Section:GDN 12 PaGe:9 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 17:48 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
The Guardian
Thursday 15 August 2019 9
It speaks to a
deep anxiety
about women
who take
control and
have a voice
Why are so many well-
intentioned people still quiet
on the ethics of porn?
Yomi
Adegoke
M
ia Khalifa – once the most popular
porn star on the planet – has just
done the least sexy thing a woman
can do: speak out against the adult
entertainment industry , the one that
made her rich and famous. Well,
famous at least; Khalifa has been frank about how little
she made during her three-month stint in porn – about
$12,000, which is made even more paltry given it has
since blocked her getting work in other professions.
She added that she has “never seen a penny” from a
site still hosting videos of her under her name; that she
does not own the domain name and has been trying to
get it altered for years, to no avail. “[Porn] corporations
prey on callow young women and trap them legally
into contracts when they’re vulnerable,” she said. It is a
boner-killing truth ignored by the many consumers who
visit the site in their droves.
In the porn industry, there is a belief that anything
can and, more importantly, should go. Discourse on
how to regulate it is deemed diametrically opposed to
its need to be “dirty”. A fear of appearing puritanical
prohibits any genuine meaningful critiques of it from the
left, leaving it to pearl-clutching Conservatives. A need
to appear liberal and open-minded
has left many modern feminists
uncharacteristically quiet on the
industry’s ethics. And because of this,
it is held to a completely diff erent
standard to any other part of the
entertainment industry. Sexual abuse
at the hands of music managers
is a scandal ; in porn, it is seen as a
hazard of the job. We chastise the
fi lm industry for racially stereotyping
characters, but barely blink at the
wildly racist caricatures in porn - in
cuckolding porn , in which black men
are portrayed as perma-erect, part
animal “mandingo s ”; in overtly racist
parodies that make light of ongoing
atrocities such as “Black Wives
Matter” or “Border Patrol Sex ”- as
though sexual desire mitigates any
type of responsibility.
Khalifa says she “blacked out”
during every single sex scene
she shot. Nobody noticed this,
presumably because preying on
young, vulnerable women is normalised and, for many,
part of its allure.
It is an industry where a parody such as Game of Bones
(in which actual demeaning sex is taking place) elicits
less outrage than an episode of Game of Thrones in
which they pretend to do the same thing. When Khalifa,
a Lebanese Catholic, donned a hijab in her most popular
video, the outrage was largely from religious extremists,
with Isis threatening her life. The chorus of “woke ”
Twitter fi lm critics who regularly harangue Scarlett
Johansson for cultural insensitivity regarding the roles
she takes on were nowhere to be found.
As with all media, porn is not made in a vacuum, but
has largely escaped the ramifi cations of #MeToo and
the encroaching conversation about violence against
women. It emerges unscathed when mainstream
entertainment is continually held to higher standards.
As Khalifa has shown, the viewer’s right to orgasm
outweighs the right to safety for many of its performers.It is an industr y
where Game of
Bones elicits less
outrage than
Game of Thrones
up becoming one, because it’s hard
to plan a wedding and juggle work,
and it’s hard not to freak out about
costings and guest lists. I didn’t
realise how easy it would be to
become one.” One of her friends has
already called her bridezilla. “I hate
it,” she says. “Even as a joke.”
There is no groomzilla in popular
culture – or if there is, it is said as
a joke. But often, says Niemierko,
it can be the men, particularly
those with a lot of money to spend,
who can be as bad as any tabloid
bridezilla. “And they can be even
worse,” he says. He has seen grooms
insist on attending dress fi ttings,
or turning the wedding into a
networking event, inviting clients
and people he is trying to impress.
