Pornography

The sex industry seems to be one of the gray areas amongst feminists. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus as to whether it is liberating to be able to play such a role for women, or degrading. Irigaray seems to have a pretty set position on this. She seems to take the latter stance.

She argues that the porn industry puts women in a subservient position to men, that what they do is what men want, and often the scripts are even written by men. In the language of our classroom, the porn industry forces women to conform in response to the gaze. Irigaray argues that even if women have “twenty orgasms”, it serves the purposes of a man, and furthermore it goes on to reinforce the notion the man is the only one capable of bringing pleasure to the woman.

One thing I’ve noticed the conservative media often do is to take any instance where a woman chooses to put her body out there, even though the point of the act is not sexual in nature, and to spin it in such a way as to make it seem that what a woman is doing is pornographic and degrading, and insinuate that she has nothing to offer other than her body to the act. One extreme case of this I remember seeing recently was when Obama girl was on the O’reilly show. O’reilly told her that all she did was take a script written by a man and flop around up there exposing her body. He seems to miss the obvious satire.



Nevertheless, in my opinion it shows that popular conservative opinion seems to coincide with that of Irigaray on the subject.