Adult performers don’t need feminist guardians — they can speak for themselves.
This weekend around 50 porn stars, strippers and sex workers turned up outside the Stop Porn Culture conference to make their voices heard.
The arrival of the World Wide Web in the nineties brought with it an era of unprecedented communication that has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the nature of human discourse and knowledge. One of many results of this revolution was to introduce an age of sexual openness; and of course, easy access to pornography has formed a key part of that.
The British people, living in one of the democratic world’s most censored nations, welcomed internet porn with enthusiasm. Thanks to our bizarre system of video censorship, introduced (without apparent irony) in 1984, Brits were denied the access to porn on video and DVD that was freely available elsewhere in Europe and the United States.
When the formidable anti-filth campaigner Mary Whitehouse died in 2001, she arguably left behind a country that was far more relaxed in its sexuality than at any previous time in history. It seemed that her crusade for ‘traditional’ (i.e. repressive) moral values had failed. But the morality movement regrouped and reinvented itself for the new millennium. It abandoned the outdated language of Christian puritanical outrage and instead presented itself as a form of feminism, protecting the rights of women who – they claimed – were victims of the sex industries.
First they came for the strippers. Strip clubs found themselves picketed by new morality groups such as Object, which claimed they were there to save the dancers. But some dancers did not agree that they were victims, or that they needed saving. They began to organise against the anti-strip club campaigners, with a number of them joining the Equity performers’ trade union. One stripper involved with the campaign told me:
‘I’ve never felt like an object in a derogatory sense. My audiences certainly never made me feel like that.’
Read more from Sex & Censorship’s Jerry Barnett at The Independent…
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