For most of my adult life, I worked in the glamour modeling industry. For those of you who don’t know what glamor modeling is, I can summarize it by telling you that it’s an extremely objectifying, sexualizing subset of modeling. Glamour models pose not for brands and the women they target, but for men and their leering gazes.
During my time doing this type of modeling, I was exposed to a myriad of masculine abuses. This experience became the catalyst –the rock-bottom– that ignited a determination to journey into the world of academia. As the legacy of hundreds of years of feminine oppression and misogyny reverberated into my psyche, I became motivated to enact change.
Last night I watched the film Suffragette and shed a tear more than once. For those who don’t know, Suffragette depicts the plight of the women who fought to get us the vote a century or so ago. The conditions for first wave feminists were tough. The cramped urban areas steeped in poverty coupled with the strain of family life meant that the women of this movement really had to get their hands dirty. There was nothing inevitable about it. It took guts.
The irony that women had no legal right to be heard even though we lived in a democracy, was not lost on them. The lack of vote was just one in a list of many symptoms of our general subordination at large. This was perfectly encapsulated by the bullying factory boss in the movie, played by Geoff Bell, who exemplified industrialized sexual abuse through his persistent low-level mistreatment of the women workers. In short, he treated them as disposable and sexually available fodder.
The confined status of the women of the first wave of feminist uprising meant that they found it near impossible to break out from prolonged cruel treatment – because of vital needs such as keeping a roof over their family’s heads. Much of this cruelty was at the hand of men in superior positions — such as bosses who were in charge of their wage packet. The persistent touching, the groping, the raping – perfectly okayed, and derived from essentialism, which excuse men as ‘just being that way’.
It’s easy to see ourselves as far different from these women – especially when we take in the period costumes and disparate living conditions which contrast to our comfortable lives today. We have our nice jobs and active social lives, but I suggest our oppression has only metamorphosed, which brings me to…
Pornography…
This highly visual genre depicts human beings as sexually explicit objects who engage in sex for the purpose of entertainment. Nothing wrong with that, you might think, and in general I’d tend to agree. It’s when one gender is depicted in a completely degrading and objectifying manner, while the other is humanized and powerful, that we start to run into problems.
I have a quick exercise for you: take an hour and flip through some of the most popular porn on the Internet. You’ll witness the following: it’s the male who engineers the scenes, sometimes even talking to the camera, smiling as if to a friend. The female? Actively taking orders and being degraded, which she somehow appears to enjoy. I urge you then to have a browse and watch a few more and you’ll see a pattern forming. She is always the spectacle. The audience, the camera, and the male are buddies in this. They all together watch the woman taking it from every angle. We see her do her very best to please, to service; the same old story over and over again.
This is shown in the titles of these films: MILF; LBFM’s which stands for ‘Little Black Fucking Machines’, girl on girl, pregnant, gaping, schoolgirl, foreign slut, big tits, squirting. One might think we were cattle.
In a pornographic scene that I recently watched, two men were having intercourse with a well-known porn actress. They had sex in the ‘spit-roast’ position while they talked and took pictures from their mobile phones of her ‘deep throating’ while they shared a joke. They regularly reposition her as they want her – with her then ending up on her knees as she smiled broadly and pretended to love having two big penises slapped hard around her face before her entire countenance, including her opened eyes, were smothered with ejaculation.
The late Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist thinker stated, “Pornography, by definition, is the graphic depiction of whores – which is a trade in class of persons who have been systematically denied the rights protected the First Amendment and the rest of the bill of rights” (1981). Many will sneer at Dworkins’ comments as being ridiculous and dated and I’ll tell you why: In the current climate we have been lead to believe we’ve reached a utopia. Some of us think that, in Western culture, feminism is no longer needed. After all, we have comfortable enough lives. The commodity culture is at our fingertips; holidays abroad, education, all very lovely. But, to me, Dworkins’ words seem even more frighteningly fitting in this digital age.
Some of us even think that being a part of this vast sexual market equates to empowerment for women — as if it’s truly empowering that we can shout about our sexuality in contrast to the burkha-clad Muslim. But it’s not our sex to shout about. Consider that we are being lied to. That we are grossly and doggedly anchored to these oppressive representations. These views of women are being spoon-fed to our children and shaping the new generations, who unconsciously look at each other in an altogether fresh perversity. The word ‘slut’ has become a meme ascribed to young girls who wears make-up and sports the ‘sexy’ look.
The selfie predominantly carries connotations of porn chic. You only have to trail through a timeline of a ‘popular’ teenage girl on Facebook to witness the effects on our young, what with her cleavage-baring photos, pouting lipsticked ‘duckface’ lips and sexualized poses. Look around – at the children, who value themselves on their sexual offerings. Imagine if you grew up on a diet of animalistic sex available at the touch of a button, witnessing women pressing giant dildos into themselves and getting gang banged by groups of men. How would it have affected you, or can you not even imagine it?
I believe that women today are blind to their oppressors, who are as strong as ever. Fourth wave feminism is the backlash against the representation of women as fodder – screamingly alive through the ubiquitous graphic display of feminine sexual abuse in the digital age. Speak out, or forever shut up.
Want to take action? Check out Pornography Harms or Anti-Pornography for further reading, and share your comments below.
Well said! In my opinion porn stars are highly respectable women in a hard profession and should be treated with high respect and if any feminist thinks otherwise, they are not a feminist.
This comment falls into the sweeping statement category with all due respect. Most porn stars are damaged people who use drugs and are suffering. I’ve known loads.
Such power illustrations that makes you visualise what you exactly mean. I hate that some women have to take all that abuse just because they need that money.
