Table of Content
Table of Content 1
Introduction 2
Chapter 1: Can we know porn? 5
1.1.1 Sex Wars 6
1.1.2 Studying pornographies 8
1.1.3 The academic field of Porn Studies 11
1.2 Encountering pornography in film studies 12
Chapter 2: Guessing educated pornography 17
2.1.1 Debating a non-existing consensus 18
2.1.2 The workability of the law 21
2.1.3 Shame and Family Values 23
2.2 It’s about sex, boys and girls! 24
Chapter 3: Sluts 28
3.1.1 About who’s sexuality are we talking 29
3.1.2 About who’s pornography are we talking 34
Chapter 4: Doing it different 39
4.1.1 Pornography that shouldn’t be there 39
4.1.2 A very bright desire 40
4.1.2.a Tease 41
4.1.2.b Dear Jiz 42
4.1.2.c An open letter to all my lovers, mentors and friends 43
4.2 The fight for accessibility 46
Conclusion 49
Bibliography 52
Articles and Books 52
Filmography 54
Introduction
The Dutch are known for their self-proclaimed tolerance. In the Netherlands you can get married to someone of your own gender, you can smoke cannabis out on the street, and one of our Sunday morning children’s programs1 is apparently so provocative that youtube.com asks for an 18 plus age verification before you can watch it. It is reasonable to think that the attitude towards pornography in the Netherlands should be just as open, but pornography is up for discussion. A few years ago Myrthe Hilkens wrote a book named Mc Sex, de pornoficatie van de
samenleving (Mc Sex: the pornofication of society) where she problematized the
influence of pornography on children and young women as well as men. This started a renewed wave of media buying into the belief that pornography might have disturbing effects on people. It seems to be a common thought and is well spread throughout the Dutch media. A small army of media producers seems to be very motivated to teach the public what the dangers of pornography are and how we should handle confrontations with pornography to reduce harm. These people seem to be very concerned with the matter and therefore bring a lot of information about it into the public sphere.
The discussion about pornography is of course bigger than just the Netherlands and has existed long before current concerns. Although the daily use of pornography seems to have risen since the introduction VHS and even more with the internet, images of sexuality have been around since early mankind just as debates about sexuality, in the form of religious scripts and obscenity laws, aren’t very new either. Nonetheless, this thesis is focuses specifically on knowledge about pornography and sexuality created since the latter half of the second feminist wave, the end of the 70’s/beginning of the 80’s - an era in which a separation became visible between anti-pornography feminism and sex positivism. We find this separation in academic writing, in activism, and in media production. In this thesis I am trying to find out how the development of this separation led to the current way that pornography is being dealt with in the public debate and if/how academia influences the media.
Chapter one provides an overview of how the study of pornography has changed since the second feminist wave. It will explain the big debates between the anti-porn feminist and the pro-anti-pornography or sex positive feminists. Then it will zoom in on the scholars who started researching pornography from the perspective of film studies and sociology. This change of perspective would 1 Diverse episodes of the series of Purno the Purno (1989) are only accessible at youtube after age verification.
eventually lead to the academic field of Porn Studies, which since 2014 has its own peer reviewed journal called Porn Studies. All these different perceptions on how to study pornography should have its implications on how pornography is dealt with within media studies. The chapter therefore ends with a case study of how pornography is being perceived within more regular film as well as a regular media studies texts. This case study will show that there is barely any xenogamy when it comes to the use of pornography studies within regular media studies. This is mainly because we are not able to show pornography within mainstream media, therefore we only can discuss the representation of watching pornography, which leaves the actual pornographic material undiscussed or badly interpreted.
The second chapter analyses what the consequences of applying this knowledge is to the design of public awareness campaigns. The campaign ‘Talk to your children about porn before the internet does so’ warns that children get confronted with pornography on the internet from a young age. The campaign includes a collaboration with the website uwkindenseks.nl, which offers a series of videos to give parents examples on how to talk with their children about sexuality related subjects. In one of these videos, watching pornography is handled. This chapter looks at how different studies of pornography and education and studies on healthy sexual development are not implemented in this particular video. Also, the chapter examines how gender plays a very strong role in the message that is being spread throughout the other videos concluding that poor research into pornography and sexuality results in uneducated advice.
Chapter three zooms in on the gender bias. Through the documentary
Sletvrees from Dutch director Sunny Bergman, we analyse the difference
between male and female promiscuity and how this is perceived differently especially when it comes to the slutphobia. Although Bergman seems to want to make a claim against these differences, she gets stuck in the already existing discourse around female sexuality and enhances the gender bias throughout. She specifically pays attention to women who have trouble with their sexuality and doesn’t acknowledge sex positive communities or empowered ‘professional’ sluts.
The objects analysed in the first three chapters seem to imply there is not any
good pornography out there. The fourth chapter is therefore a case study of the
website Brightdesire.com from feminist pornographer Ms. Naughty. Like many other feminist pornographers, she produces content that, according to the
mainstream discussions of pornography, cannot be there. This chapter focuses on this alternative pornography as an example to what pornography can be and what it can add to the public knowledge about sexuality. It also explains why these alternative pornographies have such a hard time finding their way to the mainstream media and the public debate about pornography.
Pornography is still covered under a veil of stigmas and bad reputation, but there is more than one sort of pornography out there. Pornography deserves more attention, not only to get a better understanding of what pornography is or can be, but also because alternative pornography can help to change those aspects of the feared consequences of mainstream pornography.
Chapter 1: Can we know porn?
In order to know pornography it needs to be studied. Over the last 40 years pornography has been, especially in the feminist debates, a topic for discussion as well as study. In this chapter I give an overview on how pornography has been studied and what sort of knowledge these studies produced in order to see how, in the later chapters, this knowledge is used or neglected in current media.
The first big debate I discuss is the difference in perspectives on pornography within the second feminist wave, where on the one hand there was a strong anti-pornography movement and on the other hand there was a movement that described themselves as sex-positive feminists. I mainly compare Andrea Dworkin’s idea that all pornography is rape with Gayle Rubin’s idea that watching and making pornography can be a feminist act in itself.
Then I will show how media and sociology scholars got interested in the topic, and I will explain how they started a shift in how to analyze pornography. First I will show how Linda Williams focusses on the textual analysis of pornography to come to a meaningful interpretation of narrative. Secondly I will discuss Jane Juffer’s view on the domestication of pornography especially according to women. Also I will introduce the idea that pornography can have educational qualities according to Betty Dodson, activist and sexologist.
