FiLiA Participates in Cambridge Union Debate: The House Regrets Online Pornography
Raquel Rosario Sanchez, FiLiA Spokeswoman, argues against the porn industry:
Thank you very much to the Cambridge Union for extending this invitation to FiLiA.
Thank you to the organisers of this event for putting it together during such a challenging time and, particularly, for having the audacity to tackle such an important issue head-on.
Before we begin, I would like to say thank you also very much to Ela Darling, Jerry Barnett, Epiphany Jones, Jo Bartosch and Haley McNamara: all of the speakers on both sides of this debate. I look forward to the Society having an intense and respectful debate, within the paramount importance of free speech and intellectual exploration.
As the Cambridge Union Society rightfully state, the global lockdown enacted as a response to the COVID-19 health crisis has seen an increase in the consumption of online pornography. As such, it raises a number of issues which must be addressed from a variety of angles.
At FiLiA, we are unapologetic about our position on this matter. And our position is that online pornography is a form of male violence against women and girls. As a women’s rights charity, FiLiA is committed to building sisterhood and solidarity (locally, nationally, globally), to amplifying the voices of women (particularly those less often heard or purposefully silenced) and to defending women’s human rights. And defending women’s rights includes fighting for the abolition of the sex industry which, of course, includes the porn industry.
I appreciate the speeches given by my fellow speakers but, there is one thing that I want to be absolutely clear about and that is that from a feminist point of view, the problem with online pornography is not sex and sexuality: the problem with online pornography is that is a business model, and therefore a market-driven industry, which depends on the exploitation of women’s bodies.
Which is why we see this fierce competition between production companies pushing for more extreme and violence content, in order to stay fresh in what is a supply and demand transactional market.
This is why, in the porn industry, we see a revolving door of women, particularly very young women, who don’t last very long because the requirements for novelty and the taxing demands of the industry on women’s bodies are unsustainable in the long term.
It is only by centring the profit-driven agenda which is at the heart of the porn industry that we can have an honest discussion about it.
It is a quite ingenious, patriarchal trick to attempt to frame the conversation in terms of sex, free speech and morality, but it is nonetheless dishonest.
The idea that the porn industry exists sort of like a philanthropic enterprise concerned merely with providing the educational service of teaching dim-witted people how to have sex is far-fetched. It is pretty clear, and there is scientific evidence of this, that human beings had already figured out how to have sex with each other before the advent of online pornography.
I personally find it very amusing to hear arguments that being a porn abolitionist, and rejecting the propositions of the sex trade, equates to feminist being somehow anti-sex and fearful of sexuality. In part, because I myself have a Master’s Degree in Sexuality Studies!
In this debate, we want to underscore three main points.
Online pornography constitutes a form of violence against women
Porn is about making a profit by exploiting women, particularly very young women
The mainstreaming of online pornography, along with its increased consumption, represents a decisive backlash to the gains of the women’s liberation movement
We argue that online pornography constitutes a form of violence against women because of the effects of the industry in the status of women worldwide. We argue that the mainstreaming of online pornography represents a backlash against women’s liberation because the line between what happens “within the industry” and outside of it has become frightfully thin. And that backlash is decisively violent and misogynist.
For example, we know that one of the most popular genres in online pornography is so-called ‘rape porn’, which eroticises sexual assault and violence against women. There have been a number of reports about how, in a number of countries, but to put an example, India, men are recording themselves raping women and uploading those videos online. In October 2016, Al Jazeera reported on the popularity of these videos, stating that in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh “men can buy footage of a woman being raped for the price of a cheap meal.”
These videos go on to be watched countless times and have the effect of ensuring that the victim’s trauma is preserved for posterity and distributed exponentially.
When Teen Vogue publishes an article in July 2017 about anal sex without ever mentioning the words ‘woman’ or ‘female’ and includes an anatomy graphic of the bodies of both sexes, which neglects to point out the clitoris, then we know that something is at play and its not a concern with women and girls sexual pleasure.
Although anal sex is a sexual preference for some people, the feminist analysis compels us to consider that we know from previous sexuality research that the majority of women cannot achieve orgasm purely from vaginal, penetrative sex. Even fewer can climax through anal sex. This is because the majority of women who experience anal sex find it painful.
We also know that anal sex is particularly pleasurable for men because men have a prostate so a sexual health article aimed at teenage girls which 1. forgets the most important female sex organ and 2. encourages a type of sexual activity which is generally painful for us, is a by-product of a porn culture which doesn’t care about women’s experiences. And doesn’t care about women’s pleasure.
These are merely a couple of examples, and we have not even begun to address the rise of ‘upskirting’ which has become so prevalent that countries are having to pass legislation to deter men from doing it. Or the repugnant rise of ‘rough sex’ defences used in Courts of Law to justify male violence against women, and femicide itself.
I am worried that I may be running out of time here, but before closing my remarks I would like to reiterate a point made by Professor Noam Chomsky, who was the previous speaker hosted by the Cambridge Union Society this past Tuesday. Professor Chomsky has stated that “pornography is the humiliation and degradation of women, where women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. Not like human beings”. And that “the fact that people agree to it and get paid, is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favour of sweatshops and slavery.” He has made the case that, instead of attempting to “improve” the conditions of the porn industry, we should seek to abolish the porn industry.
And that is our position at FiLiA.
Thank you!