I’ve indulged in it; I’ve taken the piss out of it; I’ve patronised the people on it; I’ve got angry about it. No, I’m not talking about the front bench of the Liberal Party; it’s pornography.
Let me say from the outset I consider myself a feminist and it’s through the prism of this theoretical perspective that I’m likely to view stuff that concerns women. But which feminism?
It’s been a long time since the dominant feminist view of porn toed the party line of radical pro-censorship campaigners like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon and their dictum that if you consume pornography you don’t have a right to your sexuality.
Then ‘postmodern’ feminists came along and told us the idea of sexualised images of women only being read as an oppressive function of patriarchy was a simplistic one.
Images have multiple readings, the meanings of which are determined at least in part by context, and that power relations of all types are fluid and not readily reducible to one reading either. Embrace your sexual power and take pleasure in it was the catch-cry of this group.
More recently, this particular spin on ‘girl power’ has been questioned on the basis that it’s just a consumerist mask for ‘slut power’ where women are duped once again by the giant marketing machine of patriarchal culture into identifying their use value with their sexual availability.
No doubt we’ll soon see another generational shift which will overturn this view in terms of a more emancipatory reading of pornography and sexualised imagery.
In fact Oprah recently devoted a show to what’s being called the “new sexual revolution” where a recent survey suggests that one in three consumers of online adult entertainment are women and that large numbers of viewers are couples in long-term monogamous relationships.
In other words, the empirical reality is that, regardless of the moral questions it raises, the simple fact is that not only men like sexualised imagery.
My problem with all of this is that as someone who has studied all the subjects at uni that should allow me to make some kind of determination about the most logical and critically thought out position to take on porn, my relationship to it is an uncomfortable one that shifts according to how I feel rather what I’m reading.
I feel vaguely embarrassed to admit I don’t like the idea of my boyfriend gaining sexual pleasure from looking at other women.
I know the standard argument against this is that there is an enormous slippage between fantasy and reality and that, moreover, porn trades in images and archetypes, not real people. One needs no more proof of this than the fact that women consistently report rape as dominant among their sexual fantasy repertoire.
And on an intellectual level I am swayed by the libertarian position adopted by many contemporary feminists – and I’ve read the research that shows no causal link between sexualised imagery of women and the idea that it leads to men perceiving them in a degrading way.
But still my relationship to pornography remains a stubbornly fraught one.
I also tend toward a pragmatic position on the truth of cultural phenomenon - I believe in engaging with the world as it is rather than pontificating on how it ought to be.
But the simple fact is I do sometimes make negative moral judgements about porn and how it makes me feel as a woman, particularly one that suffers from a very common condition: jealousy most likely rooted in poor self-image.
Indeed, many say that this is the nub of the problem, but that the panacea depends on which side of the ideological fence you sit on. The pro-porn brigade would argue that porn can be a liberating force for women like me; the pro-censorship lobby, that it’s one of the root causes of my self-esteem issues.
Uncool as it is among the majority of my enlightened friends, I remain at the very least ambivalent about porn and sometimes downright threatened by it.
I guess, like everything else, it’s a matter of negotiating the ethics of something in your own life and letting others do the same.
And that means I have a right to my fantasy life, which some days include a secret desire to live in a world where my boyfriend only wants to perv on me.
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