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Dr. Gail Dines Returns to Take on Porn Culture + Culture Reframed Virtual Conference!
65 Plays4 years ago
Gail Dines is back! We discuss Onlyfans, Second Wave Feminism, radical and liberal feminism, BDSM, & Sex Education
Register here for: Taking on Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance Through Sex Education
https://www.culturereframed.org/conference/
Gail Dines vs Ron Jeremey:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CTk1o9wg1rs/?utm_medium=copy_link
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Transcript
Introduction and Patreon Support
00:00:00
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:00:01
Speaker
It's your host, Ro.
00:00:02
Speaker
Do you like female dating strategy?
00:00:04
Speaker
Would you like to see us expand on a lot of different platforms?
00:00:07
Speaker
Then please sign up for our Patreon.
00:00:08
Speaker
We are currently targeting a $10,000 per month goal, which would allow us to work full time on female dating strategy content in order to expand on different platforms and upgrade our media presence.
00:00:20
Speaker
As a special thank you to our current Patreon subscribers, we will be increasing our upload rate for our bonus content to be weekly on Fridays, as well as offering a special discount for paid annual memberships.
00:00:33
Speaker
So please check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
00:00:37
Speaker
That's patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you.
Guest Introduction and Female Dating Strategy
00:00:41
Speaker
Let's start the show.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hey everyone, I hope you're all well.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, we're doing great.
00:01:12
Speaker
Your episode was a fan favorite.
00:01:15
Speaker
So a lot of people had never really heard comprehensive porn criticism from a respected educator before your podcast.
00:01:26
Speaker
So thank you for coming to our platform and giving us the tools to keep discussing the harms of porn and just really introducing our audience to the foundation of female dating strategy.
00:01:38
Speaker
which does have a lot of basis in porn critique.
00:01:40
Speaker
Great.
00:01:41
Speaker
I think that's why you're so popular.
00:01:42
Speaker
You're so one of the few places that does.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's not without criticism, to be honest, from a lot of other mainstream feminist publications.
Conference Announcement on Porn Criticism
00:01:53
Speaker
So we have a conference that's coming up in a few weeks.
00:01:56
Speaker
I don't know if you want to actually talk about that first, but we're actually, surprise, surprise, all of our guests are going to be hearing this for the first time.
00:02:03
Speaker
We will be giving a lecture as part of this conference, and we're going to talk about
00:02:08
Speaker
how our porn criticism was a basis for the expansion of female dating strategy and how a lot of women for the first time because of visiting female dating strategy finally had the language to understand what was going on in their relationships sexually as well as like just general dating culture and how it's been influenced by the influx of porn.
00:02:32
Speaker
Totally.
Exploitation of Women on OnlyFans
00:02:33
Speaker
And people love you.
00:02:34
Speaker
I have to say, when I was on that and I got, you know, so many emails afterwards and people just love what you're doing.
00:02:40
Speaker
Women love what you're doing because in a way you're a lifesaver.
00:02:44
Speaker
You're countering the narrative of pornography from a feminist perspective.
00:02:48
Speaker
And, you know, a lot of the so-called, I call them faux feminists, are trying to say how great porn is and how empowering.
00:02:55
Speaker
And I think you're telling the truth of women's lives.
00:02:58
Speaker
Oh, shucks.
00:02:58
Speaker
Thank you.
00:03:00
Speaker
It's always great to hear good feedback because we get so much.
00:03:03
Speaker
We get dragged so much.
00:03:05
Speaker
A lot of that has to do with like the expansion of OnlyFans, especially during the pandemic and the recession that was induced by the pandemic.
00:03:13
Speaker
There's just been seemingly like this media push to really like legitimize the sex profession and say this is going to be empowering.
00:03:19
Speaker
And this is like an avenue for women because of the fact that there's just so many women who are now becoming reliant on the sex industry because they're out of work.
00:03:28
Speaker
Totally.
00:03:29
Speaker
But let me just tell you, the average woman on OnlyFans makes something like $300 a month.
00:03:36
Speaker
So, you know, you always see in the media somebody who's making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:03:41
Speaker
I mean, that is so rare.
00:03:43
Speaker
And in fact, many of the women who end up on OnlyFans are in a worse position afterwards because they can't get hired because of their digital footprint.
00:03:53
Speaker
They get doxxed.
00:03:54
Speaker
They get capped.
00:03:55
Speaker
They get death
00:03:55
Speaker
threats so you know there's a whole seedy side well the whole thing is seedy but you never actually hear what's going on with these women and I've spoken to a number of women who did OnlyFans and they so regret it they so regret it but they're desperate for money and I understand that you know it's just we live in a culture where how do women make money right by being part of the sex industry and it is a minimal amount of money let's be very clear about this
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's been pretty apparent even from reading a lot of the Reddits that are dedicated to sex workers and to women who work on OnlyFans is that Reddit is actually responsible for a lot of their traffic.
00:04:33
Speaker
So you'll see a lot of them.
00:04:34
Speaker
It was so bad at one point that like women who had OnlyFans pages were just spamming a lot of different subreddits trying to get people to...
00:04:41
Speaker
subscribe to their OnlyFans to the point where those major subreddits started banning them and saying, okay, you can't promote your
OnlyFans Referral Scheme Critique
00:04:46
Speaker
OnlyFans here.
00:04:46
Speaker
But even they would admit like, oh, I've only made $50 and I've been spamming all of the subreddits.
00:04:51
Speaker
And that was their way of actually doing their OnlyFans marketing.
00:04:55
Speaker
There's actually
00:04:56
Speaker
Actually, another way, they have what they call a referral scheme, which I prefer to call a pimping scheme.
00:05:02
Speaker
So that's the only fans is actually a pimping platform.
00:05:05
Speaker
They pimp out the women because they take 20% of what they make.
00:05:09
Speaker
And also they offer the women extra money if they bring friends to OnlyFans.
00:05:15
Speaker
They give them the percentage of their earnings.
00:05:17
Speaker
So not only are they pimping out women, they're turning the women into pimps because they're desperate for money, these women.
00:05:22
Speaker
So they'll bring their friends on and what have you.
00:05:25
Speaker
So I just see it as one big pimping pyramid scheme.
00:05:28
Speaker
And what's interesting about that referral aspect of it is that Tim Stokely actually...
00:05:35
Speaker
introduced that to ensure that the business would survive because he's had he had several failed businesses and his dad who was an investment banker for Barclays was like okay OnlyFans is your last shot this is the last time we're going to give you 10 grand so he actually introduced that incentive just to keep the business going but not necessarily to even help out the women who benefit from that particular scheme
00:06:02
Speaker
It's really exploitative.
Sex Industry and Feminism
00:06:05
Speaker
Totally.
00:06:05
Speaker
Really, really exploitative if you think about it.
00:06:07
Speaker
Well, anyone who's setting up a sex camming site is not out there to help women.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yes.
00:06:14
Speaker
I mean, they're out there to make money and they're making money off monetising women's bodies.
00:06:19
Speaker
So, you know, don't look to these as any saviours of women, believe me.
00:06:23
Speaker
And monetising the bodies of really vulnerable women as well.
00:06:26
Speaker
It's really sad to see the discourse on social media when you see sex workers say, oh, you know, women with disabilities only found as their only option, as if, you know, their only contribution to society can be them sexually servicing men.
00:06:43
Speaker
Exactly.
00:06:44
Speaker
And actually, you know, I would say rather than calling them sex workers, they're really sexually exploited.
00:06:50
Speaker
You know, it's not really, I don't really see this as work because of the conditions under which they have to do this.
00:06:57
Speaker
The fact is that they're being pimped out.
00:06:59
Speaker
You know, I mean, I think the porn industry, the sex industry in general,
00:07:02
Speaker
wants us to think about it as work because what it does is that it kind of whitewashes the reality of what life is like for women in the sex industry and you know what what job descriptions you have where you have to go to work naked where you have to listen to all these creepy men telling you what to do sexually it's it's just sexual exploitation and the women who've exited the um
00:07:23
Speaker
Sex industry always say it was paid rape.
00:07:26
Speaker
It was not work.
00:07:27
Speaker
I was sexually exploited and it was sexual slavery.
00:07:30
Speaker
So the women I work with who've exited the industry, all different types of the industry, never call themselves sex workers.
00:07:37
Speaker
So one of the common threads we've seen among people who are on OnlyFans is that OnlyFans is actually, to be successful on OnlyFans, you generally have to go through the traditional porn system.
00:07:51
Speaker
And the traditional porn system is obviously very exploitative because you're dealing with mostly producers and directors that are men.
00:07:59
Speaker
And the argument that some women have made is that, okay, well, if you're doing an OnlyFans, it puts the power, I guess the direction and the power
00:08:06
Speaker
back in the hands of the actual content creator.
00:08:09
Speaker
What would you say to that?
00:08:10
Speaker
Well, I would say, first of all, just by we know how much money they make, what they haven't got power, you know, they're scrambling to just put food on the table.
00:08:18
Speaker
And also, you know, what kind of a world is it where this is the way that women can survive financially?
00:08:24
Speaker
I mean, we have to sort of realize we live in a patriarchal society where women's worth is measured in quote, their hotness.
00:08:31
Speaker
And so I think it's just one big exploitation of women's bodies, the monetization, commodification.
00:08:39
Speaker
It doesn't put anything in women's hands.
00:08:40
Speaker
What it does is actually often takes away from their power because employees, employers, you know, follow their digital footprint.
00:08:50
Speaker
They often get fired.
00:08:52
Speaker
They get death threats.
00:08:53
Speaker
They get stalked.
00:08:55
Speaker
All of these things they don't talk about on OnlyFans.
00:08:58
Speaker
And that's the reality of the women on there.
00:09:00
Speaker
So, and also the women are asked to do stuff straight out of porn with dildos and what have you.
00:09:04
Speaker
And some of the men, you know, will bring actually porn and say, do this.
00:09:09
Speaker
And so, you know, the women are often coerced into doing sex acts.
00:09:12
Speaker
They really don't want to do, but if they don't, they'll lose their fan base.
00:09:17
Speaker
Very true.
00:09:17
Speaker
The argument that we've made publicly is that creating a profit incentive for women sexually servicing men inherently can't really be feminist and that it's just in another patriarchal system.
00:09:31
Speaker
And it's kind of...
00:09:33
Speaker
interesting that the sex work is work mantra has gone unchecked without anybody looking at it through the lens of, okay, in what context are we talking about it being work?
00:09:43
Speaker
We're talking about it essentially being sexual entertainment and women providing a sexual service to men.
00:09:50
Speaker
Often when you incentivize that, you incentivize them to have sex against their desire and will because they have to make money to live, right?
00:09:58
Speaker
And every time...
00:09:59
Speaker
You know, our big, big, big, big push, at least at Female Dating Strategy, is to normalize the idea that sex is something that women do solely for our own pleasure and not as a service to anyone else.
00:10:10
Speaker
But it's really, really surprising because on both sides of the political aisle,
00:10:16
Speaker
they both have seemed to just had this consigned resignation that sex is a service women have to perform for men.
00:10:22
Speaker
On the conservative side, a lot of times they talk about sex being your marital duty or something you're supposed to do because as a wife, you're obligated to give your body to your husband.
00:10:31
Speaker
And then they have all those purity balls and this worship of virginity.
00:10:36
Speaker
And on the other hand, on the more liberal side, you still have this idea that
00:10:42
Speaker
women exist to sexually service men and that porn is a way for women to make money and that women having sex with men, ideas like maiden sex, ideas of that women's bodies can be monetized, that under the capitalist system somehow this is going to be empowering for women.
00:11:05
Speaker
that idea still gets perpetrated from more liberal magazines and there's like no pushback
Critique of Woke and Liberal Feminists
00:11:11
Speaker
on the idea.
00:11:12
Speaker
That's right.
00:11:12
Speaker
And you know what's so interesting about these woke men who are arguing this is that a lot of them have a really good analysis of capitalism.
00:11:21
Speaker
They understand the nature of exploited labor.
00:11:24
Speaker
And yet when it comes to porn, it's like all of that analysis goes out the door.
00:11:29
Speaker
It's like they can't hold on to that analysis and have an erection.
00:11:32
Speaker
You have to pick which one because once they get aroused, you know, their analysis is out the door.
00:11:38
Speaker
Suddenly, porn is unlike any other industry.
00:11:41
Speaker
It's not exploitive.
00:11:42
Speaker
It's not even a capitalist system.
00:11:45
Speaker
And I speak to these guys.
00:11:46
Speaker
I say, well, you know, you criticize capitalism, as I would, for its exploitive nature of labor.
00:11:51
Speaker
Well, think about women and what it does.
00:11:54
Speaker
But then you get words like empowerment thrown at you and sex positive.
