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Women and Online Porn in North America: New Media, Old Debates

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Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse

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Abstract

This chapter situates some recent approaches to pornography in North America within the context of the feminist “porn wars”, as well as of different positions within the wide spectrum of feminist discourse on pornography. The two case studies are a digital-based porn festival based in Toronto and a Web series criticizing women’s images in video games, including that of sex workers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Michel Foucault, discursive fields (i.e. the law, the family, the church) encompass competing and contradictory discourses organizing institutions and processes. Discursive field brings together language, power, institutions, and subjectivity (Foucault, 1969).

  2. 2.

    Ibid.

  3. 3.

    About state legislation and censorship associated with pornography, see, among others, the special issue on censorship in the aforementioned journal Porn Studies, Vol. 1, no. 3, (2014). Canada’s distinctive genealogy of feminist porn discourse is now the subject of archival research and preservation at York University, thanks to the initiative of feminist scholars Bobbly Noble and Lisa Sloniowski. While the archive does not exclusively concentrate on Canadian porn history, it does provide a comprehensive account of the country’s complex approach to pornography.

  4. 4.

    The complex history of the film’s production and distribution was recently investigated in a book by Rebecca Sullivan, published in 2014.

  5. 5.

    Walsh concludes: “The current feminist approach to pornography adopted by the Butler Court has proven difficult to interpret, apply, and enforce. Canada’s national obscenity standard is ineffective because it promotes censorship but fails to protect the women that are allegedly harmed by pornography.…The Committee recognized that the harm to women as defined by the feminist perspective was so pervasive in the media that the “re-orientation” of values necessary to improve conditions for women was beyond the scope of legal effectiveness” (1994: 1020–1021).

  6. 6.

    In December of the same year, Smith hosted a meeting for parliamentarians and stakeholders in Ottawa. At the meeting, she invited as guest speakers and supporters Gail Dines, a feminist and a sociology professor at Boston’s Wheelock College who founded the Stop Porn Culture group, and Julia Beazley, a policy analyst at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. The proposed Bill never became a Law. Browne, Rachel, “Conservative MP, Radical Feminist and Evangelical Christian Come Together to Block Online Porn in Canada.” National Post, December 9, 2013, Web, http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/09/conservative-mp-radical-feminist-and-evangelical-christian-come-together-to-block-online-porn-in-canada/, accessed 16 March 2015.

  7. 7.

    Feminist Porn Awards-Mandate, http://www.goodforher.com/feminist_porn_awards Web. February 27, 2015.

  8. 8.

    http://www.goodforher.com/feminist_porn_awards.

  9. 9.

    Taormino, Parreñas Shimizu, Penley, and Miller-Young, 2013: 10.

  10. 10.

    Noble, 2012.

  11. 11.

    The reference is to Appadurai, Arjun “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” Public Culture 12(1) (Winter 2000): 1–19 (3).

  12. 12.

    As Sarkeesian puts it, the trope appears “as a common feature in many medieval songs, legends, and fairy tales” and then again in the twentieth century as “a sensational plot device for the silver screen, notably in Keystone comedy shorts” (ibid.). Sarkeesian quotes “the 1913 Keystone Kops short ‘Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life,’ featuring ‘the now iconic scene of a woman being tied to the railroad tracks by an evil mustache twirling villain’” (ibid.).

  13. 13.

    While explaining the purpose of Feminist Frequency in an interview with Rolling Stone in plain words, Sarkeesian even jokes about it, saying that she knows that what she’s saying may sound like an introductory lecture in communication studies (Anita Sarkeesian 2014).

  14. 14.

    The gifs are accessible on Feminist Frequency, at the following address: https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=feminist+frequency+gifs+tropes+versus+women&fr=yhs-adkadk_sbnt&hspart=adk&hsimp=yhsadk_sbnt&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F24.media.tumblr.com%2F146cb4b193c6371a8b84430903aa8e1a%2Ftumblr_mqw966rmuE1sznwkuo1_500.gif#id=3&iurl=http%3A%2F%2F24.media.tumblr.com%2F146cb4b193c6371a8b84430903aa8e1

  15. 15.

    Instances of such characters are the Scythian figure from the Sword and Sorcery and EP and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil.

  16. 16.

    As Sarkeesian explains in her introduction:

    “This episode examines the ways in which designers often employ camera angles and clothing choices as tools to deliberately sexualize and objectify female protagonists of third-person games. To illustrate that this is no accident, we contrast the ways in which women’s butts are frequently emphasized with the great lengths often taken to avoid calling attention to the butts of male characters. We then present some examples of female-led third-person games that humanize rather than objectify their protagonists” (http://feministfrequency.com/2013/03/07/damsel-in-distress-part-1/).

  17. 17.

    The Web video series was launched on 7 March 2013.

  18. 18.

    Significantly, the magazine ends her profile with this remark: “As her detractors grow increasingly unhinged, we have proof that her efforts are working” (ibid.).

  19. 19.

