For some reason, I create new websites and blogs as though they are candy and the Internet is a candy store. And I’m still trying to figure out what kind of content I create should be put where. But since this issue is getting a lot of airtime recently, and this post I wrote on my newest blog, Maybe Days, is pretty succinct, I thought it worthy of a cross-post for regular readers here, as well.
There’s an(other) interesting brouhaha in digital anti-porn versus (IMHO inappropriately named) pro-porn debates. But instead of a porn site, this time the battleground is Facebook.
Violet Blue’s “Our Porn, Ourselves” Facebook fan page, a carefully patrolled page where over 3,000 people (including myself) discussed the issue of pornography in the context of the anti-porn and pro-porn arguments, has been removed. Exactly why that happened is known only to Facebook at the moment, but here’s what the anti-porn activists behind the @Porn_Harms twitter account said:
#facebook removed very innapropriate #proporn page. Thx FB for enforcing your no-obscenity rules. #children shouldn’t have open access there
Ah, yes. Children. Won’t somebody think of them? Please?
Noticing, @DodgerWA made a very simple, obvious point:
Interesting. According to @porn_harms even simply talking about #proporn ideals is “innapropriate” (sic).
[email protected]_Harms Links on the #proporn FB page were to articles about porn, not porn itself. It’s called social discussion & education.
This is a very telling example of anti-porn being pro-censorship. It is perhaps the most blatant example of the embodiment of anti-porn ideals on the Internet, which clearly forbid not merely the distribution of imagery that anti-porn zealots like Gail Dines find offensive, but simply ideas that they find offensive.
Make no mistake: anti-porn is pro-censorship. They may say they’re not, but read closely and you’ll see references to MacKinnon-style censorship laws that would suppress access to the kinds of ideas that were on Violet Blue’s Facebook page. And they make these (sometimes subtle) references all over the place.
To wit, this recent Boston Globe article about Gail Dines:
Having viewed countless images as part of her research, Dines says there should be legislation that would define pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and would entitle women to sue the industry for harm done to them.
Arguments like this have earned her […] the inevitable accusation that she favors censorship (Dines says she does not) and that she is an anti-sex prude. At that, she just rolls her eyes.
(Emphasis mine.)
Well, Ms. Dines, some accusations are true.
Update: Sometimes, the anti-porn contingent is not so subtle. Here’s them crowing about the pro-porn fan page’s removal. Comments include “Its all Gods mercy. More are yet to be removed God must rule” and “Thanks, FB. GOOD JOB…WA HOO! LOVE IT…PRAISE GOD!!!” (Click to enlarge.)
In addition to this post, interested readers can find plenty more good information and context at Iamcuriousblue’s blog.
by Wendy Blackheart
29 Jul 2010 at 22:03
I’d just like to come to God’s defense, and say that I’m pretty sure if he’s around and has a hand in things, he might be working on something slightly more important and harmful in this world than porn. Just sayin’.
by BEG
31 Jul 2010 at 20:39
I view porn as both reflective of *and* reinforcing of social and cultural attitudes in our society.
And given that those attitudes by and large totally suck here and now, there’s a good deal of porn that disturbs me, even infuriates me, because of what it shows about how people (particularly those with power) think about sex and other people (particularly those without power) in general and the picture ain’t pretty.
Which is why I like your male submission art blog so much even though I’m not at all into the dom/sub scene. It breaks all those “rules” and with such style.
And that’s why I work toward changing things so that porn will eventually have a much healthier reflection & effect on us. But censorship and regulation isn’t the answer, that approach just uses exactly the same mindset and tactics that I see as so problematic with current/widespread attitudes toward sex right now.
But anyway much of these anti porn people are using women in exactly the same way as the “Won’t someone think of the CHILDREN” are…which only perpetuates the mindset that women are helpless children. And on and on it goes.
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by When your face doesn’t fit: Facebook censorship | Liberal Conspiracy
02 Aug 2010 at 07:27
[…] The tactics used by Porn Harms on Facebook, their own websites and in direct contact with Pro-Porn activists both online and in person, is in my view, worth examining closely. […]
by Dae
02 Aug 2010 at 11:09
BEG – I view porn as both reflective of *and* reinforcing of social and cultural attitudes in our society.
It is – much as is any form of media, particularly entertainment media. (I didn’t misread your point, and agree with it; I just thought your first line was interesting because I see people forgetting this a lot when talking about porn – just for clarification. =) ) And also like any entertainment media, there are subsets of it that run precisely counter to the current crappy attitudes, in this case, for example, the porn women make for themselves.
I’ve been doing a lot of feminist blog-hopping in the last few days due to a surfeit of free time and a very impassioned argument thread on Pharyngula, and been pretty dismayed to see just the extent of the separatist viewpoints. (“Separatist” feminism refers to the contingent that essentially wants nothing to do with anything with a penis, unless an individual has the supreme inconvenience of being attracted to them.) Some of them are anti-porn, and some aren’t, but all that I’ve seen have been characterized by shaming women who don’t share their particular set of hatreds as “slaves of the Patriarchy.” And of course, for those who recall The Three Quakes (boob, brain, and fem) not long ago, there’s even more backlash against any male who DARES to think he knows anything or gives a damn about feminism.
