What other prices are there?

On November 20th, in Olin Rice, Robert Jensen came to Macalester to speak at a screening of the film, The Price of Pleasure, about the pornography industry and its effects on our society. Before the film started, he spoke a bit about himself and his work with pornography. His interest started in 1st amendments rights, freedom of speech and grew to include whiteness and violence against women. As there grew a feminist anti-pornography movement, Jensen became interested and involved in that dialogue, looking at how pornography (in addition to other forms of mainstream media) support and perpetuate systems of domination and violence. His last comment before starting the film was about two paradoxical trends he has noticed in the last 20 years of his work with pornography:
-on one hand, there's a trend in the content toward more cruel and degrading portrayals of women, and more overt racism
-at the same time, pornography has become more mainstream, normalized, and centralized in our society (not to say that there are no critiques)
He asked: how is it that pornography could, at the same time, become more naturalized in our society, and at the same time continue on toward more extreme patterns of male domination and degradation of women?

The creators utilized multiple voices to create the narrative of this film. There were clips from interviews with: anti-pornography activists, porn actors and directors, college students with exposure to porn, adult men who explained how pornography affected their sex lives, people at pornography conventions, and women who had been directly affected by partners' use of pornography (and I'm sure I'm missing some other sources). I thought it was fairly comprehensive look at mainstream pornography trends through its producers, consumers, actors, and critics. Some of the more poignant and disturbing points/quotes that I heard were:

An exchange that was juxtaposed thus:
Scene 1: A male producer or consumer (I can't remember which) says: "We live in a free-enterprise system where women can make a quarter million dollars a year on their bodies"
Scene 2: A female anti-porn activist: "It obscures a fundamental question - why do we live in a society where economic inequality is so normalized. So that women must sell themselves - and the most intimate parts of themselves - to make money?"
So, the directors are taking arguments for the "empowerment of women" through buying into the commodification and assignment of value to their bodies and bringing them close to feminist arguments against pornography as one of the most lucrative fields for women. In addition, it appeals to the humanity of the viewers in sympathizing with the very gendered nature of the entertainment industry - the decisions women must make and what they must subject themselves to in order to make good money in entertainment. And this isn't only in pornography, this goes into music as well and Hollywood films. In music videos, even when the artists have such superstar status as Britney Spears or Madonna, they are filtered through the lens of the directors, and end up often being objectified and sexualized for the pleasure of, largely, the viewing males (but not exclusively). And, one point of the film is: this objectification and sexualization in mainstream media has become more blatant and normalized, as a result of pornography's widened acceptance and normalization.

Another similar dyad is the quote: "it's all about choice," which I believe was said by a male at one of the pornography conventions in relation to women acting in pornography.
Feminist critic: "when your best choice is taking off your clothes and sticking toys in your cunt for money, I think here's a real problem with the labor system."
This was some serious stuff...I mean, I was just so taken aback. The second quote really breaks it down, and it makes me want to add my own questions: "this is what you call choice? This is a good job to you?" (and that's not to say that women can't or don't enjoy acting in pornography, I'm trying to get at the fact that these male viewers aren't even questioning the enjoyment and pleasure they receive from this system of commidifying women's bodies). A lot of these guys don't even think about how watching pornography influences the ways they see women. I heard a quote from one guy who claims to, in different words, compartmentalize his views of women into a "good girl, bad girl" dichotomy, where the women in pornography, he has no respect for, yet he respects women as a whole. This reminds me of the discussion about the use of "bitch(es) and ho(s)" in Hip-Hop and the idea of "that's not me they're talking about." His claim is, in effect, saying that when he's not watching pornography, he leaves that world behind, and enters the "real world" where he respects women as completely different from those who choose (or "choose") to be in porn. So...how does that work? It doesn't. The women are the bad ones, of course, not the system in which they live, where, as quoted above, their "best choice is taking off [their] clothes and sticking toys in [their] cunt[s] for money...," and that's one of the least extreme acts that women have to do in the pornography industry.

Speaking of extremity, during the section Harder and Harder, there were a lot of very disturbing and provocative quotes. I think the most insightful (for me) thoughts came from this section.
"The future of U.S. porn is violence." Disturbing.
"Pornography takes violence against women and sexualizes it. And when you sexualize it, you render the violence invisible." YES, this is it. This was like...the holy grail. Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about this, just that there was such a concise way to sum this up. And I would take that further and extend it to the way that many other dynamics operate in pornography - race, for example. When all of these violent and degrading acts are put under the umbrella of pornography (read: sex, to many viewers), and when it is a common occurrence for boys to be socialized into their sexualities by pornography, these days, and when people spend an increasing amount of time in isolation on computers, listening to iPods, playing video games, etc. and not communicating with other human beings, it becomes accepted as "how it is." At least, in the argument of this film, many of the male testimonies showed that boys had grown up with pornography, thinking that sex was supposed to be violent, that pornography was an accurate portrayal of sex and sexualities, that the acts performed in the films were enjoyable for all parties involved (because the women always "looked" like they were enjoying it too - yet one man's confession that he never thought to question the idea that people would get pleasure from ATM sexual acts...which I don't really want to elaborate, but it stands for ass or anal to mouth. Of course they aren't going to show the cut scenes where the women are gagging or throwing up because it's fucking DISGUSTING). When real sex with another person(s) proves to be inferior to that in the pornographic imagination, these men are forced to fantasize during sex to stay aroused. If that does not prove effective and they don't find sex pleasurable...guess who they take it out on - their partner(s). Of course. And I'm curious how they think women are supposed to know the roles that they're expected to fulfill by their male partners? Pornography is not aimed at women, and they certainly do not watch as much, statistically. But, of course, asking that question would be too critical of these guys who could just sit in front of their computers, alone, without any conflict or challenge, and have a good time. And one final quote from this section:
"Pornography shows the lack of questioning inherent in a system that values and rewards profit by any means possible. They'll explore every kind of sexual perversion, misery, sadness, and torture for which there is a market, and if there isn't a market, then they'll try to create it."

So, to sum up some points of what I'm trying to say:
This film was heavy. It was graphic, showing actual footage from porn videos (blurred out, of course, as if that would magically lessen the impact); it was scary, what (some) people in the industry do, and what trends they see coming; but, perhaps the most influential pieces of this film were the quotes from viewers of pornography. Their matter-of-fact language reflected their entrenchment in privilege - so deep and effective is (white, heterosexual) male-privilege that, for some of these men, there isn't even the thought of questioning the systems or even the porn industry itself, and everything falls on the individual actresses who become "whores," because they'll sell themselves and take part in acts that degrade them. I'm not sure if it was in this class or not, but I heard of a trinary (is that a word?) of types of people - those who read everything at face value, those who think there's something under the surface, and those who take a completely different reading than face value. The men interviewed in this film are, for the most part, the former of the three. I think I find it so interesting because I just don't understand what that's like...at least in this context. I just cannot seem to see into that mindset where porn is just "how it is" and my sexual interactions with other people are not; where those interactions must live up to images, to productions.

A quote from the website of the film: "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."

I found this a bit problematic... "a holistic understanding of pornography" and "pornography" are parts that I'm not sure about. I question how holistic it is, or, to interrogate the other side, what they mean by "pornography." It is a fairly holistic approach, if they are talking strictly about hardcore, mainstream porn. But, I don't recall them ever making a statement of what sector of the porn industry they were looking at, or how the subject of the film fits into the larger body of pornography (I imagine a scale much like that of Hip-Hop, and how mainstream Hip-Hop fits in as a small fraction of the whole culture). Also, this whole film is so focused on "mainstream porn," they don't discuss homosexual or queer pornography, there are maybe two or three contributors/interviewees who are non-white. I'm not sure what the think. It seems that MEF films are very much like this. Beyond Beats and Rhymes suffers from a similar constricted view. Just as Byron Hurt speaks of the box of manhood that black men (and men in general) are put into, the film suffers from being in its own box of "mainstream Hip-Hop." I am a bit concerned that these films do not engage their subjects beyond a certain point. And I do understand that movies have limited amounts of time and budget, but what about just throwing in a sentence or two, even, saying "I know there's so much more out there in this genre, but here's what I'm/we're looking at...."