    “#gamergate”’s harassment campaigns, including that against Sarkeesian, have made the headlines in international media. In 2014, the British newspaper The Guardian commented on the movement’s dubious politics and the French newspaper Libération presented “#gamergate” through one of the hashtag’s bashing, that against a female game developer, initiated as a revenge action within a classic love triangle involving a gamergate member. As Rolling Stone writes in the above-cited interview with Sarkeesian, while the journalist’s recognition of sexist tropes in video games might be “hardly controversial stuff”, it suffices to “#gamergate” to have the feminist cultural critic to be “treated like Public Enemy Number One” (Anita Sarkeesian 2014).

  20. 20.

    The British newspaper The Guardian covered the incident and showed students on campus manifesting against “#gamergate”’s action (ibid.).

  21. 21.

    This is something she is very comfortable doing, being an articulate speaker and having explored these issues in her studies (she holds a bachelor’s degree in social communication studies from California State University and a master’s degree in political thought from NYU). Sarkeesian’s successful foray in academic and gamer circuits is all the more surprising, given the low cachet of feminism and gender studies within game studies.

  22. 22.

    In her article, Consalvo prompts her field colleagues – especially those embracing a feminist approach – to counteract the sexism widespread within the gaming milieu (2012). According to Consalvo, what feminist media studies can offer to assure “an equal treatment of women” is an opportunity to “engage with the problematics of game culture” for all (ibid.). In other words, she suggests that in order to understand the reasons of so much anxiety-ridden hatred from the part of players within the video game context, one has first to give evidence of the sexist stereotypes dominant in the field (ibid.). For Consalvo, what is missing within game scholarship is first of all some account and evidence of sexism in video games, to help create better practices through the documentation and the archiving of “toxic” models and usages within the field (ibid.).

  23. 23.

    Leigh Alexander, an authoritative video game journalist and former editor at large of the prestigious and influential website Gamasutra, frequently touches on the issue of sexism in gaming culture. In 1012, Alexander published a long article on this topic. In her piece, Alexander welcomes the trend of “game press and hobbyst bogsphere alike…to address prejudice and imbalance in game culture, particularly as concerns the portrayal and representation of women” (2012). She depicts this as a “most passionate” debate, featuring “from education and discussion on rape culture and male gaze to personal stories from women whose experience of the game industry has been impacted by sexism” (ibid.). She also praises the proliferation of writings in reaction to things like “half-bake tacky plot points for their female heroines” and the troublesome response of video gamers to Sarkeesian’s, “culminating in a game where the object is to beat Sarkeesian in the face” (ibid.).

  24. 24.

    As Sarah Perry notes in the article “Digital media and everyday abuse”, as a victim of online harassment Sarkeesian has “a degree of celebrity that made her a target for abuse but also provided a base for supporters to help bring that abuse to light and (to some extent) expose their identities of online persecutors” (2014: 81).

  25. 25.

    Carrera and Kerzner, while remaining faithful to the hashtag, later on expressed some concerns and taken their distances from some of the “#gamergate” members’ most extreme manifestations. For a discussion of this, watch the interview with Kerzner and Carrera on David Parkman Show, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9L7JLnsruU.

  26. 26.

    The episode where Sarkeesian especially condemns the representation of sexual workers in video games is Women as Background Decoration. In Part 2 of the series she insists on the topic of violence, concluding: “Violence against women is a serious global epidemic; therefore, attempts to address the issue in fictional contexts demands a considerable degree of respect, subtlety and nuance. Women shouldn’t be mere disposable objects or symbolic pawns in stories about men and their own struggles with patriarchal expectations and inadequacies” (http://feministfrequency.com/2013/05/28/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/).

  27. 27.

    He writes: “Violence against sex workers is a serious problem, both nationally and internationally, and Sarkeesian makes a good case that the games she discusses treat that violence as fun, enjoyable or even laudable. But Sarkeesian’s videos have not garnered much praise from those most directly affected by these tropes” (ibid.).

  28. 28.

    Asked about the success of her project by the media platform Vocativ in 2015, Kora admitted that her initial motivation was her reaction to Sarkeesian’s characterization of sex workers (Kulze 2015). She also expressed her satisfaction at seeing that so many people enjoyed “a sexually liberated, libertarian-leaning, pro-freedom-of-speech woman delivering the product that she promised” (ibid.).

  29. 29.

    Several online articles have been published about this.

  30. 30.

    For Carrera, “Feminists that get media attention these days are the same ilk as the wealthy Victorian era suffragettes: wealthy white women whose panties are in a bunch over imagined slights and imagined injustices” (ibid.).

  31. 31.

    For Kerzner, the main problem with Sarkeesian’s view of video games is the univocal focus on women: Sarkeesian ignores violence done to men on games and her position both patron of games and gamers’ abusers and victim of abuse provides a distorted and manipulated version of a more complex situation. Without denying “the industry’s abusive path”, Kerzner denounces Sarkeesian’s Manichean standpoint, which according to her reinforces rather than criticize the same female stereotypes and tropes that she points at.

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  1. Concordia University, Montreal, Quèbec, Canada

    Rosanna Maule

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Maule, R. (2016). Women and Online Porn in North America: New Media, Old Debates. In: Digital Platforms and Feminist Film Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48042-8_4

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