Thereafter I will have a closer look at how pornography is portrayed within mainstream film. In order to show pornography in mainstream film we have to keep in mind that we cannot show pornography without being pornographic. I will have a look at what consequences this has for analyzing pornography within mainstream film.
The final part of this chapter introduces Pornography Studies as an academic field. The first release of the peer reviewed journal Porn Studies is definitely a milestone for the field, since a separate journal defines this discipline undeniably. This journal has created an academic common ground from which to discuss methodologies to study pornography. It also gives room for an interdisciplinary approach where not only academia but also pornographers and performers have a voice. In that light shall I also appoint the Feminist Porn Book, in which all those disciplines are represented.
1.1.1 Sex Wars
For the first half of the last century pornography was seen as offensive and obscene and therefore forbidden in the Netherlands and the U.S. and is, to date still, in some other countries. During the second feminist wave, views on pornography developed. On the one hand, there were the anti-pornography feminists. ‘One of the most basic claims of the anti-porn position is that pornography is violent and promotes violence against women.’(21) On the other hand, there were the sex-positive feminists. In 1986 already Gayle Rubin, an influential sex-positive feminist, wrote an essay that would later turn into the article ‘Misguided, dangerous and wrong: an analysis of anti-pornography politics’ claiming that ‘there is little intellectual justification for a feminist anti-porn position’(18).
Rubin pointed in this article to the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin. In Dworkin’s book Pornography: Men possessing woman Dworkin wrote about pornography, human rights, and how these rights do or do not apply to women. Dworkin defined pornography as follows: ‘“writing about whores”, Porne means “whore,” especially and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available for all men. […]The word pornography does not mean “writing about sex” or “depictions of the erotic” or “depictions of sexual acts” or “depictions of nude bodies” or “sexual representations” or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores’(199-200). This depiction of women was, according to Dworkin, a depiction of the possession of women. ‘The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “depictions of the erotic” means only that the debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex’(201). The problem with pornography was that these images directly relate to events in the real world. In the introduction of her book Dworkin wrote anecdote after anecdote of women who were victims of rape and molestation and thus perceived as the ultimate victims of pornography explaining as follows; ‘She was sexually abused when she was three by a boy who was fourteen—it was a “game” he had learned from pornography’(XIX).
Rubin had a strong and articulated critique of why Dworkin’s approach was problematic. She explained that the anti-porn position was based and publicly discussed on the basis of only a small and rare group of pornographic images which were absolutely not representative for pornography as a whole. The violence within the images that the anti-porn lobby was using to make their case represented a sexual practice that is usually practiced by consenting adults
under very strict arrangements, namely BDSM, a niche type of pornography depicting forms of power play, dominance and submission, and/or the use of pain for sexual arousal. In this case, the practice of BDSM was being disconnected from its origin and was therefore not a valid argument to make claims on the whole subject. There is also a difference between acting violence in a film and doing violence in order to make a film; for instance when we see a car crash in a Hollywood movie, we don’t try to sue the filmmaker for killing the actor dying in the accident. The anti-pornography movement was suggesting to sue pornographers who were depicting BDSM.
This is a standpoint that is problematic for feminist thought on the emancipation of sexworkers, where there is the belief that sexwork is work, and women should be free to choose the work they want, even when this work is sexwork. Furthermore, in other fields feminists demanded changes in order to create more equality and less sexism and misogyny; they didn’t try to ban whole fields (banning film, literature or politics) because of the representation of violence against women. By defining pornography as an act of violence against women, based on the assumptions that all pornography is a representation of non-consensual misogynist sex and documentary instead of fiction, makes it impossible to create images that represent any form of explicit sexual practice.
Also Rubin stated that the only properly done research that has been done on the topic pointed out that watching pornography strengthened other feminist thought such as less belief in marriage, a greater tolerance for homosexuality, and sexual variety (29-31). In her text Rubin claimed that: ‘These are times of great danger. We are in a period in which the social attitudes and legal regulation of sexuality are undergoing massive transformation. The laws, policies and beliefs that are established in this era will haunt feminism, women, sex workers, lesbians, gay men and other sexual minorities for decades’ (39-40).
Betty Dodson, author, sexologist, and activist during the same period, wrote about her experiences during this period in her article, Sex Wars. She confirmed Rubin’s prediction, ‘After woman’s sexual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women turned against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or pornographic. Unfortunately this endless and senseless debate continues today’ (23). She described the sentiment she and fellow activists had during this period and especially during a conference organized by Women Against Pornography. ‘After feminists had fought against censoring information about birth control, abortion , sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that
there was now a group that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. […] Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake to strike at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating while looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable!’(27).
As a sexologist, Dodson developed a method to teach women to get in touch with their own bodies. These Bodysex Workshops were well received, so she decided to film one. ‘My films were automatically labeled porn because if you see a pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without getting explicit, so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer’(29)
Pornography thus has been a topic for political debate. However, there is more to debate about pornography as the next paragraph will explain.
1.1.2 Studying pornographies
Linda Williams had this different view on what pornography is or can be. In her book Hard-Core; power, pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ she explained that Dworkin’s description of the origin of the term pornography, a description also used by other theorists, was hard to trace back to a common
tradition(Hard-Core; power, pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ 9). Therefore she took a film
studies approach on the case. In opposition to what she herself thought ‘if you’ve seen one porn film you’ve seen them all’(Hard-Core; power, pleasure and the
‘frenzy of the visible’ XVI) she wrote a 380 page book on the matter.
For example, she wrote extensively on the narrative effect of the ‘money shot’. The money shot is the shot wherein we see male ejaculation. In the early seventies this shot became a signal for the end of the film.(Hard-Core; power,
pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ 93) Seeing semen signified that the
sexual act and thus the film had come to an end. This differed, for instance, from earlier stag films, in which sexual events were edited discontinuously, but the money shot also indicated something else; it was visual proof of real pleasure. The orgasm was, physically speaking, an involuntary bodily experience, a spasm that only occurred after a certain level of quality of excitement, after satisfying sexual activity. The money shot was a signifier of good sex, but this was also problematic. ’While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure through the man’s own climax’ (Hard-Core;
power, pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ 94). This meant that the male
orgasm of the man. Williams used textual analyses throughout her work to distill meaning from the pornographic genre (Hard-Core; power, pleasure and the
‘frenzy of the visible’ 93-4).
