Okay, of all the stuff I read this weekend about the Values Voters Summit, this had to be the best. Michael Schwartz, Sen. Coburn’s chief of staff, accused pornography of creating homosexuality. First, he inferred a natural hatred of gay men in young boys that we should supposedly applaud.
But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct.
I love how, when people teach children a prejudice, and then the children parrot that prejudice, the parents gleefully announce that the kids thought of it on their own. It’s like when people claim that 4-year-old girls are just born wanting princess shit, and the heavy amount of marketing aimed at them has nothing to do with their desires. What kids are born with is a lack of context, and they spend the vast majority of their time trying to figure out how to be. If that was your only job, you’d be a fast learner, too. Anyway, boys are good homobigots until….they see naked women.
He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.
In other words, try to scare your boys off using pornography by telling them that it will make them gay. When a wingnut says stuff like this—-that naked ladies make you gay or that every man really wants to have gay sex, but has to fight the urge like mad—-I’m forced to wonder if the entire “family values” movement would fall apart if every gay man in the closet just came out already. Because seriously, if porn did push a few more dudes into homosexuality, who gives a shit?
With that in mind, I want to link this excellent post by Becky Sharper, who has a wonderful sense of irreverence in the face of people who are going to give you the least generous read imaginable when you suggest that perhaps porn isn’t all roses and fountains of gold. I hesitate to open this can of worms, because when I pointed out that the facial exists in porn as a symbolic marker of female degradation, many, many, many people deliberately misread me, claiming that I said that coming on the outside was wrong, or that if any touched your face, it was wrong, or that you’re a bad person if you like being degraded in bed. All I said was that it’s funny to me that something that is overtly about employing the “this slut deserves to be humiliated” trope in porn gets to send its message to an audience that wants to hear negative things about sexual women, and the rest of us will pretend that they just didn’t say that.
Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument—-that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation—-is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the “family values” narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity.