornographic films or photos. Just as I don’t spend the day happily cleaning my house I am not a lump of meat for sexual pleasure either. Choice, there is the key word. I would not ban pornography because I believe in I have the right to make my own choices, and so do all of us. I do have difficulties with pornography because of the position it places women in, but I equally have a problem with most of the main stream media for the same reason. The problem is choice; pornographic material limits the choices of women to gain equal forms of sexual choice.

But, it is still your right to make the choice to watch or look at it.

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