00:11:58
Speaker
So it's like all their brains just drop out of their head, you know?
00:12:02
Speaker
Don't get me started on socialist men.
00:12:03
Speaker
I think a lot of them are not even arguing in good faith.
00:12:07
Speaker
In my personal dating experience, I find a lot of these left-leaning men are snakes hiding in the sand.
00:12:14
Speaker
Opportunists.
00:12:15
Speaker
A lot of them are actually very predatory.
00:12:18
Speaker
And I'm still a socialist.
00:12:20
Speaker
I'm still left-wing.
00:12:20
Speaker
But I'm feeling very betrayed by the men within my own political group.
00:12:27
Speaker
Totally.
00:12:29
Speaker
And that makes perfect sense.
00:12:30
Speaker
And Andrea Dworkin once said, really, it doesn't matter if you're being fucked from the right or fucked from the left, you end up being fucked.
00:12:38
Speaker
You know, both are the same.
00:12:40
Speaker
It's two sides of the same coin.
00:12:42
Speaker
The notion is that sex is dirty and the dirt in it is women.
00:12:47
Speaker
And that on the right, the dirt stays just with the husband who's had access to women.
00:12:53
Speaker
And then on the left, all men can have access to her.
00:12:56
Speaker
So it's really the same idea.
00:12:58
Speaker
It's just deciding whether you're going to democratize the access or keep it just with the husband.
00:13:02
Speaker
It's like sexual communism on the left.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:05
Speaker
We've made fun of that idea, but yeah.
00:13:08
Speaker
I also think the big problem is that because liberal feminists have really gotten behind this idea and have been like feeding them these talking points.
00:13:16
Speaker
You know, I've criticized liberal feminism as basically being the PR wing of the porn industry, where anytime someone tries to make a critique of the porn industry, you have like liberal feminists coming in to jump in and say like, well, these are this, this is these women's choice.
00:13:31
Speaker
And what if a woman wants to do this?
00:13:32
Speaker
And like, they don't,
00:13:34
Speaker
They don't want to have the difficult discussion about the inherently unfair power dynamics and inherently exploitative nature of the sex industry towards women and how that can completely and totally perpetuate this patriarchy and inequality they purport to want to upend.
00:13:52
Speaker
And because they don't want to do that analysis and they just want to leave it at a very surface level, it gives a lot of these other men who are part of this fringe movement the confidence to kind of come out and just say, well, yeah, I'm supporting women by supporting the sex industry, by buying porn, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, no.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:11
Speaker
You put it so well, you put it, that was just perfectly put, is the way in which these men, you know, they want to have it both ways and they say they're supporting us when in reality what they're fighting for is their right to have complete and utter access to women's bodies.
00:14:25
Speaker
That's what they're arguing.
00:14:26
Speaker
And then they have the cheek to hide behind women.
00:14:29
Speaker
And when liberal feminists come out with this pro-porn empowerment blah blah blah argument,
00:14:35
Speaker
It's such a betrayal of their sisters because when women say it, the men then can throw the women forward and say, look, she says it, it's not me.
00:14:43
Speaker
So it's just such damage to women and feminism when these so-called liberal feminists defend it.
00:14:49
Speaker
And let me say, many of these women who defend it and say it's great, they're not doing it.
00:14:53
Speaker
They've got nice cushy jobs in the academy with tenure and stuff.
00:14:57
Speaker
They're not standing on the street corners tussling, you know?
00:15:00
Speaker
Right.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, the absolute smugness of someone with a desk job saying, like, all work is exploitation.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:15:08
Speaker
Well, I was in the academy for 32 years, and I have to tell you, you know, when I went to work, I didn't have to have panic buttons in my office.
00:15:16
Speaker
I wasn't raped for money, and they would compare –
00:15:21
Speaker
academia which is a really cushy number I mean especially if you've got tenure you know you basically got a job for life and you get paid to think you get paid to talk you get paid to teach I mean it's just a wonderful job and then they have the absolute gall to suggest that they're doing you know academic work and the women out there are doing sex work I just I find that so abhorrent just abhorrent I mean again
00:15:44
Speaker
Unfortunately, like we weren't like alive when a lot of these conversations were being had in like the first or in second wave feminism.
00:15:50
Speaker
But it did seem to me that, you know, the second wave of feminism seemed like a lot of middle class, mostly white women, and that was the criticism of the move in the first place were like, okay,
00:16:00
Speaker
being chained to the home as homemakers is like, we're not fulfilling our potential, that it's a system of oppression.
00:16:07
Speaker
And so they fought to be able to make gains in a workplace, but largely focused on white collar work.
00:16:13
Speaker
And then when it came to like working class women were basically like, oh, well go do sex work.
00:16:17
Speaker
Right.
00:16:18
Speaker
And it's like, well, if you thought living in a nice home with a single sexually servicing, a single man was oppressive, why wouldn't this be oppressive?
00:16:26
Speaker
Right.
00:16:27
Speaker
Like if you're a woman who can barely make ends meet and you have to sexually service multiple men, it just, to me, it just didn't compute like how they felt like something that was, you know, relatively cushy and privileged for most of the world's women was oppressive, but then can't see how it could be inherently oppressive for working class women.
00:16:48
Speaker
And then they get confused.
00:16:49
Speaker
Or women of color.
00:16:50
Speaker
Remember, women of color here.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
I mean, so many of the gains that white elite women made was on the backs of poor white women and poor black women.
00:16:59
Speaker
I mean, when they went out of the home to work, who was cleaning the home?
00:17:02
Speaker
Who was doing the childcare?
00:17:04
Speaker
Who was doing all the shit work that you need to keep the house going while those women were going out to work?
00:17:10
Speaker
So this is where a big rift in the second wave came when Bessie Friedan in The Feminine Mystique said to women, go out and get a job.
00:17:18
Speaker
And black women knew immediately, especially in the United States, well, okay, who's going to come in and do the shit work?
00:17:23
Speaker
It's going to be us.
Second Wave Feminism and Working-Class Women
00:17:25
Speaker
And so it really was built on the backs.
00:17:27
Speaker
And they continued to do this when they put forward the notion of sex work and the notion that it's a legitimate way to earn money and it's okay for those women.
00:17:35
Speaker
Because, you know, the further away you are from having to service men and having, you know, a dick put in your mouth for 10 bucks, the more you can say it's an okay way to live.
00:17:44
Speaker
And they wouldn't want their daughters to do this either.
00:17:47
Speaker
That's for clear.
00:17:48
Speaker
That's clear.
00:17:48
Speaker
But it's okay for those other women and it's okay for their daughters, those women's daughters.
00:17:54
Speaker
So I just, again, it's such an elitist, racist, classist argument that there's a category of women who should be out there doing so-called sex work.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I think they're then confused why a lot of these women turn to conservatism.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I'm like, well, if you put them in a position where you say their feminism relies on being sexually available, you can see a lot of women kind of rebuffing.
00:18:18
Speaker
I know Andrea Dworkin talks about that way more eloquently than I can.
00:18:21
Speaker
Exactly.
00:18:23
Speaker
And right-wing women, yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, about right-wing women, about how it's so far and away impractical for women, especially if they work gendered work.
00:18:32
Speaker
If they're doing jobs where most of their workforce is women, like nursing, teaching, house cleaning, etc., they're not necessarily...
00:18:41
Speaker
you know, they're, they're, they're looking for answers and solutions to make their lives materially better.
00:18:46
Speaker
And when like your reaction to them is like, Oh, go do sex work or like, uh, or, or, uh, wanting them to focus on women in white collar jobs and like getting the corner office.
00:18:56
Speaker
And then a lot of women who aren't in that kind of career track are like, okay, well then how does this help me?
00:19:01
Speaker
And how does, how does your feminism actually make my life better?
00:19:04
Speaker
And that's not always, uh, that case is not always made clear.
00:19:08
Speaker
And the truth is, remember, in the second wave, radical feminists always talked about liberation.
00:19:14
Speaker
We never talked about empowerment because liberation was the collective liberation of all women.
00:19:20
Speaker
Empowerment is a neoliberal individualistic term which basically says, if I'm okay, then fuck you.
00:19:27
Speaker
right?
00:19:28
Speaker
Because this is what empowerment is.
00:19:29
Speaker
Liberation is if you are not okay, if my sister over there is not okay, then you know what?
00:19:35
Speaker
I will do whatever it takes to make her life okay.
00:19:38
Speaker
So it was really much more of a kind of collective idea that we're all in this together.
Media Portrayal of Sex Industry
00:19:44
Speaker
We're all sisters and that we fight for each other and we have each other's backs.
00:19:48
Speaker
And what's happened in this faux feminism is just throwing women under the bus.
00:19:52
Speaker
You know, these elite women are throwing white women and poor white women and women of color on
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:20:18
Speaker
So with that, since we're kind of talking about working class women and people of color, the most infuriating argument that I have seen coming out of this OnlyFans fiasco is, I know we kind of touched on it, but that supporting the sex industry is somehow empowering disabled people, the LGBT community, and the
00:20:42
Speaker
People of color.
00:20:43
Speaker
And they've done a very sly bait and switch where they've now, in the name of inclusivity, have made these people the forefronting face of the sex industry in order to garner sympathy, despite the fact that they're probably, and not even probably, definitely based on all of the available content.
00:21:02
Speaker
information making the least money from this industry and being exploited the most because it is completely legal to assign less monetary value to people based on their race, based on their sex, based on their sexual orientation, right?
00:21:18
Speaker
So what do you think of the media switch into like trying to use people like this as the face of the sex industry and justify its existence?
00:21:30
Speaker
Well, it's what men are doing is they're basically, they've put women's bodies, especially, again, poor women and poor white women and women of color, they've made them the shield.
00:21:40
Speaker
So, and the men hide behind it.
00:21:42
Speaker
If you notice in many of the debates, you very rarely see in the media
00:21:46
Speaker
a John interview saying, well, you know, I really want to jerk off to this slut because, you know, this is what I like to do.
00:21:52
Speaker
You don't hear the Johns talk.
00:21:54
Speaker
And by the way, I don't think there's such a thing as a slut.
00:21:56
Speaker
It's obviously a patriarchal invention.
00:21:58
Speaker
But they have used white women, these liberal feminists, and these liberal feminists have allowed themselves to be used as a shield and as shills of the industry.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I want to give a really sort of clear example.
00:22:10
Speaker
About a few years ago, we had a conference, although I live in the States, we did a conference
00:22:16
Speaker
in the UK on porn and we got picketed by the so-called sex workers organizations and they were outside and it was a cold day and there was a few men, mainly the pimps, and they were picketing and then it started to rain.
00:22:33
Speaker
I mean, just pour with rain.
00:22:35
Speaker
And all the men took shelter and left the women outside in the rain, picketing us.
00:22:40
Speaker
They were soaked to the skin.
00:22:42
Speaker
They were barely clothed.
00:22:43
Speaker
And meanwhile, the guys had gone to the local coffee shop to have a cup of tea to keep warm.
00:22:49
Speaker
You know, it was...
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was just so, and we actually went outside and we said to the women, come in, you know, we'll give you a cup of tea, we'll give you some biscuits, come in, don't be outside in the rain.
00:23:02
Speaker
And it was just so clear there was the women getting soaked through to the skin and the guys taking shelter.
00:23:09
Speaker
And that's what they do, they shelter behind women.
00:23:12
Speaker
And then other women feel, well, if these women are saying it's sex work and it's okay, who am I as a woman to say that's not okay?
Empowerment vs. Material Change
00:23:19
Speaker
And then what happens is because we have an individual analysis and not a collective, it looks like a catfight, when in fact what it is is a political movement to basically liberate women from the sex industry.
00:23:32
Speaker
It's not a one-on-one catfight here.
00:23:34
Speaker
These are our sisters, the women in the sex industry.
00:23:36
Speaker
They're not our enemies.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think the framing of the idea that feminism is about liberation instead of just or solely individual empowerment is what's been missing totally from feminist media.
00:23:50
Speaker
Also, the notion of empowerment is just, I feel, like, when you say I feel empowered, that's just a feeling.
00:23:56
Speaker
Like, it's like...
00:23:57
Speaker
That's right.
00:23:58
Speaker
It's the sort of adrenaline rush of doing something taboo, I guess.
00:24:01
Speaker
And I find people who say that they feel empowered when they do porn, I wonder if they're conflating real power with... Like a dopamine hit from adrenaline or something.
00:24:12
Speaker
When you do something taboo, you get that sort of thrill, right?
00:24:16
Speaker
That can often be conflated with, yeah, dopamine hit or whatever.
00:24:20
Speaker
It makes you feel like you're on top of the world, but you're actually not.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:23
Speaker
But the women in the industry don't feel, I mean, when you talk to them, they don't believe in that empowerment.
00:24:28
Speaker
When you're talking to them off camera, by the way, that's not the terms they use.
00:24:32
Speaker
They use them when they're on camera and their pimps are within, you know, spitting distance of them.
00:24:38
Speaker
But in reality, having to use so many women in and out of the sex industry, and this is not a term that they use.
00:24:44
Speaker
It's a term that they are forced to use to shill for the porn industry because they need the work.
00:24:49
Speaker
You know, we live in a...
00:24:50
Speaker
patriarchal capitalist racist society and you need to put food on the table and especially if you've got kids you'll do whatever it takes to put food on the table certainly if that was the only way I could have fed my kids that I would have done it there's no question if that was the only way so and you know I want to give an example I love what you said about empowerment being a feeling and
00:25:10
Speaker
So I was going to give an interview on one of the big, I think it was CNN.
00:25:16
Speaker
So I was flying on the 7 o'clock shuttle from 7 a.m.
00:25:20
Speaker
from Boston to New York.
00:25:22
Speaker
And, of course, who's on the 7 a.m.
00:25:24
Speaker
shuttle?
00:25:24
Speaker
It's basically American capital, right, going from Boston to New York.
00:25:29
Speaker
So I get on this shuttle at 7 a.m.
00:25:31
Speaker
I'm the only woman on there.
00:25:33
Speaker
All these guys are dressed in three-piece suits.
00:25:35
Speaker
And I happen to have been reading –
00:25:37
Speaker
A third wave book and the actual introduction was done by a very well-known third waver and what she was saying was before she wrote the introduction to the book she felt really empowered because she'd just gone out and had a full Brazilian wax and that made her feel.
00:25:53
Speaker
She put this in the introduction okay to the book.
00:25:56
Speaker
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, you know what, I'm going to tap one of these guys on the shoulder on the plane.
00:26:00
Speaker
I'm going to say, you might think you're empowered because you own Wall Street and you own money, but let me tell you, you're not empowered.
00:26:08
Speaker
It's our bikini waxes that empower us.
00:26:10
Speaker
You know, I mean, how hideous is that to say that?
00:26:14
Speaker
And just as I was sitting on that plane looking at all of these guys going, you know,
00:26:19
Speaker
backwards and forwards between the main places of capital in America.
00:26:24
Speaker
And this, you know, somehow the Brazilian wax trumped being a hedge fund guy or whatever they were doing going to New York.
00:26:33
Speaker
It just
00:26:34
Speaker
shows that got no material analysis is if I feel this way or if I think this way but that's not how we live our lives we live our lives within an ecosystem of institutions that consistently work to limit women's life chances
00:26:49
Speaker
You know, the economy, the legal system, the medical system.
00:26:53
Speaker
We don't live as individuals feeling empowered or disempowered.
Heterosexual Desires and Empowerment
00:26:57
Speaker
We have to live within this system that men have set up and have set up in order to reproduce the power that they have.
00:27:04
Speaker
And we have to, and many women, especially the third wave neoliberals, will settle for the crumbs of the system, the absolute crumbs.
00:27:13
Speaker
Forget half the pie.
00:27:15
Speaker
They're just settling for the crumbs.
00:27:16
Speaker
Right.
00:27:17
Speaker
My jaw is still dropping at the idea of feeling empowered by Brazilian wax.
00:27:21
Speaker
Reminds me, you know, when you get a haircut and you're feeling super fresh and you feel like you're on top of the world, it's like you feel maybe good about yourself for a day, but it's not going to get you a promotion at work.
00:27:32
Speaker
It's not going to put money in your bank account.
00:27:34
Speaker
It's not going to make you able to influence the government and so on.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah, that was ridiculous.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's not empowerment.
00:27:44
Speaker
That's just...
00:27:50
Speaker
No.
00:27:50
Speaker
And also remember the bikini wax, what it's doing is pulling hair from, you know, the most, one of the most painful parts of the body in terms of, you know, waxing.
00:27:59
Speaker
And women bleed during it.
00:28:03
Speaker
When I was writing Portland, I interviewed women who worked in sort of, you know, manicure and pedicure shops who were doing Brazilian waxes.
00:28:10
Speaker
And they said, you know, I hate doing it.
00:28:12
Speaker
The women are in pain.
00:28:14
Speaker
I have to deal with the blood.
00:28:16
Speaker
And they also said, interestingly, the women said,
00:28:18
Speaker
I feel like I'm turning them into a child and I,
00:28:21
Speaker
I hate to do it.
00:28:22
Speaker
You know, this is what we're meant to settle for, for empowerment.
00:28:26
Speaker
It feels like hope.
00:28:28
Speaker
It's like they know that they don't have any power, so they tell themselves they're in control so that they don't feel, like it's very psychologically uncomfortable to be aware of the fact that you don't have any power.
00:28:38
Speaker
I think because it's infinitely monetizable to sell people empowerment in a form of a product.
00:28:43
Speaker
So liberal feminism is more successful because it's more easily grasped in the capitalist system, right?
00:28:49
Speaker
Because you can sell people stuff with it.
00:28:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:28:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:28:53
Speaker
Well, you know, the irony is the gym at the bottom of my road, which is for women only, is called empowerment.
00:29:00
Speaker
So evidently you can get empowerment through going to the gym.
00:29:03
Speaker
I mean, through your membership.
00:29:04
Speaker
It's just ludicrous that this is what it's considered as.
00:29:07
Speaker
So I think you're making really important points.
00:29:10
Speaker
And also, I think, you know, all of us.
00:29:13
Speaker
I think as human beings, we have a desire to have power over our lives.
00:29:17
Speaker
This is what it means to feel like you exist, you're seen, and that you can survive in this system.
00:29:23
Speaker
And this is what patriarchy does.
00:29:26
Speaker
It robs women of the power they have in order to survive.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I mean here very much on the material level, putting food on the table, having shelter, and all the things that you need to make life livable.
00:29:38
Speaker
So you rob women of that, and then you sell it back to them and go and get your bikini wax.
00:29:43
Speaker
go and dress up in a certain way so that you look heart and fuckable.
00:29:46
Speaker
That's the empowerment.
00:29:47
Speaker
So this is kind of a touchy topic.
00:29:50
Speaker
Here's where we've gotten to some controversy with some of the radical feminists who have been part of FDS.
00:29:57
Speaker
FDS is, at the end of the day, still a dating strategy.
00:29:59
Speaker
So we do frame a lot of our cultural critique from a radical feminist lens.
00:30:05
Speaker
But with the understanding that most women who are heterosexual are going on and date men,
00:30:09
Speaker
And they want to be sexually attractive to men.
Beauty Industry and Self-Sexualization
00:30:12
Speaker
How do you reconcile, like, the reality of heterosexuality with the pressure to perform for men, right?
00:30:20
Speaker
Like, it just seems like a really hard balance to strike.
00:30:23
Speaker
And we've been attempting to do it here, but it's not always, like, it's not without criticism, right?
00:30:27
Speaker
Like, we don't necessarily always go into, like...
00:30:30
Speaker
You know, if people want to wear makeup, like we don't go a ton into like critique of the beauty industry, but we do say like, obviously if you're hurting yourself by getting like plastic surgery or anything that's going to like cause you infection or do damage, it's probably not worth to do.
00:30:45
Speaker
And don't let capitalism make you insecure about things that like you weren't insecure about before.
00:30:50
Speaker
There's been like, there was like a magazine I saw where they were talking about like people having dark elbows and knees.
00:30:55
Speaker
And I was like, you know, if they hadn't put this in this magazine, I never would have thought about that.
00:30:58
Speaker
Right.
00:30:59
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:31:02
Speaker
You know, think about hip dips, like great.
00:31:04
Speaker
Another thing for me to be insecure about.
00:31:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:07
Speaker
would have thought about that.
00:31:08
Speaker
So I guess my question to you, just to kind of get, talk about this, because this is a controversy I think for us is like, how do you reconcile like wanting to be sexually attracted to men?
00:31:18
Speaker
Because, you know, women do, and especially young girls when like they're, you know, they're just discovering having crushes on boys.
00:31:24
Speaker
They want boys to like them.
00:31:25
Speaker
They want boys to like them.
00:31:26
Speaker
And then also feeling an actual, actually staying empowered, actually staying actually empowered to set your boundaries and not, you
00:31:35
Speaker
unintentionally exploiting yourself, I should say.
00:31:39
Speaker
You know what?
00:31:39
Speaker
I don't think they can be reconciled.
00:31:41
Speaker
The truth is, and I saw this in my classes because, you know, when I was teaching my feminist theories seminar, the students would have to read books and then they'd have to do a report on them and an analysis.
00:31:56
Speaker
And
00:31:56
Speaker
always when we got into the beauty industry what would happen is that this is where they would really fall apart and and they couldn't write the article they say i need a week they think the students would say we cannot write our reflection papers you need to give us longer because for them the heterosexual women were struggling so much with this with the knowing the beauty industry the harms it caused the way we were forced to self-sexualize and um
00:32:23
Speaker
This was always, of all I taught, this always caused the most discomfort
Feminist Movement and Sisterhood
00:32:28
Speaker
in the class.
00:32:28
Speaker
And at one point I said to the students, look, don't drive yourself crazy.
00:32:34
Speaker
If you need to wear makeup to feel better because that's how you've been socialized, you know what, we've got bigger fish to fry, which is pulling down patriarchy.
00:32:42
Speaker
So don't drive yourself nuts.
00:32:44
Speaker
Do what you have to do and figure out what the boundaries are.
00:32:48
Speaker
But I said, the most important thing is don't mindfuck yourself.
00:32:52
Speaker
Don't say I'm doing this because I want to do it for me.
00:32:56
Speaker
Understand that this is how women have been socialized.
00:32:59
Speaker
It's been ingrained in women through the culture.
00:33:02
Speaker
Just understand that and at some point come to some sense of I can go this far self-sexualizing but no further.
00:33:13
Speaker
and figure out what your lines are.
00:33:15
Speaker
But I told my students, you know, we've got so much work to do as radical feminists that really sitting there worrying over whether you should put that extra bit of makeup on is really taking away from the work that we need to be done.
00:33:29
Speaker
And the interesting thing is, you know, there's so many ways, if we didn't live in a patriarchal system, that what it would mean to be sexually attractive.
00:33:36
Speaker
It would mean to be smart, funny, have an interesting, you know, be quirky and all of these things.
00:33:42
Speaker
But what a patriarchal porn culture does is say the only way that you can be visible is to be fuckable.
00:33:50
Speaker
Forget the PhD.
00:33:51
Speaker
Forget the interesting person you are.
00:33:53
Speaker
Forget you're just stripped bare of everything that makes you human.
00:33:58
Speaker
And in its place, you're offered this fuckability image.
00:34:01
Speaker
So I just think it's an incredibly difficult thing that we put young women in.
00:34:06
Speaker
And I think, you know, what I would like is what's really sexually hot is a man seeing a woman and thinking, God, she's really interesting.
00:34:14
Speaker
I'd love to get to know her.
00:34:17
Speaker
I'm so interested in what she thinks, you know, those things.
00:34:19
Speaker
And given that we live in hookup culture, the last thing he's interested in is anything she's got to say.
00:34:25
Speaker
All he wants is, you know, his quick 10 minutes and off he is to the next one.
00:34:29
Speaker
So women really are the collateral damage of this.
00:34:32
Speaker
And I think it does incredible damage to their mental health because on the one hand, they do want to be seen and visible.
00:34:38
Speaker
And they know that means looking fuckable.
00:34:40
Speaker
And on the other hand, they really resent it because they understand they're being reduced to this, you know, disposable sex object.
00:34:47
Speaker
So I think it's a line that's very difficult to walk for individual women, and that's why we need a movement to support women to figure out how do you negotiate being heterosexual and wanting to be with men in a patriarchal culture that trains men to hate women.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think there's any easy answers for that, honestly.
00:35:05
Speaker
No, there's not.
00:35:06
Speaker
There really isn't.
00:35:07
Speaker
And I wish I had, you know, five easy answers to women, but it's not.
00:35:13
Speaker
That's what I feel so...
00:35:14
Speaker
it's so hard about the work I do.
00:35:15
Speaker
It's like, you know, you have it, one after one of my conferences and some people are giving different talks.
00:35:21
Speaker
I'll say, these are the five things you can do.
00:35:23
Speaker
Well, I haven't got five things you can do.
00:35:25
Speaker
I've only got really one, which is a feminist revolution.
00:35:28
Speaker
And that's not an easy thing to do.
00:35:30
Speaker
We're going to have to build a movement.
00:35:32
Speaker
We're going to have to fight and all of those things.
00:35:34
Speaker
And I think,
00:35:34
Speaker
You know, what we've really lost in feminism because of these fights between the faux feminists and the radical feminists is we've lost a supportive movement.
00:35:43
Speaker
You know, I'm older than you are.
00:35:44
Speaker
And when I came out as a feminist, I had this fabulous support system around me of wonderful women.
Feminist Principles in Relationships
00:35:52
Speaker
And now what you get, especially, you know, when you see on social media, it's just women tearing into each other.
00:35:58
Speaker
just tearing into and even and I have to lay some of the blame now the radical feminist movement I've seen you know things on Facebook and other places where you know you don't tear into each other let's forge sisterhood and let's figure out although we might disagree on certain things what is the best way we can support each other the culture is tearing us apart don't add to this it's almost like a divide and rule isn't it
00:36:22
Speaker
The only thing that I have to add to that is that, you know, a lot of the beauty that we do is for the male gaze.
00:36:29
Speaker
And so one of the ways that I've been kind of coping with that is by embracing the female gaze, if that makes sense.
00:36:37
Speaker
Well, no, Gail, what you're describing about, you know, oh, I want someone who, you know, a man who thinks I'm, like, funny and interesting and likes my personality and so on.
00:36:46
Speaker
I, you know, I heard that and I'm like, yeah, that's, like, my ultimate fantasy.
00:36:49
Speaker
And you think about, you know, a lot of romance novels where, you know, it's, like, an ordinary girl, but the guy, you know, just falls madly in love with her because of her, you know, personality or whatever.
00:36:58
Speaker
That's, like, every woman's, you know, fantasy, I guess.
00:37:02
Speaker
And so I think, like...
00:37:04
Speaker
There is value in maybe just like being honest with yourself about what you want and, you know, what you think makes you attractive and, you know, not really concerning yourself with whether men think that's attractive.
00:37:15
Speaker
Like the PhD thing, like men say all the time, like, oh, I can't fuck your PhD.
00:37:19
Speaker
And it's like, well, I don't care if you can't fuck my PhD.
00:37:22
Speaker
I want a PhD because it benefits me.
00:37:24
Speaker
And it's what I want.
00:37:26
Speaker
And it gives me power in the world.
00:37:27
Speaker
It gives me power as well.
00:37:29
Speaker
They're not going to stop trying to have sex with us.
00:37:31
Speaker
That's kind of the whole, like, gaffe about the whole thing, right?
00:37:34
Speaker
Like, if we all get PhDs, then they're just going to be forced to have sex with women with PhDs and cry about it, right?
00:37:40
Speaker
Exactly.
00:37:43
Speaker
Actually, I'm just thinking, given the Texas anti-abortion law, maybe the actual best way is for all to get high-level careers, and that's the best form of contraception.
00:37:53
Speaker
You know, the guys will run a mile from powerful women.
00:37:56
Speaker
Really, the best form of contraception is being a powerful woman, because men don't want that.
00:38:00
Speaker
They won't.
00:38:01
Speaker
It's all bluff.
00:38:03
Speaker
Some guys are into that though.
00:38:06
Speaker
Some men are, but you know what often happens is when men are attracted to powerful women, often once they get in a relationship, they do their damnedest to put the power away from them.
00:38:15
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:15
Speaker
True.
00:38:15
Speaker
Because they didn't like that, you know, and
00:38:17
Speaker
You know, I can say some stuff personally about when I met my partner, and we've been together well over 40 years, was so interesting.
00:38:26
Speaker
I remember we were out with friends and we were like 19 and there was four different couples, all heterosexual, and we were having a dinner.
00:38:34
Speaker
Somebody had a dinner party, we were students, so you can imagine what that looked like as a student dinner party.
00:38:38
Speaker
But anyway, we're having fun and then suddenly, and David and I are having this real discussion about feminism because I really felt that this was a man I really wanted to be with, but he had to understand on a deep level what feminism was.
00:38:52
Speaker
And I turn around and all the other three couples have gone off to have sex.
00:38:56
Speaker
And we're fighting over the dinner table.
00:38:59
Speaker
And I remember at one point I turned to him and I said to him, look, if we go any further in our relationship, then you have to recognize that my civil and human rights are fully equal to yours and they're not up for negotiation.
00:39:12
Speaker
That's it.
00:39:12
Speaker
And he just looked at me and he said, you're right.
00:39:15
Speaker
You're absolutely right.
00:39:16
Speaker
So, you know, there's plenty of time to have sex.
00:39:19
Speaker
It was more important that we got that out of the way before we could move on to a serious relationship because I was not going to be with any man who in any way didn't recognize and fully respect my civil and human rights and that it was going to be a relationship based on justice and equality.
00:39:36
Speaker
Otherwise, I was going to walk away.
00:39:37
Speaker
And he saw that and he wanted that.
00:39:40
Speaker
But that was a different generation of men as
Porn's Influence on Male Behavior
00:39:42
Speaker
well.
00:39:42
Speaker
Completely different generation of men.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah, I find men these days, like older men have this sort of like benevolent sexism, you know, like I don't want to say benevolent, but it's like slightly more benign.
00:39:54
Speaker
It still sucks, but it's like not as actively hostile as what a lot of younger men are having.
00:40:00
Speaker
I think what we're going through is this huge backlash to feminism and misogyny has become so much more extreme to sort of counteract that.
00:40:10
Speaker
Totally.
00:40:11
Speaker
And you can thank porn for that.
00:40:12
Speaker
I mean, this is where we get into porn.
00:40:15
Speaker
I mean, you know, the studies show, you know, what guys want to do when you ask them in studies, what are the sex acts you want?
00:40:23
Speaker
It's always number one is come on a face, then number two is anal, and number three is a threesome.
00:40:30
Speaker
And, you know, again, when I was growing up, if the guy said, can I come on your face?
00:40:34
Speaker
We would have run a mile.
00:40:35
Speaker
We would have thought he was a psychopath or something.
00:40:38
Speaker
Honest to God.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:40
Speaker
You know, who is this man?
00:40:41
Speaker
And I'm getting the hell out of here.
00:40:42
Speaker
Whereas today, you know, what my students would tell me, they don't even ask if they can come on your face.
00:40:47
Speaker
They just do.
00:40:48
Speaker
And they've seen that in porn.
00:40:50
Speaker
That's for them the power over women.
00:40:52
Speaker
They're above her.
00:40:54
Speaker
They can, you know, come on her face.
00:40:56
Speaker
She's degraded and debased.
00:40:57
Speaker
And they know she's degraded and debased because one particular study that was really interesting out of NYU where the guys actually said, yeah, we really like this because we know she hates it.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's horrifying.
00:41:09
Speaker
So what do you say about that?
00:41:11
Speaker
That men have been trained to be sexually aroused by harming women and hurting women and degrading them.
00:41:17
Speaker
This is thank you to the porn industry who have created a whole generation of men where this eroticization of violence against women is kind of normalized now.
Public Health and Porn Culture
00:41:29
Speaker
So we've gone over some of the challenges that our pornified culture has presented to young women.
00:41:36
Speaker
What can we really do?
00:41:38
Speaker
I know you've done a lot of work with Culture Reframe, so can you kind of explain what your work's about and then how it's working to impact or at least change the conversation around porn?
00:41:48
Speaker
Yeah, so what we are is we define ourselves as a public health organization that
00:41:54
Speaker
And we see pornography as the public health crisis of the digital age.
00:41:58
Speaker
And we build programs specifically for parents, for educators, for medical professionals, experts in general, to how to help young people build resilience and resistance to porn culture.
00:42:14
Speaker
So this is what we do is raise awareness.
00:42:17
Speaker
Now, one of the things that's really interesting is when you're saying that pornography is a major form of sex education today, which we know from studies it is, the question is, what are we going to do about that?
00:42:28
Speaker
And one of the answers is we need really good sex ed to help kids really think through what's going on in this culture.
00:42:36
Speaker
And what you notice is most sex ed programs, most of them are crap anyway and don't deal with anything,
00:42:42
Speaker
And so what happens is the kids and, you know, in the UK, it was mandated.
00:42:47
Speaker
It's not in the US where I am.
00:42:49
Speaker
But in the UK, it was mandated in 2020 to teach sex and relationship education.
00:42:55
Speaker
And what happened is Culture Reframe got all of these teachers coming at us begging people.
00:43:00
Speaker
for materials on how to teach sex ed with a porn critical lens.
00:43:05
Speaker
Because if you don't do that, what happens if you have kids coming into the class, especially the boys, but also girls, but especially the boys, whose sexual template has been formed by pornography?
00:43:17
Speaker
So then if you don't deal with that and help them deconstruct and interrogate
00:43:22
Speaker
what they have been taught by the porn industry and the porn culture.
00:43:26
Speaker
There's no way you're going to be able to teach sex ed, which is based more on connection, relationships, intimacy, equality.
00:43:34
Speaker
So what we're doing on October the 2nd and 3rd is we are holding what I think is the first ever international conference on how to teach sex ed with a feminist porn critical lens.
00:43:47
Speaker
We've got speakers from sex ed, from child safeguarding.
00:43:53
Speaker
We've got you and we're all excited about what you're going to talk about.
00:43:58
Speaker
We've got a whole array of speakers looking at how can we tackle this?
Conference on Feminist Sex Education
00:44:04
Speaker
through sex ed that specifically has this porn critical lens.
00:44:09
Speaker
And of course, you can't have a porn critical lens unless you've got a feminist lens.
00:44:13
Speaker
So it's going to be a great conference.
00:44:15
Speaker
We've got speakers from the US, UK, Sweden, India, Turkey.
00:44:23
Speaker
And we're going to be really analyzing what is the best way to build sex education.
00:44:28
Speaker
And it's going to be much broader than just that because we are also going to be looking at how pornography impacts young people.
00:44:35
Speaker
What are the social, emotional, cognitive and sexual harms?
00:44:38
Speaker
And how do we then build materials to support these young people to really get rid of the ideologies and the templates and the narratives of pornography?
00:44:50
Speaker
And this is really what I would say a progressive education is about.
00:44:54
Speaker
You have to unpack the hegemony, the mainstream dominant ideology, in this case that's produced by pornography, for what we're dealing with, and help them sit back and think, well, what have I learned from pornography?
00:45:07
Speaker
Because pornography is not just about images of sex.
00:45:10
Speaker
What pornography is, is a whole discourse and narrative and story about masculinity, about femininity, about patriarchy, about relationships, about sexual class equality or inequality.
00:45:25
Speaker
So we're really coming at this with everything we've got.
00:45:28
Speaker
And it's very affordable.
00:45:30
Speaker
We have tickets for people who are low resourced.
00:45:36
Speaker
And I don't think everyone has ever tried this really before, is to really tackle this from a multidisciplinary viewpoint and keeping true to the feminist project, which is to basically make sure that we do not bring up a generation of young people thinking that pornography should be their form of sex ed and that pornography is the way to go and have sex, because that's what we know is happening.
00:46:01
Speaker
The more the kids are going to porn, the more they're having porn sex.
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, we're really excited to be able to add our voice to the conversation because I think, I mean, we feel very confident that like we're going to be able to expand.
00:46:15
Speaker
We've been expanding, obviously, off of just Reddit, but onto our general social media.
00:46:19
Speaker
And the ideas that we've been putting out have.
00:46:22
Speaker
really been resonating with women who maybe aren't like traditional feminists or like traditional, even traditional Redditors or people who are super plugged in online into like these conversations.
00:46:31
Speaker
So our hope by adding our voice and also expanding our platform is that we make this kind of information
00:46:37
Speaker
accessible to women who are just like regular everyday women who maybe aren't even like super plugged into like the whole feminist network, but like who can really just start to see and understand how porn has really influenced the culture in a lot of really negative ways and help them to navigate in their dating life, how to circumvent that.
Men's Role in Porn Culture
00:46:57
Speaker
really excited because I think for us, especially too, we're going to, we're going to learn as much as we possibly can from this, from this conference as well as like put in our two cents about what we're doing.
00:47:08
Speaker
So.
00:47:09
Speaker
Great.
00:47:09
Speaker
Well, I'm so happy to have you.
00:47:11
Speaker
I mean, it's so important what you're doing and we've also got interesting, we've put a lot of pro-feminist men in to speak about how you work with men and
00:47:21
Speaker
to basically get them to see the sex class privileges they have and to unpack that.
00:47:27
Speaker
So we're doing some sessions on what does consent mean in a patriarchal society when girls have been socialized from the word go to comply with patriarchy.
00:47:38
Speaker
So we've got people like Jackson Katz speaking.
00:47:40
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's one of the, I would say probably the world's leading pro-feminist man developing programs and education for men.
00:47:51
Speaker
Because, you know, often what happens at these conferences is we talk about women all the time.
00:47:54
Speaker
But the truth is, you know, men are often the problem.