Also, she analyzed the use of sound according to sound theorist Rick Altman explaining the importance of sound in cinema and claiming that sound has a different relation to the image in pornography than in mainstream cinema. Whereas in mainstream cinema sound ‘functions to bolster the diegetic illusion of an imaginary space-time and of the human body’s place within’ (Hard-Core;
power, pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ 122), in pornography, especially
the ‘[dubbed-over] sound during the sexual acts (the disembodied female voice saying ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’), it may stand as the most prominent signifier of female pleasure in the absence of other, more visual assurances’(Hard-Core; power,
pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’ 122-3).
Besides the second wave feminist debates, Williams offered great insight in the history of the hard-core and explicit film material itself. She also gave insight into specific pornographic narratives and visual imagery. Her work opened the door for a new, more film theoretical approach to the topic. Hard Core still gets cited by almost every scholar in the field and is one of the ‘fewer than 20 single-authored books that […] made a real contribution to the academic field of pornography studies’(‘Pornography, porno, porn: thoughts on a weedy field’ 32)
Another of those single-authored books is Jane Juffer’s At home with
Pornography. In this book Juffer dove into the use and daily practices around
pornographic material. She especially addressed how women are able to practically use pornography in a historical context. In her chapter ‘Home sweet pornographic home’ she gave a brief overview on the governmental influences on the public possibilities to access pornography throughout the last two centuries. Juffer claimed that pornography is not just a struggle of representation, as we’ve seen in the second wave feminists debate, but that it is also a struggle of accessibility. ‘The feminist struggle for access to public sphere representation is so critical because for much of this century, court rulings, other governmental proceedings, and the pornography industries have worked, in different but overlapping ways to limit access to pornography to men. Yet, […] too often the feminist arguments on pornography operate on a similarly general level, leaving intact reductive notions of public and private spaces and thus failing to analyze the material conditions that constrict and enable women’s access to pornography’ (36).
Juffer treated a few different cases throughout the history of the United Kingdom and the United States in which law and practice differentiated in terms of accessibility to pornography. In the famous Regina vs. Hicklin case in the United Kingdom in 1868 pornographic writings sold on the street corners were banned to protect the working class and women, but at the same time it was common that upper-class male bibliophiles owned a private collection of pornographic literature. Also, although stag films were illegally made and secretly distributed, they were often shown in exclusive male clubs in the United States (36-7).
Further on in her work she analyzed the use of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalogue. She saw a similarity in how sexuality was dealt with during Victorian times and the dynamics of the private and public sphere of the lingerie catalog. She pointed to how this catalog, with its soft-core pornographic qualities, functioned to some users not as a clothing catalogues but as a pornographic magazine exclusively which is interesting because as a lingerie catalog, it is broadly distributed and very accessible, especially for the targeted audiences; women. Victoria’s Secret was thus creating an opportunity to consume soft-core pornography in the comfort of one’s own home.
Throughout her work Juffer emphasized the need for transgression in order to have pornography domesticated. To define transgression she used the Latin root of the word. ‘Transgression means, literally, “to go beyond the bounds or limits prescribed by (a law, command, etc.).” This “going beyond” requires that we recognize the material factors that restrict movement before we can devise the means for the reconfiguration that will free one to “go beyond” the boundaries established by governmental regulation and other factors inhibiting women’s access to sexually explicit materials’(233). Juffer explained the boundaries that keep women from accessing pornographic material and what is needed to have women enjoy pornographic material in their own private spaces. Juffer thus gave insight into the practice of using pornography.
Through the work of Williams and Juffer, we see that the debate around the pros and cons of pornography slowly shift to the field of cultural studies as well as film studies. This trend will evolve over the next decades and brings us to a renewed thinking on what the answer can be to the question What is
pornography? As Feona Attwood concludes in her 2002 article ‘Reading Porn: The
Paradigm Shift in Pornography Research’: The recontextualization of the question “What is pornography?” is a shift that enables a very productive reconsideration
of the ways in which sexuality is articulated in practices of textual production and consumption. At the present time, when the representational boundaries that in recent times have been essential for the categorization, and indeed the existence, of “pornography” appear to many to be breaking down, the reconstruction of this question is both necessary and inevitable’(104).
What we see is that there are different ways to take pornography seriously and that it can be viewed and analyzed in other ways than just politically. Williams showed that while being political, you can use basic film theory to analyze explicit sexual material.
1.1.3 The academic field of Porn Studies
Studying pornography seems, because of taboo and stigma, always a somewhat political act. This is nonetheless no reason for the field not to progress. On the 21st of March 2014 the first issue of Porn Studies was released. This academic journal is the first that is totally devoted to studying pornography as an academic discipline. The journal is edited by Professor Feona Attwood and Professor Clarrisa Smith, both known for their extensive work on media, sexualities, and pornography. In the introduction of the journal they claim:
Clearly pornography is a significant topic across a whole range of academic, public and policy domains, and yet the spaces in which it is discussed and debated are not always conducive to the sharing of research and the development of meaningful dialogue. Just as there are specialist journals, conferences, book series and collections enabling consideration of other areas of media and cultural production, so pornography needs a dedicated space for research and debate. (2)
Attwood and Smith stress the importance of interdisciplinary studies in order to let this young academic field grow. Pornography studies should not be limited by film study and media study scholars. ‘Interdisciplinary requires that different research traditions talk to each other and begin to learn from each other, not so that we all speak the same language or that we all agree, but so that our analysis grows’ (3)
The editors of the Feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure create a space where there is not only a possibility for interdisciplinary work between different academia but also between the academia and the people who produce pornography, especially those who create (but are not limited to) feminist pornography. The book ‘offer[s] a broad definition of feminist porn, which will be fleshed out, debated, and examined […] feminist porn uses sexually
explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age body type and other identity markers’(Penley et al. 9). The book includes not only articles of academia but also from performers, pornographers, and sex positive activists. The articles all have their roots in what the editors of the book ‘identify as a forty-year-long movement of thinkers, viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use pornography to explore new sexualities in representation’(Penley et al. 13) Since 2013 the editors of the Feminist Porn Book also host a feminist porn conference organized in Toronto during the same weekend as the Feminist Porn Awards. This event held her 9th anniversary in 2014 and together with the Porn Film Festival Berlin (also having its 9th edition in 2014) is the biggest and leading event in the non-mainstream pornography business.
