Dr. Helen: Is Control over Porn Really about Control over Men’s Sexuality?
Consider: Women in the state of modern western society are the bourgeoisie, holding monopoly power over the distribution of sexual gratification, a commodity not just necessary for mental health but indeed the very continued existence of the human race. This monopoly of the specifics of distribution is legally entrenched in every industrialized country with massive penalties for breaching it, and even the statistics quoted by the most wild-eyed servitors of the bourgeoisie suggests that it is upheld in upwards of 99% of all sex transactions. The sexual proletariat, therefore, scratches just the tip of its yawning need by conforming to the edicts issued by the Wall Streets and Chateaubriands of the movement. These edicts are increasingly arbitrary, historically unprecedented and unknown in a state of nature – sexual equality, nonviolence, monogamy, and consent. And even these merely scratch the surface; there are also nebulous, contradictory and ever-shifting considerations of wealth, status, material possessions, social marketability, personality characteristics, fashion, and arbitrary matriarchal definitions of beauty decreed from on high as quite literal barriers to entry.
All bourgeois monopolies seek to protect their power base by attacking those who would undercut the source of their power, and here too we see the expected result. Strippers, porn stars and prostitutes are all derided by the reactionary mouthpieces and it is demanded that the State put them out existence. And why not? They are seen as scabs or bootleggers, responding to demand by distributing products of comparable value for a far lesser cost outside the traditional business model (this is to be seen in the claim that these professions are “debasing” to women, i.e. it literally lowers the value of their salable commodity.)
The pornography viewer, therefore, commits a revolutionary act, retaking some power from the oligarchy that in a coup d’etat gained quite literal control of the means of production, not of just ultimate commodities but labor-power itself.
