Do you have a reptile brain? Or an angel brain? That’s how I describe what determines your enjoyment of pornography.1
Popular discourse on pornography and its viewing often stresses the need for limits on its consumption: like junk food, pornography is, at best, okay in moderation but too much is bad for one’s health. This being the case, it can be very difficult to find willing participants for a research project which seeks to go beyond general questions about occasional use to ask more searching questions about the place of pornography in an individual’s life – no one wants to be identified as the possessor of a reptile brain.
In this chapter I briefly examine women’s use of pornographic films, using interviews with six women aged 25–48, in relationships of various kinds: two in long-term heterosexual partnerships (more than 15 years and with children); two in heterosexual relationships of three or more years (no children); one in what she described as a fairly casual heterosexual relationship (not living together) and one woman who identified as bi-sexual and was currently in an exclusive relationship with a woman. Each described themselves as ‘open-minded’ about sexual issues and keen on representations of sexual activity. All identified themselves as regular viewers of pornographic films, though the term pornography had a very flexible border – for one, Diane, pornography meant films with significant sexual themes such as In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003) and Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999). None had seen films viewed by the others – reception research can usually rely on naturally-occurring audiences who have a shared interest in a particular film, TV programme or the coherence of a media genre but when it comes to pornography, the term encompasses thousands of titles with sometimes very little similarities of form, style or substance. Hence the interviews threw up a range of very general points of similarity (in particular, histories of viewing) and then widely different experiences and tastes in viewing, which does not, of course, make for easy assimilation into a short chapter.
TALKING SEX
It is important that we ‘allow them [consumers of pornography] to speak’2 but if we are to fully understand the use of pornography in everyday life and its significance as a form of representation their words will require critical scrutiny. Not that users of porn are to be understood as particularly ‘unreliable’ – I absolutely reject Michael Gilding’s comment that ‘just because a self-selecting group of pornography consumers say that pornography is good for their mental health and marriages does not make it so’.3 That observation reduces the importance of audience research to simple assertion of ‘benefits’ in particular media usages and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the descriptions and feelings consumers offer researchers. As Alan McKee has argued, ‘there is a systematic “othering” of pornography consumers in academic research and in public debate about the genre. They cannot know themselves; they cannot speak for themselves; they must be represented’.4
Given the continuing suspicion of those who indulge in pornographic viewing, it is not surprising that counter-discourses focus on the potential therapeutic, recreational or oppositional usages of pornography and strive to ensure that an ‘ethics of pleasure’ is established in relation to hard-core. For instance, in his recent discussion of the aesthetics of pornography, McKee notes that
There was absolute agreement that these users of pornography wanted to see actors genuinely enjoying themselves. There was no discourse available for celebrating pornography which was non-consensual. There was no suggestion that ‘anything goes’. Some interviewees went further and noted that financial inducements or drugs might place limits on genuine consent – and they had little interest in watching such material.5
While understandable, this defensiveness condenses the sense-making involved in viewing porn to simple alternatives – for example, judging ‘genuine’ and ‘non-consensual’ porn. Moreover, it presupposes that the fundamental purpose of researching pornographic consumption is to find ‘acceptable’ usages. The ambivalences expressed by many viewers in watching a porn movie – number one being ‘is she actually enjoying this?’ – are taken as evidence of viewers’ ‘better’ judgements in relation to their viewing. Thus, it seems to me that much audience research has looked to find evidence in consumers’ talk of measuring pornography for its ‘quality’ and ‘egalitarianism’, not to question how and why consumers might feel the need to offer those explanations but in order to construct a case redeeming pornography from the arguments of ‘harm’.
Academic discussions construct enjoying or not enjoying a film or story as linked to a notion of ‘good’ (consensual, authentic, free of coercive elements or ambivalence) or ‘bad’ (problematic, psychologically complex, difficult to gauge the nature of participants’ pleasure) pornography. Seemingly, academics are afraid of arguing for the possibility of finding ‘bad’ porn exciting or interesting.
This defensiveness may well be an indication of the continuing influence of anti-pornography feminism which constructed pornography as a special category of representation, particularly for women. Simply put, anti-porn feminism and, specifically, Andrea Dworkin’s arguments about pornography revolve around the belief that heterosexuality is predicated on women’s subordination and status as chattel. Thus sexually explicit representations are part of an armoury (also including rape and domestic violence) to eroticise men’s power over women and their bodies. Her most familiar publication, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), described porn as systematically dehumanising women by characterising them as dirty, masochistic and desirous of sexual pain. Thus, for Dworkin, heterosexual intercourse is a form of occupation, something done to women and, moreover, done to them without their consent.
