jameela jamil did an interview about a radio show she’s doing on consent and spoke about her own experience of sexual assault and people are picking her apart for saying “both genders” and saying that pornography has hurt women. lmao there are so many important points she made and yet they’re invalidating the entire thing bc of that! like she literally says “empathy and understanding are the way forward” and then people totally disregard that message smh

ilovemybrowngirl:

Jameela Jamil definitely has a harsh way of articulating things sometimes (and also a lot of cis celebrities still use language like “both genders” so it doesn’t surprise me that she did as well) but her points are often on point. 

I also want to thank you for bringing this up because porn is something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while.

The thing is, the porn industry is bad for women. The violent depictions of sex, the sexualization of dehumanizing and degrading women that is prevalent in porn, the fetishization of trans women, of lesbians, of bi women, of women of color (especially with themes of revenge porn), the unhealthy portrayals of men and women’s bodies (both men and women often have to take supplements and drugs to enhance the sizes of their breasts and genitalia), the normalization of kink and dangerous sexual practices, the fetishization of age gaps, incest, pedophilia, rape, and abuse … all exemplify how terrible porn is for women. The porn industry is what leads young men to expect women to perform painful sexual acts for them, and in particular it leads women to think that they have to have violent and degrading sex in order to be “cool” and “sexy”, and that if they don’t, they’re “boring” and “vanilla”. 

The problem is that most of the people who articulate these things are swerfs, and swerfs make a value judgement against sex workers, rather than analyzing how the porn industry is an actual industry that thrives off profit. So instead of criticizing the porn industry as a function of capitalist patriarchy, they direct their criticisms at actual sex workers (who actually bear the brunt of the porn industry’s abuses). They call sex workers “dick worshippers” and blame sex workers for the abuses that women face. 

The porn industry is bad for women the way the beauty and skincare industries are, the way the fitness industry is, the way multi-media corporations and Hollywood are, the way corporations in general are bad for women. But again, radical feminists completely miss the class component of the analysis, and personalize everything, to the point of creating an elitist hierarchy between “enlightened” desexualized “feminist women” and “shallow, dick-worshipping, slutty” sex workers. They may not call sex workers “sluts” but that’s absolutely what they’re implying.

And as we know, sex workers actually do face state violence. The criminalization of sex work is what contributes to sexual violence and police brutality against sex workers. SWERF criticisms of sex workers cement the violence that they face.

Thus I understand why people, especially liberal feminists, are reluctant to criticize porn and the sex industry. However, the more we shy away from acknowledging why the porn industry is among the hundreds of industries that are bad for women, the more we left SWERFs stay at the forefront of these critiques, which only leads to sex workers being denigrated and dehumanized. But ignoring that porn is bad for women neither helps sex workers nor women – it only inflates the egos of SWERFs and enables men and agents of the state to enact violence against sex workers. 

If people can criticize the beauty industry without implying that underpaid makeup artists and cashiers are the Real agents of patriarchy or that they’re evil bitches then they should be able to criticize the porn/sex industry without stating that sex workers are “dick worshippers” or are bad for women. 

Also, criticizing individual wealthy, bourgeoise women like Kim Kardashian is not “swerfy rhetoric”. Again, Kim K benefits from capitalist patriarchy, and so it absolutely is necessary to criticize women who are traitors to women as a class. Instead of targeting sex workers (who are usually working-class and experience homelessness too), people should pay more attention to deconstructing various industries (makeup, beauty, skincare, fitness, porn/sex, media/hollywood) and to calling out wealthy, bourgeoise women who perpetuate capitalist patriarchy.