thought paper 3

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Thought Paper 3: Instructions and Topic
Please read all of the instructions for your third thought paper. It is very important that you
follow the instructions and write on the topic provided here. If you have any questions, either
post those questions on the course Webpage Discussion Board or send me an e-mail with
your questions.
I. Thought Paper Instructions
1. Thought papers must be double-spaced, 12 point type, Verdana, Arial or Times New
Roman font, black font type, with 1″ margins. Your name and “PHIL 301 – Thought
Paper 3” must appear in the upper left-hand corner. You must include a total word
count in the upper left-hand corner, and your must properly number the pages of your
thought paper. Do not have a separate cover page; begin your thought paper on page
1. Failure to follow these directions may result in a 5-15% grade reduction on the
thought paper.
2. You may approach the thought paper in whatever way you feel best reflects your
own style, interests and beliefs about the topic. What is important is that you use
ideas/concepts from the required readings (you must use and refer to at least two of
the required reading) as well as stating and explaining your own views relating to the
question. If you use any writings or ideas from other people (e.g., from books,
newspapers, WebPages, journals, etc.) you must provide the appropriate citation. You
may use whatever referencing style you are most familiar, though you must include
all the relevant bibliographical information as well as the relevant page numbers. Your
thought paper must be at least 1000 words (excluding your name, references, page
numbers, etc.)
3. You must have an opening paragraph that summarizes the problem with which you
are going to deal in your paper and the approach you will take in dealing with the
problem. You also need a closing paragraph at the end of your paper that summarizes
the principal finding(s) in your paper, and that clearly states your own opinions about
the topic with which your paper dealt. Thus, to some degree, the closing paragraph
will mirror your opening paragraph, though it does go beyond it in summarizing the
conclusions of your analyses and your own final opinions.
4. Two of the criteria for assigning grades to your thought papers are spelling and
grammar. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you write your thought paper
using a standard word-processing package (e.g., MS WORD) and run both the “spell
check” and the “grammar check”. Doing this will not necessarily catch every error (in
other words, do not use these tools “blindly”), but it will help. In general, remember
that grammatically simple, straightforward sentences are good to use.
5. A good, general guideline for writing philosophy papers is Jim Pryor’s “Guidelines
on Writing a Philosophy Paper”, online at:
http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html
6. You need a “Bibliography” at the end of your paper. I recommend using the MLA
format for your bibliography. You can find an online version that has most of the
formatting information that you need at:
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http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/
(scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the “Works Cited” links for the specifics).
In addition, if you quote or use the ideas of someone on the body of your paper, then
you will need the appropriate embedded reference.
7. There are many ways that you can approach the topic of the thought paper. I leave
it up to you to discover the format that best captures your own voice and thoughts.
However, an important part of the thought paper is to explain (that is, critically reflect
upon and justify) you own opinions. One standard way to approach the thought paper
is:
(a) Identify, clarify and explain the concepts and methodologies that are
relevant to the thought paper topic. In this paragraph, you should clearly state
the principal ethical issues with which you will deal in your paper. This is your
opening paragraph.
(b) State your own opinions about the topic and explain why you have those
opinions. This is, after all, a thought paper whose intent is to have you develop
more fully and thoughtfully your own opinions.
(c) In the context of (b), make the strongest case you can in support of your
opinion. Think of it like a courtroom in which you are trying to convince a group
of impartial jurors that your opinion is the correct one and that opposing
opinions are the wrong ones. Obviously if you are doing this, simply saying,
“That’s the way I was brought up”, or “That’s what all my friends think” is not
going to win you the jury. Moreover, using the ideas/concepts of one or more
of the required readings will help you “build your case”.
(d) At the end of your thought paper, you should have your final, closing
paragraph that includes a summary statement about your opinion. Remember
that the goal of your paper is NOT simply to state your opinions. Stating your
opinions is part of your goal, but it is not the entire goal. A very important part
of your goal is to reflect thoughtfully on the topic, and then to use critical
reasoning to explain what you believe and to provide some appropriate
justification for your opinions.
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II. The Topic for Your Third Thought Paper
For your third thought paper, I want you to reflect critically on the article below. The article
deals with issues associated with sexuality, sexual relationships, pornography, and whether
pornography can be “ethical”. Be certain to make use of the readings assigned in the
course, and to explain fully what the central ethical issues are I the article. In addition,
state and explain your own opinions on the topics raised by the article.
Is there such a thing as ethical porn?
Online at: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/nov/01/ethical-porn-fair-trade-sex
Zoe Williams
@zoesqwilliams
The actors say they’re happy, the makers say it’s guilt-free – but what exactly is ‘fair trade’
porn? We find out
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They mainly call it ethical porn, though some people call it “fair trade”. The term “free range”
was essayed, but its agricultural connotations have proved too strong. “It’s the kind of porn you
would buy in Waitrose,” is how D, 40, described it. He is one of the boyfriends and sometime
co-star of Pandora Blake, 29, who runs a site called Dreams Of Spanking.
“You’re making the audience into better people?” I asked him.
“No,” D replied, “you’re allowing them to be the nice people they already are, and not have to
compromise that to watch some porn.”
We were upstairs in Dirty Dicks, opposite Liverpool Street station in London, where the cast and
crew of Dreams Of Spanking were having a party. I guess I should explain a bit about the kind of
porn they make, although the name is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of people get spanked, in a
lot of different scenarios. Blake has a major objection to spanking scenes in which the
punishment happens for a stupid reason. She doesn’t like porn in which the actors can’t act. Her
setups are curiously domestic and quotidian (a woman gets spanked by her landlady because she
forgot to feed the cat; a different woman gets spanked by her boyfriend in the bath because she
splashes him on purpose). The acting is like watching a video of a school play performed by a
person who went on to become famous. They can do it, in other words, but the production values
and the atmosphere make it seem amateurish and more human – ditto, the body types, which are
pretty varied, as body types are in real life. It is incredibly confronting to watch, in the sense that
you do feel as though you’re watching an actual sexual moment between one person and another.
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000
women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on
Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious:
porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who
performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d
internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is
exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on
everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being
exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating
what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political
beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should
you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch
might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map. It was, in other
words, a total conflict, and the rogue factor was that I don’t watch porn. So I could just absent
myself into neutrality. (I think I was chairing the meeting, so I was meant to be neutral anyway.)
A bland non-opinion is the easiest way in this combustible arena. And mainstream porn seems to
deliberately court non-opinion, in its cultivated artificiality. You can say what you like about
mainstream porn, but you cannot say that it looks real. In the way that the men are just torsos and
penises, and the women are made up and cut up to be indistinguishable, it doesn’t look that
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human. It will, I imagine, soon be entirely replaced by CGI, from which it’s already almost
indistinguishable.
What Blake does could never be generated by a computer. The film she’s making – a futuristic
dystopia in which men have been abolished – sounds a bit muesli on paper; but the landscape of
bondage, fetish and futurism is incredibly unmuesli. The shoot looks pretty lo-fi (Blake’s flat,
which she sometimes uses as a location, looks like the home of a young academic, who for some
reason needs high-spec recording equipment). Confusingly, you can see real human beings in
Blake’s films. Even more confusingly, I love it.
Dreams Of Spanking is, as Blake says, a “niche within a niche”. Nimue Allen, 30, makes less
elaborately plotted, more fetishistic porn; Ms Naughty, on her site, Bright Desire, makes very
coupley, loving porn, from Canberra; Madison Young makes densely and imaginatively plotted,
BDSM-flavoured porn that I want to call bisexual, but don’t feel that quite conveys the
unpindownability of its sexual leaning.
A common assumption is that “fair-trade” porn is going to be very soft and wholemeal and
respectful; some of it is, but most of it isn’t. It does address female sexuality in a way that
mainstream porn doesn’t (how you go from “female gaze” to “wholemeal” is, of course, via the
misapprehension that female sexuality is really sweet). “This image of ethical porn is pretty and
fluffy and storyline-driven, a hardcore version of daytime soap operas or Harlequin romance
novels,” says Sinnamon Love, previously a performer, now a “sex educator”. “But a lot of
women, especially of this younger generation, are looking for more hardcore porn that’s to their
taste.”
You won’t get the same angles in ethical porn as you would in the mainstream, and this isn’t just
female versus male gaze; this is human versus robot gaze. Nimue Allen explains: “I have tried
shooting sex scenes as mainstream porn does, so that you get the graphic close-ups. I did one
scene like that and thought, ‘This does not feel good.’ There is not any reason to get into those
ridiculous, contorted positions, other than to allow a camera to see what’s going on.” AJ, 32,
who is Pandora Blake’s PA, interjects in a practical voice: “If you’re jizzing, I don’t want to see
you jizzing. I want to see your face.”
(“God, I’m old,” I thought. “Incredibly old and prudish.” And then I thought, “I wonder how you
spell jizzing?”)
Feminism is not a prerequisite when it comes to making ethical porn, Blake says. “Feminist porn
is explicitly focused on women’s desires and sexuality. So, for example, the belt-whipping scene
where I got the life thrashed out of me, that I would say is feminist, because it’s about my
journey and my sexuality. Whereas I think it’s possible to produce male-gaze porn in an ethical
and fair trade way. That means complete respect for performers, for their boundaries and
consent. If someone says no, you don’t ask again, you don’t ask last minute in the middle of a
scene. You don’t trick them into doing stuff. You pay them. It’s not only all of those principles,
but also communicating that to your audience.”
