Love Lives - Why we need to talk about porn, with Sara Pascoe

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Support Millennial Love with a donation today: https://supporter.acast.com/millennialloveThis week, Olivia is joined by the brilliant author and comedian Sara Pascoe.The two discuss her latest book Sex, Power Money and one of its main subjects: porn.Why don't we talk about porn more? Is it anti-feminist to watch porn? Or does being anti-porn make you anti-feminist? And does porn really lead to more sexual violence?We discuss all this and more. Enjoy the show!Follow the show on Instagram at @millennial_loveSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Twas the season of chaos and all through the house not one person was stressing. Holla differently this year with DoorDash. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. Hello and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week, I'm very excited to be joined by the award-winning comedian and author Sarah Pascoe. She's best known for her wry observations about sex, femininity and for her incredible book Animal, which was all about the evolution of the female body.

Today, Sarah joined me on the show to discuss her latest book, Sex, Power, Money, which was a Sunday Times bestseller when it was released last year and is about to come out in paperback. The book examines how these three subjects influence almost everything you can think of about how we exist in the modern world. We talk quite a lot about porn in the show and about some of the myths and misconceptions that people attach to those in the sex industry. I hope you enjoy the show. show hello hello how are you doing how's it going yeah i'm good thank you uh how how has your lockdown been i mean up and down it's had times where i felt like you know very lucky to have some time off and enjoy um nice things in my home and then there's been times where it's been so frustrating and you feel very out of control.

And obviously the news is very scary and depressing. So mixture, how about you? I've been okay. I've also been struggling a bit more recently, actually, as restrictions are lifting. I'm finding that I'm not ready yet. And I was quite enjoying not having to see anyone or do anything and having like no social pressures and stuff so I'm actually not really enjoying

people making plans again I'm like can we just go back into lockdown for a little bit it was just it was just quite nice and you know if you've got if you've got projects and stuff to do and work you don't have to say no to people you can just get on with yourself but isn't it interesting that having an excuse to say no you realize that all along you felt compelled to do things you didn't want to and what was great was not having to explain yourself whereas now we go back to oh if I don't want to come I have to tell you why I was thinking maybe you could pretend to have something else that's infectious you'd be like oh I think I've got the mumps I won't know for another 10 days but I definitely can't be around people yeah and to be honest everyone's so on edge you can just

be like oh my god she's ill no way don't don't come exactly yeah so your latest book uh sex power money can you start by telling us a bit about what made you want to explore these three subjects together yes well it um it very much came out of my first book because in my first book i had been planning i was writing about the female body and how the female body has been treated in culture and so i thought it was very easy to do like a chapter on pornography and this sexual objectification of the female body um within that book and then as I came to that chapter to write it um I'd never watched porn so I had like seen it twice by accident but I'd never watched it on purpose and as I started doing like some reading about about pornography to then go into watching

some I then realized that everything I thought I was going to write about was completely wrong and I realized that everything I knew about pornography had come via feminism and what that meant was that it had a very strong agenda that actually wasn't necessarily correct in a lot of ways like you can say that there are received wisdoms about pornography for instance oh um porn um makes children really kind of um it's their first messages about sex when they're like really young now and then they can't have a healthy sex life and we kind of think oh that sounds right but that sounds like a really worrying thing or even the thing about and it said a lot in feminism like oh pornography just shows a certain kind of perfect female body and and it's not realistic and then

actually one of the first things i found out was actually porn shows a huge variety of bodies now it definitely still like fetishizes and compartmentalizes and objectifies but it wasn't just one type of body that they were doing that to so what i realized was oh i'm gonna have to do a lot more research before i can say anything and then sex power money what kept coming up whenever i was researching something about transactional sex whether it was porn or whether it was sex work was that the money part of it was actually as much of the discussion as the sex bit of it like it was much less about morality and it was about economics and so that's why those three things came in because

actually the power dynamic is the most important thing because if people are not empowered in their own lives then they can become vulnerable and empowerment is often very connected to finances because the most disenfranchised people are experiencing poverty it's so interesting because i was having this conversation with someone literally last week about how sex and power and i suppose within that we were kind of talking about money but how sex and power undercut almost everything that we do and think and feel and I wonder if there are any kind of obscure scenarios that you can think of where sex and power apply but you wouldn't necessarily think about that just off the outset well I actually one of the areas that's quite interesting within it is um

teacher-student relationships because um I think generally across our society, we think that it's very wrong if someone who's under 16 has a relationship with a teacher. And the reason that we think that it's wrong is because of the power dynamic. We don't think that people under 16 can give informed consent. And at the same time, while we all feel very grown up at 14 15 16 once we've reached our 30s we can we then know the difference and so we really judge very harshly but sometimes there can be a huge range of inappropriate behaviors going on between teachers and students so and that's because of perhaps the possibility of sexual attraction which is this really uncomfortable area so like um i was listening to a podcast the other day and and it was it started where a 14 year old girl was getting twitter dms from her teacher and that's like incredibly inappropriate i think

it's incredibly inappropriate but he wasn't saying anything sexual at that point but I read that whole situation as well that's an abuse of power it's a form of whatever he thinks he's doing I interpret it as the beginning of a grooming it's sowing privacy it's like a secretive because if you tell your friends I'll get in trouble it's all these things that kind of sets you aside from your group so I think that's an area where teachers what I mean is that teachers have to be really careful my sister's a teacher and she she'll get things like just when like kids will leave school at 16 and then they'll request to be her friend on Facebook and she always sends them a nice message back but saying it's not appropriate I'll always

be your teacher I'll always will have been your teacher just because you've left school and it doesn't mean she doesn't care how you get on at university it's like come back to the school and tell me I don't want my private life to overlap that's so interesting yeah yeah I think it's really important to have those boundaries and when you're talking about that I'm have you read my dark Vanessa well I was just going to say I read that right at the beginning of lockdown. And it's such a great read, because I didn't feel it was very black and white. Like, no, I didn't feel it was very grey area. For me, it was really black and white, where even though she's saying, and I completely understood, like, that it's a person's right to say, I wasn't groomed. That was my love story. Don't judge my life. Don't call me a victim.

But I very much judged the teacher like I didn't think like oh this person is so torn and confused I'm like no that is someone who's grooming he was grooming her yeah yeah that book was brilliant I was so captivated by that it was so it's really readable yeah really readable and also if you if you like um Lolita and stuff it's like it's so great of that. Okay, so going back to the book. So I want to talk about porn a bit more because I think what you said is really interesting at the beginning just then. And it touches on the points you make in the book. And I'd say I was quite similar to you before I really started looking into porn, which I've been doing for my book based on the podcast.

which I've been doing for my book based on the podcast, I was very anti it. And I kind of had all the same views that you would think. Porn makes people have bad sex. It gives people bad body image. Violence perpetuates really negative gender roles, all of this awful shit. And it does do that.

And there is a singular type of porn that does do that but to talk about porn in such limited terms is is just you're just naive and you're just you're just missing out on all of this other stuff that is out there and and it's quite myopic today to talk about porn like that because there's a lot of people trying to change the industry and doing a lot of positive there's artists yeah there are artists who are making exploratory porn that kind of is smashing through the concepts of gender they play with power dynamics there are people who make porn to explore their disability and the sexiness of their disability there are people who are playing with race not in the stereotypical racial way of um like gonzo or

mainstream tube site porn but people who actually like like like um it would be like saying that all of hollywood was um it was would be like reducing all down to a certain type of film and saying okay well the whole of hollywood is um the blair witch project and we think it's very unhealthy instead of realizing there are there are all of these kind of people who are fighting back what they think is negative about porn in terms of the porn that they make so that was one of my first realizations but the other one was that um wanting men and women's lives to be better um doesn't come from making them feel bad for the porn that they're watching like all of the studies showed that making men in particular feel,