There’s a certain amount of black humor in seeing anti-porn self-titled radical feminists aligning with the Bible-thumpers on this one, because they ultimately end up using shades of the same arguments as (start atheist bias) a religion that systematically acts to deny rights to women, and pretty much whoever else they can see as being “different” (end atheist bias). Porn supporters are seen as brainwashed, or worse – slut-shamed, because any sexualization is either Exploitation or Moral Degeneracy.
I think it’s absolutely deplorable that the Violet Blue page was taken down – yet another in the endless string of examples of a noisy, self-righteous faction playing the “I’M OFFENDED!” and “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” cards and getting their way against another group promoting discussion and understanding.
For anyone interested, I’d recommend this youtube video as a succinct sum-up of pro-porn feminist views (the tone some of the speakers use got under my skin a bit for condescension, but the arguments are well-stated), and its follow-up companion.
by Dae
02 Aug 2010 at 11:13
Addendum: YAY, another Maymay blog to read! How’d I miss that?! O.o
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by Kink On Tap » Blog Archive » Sex and Censorship: What Recent Attacks on Online Sex Discussions Have to Do With Your Blog | BlogHer
18 Aug 2010 at 16:45
[…] 3 stories of anti-porn's inherent pro-censorship stance, Anaiis Flox illustrates what's at stake: "This isn't an issue of us vs. them, […]
by BEG
03 Sep 2010 at 19:22
By the way, Dae, the youtube videos you linked in look potentially interesting but they are inaccessible to me since they aren’t captioned.
by maymay
05 Sep 2010 at 01:29
I’ve written a transcript for you, BEG. I’ll try to get in touch with the video’s creators so they can use my transcript to add Closed Captioning to their video.
Thanks for the shout-out about accessibility. That is a big priority for me.
by BEG
14 Sep 2010 at 10:58
Oh, wow… thanks. I wasn’t asking for it, but I’ll take it :) I mostly try to get hearing people to just think about this stuff… the more people that pipe up the more solutions we’ll see, so again *thank you*
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by I am no Hercules « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
15 Nov 2010 at 00:15
[…] or made to feel less than worthy. And although they are constantly attacked, demonized and threatened with censorship, there are also so many places where sex and sexuality is celebrated. But I never felt welcome in […]
by William Belle
21 Nov 2010 at 15:30
I decided to do a personal investigation into the “truth†about pornography. What I basically found is a near hysteria which seems to come from the ring wing religious fundamentalist conservatives about anything relating to sex. Period.
Porn causes evil? Legitimate studies have found that as the availability of porn in society goes up, the rate of sex related crimes comes down.
Who buys the most porn? Conservatives.
People tell personal stories “I know a guy…â€, “I heard of a family…†and pass it off as scientific evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data.
What’s the real problem? We are all so hung up about sex, we can’t talk about it. Because we can’t talk about, we don’t deal with it and hide it. A sad state of affairs. The real problem isn’t pornography, it is our own sexuality.
http://wqebelle.blogspot.com/2010/11/pornography-investigation.html
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13 Jan 2011 at 02:51
[…] portion of my peers seem oblivious to it. The simple-minded, in their never-ending idiocy, lobby for government regulation to solve this problem, but that is so obviously the wrong tool for this job. Their’s is the lazy solution, forcing […]
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by An appeal for safe intellectual exploration: Touch me thoughtfully « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
20 Feb 2011 at 17:47
[…] as my Tumblr blog. Sometimes this is all that was needed, as the collecting of material resulted in a post here on its […]
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by Anti-censorship best practices for the sex-positive publisher – Atlanta Poly Weekend 2011 « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
30 Mar 2011 at 16:57
[…] took down the community pages of Self Serve, a women-owned sexuality resource center, and also Violet Blue’s “Our Porn, Ourselves” consciousness-raising campaign page. While this cultural terrorism hurts us, not only will it hurt less the more decentralized our […]
by CG
16 Oct 2011 at 02:15
MODERATOR’S NOTE: This person’s comment has been moderated because they have posted multiple comments on this entry that are, verbatim, their same comments posted on this SavageLove article, among several other places on the web where pornography is discussed. They then copy and pasted (without bothering to reformat) an entire academic article, as well as a couple of anti-porn opinion pieces from elsewhere on the web, including one from the religious right’s propagandist faux news outlet, LifeSiteNews.com. Multiple separate comments that are identical to material elsewhere on the Web that are thousands of words long are not discussion, they are spam and will be marked as such. If you wish to engage in a conversation on this site, you need to speak, not spam. And if you’re a Kink On Tap listener and this looks familiar to you, it’s because possibly the same individual did the exact same thing on Kink On Tap months ago.
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by Backdoor access to your FetLife profile remained open permanently « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
30 Dec 2011 at 15:59
[…] who use it do so precisely to avoid using services that aren’t friendly to sexual expression (like, say, Facebook). In other words, most of FetLife’s adoring fans don’t just treat the company like a friend, […]