2008 Woodie Awards
Snuffed
Why Porn Still Isn't Liberating
Emily Jensen
Issue date: 3/18/08 Section: Outside the Bubble
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In several progressive circles, it's common to promote porn as a vehicle for female empowerment. A recent article in the Yale Herald, profiling an amateur porn star, made the claim that "porn brings liberation and pleasure," because women in the industry are in control. "She chooses who, she decides how, and she tells them when." But based on the most common images available, porn has less to do with women's free sexual expression and more to do with the poorly disguised maintenance of their subordination.
Here are the taglines for some free videos online:
"Hot Blonde With Tan Lines Gets Pounded"
"Brand New Babes Getting F*cked!"
"Nasty Tramp F*cked in All Positions"
It is convenient but shortsighted to imagine that a woman being strong and independent off-camera is enough to reconcile the roles she plays on-camera. Whether or not she reads the Sunday Times and speaks eloquently in her free time, the consistent trend in mainstream porn is for the woman to be the fucked, not the fucker.
Which is why it shouldn't come as such a shock when pornographic material features violence. Accessing porn in which a woman is stalked, tortured, or raped is as simple as typing in "rough sex" on your favorite search engine. When a female's body is more often being acted upon than acting for itself, she becomes a mere vehicle for other people's fantasies. And while certain feminist thinkers may champion the liberating powers of the "healthy" pornographic film, lines between what is and is not appropriate sexual behavior must be drawn with great care. Time-honored pornographic fascinations like the schoolgirl outfit and monstrously huge breasts have been a part of the business for so long that their perpetuation of sexism is nearly impossible to recognize.
This does not mean that porn as a genre should be outlawed. As Feminists Against Censorship member Holly Combe says, "if we let the government tell us what we can and can't look at, who knows what they'll be able to achieve in the future?" But at the same time, the porn industry as it exists now should not be written off as part of some secluded sexual underworld - explicit sexual images that portray violence do have ramifications.
One such side-effect is the more extreme, less accessible, and less well-known pornographic genre known as snuff. Some say it's an urban legend; others say they've seen it with their own eyes. Either way, the concept is alarming. The basic idea of a snuff film is that a person, most often a woman or child, is sexually abused and then literally murdered while the camera is rolling. To truly be snuff, the film must be intended for commercial distribution when it is made, and geared toward the sexual arousal of its producer and its audience.
In the 2006 documentary The Dark Side of Porn: Does Snuff Exist?, filmmakers, law enforcement officials and other experts discuss the history of the genre. The term "snuff" originated from the footage the Manson Family took during their 1969 killing spree in West Los Angeles. The police never discovered the actual tapes, but rumors spread that copies were circulating on the black market.
Despite the lack of proof, filmmakers were immediately captivated by the concept of an actual onscreen murder, and around the world films began to emerge that attempted to realistically fake a snuff film. The efforts produced the roots of today's excessively gory cinema, from the 1980 Italian film Cannibal Holocaust, which was so realistic that it was banned in 46 countries, to the 1985 Japanese horror flick Flower of Flesh and Blood, a movie that depicted a gruesome murder so convincingly that Charlie Sheen brought it to the FBI for investigation.
Modern films like American director Eli Roth's Hostel continue to explore the possibilities of realistic on-screen violence, but the experimentation has had fatal consequences. In July of 1989, Japanese officials arrested Tsutomu Miyazaki for abducting four preschool-age girls and reenacting and recording scenes from Flower of Flesh and Blood to rape and kill them. Because the footage of Miyazaki's murders was not intended for commercial distribution, it is not technically considered a snuff film. But this case and others discussed in Dark Side, including one regarding British suburban resident Geoffrey Jones, who lured an aspiring actress to his home for a "fake" murder film then actually hung her onscreen, illustrates the gravity of the worldwide fixation on violent films.
While cases of murder are extreme incidences, films centering on sexually motivated violence have hardly left popular culture untouched - the more mainstream types of violent porn that are readily available through the internet are not "just movies." Male chauvinist extraordinaire Tucker Max, a self-proclaimed asshole whose website chronicles his drunken debacles, published a story about a woman he dated who asked him to strangle her during sex, act out rape fantasies, and perform various other violent practices. "Aside from the freaky sex this girl was basically worthless," he wrote. "If it was sexual, she wanted it to include pain and humiliation… I was at the point where I was doing shit to this girl that could have literally gotten me thrown in jail."
When women start asking men to hurt them, it may be time we ask ourselves why. What is it about the way women view sex that makes violence attractive? It would be inadequate to place blame solely on the promotion violent fetishism in pornographic films, but it is easily a factor. Even in typical, no-frills sex-on-tape, it is imperative to pay attention to whether the woman is a free-willed, active participant or an acted-upon sexual object. At present, the porn industry has yet to prove itself as a driving force behind the women's movement - but it certainly has furthered the cause of sadomasochism. If porn could do for women's rights what it has done for patent leather and chains, female empowerment would be unstoppable. But until it does, it's just another obstacle in our way.
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