The Slut-Shaming Kind Of Feminist

As a feminist, shouldn’t a little alarm bell go off if an argument becomes pretty much classic slut-shaming? The feminist blogosphere is not such a fan of slut-shaming. Even when people we like do it! Tina Fey got rather directly called out for it by Sady Doyle, here. Slut shaming? Not okay!

Yet there are folks who call themselves feminist, who do it pretty openly. A few months ago in the kerfluffle where a couple of anti-porn activists tried to smear Maymay for the open-door policies at the Kink For All series of conferences, I read up a bit on Donna M. Hughes, and I found out that she has some nasty things to say about women who disagree with her! She referred to Megan Andelloux, a sex educator with a graduate degree, as:

[a]tattooed woman, calling herself a “sexologist and sex educator,” … She is also a reporter for a prostitutes’ magazine called $pread. (I couldn’t make this stuff up!)

For more on that nasty business, see here, and here.

But Hughes is a creature of the political right, not the left. She has contributed repeatedly to The National Review, including a piece praising George W. Bush. I’ll leave feminist card-checking to someone else, but I think it’s safe to say that, unlike someone who is explicitly a progressive, we shouldn’t expect Hughes to be an ally across the range of issues that we understand to intersect with feminist struggle.

Sadly, among antiporn activists, she’s not alone in attacking women. I read Amanda Hess’s blog for the Washington Citypaper, The Sexist, today, as I often do — I have a soft spot for the Citypaper, which I once read regularly, and I am a big fan of Amanda’s work. Recently, she covered a Kink For All conference, an antiporn conference, and the federal obscentity trial of John Stagliano, which ended in a dismissal before the jury even got it because the judge held that the prosecution’s case was insufficient as a matter of law.

So this morning Amanda has up a post about antiporn activist Mary Anne Layden, Ph.D., a sociology professor at Wheelock College, who says that the more porn women watch, the more likely they are to get raped. Seriously, she said that. Here’s the quote, from the ultraconservative and Unification Church-controlled paper the Washington Times:

The more pornography women use, the more likely they are to be victims of non-consensual sex,” said Mary Anne Layden, professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. “The earlier the male starts using pornography, the more likely they are to be the perpetrators of non-consensual sex.”

[Emphasis supplied.]

Empirical support for that? They don’t say. I’d be very surprised if there were any. Hess quotes a psychologist from Psychology Today debunking it as unsupported horseshit, dependent at best on taking a very tenuous connection through several steps and implying simple causation.

But the other problem with it is that it’s just another variation on the same old slut-shaming, victim-blaming line of shit. Are we now going to see articles attacking the victims of prominent rapists as porn-watchers? We might. Every story gets attacked.

The key paragraphs from Amanda Hess’s post are these:

Layden’s assertion is both victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing. Pretending that porn is responsible for creating rape victims and perpetrators—that it robs men of “themselves” and robs women of consent—shifts the blame for sexual assault away from rapists (the few) and on to every man and woman who watches porn (the many). The implication is that the perpetrator and the victim deserve each other.

And since almost every man admits to looking at porn—and only some women admit to the same—the burden for avoiding “bad” behavior falls largely onto women. Notice how, in Layden’s statement, women are faulted for the quantity of porn they consume, whereas men are faulted for the age at which they begin watching porn. Presumably, a woman can control the amount of porn she consumes, but a man can’t control the fact that he was initially exposed to pornography at a young age.

Under Layden’s model, all men are potential rapists—but some women are good enough to resist making themselves into rape victims.

It smacks of “good girls don’t.” Over the years, it has become apparent to me that for some antiporn activists, stopping porn is not a means to reduce misogyny or lower rape, but an end in itself, and they’ll attack anyone who opposes that aim, not least women who stand up to them. And they’ll use the master’s tools to do it.