Meagan Tyler
June 2011

Why would you not like a model that doesn’t make you subordinate? Why would you not like that model? I don’t understand why it should be so controversial when you are saying ‘I want an ethical sexuality’.

Mum always said it was set in stone after I was about four years old. One day I wanted her to play with me when she was ironing, and when she said ‘a woman’s work is never done’ I burst into tears.

I don’t even remember it but I remember growing up thinking the division of labour in our house wasn’t fair and I didn’t want that to be my life. Not that it was particularly unequal; it was probably more equal than that of a lot of the friends I grew up with.

But I still didn’t think it was very fair.

I didn’t want to become a woman in that sense. I didn’t want to do the cooking and the cleaning. I didn’t want to raise kids. It was weird. I grew up in a house where we were very entitled to be angry about inequality, and yet we didn’t criticise the gender inequality in our own house.  So, I set up picket lines with my teddy bear. In my tea parties I made picket lines and strikes about things that were unjust and unfair. I think I applied that to areas my parents never had!

In my teens I felt under enormous pressure to say I was sexually liberated and I loved p…nography. There was this p..nification of culture that I wasn’t aware of then, but was happening. I remember thinking I should go along with it, that this made sense, having grown up in a very sexually liberated household as well.

Mum had a crisis at one point from a book she was reading, which was very traumatic. I was so young but I remember walking into her bedroom where she was reading it and she said something like ‘we have all been lied to’. She was so angry and that was what I thought was feminism in my early teens. That was what she was reading.

It was the realization that this wasn’t working out in my own life, this ‘if you believe you have got power, you have got power’ that made me see it was not working out for me. I am not the shy retiring type by any means, but I felt my relationships with my male friends and my boyfriends were fundamentally unequal.

It wasn’t till I went to university that I had the tools to understand what those feelings were. In time I came to realize that this was the p..nographic view of sexuality.

We all wanted our Playboy t-shirts. To be sexual was the ultimate ideal but in reality it wasn’t as fantastic as everyone was making out.

At university I heard Sheila Jeffries speak for the first time there and found it all very confronting. I went away and read a lot. It felt like my brain was melting for a while; I thought ‘people have written about this - my goodness!’

I remember stumbling across (it probably wasn’t the best thing to stumble across so early on) Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse. It was threatening and I put it away for a while, but a couple of years later I came back for more when I did feminism at university. I was about twenty or so. Then I did a DipEd and taught in high schools. That was when all this took off. It was seeing what it did to other young women and what they were going through that affected me. It is much easier to see it from the outside.

I wondered why no-one was writing about women’s – particularly young women’s – sexuality and heterosexual experience in terms other than those of female dysfunction. It felt like young women were lambs to the slaughter the way they were written about and the way sexuality was constructed. It was so, so wrong, and there were no real spaces to speak about it. So going back to university and doing a PhD seemed the way to go, to be able to have the time to read about it and to research it.

And that was how it came about, I suppose. At first I thought that to decide not to have sex would be liberating. But the more I thought about it I thought you are still accepting the dominant model essentially when you say ‘I would just like to buy out of it’.

I think you have to actively create something else as well as opting out. Or otherwise you get this barren view of sexuality, where you have to buy into it or just not be sexual. In some abstract sense sexuality is removed from the culture we are in. It doesn’t have to be a nasty thing, a bad thing. In fact it is so fundamental to who we are, I think we don’t realise we are being fobbed off. So I moved more towards the idea of an ethical sexuality, or at least talking about what an ethical sexuality looked like.

The ‘p… culture’ stuff was problematic, I thought. The sexualisation of children stuff could be useful in a way, I suppose. People are so much more shocked at girls being involved in the p..nification of culture, where Playboy bunny t-shirts are worn by children of 11, 12 or 13. But, just as we argue in terms of prostitution*, well, if you have grown up with this culture, how can you make a free decision about what is OK for you when you are eighteen when young women have subsequently internalised these ideas about sexuality?

I thought ‘the p… industry is really involved in this. It isn’t happening of its own accord so what is their relationship to it? And I thought ‘if you are so determined to create that image, well, what is it that you are hiding? What is your hard-core p..nography?

It was not a surprise to find out that they intentionally cultivate these forms of p..nification, that they want merchandising. They use merchandising to try to create an image that is clean and happy and fun and that is separate from hard-core p..nography. Well, I thought that was bad enough, that we were grooming our girls in this way and that young women subsequently internalised these ideas but then I asked ‘what is really involved in all this?

Is Playboy just happening of its own accord? What is their relationship to this? And I thought ‘if you are so determined to create that image, well, what is it that you are hiding? What is your hard-core p..nography? I didn’t really know. I had been exposed to p..nography by boyfriends and male friends over the years, but reading about it now I realize that is the ‘introductory’ p..n that the industry thinks is safe to show to your girlfriend, in the hope that later on you will move onto something else. Seeing what they were really doing was shocking and horrific even though earlier I had reservations about it.

I decided that my data set was going to be several years worth of viewing Adult Video News to see what they thought was good about it, what would sell etc. The way they spoke about women was really ………..  Like Gail Dines says,  when you read what the producers and the directors are saying about their own product – and there is no other way of reading it, seeing the way they referred to women as meat holes and …. holes, and you are being bombarded with it day after day - there is an effect.

I thought ‘I’m OK, I’m dealing with this.