00:47:57
Speaker
And we need to address that.
00:47:59
Speaker
And not in a way that is kind of comes after them, although, you know, many of us are aggravated what men are doing, but in ways that give them an opportunity to step back and think how they've been socialized into the porn culture.
00:48:12
Speaker
And is this what they want to be?
00:48:13
Speaker
Are these the men they want to be?
00:48:15
Speaker
Do they want to look in the mirror and think to themselves, I'm a guy who jerks off to violence against women?
00:48:21
Speaker
And I would really argue, I think many men actually probably don't want that.
00:48:26
Speaker
I'm sure there's those who do, and those need to be dropped on a desert island and kept far away from.
00:48:31
Speaker
They need to go to Rapist Island.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:34
Speaker
On our Rapist Island.
00:48:35
Speaker
This is a recurring joke.
00:48:37
Speaker
Call back to a previous episode.
00:48:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:48:42
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:42
Speaker
But, you know, the irony here is that as feminists, we get called man-haters, and we're the opposite.
00:48:48
Speaker
We actually are the only group rooting for men's humanity.
00:48:51
Speaker
We're the only group who've argued over and over and over again that what pornography says about men is not true, that men are not just life support systems for erect penises.
00:49:03
Speaker
They're fully human.
00:49:04
Speaker
LAUGHTER
00:49:06
Speaker
That's the image of men in porn.
00:49:08
Speaker
Systems for an erect penis.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:13
Speaker
Well, you know, we know men who we know many of them who are not that.
00:49:17
Speaker
A few of them are.
00:49:19
Speaker
I mean, some men embrace that with their whole heart.
00:49:23
Speaker
No, but I know what you're saying.
00:49:24
Speaker
There's plenty of men who, and, and, and to reiterate your point, there's definitely a hunger for that.
00:49:29
Speaker
And, um, I mean, obviously there's a huge, there's actually a huge movement towards that on
Media and Porn's Harms
00:49:34
Speaker
Reddit itself.
00:49:34
Speaker
If things like no fap or, or men who are trying to unplug from the porn network, unfortunately it feels like the only people who have really like legitimately addressed this with men has been, has come from the religious right.
00:49:45
Speaker
But of course they come from a certain ideological framework.
00:49:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:48
Speaker
No fap doesn't.
00:49:49
Speaker
No fap is not, um, uh,
00:49:53
Speaker
Alex Rhodes, who runs that, is absolutely not religious, not right-wing in any ways, progressive.
00:49:59
Speaker
But a lot of the so-called recovery programs are run by the religious right-wing and don't address, you know, unlike any other substance.
00:50:09
Speaker
They're hungry for people that aren't from their religious right to just tell them, like, what they kind of maybe intuitively are feeling and knowing.
00:50:15
Speaker
And so I think that's...
00:50:17
Speaker
Hopefully what this will provide a an actual scientific critical lens about how it's affecting people.
00:50:22
Speaker
That's not just like coming from people who are trying to do it based on, you know, their beliefs in God.
00:50:30
Speaker
Well, that's not happening at our conference.
00:50:31
Speaker
I can tell you that we're a progressive, you know, feminist.
00:50:36
Speaker
And, you know, often I get phone calls from journalists and they'll say, so Gail Downes, you're a right-wing conservative.
00:50:44
Speaker
And I'll say, well, actually, I'm a left-wing Jewish radical feminist.
00:50:47
Speaker
So apart from that, you've got everything right, you know.
00:50:50
Speaker
I mean, Culture Reframed is a science-based, research-driven organization.
00:50:55
Speaker
We are not a faith-based organization at all.
00:50:58
Speaker
And I think in the United States, there's probably some others in Australia
00:51:02
Speaker
But I'm saying in the United States, we are the only anti-porn organization that is not faith-based and that comes at this from a scientific research-driven place, which, you know, is ridiculous.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same.
00:51:15
Speaker
Isn't it?
00:51:16
Speaker
We should have tons of competition out there and we haven't.
00:51:20
Speaker
at all.
00:51:21
Speaker
So this is why we were really driven to have this conference.
00:51:24
Speaker
And what I love about it is first of all, we're coming at this from so many different approaches, from pediatrics, from feminist theory, from neuroscience, from activism,
00:51:36
Speaker
So, you know, for those two days, we're just going to have so many speakers from so many different angles.
00:51:41
Speaker
But, of course, what joins them all is a feminist understanding that pornography causes violence against women and children in its production and consumption.
00:51:51
Speaker
That's what we all agree on.
00:51:53
Speaker
And then everyone takes their own area of expertise and expands on that.
00:51:56
Speaker
So there's going to be lots of speakers, and then we're going to have breakout sessions and discussions.
00:52:02
Speaker
And I have to say, we went live last week and we've had hundreds already register and we've not even started really our full on media promotion.
00:52:15
Speaker
So clearly there's a hunger for this, just given our registration figures.
00:52:19
Speaker
And just to kind of touch on your point before about how there's just no porn critical education that's not faith based.
00:52:26
Speaker
That's that's been a really interesting realization for us, because I know recently the New York Times has run a piece about like sex educators that are kind of sort of trying to bridge the gap.
00:52:38
Speaker
But they're still coming at it from a very pro porn lens.
00:52:42
Speaker
And it's actually, I think there was one woman who had taught it in like a pretty elite private school.
00:52:47
Speaker
And like the parents are like so outraged, she actually got fired.
00:52:50
Speaker
And so now instead of like retooling the porn critical education and like looking for existing literature from people like yourself, it's like they're trying to push the idea that like all these parents are reactionary.
00:53:03
Speaker
I think this woman was like literally showing people porn.
00:53:05
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah, she was showing the kids porn, which of course is a complete violation of their rights.
00:53:12
Speaker
And two, it's illegal because they were under 18.
00:53:15
Speaker
And interestingly, a lot of people in the UK contacted me because there's private organisations now developing curriculum.
00:53:25
Speaker
And they sent me some of the porn curriculum that they're teaching around sex ed and porn.
00:53:31
Speaker
And it's a lot of it is pro porn.
00:53:34
Speaker
I mean, they're saying things like there's no evidence that porn can harm you or it has a negative impact and you should learn how to use it responsibly.
00:53:42
Speaker
That's like telling somebody how to drive drunk responsibly.
00:53:47
Speaker
Right.
00:53:47
Speaker
I mean, you wouldn't do that.
00:53:48
Speaker
So what we're trying to do is really fill the gap here and come at this through a porn critical lens that is not in any way faith based or driven by morality, but is driven by science and driven by activism.
00:54:01
Speaker
I mean, that's the other thing.
00:54:02
Speaker
We need activists doing this, feminist activists, because, you know, who really makes the change in the long run?
00:54:09
Speaker
It's feminist activists when it comes to this issue.
00:54:11
Speaker
The science is really important because we use that as our tools to make the argument.
00:54:17
Speaker
But ultimately, you couldn't have any piece of science that would convince the oppressor to stop oppressing the oppressed.
00:54:26
Speaker
So we feel with pornography, as much as the science is so crucial and it's all showing exactly what we're saying about the harms, it's the activists who are going to have to change
Sex Education and Porn Critique
00:54:36
Speaker
this world.
00:54:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's been very, very strange to me how there's been this media almost like blackout of any information that actually does show that porn is having a negative effect individually and culturally.
00:54:49
Speaker
They seem to focus on either studies that are somewhat inconclusive or saying that, oh, it's not actually causing...
00:54:56
Speaker
men to go out and like physically beat up women as much, but like all of the other research about how it's depicting criminalized sexual activity as normal, about how it's leading to men having more sexually coercive behaviors towards women, for which there is research.
00:55:10
Speaker
It's like they're summarily ignoring that.
00:55:13
Speaker
How do you feel about that?
00:55:14
Speaker
Or like, how does that...
00:55:16
Speaker
get the point of doing that and like why uh why do you think there's been such a media blackout and admitting that like there's actually some harmful effects of porn well there's i think a couple of reasons first of all there's a lot of economic connections between the mainstream media and the porn industry got to remember that money speaks louder than anything also a lot of the um journalists today have been brought up in a media in a porn culture so they themselves have internalized the porn scripts
00:55:47
Speaker
So what's interesting is when I do, and I get interviewed a lot, I really do bring to the journalists a ton of research and say, look, in the social science community, when we're discussing pornography, we're not saying does it harm a lot.
00:56:00
Speaker
We know that from 40 years of research.
00:56:02
Speaker
What we're doing is doing a more sort of nuanced analysis of the harms and what are the protective factors.
00:56:09
Speaker
If you live in the social science community,
00:56:12
Speaker
Nobody thinks that porn has no harm.
00:56:14
Speaker
I mean, we've just got too much research to show.
00:56:17
Speaker
And increasingly, the neuroscience research is showing how the dopamine releases reframe and reshape the brain of the men and boys who are using it.
00:56:27
Speaker
So I think…
00:56:28
Speaker
I think what's going on here is that the media have a vested interest in promoting pornography.
00:56:33
Speaker
Also, you know, you have what's called the Free Speech Coalition, a hideous name, but it's the lobbying arm of the porn industry.
00:56:40
Speaker
They do a ton of press releases.
00:56:42
Speaker
They're always on the phone with them.
00:56:45
Speaker
So they have a lot of power in shaping the narrative.
00:56:49
Speaker
And often as feminists, we don't have that same power.
00:56:52
Speaker
So this is why we're holding this conference as well, is to introduce people to the research.
00:56:57
Speaker
We have some of the great researchers out there talking about their research.
00:57:01
Speaker
So you're getting we're going to give sort of something for everybody from research right through to activism.
00:57:07
Speaker
I'm really excited for the part about having men talk about porn to men because, you know, having conversations with men about porn as a woman, it's challenging because it's almost like, you know, for men who are very misogynistic, they aren't going to listen to women.
00:57:24
Speaker
It's unfair, but that's just the reality.
00:57:27
Speaker
It's like they only believe it when they hear it from another man.
00:57:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:57:31
Speaker
Which is terrible.
00:57:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's terrible that it's like that, but it's the unfortunate reality that if we want to change things, we have to get men on board and, you know, speaking out.
00:57:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's the reality.
00:57:42
Speaker
And there are men on board.
00:57:43
Speaker
I have to tell you, I've worked with...
00:57:46
Speaker
Many of my co-authors have been men and they are, you know, as opposed to porn as feminists are, they're pro-feminist men.
00:57:55
Speaker
And also they have an insight that women don't have in the sense that I have to say I've studied porn for over 30 years.
00:58:03
Speaker
I know the research inside and out.
00:58:06
Speaker
I know the economics of the industry.
00:58:08
Speaker
And on some level, I really don't understand it.
00:58:11
Speaker
There's something about it in that knowing place where I really, when I look at it, there's a part of me that still doesn't understand how is this arousing.
00:58:22
Speaker
And what's interesting with the men that I've worked with who are anti-porn and have a great critique is they have a very hard time doing this research.
00:58:31
Speaker
The reason being is they hate porn, they hate the violence it causes, and yet when they're doing the research, they get aroused.
00:58:37
Speaker
Right.
00:58:38
Speaker
And they feel like their body is betraying them.
00:58:41
Speaker
These are men who feel that that is in intense bodily betrayal, given what their politics are and how they really feel about porn.
00:58:49
Speaker
You can groom people.
00:58:50
Speaker
I mean, Facebook actually just came under fire because they have moderators that go through a lot of the explicit content that gets reported.
00:58:58
Speaker
And one of the things that the moderators were saying is that just from looking at
00:59:01
Speaker
I mean, they would see really, really, like, disgusting, disturbing, illegal things, like people sexually abusing animals,
Debate with Ron Jeremy
00:59:07
Speaker
etc.
00:59:07
Speaker
And he said just, like, repeated exposure to the violence, it started to almost, like, he had a reaction to some of the sexualized images.
00:59:16
Speaker
It gives a...
00:59:17
Speaker
PTSD.
00:59:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:59:19
Speaker
It gave him PTSD.
00:59:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:21
Speaker
And like severe PTSD, both because like it's unexpected, but also like, you know, yeah, him judging himself.
00:59:27
Speaker
I mean, like this was I was never like this.
00:59:29
Speaker
I never used to have these thoughts.
00:59:30
Speaker
And now these thoughts are intrusive because I've been exposed to these images.
00:59:34
Speaker
So.
00:59:35
Speaker
Exactly.
00:59:37
Speaker
Well, you know, I heard a talk by, I think it was the head of the police in Sweden, where they were talking about, you know, the child sexual abuse images and how the police are dealing with this.
00:59:50
Speaker
They said that the police who deal with child sexual abuse images have more PTSD than the detectives who deal with homicides.
00:59:59
Speaker
I can believe it.