1.2 Encountering pornography in film studies
Studying pornography itself is not the same as analyzing the appearance of pornography within mainstream media. While studying pornography focuses on pornographic text and how this can be read, encountering representations of pornography in mainstream media is different. When pornography is discussed in a mainstream setting, for example represented in a mainstream film or on mainstream television, we have to keep in mind that we are never looking at or discussing pornography itself. Pornography can’t be shown in mainstream media, due to regulations and legislation. Showing pornography in the mainstream would turn the mainstream pornographic. Therefore, when pornography is incorporated in mainstream media, we often see an image of someone watching pornography, and what can be looked at and discussed is the reception of this person watching pornography.
Although The Adjuster (Egoyan, 1991) is not a mainstream film, but more to be considered a cult or art-house film, the film has a perfect example of how we encounter pornography within mainstream film. In The Adjuster we follow Hera (Arsinée Khanjian, 1958), a film censor, from an immigrant Armenian background. In the still below we see a typical pornography in mainstream moment. Basically, the narrative takes place at two different levels.
Hera watching and rating a pornographic scene in The Adjuster
The first level is the level of the visual. We see people sitting in a cinema setting watching in the direction of the screen, but this screen can easily be imagined a television screen or a laptop screen. This scene ends with Hera pushing a button on her censoring device. The push on the button is here to signify the moment of judgment about the content of the film. In other mainstream movies we often see another form of judgment such as in American Pie (Dir. Weitz. 1999) and Don
Jon (Dir.Gordon-Levitt. 2013). In both films the pornography viewers, who are in
these examples both male, are being caught watching pornography respectively by their parents and their girlfriend. Here the judgment comes from those people as well as from the characters themselves. Whereas the judgment in the
Adjuster is purely shown as a mechanical act, in these two examples it is much
more an emotional rejection of the character’s behavior. In American Pie the scene is used for humorous effect; in Don Jon it is a more serious moment where being caught watching pornography indicates infidelity. In both scenes the pornography viewers try to hide the fact that they are watching pornography and try to lie about what they just watched. Therefore they are acknowledging that they did something wrong or at least somewhat agree with the idea that they might have done something immoral.
The second level of the narrative is the level of sound. Although we cannot see the actual sexual act on screen within the mainstream film, we can hear it. In the scene from The Adjuster we only hear sound, in the other examples we see short shots in which the television, but no nudity, is visible. As we know from Williams work on sound, sound in pornography isn’t usually synchronized with the actual images. In mainstream film the pornographic sounds we hear are used
to signify the explicitness of the sex we are not seeing. These sounds are often being interpreted as non-dubbed, synchronized, diegetic sounds. At least, that seems to be the case when we look at different media scholars interpreting the sound in the pornography rating scene in The Adjuster. William Beard in his article Playing House, as well as Catherine Lord in her lecture on The Adjuster, both interpreted something about the content of the pornography being watched based on the sound alone. (And conclude also insights in Hera’s response.) Beard put it like this:
The connection of serious, reserved, family-oriented Hera, still carrying ties to her socially conservative homeland, with some of the ugliest detritus of “sexually liberated” Western culture creates a disturbing and even scandalous juxtaposition. The point is not so much the offence such material causes her (although we do see her flinching during one particularly excessive male-sadistic film) as our sense of how this material must offend woman of her background , circumstances, and appearance. Surely she will be a severe judge, we feel, even when there is no evidence that this is particularly the case, because she stereotypically seems to represent a conservative and proper set of values and is so closely tied to home and family (also implied rather overtly by her name, that of the Greek goddess of marriage, childbirth and married woman) (57).
This interpretation is more a (consequence) on how women, nurture, and pornography are being seen culturally, than a critical insight into how this pornographic scene works within the film and how this pornography can be interpreted. What we are looking at in this type of scene is a mirroring of the stigma around pornography. We are telling a story about the immoral aspect of pornography. We are not looking at how pornography is used in real life. Although it is true that people are being caught and then judged while watching pornography, most pornography is used privately for someone’s personal pleasure, without interference from judgemental tendencies (at least not physically); this is an image we don’t get to see in the mainstream. We don’t see someone watch pornography, masturbate to it and then fall asleep peacefully.
In order to learn something about pornography and how people really interact with it, other than what we already think we know, it might be better to not look from a mainstream perspective at pornography. In order to get new insights, a new starting point needs to be created, an academic field in which pornography can be analysed from the inside out.
Debating and studying pornography has been a common practice, especially within feminist circles. Although the anti-pornography voices within this debate are predominantly heard during the second feminist wave there were strong voices claiming positive qualities within pornography. Sex-positive feminists like Gayle Rubin and Betty Dodson said that watching, creating, and performing in pornography could be interpreted as a feminist act.
During the eighties the way in which pornography was analysed shifted from a discussion of potential harmfulness to a more film studies and sociology based approach. Linda Williams took the pornographic text, as a specific genre with its own imagery, very serious in her book Hard Core the frenzy of the
visible, while Jane Juffer took a look at how pornography is accessed and
consumed within the privacy of the house. These books allowed the study of pornography to find its connection to cultural studies. Still, these pornography studies aren’t part of common practice when pornography is studied within the mainstream. With the release of the first Porn Studies journal and books like the
Feminist Porn Book, pornography studies might find its way to the academic
curriculum; it did make it through to common practice when pornography is encountered in mainstream film. This means that this knowledge doesn’t seem to find its way to the public debate. In the next two chapters I will look at how pornography is dealt with in a successful documentary and a sex-ed campaign in the Netherlands to see how knowledge about pornography is entering the public debate. I will show how it seems to be more common to open up the debate around pornography in the public sphere and how this debate is mainly being held on arguments that originate from the second wave feminist anti-pornography theories and thus don’t seem to have transitioned to a anti-pornography studies perspective.
Chapter 2: Guessing educated pornography
In 2013 as part of SchoolTV, the show Dr. Corrie was started, a children’s program from the Dutch broadcaster NTR that specifically combines their item topics with schooling material. Dr. Corrie is a sex educational program in which Dr. Corrie, (Martine Sandifort, 1970) speaks about puberty and sexuality in a humoristic though sex-positive manner. As a result, a group of concerned parents started a petition named Stop Dr. Corrie to stop Dr. Corrie from being aired. They believe that public television shouldn’t be the source of sexual education. Especially the progressive approach of the program concerns parents with a religious background. The initiators of the petition also have their misgivings about the trustworthiness of Rutgers WPF. Rutgers WPF is a foundation subsidized by the government and researches and gives information about sexuality.