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People protesting against porn and sex work take as their opening position that nobody would be
doing it if they weren’t coerced, or so desperate for money that it amounted to coercion. Ms
Naughty insists that the porn she produces is not done this way: “There’s this urban myth that all
of the women in porn are drug addicts or abused and don’t know what they’re doing.” She
doesn’t say this never happens, that nobody is ever on drugs; but when you look at what she
makes, you’ve never seen couples who look so consensual, so un-ground down by the heel of
life.
“I want to make it explicit to the viewer that, no, this hasn’t been produced in that way. I’m
going to depict them respectfully, but they’re also having a say in how that depiction is going to
come across. I’m not going to say, ‘Shave off your pubic hair.’ I have a respect for the bodily
autonomy of my performers. I’m not going to say, ‘Go and lose five kilos, you’re too fat.’”
Nimue Allen takes a view of pornography as real sex turned into ventriloquised desire – the
performers would be doing these things anyway, and the filming of it only adds to their
titillation.
Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed
‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”
Noelle Nica is a pornographer whom feminists rate – several of her films have won at the
feminist porn awards – but she resists the label “feminist pornographer”. In fact, feminists irritate
her. “I never liked watching boy/girl porn, because I felt the men were depicted as grunting
Neanderthals. The objectification of men in porn was that extreme. And on the practical,
economic side, men make much less per scene than women do because they’re viewed as less
important. That’s another little detail that would have feminists up in arms if the situation were
reversed. Yet nobody rallies to get equal pay for male performers.”
Now that is a new angle in the porn conversation: is it actually the men who are ill-treated? Or is
that just a cheap reversal of expectation to derail the feminist argument – a kind of
Fathers4Justice, only naked?
Danny Wylde recently had to give up a career as a performer in pornographic films after getting
priapism as a result of erectile drugs for the third time in eight years. “I received word from the
doctor in the emergency room that the more often this happens, the more likelihood of you losing
the ability to get an erection, period.” The industry doesn’t cover health insurance. Porn actors
are paid by the scene, which gives them a precarious, zero-hours type of professional life; there
are few divas, and a lot of people who feel quite dispensable and would sooner take Viagra than
cause a hold-up. “As far as taking the drugs,” Wylde recalls equably, “I would not say that it’s
something that porn producers openly tell you to do. You figure it out by talking to people. It’s a
status quo… Look, it’s exploitative in the fact that it’s a capitalist industry and it exploits labour
and so forth. But are people here against their will? I don’t think that’s true.”
It’s undeniable that the porn industry is dominated by men, and the more commercial pressure it
comes under, the more repetitive and violent this has made it. Women making porn tend to be
independent, and they tend to be making the kind of porn they’d want to watch, which means
they allow in the possibility that you don’t have to screw people just to watch them screwing.
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Madison Young started out as a performer in sex-positive porn, making films with her then
girlfriend (the sex-positive movement is one that holds “all consensual sexual activities to be
fundamentally healthy and pleasurable”). She then did a mixture of mainstream porn and
bondage and fetish modelling, before becoming a director herself. She has a very cool delivery,
as if observing tiny things down a microscope. “Fetish and bondage modelling was very much
based on skill, flexibility, endurance. A lot of positions are challenging; dance students are big in
bondage. It tends to be a more cerebral crowd in general. In the first several years, I would do
strap-on play and do modelling with women. And in 2006 I started working in mainstream porn
in LA.”
When people in porn describe the shortcomings of the mainstream, it’s not really in sexual terms.
Cindy Gallop, who started the website Make Love Not Porn, says: “All the issues that worry
people about porn are actually business issues. It has become so big, it now has norms and rules
and conventions, which is why so much of it is repetitive and boring. Everyone in the sector
competes with everyone else in the sector by doing exactly the same as everyone else.”
Madison Young makes an analogy with fast food: “The way they have made it more exciting is
to add more meat to the sandwich. The chicken, bacon, Double Whopper with barbecue sauce.
How many animals had to die for that?”
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And her experiences making mainstream porn were similar: “A bunch of guys saying, ‘Stick peg
A into hole B and we’ll make this much money.’ I had to be an aggressive communicator. I
really had to stand up for, like, ‘This is the way I like to be touched, this is what I’m OK with,
this is how I want to connect with you. How do you like to be touched?’ The director often just
didn’t get it, and would be like, ‘Oh, in five minutes, we’d like you to fake an orgasm.’”
