The NY Posts wants to tell us about "Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn" — a health and sexuality workshop at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School.

I'm trying to read "Columbia Prep students and parents reel after class on ‘porn literacy.'"

This article is written in a cutesy style that obscures the subject and prods us to become outraged before we can even understand what exactly this class was. As you can tell from the title, the emphasis is on how the students and their parents reacted to something that they had trouble understanding. It's pretty irritating to read the news in the form of trying to understand something through the lens of other people's incomprehension and outrage. 

We do learn in the third paragraph that the students were juniors — that is, they were 16 and 17 year olds. Presumably, they've all seen plenty of pornography and have either engaged in sexual intercourse already or encounter a great deal of pressure to do so. It seems to me that "pornography literacy" is a good educational topic for this group. Kids can get a lot of distorted notions from pornography, and pornography can turn them away from real relationships or make them harmful or dangerous within relationships. 

I'm imagining an idealized class on this subject, and it seems easily defensible. But what did this particular teacher — Justine Ang Fonte  — teach? 

[The class included] how porn takes care of “three big male vulnerabilities”; statistics on the “orgasm gap” showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze “what is porn and what is art.”

I'm going to guess that some of the slides showed nudes in what was conventionally "high art" — Gustave Klimt, perhaps. The high/low distinction is one of the great intellectual topics. It's impressive if you can get 16 and 17 year olds to think about it seriously. I have no idea how well that topic was presented, of course. I'm just saying this list of topics isn't outraging me.

Fonte’s presentation, some of which was seen by The Post, included a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more. One slide cited various porn genres such as “incest-themed,” consensual or “vanilla,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM” (which included “waterboard electro” torture porn as an example).

“We were all like, ‘What?'” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.'"

That sounds like a 16-year-old at school: "What? What the hell is this? It’s so stupid." Whether it's actually stupid is another matter. I would guess that the teacher's idea was that human nature combined with an internet search engine takes you in a dark, sad direction and not where one might find love and happiness.

One part of the porn presentation involved something called the “marketability of Only Fans,” the hot new app used mostly for sex work. One slide included a photo of a pretty young woman who appeared to be promoting OnlyFans-type work. “I identify as non-binary,” she is quoted as saying, “but because that hasn’t hit the general consciousness of the adult industry, I say ‘girl,’ because that’s what people who want to buy my content will be looking for.”...

Again, I have to guess what the teacher was attempting to do with this material. The obvious answer is to help young people see how awful it is to take your life in this direction — how awful and how easy. Do the readers of the NY York Post understand how many very young women are engaging in this kind of activity?

[One] parent of a middle-schooler at the pre-K-12th-grade school said, “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families...."

Junior year is not middle school, so why is this comment in the article? The parent seems to be swinging wildly: The goal of this is to disrupt families. How? Isn't it the pornography and the Only Fans app that are disrupting positive human relationships? What's the point of pretending pornography and sex-work apps are not right there for all those teenagers to see and use?

Why isn't there a vibrant anti-pornography movement within the present-day cancel culture?

I wondered. I remember the big anti-pornography movement of the 1980s — and how it was squelched — and I thought it is due for a comeback. We're censoring Dr. Seuss books for minor racial improprieties, but the monumental misogyny problems of pornography are ignored. 

So I looked to see if there were signs of a resurgence of the anti-pornography movement, and I found this (from a few days ago, at Vox): "This week in TikTok: The problem with the 'Cancel Porn' movement/On TikTok, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion about sex work."

Apparently, there's enough of a new movement that Vox needs to instruct us about what's wrong with it. If there's a resurgence there's also a squelching of the resurgence, off and running. 

Notice that Vox's problem with it is structured as feminism — helping sex workers? — but that's how the squelching of the 1980s movement worked too. It was packaged as feminism. What's different now: There's TikTok, and the activists are teenagers reaching teenagers.

Here's #cancelporn if you want to educate yourself about how this movement is taking off.

ADDED: Here's a Reddit discussion from January: "I'm very worried about the #cancelporn movement on TikTok." The worry expressed is that it will be used "to shame sex workers and generally safe ways of sex work."

Someone there says: "I wouldn't worry too much, the porn industry is one of the largest in the world and there's no chance in hell that a bunch of TikTok cringe artists are going to have any sort of actual impact." 

That roughly corresponds to something I was thinking. You can't pressure porn businesses if they are nothing but porn. It's not like demanding some publishing company take out a book here and there or movie company cancel some of its productions. If the questionable material is only a part of a business, there is leverage to pressure the business. 

So the "Cancel Porn" movement will need a different strategy. What I would expect to see is young people, especially women, staunchly disapproving of people who consume porn and declining to be in a relationship with a porn user. Boycott the users.

AND: From the Vox article (which is written by a woman, Rebecca Jennings):

[The Cancel Porn movement is] just one facet of a conservatism, for lack of a better term, that’s proliferating on TikTok from rather unlikely sources: young, presumably progressive women (for the most part) who seem to believe that “choice feminism,” or the idea that every choice a woman makes is inherently feminist because a woman made it, is propagating patriarchy and the male gaze....

Escorts, sugar babies, cam girls, strippers, OnlyFans creators, and folks who sell feet pics or panties online have used [TikTok] to show both the highs and lows of their jobs.... Yet even more than those videos, I’m seeing the backlash to them: “Liberal feminism telling young girls that hookup culture is liberating, conditioning them to think that if you dont have extreme kinks at a young age then they’re boring and vanilla, and encouraging them to get into sex work the minute they turn 18,” reads the caption on one video by a TikToker whose bio says she’s 16...

On TikTok, where only a certain kind of video will always rise to the top... [i]t begins to seem like there are only two teams: the left-wing feminists who seek liberation through beauty and sex work and the SWERFs who lean so far into what they believe is left-wing feminism that it becomes conservative (horseshoe theory, etc., etc.)....

SWERFs! That's a new one to me, but it's obviously like TERFs. The "RF" stands for "radical feminist," and these acronyms are used to demonize feminists who go radical in a way that's deemed wrong. The "E" stands for "exclusionary," though, ironically, the acronym is all about excluding a type of person — a radical feminist who doesn't want to consider transgender women to be women (TERF) or a radical feminist who's critical of sex work (SWERF).

Willfully and lewdly printing indecent writings.

 

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