I have argued elsewhere that Dworkin’s arguments are a part of the fabric of meaning-making for pornography’s consumers and commentators alike.6 Hence, the ‘good’ porn consumer demonstrates that s/he assesses their pornography for signs that the actresses act of their own volition and free will, as Parvez Z. Fareen’s research demonstrates that it is seemingly impossible for women to engage with pornography without thinking about their responsibilities qua women to other women.7 As Maggie, an interviewee for this chapter said,
I think I ought to say something about the actresses – see this is where it gets difficult ‘cos within the film you can sort of say ‘oh yes, the story they’re telling is this one and that’s fine’ but then sometimes I think about what happened later and I think but can those women then decide ‘well I’ve done something once but that’s it, I don’t want to do it again’? I mean can they make that choice and that worries me. ‘Cos its like you know that if they’ve done a two guy one girl scene that its difficult to say no to doing three guys and then four and so on. And if they’ve done anal then why not DP and then TP and then who knows?8
Maggie’s worries came towards the end of an interview in which she had been enthusiastic about various forms of pornographic representation and practices including BDSM and group sex which she thought would probably upset most ‘ordinary people’. I could use this quotation as an indication of ‘a conscience’; however, that does not adequately reflect her discussion of pornography as a whole. The comment doesn’t start from a questioning of harm within the image (is this woman having an authentically good time?) and she is not worried about the effects of the image on either herself or other viewers; instead her quandaries revolve around questions of agency for the actress. To make any claim of ‘conscience’ for this woman is to perpetuate the picture of the pornography consumer as a special case divided into ‘good’ consumers and ‘bad’.
Public talk about women using porn often emphasises a level of coming to terms with sexually explicit materials, a sense that women have had to ‘desensitise’ themselves or practice some form of ‘aversion therapy’ in order to enjoy porn and sexual pleasure (as advocated by Germaine Greer in the 1970s9); even as the numbers suggest a rise in women’s consumption of pornographic representations, they are often dismissed as a coarsening of a natural and properly feminine sensibility towards the sexually explicit, something which is evident in women’s own ambivalences in discussions about watching pornography:
I wasn’t sure that I would like it, or that, or that, I could like it. I mean … I was always told that it was dirty and that it was … well brutal and that women just had things done to them. Y’know that men do and women are done to and that they don’t really want to be there… So when I watched … not the first time, but later I was kinda surprised to find I was enjoying it and it was like my dirty little secret at first … and sometimes, well it still is… I mean, I’m still not sure it’s okay to do it … I couldn’t say [anything] about it at work or to my neighbours or anything.10
There is a constant ‘self-surveillance’ in relation to the arguments about harm which are both about the viewers own reactions – are these signs of corruption, the unruly nature of desire in the face of ‘bad’ sexual practices? – and acknowledgements of being judged by others as someone who is doing something dirty or, as Judith suggested, ‘doesn’t care about women’. So what motivates women to watch pornography, what do they get out of it, what emotional investments are made in their viewing?
MOTIVATIONS
Often accounts of ‘pornographication’ and sexualisation have emphasised the ease with which people can now access pornography;11 indeed, in the critical accounts it is asserted that it is difficult to avoid porn – it appears to be everywhere, bursting upon us when we least wish it.12 However, even as sexualised imagery crops up in mainstream media, porn viewing, like most interests, is one that needs to be pursued. DVDs or downloads have to be chosen and purchased, sometimes at considerable expense. Time needs to be set aside to watch them – and often viewers have to ensure that there will be no interruptions to get the best out of their film. Unless the film is being screened in company, viewers try to avoid the need to explain why they are watching: ‘God, I’d just die if he knew I was watching it on my own!’13 Consuming porn requires space to engage one’s imagination: this may be to separate the body from what it was doing earlier – domestic chores in the case of some of my interviewees – to engage with it as a feeling and possibly aroused body. This setting aside of time is a symptom of our cultural shame around viewing pornography but is also a requisite of engaging properly with the material.
