Reflections on Playboy and Pornography

A lot of men I have met confuse the feminist critiques of porn with the notion that feminists hate sex, pleasure and beauty. They believe that we want them to feel guilty every time they look at a picture of a beautiful naked woman or admire a woman’s body. Indeed, there is a strong strain of prudery in our culture that sometimes affects feminist thinking about these issues. However, critiquing porn is not the same thing as telling men they are bad people for wanting visual sexual stimulation.

I do not believe that sex and nudity are inherently degrading. I do not even believe that sex and nudity on camera or for money is inherently degrading. I believe that women who pose nude or who engage in sex work should be viewed as full-fledged humans with hearts, brains and souls worthy of respect.

The problem is that so much of the most popular soft-core and hard-core porn in our culture does seem to be predicated on reducing, degrading or “pulling one over” on women. I am not even going to get into hard-core in this article (mainly because I don’t have the stomach or the time to do any, um, research). But consider two of the most popular, socially acceptable and allegedly “wholesome” versions of soft porn – Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. “Playboy,” while it preaches a philosophy of sexual liberation for both sexes, is all about infantilizing women. Posing naked is not inherently degrading. But walking around with bunny ears and a cotton-tail on your ass, while gushing about how doing so is the greatest honor of your life, is degrading. Having the nude picture of yourself posted with a little cutesie yearbook entry about your likes and dislikes written in bubbly handwriting is all about portraying you as unthreatening and as powerless as possible. Being one of three girlfriends fawning over 80-year-old “Hef” while begging him to put naked pictures of you in his magazine and struggling to abide by the curfew he sets for you – also degrading.

“Girls Gone Wild” is also marketed as good, clean fun for the red-blooded American male. What young (or older) man wouldn’t want to see pretty young women appearing to spontaneously flash the cameras or engage in other sexualized behavior in the heady exuberance of the moment?  But newspaper accounts establish that “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis and his cameramen are routinely engaging in very predatory behavior on very young women, whom they encourage to become intoxicated – Francis is a first-rate misogynist. The problem isn’t nudity or sex. The problem is that these publications promote and are motivated by a demeaning view of women. I don’t necessarily see porn or sexualized images of women in our society as the major problems women face. I see them as symptoms of a larger issue in our culture, the fact that a lot of cultural views and assumptions about women in a variety of contexts have not caught up with our legal equality, and are thus still demeaning.  

While I favor full freedom of expression, I think as ethical consumers, feminist men and women can work to promote more egalitarian views of women in all areas of expression, including but not limited to pornography.

Contact  Elizabeth Marino at [email protected].