Pizza, Porn and Healthy Debate

Photo by Hannah Plishtin

Last Thursday, over one hundred students gathered along the perimeter of Cro’s Nest with a seemingly shocked Professor Feldman nestled modestly in the chaos of seats and furniture. “Pizza and Pornography” was organized by Conn’s sexual assault awareness group One in Four and was intended to shed light on and question the correlation between pornography and violence against women.

The discussion commenced with Feldman addressing the issue of how to define pornography. After all, Feldman noted, “if we’re not referring to the same things, our conversation could get a little messy.” The students chimed in with their ideas of how to define pornography. Some used examples from experience, others tiptoed around the idea of admitting to watching porn and others flatly claimed to be hypothesizing. The students all agreed that pornography included “the commodification of sex,” and the majority of students raised their hands when asked if they viewed pornography as something aimed towards straight men. Feldman passed around a handout with some definitions and statistics, which included a definition of pornography by feminist scholars Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Their definition specifically included the phrase “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women.” For the purpose of this talk, Feldman focused on the aspect of definition that included the subordination of women.

This sparked a continuous rapid fire of responses from the students. Does straight pornography always have a connotation of violence against women? What does it mean to be dehumanized? Is it really possible for a person to volunteer to be dehumanized? Does this imply that there is no such thing as ethical pornography? Wht would the global implications of a lack of ethical pornography be?

In the United States, 77% of men and 28% of women are thought to consume pornography. This consumption is presumably in private. “If pornography is consumed so prevalently, why does public America seem somewhat prudish whereas private America seems, well, quite different?” asked Feldman. “Is part of its prurient pleasure in its secrecy?”

The gender divide between students at the talk seemed to be representative of Conn’s sixty/forty female-to-male split, so there were fairly equal opportunities for both sides to voice their opinions as to if and how porn is related to violence against women.

However, when the subject did manage to surface, the conversation veered away from violence. The students at the talk broadly agreed that women are often portrayed negatively in porn, but some students expressed doubts over the claim that pornography had a direct causal effect on violence against women.

The discussion came to a close with Professor Feldman presenting the term “illocutionary.” He defined the word in colloquial terms. “Language affects the status of the world, and words and images don’t just make us feel a certain way, they construct the world and have power.” He gave an example: Your girlfriend says, “I’m dumping you.” This phrase is not just a string of words. This language has just changed the status of your life, your surroundings and your world.

The conversation tapered off on this note, implying the possibility of pornography’s correlation to violence against women. Though the discussion ended without a definitive conclusion, a number of issues had been raised, which was the goal of One in Four. •