So why do women watch pornography? For Chris its importance in her life is very complex:
I like to watch porn because it reminds me that I’m not just this part-time worker and full-time mum and a long-term partner and stuff, but that I have a body which feels sensational sometimes, does that make sense? It’s like it’s possible to be me in my everyday life but at the same time feeling like I used to before kids and everything… I have friends who complain … that it all used to be different when they first got together – well of course it did, you didn’t have kids, probably didn’t have a job you really cared about or needed or whatever … you go from feeling kind of loved up, really interested in each other’s bodies and stuff to just a quick peck and roll over … everything else is in the way. And that’s really what I get out of watching porn is that you can sort of gear yourself up … get yourself feeling excited again … I feel more laid back and stuff if I’ve watched a film (and not just if I’ve actually come when I watch it) I mean sometimes I just watch them like I would some daytime TV programme and it just lifts my spirits and gives me a kind of high all day and I really like that and … later I’ll be really touchy feely with Paul and I just enjoy that, I just enjoy that sensation of being relaxed and not cross with the world and just able to sit stroking his hair or letting him do that to me while we watch the telly and we go to bed and maybe we have sex but not always and that’s great too. Its just I feel more open rather than my usual tense and kind of resentful self if I’ve had a bad day – some people probably go to the gym for that or have some wine or something but I do like reading or watching or just thinking about sex to make me feel less tense.14
This fits with the idea of pornography as an outlet for feelings not met elsewhere – the therapeutic model of consumption. However, there is something more offered here – a sense of preparing and planning for being part of a couple. A way of reinvigorating not just sexual feelings towards a partner but of preparing oneself for interactions which are not fraught with the domestic problems of the everyday and of reconnecting with one’s own body. The offered motives also deflect any likely criticisms – within the context of her loving and monogamous relationship, pornography is a means to ensure that she’s not tense and irritable when the children and her husband come home; orgasms, feeling sexy are not necessarily experienced as spontaneous, they are part of family life and need to be planned for.
Yet Chris doesn’t use the vocabulary of performance enhancement – learning techniques, for example. Instead, she talks of pornography’s place in her personal history. Her sex life (articulated at various points in the interview in terms of not having time or energy for sex) has seemingly fallen out of alignment with her self-image; Chris described her life in ways that showed she valued her former, sexy, spontaneous, responsive self and was unhappy to find these qualities disappeared with the advent of children, marriage and career. Her viewing of pornography stemmed from this disappointment. Anthony Giddens’ concept of the project of the self could be used to explain her desire to retain some element of that former sexy self but as Nick Crossley suggests in his discussion of gym-going,
Contra Giddens, these agents were not setting out, pro-actively, to construct a particular body or narrative. They were seeking to recover something they had lost, to return to former glory. For the same reason, talk of social norms and ideals is not quite right either. Their concern was more focused upon the contrast between past and present selves and was framed as a personal preference, even if preferences tended to coincide with social norms and ideals. The reference point of the agent was not a social standard, accessed through advertisements, celebrities or some other conduit of common culture, but rather their own past self, as revealed by experiences that effected a contrast.15
So, drawing on this, I suggest that for Chris a reason which explains her viewing also justifies her further use of pornography: it is her personal response to the problems of long-term monogamous relationships – the comfort and domesticity, the mundaneity that goes to destroy passion – but it is also one which contributes to the smooth maintenance of her marriage and, by extension, her family.
However, I do not suggest that her sexual-consciousness or motivations for watching porn are simply an appropriation or effect of discourses of ‘keeping her man’. Her porn viewing is a response to particular circumstances and a particular reflexive understanding of herself and her body. Chris’s motivations could be understood as doubled: watching porn keeps alive her sense of sexual feeling for herself and provides a sense of excitement in the midst of the domestic – she uses porn precisely because it fractures the notion of the mundane, the routine, even though her use of it could be understood as routine, watched as if it is daytime TV:
I like the feeling of being turned on, of feeling sexy, of just… Of having my body feel kind of tingly all day and then there might be sex or not but it doesn’t matter whether I … masturbate or if when Paul comes home – I mean when we go to bed, whether we have sex or not because its just a nice feeling, feeling my body.16
This seems to me to seriously complicate the claims that porn viewing is entirely tied up in the structural inequalities of heteronormative, patriarchal society. It is important to recognise the very individual personal histories that are intertwined with the sense-making and pleasures of pornography. Pornography may involve processes of learning but why should we believe these are limited to compliance with instructions? Fantasy and imaginative-play clearly have a role to play. Moreover, the motivations Chris outlines make clear that fantasy is not a separate sphere from her ‘real’ life: it has an organic role, it doesn’t dominate her life or skew her perception of ‘normal’ sex as anti-porn theorising might suggest.
Fantasy offers rich kinaesthetic pleasures firmly allied to Chris’s sense of her own body. Chris declared that masturbation was not the key imperative of her porn viewing, rather her interest often lay in feeling aroused and the pleasures of a heightened perception of her body throughout the day. This may well be an example of transforming one’s ‘being in the world’, one’s sense of embodied self. For Chris, watching porn brings the body back into focus in ways that are positively felt: emotionally, psychically and physically. Her newly re-embodied self moves alongside her motherly, wifely and employee self. In some ways of course, through her discussion of her earlier history as a sexually active woman, she may be suggesting that this embodied self is closer to her ‘true’ self.17 These pleasures or possible uses of porn are available to Chris because she puts in the time and effort to view porn, she can discriminate between different forms, she knows what she wants in a film and what films will suit her on a particular day.
FIGURE 12.1 Fantasy spaces and everyday actions: active female gratifications in the films of Anna Span
AUTHENTICITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF PORNOGRAPHIC PERFORMANCE
What does it mean to think about porn viewers as discriminating consumers and how do they discriminate between films? Even those commentators who investigate pornography as more than sets of images invading softened minds have a tendency to generalise about individual films, claiming that sex scenes and the sex acts encountered therein are interchangeable. It is simplistic in the extreme, to claim that all porn is the same; for regular viewers there are clearly means by which one chooses between titles, although these are unlikely to be easily accessible to market research! As Angela told me,
Oh … I do like some of the celebrity stuff – I like the fact I can do two things at once, get the gossip as it were and get turned on! I like the Pammy and Tommy vid, probably for all the same reasons everyone ever says – that it looks like they’re in love and all that but it does some really … it’s authentic, that’s how they were feeling so that’s really good. I saw the Paris Hilton thing too but I can’t stand how she looks so apart from the interest in seeing what she does in the nude and when she’s getting rude, I didn’t enjoy that much. Oh god … I watched the Lea one – from Big Brother – YUK! That’s one thing I don’t like is the fake tits – I understand why women might want to do enlargements or whatever but in a movie they just look hideous, when a guy is groping them or whatever, they just move like balloons and the nipples are so stretched you can’t believe they have much sensation so I hate that… I do quite like that amateur stuff though, the audition tape stuff and Ben Dover although I get really bored with all the anal – I don’t mind watching that but sometimes films just have too much of it and its like … enough already with the arseholes! Do something else!18
This account is contradictory – the means by which Pam and Tommy Lee: Stolen Honeymoon (1998) is judged is only partially applied to the Paris Hilton tape: both are celebrity videos and score on that count, but Hilton’s is judged by how she looks and Pam by the ‘authenticity’ of the performance. The Lea video is found wanting because of her breasts but this is not applied to Pam (also a possessor of enhanced breasts). Anal sex is okay but too much ruins the film.
How then might we assess films for their possible pleasures? For some, the notion of authenticity has been an important device for understanding viewers’ pleasures; the claim is that viewers obtain satisfaction from judging whether or not the pleasure they are viewing on screen is real. This presents a very interesting problematic – pornography is a form of representation purporting to show real people having real sex but viewers’ relations to this element of the real is not straightforward. Viewers clearly understand ‘real’ sex in multifaceted ways: for example, a number of levels of distinction are employed in Maggie’s talk of authenticity.
I’m not on the scene [BDSM] or anything, no way … I couldn’t … I couldn’t now – I wish I had before… So really its now just watching and reading about it. I love the whole play thing, the fact that two people have decided to work together to see how far they can go, just … to go further into your fantasies … An’ what I like, what I love to watch is the real … the way people’s muscles move, when they’re being bound or something an’ their eyes close and … the muscles tighten everywhere – in the face, their neck and no-one’s saying anything (I like that best) – them just concentrating and you can feel the anticipation … and the tension…19
Maggie’s relationship with BDSM is vicarious; as a wife and mother she feels she has no way of accessing the lifestyle or scene for herself except through pornography. Her interest in BDSM films was particularly focused on the possibilities of play and of agreeing to explore fantasy. While aware of the very scripted nature of the scenarios she watches on screen, the quotation above demonstrates she also sees these as revealing something ‘real’ to her. In the theatricality of BDSM – the costumes, the tying up, the silences and slow pacing, the scenarios reveal a truth to her in the unconscious responses of the muscles, the closing eyes and silences as evidence of the surrender of control, the giving up to pleasure. In witnessing this transformation from contract to unconscious response, Maggie can feel the anticipation, the tension and the intimacy of the moment that is being shared on screen – it is real to her.
This pleasure in authenticity was something other women talked about, sometimes in relation to the ways in which pornography can fail to deliver the ‘truthful’ performance. For example, Judith talked about girl/girl scenes:
I’m not a big fan of girl-on-girl action not ‘cos I’m anti lesbian-sex but ‘cos the scene just doesn’t seem to come from them … the angles are wrong, they kind of do that stretching their bodies up against each other and kissing with lots of tongues but so that you get to see everything, not ‘cos they’re feeling really passionate. And I think the really made up girls, lots of big hair, red lips all that stuff, they’re male fantasies rather than their own, d’y’know what I mean? I suppose I like the actors who are not so fake-looking … and whose performances are not so fake…20
While Judith knows that these are performances of sexual interaction there is a level of sincerity about the performance she requires for it to ‘work’. It may be that what is lacking for her in such scenes is a sense of intimacy in the interaction but its signal failure lies in the bodily performance which is too aware of its audience. Her measure here is of two performance styles – one, the stylised porno girl-on-girl routine and the other, an imagined ideal where women are more interested in each other than in the camera. Chris also talked about the failure in genuine sexual connection:
One thing I wish is that they’d follow the line of sex through – y’know they’re showing really hot sex and it seems like its all really them … them losing all their inhibitions and stuff but then it never really goes the whole way. Like in orgy scenes you have a few guys and girls getting it on and of course there’s always the girl/girl scene but you never get a boy/boy scene except y’know the double penetration or double anal but y’know if they were really turned on then I think the guys’d start blowing each other or touching each other, even fucking each other and I’d really like to see that. I think it’d be sooo hot…21
Thus, the self-claimed excess of pornography – the multiple couplings and the supposed abandon of the orgy scene – can work against viewer pleasure in that it demonstrates pornography’s own boundaries and taboos. While what is being performed is ‘real’ – couples are engaged in sexual interactions – the emotional and sensual real is thwarted by the actors’ adherence to the taboo on male/male intercourse. The actors don’t test enough boundaries, the film disappoints because it doesn’t deliver what it promises. This was something Samantha complained of:
But why I didn’t like some of the films was the soft focus stuff, I really don’t, where they’re pretending it’s something more than it really [is]. Where they pretended it wasn’t really porn … more classy than that and I know a lot of that was just to get around the censors but in a way if you’re going to go in for watching other people having sex you might as well make it dirty sex that the people on screen are really enjoying…22
So authenticity, as required by Samantha and others, is a sense of the performance exceeding its own scripting where the performers appear to go beyond the call of duty (to present ‘real’ sex) to a spontaneous loss of their professional control in unguarded pleasure. And, in addition, a filmic experience true to the form of pornographic representation, that is not afraid to say this is sex for the pleasure of watching sex. Angela described this ideal:
I like Anna Span films […] Actually this is going to sound ridiculous but .…I LIKE their clothes! I mean I like their style … quite funky, nice jewellery and stuff … and they look like normal everyday people.
The guys are nice looking in a kind of ordinary way … what’s really nice is that the guys smile a lot … they do lots of eye contact and flirting and stuff and you really feel like they’re into each other … like they’re really pleased they’ve struck lucky with each other… The one I really like has this girl going to the country with her friends and them driving around in a fire engine and then her and this one guy get it on while their friends go for beers or something. I like that one a lot ‘cos he smiles ALL the time, its like he can’t believe his luck and the other thing is that when he’s doing oral on her he keeps looking up at her like he actually wants her to enjoy what he’s doing… There’s another scene on that vid I like too – where the guy is doing oral and he’s pushing his fingers in and out of her too and I dunno… the angle you see from is just good … that bit always turns me on because he’s obviously enjoying what he’s doing to her and so is she…23
FIGURE 12.2 The pleasures of porn performance: authenticity as audience satisfaction in Anna’s Mates
Angela enjoys what might be termed the ‘ordinariness’ of certain genres of pornography – at one level the pleasure of this film lies in its story, the outline of an emerging relationship that justifies the sexual interaction and the seeming genuineness of the various performances.