Wow! I can totally see what you mean. This is exactly why I choose erotica over porn.
You are such a brave woman! Most women in your position would want to hide their past to themselves, and act like they have always been so high and mighty, but you’re like an open book, and this way you are in fact helping so many women by sharing your experiences good and bad. Thank you!
The images in this article are incredibly powerful. I suggest you continue to push the envelope in order to get the message across. One of your best articles ever Urbanette, bravo!
Such a heavy reading. So many things are playing in my mind, I can’t seem to put the words coherently together and express my thoughts. What the author mentioned in this article were mostly in the context of a developed country. I can’t begin to fathom what it could be like in developing countries where societies are highly patriarchal and the laws gender-biased. It may be severe in those countries, but even in the developed countries, women working in this industry may not feel any better.
There was this petition sent to the UN sometime in 2014. The petition asked the UN to not document women working in prostitution as sex workers but as prostituted women. One contention is that no woman would ever voluntarily choose sex work. If given the choice, they would have opted for an alternative. Survival strategies are not a choice but an absence of choice.
Another contention is that one should never call exploitation a work, and prostitution is reeking of abuse and exploitation. Further, it is in conflict with the UN standard definition of what acceptable livelihood and labor is.
The petition also stated that most of human trafficking victims ends up working in prostitution. They are in this kind of living because their vulnerabilities were taken advantage of to seduce, trick, coerce or force them into prostitution.
The above contentions were based on the context of third-world countries. But I think it is also true even in our country. Women in pornography are as much as abused and exploited as the rest. It’s even more alarming because the exploitation does not stop after the act was done. It is recorded and exchanged. It is uploaded in the internet for more people to view. Whatever goes inside the internet is forever.
In this age of the internet, exploitation has become more convenient. But in this age of information technology, we may be able to put a stop on the exploitation as well. It has been 200 years since the sacred struggle started. Until we have reached equality… the work, the movement, the fight continues.
It goes without saying that main consumers of porn are men. However most men aren’t aware that women in porn are being exploited. There is the illusion created by the porn industry, that the women on camera love what they’re doing and feel empowered by doing it. Men easily believe this fiction because they identify with the enjoyment and because a contrary perspective is rarely available. As a man, my opinion is that if the pain and degradation suffered by so many women in the porn industry was exposed more and more, it would change a lot of men’s hearts about watching porn. Men need to be educated. Vikki’s article does that and does it very well, but there needs to be more.
Totally agree with you Kevin. This is a continuing process and it should all start with realizations, which should stem from awareness and education.
Those who watch porn would totally flip if it’s their loved ones they would be seeing. But it would be okay if it’s a total stranger. But regardless of who the involved are, porn is a clear violation on the subject’s rights. And the violators are not just those who are doing the act or producing, but includes all those who are watching it. For as long as there’s clear demand for this kind of services, the industry will continue. The porn industry is a purely market-driven phenomenon, and it will continue to prevail unless there’s external force stopping it.
For us who have seen porn as a gross violation of women’s rights (or of men’s, LGBT’s, and children’sw), our actions shouldn’t just stop with the discovering and the realization. It should issue into an action. We can use the internet as well to disseminate information and awareness. Decreasing the demand from the consumer side, and decreasing supply through government intervention, would surely make a huge (negative) impact in this industry.
Yes, we should push this further. We shouldn’t stop here. I think new laws should come into effect. For a start, women who act in porn should after a certain amount of time be allowed to have their images removed, so they are freed to move on. Secondly, their should be greater screening for the vulnerable, that’s mental illness, emotional disorders, and generally those who really shouldn’t be partaking in porn. Thirdly, the women as fodder representation needs total and complete regulation so as to avoid morbid gendered-abusive oppression via the genre.
Is there a possibility for legislation like that in the UK? Here in the states, I don’t see it happening. Sadly, no one cares that much. Plus there is a lobby of women in porn who will aggressively argue against such legislation while denying it’s dangers.
Kevin, who is the ‘no one cares’ exactly? I don’t understand that comment. Clearly people do just from this thread. This is a sample of a much bigger consensus, trust me.
Men should be self critical about their hatred against women to overcome their destructive emotions and acts.
I agree that the ubiquitous degradation of women is a symptom of embryonic spiritual attainment; a by- product of insecurity felt collectively by the production companies who are generally male.
Porn is degrading to any human being despite their gender. That article is so on point! Good to read it from the point of view of a woman who was there, but managed to make such a respectable woman out of herself! I really admire how you turned your life around for the greater! 🙂
Thank you for this. I still feel scarred to this day. It’s my distancing from that industry via education that’s piecing me back together. It’s anti-women, no question.
There is porn and porn. Porn as the one described in the blog you posted is like rape, they hurt women and therefore is denigrating. As a woman watching these films is painful; you even can see that women are not enjoying it (and sometimes even suffering) and this is denigrating. But there are few porn films that represent the sexual act as a mutual enjoyment of both parties, these ones are not denigrating, because the woman is enjoying it and is not being treated savagely, therefore it is erotic.
I think that porn in general has a tendency to degrade women by depicting them as pieces of meat and objects to be dominated. I also think that it makes real sex dis-functional when men try to play these roles out.
I agree with your comment, especially that it makes real sex dysfunctional. As a man, I can tell you from experience that one of the reasons why I stopped watching porn was because it warped my sense of how sex should be with my partner. Sex based on what I saw in a porn video. Also I realized that I was objectifying almost all of the women that I saw anywhere on any given day. I like to think of myself as a self-aware individual, so fortunately I was able to recognize this problem in my attitude and thinking, and do something about it, which was stop watching porn.