I was reading about thirty reviews a day for about two weeks. Somewhere in that process I felt that my brain broke. I saw such nasty stuff - a presentation with a woman strung up literally as a punching bag. She is supposed to be masturbating while this man beats her with boxing gloves, and then one day I just couldn’t stop crying.

I thought ‘what is wrong with me?’ I had buried it so much I thought I could separate myself from it, but I couldn’t. As much as all the nasty things that existed in the construction of women’s sexuality and men’s sexuality, believing that someone could actually orgasm watching someone else get beaten just did something to my brain. It didn’t make sense of what I understood humanity to be, that you could do that. And knowing you could do that and sell it, that there were enough people interested in buying it to make it marketable. What does that say about your position as a woman. What kind of a world are we living in where that is possible?

That was really, really tough and radicalised me more than I had been before that.
Your immersion in this makes you see the world in a p..nographic way, which gives you insight, in a sense, of what it must be like for someone who watches a lot of p..nography.

It affects you. Not only is it ridiculous to think otherwise, it is empirically false. Of course it affects you. My sister is a chef. She was making dinner one night with one of those Japanese mandolin slicers and a carrot, and just for a second I thought to myself that the carrot was a dildo. I had been just so immersed that everything came to look that way.

It was nice having read a lot of feminist analysis of p..nography. It gave me the support to know I was not going insane. I remember reading about where telephone cords become bondage tools to wrap women up in and I thought ‘if this is what is like when I am trying to remove myself from this, what would it be like for someone who is masturbating to it? And we are not allowed to talk about it. That was what I thought was really frustrating.

This is a form of violence against women that is worse than beating a woman in the street and yet people say ‘what is your problem with it, it is consensual?’ Is this consensual? In the face of the horrific things it does to women it is callous.

We are not linking what is happening in the industry to its infiltration in popular culture because all people see is the nice edges of it. But the fact it has infiltrated popular culture is related to the fact that the industry is getting harder and nastier. It is a process. I think we see them as separate and that is really problematic.

Yet I find an enormous amount of hostility. It is funny when I am talking at cross-purposes with academics when they were the first to say this is not just a few crazy men in raincoats we are talking about but a multi-million dollar industry, over 60 million dollars annually worldwide – pretty much the GDP of some Eastern European and South East Asian nations.

It is huge and the industry uses this to claim, themselves, that this not just a few weirdos and losers but an important part of the culture, so we have to analyse and treat it like any other genre of film. It is funny how they seem to use it to try to shut down anti-p..n feminists by claiming the normality of p..n – the same argument as the anti-p..n feminists used.

Catherine McKinnon wrote this fantastic piece saying, basically, ‘I told you so. We campaigned against this. We said this would happen if it became normalised. It is exactly what was happening in the 1980’s. We didn’t want it going into homes with the arguments silenced by debates over freedom of speech, or whatever else was happening in Europe or here’.

The industry ultimately equates sex and p..n, and not as a particular model of sex, either.
I find it bizarre when the anti-p..nographers are saying ‘yes, this is really important, it has infiltrated everywhere and it is massive, but  I would like to talk about it as an industry’ response is ‘no, it is so normalised we can’t possibly analyse it as if it is something bad.’

We are all told we should be sexual but the only message we get about sexuality is that it is something bad. This is the same group of leftist thinkers who would happily respond to a criticism of McDonalds without claiming you are saying that eating food is bad. If I criticise McDonalds I don’t criticise eating, I criticise this model which does us harm in ways that are not always very obvious.

P..n is big, it is normal, so you can’t say it is bad. That is the argument. ‘It is avant garde, it is breaking down norms of sexuality.’ I can’t help thinking ‘what norms?’ That is not the message that kids growing up in somewhere like Melbourne are getting. The similarity between p..nography and fast food is fascinating – smoking, too. And they all try to get people young. The difference is that we do criticise those. But sex and p..n are so synonymous in our culture that you can’t say ‘I am against p..n without people thinking you are against sex. S..xualization and p..nogrification are now considered the same thing.

This is why the sexualisation of children thing is really problematic. It equates sex with p..n. When you say, ‘no, this is just a particular model of sex’ people look at you with this puzzled expression.
I think we are so insular in some ways. There are cultures that have really got along fine without people filming sex and making money out of it!

I refuse to stop criticizing the p..n industry just because it is seen as sex that I am criticising. I don’t understand why my request for a sexuality that doesn’t demean you and make you subordinate creates hostility but I would like a basic discussion of sex in terms of ethics, the same as we have with our food and clothing. Where is it produced, under what conditions, who gains, who loses? 

I would like women to be able to feel about sex how they really do, not just how they feel they should. When they feel something is uncomfortable, there is something they would rather not do, they should be able to say ‘I would rather …’ But they can’t say this if they don’t know what that ‘rather’ is, if the only model of sexuality they have had is the pornographic limited version of sexuality.

Why would you not like a model that doesn’t make you subordinate?  Why would you not like that model?  I don’t understand why it should be so controversial when you are saying ‘I want an ethical sexuality’.

* See Not Just Harmless Fun: The strip club industry in Victoria, Dr Meagan Tyler; Professor Sheila Jeffreys; Natasha Rave; Caroline Norma; Kaye Queck; Andrea Main; Kathy Chambers. Dec 2010 Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia (CATWA),