Friday, Apr 23, 2010    Text size: 

PRINCETON, N.J. — Pink Visual President Allison Vivas fired back at anti-porn feminists who objected to the planned screening of porn at Princeton University’s "Let’s Talk Sex" event last month.

The school’s student government granted $1,500 to the event organizers slated to screen porn clips at a lecture to be given by porn director Tristan Taormino.

A petition was circulated to stop the viewing and reported in the school newspaper.

In an opinion piece in the The Daily Princetonian newspaper, Vivas said that many of the objections to the screenings were “…built upon faulty assumptions and flawed axioms.”

One dissenter, Shivani Radhakrishnan, president of the Anscombe Society and a member of the “Prince” editorial board, asserted that “pornography portrays women as objects of sexual desire and normalizes this objectification,” and that “there are health costs [like] addiction.”

Vivas countered and said “porn addiction” is a highly contested notion in scientific and medical circles, and it’s false to assert that all pornography portrays women as “objects of sexual desire.”

“The area in which this tired cliche is most obviously false is in the realm of gay pornography. Many gay pornographic films do not depict any women at all, much less depict them as objects of sexual desire," Vivas wrote.

She also pointed out that the generalization could falsely demonize lesbian pornographers as also being guilty of objectification.

“As both a woman and president of an adult entertainment company, Pink Visual, I strongly object to feminists presuming to speak on my behalf when they rail against pornography. The very point of feminism is to affirm that women are fully formed human beings, capable of independent thought and action, and entitled to every bit as much diversity in their thinking and actions as are their male counterparts. I would love to see women who are anti-porn show greater consideration for the opinions and actions of women who are not anti-porn, and for those of us who work in the adult entertainment business, in particular,” Vivas said.

Vivas noted that many of her company’s executives are women who love what they do and are not at all oppressed by men, which flies in the face of accusations by anti-porn feminists.

“Our company is not unique among adult entertainment companies in this regard: We are really just the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at this year’s nominees for the “Feminist Porn Awards.” I submit to you that the women represented on that list would, as I do, take umbrage with the suggestion that we are all exploiters of the female performers we employ. That assertion is not only unfair and ill-informed, but it is also deeply offensive to women on both sides of the camera.”

Vivas also asserted that porn consumption by women is on the rise and she is seeing women joining her websites and buying her DVDs. “Men still greatly outnumber women among our customers, but that margin is thinning decisively over time,” she said.

She added, “The central thrust of my point is that it simply isn’t the place of anti-porn feminists, or any type of feminists, to speak on behalf of all women everywhere. To attempt to do so is equal parts presumptuous, egotistical and ignorant.”