Two things to kickstart your week: a seriously interesting article on the way we talk about sexual health, and some church pastors who think they have a porn addiction.
Happy Monday…
The good: challenging the Boyfriend Narrative
Ella Dawson writes brilliantly about STI stigma and sexual health, often bringing up a tonne of stuff that I’d never considered, but that I end up thinking about long after I’ve read her article. Last week she published a great piece about the ‘Boyfriend Narrative’:
“We’ve all read that essay: the woman who gets herpes because she caves to temptation just once and has a regrettable one-night-stand, but goes on to find happiness because she meets that one man who loves her just as she is, STI and all. You can find it in glossy women’s magazines and anonymous chat rooms across the web, the inspirational packing popcorn of sex writing. It’s the Boyfriend Narrative, and it needs to die.”
What she highlights is one of those things that’s been scratching at the back of my head for a long time, and now that she’s articulated it so beautifully I am going to see it EVERYWHERE. Not just in articles about STIs, but in a whole lot of other places too: getting and keeping a romantic partner is so often presented as the end goal in any situation. The Solution To Whatever Problem Is Being Discussed In The Article.
And Ella’s right – it needs to die.
The bad: Church pastors struggle with porn ‘addiction’
I have so many thoughts about this really fucking weird story that it’s hard to list them all. Basically CBN has reported that a large number of pastors and youth pastors ‘struggle’ with porn ‘addiction.’ I know, sorry, there aren’t enough scare quotes in the world.
“Many pastors struggle or have struggled with pornography and even more youth pastors struggle with it … The Barna Group released the findings this week, based on an online study including 432 pastors and 338 youth pastors. In the study, 57 percent of the pastors admitted to a current or past struggle compared to 64 percent of youth pastors … Eighty-seven percent of pastors say they feel a great sense of shame around their porn use and 55 percent of those who use it say they live in constant fear of being discovered.”
A number of things here trip my ‘wtf’ klaxon:
- The verb ‘use’ as opposed to watch/read/listen to when describing porn. This happens so often in anti-porn articles it works as a nice red flag for you to take it with a pinch of salt. You do not ‘use’ porn: it is a genre of entertainment, not a fucking laundry detergent.
- Total lack of clarity around the word ‘struggle.’ I too have ‘struggled’ with porn, when I’ve had a slow internet connection or stumbled across some that totally killed my mood. Obviously they mean ‘morally struggled’, but that can be a pretty broad spectrum – from a twinge or two of guilt (which to my mind can be pretty healthy – especially if you’re looking to become a more ethical porn consumer) to full-on flagellation based purely on what society tells you is naughty.
- Of course they feel fucking guilty about it – they are pastors. Saying that 87% of them feel guilty just makes me wonder if the remaining 13% aren’t pastors at all, they’ve just wandered over to the survey and clicked on things to kill time on their lunch break.
I’m not a fan of porn ‘addiction’ articles that unquestioningly accept the idea that regularly watching porn makes you some kind of monster. I think most of us probably watch/read/listen to porn to varying degrees, and it’s unhelpful to offer up a yardstick of porn ‘addiction’ based on ‘what people reckon is too much because they feel a bit guilty about it.’
Using church pastors as an example of this shows how laughable it is: how you feel about porn will depend a lot on what you’ve been told you should feel about porn.
9 Comments
A big fat yes to Ella’s article, which I’ve already sent her way – the idea (or the automatic assumption) of a partner of ‘saving’ you from something is just ludicrous. At my most depressive period a few years ago my then-BF was of absolutely no help (and made it worse), so I dumped him and it was one of several things I did to help me recover. It was like anti-saving.
I recall a teenager once writing in to Mariella Frostrup at the guardian lamenting that her boyfriend watched porn; Mariella was of the instant ‘dump him/he’s a freak/doesn’t love you’ opinion, which was INFURIATING. It’s a nuanced issue which is constantly boiled down to idiot simplicity.
[TW: rape]
Years ago I was volunteering at a rape crisis centre and to raise profile on the subject, we used to pitch interviews with survivors like me to the press.
We accidentally got sent the wrong reply from [large women’s magazine] which basically said ‘please remember, we don’t run any stories on sexual crime if the victim is still single afterwards. Look for the Prince Charming angle so as not to scare our readers’.
In other words: don’t feature anyone who might be damaged goods or not responding to sexual assault in a really narrow and socially acceptable way. The idea no one will ever want to buy matching bedside furniture from Ikea with you after you’ve been raped is the real tragedy here. Not the occurrence of endemic sexual violence, widespread rape culture, lack of justice and counselling. God forbid no one will want to date you.
I remember being righteously indignant and writing a haughty reply about stereotypes, heteronormativity and rape myths in response. And still feeling like shit for years afterwards because I was single after being raped and felt like damaged goods for it.
I’ll be interested to read Ella’s piece on the ‘boyfriend narrative’ because ironically the first partner I got after being raped gave me herpes…
Oh my god that’s shocking – I’m horrified that they were actively pursuing that angle so blatantly. Good on you for challenging them – did you get a response?
And I know this is going to sound really twatty of me, but for libel reasons I’m a bit nervous about keeping the name of the publication in your comment. It’s unlikely that they’d sue me, but conceivably there’s a libel issue here so I’ve had to edit to take the specific name of the magazine out. I’m really sorry about that, and I hope it doesn’t totally kill your point – I wonder how many other mags actively look for angles like this. I’m signed up to a few media mailouts and often get journalists asking for ‘Someone who’s had X experience but now is in Y situation’ – never quite as shocking as that, but sometimes close.
Totally understand your editing. Didn’t even occur to me so thank you for being so on the ball. And I should have trigger warned it too. Note to self, don’t type annoyed. (Although telling that I’m still so pissed off 12 years later…)
The official line wasn’t so blatant as that but someone replied to the wrong email and we got to see the nitty gritty not the sympathetic public view. They replied with something generic about how they felt this angle was the one their readers wanted but sorry if we were offended by their office chitchat.
They should have heard our office chitchat in response to that. It was so unladylike I’m surprised all the men in the area didn’t die of shock.
Ah, ‘office chitchat.’ I am making my most sceptical face. Weirdly, I think there are a lot of things like this that many editors take for granted: ‘oh our audience will want such and such an angle’ without ever actually exploring whether their audience might, you know, be interested in getting the full picture. It annoys me particularly that they think their audience would be ‘frightened’ yet seemingly failed to realise that it’s a reality many people in their audience will have had to deal with – the ‘boyfriend as redemption’ narrative may actually be more harmful for people in the long run, especially if presented so uncritically.
And thanks for your understanding re: the edit. I’ll add a quick TW to your comment too as you mentioned it – I should have an edit facility in the comments but I am, essentially, a bit rubbish at tech =)
Doesn’t “libel” require it to be false?
I thought the UK had finally come out of the dark ages on that a few years back.
Libel law is intensely complicated, and a massive pain in the arse. Libel Reform campaign did some awesome things, but it’s still an incredibly tricky area. I hope you can appreciate why I’d rather play it safe.
We went into this in detail when I was writing the articles about my ex-husband raping me. While there is no recourse if it is true, proving it is true costs time and money so is always better avoided. Legal letters can be upwards of £100 a shot.
This was a fun read. HH and I use the term “nymphomania” like we use the term “slut” – as a honorific rather than a stigma. Really enjoyed reading about your “struggles” with porn! Ha.