Yes, porn is a social blight. But the demonisation of men has to stop
In 2019, the global pornography industry was conservatively estimated to be worth $US90bn. Its social impact has always been the subject of intense controversy. In terms of numbers, its primary opponents are the religious, who pollute the debate with shifting definitions of “morality” and a relentless emphasis on the violence at the heart of men. “Sex positive” – that is to say, pro-pornography – feminists perceive their feminist opponents as enemies of feminine autonomy. As Canadian sex-positive feminist Wendy McElroy wrote, “To get upset by an image that focuses on the human body is merely to demonstrate a bad attitude toward what is physical”.
Two Australian feminist activists at the frontline of the anti-porn movement have, for years, maintained the rage. Last month, Melinda Tankard Reist, who co-founded the powerful, highly political grassroots campaigning movement Collective Shout, is releasing the anthology He Chose Porn Over Me: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn. Reist has never diverged from her central argument: that the potential for brutality in men is developed to chilling effect by pornography.
“No, you don’t just need to try harder,” she tells her readers. “It’s not you. It’s him. Porn is abuse. It’s not your job to fix him. He needs to do the work himself, and recognise he has become a patron of a global industry built on the bodies of women and girls. He needs to see the depth of suffering he caused his partner, acknowledge the erosion of his humanity and the atrophy of his empathy, and run for help.”
Caitlin Roper, her campaign manager at Collective Shout, is equally committed to the cause. Her first book, Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance, which deals with the “inherent misogyny” in sex dolls and the “threat” they pose to women and girls, will be released later this month.
“Through my research,” Roper writes, “I have been forced to confront some of the worst humanity has to offer. As I have read the words of doll owners, manufacturers, advocates, pedophiles and men’s rights activists – all defending men’s access to sex dolls in the form of women and girls – I have come to understand how so many men truly perceive women. I wrote this book to expose the inherent misogyny in the trade of female-bodied sex dolls and those who profit from it.”
Neither book brings anything new to the table, but they do have value to women whose lives have been marred by sexually dysfunctional partners. Reist’s in particular showcases the terrifying realities of the ways in which emotionally distorted men can respond to pornography.
The studies have always been depressing. Pornography consumption by women has long been shown to result in their increasingly submissive sexual behaviours. Heterosexual viewers generally accept pornography’s script of male dominance and have been shown to behave accordingly. Dr Jill Manning told the US Senate that excessive pornography use was cited in 56 per cent of divorces, and the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers concurred, stating that yes, pornography was inarguably poisoning the groundwater of intimacy.
The real problem with both the anti-porn and sex-positive ideologies is that they are based on fallacies – not in terms of the harms done by pornography, which are very real and disturbingly prevalent, but in their understanding of pornography and sexual deviation.
As I point out in my new book Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, blindness to the relationship between birth, infancy and sexual practices is universal. Feminists are particularly reluctant to address this issue because of what they fear to be the potential ramifications – namely, the understanding that any acknowledgment of the relationship will result in the erosion of maternal autonomy.
Australia, in this respect, is peculiarly backward. In 2008, when best-selling children’s author Mem Fox expressed her misgivings about little children in daycare, the backlash was swift. Calls were made to ban her books, and she was widely vilified for a perspective that is, in fact, supported by innumerable studies. This dogged insistence on maternal choice over sometimes disastrous lifelong consequences for children has never been adequately debated in this country, and any potential threat to the maternal status quo is either dismissed or ignored.
When, in 2013, I wrote Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, a book about attachment-based parenting that later made number one on Amazon in Britain, it was rejected by every local major and university publisher I approached. When best-selling childcare author and paediatric psychologist John Irvine praised Mama on the ABC, describing it as the maternal equivalent of The Female Eunuch, the childless female presenter was visibly shocked. I watched as she laboured to persuade Irvine to criticise what she clearly believed to be a retrogressive ideology, but he only emphasised his endorsement.
The issue of maternal guilt continues to be cited to me as a justification for avoiding the debate. But are mothers really so fragile that they cannot tolerate any open discussion of their role or failings in relation to their children’s health, happiness and future sexual habits?
Using high-profile examples, I explain the relationship between birth, infancy and sex at length in Apple, presenting the first rational, non-religious explanation for sex dolls, latex fetishism, and pornography.