01:00:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:00
Speaker
And that they have to switch them out about every three months because they just and actually one of the people who's going to be speaking, Dr. Sharon Cooper, who is a pediatrician, a forensic pediatrician, she actually trains people in the FBI how to deal with the trauma of what they're looking at.
01:00:20
Speaker
Sharon's one of our opening speakers.
01:00:23
Speaker
She's an actual, as I say, forensic pediatrician, and she also has her own practice.
01:00:30
Speaker
I don't think I've ever met anybody who knows more about the effects of pornography on kids than Sharon.
01:00:35
Speaker
Just listening to her for 45 minutes will change your world.
01:00:40
Speaker
Incredible, because she deals with
01:00:42
Speaker
the victims of it.
01:00:43
Speaker
She deals with the perpetrators.
01:00:45
Speaker
I mean, just intent.
01:00:46
Speaker
And I met Sharon because both of us were expert witnesses, um, against a very well-known pornographer.
01:00:52
Speaker
And I'm happy to say that we actually bankrupted him.
01:00:55
Speaker
And that's how I met her many, many years ago.
01:00:57
Speaker
And,
01:01:00
Speaker
We did.
01:01:00
Speaker
We bankrupted him and we took down his industry, his company, which was great, by the way.
01:01:09
Speaker
Wonderful.
01:01:11
Speaker
A highlight of one's life.
01:01:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:16
Speaker
And the other thing is, um, now we know as well as what's his name on Jeremy.
01:01:20
Speaker
He's got how many cases against him?
01:01:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
I think there's 30 cases against him of sexual abuse, but you know what?
01:01:29
Speaker
He's been in over 1500 porn movies.
01:01:32
Speaker
So I would argue that he's probably sexually abused well over 3000 women, not 30.
01:01:36
Speaker
Oh, for sure.
01:01:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:38
Speaker
You know, because what is porn if not the sexual abuse of women?
01:01:42
Speaker
And he's a particularly unsavory porn performer who's really sadistic.
01:01:47
Speaker
Why is Ron Jeremy, like, the number one male porn performer?
01:01:52
Speaker
I don't get it.
01:01:53
Speaker
He gives me the creeps.
01:01:55
Speaker
That's another female gaze problem, okay?
01:01:57
Speaker
Like, I...
01:01:58
Speaker
I don't want to see fucking Ron Jeremy.
01:02:01
Speaker
Like, who let this creep in?
01:02:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:04
Speaker
He's not very pleasant to look at.
01:02:06
Speaker
He certainly is not.
01:02:08
Speaker
But you know what?
01:02:09
Speaker
Interestingly, I'll tell you why Ron Jeremy was so successful in the early years.
01:02:13
Speaker
Because he could sustain an erection for a long period of time and not ejaculate.
01:02:18
Speaker
Now he wouldn't make it in the porn industry because of Viagra.
01:02:22
Speaker
If you notice, Viagra changed the whole scene because now they have much more sort of, you know, men we would consider conventionally hot who can go in it because the Viagra helps them sustain their... Just barely, but yeah.
01:02:37
Speaker
I don't know exactly.
01:02:38
Speaker
I mean, it's really interesting when you see the change when Viagra hit and what the men look like because, you know, there was very few men who could sustain an erection for that length of time.
01:02:48
Speaker
And then when the director said, you know, come, who could come at the drop of a hat, he was one of the few.
01:02:55
Speaker
That's why he was so successful.
01:02:57
Speaker
He would not get – looking like he does, he would not get into porn today.
01:03:00
Speaker
And hopefully he's headed to prison.
01:03:02
Speaker
I hope he's headed for prison.
01:03:03
Speaker
And, you know, I debated him.
01:03:05
Speaker
I think it was on CNN.
01:03:06
Speaker
Oh, you debated Ron Jeremy.
01:03:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:03:09
Speaker
I was on CNN, and he kept saying, you know, my job when I go on to debate pornographers is to basically just cut them to pieces, right?
01:03:18
Speaker
To go in there, show no mercy, and just destroy them.
01:03:22
Speaker
And I was really going after him.
01:03:23
Speaker
You know, he kept coming back, and I was just coming after him, after him.
01:03:27
Speaker
And at one point, he said something like, that woman, and he pointed to me.
01:03:30
Speaker
I said, well, my name is Dr. Gail Dines, not that woman.
01:03:35
Speaker
And because they're so used to treating women with disrespect and then, you know, kept interrupting me.
01:03:41
Speaker
And I said, you know, and I actually at one point I said, you know, I'm not surprised you're interrupting me because have you ever listened to a woman in your life wrong, Jeremy?
01:03:48
Speaker
Because that's not your job, is it?
01:03:49
Speaker
Your job is to treat them as disposable sex objects and move on to the next one.
01:03:53
Speaker
So this is why it's such a problem debating pornographers because you don't know how to listen to a woman.
01:03:58
Speaker
I just looked it up on YouTube.
01:03:59
Speaker
I can't wait to watch that immediately after.
01:04:01
Speaker
We'll put this in the show notes.
01:04:02
Speaker
You know, I hate they took out the best bits when I really went after him.
01:04:06
Speaker
Really?
01:04:07
Speaker
They edited it out.
01:04:08
Speaker
Yes, the parts where I really went for the jugular, they took out.
01:04:13
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
01:04:14
Speaker
Which is really upsetting.
01:04:16
Speaker
That's how you know it's like a media conspiracy to, you know, promote porn.
01:04:20
Speaker
They'll cut out the parts where you actually like win the argument and then create a more biased narrative.
01:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, but I have to say, it's, you know, talk about cathartic when you've got a male pornographer and your job is just to eviscerate them in public.
01:04:33
Speaker
What's a better thing than that?
01:04:35
Speaker
That's a radical feminist dream, you know?
Porn and the Female Gaze
01:04:38
Speaker
We should do a Rosa Scrope for Ron Jeremy after this.
01:04:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:41
Speaker
100%.
01:04:42
Speaker
Alice Sagan.
01:04:42
Speaker
We should do it.
01:04:46
Speaker
What a creepy, creepy, horrible guy.
01:04:48
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:04:49
Speaker
But this is also why I don't buy the argument that porn can ever be feminist.
01:04:55
Speaker
Because if you look at, even now, like the actors who are in porn, they never, you know, like Leif said, ever appeal to the female gaze.
01:05:05
Speaker
Ever.
01:05:05
Speaker
No.
01:05:06
Speaker
Well, they're not.
01:05:07
Speaker
You know what they're meant to do, actually, is interesting.
01:05:09
Speaker
The role of the man in pornography is to really, the focus of the camera, where they put the gazes on his penis, right, so that the man who is, the users who are watching it can identify with him and his penis rather than having to see...
01:05:26
Speaker
him completely because they want to put themselves in that position doing to the women, thinking of themselves doing to the women what they're doing.
01:05:34
Speaker
So what's very interesting when you look at some films is the men are really backgrounded and it's their penises that are foregrounded.
01:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually really, really disappointing.
01:05:41
Speaker
disappointing as a heterosexual woman because and this is why I feel like they're gaslighting us about this being like empowering and like sexually arousing for women because I'm like I can't go in and like type in a category of a men's body type that I like but like you can find porn for every single minuscule piece of a woman's body but there's nothing for men let's just say I like oh I like tall men with like broad shoulders and I don't know like dark eyes like you can't even find that kind of thing and if you did if you did you wouldn't like it after you'd
01:06:11
Speaker
watched him anyway believe me that would be a complete arousal killer watching a guy in porn you know i mean like can i find handsome man porn and not all these like weird bridge trolled porn like but no there's nothing i almost feel like they cast ugly men in porn on purpose because a lot of the men who watch porn are probably you know not that attractive and so they that's why they identify with them
01:06:33
Speaker
Well, that's actually, all men watch porn now.
01:06:36
Speaker
All men do.
Porn's Impact on Sexual Experiences
01:06:38
Speaker
The truth is, you know, given the studies, it's, you know, there was one study they were doing in a university where they wanted, it was in experimental psychology, they wanted to measure the effects of pornography.
01:06:50
Speaker
And they had to cancel the study because they couldn't find a control group of students who hadn't seen porn.
01:06:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:06:57
Speaker
So, I mean, you're not going to... It's all guys watch porn.
01:07:01
Speaker
I mean, what's really interesting, what would be really interesting would be to do research on the guys who don't watch porn.
01:07:07
Speaker
They're the deviants, right?
01:07:09
Speaker
The guys who don't watch porn are the deviants in our culture now.
01:07:12
Speaker
I mean...
01:07:13
Speaker
I've met, I mean, I think it's impossible to find a man who's never seen porn, but I've met a fair amount of men who don't watch porn, who have watched porn in the past, but just like realize this is not adding to my life in any material way.
01:07:22
Speaker
So I don't want to like, because one of the discussions that we've had with some of our members, I'm like, well, it's impossible to find guys that don't watch porn.
01:07:29
Speaker
I feel it's actually, first of all, if you express that it's a problem and he feels like he's being cornered and stuff, like this is some kind of necessity to his life, it's almost like an indicator that his sexual needs are always going to come before yours.
01:07:43
Speaker
And then secondly, the fact that a lot of women who have had sex with men who are not porn watchers, the sex is just so demonstrably better that a lot of women don't want to go back, right?
01:07:53
Speaker
You can't even go back.
01:07:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:07:55
Speaker
I can't compare it.
01:07:56
Speaker
No, you can't.
01:07:57
Speaker
I mean, you know, I think the best thing I ever heard a man, it was actually a college student, he said, porn taught me how to masturbate into a woman.
01:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it feels like.
01:08:07
Speaker
That's what it feels like, being a flashlight.
01:08:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, you're being masturbated into.
01:08:12
Speaker
And, you know, my students used to tell me they immediately know when a guy's a porn user.
01:08:16
Speaker
They can feel it in everything, his body, the way he relates to them, the way he's dissociated during sex.
01:08:23
Speaker
Because, you know, what we found in studies is that men who watch porn, and it doesn't have to be a lot of porn, when they're actually having sex with a...
01:08:31
Speaker
real woman there and not watching porn and they're having sex, they pull up their favorite porn scenes and they play them in their head as they're having sex with that real woman.
01:08:42
Speaker
So, of course, they are masturbating into it.
01:08:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:44
Speaker
How wild and like pathetic is that in some respects?
01:08:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:50
Speaker
And it makes sense because I know sexlessness is rising among young men in particular.
01:08:56
Speaker
And a lot of it is because young women are sort of opting out of having sex.
01:08:59
Speaker
They don't want to be masturbated on.
01:09:01
Speaker
And it's because the experiences are not enticing for a lot of young women anymore.
01:09:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:07
Speaker
Unfortunately, though, many women...
01:09:10
Speaker
know they're being, they know something's wrong.
01:09:13
Speaker
The sex is lousy and bad and they feel like a piece of meat, but they haven't got the language to say he's masturbating into me because that term suddenly makes everything crystal clear what's happening.
01:09:27
Speaker
You don't exist.
01:09:29
Speaker
He's not with you.
01:09:30
Speaker
He's dissociated.
01:09:31
Speaker
He's miles away from you, although he might be on top of you, but it doesn't matter because he's not there.
01:09:36
Speaker
He's not present.
01:09:36
Speaker
Yeah, we get that a lot from women who, you know, when they find FDS, a lot of women say, you know, I'd always known something was wrong, but I didn't really know, I didn't have the vocabulary for it or didn't know, you know, basically FDS, we make things crystal clear and help women understand exactly why it's not, you know, what exactly is wrong.
01:09:57
Speaker
We're explicit.
01:09:57
Speaker
We just, we have a flair called porn sick limp dick and we don't really apologize for it.
01:10:03
Speaker
We just say we don't feed around the bush.
01:10:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:06
Speaker
No, you're incredibly, I have to say, the stuff listening to you, you are so incredibly articulate.
01:10:13
Speaker
And you've actually, what you do, I love being on this show, is you take all these concepts and it's like you absolutely...
01:10:23
Speaker
How can I put it?
01:10:24
Speaker
Like a trash compactor.
01:10:25
Speaker
You bring it down to its core and you just spit out these pearls of wisdom, you know?
01:10:30
Speaker
I mean, just wonderful the way that you deal with the concepts and make them accessible.
01:10:35
Speaker
We're millennials.
01:10:35
Speaker
Our attention spans are short.
01:10:37
Speaker
So, like, we try to make our media that way.
01:10:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:41
Speaker
It has to be 280 characters or less.
01:10:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:45
Speaker
But it's not easy to do.
01:10:46
Speaker
It's not easy to do what you're doing.
01:10:49
Speaker
I mean, it's the hardest thing is to take complex concepts and make them accessible.
01:10:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:54
Speaker
You know, I mean, it's very, and you do a fantastic job of that.