because they've been studied, feel very ashamed about what they were masturbating to, didn't make them masturbate less. It didn't make them more respectful of women in society. What it did was make them feel worse about themselves. And sometimes that was then reflected in their behavior. A man who feels really isolated because he doesn't, sometimes he might be masturbating to things that he doesn't even identify as his sexuality if he if he has

this horrible shame society is telling him you're a bad person who exploits people who has no humanity no empathy all of that self-hatred was making them masturbate more feel worse about themselves and then treating people in their lives badly so So that was a big thing for me. It's like telling people, some people who, you know, like eat too much, like making them feel really bad about what they're eating actually just puts you into a cycle of binge and guilt that actually always makes you much less healthy. And can you explain a bit about how your feminism interlinked with being anti-porn and how you kind of came to realise that maybe there were things that weren't actually quite aligning the way that you thought they were? So this is like going back maybe eight years or six years ago, I would have probably argued that the fact that porn exists makes straight men

see women as sexually available all the time. In pornography, the narrative is always that women are very easy to arouse. They're like really enthusiastic about what the man is doing to her. And all of those messages, I thought, well, of course, a man can't help but absorb them and then go out into his regular life. And then I did know some people who had had very extreme, I would say like pornography addictions or pornography compulsions. I assumed all straight men were existing at maybe a slightly lower level, but they couldn't help like walking into shops and imagining women naked or walking down the street and always imagining like having sex with everyone. And then actually most people, most people's relationship with porn

is relatively what you'd call healthy. Like it's a, it's a release, it's fantasy. They know it's not real. It can be either different or separate from what they do to their partners but that's not as interesting so I think I had a really warped view of how many people were negatively affected because some people definitely are and just like you were saying that there are definitely some parts of the porn industry that I think are evil in terms of what they make how they treat people and those kind of things so it's not me pretending that I think it's perfect but it was very feminism had being anti-porn had made me really unbalanced it's just more it's just more complicated than people think it is and the problem is I mean there are two big problems one is that we we don't have the adequate well we

didn't have the adequate sex education when we were in school in order to help us contextualize the stuff that people would see in porn and the second one is just that we don't we don't talk about sex and porn as openly as as we should and so like you said it then becomes this like shameful thing which then makes it worse so one thing that I want to talk to you a bit more about is the kind of argument a lot of people make saying that you know porn leads to sexual violence and I know I'm sure you know this as well but when you look at the research into that it doesn't really stand up does it well actually so even more than that not only does it which also again never speaks to individuals because you know like with computer games or violence in movies occasionally there'll be a crime that's

so horrific they'll think oh my god children are being affected by watching the chucky films or children are affected by um i'm trying to think grand theft auto but actually the vast majority of people um don't have that extreme reaction they don't think oh I've seen it so I'm going to go out and try it but one of the studies I thought was so interesting is that what they wanted to show they wanted to prove was that people were searching for more violent search terms on porn sites than they ever used to be and that people needed more violent porn than they used to 10 years ago and they and they just didn't find it what they found was and they were judging along the criteria of um the minutes spent watching certain titles and they're done like a hundred at each end of the spectrum and and also how often people thumbed up the video so

they were like oh i like this so this is what they were testing on and they found that um vastly the the videos that people preferred watching and watched for longer were, showed female pleasure. In all different varieties, people tended to really enjoy ones where the woman looked like she was orgasming, looked like she was having a great time. And whatever variety of kind of sexual behavior she was displaying, what people liked, what they saved and what they thumbed up on and the numbers of people watching so it showed the exact inverse of what they expected to prove the difficult thing with tube sites is that um it's been pointed out before but when you're researching pornography especially

if you're trying to research very violent pornography it completely changes your algorithms and then you only get suggested other very very violent things so it then becomes like and this is what happens with feminism you go i opened my computer and instantly it said gag this cum bucket and piss in her like and you were like oh my god it poured and so horrible but that's what surprised me when i started doing my research i was like this is all really tame everyone's just having sex no No one's hitting anybody. Because I had expected it to be, I honestly was so wary about even lifting my computer lid

to go on YouPorn because I thought I was going to be watching people being beaten. Breaking news happens anywhere, anytime. Police have warned the protesters repeatedly, get back. CBC News brings the story to you as it happens. Hundreds of wildfires are burning. Be the first to know what's going on and what that means for you and for Canadians. This situation has changed very quickly.

