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Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations. At the same time, the film examines the unprecedented role that commercial pornography now occupies in U.S. popular culture. Going beyond the debate of liberal versus conservative so common in the culture, The Price of Pleasure provides a holistic understanding of pornography as it debunks common myths about the genre.
That's a film I want to see. That's a film that needs to be made. We urgently need to see it if we're going to stop clawing ourselves to death over our desires. But The Price of Pleasure obviously isn't that film. The trailer confirms every American's worst nightmares not only about porn, but about sex itself. It's hungry, hateful men dangling on the very edge of rape and women who are either victims or who have failed in their duty to restrain men's sexual urges and channel them into more civilized pursuits.
Anyone who's seen a sizeable amount of porn and hung out with other people who like porn knows that the portraits the makers of The Price of Pleasure are hawking aren't total fictions. There's a lot of sleazeballs out there. But they're not the truth, either. The picture that they're giving is one that's carefully framed and cropped to frighten people who haven't seen enough porn to realize that the X-Treme stuff that's so beloved by Dines and Jensen is a small fragment of the total picture.
Naturally, it may be ridiculous of me to be passing judgement without seeing the film as a whole. But I don't think so. There's some obvious philosophical slants in the fact that the trailer shows Joanna Angel asking "How to you make a woman into an object? What the hell does that mean?" followed by an abrupt cut to a film clip showing her being gagged with duct tape. The clips page virtually excludes any activists from the sex industry except for Ernest Greene, in favor of the standard anti-porn talking heads like Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, Pamela Paul, and Ariel Levy.
The juxtaposition of Joanna Angel's interview with her movie clip is particularly disturbing to me. It reminds me of one of the most pernicious tendencies of anti-porn feminists, which is to act as enforcers against other women of a very specific vision of normative sexuality. In order for that particular part of the trailer to have any meaning at all, you have to count on the fact that the viewer will say to themselves "No normal woman would like that," as reflexively as they would say "Water is wet." You can see Joanna Angel one of two ways after watching those few seconds of video: as a helpless victim or as a sick, sick woman. She can be cast as either virgin or whore, with nothing between those two poles that would represent her humanity. That's one of the most corrupt and offensive things about the anti-porn school: the barely-hidden misogyny that they direct towards women in the sex industry. According to the web site, there are screenings planned in Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno between September and November. What I'd like to see happen is for those of us in communities where these screenings are going to take place to organize in groups to attend and ask questions that are critical of the methodology and philosophy behind the film. I don't think that sex-poz activists should be disruptive at such an event, but neither do I think that a film that presents itself as "nuanced" and "non-judgmental" about pornography should be shown to homogenous, un-critical audiences. Many of these small films have very long lives in very influential circles.
Blog: Literate Perversions
Blog: Literate Perversions
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then finally y
"That’s a film I want to see. That’s a film that needs to be made."
You wished and it was so:
Also, there are several reviews up about TPoP, and all of them confirm that its anything but "honest and nonjudgemental".
These two things are what I'm blogging about over on the Pro-Porn blog literally right now, so it will be up shortly. I'll post a link when I'm done.
OK, here it is:
http://bppa.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-movies-about-porn.html
Chris, I'm so glad you posted this. And Iamcuriousblue, I read your post on the Blog for Pro Porn Activism and I'm glad you're out there writing. (I was also glad to see the comments there from Ernest Greene, Renegade Evolution and Anthony Kennerson).
I think this is incredibly timely given the news from Staunton VA about the conviction and continued prosecution of Rick Krial on obscenity charges for selling pornography to adults in his adult video store. There is much to say about that case, but for the moment let me just thank the two of you for putting the issue of "unbiased" analysis of porn out there. Certainly "The Price of Pleasure" is not unbiased, and I'm angered by they way they took clips of Ernest Greene and Joanna Angel out of context to slip into their framework.
Chris, I love your idea of organizing a group to attend the screening and ask questions - insistently yet respectfully - so that the bias is revealed and the discussion in the room can become more balanced.
It is important, when possible, to disrupt the ritualistic solidarity-building potential of these screenings by insisting on a more nuanced and less biased discussion.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Thanks for the good word, Elizabeth. I plan on concentrating my blogging activity more on posting on the Pro-Porn Activism blog, as well as my own blog , too (where I still post occasionally for topics that don't quite fit on BPPA). I'm scaling way back on my activity among the commentariat at feminst blogs (even sex-positive ones), becuase I just don't think its very productive and leads to a whole lot of strife and petty personal stuff that's a huge drain.