Children and sex education are a hot topic. In April 2014 SIRE, Rutgers WPF, and SOA-AIDS Nederland joined forces and started the campaign ´Talk to your child about sex before internet does; Children see pornography on the internet.’ The SIRE campaign is linked to another informative website called Uw kind en Seks (Your child and sex); on this website parents get tips and tricks on how to discuss sex with children. They have even created practice conversations, given as an model on how to form your sex educational talk. The organizations involved with these campaigns are either subsidized by the government, or they are known for their social influential character. SIRE, explicitly, is a non-governmental unsubsidized organization creating massive awareness campaigns about the danger of playing with fireworks and the need for donor card holders. Together these three organizations seem to be a reliable party from which to get your information, but what kind of information are these campaigns offering and does this information correspond with pornography studies about children?
This chapter will give insight in which underlying assumptions lay beneath the current approach of informing children and their parents about pornography. These assumptions will be put to the test firstly from the perspective of how pornography might influence sexual development. This perspective will also give more information about how this ideal development should be interpreted. Then the current approach will be held against the current reality of the internet age we live in and how this gives children access to pornography. Thereafter the consequences of this approach will be seen in the light of the former chapter in
this thesis. Combined with that this chapter I will conclude that the advice given by these campaigns is based on a mis-educated guess.
2.1.1 Debating a non-existing consensus
On the website uwkindenseks.nl SIRE offers, in a collaboration with SOA-AIDS Nederland and Rutgers WPF, so called ‘practice conversations’. In these video’s they show different situations in which parents have an opportunity to speak with their children about sexuality and manners around sexuality. For instance, how do you respond when your son has a sleepover at a girls house? Or how do you respond when your son is badmouthing a promiscuous girl? On the website
uwkindenseks.nl is also a video that narrates the discovery of a ten year old
watching pornography on his father’s laptop; Kijkt hij naar porno?. A young boy arrives home after school and asks his father if he may use his laptop, his father agrees and leaves the boy alone while he prepares dinner in the kitchen. After he puts his son to bed he opens his laptop and sees that his son visited a pornographic website.
The video stops and we now we see multiple choice question asking ‘you discover that your ten year old son watches porn on the internet. What would you do?’ The site gives three possible answers, ‘you ignore it, this is normal behavior’, ‘you forbid him to watch, he is too young for this’ and ‘you make clear to him you are not angry, but that you do want to know why he is watching this’. By clicking on the different options you will hear a voice-over. By the first option we hear that it is normal indeed for boys to be interested in sex and that they want to watch porn, but he has to know that porn is not the same as real sex. If he doesn’t hear that from you, he will get a strange view on what sex is. As a parent you should take this opportunity to speak about the subject. At the second option we hear that forbidding an adolescent something is useless, they have their own smart phones or computers and they will start watching it secretly. Again the advice is that as a parent you should take this opportunity to speak about the subject. The third option is the correct option, asking a question helps to start the conversation.
Now the video continues and shows how the father is confronting his son the next morning, right after he woke him up. The father starts indeed with claiming he isn’t mad but that he wants to know why he the son is watching this. When he answers with; ‘gewoon’ (well, just because), the father then explains that it isn’t normal. It is normal that he has become interested in sex but that
pornography is not sex because sex is love, or at least it should be love, and in pornography there is no love. He explains that you can’t learn sex from pornography and that you should talk with a sexual partner because everyone is different, but the boy will find that out when he is old enough. The son is still allowed to use his dad’s laptop, as long as he doesn’t surf to websites that aren’t meant for him. When the son asks if his father and mother ever watch porn, the father demands him to get dressed and leaves the room.
In this example pornography, as well as the son, is presented as a one-dimensional object. Therefore this advice carries a lot of assumptions and leaves important questions unanswered. If pornography is not the same as sex, then what is it. This is not explained. The son is not old enough for this material, even though he is interested in sex and sexuality. What the appropriate age is stays undiscussed. The son watches pornography to learn about sex, not because it arouses him, and this implies that he is not sexual yet. Pornography is explained as something inherently dangerous, probably because it is still taboo to talk about adolescent sexuality. I will later in this chapter tell a bit more about that. As a result, pornography is within this advice almost put at the same danger level as cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. It is something that dangerous that it is uncontrollable for adolescents, but unlike cigarettes, alcohol or drugs, watching pornography doesn’t harm your health. In fact, as soon as you turn eighteen and suffer from a sexual dysfunction, pornographic material is advised by sexologists as stimulus material, to get in touch with your arousal routine (seksuele
disfuncties, 2015).
The video suggests, just as other researchers on adolescents and pornography, that adolescents watch pornography because of sexual curiosity or to learn something about sex. This implies that pornography projects something on the adolescent that isn’t part of the adolescent and thus forms the sexuality of the adolescent. It is as if adolescents don’t use pornography as it is meant, namely for sexual arousal. It is almost as if adolescent sexuality is an empty shell, which by some magical, unconsciousness insight starts looking for sexual content. This content then completely fulfills the adolescent sexuality. The adolescent does not have a sexual identity nor desire from itself, it is just formed by whatever it confronts. Thus pornography is read as an extremely informative or even performative product, and the information this product gives or even performs at its adolescent viewer is wrong because the practices being portrayed in pornography aren’t real sex. Often practices where the female is submissive to
the man, such as facial cum shots and anal penetration, are referenced. By claiming these examples aren’t real sex, these researches say something about an ideal sexual development. ‘When you are healthily sexually developed, you will not do the things people do in pornographic films’, seems to be the underlying belief of this campaign. But this is something highly doubtful. Enjoying these types of practices isn’t seen as sexual deviance, and there isn’t a consensus on what a healthy sexuality looks like.
There is no agreement about what constitutes healthy sexual development (McKee et al. 15). Instead, different fields of research came up with different studies which now result in a patchwork of research that makes it possible to get an idea of what could be normal in terms of sexual development. A group of Australian scholars coming from as different academic fields as Media Studies, Health, and Law bundled their knowledge and produced an article. This would be a holistic approach to healthy sexual development (McKee et al. 15-6) and identifies fifteen key domains in which they provide a multidisciplinary framework for understanding healthy sexual development (McKee et al. 16).
