Legitimate and illegitimate sex work – the role of identities in the Swedish pornography debate
When the ‘pornification’ of the Swedish public sphere is discussed, the argument that pornography equals men’s violence against women is frequently expressed, similar to arguments made regarding prostitution. There are obvious overlaps between the Swedish pornography and prostitution debates, but also interesting differences. By examining the pornography debate in isolation from the prostitution debate, important insights can be gleaned that have implications for our understanding of the general sex work debate in Sweden.
A heated debate over pornography sparked in 2000, following the anti-pornography documentary Shocking Truth which was displayed to the government and in Swedish cinemas. Following this debate, the Social Democrat Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog proposed an extension of the censorship law. Censors had their periods of employments cut by half, on the ground that they were thought to gradually become insensitive by watching pornography. It was decided that Swedish prisons should be able to prevent sex criminals from watching pornography in prisons. Margareta Winberg, Minister of Equality, tried to ensure that hotels didn’t show pornographic movies if they wished to receive municipal contracts. An epistemic community of feminist debaters, experts, journalists and politicians (from now on referred to as debaters) shared a consensus that pornography constituted men’s violence against women. However, a crucial difference to the Swedish prostitution debate is that not all pornography is perceived as bad. While debaters are working hard to ban one kind of pornography, another kind is not only accepted, but also promoted: in 2009, the Swedish film institute (SFI) decided to finance the making of the feminist pornographic movie Dirty Diaries, which did not engage any of the anti-pornography debaters heard in the Shocking Truth debate. How can this be explained?
Identities, defined as the terms and labels used by debaters to describe those individuals producing and consuming pornography, seem to be crucial in understanding the respective policy debates and decisions following Shocking Truth and Dirty Diaries, not least because of the general quality of a label to simplify and homogenize. Debaters were employing identities and subjective emotion as evidence, rather than hard facts, in order to further their discourse, which frequently lead to the disregard of nuances. The most common identities found in both debates were female victims and male perpetrators. These identities functioned mainly as a widely accepted argument as to why pornography constituted men’s violence against women.
A frequent strategy in the Shocking Truth debate was that scripted pornographic scenes were perceived as documentary in order to fit the anti-pornography debaters’ arguments. Hence, in one scene that director Alexa Wolf picked out for her film, a woman is having sex with five men, wearing animal masks. In a following scene the woman is telling the camera that her dad’s friends did the same to her when she was 11 years old. This scene is dramatised and not documentary. However, Wolf and many others in the debate stressed that the scripted scenes should be seen as documentary. The argument was that sexual abuse is driving people into the porn industry; Wolf estimated that 95 % of the people acting in porn movies have been subject to sexual abuse in their childhood. However, in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet she admitted that there is no scientific proof for this claim.[1] Helena Karlén from ECPAT Sweden reproduced the view that the above mentioned scenes are documentary in a debate article: “[t]he fact that the porn industry is making an incredible amount of money on the humiliation of women who have been raped when they were children is unacceptable”.[2] This quote is representative for a large part of the debate; the line between what is reality and fiction is consistently ignored as irrelevant. Debaters defending the victim – perpetrator identity formation tend to argue that pornography in general, and the debated scene in particular, is documentary.
Identities simplify and homogenize in order to be rendered meaningful, which can explain why the debate came to focus almost exclusively on the categorisation of women as victims and men as perpetrators. The Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog argued in an interview that “the women [in porn films] are portrayed like dead meat with body openings and the men like sex machines.”[3]
The view that women are victims for men’s sex drives, rather than sexual subjects, eventually lead to the connection between group sex and group rape. Just a few days after Shocking Truth, a range of politicians, experts and newspapers started to connect pornography with a recent occurrence in Rissne, where a girl was raped by a number of young men. Helena Sutorius, lawyer and researcher on sexual crimes argued that “the group rape verdicts I have studied are copies of the acts we have seen in the movies. There are clear parallels between the TV-channels’ pornography and the group rapes that have occurred during the recent years in Sweden.”[4] Inger Segelström from the Social Democrats argued that there had been a large increase in group rapes during the recent years and that there was a strong connection to the gangbang scenes in porn.[5] However, two months later, Ann-Marie Begler, director-general at the Swedish Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet), strongly reacted to this connection and claimed that a consistent decrease in reported group rapes in fact had occurred during the recent years.[6]
So how come many leading experts expressed this view, despite the lack of evidence? This case clearly constitutes an instance of where identities are crucial in providing a simple version of reality and a credible causal story. With the help of the victim – perpetrator identities, this connection could explain the social problem of rape, and at the same time offer a legitimate reason for why pornography had to be banned. The consequence of this view is that the male sexuality is perceived as dangerous and something that has to be stopped, while the female sexuality seems to be drastically different from the male.
