Are "Facials" Misogynistic?

This paper has been on my website for a while (here). It has now been accepted for publication at Porn Studies, which is a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis. I've been wanting for some time now to publish something in a non-philosophy, gender-and-sexuality-studies sort of journal, so it looks like that will finally happen.

UPDATE: Now published online, but not yet in the journal. 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/23268743.2026.2620635 

Abstract:

So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in pornography. While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials may instead be rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm—semen—is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials may often be misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always.

 

New Paper: Are 'Facials' Misogynistic?

Find it here.

Abstract:

So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in pornography.  While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials are instead rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm—semen—is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials may often be misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always. 

NOTE: This may not be a philosophy paper. My intention is to submit it to a sexuality studies journal. 

Published: "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?"

Abstract:

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio-sexual norms (for good or for ill).

Find it here.

Porn Reviews Site

Whenever I go somewhere to talk about my work on pornography, I have at least a few people ask me whether there really is decent porn out there. Well, there is, if you know where to look. Even then, though, it may hard to find the really good stuff. So I've started a new blog, "Sexually Explicit Visual Media", where I'm going to post short reviews of that sort of thing. I'll be watching quite a few such films in the next few months, since I'll be teaching my course on pornography this spring.

At the moment, the only things there are a mission statement and an annotated list of links to websites that have 'better' porn. But I'm intending to post the first review within a day or two. I'll link to those reviews from this blog.

New Paper: Sexual Fantasy and the Eroticization of Evil

Abstract

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed.

This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?".  

Download it here.

"Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?" Accepted at Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

What a relief! The paper had been rejected at another journal without even being sent to referees, so I was starting to get worried.

A somewhat longer version than what will be published is available on my web site.

If You Read One Article on Pornography....

I've been teaching, for the first time, a course on pornography this semester. It's been quite an amazing experience. We've of course read a lot of philosophical writing on the topic (syllabus here), but also work in sociology, sexuality studies, and so forth. By far the most interesting, and enjoyable, part of the course, though, has been the several sessions we have devoted to talking about specific films. My students never cease to impress me with their thoughtfulness.

There's a lot I'll do differently next time. We spent too much time on 'free speech'-type issues and not enough on aesthetic issues (which got even more truncated due to scheduling changes). But it's been a joy to re-read a lot of this material, and I've been reminded how much more interesting a lot of the work outside philosophy is, and how little philosophers seem to know of it.

Which brings me to the title of this post. One of the last things I'm having the students read is a now famous article by Richard Dyer, "Male Gay Porn: Coming To Terms", which appeared in Jump Cut in 1985 (freely available here). It is one of the, perhaps even the, first papers to address pornographic films as films. It's an extraordinary article, whose central idea is that "A defense of porn as a genre (which...is not at all the same thing as defending most of what porn currently consists of) would be based on the idea that an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot". 

It's a powerful idea, it seems to me, and one that still has not been explored as much as it should be. Indeed, the only other paper known to me that takes this approach, and which was directly inspired by Dyer, is Linda Williams's "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" (JSTOR) which explores the relations between pornography and other 'body genres'---horror and melodrama, specifically---which aim to effect a bodily response in the viewer. I hope, at some point, to take up this idea myself.

Published: How Not To Watch Feminist Pornography

In Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Read it here.

Abstract

This paper has three goals. The first is to defend Tristan Taormino and Erika Lust  (or  some  of their  films)  from  criticisms that Rebecca Whisnant and Hans Maes
make of them. Toward that end, I will be arguing against the narrow conceptions that Whisnant and Maes seem to have of what “feminist” pornography must be like. More generally, I hope to show by example why it is important to take pornographic films seriously as films if we're to understand their potential to shape, or misshape, socio-sexual norms.

The Great Blowjob Debate

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New Paper: Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?

Abstract:

Rae Langton and Caroline West have argued that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, “Dirty Pool”, makes such presuppositions. I argue for four claims. (i) Langton and West's account of how pornography silences women is empirically dubious. (ii) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts of presuppositions they require. (iii) Even "Dirty Pool", for all its other problems, does not make the presuppositions that Langton and West claim it does. (iv) Langton and West misread “Dirty Pool” because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography traffics in sexual fantasy.

Get it here.

New Paper: How Not To Watch Feminist Pornography

Abstract:

This paper has three goals. The first is to defend Tristan Taromino and Erika Lust (or some of their films) from criticisms that Rebecca Whisnant and Hans Maes make of them. Toward that end, I will be arguing against the narrow conceptions that Whisnant and Maes have of what `feminist' pornography must be like. More generally, I hope to show by example why it is important to take pornographic films seriously as films if we're to understand their potential to shape, or mis-shape, socio-sexual norms.

Get it here.

Pornography and Accommodation: Published

Online anyway, here.

If you can't access that, then you can find the pre-publication version here.

New Paper: Pornography and Accommodation

Abstract

In 'Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game', Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simpified model of that phenomenon. I argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges.

Download it here.

The Tumblr Porn Ban

Yes, there are a lot of other horrible things going on in the world these days. But the recent decision by Tumblr to ban 'adult content' from the site is still extremely depressing. For one thing, as Violet Blue put it, it's clear that there's now a full-blown war on sex on the internet. And it's not going to make sex on the internet go away. What it's going to do is solidify the dominance of large corporations like MindGeek (the owners of PornHub, etc, etc).

What Tumblr and its ilk offered was an opportunity for people whose sexuality is usually marginalized, fetishized, or denied to express and explore that sexuality on their own terms. Stories abound of young, disaffected, confused, lost people who discovered who they were in large part because of their discovery of people like them on Tumblr. No one has given better expression to that than the wonderful and inimitable Vex Ashley, in this piece on Medium.

Among the 'marginalized' groups in question we find, frankly, women, who seem to have made up a large percentage of various Tumblr porn communities. Mainstream pornography rarely troubles itself to portray women's sexuality except as it serves men's. (We'll explore that and related issues in my graduate seminar this spring.) And it's not just men directors who are responsible. Most women directors struggle to break out of that mold, too. Among many other things, Tumblr provided a place for people to share the alternative pornographies they'd discovered and to try to construct some kind of counter-narrative to what's being peddled by PornHub (now that they've killed and then swallowed much of what used to be the mainstream pornography industry).

Probably all of that will migrate to some new location. (See here and here for some reporting on this.) But in so far as Tumblr's decision was a reaction to the imminent activation of FOSTA/SESTA, it's hard to know whether any platform that allows freely posted adult content can survive.

It's a lesson that's been taught over and over, but that never seems to be learned: Restrictions on sexually explicit expression always affect most directly and immediately sexually marginalized people. In part, that's because it's always up to some authority or other to enforce those restrictions, and the discretion that's built into the system makes it inevitable that they'll clamp down first and hardest on the already marginalized. But, in part, it's just because the marginalized are always the folks who get screwed (and not in a good way).

When Canada implemented MacKinnon-inspired restrictions on pornography in the early 1990s, for example, they were immediately used to shut down gay and lesbian bookstores, while the sex shops catering to straight men were left untouched. When Britain implemented new restrictions on online content a few years ago, they banned any display of female ejaculation while permitting 'facials'; banned women sitting on men's faces for oral sex while permitting rough fellatio to gagging; etc, etc. And whom did the agencies tasked with enforcing the law decide to go after? Women who ran BDSM sites. Anyone want to guess who age verification laws will actually affect? Not the big corporations that can afford the exorbitant fees the credit card companies stand ready to charge for the service.

Depressing? That barely scratches the surface.

UPDATE: Another excellent piece on this, from HuckMag.