Freedom of unwanted activity
An understanding of consent and ethical conduct more generally Education about biological aspects of sexual practice
An understanding of safety Relationship skills Agency Lifelong learning Resilience Open communication
Sexual development should not be ‘aggressive, coercive or joyless’ Self-acceptance
Awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable Understanding of parental and societal values Awareness of public/private boundaries
Competence in mediated sexuality (McKee et al. 16-8)
In the light of the campaign, the father in the video does work with some of these key domains. He explains the importance of open communication when you are having sex. On the other hand, when his son asks if he and his mother ever watch pornography, he dismisses the question. ‘Healthy development requires open communication between adults and children, in both directions. […] this means that children are provided with age appropriate information about
sex and particularly that they are given honest answers to any questions they may have’(McKee et al. 17) By not answering the question, it might be doubtful that his earlier comment ‘that it is normal to get interested in things like sex’ (Uw kind en seks, 2014) does anything for the son’s self-acceptance. Also considering that ‘sexual development should not be “aggressive, coercive or joyless”’ (McKee et al. 17) waking a child up by shoving pornography under his nose doesn’t seem like the most ‘fun, playful or lighthearted’ (McKee et al 17) way to deal with the subject.
Although the video does represent the idea that having a conversation with your child about pornography is a healthy practice, it leaves the audience behind with a lot of room for speculation about how a healthy completion of this conversation would look, not even considering the final key domain, namely the competence in mediated sexuality which draws attention to the fact that ‘in healthy sexual development children will develop skills in accessing, understanding […] and critiquing […] mediated representations of sexuality’(McKee et al. 18).
2.1.2 The workability of the law
The Dutch criminal law article 240 states that you can be sentenced with a fine or imprisonment if you provide an image or object that carriers images that can be harmful for persons younger than sixteen years old2. Although this law is mainly used in combination with erotic cinema and age specific entrance, it is also the law on which the Dutch parental advisory organization, Kijkwijzer, bases its policy. Kijkwijzer also uses a lot of research to explain why certain texts can be harmful to children, for example; adolescents tend to identify strongly with the protagonist of a movie, and therefore a violent protagonist is harmful.
When it comes to sex Kijkwijzer is very clear that there is no empirical research on the influence of watching pornography on children, but they take different reasons into account when advising that sexually explicit scenes are not suitable for a person younger than sixteen years old. Based on the research they use Kijkwijzer is claiming to make an educated guess. The first is research that shows that children do not have enough life experience to interpret sexual scenes correctly; they might confuse sex with violence, and this can make them fearful. Also there is research that shows that children get unsure about the adults around them, especially children who aren’t ready for sex themselves, feel 2 Freely translated from Wetboek van Strafrecht article 240.
embarrassed, and don’t want to be confronted with adult intimacy. Another study shows that sex, especially in fiction film, is barely planned or safe and often nonconsensual. This might result in a liberal attitude towards sex. Children might get the wrong idea about sex, especially adolescents, who are specifically looking for sexual representations.
Indirectly Kijkwijzer tells us that because adolescents are looking for sexual material, we should keep them away from this material because this material is always a wrong representation of what sexuality should look like. On a superficial level, this sounds like a sane plan, but in current times we face another problem. Like SIRE explains in their video ‘Vanuit zoekresultaten in drie muisklikken’ children who use the internet are only three clicks away from being confronted with pornography. Keeping in mind that children already use the internet unsupervised from the age of eight, and more and more children have access to their own internet device, like smart phones and tablets, the advice to keep children away from sexual material, or tell them they shouldn’t watch it, seems rather useless, but this approach isn’t specific for the Netherlands. According to Kth Albury: ‘Also in the United Kingdom and Australia these debates on porn education tend to presume that young people aged under 18 should be provided with porn literacy education that promotes critical disengagement from pornographic texts’(173).
‘This because pornography has been criticized for “normalizing” stylized or “pornofied” forms of corporeality and self-representation. This critique has focused primarily on female bodies. […] Health researchers, feminist scholars and popular commentators have also claimed that pornography has influenced young people’s sexual repertoire in potentially damaging ways’(174). It is also suggested that the key question for ‘porn education’ is not what sort of sex practices have been seen or can be named […] but whether young people have access to other forms of education that promote skills to help them navigate their sexual learning processes ethically and safely which is in line with the remarks the Australian study shows(174).
Unfortunately, providing a porn education that can address all those domains while discussing pornography is problematic. ‘The difficulty for educators in the field of “porn literacy” is that they may not legally distribute the object of the study to their (minor) students, nor may they legally encourage students to develop alternatives as a means of developing literacy- a common strategy within mainstream media education. This means that porn education
(for under-18s at least), neither permits close readings of actual explicit texts nor allows for direct discussions of specific texts’(176). That is basically what is needed to make sure the fifteen domains of a healthy sexual development can be taken care of when children and adolescents get confronted with pornography. If educators and/or parents could perform close readings on the pornography students/adolescents watch, they could point out topics such as safer sex practices, giving and recognizing consent, and awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable, et cetera.
Also, they could discuss other sorts of pornography with practices that might be more suitable or age appropriate. Interestingly enough, none of the studies seem to take into account that pornography doesn’t only include misogynist, unsafe, nonconsensual sex practices, but that there are explicit representations of consensual, loving, communicative and even monogamous sex which seem to be exactly the qualities that SIRE and Kijkwijzer and other popular commenters do want to see mimicked by adolescents. By advising adolescents not to watch pornography at all, we miss the opportunity to give them a representation of what we love to believe is right for them.
2.1.3 Shame and Family Values
One of the fifteen domains McKee et al. point out is ‘Understanding of parental and societal values’ (17).
In healthy development, children learn social and parental values around sexuality to enable them to make informed decisions about their own sexuality in relation to them. These vary greatly. Research shows that parental values around sexuality range from extremely conservative to extremely liberal and that judgments about what is appropriate sexual behavior in children differ dramatically in different societies. (McKee et al. 17)
The role of parents, as well as society, is a major influence on how people, and especially adolescents, deal with sexuality. Although SIRE claims that this campaign is designed to start the conversation between adolescents and their parents without adding a presupposed ideology from the campaign itself, the father from the video makes a remarkable statement. He says: ‘Porn and sex aren’t the same. Porn is sex without love, while sex normally is love, or at least should be’ (Uw kind en seks, 2014) This comment shows two things, firstly that the father in this video only knows one sort of pornography. He himself, isn’t aware of the fact that there is pornography available that portrays loving sex and where people communicate about what they do and do not like. Secondly,
uwkindenseks.nl implements a strong ideological message here. Sex without
love should not be. In anticipation of the next chapter of this thesis, the
campaign is oppressive towards promiscuous behavior. Out of fear for high-risk sexual behavior, the advice that is given is to behave chastely. Instead of advising a more knowledgeable way of reflecting on and parenting adolescent sexuality, stigmas around sexuality are being enhanced. Stigmas that, as we will see in the next chapter, reinforce ignorance, gender inequality, and sexual dysfunctions.