01:10:58
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:10:59
Speaker
Fantastic.
01:10:59
Speaker
Thank you.
Teen Magazines and Sexual Grooming
01:11:00
Speaker
I wanted to tell Gail a little bit about, I don't know if you listened to our episode about BDSM.
01:11:05
Speaker
In that episode, I talk a bit about how when I was 14, I dated a guy who was 16 and he showed me porn that was like very, you know, like degrading.
01:11:15
Speaker
And he pretty much was like, this is sex.
01:11:18
Speaker
Like, this is what I want to do.
01:11:20
Speaker
And because, you know,
01:11:21
Speaker
I'd learned how to, you know, put on condoms and stuff, but I didn't really, you know, they don't teach you in sex ed about boundaries or what's normal sexual behavior and what's not, right?
01:11:31
Speaker
So seeing that and you think, oh, well, that's, I guess that's what everyone's talking about.
01:11:35
Speaker
Exactly.
01:11:35
Speaker
The sex thing, right?
01:11:36
Speaker
So it's alarming to me how porn is basically used to groom young women into not having boundaries or to do sexual things for the man that maybe they don't particularly enjoy.
01:11:47
Speaker
What was creepy is like, looking back, my boyfriend would praise me whenever we did something gross.
01:11:54
Speaker
And then, you know, because at the time, you know, you're a teenager, you know, your hormones are, you know, crazy, you want boys to like you.
01:12:00
Speaker
And so you think like, oh, I'm doing, I'm doing good, right?
01:12:03
Speaker
So when you get praised for that, and so it's a very like, insidious form of grooming.
01:12:09
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
01:12:10
Speaker
Again, studies have found that often men know, especially around anal sex, when they want their partners to have anal sex, the way they introduce it is through porn, is they'll get their partners to watch anal sex porn.
01:12:25
Speaker
And I remember interviewing one guy and he was saying how he was very carefully judging her response.
01:12:31
Speaker
And as he was showing her more and more anal sex porn over time, he was figuring out, is this the time now to anally penetrate her?
01:12:39
Speaker
Because he was grooming her and he had a very sharp eye on at what point could he then come in for the kill for anal sex because she didn't want it and he was using that to groom.
01:12:47
Speaker
And also, you know, pimps use pornography to groom prostituted girls and women.
01:12:52
Speaker
That's one of the biggest groomers is pornography to show them what to do.
01:12:56
Speaker
And you know what's really never taught, barely ever taught in sex ed, which is like the thing you can't talk about?
01:13:04
Speaker
Women's sexual pleasure.
01:13:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:06
Speaker
You're told you're going to get pregnant, you're going to get STIs.
01:13:10
Speaker
You're never told that you are entitled to sexual pleasure.
01:13:14
Speaker
Right.
01:13:15
Speaker
That's completely missing from most.
01:13:17
Speaker
And that's another thing we're going to talk about at the conference is the role of teaching girls and women about their right to sexual pleasure.
01:13:24
Speaker
Because what studies show is the more you foreground sexual pleasure in sex ed,
01:13:29
Speaker
the less likely she is to be sexually victimized and the more likely she is to put sex off until she's older.
01:13:36
Speaker
And you know why?
01:13:37
Speaker
Because she suddenly realizes she has a right to say no.
01:13:41
Speaker
And I don't want to put the blame on the women by any means or girls for being raped.
01:13:45
Speaker
It's always on the men and boys.
01:13:47
Speaker
But there's a way in which showing the sexual pleasure that she is entitled to and has a right to provides the capacity for her to build more sexual boundaries around her.
01:13:59
Speaker
No, when I was younger, I remember feeling like this is something I have to do.
01:14:04
Speaker
I remember feeling this like deep sense of dread.
01:14:07
Speaker
And they're putting it in teen magazines.
01:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, teen Vogue is terrible.
01:14:12
Speaker
Like teaching, like, especially teaching, like, for example, young girls how to do anal and like BDSM choking in teen Vogue.
01:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:14:22
Speaker
There was a huge thing on teen.
01:14:25
Speaker
It was enormous showing you what to do, how to get ready for it, not telling you, by the way, what can happen if anything goes wrong.
01:14:33
Speaker
Firstly, it's not that pleasurable for women.
01:14:35
Speaker
And secondly, if anything goes wrong, you know, you can cause terrible internal damage, terrible internal damage.
01:14:43
Speaker
And none of that was really discussed.
01:14:44
Speaker
It's almost treated as a given that this is something you're supposed to do.
01:14:48
Speaker
Exactly.
01:14:49
Speaker
Exactly.
01:14:50
Speaker
And you're a prude if you don't.
01:14:51
Speaker
You're a prude.
01:14:52
Speaker
You know, they've got you every which way.
01:14:54
Speaker
You're a prude.
01:14:56
Speaker
People writing this don't even have the credentials to be talking about it.
01:15:00
Speaker
I think the author of that particular article, who we've kind of lambasted before, she didn't have any credentials on the topic.
01:15:08
Speaker
And everyone's like, why are you having someone who's just essentially a person with a bachelor's degree in journalism, like trying to explain complex sex education?
01:15:15
Speaker
That's going to give you a good sex education.
01:15:17
Speaker
And so it's not even that they're just giving, that they're breaching the topic to young kids.
01:15:24
Speaker
Because remember, like, when you're talking about the teen magazines, the target audience is like 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, because everyone above that is reading adult magazines.
Critique of Sexology Industry
01:15:34
Speaker
Broaching that subject with very young kids and then with someone who is so clearly uneducated on the topic.
01:15:40
Speaker
I know, it was outrage.
01:15:41
Speaker
That did get a lot of pushback, I have to say.
01:15:43
Speaker
I mean, I think if they took it a little bit too far, and I'm really glad that they got pushback from that one.
01:15:48
Speaker
But you're absolutely right.
01:15:50
Speaker
What is somebody with a degree in journalism doing dispensing sex education?
01:15:55
Speaker
Just reinforcing the narrative that they want.
01:15:57
Speaker
I mean, that's just what it comes down to.
01:15:59
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:16:00
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:16:01
Speaker
You know, well, can you imagine having someone in a medical journal who's got no medical background talking about that?
01:16:07
Speaker
I mean, it's ludicrous.
01:16:09
Speaker
Only in this do you not have to have any background in the topic that you're talking about.
01:16:13
Speaker
And it's kind of, and actually I kind of wanted to ask you about this because we've, we were discussing about whether or not we should talk about, and I think we will at some point, like talk about like the sexology industry as a whole and how so much of it is scams.
01:16:25
Speaker
Some of them are grifters, yeah.
01:16:27
Speaker
Some of them are just straight grifters, like,
01:16:28
Speaker
There's basically like these sexology diploma mills.
01:16:31
Speaker
They're not accredited.
01:16:32
Speaker
Some of them have been shut down.
01:16:34
Speaker
And they sometimes pull ideas from these quote-unquote sex educators or sexologists that are just basically made up.
01:16:43
Speaker
Like they're not part of any type of formal research program.
01:16:47
Speaker
Then they just start to create a narrative that the media picks up on.
01:16:51
Speaker
Oh, sexology is terrible.
01:16:53
Speaker
It's a terrible field.
01:16:54
Speaker
A lot of them are just like sexually depraved people who want to feel okay with it.
01:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's really weird.
01:17:00
Speaker
And it's sad because I feel like women could really use legitimate research from people who are biologists and people who... Absolutely.
01:17:09
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:17:10
Speaker
I'd love to give you a quote.
01:17:12
Speaker
So I was... When I first was doing this many, many years ago, one of the most famous sort of sex therapists, sex researchers was John Money.
01:17:21
Speaker
Have you heard of him?
01:17:22
Speaker
Yes, I've heard of John Money.
01:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, he was from, I think...
01:17:26
Speaker
He was a psychologist who did the David Rymer study.
01:17:29
Speaker
Is that John Hopkins?
01:17:31
Speaker
Yes, he was at John Hopkins.
01:17:32
Speaker
So I was at a conference where he gave the opening, the keynote lecture.
01:17:38
Speaker
And you know what he said?
01:17:40
Speaker
He said, we need to, this is in my brain, I will never forget this.
01:17:44
Speaker
He said, we need to redefine incest as a love affair between two people of discrepant ages.
01:17:50
Speaker
What?
01:17:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:54
Speaker
In a full auditorium of experts, he said a love affair between two people of discrepant ages.
01:18:04
Speaker
Unbelievable.
01:18:06
Speaker
Unbelievable.
01:18:07
Speaker
I can remember we studied him during my A-level psychology, and when we read that, everyone's jaw, including the men in the room, just dropped.
01:18:19
Speaker
We were just absolutely mortified.
01:18:21
Speaker
No, they've got a lot to answer for, those people, the so-called sexologists and the sex researchers.
01:18:27
Speaker
And actually, there's a lot of great feminist stuff written about that.
01:18:31
Speaker
And I can...
01:18:33
Speaker
Name some of the – Meg Tyler has done some great work on this about really looking at the core of the theories and where they came from and how it developed and how misogynist the whole thing.
01:18:48
Speaker
Yeah.
Skepticism on Feminist Porn
01:19:06
Speaker
And she's talking about being filmed about pornography.
01:19:10
Speaker
And in the break, she was saying to me how much she loves pornography and watching pornography.
01:19:15
Speaker
And she does that for fun.
01:19:16
Speaker
And this was a sex therapist.
01:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, when I hear women who say, I watch porn with my husband.
01:19:19
Speaker
We love to do it.
01:19:20
Speaker
It's a fun couple activity together.
01:19:22
Speaker
I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
01:19:25
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
01:19:26
Speaker
I've never seen feminist porn.
01:19:27
Speaker
They keep saying that there's feminist porn, and I've never seen it because it's so male-gazy.
01:19:33
Speaker
I haven't either.
01:19:35
Speaker
Believe me, I've looked for it everywhere.
01:19:37
Speaker
First of all, you can't have such a thing.
01:19:40
Speaker
You can't have the word feminist next to the word pornography.
01:19:43
Speaker
It's an oxymoron.
01:19:44
Speaker
But even those things they call feminist porn, it's basically... I remember going on Erica Luss' website, and she's like,
01:19:52
Speaker
considered the queen of feminist porn.
01:19:55
Speaker
And I remember looking at the stuff and there was a woman on her knees with a penis right down her throat.
01:19:59
Speaker
And I thought, oh, I've never seen that before.
01:20:01
Speaker
This is really novel, you know?
01:20:03
Speaker
I mean, they do the same shit that the regular pornographers do.
01:20:05
Speaker
They just hide behind the flag of feminism.
01:20:08
Speaker
They admitted that part of that is because it's not easily monetizable.
01:20:13
Speaker
Quote unquote, feminist porn isn't monetizable as readily as...
01:20:17
Speaker
porn that is catering to the male gaze.
01:20:19
Speaker
So in order for them to stay profitable, they end up having to create the same kind of thing, right?
01:20:24
Speaker
They do the same thing.
01:20:25
Speaker
They do the same thing, yeah.
01:20:27
Speaker
You know, I've got a great story about Erica Lust.
01:20:29
Speaker
I was contacted last year by two filmmakers who were doing a documentary on Erica Lust.
01:20:37
Speaker
And I said, I'm not really interested in talking about it because I don't agree with her.
01:20:42
Speaker
And, you know, any documentary around this, I'm sure is going to be praising her.
01:20:45
Speaker
And they said, no, we absolutely promise we're going to do a balanced viewpoint.
01:20:49
Speaker
We really want you.
01:20:51
Speaker
So they interviewed me for two hours, right?
01:20:54
Speaker
And I said to them, you know, are you really going to give a critique of her?
01:20:58
Speaker
And they said, yes, we'll use you.
01:21:00
Speaker
The documentary comes out.
01:21:02
Speaker
I think it's an hour long.
01:21:04
Speaker
It's 58 minutes on Erica Lust and two minutes on me.
01:21:08
Speaker
So that's so I saw it.
01:21:10
Speaker
So then they said they had the cheek to them right to me said, will you promote our documentary?
01:21:15
Speaker
And I said, yes.
01:21:16
Speaker
And I went to my Facebook page and I said, here's my promotion for the documentary on Erica lost.
01:21:21
Speaker
Don't watch it.
01:21:22
Speaker
Nice.
01:21:23
Speaker
Nice.
01:21:24
Speaker
Yeah, that was my conventional, don't watch it.
01:21:27
Speaker
It's shit, you know.
01:21:29
Speaker
I mean, they love Erica Lust.
01:21:31
Speaker
They really do.
01:21:32
Speaker
And let me tell you, the stuff she does, the way she debases women, and she really gaslights them because she says it's feminist porn.
