Just a john? Pornography and men's choices
a talk by Robert Jensen
[Talk delivered to the Second Annual Conference on the College Male,
Saint John's University, Collegeville, MN, February 26, 2005. This
version reflects changes based on comments of conference
participants.]
There has been much talk at this conference about the need for men to
love each other and be willing to speak openly about that love. That is
important; we need to be able to get beyond the all-too-common male
tendency to mute or deform our emotions, a tendency that is destructive
not only to ourselves but to those around us. Many this weekend have
spoken about our need to nurture each other, and that's important, too.
But it's also crucial to remember that loving one another means
challenging ourselves as well.
That's what I would like to do today, to challenge us -- in harsh
language -- on men's use of pornography. In an unjust world, those of us
with privilege must be harsh on ourselves, out of love.
This challenge is: Can we be more than just johns?
Let me start with a story that a female student at the University of
Texas told me. She was riding from Austin to Dallas for a football game
on a bus chartered by a fraternity, on which many of the passengers were
women. During the trip, someone put into the bus' VCR a sexually explicit
video. Uncomfortable with those hardcore sexual images of women being
used by men, the female student began a discussion with the people around
her about it, and one of the men on the bus agreed that it was
inappropriate. He stood up and said to the other men, "You all know me
and know I like porno as much as the next guy, but it's not right for us
to play this tape when there are women on the bus."
No doubt it took some courage for that young man to confront his
fraternity brothers on the issue, and we should honor that. But we should
recognize that his statement also communicated to his fraternity brothers
that he was one of them -- "one of the guys" -- who, being guys, naturally
like pornography. His objection was not to pornography and men's routine
purchase and use of women's bodies for sexual pleasure but to the viewing
of it with women present. He was making it clear that his ultimate
loyalty was to men and their right to use women sexually, though that use
should conform to some type of code of chivalry about being polite about
it in mixed company.
In doing that, he was announcing his own position in regard to sex. He
was saying: I'm just a john.
Pimps and johns
A john is a man who buys another human being for sex. Typically that
other human being is sold through an intermediary known as a pimp.
Pimps sell the bodies of other people (most typically, a male pimp
selling a woman) to a third person (who is almost always a man).
Men sell women to other men for sex: Pimps and johns.
There is much that could be said about the current cultural practice of
using the term "pimp" in a wide variety of other contexts -- for example,
the MTV show "Pimp My Ride." We live in a world in which men who sell
women are glorified. It also is a world in which the dominant white
culture implicitly defines a pimp as black and then alternately
celebrates and denigrates them. The confluence of racism and sexism in
these cultural trends deserves discussion. But today I want to
concentrate not on the pimps but on the johns, on the men who buy women
for sex.
I assume that lots of the men in this room use, or have used,
pornography. I assume that lots of the men in this room masturbate, or
have masturbated, to pornography. So, I assume there are lots of johns
and former johns in this room.
I don't mean that most of us have necessarily bought a woman from a pimp
in prostitution, though no doubt some in the audience have. I'm talking
about the far more common experience of masturbating to pornography. In
my childhood and young adulthood, I was sometimes a john. Virtually every
man I know has been a john. Some number of you in this room no doubt
still are johns.
In pornography, the pimp is called a publisher or a video producer, and
the john is called a fan or a pornography consumer. But that doesn't
change the nature of the relationships: One person (usually a man)
selling another person (a woman) to a third person (usually a man).
So, pornography is pimps and johns, mass-mediated. When you masturbate to
pornography, you are buying sexual pleasure. You are buying a woman. The
fact that there are technologies of film or video between you and the
pimp doesn't change the equation. Legally, it's not prostitution, but
you're a john. Legally, you're not in trouble, but you're still just a
john.
The pornography that johns like
At this point, let me define a few terms. In this discussion, I'm using
the term pornography to describe the graphic sexually explicit material
that one finds in a pornographic video store that depicts primarily
heterosexual sex and is consumed primarily, though not exclusively, by
heterosexual men. Such material is also widely available on the Internet.