2.2 It’s about sex, boys and girls!
Another thing that is notable about the ‘Uw kind en seks’-campaign is how gender is interpreted throughout. On the website there are eight so called practice conversations, short videos about different subjects surrounding sexuality. In the middle of the video there is a break, a ‘how would you respond question’ is asked, and then the video continues on how you can respond. This example response is, according to the makers of the campaign, obviously the best way to respond. The eight examples deal with four daughters and with four sons; their ages differ from eleven to seventeen.
What is stunning, especially in the current light of pornography, gender, and sexuality studies, is that in all the examples girls are just objects of desire and never the subject of desire. The first video is about the eleven year old son who watches pornography, as extensively analyzed above. The second video is about a daughter who is practicing how to dance with a, also female, friend of hers. They are practicing something called Twerking, a move that looks like an isolated shake of the buttocks and is often performed bent over while standing close to someone’s crotch. When the mother in this video sees this the ‘what would you do question’ is asked. The correct answer is, according to ‘Uw kind en seks’, to ask your daughter if she dances like this to arouse boys because she probably doesn’t even realize boys might get aroused, and if they do, they may later feel upset if the daughter doesn’t want to do any other intimate dancing. The assumption in this example is that the daughter doesn’t have any sexual desire, but might provoke this desire within the boys in her class. In the third video we see a son and his father. The father discovers that his son is looking at pictures of pretty men. The correct way to respond, again according to this campaign, is that the father should say that no matter what his son’s sexuality is he will always love him. This advice is pretty open minded when it comes to
homosexuality, but what I mainly would like to accentuate here is that the boy has a sexual desire, and that is alright. The fourth video is again about a daughter who is about to fall in love with a boy on the internet. The information the daughter gives to her mother about the boy is clearly a sign that she is being groomed; he is older than he says he is, and he asks her to get naked in front of the webcam which she hasn’t done yet. She is afraid to lose him because she is too prudish. The correct thing to do here is to ask your daughter more about the boy to show her that he (the boy) doesn’t deserve her. Not a word is asked to see if she might feel a desire to get naked; the daughter is portrayed as someone who is in love with someone who wants sexual action, but who has no sexual desire herself.
The fifth video is about a father and his son and how to discuss when the son wants a sleepover at his girlfriend’s house. The sixth video is about a daughter who is wearing a short skirt and her father who explains that when you are wearing a short skirt, some men might think it allows them to touch you, and that is, of course, not what the daughter wants. The seventh video is about a mother who hears her son talking about a girl; he calls her a slut because she kissed more than one person, and therefore probably has sex with the whole city as well. The mother calls her son on this and explains that it is not respectful and that this behavior doesn’t help her son to get laid. The final video is about a daughter who chats on her laptop. Her mother wants to know if she is aware of the risks she might be taking, so she starts a conversation about a girl who has been sexual assaulted after dating someone she met on the web. Of course the daughter doesn’t sit naked behind her webcam, so no risks are being taken.
In this series of videos we see a tendency that is illustrative of how contemporary society deals with sexuality and specifically with the difference between male and female sexuality. Women are rarely seen as sexual beings, opposite to men who naturally seem to be perceived as sexual beings. Women are being warned about male sexuality, and men are being warned about their own. This difference is intensified throughout this campaign and specifically being pushed on adolescent sexuality. This tendency has very profound consequences which shall also be further discussed in the next chapter.
The campaign ‘Praat met je kinderen over seks voordat internet dat doet’ addresses a relevant social topic. It tries to make parents and educators aware of the fact that children and adolescents might get confronted with pornography.
The campaign tries to encourage a conversation where the adolescents are being taught to establish a critical disengagement towards pornography. In light of healthy sexual development, the healthy curiosity towards sexuality of adolescents, and the practical possibilities of current times, this advice is not suitable.
In healthy sexual development fifteen key domains need to be addressed. Open communication, understanding safety, and a competence in mediated sexuality are, per example, a few domains that can be addressed pretty easily when a close reading of pornography is performed. Unfortunately the practice of close reading pornography with minors is by law forbidden. Although this comes from the idea that sexually explicit material might be harmful for adolescents, it doesn’t prevent adolescent from getting confronted with pornography. Research tells us that children from the age of eight years old are using the internet unsupervised and are then only three clicks away from pornography. Also, by telling children and adolescents that pornography is bad, we don’t contribute to a healthy self-acceptance of one’s own sexuality.
Furthermore, the campaign does enhance the tendency to respond differently to female sexuality than to male sexuality assuming that the daughters don’t have any sexual interest nor desire but all the sons do. This is problematic for reasons that shall be more extensively discussed in the next chapter, but also from the educational perspective, deprives daughters of the opportunity to have conversations about how they can healthily form their sexual desires and experiences.
Chapter 3: Sluts.
After the pre-premiere of Sletvrees (23 november 2013) in the EYE film museum in Amsterdam the VPRO organized a question and answer session with the director of the documentary, Sunny Bergman. With the main focus of the film being the liberation of female sexuality, the moderator asked Bergman ‘Are we heading in the right direction?’. ‘Well’ Bergman said ‘My mother is a feminist too and I’ve been talking to her a lot about this topic. She said she was dealing with these problems already when she was my age, so I am afraid not.’
Bergman is a Dutch documentary maker who released three documentaries on femininities and sexuality over the last seven years. Her first documentary was called Beperkt Houdbaar (Bergman, 2007) and addresses how marketing campaigns from the cosmetic industry cause low self-esteem in women. Her second documentary on this subject is called Sunny side of sex (Bergman, 2011) and is a series of episodes where Bergman travels the world to show how people in other countries, and women in particular, deal with topics such as sexuality, relationships, and sexual education. Her third documentary on this subject, released in 2013, is called Sletvrees (Bergman, 2013), which literally translates to slutphobia or translated to a more commonly used term, slut shaming. ‘In
Sletvrees Bergman explores the intellection on female sexuality and researches
how slut shaming enters our thought and sex lives.’ Bergman states at her website.