And you're right to point out this Virginia obsecenity prosecution, which is part of a much larger wave of obscenity prosecutions in the US, both federal and local. Its one of the main reasons I blog about this topic, because I don't think the anti-porn movement, including the left/feminist side of it, exists in isolation and I think their claims that they don't want a return to traditional obscenity laws are disingenuous. Its quite clear to me that if a lot of the lies these people are spreading about porn get wide currency, these kind of obscenity prosecutions are a natural outcome.
I have mixed feelings about organized gatherings to screenings of The Price of Pleasure. I think it is a good idea to be present to calmly and respectfully call the agenda of this film into question, but at the same time, I know how much anti-porn folks like to bait their oponents with really ugly personal attacks. Toward men, "this is what you jack off too and this is what it says about you, you scum" kind of rhetorc. Toward women, "you're no feminist and you're betraying women". One has to be prepared for that kind of stuff and have the presence of mind not to respond in kind, which is easier said than done. The fact that these kinds of discussions would be in-person rather than over the blogosphere would certainly have an inherently civilizing effect on discourse to some degree, but if the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80s are any guide, things can get pretty bad , even in real-world meetings.
In the eighties and nineties, the big anti-porn agitprop film was Bonnie Klein's Not a Love Story. It was shown at film festivals, art houses, and universities, and was essential in defining the narrative about pornography. One very good critique written at the time summarizes the film:
NOT A LOVE STORY focuses on ex-stripper Linda Lee Tracey, Early in the film, we see Tracey performing her "Red Riding Hood" act, which she claims is not to be taken seriously. While Tracey has some reservations about stripping, she does not yet see pornography as harmful. NOT A LOVE STORY is essentially a description of Tracey's conversion. With Tracey and Klein, we journey through the world of pornography in all its forms: porn shops, sex booths, live sex shows, hard-core" magazines, photographs of women in bondage. We hear directly from the workers in the porn industry; social scientists such as Edward Donnerstein who discusses the connection between violent pornography and violence against women; an owner of a chain of pornographic magazines who describes the proliferation of hard-core pornography as a response to the women's movement; and U.S. and Canadian feminists who analyze the phenomenon of pornography.
Not a Love Story was one of the great media successes of the anti-porn movement, and it was years before an effective counter-narrative was established within feminism. I'm sure that the producers would love to reproduce that success. That's why it's important to start picking it apart now. We'll never convince Dines or Jensen, but there's a lot of people out there with little direct experience of porn who could easily be convinced either way, and I don't blame them. Frankly, if films like this were my main experience with porn, there's no way that I'd want to get anywhere near the stuff.
Blog: Literate Perversions
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then finally y
Yes, I totally remember Not a Love Story, which got an awful lot of press when it came out, about 1981-1982, and was touted by many as the definitive "progressive" line on porn. At the time it came out, I didn't get a chance to actually see it other than the movie trailer, but I remember it as having some word of mouth among my female friends, who would talk incredulously about the things they learned about porn-using men (who were, it was presumed, were a subculture of sexually deviant men, rather than typical guys they knew). This was right around the time I started viewing hardcore porn myself, so it was a rather strange message.
I will note, however, that there really was a feminist counter-narrative to it at the time it came out, its just that that kind of feminist and sex-poz critique was a great deal less mainstream than it is now. That kind of critique was coming from groups like SAMOIS, marginal sex magazines like Spectator, and from a few dissident feminists who were less than pleased with the whole cultural feminist/anti-sex turn in feminist ideology starting in the late 70s. In fact, I remember reading a critique of NaLS in Spectator around that time and it was one of the things that clued me into the fact that there were a lot of half-truths and downright lies espoused by this documentary and the emerging feminist anti-porn movement.
Not a Love Story made a big impression, but was soon buried by the larger Feminist Sex Wars that emerged over the next few years. NaLS has similar self-induced distribution problems to The Price of Pleasure – its producer, The National Film Board of Canada, only made video copies available at expensive academic pricing, a situation that remains true to this day, so unless you make a special field trip to the media center of an academic library or had it pushed on you in a women's studies class, you're unlikely to ever have seen it. (Not exactly the best way to get your point of view out there into the marketplace of ideas, but that's academic radicalism for you.)