There are, of course, other genres of pornography (such as gay or
lesbian). But I'm speaking today of the material that I would suspect
most of the men in the room have used most routinely -- those DVDs and
videos that are the bulk of the commercial pornography market.
There are three consistent themes in that pornography:
--All women want sex from all men at all times.
--Women naturally desire the kind of sex that men want, including sex
that many women find degrading.
--Any woman who does not at first realize this can be turned with a
little force (though force is rarely needed because most women in
pornography instinctively understand their "true" sexual nature).
The pornography industry produces two major types of films, features and
gonzo. Features mimic, however badly, the conventions of a Hollywood
movie. There is some minimal plot, character development, and dialogue,
all in the service of presenting the sex. Gonzo films have no such
pretensions; they are simply recorded sex, often in a private home or on
some minimal set. These films often start with an interview with the
woman or women about their sexual desires before the man or men enter the
scene.
All these films have a standard series of sex acts, including oral,
vaginal, and anal penetration, often performed while the men call the
women "bitch," "cunt," "whore," and similar names. As they are
penetrated, the women are expected to say over and over how much they
like the sex. As pornography like this has become increasingly normalized
and mainstream -- readily available throughout the country by
increasingly sophisticated technology -- pornographers have pushed the
limits of what is acceptable in the mainstream.
One of the increasingly common types of sex in gonzo, and less common in
features, is the double penetration -- a scene in which a woman is
penetrated anally and vaginally by two men at the same time. Another type
of sex scene in gonzo is a "blow bang" -- a scene in which a woman
performs oral sex on a group of men, with each man in turn ejaculating
onto the woman's face or into her mouth in standard pornographic fashion.
Some gonzo tapes advertise "ATM," or "ass-to-mouth," in which a man
removes his penis from the woman's anus and she puts it directly into her
mouth.
As one pornographic film director put it: "People want more. They want to
know how many dicks you can shove up an ass. ...Make it more hard, make it
more nasty, make it more relentless."
How many dicks can you shove up an ass? It's rare, but there are films
with double anals: Two men penetrating a woman anally at the same time.
In recent years, the pornography industry has produced about 11,000 new
hardcore, graphic sexually explicit films a year. Estimates of the annual
revenues of the pornography industry in the United States start at $10
billion. For comparison, the Hollywood box office -- the amount Americans
spend to go to the movies -- was $9.5 billion in 2003.
That's a lot of johns and a lot of profit for the pimps.
Men's choices and responsibility
So, we live in a world in which men sell women to other men directly. And
men also sell women to other men through mass media. These days, women
are sometimes the buyers. And on rare occasions in recent years, women
are the sellers. That is, there are women who consume pornography and a
few women who make it. In this society, that's called progress. Feminism
is advanced, we are told, when women can join the ranks of those who buy
and sell other human beings.
All this is happening as a predictable result of the collaboration of
capitalism and patriarchy. Take a system that values profit over
everything, and combine it with a system of male supremacy: You get pimps
and johns, and pornography that is increasingly normalized and
mainstreamed, made into everyday experience. Because it's profitable in a
capitalist world. And because men take it as their right to consume
women's sexuality in a patriarchal world.
When confronted with this, men often suggest that because women in
pornography choose to participate, there's no reason to critique men's
use of pornography. We should avoid that temptation to take that easy way
out. I'm going to say nothing in regard to what women should do, nor am I
going to critique their choices. I don't take it as my place to inject
myself in the discussions that women have about this. (A new book, Not
for Sale, has interesting insights into those questions.
http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/non-fict/nfs.htm)
I do, however, take it as my place to talk to men. I take it as a
political/moral responsibility to engage in critical self-reflection and
be accountable for my behavior, at the individual and the collective
level. For men, the question is not about women's choices. It's about
men's choices. Do you want to participate in this system in which women
are sold for sexual pleasure, whether it's in prostitution, pornography,
strip bars, or any other aspect of the sex industry? Do you want to live
in a world in which some people are bought and sold for the sexual
pleasure of others?