All of Bergman’s documentaries were broadcasted by the VPRO. In the Netherlands there is a dichotomy in the broadcasting networks. On the one hand there are the commercial broadcasters, who get their income through their advertisement blocs and advertisements within their content, programs such as soap operas and game shows. On the other hand there are the public broadcasters; these broadcasters are financed by the government and often have a certain role within this public broadcasting system. The different broadcasters provide, for example, a certain religious view or a more philosophical view. There is a humanist broadcaster, an oecumenical, an evangelical and even a labour one. The VPRO was originally based on liberal Protestant beliefs when it was founded in 1926, but this changed during the sixties and ever since their mission ‘is to be a public broadcaster wherein creativity, global citizenship, innovation and self-will are the leading conceptions, with the public as starting point. For this public, the creative class, the VPRO, as
they put it on their website, wants to be a junction of skill and expertise, commitment and passion.’ Especially the documentaries the VPRO is broadcasting are highly valued as intellectual, creative, and often seen as socially critical. When you watch a documentary at VPRO, you are looking at something meaningful, so to speak, and the fact that this is government supported enhances this idea. Partly because Bergman’s documentaries are all broadcasted by the VPRO, she is now one of, probably the most, influential opinion maker when it comes to female sexuality in the Netherlands. Why is it that a director like Bergman, who is obviously concerned with the woman’s sexual emancipation, states that the liberation of female sexuality is standing still? More interestingly, how does the argumentation of Sletvrees influence the debate in order to liberate female sexuality?
This next chapter will have a discourse analytical approach, starting by looking at how Bergman defines the problem of female sexuality and by looking at how she visualizes that in terms of her characters. Do they represent all of female sexuality or are there missing elements and if yes, which part of female sexuality is not represented? Bergman uses a big part of her documentary to speak about pornography and sex work. She visits a pornographic fair in Berlin and speaks with pornographic producers and performers. How she chooses her characters and how she portrays them influences her bigger argument about female sexuality.
3.1 About whose sexuality are we talking
Bergman takes a stand against gender inequality by making the documentary
Sletvrees. She claims that men are much more free to be promiscuous and that
women are being oppressed and are even shamed for practicing the same sort of promiscuity. This oppression is resulting in women suffering emotionally and physically because of their sexuality. Although this isn’t uncommon thought in gender and sexuality studies, Bergman is giving a very biased view on female sexuality.
Sletvrees is a documentary shot in what Bill Nichols calls the participatory mode
(117). ‘The filmmaker serves as a researcher or investigative reporter. In other cases, the filmmaker’s voice emerges from direct, personal involvement in the events that evolve. This can remain within the orbit of the investigative reporter who makes his own personal involvement in the story central to its unfolding'(119). Bergman is very visible in the documentary; we see her
interviewing all of her subjects. We also hear her giving feedback, or her personal interpretation, in voice-over of what just has been shown, a style that is typical for Bergman’s work, as has been identified by Valck and Wilkinson in their article ‘“Echte” vrouwen willen geen makeover! Een analyse van het kritische
anti-makeovermanifest’, and also works as a melodramatic feature, a diary-like
voice, that shows the true thoughts of Bergman(11).
Bergman uses this technique in a way that creates a very biased view on female sexuality. The first scene of the film is a perfect example of how Bergman reasons through the combination of interviewing and commenting. Bergman is making an opening statement with youngsters being interviewed about female sexuality; they all claim that women who have lots of sexual partners are sluts, or are considered sluts by others (men as well women). Then Bergman gives a definition of the term slut; being a fallen, lewd woman. Bergman asks, in voice-over, ‘Why is the combination of women and sex still problematic and how does this slutphobia influence our sex life?’
To answer these questions Bergman interviews several people. She interviews women who encounter emotional problems because of this stigma reinforcing her claim. Also, she interviews a lot of men who find it problematic to have a female partner that has had many sexual partners, and she interviews a few experts and scholars who work with the subject of female sexuality on a daily basis. As a result, this sequence creates a representation that most women struggle with their sexuality. What is interesting here is that the women who she is interviewing are not a representation of the mainstream. Most of the women (but also the men) she interviews are adolescents, people who are still developing their sexuality as well as their social views. Also she included a more in-depth interview with an obese woman, who does not only encounter problems with her sexuality because she is a woman and thus slut-shamed but also because she is being fat shamed3. Both types of women do not seem representative of the average Dutch woman; being between 25 and 64 years old (Wobma en Portegijs, 2011) with a BMI lower than 30(Nationaal Kompas Volksgezondheid, 2014).
Bergman doesn’t only exclude the average woman, she also excludes sexually empowered women. In the film we see only one promiscuous woman named Zorica. This woman claims that she doesn’t have any problems with the fact that people might feel bad about her sexuality. Bergman neglects to ask further 3 Slut- and fat shaming are neologisms used to put people, especially woman, to shame who behave (or are suspected of) promiscuity or overweight.
questions. While Bergman goes out of her way to explain why young women feel insecure about what people say about their sexuality, she doesn’t seem to be interested in showing why women are also capable of living their sexual selves without being held back by stigmas.
Bergman has a reason for this disinterest that is not being articulated in the documentary itself. In interviews about her work, Bergman explains this reason. According to Carl R. Plantinga ‘we don’t necessarily need to know the production history of a film to ask why certain subjects or topics were omitted and other included. For any given representation, we can imagine the discursive choice of features other than those present, and that is often enough to tell us something about rhetorical effects of selection for that film […] If we are fortunate enough to know the production history of particular film or the methods of a filmmaker, that knowledge is useful to understand the motivations for a film’s selection’ (86-7).
Bergman leaves a trace of the history of this film in interviews with other media and personal encounters. These traces make it very clear why she excludes women who are sexual empowered. One of the arenas in the film is a tent in which she interviews people about sexuality. Bergman herself stays outside and the interviewees are laying on their backs talking to the camera in the top of the tent. Interviewed by the Dutch VPRO radio program de Avonden Bergman says: ‘When we were looking for people to lay in the tent in our own network, we found too many sexually liberated and progressive people.’ For Bergman this was a problem because she was afraid the audience wouldn’t be able to identify with sexually empowered women, so she excluded them from her in-depth interviews. She also explains that she excluded stories because they didn’t fit the argument of the film and says: 'There was a lot of good material but for my film I could only use that which was useful for the argumentation of my film’ This, of course, does create a stronger claim for the film, but from an academic perspective, it is quite problematic. Also in terms of representation, this practice is difficult. The film shows Bergman, who also is known for studying philosophy and politics at York University, as a somewhat academic researcher which gives the idea of an objective story, but instead she confesses outside the film that she is only telling what fits her preferred argument.
By not digging any deeper when it comes to positive experiences with promiscuous female sexuality, Bergman also leaves out alternative sexualities, especially those where a form of slutism is appreciated. For the documentary
