Thesis in Literary Studies: Literature, Culture and Society

Resisting Cultural Pornification in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction MA Thesis in Literary Studies: Literature, Culture and Society Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam Anna Holbrook 11769467 Supervisor: Dr. Kristine Johanson Second reader: Dr. Anna Seidl June 2018 Table of Contents: Introduction: Pornified Culture and Feminist Speculative Fiction 1 Chapter One: Twentieth-Century Interventions 14 Chapter Two: To be Female is to be Alien: Awakening to a Pornified Culture 27 Chapter Three: Dystopian Realities in The Power 37 Conclusion 48 Works Cited 52 Holbrook !1 Introduction: Pornified Culture and Feminist Speculative Fiction Following the 2018 partial suffrage centenary in the UK, meaningful and affirmative contemplation of what the next century requires in order for women to meet full parity with men holds far more promise than the event’s momentary celebration. In the wake of heightened public scrutiny of men’s sense of sexual entitlement in the form of the Weinstein scandal, the #metoo and #TimesUp movements, the spring 2018 exposé of the rampant sexual harassment at the President’s Club men-only charity event in London, and the revelation that Oxfam senior staff paid local women for sex after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti — to name but a few examples — the seeds of a revolution are being sown. This revolution is challenging the deeply ingrained ideology which validates the inequality between women and men in the realm of sex, power, and relationships. Yet questioning how this resistance can be effectively cultivated is crucial in order to prevent this moment from becoming trivialised or transient. Viral campaigns have been criticised for their fleeting success: for example, the support of figures such as supermodel Cara Delevingne in #bringbackourgirls in 2015 on social networking sites appeared to encourage fashionable participation in ‘clicktivism’ rather than meaningful activism in response to the abduction of over two-thousand girls by Boko Haram (Shearlaw). In the West today, pornified mainstream culture represents the most inimical form of patriarchal control, a realm in which pernicious prescriptions of gender and power fester. This thesis argues that the strategies used by writers and producers within speculative fiction powerfully resist the harmful ramifications of Western pornified culture. In doing so, speculative fiction of the twenty-first century exposes the constructed and deeply unequal nature of our present reality, ultimately providing an important form of feminist activism necessary for the continuing struggle for equality. The pornography industry has long been blamed for constructing women’s societal and cultural confinement owing to its justification and naturalisation of essentialist and unequal roles of men and women in the realm of sex, and by extension, society. Pornography’s move from the margins to the mainstream in contemporary Western culture has allowed for deep-set gender inequality to intensify and consolidate, indicating that now — more than ever — is a powerful counter-narrative to porn required. The gender equality that various contemporary movements are pursuing is achievable in the foreseeable future if such a critical counter-narrative to porn is constructed. This thesis argues that this counter- Holbrook !2 narrative is visible within the study of literature, and specifically within the genre of speculative fiction in twenty-first-century American and British novels and visual media. Speculative fiction is commonly referred to as the genre of ideas: a genre that encompasses all that is other-worldly about a text, including science fiction narratives, alternative worlds or societies and non-human life forms. As an ideologically-based literature that provides access to the narrative of gender that contemporary pornified culture disseminates, feminist speculative fiction deconstructs, resists and re-defines the prescriptions of female sexuality by working to expose the constructed and deeply unequal nature of American and European society. The manifestations of pornified culture as laid out in this introduction — such as the pornographic lens — are resisted by the visual and narrative strategies employed in Under the Skin (2013), the first series of Westworld (2016) and The Power (2016). This thesis argues that these techniques — such as the alien cinematic gaze, the construction of artificial female subjectivity, and the imagining of a world in which the contemporary language of power is reversed — resist the pervasive influence of pornified culture upon gender equality today. Their strategies of resistance provoke a critical questioning of the problems of binary constructions of gender; of essentialist narratives of power; mechanisms of female objectification; and of the present condition of inequality as one directly inculcated by pornified contemporary culture. Unless stated otherwise, I understand ‘pornography’ as mainstream visual material primary found on the Internet, as I believe it is this material that encompasses what is both most pervasive and most detrimental to contemporary women’s subjectivity and equality. I identify the elements of a pornified culture to which I refer throughout the body of the thesis to include: the infiltration of pornography into the mainstream of popular culture and its increasing influence in popular media, as visible in hyper-sexualised advertising, music videos and on self-promoting social media sites such as Twitter; pornography’s constant and deregulated availability owing to the shift in the way in which it is produced and consumed in the digital age; and the increasing conflation between images of sex produced by porn and the way in which sex is experienced in reality owing to its domination as an explicit educational tool for young people. I argue that pornified culture also further inculcates and naturalises rigid prescriptions of female sexuality which place women’s pleasure as secondary to that of men; denies women sexual subjectivity as objects of male desire and in servitude to an Holbrook !3 ‘insatiable’ male sex drive; suggests that inequality and even violence within sex is erotic; and posits that consent is negotiable. Cultural pornification has led to the heightened influence of the pornographic lens, through which women’s sexual agency is rendered less available, and gender relations in the realm of sex in particular are obscured. Speculative literature and media reacts to contemporary pornified culture by directly confronting the strategies that it employs to normalise and maintain gender inequality. This introduction further reflects upon the effects of contemporary pornified culture as the basis for the exploration of the reactionary position occupied by British and American speculative fiction in the twenty-first century. The digital age has transformed the ways in which porn is consumed: its constant availability, accessibility and heightened anonymity has meant that the line between the marginal and the mainstream has become increasingly blurred. Pornhub, one of the most popular free websites, provides unmediated access to porn, with ‘eighty million visitors a day and more traffic than Pinterest, Tumblr or PayPal’, illustrating its no longer marginal, and highly influential global position (Jones). The ease of self-promotion on social media sites such as Twitter (which, unlike social-media counterparts such as Facebook, does not censor pornographic material) exemplifies this expansion of pornography’s influence in popular media (Holbrook, ‘Making the Center Visible’ 3). Indeed, the prevalence of social media sites and photo-sharing has lead to the rise in revenge porn, legally defined as ‘the sharing of private, often sexual or explicit, photos or videos, of another person with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress’ (Davies). The mainstreaming of porn culture is also evident in the pornographic content of music videos, that came under particular scrutiny in 2013 after Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ song and accompanying video were banned in over twenty British Student Unions (Lynskey). The lyrics of the song — ‘I hate these blurred lines/I know you want it’ — that denote a disturbing attitude towards sex and consent were reinforced by the uncensored music video, which features a topless model being pursued by three fully clothed male performers (Lynskey). Recent popular culture trends — as exemplified by the worldwide interest in Fifty Shades of Grey (2011-2018) and its portrayal of BDSM sex — further illustrate the mainstreaming of content that normalises pornographic or rough sex. Pornography’s mainstream status is also exemplified by the vast number of celebrities, such as Kim Kardashian, who have become famous for their sex tapes. What is Holbrook !4 insidious about such trends is the fact that the cultural mainstreaming of pornography has meant that its damaging notions of sex, intimacy, gender and power are further embedded and thus become more difficult to critique. As a result, in contemporary Western cultures, sex has become almost synonymous with porn. Despite the radical nature of this claim, the ramifications of the dramatic pornification of culture have undoubtedly problematised the ability to distinguish between ‘real sex’ and the sex that is performed in mainstream material. For example, online pornography has increasingly become the principal means by which young people in particular are educated about sex, and perceive sexual acts to be performed: a 2016 survey

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