Porn is always a super scapegoat

Madita Oeming is one of the first cultural scientists in German-speaking countries to research porn. In an interview, she says why new porn is needed, why the panic over alleged porn addiction is exaggerated and why hypersexualized youth is a myth.

Madita Oeming, this semester you taught a course in Berlin entitled “Porn in the USA”, with greetings to Bruce Springsteen. There were strong reactions to this. what happened there?

Madita Oeming: Beatrix von Storch was loose! The AfD politician shared the announcement of my seminar on Twitter and gave me my first real, primarily right-wing shitstorm.

What exactly is Frau von Storch’s accusation?

She accuses me of intentionally harming the taxpayer and deliberately “doofing” the academics. She complained, almost in Trump fashion, that while the Chinese are training “hundreds of millions of engineers and programmers”, in Germany, on the other hand, they only learn to watch porn. Sounds almost funny, but the consequences for me weren’t.

Is it the same for Porn Studies as for Gender Studies? They are also massively attacked from the right. “Gender madness” is a key slogan in the new culture struggles.

Absolutely. I hear that all the time too. In their eyes, what I do is the absurd pinnacle of gender studies. There was an article about me on the right-wing blog “Die Freie Welt”, which said that porn studies were the “shameless fulfillment” of gender studies. Of course, I also use approaches from this area, but a lot of what we discuss in such a seminar has nothing to do with gender issues.

There are recently reported on a new “war on porn” in the USA and saw it as evidence for the so-called horseshoe theory, according to which right and left extremes are converging. The author wrote: «The piquant thing about the renewed challenge to pornography is that controversial arguments by a radical feminist opponent of pornography and prostitution are approaching those of religious-conservative moralists» Is there something to it?
The observation is basically correct, but this is not a new development: the so-called radical feminists have been fighting hand in hand with the religious right in the USA since the 1970s. This does not confirm the horseshoe theory, but only shows that radical feminism is less left-wing than many assume. This can be seen very clearly, for example, in the headscarf debate. 

When it comes to feminism and pornography, many people probably think of the PorNO campaign that started in 1987. What do you think?

It is often overlooked that feminism was split back then. Everyone agreed that the image of women portrayed in most porn is difficult. But while the anti-porn feminists, like Schwarzer in Germany or Catharine MacKinnon in the US, wanted to ban them because of it, the pro-porn feminists had a different approach: let’s make our own, different images in which we find ourselves.

You paraphrased a famous slogan: The answer to bad porn is not no porn, but to make better porn!.

Right, that’s a famous quote from Annie Sprinkle, a pioneer of feminist porn. This differs from the traditional porn above all by the inclusion of female and queer lust. For decades, pornography has been created by and for the male gaze. Feminist pornographers wanted to change that.

So what is good porn?

Basically, I avoid this formulation. Because it is often used to distinguish the good fem porn from the bad mainstream porn. That bothers me. I also find feminism in mainstream productions, and there are now a number of successful female producers there as well. At the end of the day, good porn for me is simply one that I like and that excites me. But that is of course completely subjective. I find it objectively important that porn was produced ethically. That value is placed on consent and security. In feminist productions, care is taken to ensure that women and queers are involved in the production process, that they also stand behind the camera, not just in front of it. And the sexual preferences of the performers are often taken into account. Of course, this also helps to ensure that everyone feels comfortable.

And how does that translate to the screen?

As for the images themselves, we should be open. One sometimes hears the term «female-friendly porn». I find that awful. And very sexist. Women want to see a wide variety of things and not necessarily something different than men. But from a feminist perspective, I would pay attention to diversity of bodies, gender identities, sexual orientation and origin. But also perspectives. We very rarely see straight sex from the woman’s literal point of view. For example, so-called POV porn is very popular. The male actor basically has the camera strapped to his head and we see everything through his eyes. It’s almost never the other way around. I wish for a democracy of images.

What does the ongoing, mass boom in pornography actually tell us about the society in which we live?

The consumption of pornography and the public interest in it have not increased so massively of their own accord, but because pornography has become so easily available through the Internet. Anonymously, free, fast. So more of a technological change that brings with it a social one. We shouldn’t overestimate that. We humans use every medium that is available to us to depict explicit sex. From cave paintings to photography to the internet. It seems to be a basic desire that just takes on new forms and thereby new proportions.

How do you rate the influence of porn on our body images? You write about the trend towards the designer vulva or, that sounds better in English, the «designer vagina».

Sounds better, but it’s actually wrong. I always like to point out that we always say vagina when we mean vulva. Because the vagina is just the inner tube. The vulva, on the other hand, is everything visible from the outside. And that’s what this trend is all about, namely the surgical reduction of the inner vulval lips. They are cut in such a way that they no longer stick out in front of the outer ones, but the vulva looks like a closed shell. It is repeatedly claimed that this so-called bun ideal of beauty originated in porn. But that is simply wrong. In fact, in our mainstream culture, porn is actually the only place where we can see a wide variety of vulvas. Basically, I think that porn has less of a catastrophic effect on our body images than advertising and Hollywood, and also on our notions of gender roles. I wish we would take a critical look at it! But porn is always a great scapegoat.

What are the effects of internet pornography on young people?

This cannot yet be answered empirically. But I think it’s important to say that here, too, there is panic about this topic that is not justified. The youth, allegedly hypersexualized by constant porn consumption, is nowhere to be seen. On the contrary. Statistically, young people today tend to have sex later and less often. The real problem is the lack of sex education. For me, pornography itself also belongs as a topic in school lessons. I believe in education, not censorship. I also think that we should have more faith in young people. They are perfectly capable of understanding that comics or action movies are fiction. You could explain that to them with porn, too. They are more media savvy than we think.