When I roam porn/porn-critical chatrooms, they’re full of people muttering darkly about how
ethical porn has been co-opted by the mainstream and has big-studio money behind it. It’s the
classic modern double bind: if you look slick, then you’re part of the machine; and if you don’t,
you’re too small or weird to count.
It’s noticeable that fourth-wave feminists (this is a term I use to mean “younger than me”) take a
different stance, in tone and content. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who co-founded the feminist blog
the Vagenda and is in favour of more female-friendly porn, says: “It feels unnatural to be
completely against pornography, having grown up in a culture that’s so saturated in sex. I
remember being a teenager when Christina Aguilera had just done her Dirrty video; that to my
mother was pornographic, but that to me was normal. I think arguments that are anti-porn do
ignore the testimonies of lots of women who are themselves in the sex industry. You’re telling
women what they can and can’t do, you’re telling women what they should find arousing and
what they shouldn’t.”
Everyone I met at Dreams Of Spanking, or talked to in the porn world, seemed so certain that all
the industry needs is a road map, somebody curating and navigating, so that people will just stop
visiting the ugly parts, that I almost forget what there is to object to.
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Then I read this description of a scene in Gail Dines’s book about racism in porn, Pornland: a
black woman who hates white men has sex with them anyway for $1,000 because her children
are hungry. It’s the sheer lack of empathy – that anyone would want to get off on this ragbag of
child malnutrition and maternal humiliation. I find that much more appalling than classic gonzo
porn scenes, and far more fetishistic than spanking or nipple clamps. Mainstream porn
dehumanises. Whether that’s by turning all its players into body parts, erasing their differences,
adding some crappy racist backstory, the result is the same: sex remade as alienated, solitary,
bitter and ugly, the exact opposite of what it’s about.
On the sheer nastiness in a lot of the mainstream, anti-porn campaigners and ethical
pornographers are in agreement – as Cindy Gallop says: “I realised six or seven years ago,
through direct personal experience dating younger men, that we simply can’t afford to carry on
the way we’re going. We can’t have young people learn about sex through this kind of porn.”
It’s not that there is no violence in ethical porn. Truthfully, a lot of what they make, and what
they watch, is quite violent. Pandora Blake has just bought a membership to crashpadseries.com,
“which is a queer radical feminist site that’s been running for 14 years. The premise is that
there’s this apartment – if you’re in the know, you’ve got a key. If you meet someone hot, you go
there. There are cameras. It’s got some really good consensual dominance, submission. You
know, rough sex, which is what I like. But I know how it’s made, I don’t have any anxiety about
how it was created.”
There is an interesting side point, about what happens to porn when it is democratised, how
instantly it explodes into a thousand different kinks. “As an exercise,” Blake says, “look at a
Clips 4 Sale list. Make sure you’re sitting down. It hosts pay-per-download fetish content. Very
low production values, cheap overheads. They’ve got 500 categories. You have no idea of the
beautiful variety of human sexuality until you’ve cast your eye over this list. Eyeball licking…
snot” (the only time I was too squeamish to hit “enter” was the subheading “Cats”). It’s
interesting because that site was originally conceived to host regular user-made porn, and just got
colonised incredibly fast. It seems that the more the sex industry tries to hammer us into one
sexual identity, the more we rebel with riotous weirdness.
Makers of ethical porn believe you can have a violent fantasy, of any kind, and that can be a
legitimate part of your sexual identity, one that you have a right to explore. This is the point at
which anti-porn campaigners stick. There is a chasm here, between people who think that all
violence in sex is the result of a patriarchal culture and will lead to violence in real life, and
should be stamped out; and people who think that all fantasy is legitimate, and almost all of it
can be legitimately met by porn.
AJ, Blake’s assistant, says: “When people chase after paedophilic fantasies, it’s very hard to
satisfy them in a way that isn’t damaging someone. But it’s perfectly possible to seek out rape
fantasies in a way that isn’t.”
Julie Bindel, feminist and activist, is scathing about this. “Put it this way, if I had a fantasy about
having a black woman on her hands and knees scrubbing my kitchen floor and saying, ‘Yes
madam, no madam’, yes, I would quash it.”
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“The religious right and the feminist left have been indivisible to me,” says Nina Hartley, a
veteran porn star. “People who are suffering from sexual guilt, sexual anything, their suffering is
as real as a broken leg, it’s as real as cancer. They need someone who can tend to them. Who
will say, ‘Your sexual desires don’t disgust me, they don’t freak me out.’”
And perhaps this is the sophistication of ethical porn: without exploiting or harming the
participants, it allows you to explore what you’re into. You have a right not to be ashamed. This,
says Cindy Gallop, gives us our cue about how to talk about porn: “When you force anything
into the darkness, you make it much easier for bad things to happen, and much harder for good
things to happen. The answer is not to shut down. The answer is to open up.”