01:21:39
Speaker
So, like, when one of them's having a really hard time and they're upset, because it's feminist, she gives them a bottle of water, you know, and puts her arm around them and says, it'll be fine, now carry on.
01:21:50
Speaker
Oh, no.
01:21:51
Speaker
Jesus.
01:21:51
Speaker
I can't bear her.
01:21:52
Speaker
Can I hear that name again, you know?
01:21:55
Speaker
It makes me want to go into a full-on feminist fit.
Controversy of Introducing Porn to Children
01:21:59
Speaker
So, Gail, I'd like to get your reaction to this idea that's been floating around on LibFem Twitter, which is the concept of entry-level porn for kids.
01:22:09
Speaker
Deep, exasperated sigh.
01:22:10
Speaker
I don't know if you've heard about this.
01:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, I get asked this a lot.
01:22:15
Speaker
You mean, what should we show kids?
01:22:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:17
Speaker
Like there's, so there's, I think she was a journalist.
01:22:20
Speaker
I can't remember her, her name or maybe you can help me out, but she posted something like, oh, you know, kids are going to want, you know, find porn anyway.
01:22:28
Speaker
So we may as well like show them porn that shows consent and blah, blah, blah to like teach them, you know, I don't know what, what her point was, but she basically floated this idea of entry-level porn for kids.
01:22:41
Speaker
And of course she got dragged, right?
01:22:42
Speaker
Because it's a, it's a terrible idea, but I just like to get your, I'd like to hear you roast it.
01:22:47
Speaker
Well, first of all, I don't know what you'd show them because the porn, I don't know anywhere where you could get non-violent porn.
01:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, what would you show them exactly?
01:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, the number one.
01:22:57
Speaker
Number two is even if it's not overtly violent, the very fact that you're commodifying and monetizing a woman's body is a form of violence against that woman and all women.
01:23:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:08
Speaker
So, you know, to start legitimizing pornography in any way to kids is just ludicrous because they'll listen to this and, you know, adults are saying this is okay and it's entry level.
01:23:20
Speaker
But what you're doing is you're just basically telling them that misogyny and pornography is fine.
01:23:24
Speaker
So I'm completely opposed to that.
01:23:27
Speaker
It's like, you know, what should we give them an entry level cigarette?
01:23:30
Speaker
Right.
01:23:32
Speaker
I was actually just about to say, that was my response.
01:23:34
Speaker
I said, it's like we hear from representatives of the tobacco industry about giving them, you know, mango flavored and grape flavored cigarettes to, you know, get them hooked on it young kind of thing.
01:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, and let's do entry level, entry level alcohol.
01:23:48
Speaker
You know, what should we do for that?
01:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's just a way of getting them addicted from a young age.
01:23:53
Speaker
Totally, totally, you know.
01:23:54
Speaker
Plus, I feel like they don't know how kids work.
01:23:57
Speaker
Like, if parents try to make, like, sex cool or they try to make, like, feminist porn cool, then they're going to want to go look for taboo stuff just to be rebellious.
01:24:07
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
01:24:07
Speaker
Like, it almost seems like they would, that would backfire because then it would become, like, part of lame, you know, lame parent culture.
01:24:14
Speaker
Oh, totally.
01:24:15
Speaker
Totally.
01:24:16
Speaker
On so many levels.
01:24:18
Speaker
And it was interesting because a couple of years ago, pre-COVID, I did a kind of tour of L.A.
01:24:25
Speaker
and I must have spoken about 20 different places.
01:24:28
Speaker
And I have to say, it was mainly in L.A.
01:24:30
Speaker
I got this question all the time.
01:24:33
Speaker
Should we show them Playboy so they don't go to the hardcore porn?
01:24:37
Speaker
And I kept getting this question.
01:24:40
Speaker
This is a pipeline from one to the other.
01:24:41
Speaker
Exactly.
01:24:42
Speaker
Exactly.
01:24:43
Speaker
So would you say I don't want my kids to get to heroin?
01:24:45
Speaker
So maybe I'll just give them at 12 some marijuana, you know, and let's see where they go with that.
01:24:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:51
Speaker
But that question came up in L.A.
01:24:53
Speaker
over and over and over again.
01:24:56
Speaker
And what that shows is an absolute lack of understanding of what sexuality is about, what pornography does to sexuality, and that you're actually saying to boys, you have the right and the privilege to look at women and best debate to them because that's all they're worth.
01:25:17
Speaker
So you're reinforcing all of patriarchal ideology by showing them anything.
01:25:22
Speaker
Yeah, it seems there's like, they have an allergy to boundaries almost.
01:25:25
Speaker
And I don't know what that is exactly is, but that's a lot of the justification for showing these kinds of things to children, as well as like the BDSM conversation we had earlier was like, oh, I don't want to shame them for having fantasies.
01:25:36
Speaker
And I'm like, shaming them is quite a bit different from like actively introducing them to things, right?
01:25:41
Speaker
Not
01:25:41
Speaker
Promoting it.
01:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:25:44
Speaker
Exactly.
01:25:44
Speaker
And also, you know, they say BDSM, the alphabet soup, but it's really S. It's sadistic men on the prowl for vulnerable
BDSM Practices and Misogyny
01:25:53
Speaker
women.
01:25:53
Speaker
That's what I found with my students who were so-called into the BDSM community.
01:25:58
Speaker
So many of them, the women had been raped.
01:26:01
Speaker
and had sort of been led down the garden path to BDSM by these predators who could smell these women a mile off.
01:26:09
Speaker
So, I mean, I deconstruct the BDSM and just say, let's highlight the S, the sadism of the men.
01:26:15
Speaker
I mean, I was in the B,
01:26:16
Speaker
BDSM community for a long time, about five years.
01:26:20
Speaker
And I fully believe that the normalisation of BDSM is 100% to do with porn.
01:26:28
Speaker
Because all the dominant men, all the dominant, in quotation marks, men that I met, they all said, I watch porn and then I found women.
01:26:38
Speaker
you know submissive women who I could act up my fantasies you know out on and it is it's a progressive erosion of boundary the BDSM because because within a dynamic they've even got something like for example soft limits which basically means that um it's basically a boundary that can be stretched and so even then you see the breaking down of boundaries
01:27:01
Speaker
You know, what's interesting as well is, you know, some of the prominent women in the so-called BDSM communities actually come forward to talk about the level of sexual abuse and rape and that this whole notion of safe words doesn't exist and that they've been really horribly hurt.
01:27:18
Speaker
It's honestly prolific.
01:27:20
Speaker
But, okay, so the wild thing about the BDSM community is when it comes out that a dom was abusive or raped someone, they always say, oh, well, he's not a real dom, he's just an abuser.
01:27:32
Speaker
They use this no-true-Scotsman argument.
01:27:34
Speaker
And it's like, well, you know, all these guys who claim to be doms are coming out and end up being abusive or rapists, and it's almost like...
01:27:45
Speaker
there's some kind of relationship between wanting to be a sadist and, you know, being abusive, right?
01:27:50
Speaker
You know?
01:27:51
Speaker
You would think.
01:27:53
Speaker
Now, I was going to say BDSM is, if we look at the history of BDSM, it was founded upon the Marquis de Sade, who was a, I think he was a French noble who, who basically got his rocks off by, by kidnapping and, and sodomizing his servants.
01:28:11
Speaker
And,
01:28:11
Speaker
You know what?
01:28:12
Speaker
BDSM is a beard.
01:28:14
Speaker
That's what you do.
01:28:15
Speaker
If you're a sadistic guy and you want to beat the shit out of women and you don't want to think of yourself as a rapist, then you just say you're into the BDSM community.
01:28:23
Speaker
It's just a beard.
01:28:24
Speaker
I often think that the alphabet soup of BDSM is a beard, that sadistic men...
01:28:32
Speaker
who really want to just rape women, abuse women, don't want to see themselves in that way.
01:28:37
Speaker
So what they do is they use the BDSM argument and that way they can be woke and cutting edge and transgressive and they can rape women in the name of being woke and transgressive.
01:28:50
Speaker
So,
01:28:51
Speaker
I've got very little patience with this.
01:28:52
Speaker
It's sadism.
01:28:54
Speaker
And the ones I've met, and I'm often picketed by BDSM groups when I'm giving lectures, and the men are particularly sadistic.
01:29:02
Speaker
Particularly sadistic, and I can feel it oozing out of them.
01:29:06
Speaker
And they can also be shielded from their misogyny.
01:29:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:10
Speaker
No, I've dated guys like that where they think that they're one of the good guys, but they don't want to be seen as a piece of shit abuser, and so that's why they do BDSM.
01:29:17
Speaker
Exactly.
01:29:19
Speaker
That's right.
01:29:19
Speaker
I'm into the BDSM community.
01:29:21
Speaker
You know, look at me.
01:29:22
Speaker
Look how woke I am.
01:29:25
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:29:26
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:29:28
Speaker
Do we have any more questions for Gail?
01:29:31
Speaker
Our audience is going to love this.
01:29:32
Speaker
A lot of people, for the last episode, people were saying, I could listen to five hours of Gail Dimes.
01:29:37
Speaker
Oh, that's nice.
01:29:39
Speaker
I don't know if I've got five hours in me, to be honest with you, but never mind.
01:29:44
Speaker
But I'm so glad you had me back on, and I'm really grateful that you're promoting our conference.
Young Feminists and Cancel Culture
01:29:49
Speaker
I'm so happy you're speaking.
01:29:50
Speaker
I'm glad to have you.
01:29:51
Speaker
I mean, you know, just wonderful that we've made this connection and that I'm sure it's going to continue.
01:29:56
Speaker
Because you really, in a way, are the young people
01:30:00
Speaker
women who embody the values of Culture Reframed.
01:30:04
Speaker
Thank you.
01:30:04
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:30:05
Speaker
And, you know, I'm so glad we kind of stumbled upon each other because we really need young women out there speaking about this world and what it's like to live in this world.
01:30:15
Speaker
And there's just, you know, and so many women are silenced through fear, cancel culture, what have you.
01:30:21
Speaker
So you're just providing an incredible, the goddess's work.
01:30:25
Speaker
That's what you're doing.
01:30:26
Speaker
The goddess's work.
01:30:27
Speaker
Thank you.
01:30:29
Speaker
Thank you.
01:30:30
Speaker
And you know what would be great if there was a donor out there listening to this who wanted to make social change and really help you develop this into a movement?
01:30:40
Speaker
Because this is so critical.
01:30:44
Speaker
And nobody's better to take this on than you three.
01:30:47
Speaker
You're just wonderful.
01:30:49
Speaker
Thank you so much.
01:30:50
Speaker
This is the kind of work we need to be doing.
01:30:52
Speaker
This is exactly the kind of work we need to be doing.
01:30:54
Speaker
And I can't wait for you to be at the conference.
01:30:56
Speaker
I'm dying to hear what you've got to say.
01:30:58
Speaker
I'm so excited.
01:30:59
Speaker
So I'll make sure I come into your breakout session and be part of it and moderate it with the question and answers and everything.
01:31:07
Speaker
It's been great having you back.
01:31:08
Speaker
Thanks so much.
01:31:09
Speaker
Okay, well, it's always a pleasure.
01:31:12
Speaker
Always a pleasure.
01:31:12
Speaker
Anytime.
01:31:13
Speaker
And that's our show.
01:31:15
Speaker
Please check out.
01:31:16
Speaker
our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy for weekly bonus content.
01:31:21
Speaker
Uh, our bonus content last week was the second half of the 16 rules of misogyny.
01:31:25
Speaker
So if you wanted to continue that discussion, please check it out.
01:31:28
Speaker
Um, you can also check out our website at the female dating strategy.com.
01:31:32
Speaker
Uh, there's a forum there.
01:31:33
Speaker
If you want to interact with, uh, other female dating strategy followers, uh, as well as follow us on Twitter at fem.strat.
01:31:39
Speaker
Thanks for listening Queens.
01:31:40
Speaker
And for all you scrotes out there,
01:31:42
Speaker
Sign up for the Culture Reframed Workshop so you can learn.
01:31:46
Speaker
Because you really need it.
01:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, you actually really, really, really need it.
01:31:49
Speaker
So like really need it.
01:31:51
Speaker
Like a lot of you need to read.
01:31:52
Speaker
Really, really need it.
01:31:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:55
Speaker
It's on Saturday and Sunday at
01:31:58
Speaker
So please sign up.
01:31:59
Speaker
The website is culturereframe.org forward slash conference.
01:32:01
Speaker
We will be there giving our own lecture.
01:32:04
Speaker
So.
01:32:19
Speaker
If you want the opportunity to listen to a lot of different academics on the impact of porn, as well as how to build resilience against porn culture, this will be a wonderful workshop.
01:32:31
Speaker
Thanks, guys.
01:32:32
Speaker
See you next week.