For example, I address the pornographic vogue for female genital depilation. A source of confusion to researchers, it has been variously attributed to a cultural emphasis on “heightened sexuality”, the facilitation of genital visibility on screen, pedophilic urges, and to the retaliatory patriarchal infantilisation of women. From an evolutionary perspective, the culturally sanctioned erasure of female pubic hair appears counterintuitive, as pubic hair traps important, sexually arousing olfactory messages and reduces “mechanical friction during sexual intercourse” in addition to protecting the vagina “from parasites or other pathogens”.
This is not, however, why female pubic hair disappeared from mainstream pornography.
Female pubic hair began to be depilated in the 1940s, around the time that babies born to women whose pubic hair was shaved in preparation for birth began coming of age. As one study reported, “By the 1920s, obstetrics had refigured the perineum as pathological, and the practice of pubic shaving (in preparation for birth) became widespread.” Obstetric shaving and swabbing of the vulva remained standard practice in the First World until the 1980s, ostensibly because in the event of perineal tearing, it reduces infection. (It has, in fact, been shown that the very opposite is true: the tiny abrasions and lacerations created by shaving act as “vectors” for infection.)
The reason billions of men are now aroused by depilated vulvas, then, is not because they are pedophiles, but because they unconsciously seek to replicate the circumstances of their births.
Similarly, when a mother, because of abusive birth practices, unrelated suffering, or other reasons, is unavailable to her infant in her entirety, he can only love the inorganic fragments – among them, the latex or rubber associated with her in hospital – that return him to the matrix of his consciousness. For this reason, these fragments must, to those with the right set of variables, be presented in a humanoid form: a rubber mother, say, like those in Roper’s book.
While pygmalionism – sexual responsiveness towards an inanimate object, particularly of one’s own making – is an ancient concept, the industrial capacity for mass-produced rubber simulations of femininity did not exist until the 19th century, and even then, prudery scuppered their manufacture. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when Westwood made fetishism hip, that the first crude latex, silicone, and inflatable vinyl sex dolls hit the market.
Men who develop feelings for these “synthetic humans” are known as “iDollators”. Some live with their sex dolls as partners, styling and dressing them, taking them out in wheelchairs and in company, and generally relating to them emotionally as a newborn would to an unconscious or uninterested mother at birth. On removing his doll from her crate, one recalled, “I just held her in my arms for a while. It felt so right and natural … It seemed perfectly normal for me to treat something that resembles an organic woman the same way I’d treat an actual organic woman.” This man concluded that relating to “an organic woman doesn’t seem worth it to me”.
Reciprocity, by those who, as newborns and during early infancy, had emotionally or physically restricted access to their mothers, is experienced in adulthood as destabilising, exhausting, and unmanageably intense. Betrayals and conflicts cannot be metabolised by such people as the necessary foundation – namely, a solid sense of self – was never established. Love, to them, is one-sided, which is why they prefer masturbation, pornography, prostitution, sex dolls, stalking, unrequited love.
Texturally, sex dolls – adult attachment objects – would have a powerful emotional resonance with those who, during infancy, were, for long periods, exposed to silicone in particular in the form of bottle teats, feeding tubes, pacifiers, and so on.
This exposure would, of course, have to exist in tandem with other factors: the absence of tender, territorial maternal investment, say, or severe and sustained abuse or neglect, such as that resulting from mental illness or substance abuse.
Yes, pornograph is a social blight. Yes, governments need to intervene. Yes, pornography is a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse, detachment and dysfunction. But the demonisation of men has to stop. Our cultural deafness to the language of male violence has to stop. We need to move away from the toxic understanding of men as intrinsically promiscuous or cruel.
As a culture, we need to address the issue of an infant’s needs at birth and during early childhood. Yes, this does mean de-emphasising our insistence on maternal choice. Yes, this does mean that new behavioural markers for the sexes have to be put in place. Yes, this does mean that parents need to be supported – by family, community, and government policy – in caring intensively for their infants and little children.
The magnitude of our pornography industry is a reflection not of masculine savagery, but of increases in the prevalence of toxic birth practices. Given this, both sex-positive and anti-pornography feminists need to revise their understanding.
Pornography and sex dolls are markers of severe attachment disruptions, not by-products of satanic forces or tools for empowerment. Critically, all feminists need to begin recognising maternal choices as instrumental in the creation of sexual dysfunction. Together, we need to work towards a solution.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, can now be pre-ordered.
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