But also there’s a mundaneity to the storyline that suggests a particular kind of recognition for her: the realness of the sex is allied to a recognition of ‘ordinariness’ (the jewellery, the clothes, the men are all familiar). Chris appreciated a more overtly ‘professional’ performance:
This guy runs flames over the woman’s body – fast, mind – and touches … like they do with waxing to calm the nerves … and I think that looks incredibly hot … ha ha… sorry!… um I mean it looks like a really sexy thing to happen but y’know I think about how that might feel; but also know it’ll never happen because if I suggested it to Paul and he said yes and we tried it I’d be scared stiff he’d do it wrong and like the guy in the film obviously knows what he’s doing – its like watching people in the circus … ha … yeah that’s what its like … like its really exciting to watch because it is dangerous because only some people have the nerve for it and the skill to do it… So in a way what I’m saying is that some stuff, that I know other people find disgusting, I can find it fascinating or horny or whatever because they’re skilled at it.24
Even as they are aware they are watching an ‘artificial’ performance of sex, viewers can appreciate the performance on a number of levels – if the performers demonstrate a sense of spontaneity, a skilfulness or playfulness, the opportunity of sharing an intimate moment, there is the possibility of the film revealing a genuinely real moment – a truth about the transformative potential of sexual abandon and sensual enjoyment: a sensual enjoyment which is seen on the bodies of the performers and felt in the bodies of the viewers. This pleasure does not have to be straightforwardly transparent to Chris:
Sometimes though I don’t think it has to be about having a good time; I also like stuff where people look a bit trepidatious, like they’re worried about what’s going on – I think that’s why I like The New Devil in Miss Jones even though it’s a bit cheesy … she’s acting all that shyness and stuff but she does it well and then when she has the sex of all kinds you have the feeling that it is a revelation, that she’s learning about her body and finding out that she can really feel things. And the fact she’s been scared is good for that.25
Thus interviewees talked of more complex pleasures coming from particular moments in films which could be ‘difficult’ to watch, as Samantha explained:
Y’know there’s such a lot of spitting in films now and I can’t get my head round why… I mean I know its good to have lots of lubrication when you’re having sex and being really wet can feel amazing but … um … um spitting is a horrible habit and sometimes they do it in the films with this real sense that they think its disgusting too and that what they’re spitting on is disgusting. And, I don’t know how to react to it ‘cos sometimes it’s just part of a great oral scene and its good and then other times … just makes me want to gag or even worse … I just feel … I feel like … it’s kind of degrading … and then I can feel real bad that I was enjoying this ‘cos I think that guy hates women … he … uuuugh! And I think who’s it for? Is it for lube or is it ‘cos everything is dirty … Am I supposed to know she’s a … a … slut?
CS: And does that ruin the film for you? That it’s horrible to women?
Not always, no … ‘Cos lots of women do it too to the guys … it’s the spitting that’s really horrible … sometimes the way women spit on the guy’s dick is just … uuuugh.26
For this woman, spitting might be what Martin Barker and Melanie Selfe have called a challenge moment – ‘moments of abrasion between points in the film, and cultural and ethical presumptions in viewers’.27 Challenge moments appear to need reconciliation in terms of plausibility or meaning both within and outside the film. Pleasure in the film seems to be dependent on whether such reconciliation is possible, although Samantha questioned the necessity for this.
But its interesting, isn’t it, that its only in porn where we expect everyone to make clear that they’re enjoying it? ‘Cos in other kinds of films we can watch people crying and think yeah this is part of the story, and yes I feel bad for you and stuff, but that it doesn’t then ruin the story, it’s a part of it. But here in porn, its like you can’t have any complications and that you’re a bad person if you’re watching someone, man or woman, looking like they’re having a bit of a hard time. And also, if there’s like a kid in an ordinary film, crying ‘cos their mum’s died or whatever, we don’t immediately think that’s terrible how could the producers treat that little girl like that, we don’t immediately think that distress is for real, but we do in porno.28
My own research, and that of others in the field, shows that female consumers of pornography are constantly dogged by questions of harm, subordination, objectification and authenticity and the need to consider women’s well-being before their own pleasures in watching or reading pornography – but this may be as much to do with the questions and approaches researchers take. Do researchers construct and determine the socially acceptable or naturally feminine response to pornography? What experiences are we sidelining in our attempts to ensure that the porn consumers we interview are the ‘good’ ones?