Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1
A more detailed critique of Linda Williams’ Porn Studies can be found in my
article “The Boundaries of Porn Studies.” New Review of Film & Television Studies,
4 (1), pp.1-16 (2006).
material aimed at heterosexual men). Yet, in her introduction
Williams makes the case for taking pornography seriously by
focusing on the scale and reach of a defined commercial porn
industry:
Which is why I want to argue against the prevailing trend for the
importance of maintaining the distinction between hard core
pornography and its mainstream referents, citations and copies and
I have found it most useful to do this by considering pornography as
a form of commercial sex. In commercial sex, sexual acts are
performed by real human beings for the (usually sexual) pleasure of
a paying third party. It depends upon a sexual transaction, on there
being a group of people who are willing to buy access to the bodies
of another group of people for their own sexual gratification. In
pornography, customer and performer do not necessarily interact,
but the performer’s body is still real and (like the body of the
prostitute) is really involved in the sexual acts constructed for the
sexual pleasure of this third party (which is not to argue that they
‘really’ experience those acts as shown on screen). If we locate our
study of pornography within a broader study of the sexualisation of
culture then the danger is that the specifics of this transaction are
obscured. To give one further example of this from Porn Studies, in
Williams’ description of pornographic revenue, she tags “sex toys”
on at the end of a list of pornographic products. Sex toys may well
be profitable business for porn companies, but they function here as
a kind of alibi which diverts our attention away from the specifics of
the pornographic transaction. Buying or using a vibrator is not the
same thing as buying or consuming pornography. One activity
depends upon the use of the bodies of other human beings, the
other does not. The casual equation of these activities seems to me
to be a way of making commercial sex appear less misogynistic by
suggesting that women are also consumers, ignoring the fact that
what is being sold to women – whether in the form of sex toys or
pole-dance classes – is something for their own bodies and not
sexual access to the bodies of others.
2
A more detailed account of this research can be found in my “Courting
Consumers and Legitimating Exploitation: The Representation of Commercial Sex
in Television Documentaries.” Feminist Media Studies, 8 (1), pp.35-50 (2008); and
“The Dark Side of Hard Core: Critical Documentaries on the Sex Industry”. In: Kerr,
D. & Hines, C. (eds) Hard to Swallow: Reading Pornography on Screen, London:
Wallflower (2008/09 forthcoming).
The first thing that is apparent about representations of commercial
sex on television is that the focus is almost exclusively on the
women who “sell” sex. While women’s testimony was indeed an
important aspect of early feminist work, more recently testimonies
of individual women who are pro- or anti-commercial sex have
tended to be pitted against one another and the women themselves
judged as in/authentic. This is where engaging with these
arguments at one remove – by focusing on television representation
– can be useful. Examining these testimonies in the context of an
analysis of television, allows us to unpick their generic qualities and
highlight how they function. That is, it’s not about accepting or
questioning the truth of individual women (or men), but of thinking
about how their stories are used in particular ways. This is also why I
am leaning towards the term “commercial sex” rather than
“commercial sexual exploitation”, as my experience has been that
the term ‘exploitation’ seems to invite questions/ comments that
further scrutinise the woman and not the industry. In contrast – and
in line with recent feminist campaigns around prostitution in
particular – my analysis is less concerned with the women as
individuals or even as a “class” but rather with pornography as an
industry which depends upon its male consumers and on gendered
inequality.