Susie Bright's Journal

The Feminist Sex Wars and the Myth of the Missing Middle

I was quite delighted to hear about the recent publication of The Feminist Porn Book, edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, and chock full of authors I know and whose work I treasure.

 

A Letter to The Feminist Porn Book's Editors, by Gayle Rubin

 

So I was startled to see the headline for an article by Tracy Clark-Flory about the book on Salon titled “The Feminist Pornographer: Tristan Taormino, Editor of a New Book on X-rated Activism, Says It's Time to Find a Middle Ground in the Porn Wars.” 

This story consisted of an interview with Tristan Taormino, one of the editors of the book, accompanied by some introductory remarks.

My surprise turned to dismay as I read the following passages from the Clark-Flory’s comments: 

Not that feminism— which, like porn, is not a monolithic entity— is entirely resolved on the issue: That’s why this book, which is filled with compelling essays by porn performers, directors and academics, has appeared now, decades after the “porn wars” began.

These are testimonials about attempts to challenge those familiar foes of any Women’s Studies 101 class— from basic gender binaries to every “-ism” out there— but from inside the adult business.

What the book does most beautifully is carve out a middle ground: The unfortunate result of the “porn wars” was “the fixing of an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp,” argue the editors, Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, in the book’s introduction.

“On one side, a capital P ‘Pornography’ was a visual embodiment of the patriarchy and violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as ‘speech,’ or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might someday be transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression.” Meanwhile, they say, the “nuances and complexities of lowercase ‘pornographies’ were lost in the middle” — and this book is an attempt to elevate that reasonable center.

This way of framing the history of debate over pornography within feminism is not uncommon, but it is dead wrong.

The Feminist Porn Book Editors Respond to Gayle Rubin

We thank Gayle Rubin for her critique of the Introduction to our volume, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.

We take her point seriously but feel it misrepresents our text. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify our argument and to engage the questions that Rubin has raised, because they are crucial to the feminist debates about sexuality, pornography, and sex work that our book addresses.

 

A Response to Gayle Rubin's critique by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young; FPB Editors

Rubin begins her critique by pointing out the unfortunate framing of our text in the February 23, 2013 piece by Salon author Tracey Clark-Flory, whose headline states, “The feminist pornographer: Tristan Taormino, editor of a new book on X-rated activism, says it’s time to find a middle ground in the porn wars.”

Rubin argues that both the Salon article and our book’s introduction promote the distorting mythology of a "missing middle ground" between two extreme sides in the feminist sex wars. She seizes on Flory’s claim that our book is “an attempt to elevate that reasonable center.”

Tristan never said, “it’s time to find a middle ground in the porn wars” (that was a headline provided by Salon's editors). We don't call ourselves, the contributors, the book, or the feminist porn movement a “reasonable center”— nor do we want to elevate that center.