When one asks such questions, one of the first things one will hear is:
These are important issues, but we shouldn't make men feel guilty about
this. Why not? I agree that much of the guilt people feel -- rooted in
attempts to repress human sexuality that unfortunately are part of the
cultural and theological history of our society -- is destructive. But
guilt also can be a healthy emotional and intellectual response to the
world and one's actions in it.
Johns should feel guilty when they buy women. Guilt is a proper response
to an act that is unjust. When we do things that are unjust, we should
feel guilty. Guilt can be a sign that we have violated our own norms. It
can be a part of a process of ending the injustice. Guilt can be healthy,
if it is understood in political, not merely religious or psychological,
terms.
Buying women is wrong not because of a society's repressive moral code or
its effects on an individual's psychological process. It is wrong because
it hurts people. It creates a world in which people get hurt. And the
people who get hurt the most are women and children, the people with the
least amount of power. When you create a class that can be bought and
sold, the people in that group will inevitably be treated as lesser, as
available to be controlled and abused.
The way out of this is not church or therapy, though you may engage in
either or both of those practices for various reasons. The way out of
being a john is political. The way out is feminism. I don't mean feminism
as a superficial exercise in identifying a few "women's issues" that men
can help with. I mean feminism as an avenue into what Karl Marx called
"the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will
shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the
powers that be."
We need to engage in some ruthless criticism. Let's start not just with
pornography, but with sex more generally. One of those discoveries, I
think, is not only that men often are johns, but that the way in which
johns use women sexually is a window into other aspects of our sexual and
intimate lives as well. For many men, sex is often a place where we both
display and reinforce our power over women. By that, I don't mean that
all men at all times use sex that way all the time, but that a pattern of
such relationships is readily visible in this society. Women deal with it
every day, and at some level most men understand it.
We can see that pornography not only raises issues about the buying and
selling of women, but -- if we can remain ruthless and not shrink from
our own discoveries -- about sex in general, about the way in which men
and women in this culture are commonly trained to be sexual. It's not
just about pimps and johns and the women prostituted. It's about men and
women, and sex and power. If throughout this discussion you have been
thinking, "Well, that's not me -- I never pay for it," don't be so sure.
It's not just about who pays for it and who doesn't. It's about the
fundamental nature of the relationship between men and women, and how
that plays out in sex and intimacy.
And if you think this doesn't affect you because you are one of the "good
men," don't be so sure. I'm told that I am one of those good men. I
work in a feminist movement. I have been part of groups that critique
men's violence and the sex industry. And I struggle with these issues all
the time. I was trained to be a man in this culture, and that training
doesn't evaporate overnight. None of us is off the hook.
What is sex for?
No matter what our personal history or current practice, we all might
want to ask a simple question: What is sex for?
A male friend once told me that he thought that sometimes sex can be like
a warm handshake, nothing more than a greeting between friends. Many
people assert that sex can be a purely physical interaction to produce
pleasurable sensations in the body.
At the same time, sex is said to be the ultimate act of intimacy, the
place in which we expose ourselves most fully, where we let another see
us stripped down, not just physically but emotionally.
Certainly sex can be all those things to different people at different
times. But is that not a lot to ask sex to carry? Can one human practice
really carry such a range of meanings and purposes? And in such a
context, in a male-supremacist culture in which men's violence is still
tacitly accepted and men's control of women if often unchallenged, should
we be surprised that sex becomes a place where that violence and control
play out?
This isn't an argument for some imposition of a definition of sex. It's
an invitation to confront what I believe is a crucial question for this
culture. The conservative framework, often rooted in narrow religious
views, for defining appropriate sex in order to control people is a
disaster. The liberal/libertarian framework that avoids questions of
gender and power has failed.
We live in a time of sexual crisis. That makes life difficult, but it
also creates a space for invention and creativity. That is what drew me
to feminism, to the possibility of a different way of understanding the
world and myself, the possibility of escaping the masculinity trap set
for me, that chance to become something more than a man, more than just a
john -- to become a human being.
Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of
Inequality and is working with the producers of the forthcoming
documentary film "Fantasies Matter: Pornography, Sexualities, and
Relationships." He can be reached at
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.