FEMINIST PULSE
Do you know the mirror game? The one where you say something three times in front of a mirror, and it grants you a wish – but it never reveals the price until the ‘thing’ is too close to touch you, but then there is nowhere to hide? Liberal/Choice feminism propagates this folklore into the mainstream with a straight face. Find a mirror, say the words: choice, agency and empowerment three times in front of it, and watch structural violence disappear before your eyes.
Except it doesn’t; it remains for a lifetime. Be it through coercion packaged as consent, the debts that never end, men who continue to devalue your body, and the permanent set of eyes that will forever be undressing you virtually long after you’re gone. You said the three words, and you were granted the delusion, and you turned around to pay the price too heavy to handle. Neoliberal feminism has stripped all political meaning from all the words you whispered by rebranding them as a way of self-commodifying our bodies.
A woman offering to sell access to her body in a society that’s entirely dependent on her desperation to do so – shaped by patriarchal demand – is not exercising choice or agency as much as she is negotiating survival. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Andrea Dworkin summarises it thus:
“Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us,” she writes in Intercourse. “One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behaviour and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice.”
Real agency stems from a collective effort that dismantles patriarchal structures. It doesn’t depend on renting out our servitude and calling the pay cheque (if there is one) liberation. Neoliberal feminism has been right on the mark in keeping the confusion intact: of survival tactics of the oppressed with the illusion of a woman’s agency. And this sustained confusion is what has now flourished into a million-dollar industry.
You Cannot Production Design Your Way Out Of Power
The whole modus operandi of “ethical/feminist porn” is that it puts women behind the camera, provides “fair pay”, and a focus on “female pleasure”. Fix the production crew, and poof… exploitation disappears. Right? Wrong!
Objectification and sexualisation are not a ‘gaze’ problem, nor has it to do with lighting or production design. It is the reduction of a whole person into consumable pixels that requires a complete fragmentation of the mind of the abused. Record a body, market and sell it how you deem fit – ethical or feminist – the end product serves the same identical purpose regardless of who is holding the camera. Dworkin calls it the war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity and human worth. She likens it to tyranny, and she is absolutely right.
A female director or a cinematographer is not an upgrade, but they do sanitise this harm. Feminist activist and author Gail Dines put it bluntly: “Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear.” If the product relies on the unequal status of a woman, it is far from offering an alternative to patriarchal desire. Instead, it is the same propaganda with a content warning claiming “no harm done” even when the harm is right in front of their eyes.
Surely, “Feminist Porn” Industry Is Not Running A Charity
It doesn’t matter what they call it; it is still pornography, and pornography remains a thriving industry, and industries publish numbers. Global “adult entertainment” revenue as estimated by commercial market-research SEO aggregators, is roughly at $90 billion in 2024, marching ahead towards $97-100 billion in 2026, maybe more, and estimated to grow to $270 billion by the early 2030s. This kind of revenue in today’s economy is the size of a national GDP, only this economy is built solely on selling the footage of women’s bodies.
Erika Lust: a name that is routinely held up to be proof that the pornography industry’s exploitation can be somehow redeemed from the inside – through its “feminist” values – makes roughly $14 million per year through her studio. Surely, she didn’t start a charity for women’s safeguarding in this violent industry; she has scaled her business by selling the same commodity. Granted, she may have softer lighting, favourable press and high-end media coverage; she is still reaping the benefits of manipulating the gullible.
“Even women watch porn, so how bad can it be?”
Women are not a monolith, and selective qualities don’t make consensus. But even the obvious point aside, is consumption really proof of lack of harm, or is it proof of how deep the conditioning is? A woman watching porn did not create the demand for sexual subordination of women’s bodies; it has patriarchy written all over it. Patriarchy created that demand, and built a multi-billion dollar empire to distribute it long before she typed the word porn on her browser. Of course this is not to say her consumption is somehow absolvable, or immune to harsh analysis, because at the end of the day, she is the one hitting play, and it is a choice she made. But have we considered who this consumption benefits even more? The men she ends up with. A woman who is fluent in the grammar of eroticised inequality makes for a compliant partner for the man such grammar was written for. So, unbeknownst to her, she has practised mistaking her arousal at subordination for choice, agency, and empowerment. A free training on a new form of slavery so the market can keep raking in dividends.
“Some porn is only for women. Lesbians watch it”
That’s another justification used to purple-wash the industrialised subordination of women. Indeed, as some women became pornography consumers, in some lesbian circles, pornography – the filmed version of prostitution – has also been popularised. Aided by the BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, SadoMasochism), sexual fetishism is enthusiastically promoted by the ambiguously named “LGBTQI+ community”. Citing “Queer” theories – in which many lesbians find themselves trapped – many have bought into the idea of the female body being a commodity. The myth that this commodity is used by another woman somehow makes it “ethical” is as similar as saying a female slave owner treating her female slaves “nicely”. Putting the label “lesbian” on patriarchal conditioning of treating women as sexual objects neither makes it acceptable, nor exempt from critique.
So Where Do We Draw The Line?
Would “ethical porn” survive a contradiction if it’s placed next to other forms of oppression? If alleged consent, good pay and a female gaze are all it needs to erase exploitation, and if exploitation stops being one if it is a woman running the show and profiting from it, would it be okay to apply the same logic elsewhere?
Could there be ethical trafficking – but only if the trafficker is a woman? What about ethical FGM, considering it is the aunties and grandmas who wield the blade? How about ethical surrogacy for a matriarchal family?
Let us find the three words to say in front of the mirror. What’s the incantation that de-exploits trafficking? What’s the word for normalising the rented womb, a ten-year-old bride, or a minor addicted to drugs? There are no such words. There were never any for porn either. The mirror hardly grants any wishes but awaits to collect the price when we fall for the show.
The moment feminism starts negotiating “ethics” in determining our own degradation – as opposed to demanding an end to it – it liberates nobody, and continues to profit our oppressors.