Later, it turned out that one of the ’victims’ in Shocking Truth in fact was a business partner of porn companies and had acted in thousands of porn movies. “I suggested the rape scenes myself”, she said to the TV channel TV3; “I wanted to do something sinful, wild and crazy”.[7] None of the actors in the debate chose to comment on this since the identity that this woman expressed did not correspond with the identity of the female victim that they defended. This is only one instance of how debaters sometimes were predetermined to a certain finding and refused to accept counter-evidence that conflicted with the identities. This tendency is described by Becker and Hendriks who argue that a typical attribute of a paradigm, around which epistemic communities gather, is the disregard of nuances: “…disturbing aspects of reality and critical questions are easily ignored.”[8]
The perceptions of the victim – perpetrator identities allowed not only politicians, but also experts to make subjective and normative claims. There was an accepted subjective tone in the debate where emotion was used as evidence. Being inexperienced and emotional was seen as a positive quality when it came to review pornography. The Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog argued that the Swedish Board of Film Classification (Statens biografbyrå) was not emotional enough when it came to the review of pornography. She claimed to be worried that the censors watched the films “from a professional and analytical point of view rather than based on emotion and experience.”[9] Hence, the emotional element is not only accepted – it is demanded. The executive at the Board of Film Classification, Gunnel Arrbäck, was very critical and pointed to that their mandate required them to be professional and not emotional. Despite this, Ulvskog soon introduced a shorter time limit for the censors’ employment on the grounds that censors become less sensitive the longer they work. Their periods of employment were decreased from 12 to six years.
The emotional tone in the debate allowed for personal and subjective constructions of pornography. Ewa Larsson from the Green Party questioned the Board’s definition of brutal violence and claimed that: “some movies ‘look like’ they are made equally. But then it ends with the man shooting his sperm onto the woman’s face. And what fun is that?”[10] Larsson was expressing her own subjective preferences and emotions as a relevant argument, and this is somewhat representative for the arguments in this debate in general. There is a notion of a common understanding of what sexuality is and should be, rather than a perception of individual taste, not conditioned by sex or gender.
When identities are successfully employed in a debate, they seem to open up for a subjective and emotional tone, as opposed to a focus on professionalism and hard facts that could nuance the picture. Furthermore, when the identity of the female victim who has to be saved from the male perpetrator is translated into policy, it functions to homogenize both female and male sexuality; and stigmatise the male sexuality as inherently dangerous.
The victim – perpetrator identities are reproduced also in the debate about the government’s financing of the feminist porn film Dirty Diaries. Chief Executive at SFI, Cissi Elwin Frenkel was eager to assert that SFI does not support pornography, but a new approach to depict female sexuality. Feminist pornography, expressing a feminist sexuality identity is defended and celebrated in opposition to mainstream pornography, which is seen to express an illegitimate sexuality. This can explain why Dirty Diaries did not spark a big debate. In fact, Dirty Diaries received more attention abroad than in Sweden. The female victim – male perpetrator identities are expressed in both debates. Thus, rather than representing a shift in the pornography discourse, Dirty Diaries seem to be part of the same discourse expressing a view of a legitimate kind of pornography alongside with the notion of an illegitimate mainstream pornography, represented by Shocking Truth.
By isolating the pornography debate from the prostitution debate, an important finding is distinguished: not all sex work is seen as bad. One narrow form of pornography, where feminist women are in charge, is in fact encouraged; moreover empowered by a strong feminist discourse with the interpretive prerogative of sex work in Sweden. While there are close connections between the pornography debate and the prostitution debate, an intriguing question is why similar identities of legitimate feminist sex workers are not found in the prostitution debate.
[1] Nilsson, S., “Sexaktörer har ofta utsatts för övergrepp”, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 February 2000.
[2] Karlén, H., “Alla måste bli förbannade”, Aftonbladet, 21 February 2000.
[3] Sjödin, S., “Förbjud all porr i tv”, Aftonbladet, 15 February 2000.
[4] Andersson, E., “Våldtäkter kopieras från tv”, Svenska Dagbladet, 17 February 2000.
[5] “Tv-chefer hängs ut på internet”, Göteborgs-Posten, 13 February 2000.
[6] ”Färre anmälda gruppvåldtäkter”, Sydsvenskan, 11 April 2000
[7] Österholm, U. L., “’Offret’ i Shocking truth: Jag föreslog våldtäktsscenen”, Aftonbladet, 21 October 2000.
[8] Becker, U., Hendriks, C. (2008), “’As the Central Planning Bureau says’. The Dutch wage restraint paradigm, its sustaining epistemic community and its relevance for comparative research”, Review of International Political Economy, 15:5.
[9] Persson, A., “Påfrestande vara filmcensor”, Dagens Nyheter, 10 May 2000.
[10] Mårtensson, M., ”Vad tycker ni om porren, politiker?”, Aftonbladet, 17 February 2000.
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