NEW YORK — Prestigious fashion, art, photography and design journal Document published today an incisive article by writer Sophia Giovannitti examining the resurgence of anti-porn feminism in mainstream cultural discourse around sexual content.
In “The Resurgence of Anti-Porn Feminism,” Giovannitti makes the case that “the debate around sex work is really all about labor.”
To insist that sex “should be private and free when the conditions [of privacy-less, data-driven late capitalism] make such descriptors patently impossible,” she writes, “is to play into the impossible demands of patriarchal capitalism — the fallacy that we have on time and off time; work time and home time; internet time and private time; and that sex should always remain firmly in the latter, damned to invisible pockets of time that don’t, ultimately, exist.”
The author notes that “lately it feels like every time I open Twitter, I see a semi-viral tweet bravely decrying the evils of misogynistic or violent porn, drawing a direct causal line between the ubiquity of men watching pornography and the ubiquity of violence against women — as though the genre’s only relationship to women is interpersonal, mediated through the watching of porn by men.”
Giovannitti calls this discourse “exhaustingly one-note.”
“Any individual pretending to know that in every instance correlation is indeed causation — that pornography has an innate property ascribed to no other media, the power to give primarily men permission to behave badly in ways they otherwise wouldn’t, or wouldn’t with such frequency and zeal,” she points out, “is speaking with a certainty I can’t pretend to have”
Sex and Labor
Giovannitti points out that her “relationship to the aesthetics of sex is a peculiar one. I don’t make or sell porn, though I do other forms of work which involve presenting myself as sexually exceptional in a way that is legible to consumers of porn and the like. A lot of people I know sell porn. We speak about sexual labor the way we speak about other forms of labor: our annoyance at having to do it; trading tips and warnings; 'Has anyone ever said this to you before?;' showing one another nudes and clips and texts for the purposes of soliciting advice, compliments, or catharsis.”
Answering notable New York Times-endorsed SWERFs like Michelle Goldberg and much ballyhooed Oxford philosophy professor Amia Srinivasan, Giovannitti provides a fundamental reply to the question that their generalizing arguments so obviously beg: “Why do so many women make porn, after all, if porn is ostensibly so bad for women?”
“People make porn to make money,” Giovannatti states. “Women make porn to make money. Making money and thus avoiding the perils of life with no money — lack of housing, food, healthcare, stability, anything else — supersedes the desire to avoid any other perils, like a changed relationship to one’s sex life.”
During the pandemic, she adds, “a lot of people would rather fuck their boyfriends or girlfriends on camera and sext with customers for tips, than host at a restaurant or do any other type of service work in which they’ll be badly treated, sexually harassed and paid a pathetic hourly wage.”
To read “The Resurgence of Anti-Porn Feminism,” visit Document Journal.