However, I got a chance to see it when I was living in Seattle in the mid-90s – the Seattle Public Library happens to have a VHS copy among its circulating videos, so I was finally able to see what all of the fuss was about. One of the first things I was struck by was just how dated the rhetoric in NaLS was. Its a work that wears its cultural feminist perspective on its sleeve, and as a result would totally not work as propaganda today (it probably would have fallen flat any time after about the mid-80s, actually), and in places almost comes across like a parody of a feminist documentary. Its an artifact of late 70s/early 80s radical feminism, which was dominated by some very essentialist views about male and female sexuality and a purist orientation toward "womyn's culture" rather than corrupt male-dominated pop culture. Its a fascinating portrait of radical feminism at the time, and its very interesting to compare and contrast it to radical feminism today. Many things about radical feminism remain the same today, of course, but things like the idea of an innately gentle women/lesbian sexuality or the tendency toward separatism and celebration of rather traditional modes of "women's culture" have gone by the wayside in many cases, Womensspace being the notable exception. (The biggest change in radfem theory that I've noticed is that they've gone 180 degrees from a blatantly essentialist view of gender to beating everybody over the head with more-social-constructionist-than-thou rhetoric.)
The movie is also way too blunt in its rhetorical style, to put it mildly, even having one of its subjects literally stand on a soapbox in Times Square to denounce the evils of pornography. Another thing that stands out is the fact that the main subject of the film, Lindalee Tracy (who is portrayed as making a journey of conversion from sex worker to feminist), later wrote in her autobiography she felt very manipulated by the filmmakers and that NaLS was not an accurate depiction of her views on the subject. She had her own criticisms of hardcore pornography, but was far from anti-sex work. If this pattern of putting words in sex workers' mouths sounds more than a little familiar, it should, because performers as diverse as Linda Lovelace, Belladonna, and Sasha Grey have said much the same thing regarding their experiences with anti-porn feminists or mainstream media.
Bonnie Sherr Klein (who is Naomi Klein's mother, BTW), the director and main force behind NaLS, gives her perspective here and its pretty telling. To be blunt about it, a lot of her statements are pure BS, claiming that positive versus negative reviews were entirely split on gender lines, with men hating and women supporting it. (Actually, many women were among its most vocal critics.) She also implies that third party "radical feminists" gave her flack for putting words in Lindalee Tracy's mouth, when in fact Lindalee Tracy herself stated this in her autobiography.
There are some clips from Not a Love Story from the NFBC website here, here, and here, and very good critique of it here over at the Lucrezia Magazine site.
Speaking of old anti-porn docs, I remember another one, Rate It X, that came out about 5 years after NaLS, which got some showing on PBS at the time. It also managed to garner these clips and discussion on Siskel and Ebert. I think both movies kind of serve as a template for TPoP. NaLS in the sense of showing (often cherry-picked) porn images in order to "expose" porn, and RIX in its emphasis on pointed and confrontational interviews with porn industry people and fans, and with the fact that RIX also similarly veils (rather thinly) its real agenda around the pretense of fostering dialogue.
Iamcuriousblue wrote:
I will note, however, that there really was a feminist counter-narrative to it at the time it came out, its just that that kind of feminist and sex-poz critique was a great deal less mainstream than it is now. That kind of critique was coming from groups like SAMOIS, marginal sex magazines like Spectator, and from a few dissident feminists who were less than pleased with the whole cultural feminist/anti-sex turn in feminist ideology starting in the late 70s.
IACB, it is so important to be reminded of that. Thank you. There was also the 1982 Scholar and Feminist IX Conference, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality" (later just called the Barnard Conference) that produced the essays collected by Carole Vance in the amazing anthology Pleasure and Danger. The anthology contains essays by feminists like Dorothy Allison, Gayle Rubin, Cherrie Moraga, Joan Nestle, and Amber Hollibaugh and from many others.
Given the prolific writing by feminist sex work and sexual expression advocates I wonder if there is a way to pull the best of that writing together into a new anthology! We do so much publishing online - and consider that the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is now in its 8th edition - I wonder if we need to be pushing something into print. This might be a good moment for such a thing.
I was on a panel on Sex Work and Left Politics with Amber Hollibaugh, Audacia Ray, and Ignacio Rivera (moderated by Antonia Levy) at last April's Left Forum. Amber and Antonia, having been regulars at the Left Forum - were nervous about the reception we would get. In fact just about everybody who attended, and the room was full, was supportive of our message that sex worker rights were human rights. Is there space right now among folks on the Left to do some coalition building with libertarian-types and advance an agenda that is truly supportive of freedom for sexual expression? If so, we should be using all media at our disposal, including the 'old' ones, perhaps, to provide fuel.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
