The manosphere is deeply divided over the issue of pornography. For many in the alt-right, pornography—and the addiction to masturbation with which it corresponds—is genuinely dangerous for men. The far-right fraternal group Proud Boys, who made headlines in 2018 for beating up antifa protestors on the Upper East Side, requires that all second-tier members subscribe to what they call NoWanks, giving up masturbation and pornography for thirty days at a time. (At the end of a cycle, Proud Boys are given the option of a single cheat wank.) In a 2015 video for the right-wing website The Rebel, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes explains that, by providing young men with a fleeting but addictive hypermasculine delirium, pornography has made it impossible for them to date, marry or reproduce effectively: “You’ve fooled your brain into thinking you’re inseminating 10s, and then when you’re with a real woman, your brain goes, “What are you doing with one broad? She’s not even a 10, she’s like a 7. Why are you wasting my time with this?’” While he admits that being antiporn sounds like “an Andrea Dworkin thing,” McInnes assures viewers that it’s worth their time. “I’ll be whistling on my bike, I sing in the shower,” he tells the camera through his hipster beard. “I really feel more alive.”
Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness. Of course, anxieties over porn addiction are hardly exclusive to the manosphere, especially now that digital technologies, especially smartphones, seem to have placed an infinitude of free, easily accessible pornographic material beneath the nation’s vulnerable thumbs. Hence what is known as Rule 34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it. This has left the social field well lubricated for periodic moral panics about the sexual degeneracy presumed to prowl the public playgrounds of the digital. The decades-long cancer of go-go bars and porn theaters in Times Square may have finally been cut out by the family-friendly scalpel of the Walt Disney Company, but Lion King–themed erotic cartoons can now be accessed by any twelve-year-old with Internet access and a clue.
Feminists, meanwhile, have been debating pornography for decades, since it became a centerpiece of the so-called sex wars of the eighties. For activists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, pornography, with its graphic depictions of female degradation, was the patriarchal institution par excellence, the key to understanding all sex between men and women. Others, sometimes grouped under the label “pro-sex,” wondered how their feminist commitments might be reconciled with genuinely pleasurable experiences of dominance and submission—not to mention, eroticism generally. Tensions between the two camps boiled over at the famous “Pleasure and Danger” conference held at Barnard College in 1982. A week before the conference, antipornography feminists phoned Barnard officials to warn them of the conference’s antifeminist agenda; those administrators responded by confiscating 1,500 copies of the elaborate, sometimes graphic seventy-twopage program organizers had lovingly prepared. The day of the conference, while participants gave and heard papers on the theme of “pleasure and danger” in female sexuality, members of the radical feminist group Women Against Pornography passed out leaflets vilifying the conference and accusing women by name of collaboration with the patriarchy. At stake in all this was the question that Amber Hollibaugh raised at Barnard: “Is there ‘feminist’ sex? Should there be?” Or to put it bluntly: can women have sex without getting fucked?
Valerie’s answer is still the best one: No, but who cares? “Sex is the refuge of the mindless,” she gripes in the SCUM Manifesto, which isn’t against sex so much as deeply unimpressed by it. “Sex is not part of a relationship,” Valerie writes. “On the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time.” She had it, of course—sometimes with men, sometimes with women, sometimes for money—and she certainly had no time for the cheap, quasi-religious moralism that antiporn feminists would cultivate in the years to come. If anything, she was an accelerationist about the whole thing: “SCUM gets around … and around and around … they’ve seen the whole show—every bit of it—the fucking scene, the dyke scene, they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier—the peter pier, the pussy pier … you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex.” Ti-Grace Atkinson reports finding a piece of erotica that Valerie had written for Hustler magazine among the latter’s belongings in 1968. “Typical male pornography, S&M, really written from that place,” she told Fahs. “I assume she was writing it to make some money and you can’t play around too much if you want the money.”