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More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. My biggest understanding of porn now is that if people paid for their porn properly, if they didn't expect to get it for free, which means stealing it, someone's stolen it from the people who make the porn, or they make it very quickly for the porn sites to get money from advertising.

But number one, it means that the performers aren't being paid their residuals, which are due as actors and that's how you take care of people ethical porn unfortunately gets stolen like absolutely everything else so they spend thirty thousand forty thousand pounds or dollars making a film and actually there's the reason there aren't more of those companies is because they exist for a little while and they get completely ripped off and then they kind of collapse financially so actually i think everyone who watches porn especially if they really believe in a company and the stuff they're making really suits them they should just pay a little bit of money like every month which is all people are asking and you would do that

for netflix but with with um sex stuff people feel like i think it must be to do with shame and masturbation people feel like oh i don't i shouldn't pay it's done i don't never want to think about it again but actually if people want to improve the industry and to make sure that the people who are making porn are well taken care of that would that that would solve it if everyone watching it paid a little bit every month to to accompany or the performers that they watch that would solve the problem i was talking to florence given last week and we were saying how there is this thing, isn't there, where it's like, oh, a woman who sleeps with lots of men is labelled as that because it's like she has a loose vagina. But then a woman who has a boyfriend and has lots or, you know, has just has lots of sex with a partner is fine.

So it makes no sense. And do you think that comes from porn, that idea? fine so it makes no sense and do you think that comes from porn that idea i think it predates porn i think it predates porn that um just like a men have been easily denigrated by something like calling man a man having like a tiny dick like this is horrible horrible very childish thing actually but it's a way to diminish whatever a man's achievements might be it's a very hurtful thing to say and the opposite obviously is for a man to say well she was loose i couldn't touch the sides all of that kind of thing i've heard obviously we all have we went to school with boys i've i think i heard those phrases at such a young age and it is the connotation is don't be a slag like literally your body will tell on you or

if i don't like your body i will i can then tell other people that you were a slag and that was the reason. And that's it. So like all of those weird understandings. I used to, when I was younger, be worried about being too aroused in case it stopped me being like tight at the point of entry.

I think like, oh, and it's like one awful thing to think about. Like, oh, I better not enjoy this too much in case he thinks I'm too like easy to get inside it's so strange it's so strange so you don't think that comes necessarily from porn I think what happens in porn is there are certain words that are used like in a complimentary way and I do think it's twofold because absolutely um women in porn one of the things that they're quite often told is that, oh, her tight pussy, you're so tight, da da da. But they're also, people use the word wet. So that's about arousal and that's sexy too. And for men, there's so much, you're so hard, you're so big,

like all of that kind of stuff. So I think everyone is getting, this is why, to go back to the sex education thing, to know all of those things when you're a teenager, when you're just discovering, oh, what sex is and I'm going to want to do that one day and who am I aroused by and oh the internet exists and I can find everything on there the reason that education needs to be so fully rounded is someone needs to have that conversation with everyone at a point where so they don't go around thinking in their head oh my god the dicks in porn are so massive and the women seem to love it and mine doesn't look like that like I wouldn't want a young man going through years

of his life feeling like he's not lovable or going to be found really sexy because of something that we all know is an extreme and like with the tight pussy stuff isn't real and also there's um isn't there um a link to a rise in vaginal reconstruction that people attribute to porn like labiaplasty because because everyone wants like smaller lips or something yeah but i think so part of it must be because from pornography a lot more and it's women looking at them i don't think men are telling women to get labiaplasties i think what happens is i think and i know this for myself as well like um there is no end to what we will be insecure about about ourselves in order to kind of keep uh like hating ourself a little bit or undermining our own self-worth it can be a real battle to go i'm not going to find something else that's terribly wrong with me and I think if you're looking at other women's vaginas because they're more easily available

now on your phone or your laptop then maybe you then look down at yourself and think oh that's not what I've got and so and I don't think that is coming from men and also it might not as much coming from porn is the fact that now sometimes women like to take pictures of themselves because it might be because if you're the kind of person who wants to send pictures to a lover i'm not that kind of person but i absolutely respect that some people are maybe that's the vanity the reason you want to have your labia cut off or tucked away is you think it's more photogenic for you but the real shame is like at the same time as we're all trying to kind of obviously get fgm banned and and work with countries where that's part of the culture that women without before they are of an age to

consent are having their genitals their clitoris is cut and or their labia is cut or both at the same time what you have is like the luckiest women in the world deciding to do that to themselves and it feels really it feels really really sad that fgm happens in this country from rich women who don't think that they have the fannies that look right and it is really sad but do you think it would be wrong to blame that purely on porn do you think it's it's a wider it's a wider issue than just that i i i wouldn't be convinced that it's just porn i think porn is a factor um like i remember women's magazines when it first started happening they all said it was because they wanted

to look nice in their yoga pants which obviously has nothing to do with nudity or sex it was to do with like a nice little tucked up labia because when everyone got into like because people used to wear baggy clothes to exercise like people used to wear jogging bottoms and then yoga pants were invented. And then they obviously have this like svelte, skinny kind of yogi figure. And that was what the women's magazines were originally saying.

So you had a nice little smooth mound in your yoga pants. And I think quite often, and we'd have to ask every individual, really, that's what I think, rather than just going, oh, that's to blame. What I'd want to do, and I don't know anyone often and we'd have to ask every individual really that's what I think rather than just going oh that's to blame what I'd want to do and I don't know anyone who's had it done but I'd really want to know what is it that made you feel wrong because you know do you follow on Instagram the vulva gallery no no I think you'd really like this account because people send in pictures of their vulvas and and then what happens is the artist does a

picture like she does a paint a watercolor and then there's a story about the person underneath and it always starts off with um this is a lovely person's vulva and then that person tells their relationship to it and quite often it involves like childhood or someone saying something or them getting something in their idea or hearing something from an adult quite often people's journeys about what or sometimes it's just that because they were always supposed to keep their vulvas hidden and that they just had no relationships so they were just instantly felt it was a dirty place or a shameful place or but it's really interesting hearing lots and lots of people telling their versions and for some people it's because they were in the showers at school and someone pointed and said what's that about their labia or something like that

and so but very few of them talk about pornography being a factor that's something later on that's really interesting as well I think because you know when I was growing up for example I I didn't watch porn I saw it once accidentally um but I didn't watch a lot of porn but I still think that almost every sexual interaction I had growing up with men was influenced by porn but I think that was because of the porn they were watching or the porn that they were talking about with their friends so do you think that porn can still influence your sex life even if you're not the person watching it? Oh, of course. And then maybe even more because you might not feel educated as to where something's come from.

Like I am. So how old are you, if you don't mind me asking? Twenty six. Twenty six. Yeah. So you're exactly at the age where by the time all of you were like 11, people still people had phones and they had access to it so you didn't get the thing of growing up growing up with boys because I'm 39 I grew up with boys who the only porn they would have watched is magazines or videos until they were 16 and so then what there was is a little bit of a change but they had long enough I think in their lives not for it to have been like what they call like critical learning stages. It wasn't their first idea of sex.

You talk quite a bit about the conundrum of heterosexuality in the book. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, I think what I kept realising was that there were maybe certain things that were evolved male needs and certain things that evolved female needs. And it meant that sometimes, even in the the modern world we were coming into conflict so when you study kind of like evolutionary behavior which obviously has been going on forever and suited us very well when we kind of lived in tribes you know like 40 000 50 000 years ago um and obviously changes in recent times have happened really quickly but if you think that that was what we were evolving towards with a tribal the way that men had to be strong the way that women had to be strong are entirely different

um men being prized for what they can provide and and women needing to be cared for and the thing is as a modern woman like i find the idea of being cared for by a man like disgusting pathetic so unattractive would never want anyone to pay for anything for me would never want to be reliant on them like i look after myself and i feel like that's what my culture told me was the safest way to be and then the conundrum of heterosexuality is that exact same culture that said to me you look after yourself hard, you don't need a man. Like, you can love people and appreciate them, but you don't need to depend on them. Told that exact same man that he has to buy my drink because that's romance, or he has to pay,

or he's supposed to earn more than me. And so then what ends up is I feel like, oh, the conundrum of heterosexuality is, these are all conflict, this is conflicting information. And it's not fair. And what I realised was was some of I wasn't actually being very empathetic towards the fact that men have been told um exactly the same unhealthy messages about what is expected of men as women have been told about what is expected of women I just hadn't paid any attention to that so that's like this new phase of my life is really

really thinking about that yeah I mean it's like toxic masculinity for example like I know that phrase has kind of become overused but it's it's really important to address those tropes I think isn't it it's that whole alpha male idea and I think the reason that some some men really hate that phrase is they feel told off. And it's like, oh, no, we're not trying to throw you in the bin. We're trying to rescue you from something. When we say something's a toxic male behavior, we're not going, oh, you're a bad person. We're going, you have been performing this kind of type of masculinity because it makes you socially safe. And you don't have to, you lovely baby.

You can be soft. All of your feelings are so correct and worthy. We would love to listen. But they don't realize to your lovely baby you can be soft all of your feelings are so correct and worthy and we would love to listen but they don't realize that's what we're saying okay so it is now time for our lessons in love segment so this is part of the show where i ask every guest to share something they've learned from their own relationship experiences and how it kind of shaped their understanding of love and relationships moving forward. So Sarah, what is your lesson in love? Okay, so my lesson in love is that sometimes you know that someone isn't right for you. And rather than leaving, you keep trying for another two years.

So this is maybe does not going to sound that nice about love. But I think if you leave people that you don't love, what you free up is that someone else who is going to love them the way they deserve to be loved will come into their life. And that will happen sooner because you're not there. And vice versa, everyone gets to heal. And then you get to be someone who rather than going, this is all I deserve, or I've invested so much, I can't walk away. You become someone who's so strong by going, I've had a great time with you. who's so strong by going, I've had a great time with you.

Let's not hate each other in three years because we kept trying and not sleeping together and going through sometimes just trust yourself. You know, I think because we think relationships are supposed to be really long or they're failures, sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves when actually shaking hands with someone, giving them a kiss on the cheek and saying, this has been great.

And I really hope that you have all the best in the future and walking away. That's actually a really healthy part of the loving cycle. That's what I'd say. That's a really, really good tip. You know, I think because we have this idea that, A, like you said, you know, we have to stick it out and it's a failure if we don't make it through a relationship. But also we have this idea that breakups have to be this like messy dramatic thing when actually if you could just make a mature healthy decision together about it it'd be so much better yeah yeah and also like even like not to be scared of pain because the reason we don't tell people we don't love them anymore we don't fancy them anymore is we're so afraid of hurting them but we hurt people so much longer by going on for months and months pretending people know and i would also say like i don't i think monogamy is a very overrated thing but i think if you're in a monogamous relationship and then you overstay it

when you should have left and then you end up cheating on someone that's so much more damaging than if you had an early stage go do you know what i'm so desperate to sleep with other people and i know that's really hurtful for you to hear but but you want me to be faithful. So shall we break up? And even though that person might be so hurt in the long run, you will respect yourself so much that they will respect you so much that you just called it at a stage where you went, I can't get what I need from just you. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you're a new listener to the show, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast, or anywhere else. You can comment and leave us a rating too so that more people can find us. Keep up with everything to do with the show on Instagram. Just search

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