The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships

For my event, I attended the screening of “The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships.” Robert Jensen, who authored a book about pornography and the end of masculinity and who was interviewed in the film, was also present for a question and answer period after the film and prefaced the screening with some commentary on the subject. The most salient aspect of the film that I took home with me was how pornography as an industry is a process of comodification within capitalism. We are all familiar with the term “sex sells,” but this film makes clear how private enterprises make money off of human needs and desires. Even more so, it is impossible to critique the pornography industry without grounding it in a patricarchical, white supremacist and predatory capitalist framework. Essentially, sex is being sold in allegiance with these dominant frameworks that perpetuate oppression. This can be seen in the various tropes used in mainstream porn, from the increasingly violent depictions of women, to the exploitation of black sexuality, in terms of showing black men in the brute stereotype and black women as sexually unbridled.

After the film was over, I was left wanting to discuss more the role that porn played in the lives of women. In terms of the roles men and women play in the pornography industry, the film maintained that men are the primary produces of and consumers of porn, and that women are always the objects being exploited within the industry itself. While I don’t doubt that these things are true of the industry, I wanted to ask Professor Jensen if he had done any research or was aware of any scholarship on the role of mainstream pornography in the lives of women. The film made clear how the pornography industry constructed the sexualities of the men who consumed it and the women in their lives whose relationships suffered due to that consumption, but it did not address how women today personally relate to pornography as consumers.

In terms of his own scholarship, Professor Jensen could not directly answer my question in terms of if his work focused on women who watch porn (it did not), but he helped approach an answer by posing another question: is it possible for pornography to be attempting to be consistent with creating a more just world, one that, in its framework, attempts not oppress queer people, women, people of color or poor people? In this sense, feminist porn may be the response to mainstream porn in terms of women trying to define and control how they produce desire, fantasy and sexuality, but when it comes down to it, Professor Jensen noted, feminist porn is simply not selling. Therefore, the ideologies of mainstream porn are feeding into and creating the desires of its consumers, which in turn demand more from these particular markets, which makes the mainstream porn industry so successful. In other words, desire is driving the economy, and the economy is just as powerfully driving desire. It appeared to me that Professor Jensen believed that in the existence of a just society with egalitarian norms and expectations, there would not even be the question of something like feminist pornography trying to create a more just world. In this sense, I agree, but in the meantime, where does that leave women and their autonomy to pursue their desires?