Being anti-porn a misogynistic and ableist position, based fundamentally in idealism. Furthermore, it is an inherently contradictory position to be a Marxist and anti-porn. This is not to be confused with criticizing the porn industry, but rather bans on porn as a concept and the exceptionalization of erotic art in general. I will mainly discuss socialist strains here, only discussing liberal feminism where it effects socialist thinkers and societal attitudes, as liberalism is a dead ideology which I do not care to critique. There are two strains of anti-porn socialist feminism I have identified: Transitionary phase prohibitionism, which believes prohibition should only happen upon the transition to lower-stage socialism, and absolute prohibitionism, who believe in immediate prohibition. These are porous boundaries, however, in which a person can have a different opinion on a given topic or format of porn can vary. While I find transitionary phase prohibitionism is misguided, it is a position I understand how one could come to; meanwhile, absolute prohibitionism is a belief which I cannot find common ground with.
Pornography is necessary for free artistic expression. The idea which separates porn from art is an idealist notion inextricably rooted in moralist and misogynistic views of purity. Pornography can be produced consensually, and to say otherwise is to infantilize women into not being able to make their own choices. I find it confusing to know how these claims and the related claim all sex work is “paid rape” are even brought up in feminist discourse in the modern era, as it’s a self-defeating term outside of trafficking, an issue of labor exploitation. If one is arguing that survival sex work is nonconsensual, this is a problem with capitalism.
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Women enjoy making and viewing porn. If porn was fundamentally misogynistic, this would not be the case. There are sex workers who are sex workers by choice, and the notion that they would simply stop doing the job they’d enjoy, for transitionary phase prohibitionism, is a ludicrous notion. In the radical feminist (a term I take issue with given it being a reactionary form of feminism) framework, women cannot consent to or enjoy something simply because it aligns with patriarchy-influenced production of desire. One cannot be for the liberation of women and then say women cannot consent or have non-standard desires; it is merely an inversion of patriarchal norms. These so-called radical feminists have not even engaged with the idea that women’s desires are shaped by patriarchy, as is evident by seminal feminist text My Secret Garden, published in 1973 and documenting women’s fantasies involving non-consensual scenarios with a man as the dom. Further contributing to the illiteracy of radical feminism is their unfamiliarity with arguments in the critical work Anti-Oedipus, published in English 1977—the decade in which radical feminism took its reactionary turn. The pornophobia of reactionary feminism is an outgrowth of it being unable to grapple with the production and shaping of desire.
Cultural feminism (which subsumed radical feminism and took its name; the dissolution of the distinction between the two is a great loss in the popular historiography of feminism) is critiquing superstructure and misconstruing it as the base. The idea of aligning oneself with religious conservatives to ban porn is so toxic that it can only be explained by superposition, thesis and antithesis unable to synthesize, a metal gauntlet grabbing a lightning bolt. To ban the expression of desire because it reflects a society that is based around misogyny is never going to work, as it is like treating liver failure by using foundation on jaundice. By foreclosing the ability for porn to exist while being free of misogyny, it prevents misogyny from being addressed.
In Anglophone feminism generally, discussions of how desire is shaped have been woefully underexplored since the reactionary turn of radfems, leading to utter failure of fourth wave feminism. Criticizing how much clothes characters video game characters wore (seemingly always criticizing women for showing too much skin by comparison and not men for showing too little) did nothing to stop the Supreme Court from overturning Roe v. Wade. For transitionary phase prohibition, the socialist republic would already be focused on abolishing patriarchy. A sex worker’s guild or syndicate, to avoid creating a class of petite bourgeoisie engaging in market competition, fixes any issues one might have with the arrangement.
Anti-porn feminism does not, actually, engage much with porn. They are speaking about something they have no experience. I don’t have much experience with it myself—enough to know that porn featuring real people does not interest me that much in large part, and I find the studio stuff generally repulsive. There is plenty out there that is made under better conditions, and a basic familiarity with an artform is necessary to critique it. If one does not engage with at least some porn themselves, they do not have any right to criticize it as a form. Moralizing censoriousness of fiction, unlike censoring hate speech, does not and cannot engage with the material except through nitpicking lenses of purity.
The patriarchal notion of purity is the root cause of anti-porn rhetoric, not concern for women’s safety. Christianity, in most of its ecumenical mutations and aberrations, is the most prolific fetish organization conceived. Sexual purity is a component of the patriarchal greater fetish, forced on children from a young age to shape their desires towards the patriarchal ideal of men as predators who must control themselves and women as those who must guard themselves. Women and children are treated as sexual property of the patriarch; they are territory which must not be infringed. Sexual frustration is channeled into reaction, as the only way to express desire is through violence. There is a reason why the fascist group the Proud Boys are told not to masturbate: It is so that they cannot express their desires except through explosive violence.
The censorship and suppression of art causes less growth of artistry. This is why porn hasn’t been able under capitalism to take artistic; the craft hasn’t been developed. Science fiction and horror in the early 20th century were considered unartistic; it wouldn’t be until the 40s and 50s of authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and the subsequent iteration of the New Wave in the 60s and 70s with authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and Samuel R. Delany, that it could develop into a literary form. If one argues that porn cannot be art, where is the line drawn? Where would a judge, a prosecutor, an agent of the state—whether capitalist, under the absolute prohibition, or socialist, under the transitionary prohibition—will draw the line? Now what if a film (using the narrowest definition of porn being a form of filmed sex work) something challenging this proscription from the state (whatever it may be!) with an artistic message? Is that not a work of art? The sexual myths are unable to be criticized due to porn being treated as low art, and thus sexual myths continue unabated. It is an idealist notion to believe there exists a difference between erotic art and porn when these two things are one in the same. There is no material difference between porn and art, because porn is a type of art.
Racism involved in the current porn industry is rarely ever brought up by both contingents except as a drive-by when running down a laundry list of complaints. This is because porn bans are not rooted in actual policy, but rather a continuance of the colonial myth of the logical, thinking white body, whose body and mind are steeled through willpower. Think of the British gentleman with a stiff upper lip, who must “civilize” (i.e. delibidinize and sexually repress through conversion to Christianity) into the western gender and sexual paradigm. The subaltern are viewed through the colonial gaze as animalistically drive-driven, brought oppositionally against the enlightened white body. In truth, we are all both object and subject of desire, both dialectically united as libidinal and logical. The myth of black men having larger penises (which, through the patriarchal myths of the phallus, is supposed to indicate their hypersexuality) is based on pseudo-scientific racism. Meanwhile, of course, rape, especially of children, is utterly common to patriarchal, hierarchal institutions, from Eton High to the Mormon Church. In this way, those who engage with pornography are considered lesser-than. TERFs will call trans women “porn-brained” and assume that their transitioning is a fetish. Not only is this not true, it also should not matter; if someone transitions because they have a fetish for it, it’s harming no one. The liberal myth of “rational” debate is simply an unwillingness to reckon with desires. Referring back to the discussion on science fiction for a moment: Rather than allowing the natural development of art against artistic criticism to go through and debunk myths of the “big black cock” through artistic iteration and critique, suppression and demeaning of porn as less-than allows these concepts to continue unabated.
The concept that somehow, because porn is bad under capitalism, it cannot exist in a revolutionary society, is an inconsistent standard. If we apply the same standards in which anti-porn arguments to other industries for the transitionary phase prohibitionists, there would be no construction under socialism given the labor trafficking conditions of Qatar and the UAE. Any shady or bad behavior is no different than other myths, and exceptionalizing sexuality is Christian concepts of purity and sin. Under the current regime or the worker’s successor state, it can be regulated. Any argument having to do with the current industry is not an argument against porn, but an argument against capitalism.
Porn is under an onslaught form the right. This won’t apply to transitionary phase prohibitionists, but to the absolutists, I am endangered by their rhetoric. Trans people are argued to be fundamentally pornographic. The right wing blob of think tanks and consultants are trying to outlaw porn, either directly or through bans by banks, Visa, PayPal, Stripe, and MasterCard. The specific recent round, which targets game storefronts Itch.io and Steam, is through a far-right anti-sex work organization masquerading as a feminist one called Collective Shout. It is not in our benefit to align ourselves with them in any way, before or after the establishment of socialism.
A classic argument both kinds of prohibitionists is that only banning a certain type of porn—lolishotacon and fictional nonconsent being the most common targets—is, against all odds, a fine use of state power. If adults making art for other adults is illegal, this is a victimless crime. Fiction about assault is not assault, and arguing it somehow influences people to is akin to arguing the Columbine massacre was caused by Doom. In addition, banning art like this will simply either be broad enough to encompass everything, or narrow enough to encompass nothing. Yvan Godbout in Canada wrote Hansel et Gretel, a horror novel in which a child is sexually abused, and the Quebec police (tous les flics sont des bâtard) tried to prosecute him for CSAM charges. Canadian law makes no distinction between the two, thus literally erasing child sexual abuse from mattering in its law against child sexual abuse materials. His acquittal only came after the case came to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the resulting problems for his name being dragged through the mud resulted in him having to retire from writing. As a Marxist, this is a textbook case of misuse of state power, but yet I have seen anarchists be for its absolute prohibition, all because it falls within within what’s popularly considered Entartete Kunst, the use of state violence does not matter to them. These laws inherently have a chilling effect on artistic expression. Survivors are going to be afraid to write memoirs or fiction inspired by their experiences if they know it can be attacked by the police state. While textual bans are already in place in supposedly-liberal countries like France and the UK, as people back away from this content for its controversy, it’s one slippery legal re-interpretation away from being cracked down upon and selectively enforced.
Furthermore, bans on fictional content bans sprout from a fundamentally ableist assumption: The desires of the non-autistic, non-survivor, and non-schizophrenic should be same as the desires of those who are affected. We’re a plural system, and there’s a member in here who, in our headspace, is an incubus who looks like he’s 12. While our plural system was not formed due to dissociation via trauma (instead coming from the need for someone to keep us company during psychotic episodes as a child), it was no doubt influenced by our experience being abused as a child. If we are to write or commission sexual art of him, is the way our brain deals with our trauma somehow less important than theoretical harms? Even in left-wing spaces, I am told that this is somehow a non-specific harm, that our mere existence and turning of our childhood trauma from a locus of pain to a locus of pleasure is somehow amaterially harmful based on vibes. Even as Texas is trying to enact bans which will be used to crack down on free speech. We can follow this logic to its conclusion: The mere idea of the purity of the patriarch’s sexual property matters more than the victims of childhood sexual abuse. We can see this in the case of the Australian Federal Police, who, as I will point out every time Australia is brought up, ran a website distributing child sexual abuse materials, this information being plainly stated The Guardian. Yet lolishotacon art is against the law in Australia. The Australian carceral state, it seems, cares more about fictional children than real ones. This gets at the fundamental nature of bans on erotic art: It is not about protecting children, it is about enforcing boundaries and policing the imagination.
This is not a theoretical, like I stated before—there are incredible works of art being made, and yet Subarashiki Hibi is a visual novel which is precious to me, and it can only achieve everything it sets out to do because of its extreme content. One already has to use a patch to read anything more than the first story arc on Steam, a platform currently by Collective Shout in their crusade against porn. Despite this, I know a world where eroticism becomes something to outlaw, where flows of desire are limited by state control, its existence will be erased. I’ve written about topics which I was too afraid to share at large, but I shall no longer bow to these people. Prohibition must only come with direct, provable, unavoidable harm. Fascism is here, and we must stand united for desire, and against sex negative feminism.
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