discipline posted:how porn in the 70s was incredibly tame
this is purely anecdotal, but i've personally heard the opposite. is there any kind of study examining this?
discipline posted:I was talking to an older feminist the other day, and she was telling me about how porn in the 70s was incredibly tame mostly because of the direct action pressure radical feminists kept up on the industry, i.e. smashing up porn shops.
LOL I'm pretty sure porn directors didn't really care that much about the response Gapin' Granny's 16 would get from feminists if it was too "extreme"
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
littlegreenpills posted:what form of direct action wd be appropriate in this day and age
Pirate porn and undercut their profits.
MadMedico posted:littlegreenpills posted:what form of direct action wd be appropriate in this day and age
Pirate porn and undercut their profits.
you realize this is part of what's driven the move towards anal shitting donkey head insertion themes, the ubiquity of regular naked people having a sex
discipline posted:I was talking to an older feminist the other day, and she was telling me about how porn in the 70s was incredibly tame mostly because of the direct action pressure radical feminists kept up on the industry, i.e. smashing up porn shops, but now that feminism is about individual empowerment and sex positivity pornographers feel free to create what is basically hate speech against women pretty normal
I don't know what "incredibly tame" means, but MacKinnon et al. were responding to something in their critiques of pornography, and it wasn't just "tame" images of people having sex. That said, it's obviously more extreme now. I just don't think it's accurate to call it all "tame," in the 70s, except maybe in relative terms.
I don't totally buy the argument she's making - I think there were probably a lot of structural factors like the way porn was created and distributed that account for many of the differences between then and now. As producers of a medium that had yet to come into its own as a mass-consumed spectacle, pornographers were in the process of creating a visual language which was specific to the genre.
The pivot from second to third-wave feminism relaxed the pressure on pornography producers. That pressure wasn't sufficient to keep things in check, though. Once the porn industry came into its own it was going to take off, shop-smashing or not.
littlegreenpills posted:what form of direct action wd be appropriate in this day and age
no fap november
roseweird posted:MadMedico posted:"Guys, we gotta reshoot some of the scenes for the Innerspace porn parody, I just got a letter from a dude who runs an adult bookstore in LA and he mentioned how this woman came in and grabbed a Hustler and set it on fire with a lighter, really caused a mess"
before men had constant easy access to pornography in the privacy of their homes they gathered at pornographic theaters and sex shops. pornographic culture at that time existed in concentrated, identifiable, sparse, and clandestine spaces, whereas it now exists in pervasive and diffuse form on the internet. at that time, men's secretive erotic spaces could be disrupted in ways they now cannot.
why are you being so rude, do you just like porn too much and feel bad
"could be," in this case, has nothing to do with "was." the era you're talking about was the most lucrative and culturally pervasive in western pornography's 400-year history, and the occasional vice raid or obscenity suit (to say nothing of extrajudicial feminist protests) did very little to stem the tide. It's true that the contemporary state of mainstream video porn is more extreme in terms of acts presented than in the 70s, but a) it also presents a more professional appearance to the eyes of the state, with mandatory registration and testing and a host of other measures that allow the avoidance of more troubling (and probably more significant) questions, and b) the pervasiveness of mainstreamed, glossy rough porn notwithstanding, significantly more graphic materials have been available within the pornographic industry since its french nascence in the 1500s. This doesn't even account for the historically singular likes of de Sade, etc. The pornographic mainstream at the time contained acts that would be considered prosecutable today in much of the US.
Materials that would make the most hardened punter retch- far more extreme than almost anything legally produced in America- are openly sold over the counter in France and most of Scandinavia. In Sweden this stuff is technically illegal, though rarely enforced, and they still allowed bestiality up until january first of this year. Some Neue Sachlichkeit materials (mostly texts) have thing that are even more graphic than that. Examples go on and on and on. The point I'm getting at is that while certain feminist critiques of pornography (halberstam, dworkin, butler, you all know the names already) can offer us a wide range of tools for dealing with the question of porn and a plethora of approaches to the problems it raises, much of the criticism of it has been the same for half a millenium and the stuff being criticized isn't novel in any way.