“He is going to have that ridiculous
fi rework display and show off , and
outdo his friend’s wedding he wentan associate professor of
communication at Southern Oregon
University and editor of the book
Media Depictions of Brides, Wives
and Mothers , came across the term
when it was used as the title of a US
reality show in 2004, showing
the extreme behaviour of brides-
to-be. Why has the stereotype
been so enduring? “It taps
into longstanding stereotypes
about women,” she says. “That,
under pressure, a woman is
going to have a meltdown.” A
woman, particularly a heterosexual
woman, is supposed to view her
wedding day as an achievement,
something she has been encouraged
to “dream” about – through stories
and fi lms – since she was a child. It is
supposed to be perfect. “And when
it’s impossible to live up to those
standards, we’re going to sit back
and enjoy watching the drama of
her stress .”
She can’t win, says Ruggerio. “On
the one hand, a woman is supposed
to have high standards in order
to make all the arrangements and
manage all the details; she’s being
asked to exert a lot of power, but
even just being able to display that
competence can be a threatening
display in a sexist society.”
The term bridezilla, says the
writer and feminist Joan Smith,
“brings together a number of things,
which is a rather old-fashioned idea
of femininity, women apparently
behaving in a trivial way and also
being assertive. Those things
together are always very easy to
set up as a target.” There is also the
irreconcilable idea that women are
not supposed to seek attention,
while also being the centre of
attention on their wedding day
(although a mute, virginal fi gure).
“They’re spending a fortune on
the dress and they want people to
look at them and admire them, and
women are not supposed to do any
of that, even though the commercial
pressure to do all that is very large.”
Smith points out she is from
a generation of women who did
not want to get married, and
certainly there are opportunities for
resistance. “You don’t necessarily
have to subscribe to all of those
cultural standards of what a
wedding is supposed to look like,”
says Ruggerio. But the $300bn global
wedding industry – not to mention
the deluge of Instagram pictures
and Pinterest boards – continues to
push the idea of what a wedding is
supposed to look like.
Sophia Kingston,
an administrator from Somerset, is
getting married in two years’ time
and is already heavily involved
in planning her wedding. Her
boyfriend is helping but she is doing
the majority of the work. She says
she didn’t think there was much
danger of turning into a bridezilla
“until I realised I am going to end
to last year.” The British reality
show Don’t Tell the Bride, in which
the groom takes on all the wedding
planning to surprise his wife-to-be,
only works because we take it as
a given that it is the woman who
should really be organising their
wedding, and the stakes are so high
because it is supposedly the most
important day of her life. When
a groom on the show is throwing
a tantrum or making impossible
demands of his best man, nobody
suggests he is becoming a monster.
In the UK, the average cost of a
wedding is about £30,000. “I’ve
spent the past eight years working
with brides-to-be, some of whom
had £7k to spend, many of whom
had well over £100k to spend,” says
Jade Beer, a former editor of Conde
Nast Brides and author of The
Almost Wife. “But regardless, their
attention to detail is what
is consistently staggering.
These women are deeply
impressive. Every one of
us could learn from their
work ethic.” Imagine
juggling the dietary
requirements of more
than 100 guests, she says. “Some
tell horror stories of guests fl ying in
from multiple foreign destinations
and expecting the bride to assume
the role of tour operator.”
The bulk of organising a wedding
is still viewed as the woman’s job,
Kay points out. “It’s not just project
management, in terms of running
this multi-faceted event, but all
the emotional labour that has to
go into it – negotiating complex
family politics and mak ing sure
that everybody’s happy,” she says.
If some women snap under the
pressure, it is hardly surprising, but
the trope of bridezilla says more
about how we view “women’s
work”. “It’s part of the way we
don’t value the kind of emotional
labour women are doing all the
time,” says Kay.
Of course there will be some
women who have acted in
horrendous ways while trying to
create some idealised perfect day,
but the fear of being criticised for
having demands or wishes, has a
wider, pernicious impact. “The
trope of the bridezilla,” says Kay,
“does a lot of ideological work
in trying to keep women in their
place.”Kate Hudson
and Anne
Hathaway in
Bride Wars
(2009)Mia Khalifa,
who spoke out
against the
industryVictoria and
David Beckham
about to
head to their
big-budget
wedding in 1999РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS