In episode 15, season 2 of Sex and the City, Samantha Jones, the most sexually adventurous of the four women depicted in the series, finds herself confronted with a recalcitrant lover who is demanding oral sex. She is not inclined to oblige him, and gives him a detailed tutorial on the logistics and strenuous efforts involved. She finishes her enlightening discourse by saying: “Honey, they don’t call it a job for nothing!”
While this is hilarious, not least the mixture of resentment and hope on the face of the recalcitrant lover, it produces a serious question that all women and girls need to ask about any male-demanded sexual activity: what’s in it for me? What appears to be in it for women and girls, on the plethora of pornography sites now being viewed by young people in Ireland as early as nine to 10 years old, is strangulation, slapping and other kinds of physical abuse, insults and the assumption they will be utterly compliant in their degradation, as well as the prospect of having intimate videos of themselves engaged in such practices posted on the internet.
Eoghan Cleary is a secondary schoolteacher and passionate advocate for children’s rights to be free of constant bombardment by ever more extreme porn videos. He runs classes for his pupils to educate them in how to manage this tsunami, how to understand that sex does not have to be as it is represented in porn – aggressive, dominant, abusive males and submissive, uncomplaining, supremely compliant females. The students, in interviews, express serious gratitude that they are allowed to talk about porn with a concerned adult, and they report consequent changing attitudes towards sexuality and sexual practice for both girls and boys.
As Ellen Coyne recently reported in The Irish Times, gardaí and medical professionals are now expressing concern at the increasing rate of strangulation injuries coming to their attention. The Minister for Justice has said: “This invasive, insidious, toxic material often pushes a world view that men are entitled to control women, with violence and sexual violence part of that control. Unfortunately, this content is increasingly accessible, and increasingly normalised.”
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Well, yes, but what is to be done? Can every school and university in the country have properly funded access to the kind of supports provided by Cleary and the Rape Crisis Centre? Is anyone going to ban online representations of activities which are illegal offline?
Will parents stop giving their young children unsupervised access to smartphones, where it is inevitable they will come into contact with extreme pornography?
Pornography has been around for as long as human beings have existed.
Up to 40,000-year-old representations of giant penises and prominent vulvas are parts of the earliest archaeological record. Of course they represent fertility as well as sexual activity. We have been interested in and enchanted by sex from the beginnings of our time on this planet. But extreme pornography is now available in vast quantities online, and increasingly being viewed by children, as well as adults.
Part of the problem with criticising pornography is the legacy of anti-porn activists like Mary Whitehouse and Phyllis Schlafly, both antifeminist, deeply conservative and definitely not sex-positive. Liberal opinion until recently has opposed curtailing access to pornography on grounds of free expression, sexual liberation and the right to watch whatever turns you on.
Feminist opinion has been, since the 1970s, sharply divided between pro- and anti-porn activists and writers. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon collaborated in the 1970s and 1980s to have legal limits put on pornography as a civil rights matter, citing its degradation and subordination of women.
Their approach eschewed the traditional charge of obscenity; they sought the passage of ordinances which would allow women to sue if they could prove harm from pornography. They placed pornography in a civil and human rights space, comparing the view of women expressed in its products as akin to that of black Americans before the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s.
In their influential book, Pornography and Civil Rights, published in 1988, they refer to “the outright buying of liberal credibility, which parades a traffic in human beings – this auction block on every news-stand in the country – as a principled means of sexual and expressive freedom, and stigmatises doing or saying anything about it as censorship.”
Dworkin and MacKinnon were operating in the era of print pornography, so-called top-shelf magazines. Video was just starting to be affordable, and they were decades away from pornography’s big moment – access to the internet. Although they had some success in getting their proposed ordinances through legislative assemblies, beginning with Minneapolis, they ultimately foundered on the rocks of misogynist resistance.
Sex-positive feminism, led largely by gay women, had arguments about freeing porn from its undeniable violent content, and creating woman-friendly pornography, which could also serve as a sex education tool. But that means the bad stuff stays in place, with its algorithmically voracious appetite for more extreme content.
Freedom of expression, constantly flouted these days by the government of the United States, is regarded with enormous reverence by good people, but they cannot mean it to produce an 11-year-old girl watching, on her phone, a woman being strangled, beaten and spat on during sex, the perpetuation of dangerous myths about female inferiority and desire for domination, or the generation of vast profits for porn companies and the private tech companies who provide their platforms?
Human sexuality is as various as we are, and some of it can be very dark. But it’s mostly not. The idea that boys and men are only capable of sexual relationships with girls and women that degrade them and put them in physical danger is ludicrous. A judicious mixture of long-overdue, properly enforced regulation, and the kind of enlightened supports for children and adolescents supplied by Cleary and the Rape Crisis Centre could make life so much better for young people trying to navigate the fascinating and often perplexing channels of sexual identity and pleasure.
Billie Eilish, talented singer and songwriter beloved of many girls and young women, has spoken of her early porn addiction: “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11. I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much. The first few times I ... had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”
Younger sisters, always ask what’s in it for you.
Catriona Crowe is former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland
