BIBLIOGRAFÍA

Pornography has historically operated hand in hand with stigma from society at large to institutions in the fields of medicine and sexology in the 19th and 20th centuries (Kendricks, 1987; Weeks, 1991). Those who engaged in both consuming and working in pornography were pathologised and subjected to stigmatisation, relegated to deviant and/or victim status. In her 1984 essay Thinking Sex, Rubin examined the issue of stigma while calling for a radical theory on sex. Rubin outlines how stigma arises from societal hierarchies of what is considered to be

‘’good sex’’ and what is relegated to ‘’bad sex’’, and utilizes the concept of a ‘charmed circle’

to illustrate this.

Fig 3. Rubin's’ Charmed Circle (2011, p.152)

In the centre of the circle, Rubin places sex that is married, heterosexual, monogamous, and which occurs in private, with no toys or accessories. These acts are firmly in the category of acceptable sexual activity. The outer circle is designated to be the outer limits, where sexualities and sex acts are deemed to be deviant, abnormal, dangerous, and something to be avoided by ‘respectable’ members of society. These activities consist of being promiscuous, engaging in BDSM, public sex acts, using toys and sex for money or making/consuming pornography. In this category of ‘bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned sexuality’, stigma is applied to participants and they are excluded from ‘blessed sexuality’, and respectability (2011,

p.152). Foucault argues that this framing of sexual activities and sexualities as ‘deviant’ or

‘normal’ functioned not as a benevolent quest for the truth, but in fact as a repression technique to stop truth emerging. He posits that

It is as if a fundamental resistance blocked the development of a rationally formed discourse concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects. A disparity of this sort would indicate that the aim of such a discourse was not to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence (1976, p.55).

The stigmatisation of sex and pornography performers still functions in this way, and still affects emerging truths. Indeed, Chapter Four discusses the impact of the dismissal of performer truths. The lack of interest in building an extensive body of knowledge on performer experiences could be related to this resistance, but this speculation is in need of further research to explore its validity.

The line between these two categories of good and bad is enforced by society, lest a ‘good’

person may fall prey to the deviance flourishing in the outer limits. This sexual value system perpetuates fear, what Rubin terms a ‘domino theory of sexual peril’ (2011, p.151), and thus a strict line must be drawn to protect the good people engaged in the correct acts. Rubin suggests that:

The line appears to stand between sexual order and chaos. It expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic demilitarised zone, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across (2011, p.151).

This fear of the unspeakable is also a fear of the power attributed to the outer limits and how easily this unspeakable thing can corrupt the ‘good’ people. This line is also the partition

between acceptance and disgust, and a universalistic approach versus a particularist, nuanced reading of sexual behaviour:

As long as it does not violate other rules, heterosexuality is acknowledged to exhibit the full range of human experience. In contrast, all sex acts on the bad side of the line are considered utterly repulsive and devoid of all emotional nuance. The further from the line a sex act is, the more it is depicted as a uniformly bad experience (2011, p.151).

Thus as performers are relegated to the outer limits, their experiences as individuals are lost, and they are subsumed into the metanarrative of theirs experiences being uniformly bad and lacking in nuance. The performers placement as being in a marginalised situation is thus enmeshed with societal perception of them having a marginal personality which results in objectification, and the performer as a person being perceived as uniformly bad (Mann, 1958, p.77).

This fear of alleged deviancy has existed since the invention of pornography, in various guises and was cemented in Victorian times (Kendricks, 1987; Weeks, 2017) and continues today.

Smith and Attwood state that:

(t)hese panics about sex draw on narratives of danger, disease, and depravity to which ''we'' are all susceptible, and rely on the repetition of 'evocative sexual language and imagery'' that urges ''us'' to be vigilant at all times, both as members of communities and as individuals (2013, p.45).

Rubin argues that those engaging in acts relegated to the outer limits were viewed as ‘socially inferior, or symptomatic of psychological impairment (2011, p.311), far outside the realm of respectability. It follows that these persons were then stigmatised, and stripped of their individuality in favourite of being part of the collective exile that were too dangerous or deviant to approach.

This charmed circle analogy is useful for examining power dynamics when analysing societal attitudes to sexuality, but also when focusing on the academic discourse on sexuality and pornography. When we look at existing studies and feminist theories on pornography and the definitions utilised, we can see words like ‘degradation’, ‘violence’ ‘submission’, with simplistic definitions that only frame terms like these negatively. No space is allowed for the consideration that these activities may be pleasurable to the participants- however unpalatable these acts may or may not be considered by some.

This demarcation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex is visible in the discourse around pornography.

When performers speak up as having good experiences, they experience dismissal and are deemed to be ‘not representative’, as discussed in Chapter Four. The narrative here is that the experience of women working in porn is a uniformly bad experience. We also see this when the performers are labeled as victims. We can see a pattern building- those who report ‘good’

experiences are not considered legitimate sources, and those who report liking ‘bad’ sex acts are also dismissed.

This dismissal is the barrier between those who claim to know the ‘truth’ about pornography and those who are dismissed and thus are excluded from this expert status. Those who are disdained are also stigmatised as unknowing, on the wrong side of what the ‘truth’ is about these sex acts and the realities of working in pornography. This claim to truth functions as a boundary of this line between good and bad, respectability and stigmatisation. Additionally, it also functions as the lineation of nuance, and the divider between ‘good expert’ and

‘deviant/victim with untrue knowledge’, and a divider of different camps of feminism.