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From today’s newsletter:
As I rapidly approach middle age (I’ve got exactly one week before the big 4-0), something I’ve been saying a lot to myself lately is “More for me!” Oh, the kids are rolling their eyes at something I like? More for me! People have soured on an artist I like? More for me! Not only one of my favorite conversational shortcuts, but a way to stay focused on minding my own business and doing my work.
Ryan McGinley, Fawn (Fuchsia), 2012. From Waris Ahluwalia’s portfolio in issue no. 201 (Summer 2012).
Well into my thirties, I was lucky enough to have friends with whom I could talk about anything. Anything—except the subjects of porn and masturbation. It had always been that way for me, outside of a few explosive arguments with ex-partners. The rest of the time we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to, because everyone was cool with it—or so our silence seemed to be saying. Except I was fairly clear that beneath this facade, I wasn’t cool with it—I’d almost never had conversations about porn, and because I hadn’t worked out my feelings and thoughts, I felt terrified to even begin. This seemed to indicate that I needed to bite the bullet and talk about it, and I imagined that other people probably did too.
So, over the course of 2020, when many of us were at home, I began to speak with friends and acquaintances on the topic of porn, recording and transcribing our conversations. Initially, I thought that if I published the chats at all, I would somehow incorporate them into essays—a safer and more literary and urbane strategy. Over time, I came to understand that these were conversations that needed to be presented as they were—in part to convince other people of the benefits of speaking about porn, and to give an insight into what those conversations could actually look like in practice. What follows are extracts from three of the nineteen porn chats I had.
ONE
A gay man in his early thirties. He lives in the United States, and is currently single.
What is good porn for you?
Good porn is no longer than twenty minutes long. Not to be overly virtuous, but I think that a lot of the porn I watched in the past—and probably the porn a lot of people consume—is pretty crappy and unethical. I’ve been interested in the idea of finding more ethical porn, less problematic porn. There’s more ethical stuff for straight people, a few sites. I’ve found a lot fewer for queer stuff, weirdly.
What would ethical porn look like?
Porn that’s less about cum, more about intimacy. Less about these “sexual scripts” that seem to be a really tried-and-tested formula for what sex looks like when visualized. I’m less comfortable watching some of the stuff I used to watch because I feel like it’s programming me or it has programmed me and will continue to program me if I continue to consume it.
Reinforcing scripts about what sex should be like?
Absolutely, and about what bodies are attractive. The only way for me to really move beyond some of that generic shit that a lot of us assume is normal is to stop consuming it on a daily basis. Anything that I’m engaging with on a daily basis is going to mark me in some way. I’m not sure that watching problematic porn, even with a critical lens, is the answer for me.
Have you observed the way these scripts impact you?
Definitely. The annoying thing is, I’m aware of the scripts but there’s still something that draws me to certain formulas, because I’ve watched thousands of porn videos where you can guess what’s going to happen, step by step by step. You can guess who’s going to be in it, the types of bodies that they’ll have. I was going to say that’s definitely changing, but I don’t even know if it is. Go on Pornhub and it just still seems to be the same stuff. If anything, there’s a bit more aggressive stuff on mainstream sites than ever.
Do you know what the part of you that’s drawn to the scripts wants?
Familiarity. The predictable is comfortable. It gives people a blueprint. It gives me a blueprint. It’s useful knowing how other people see the world, what other people expect in sex, what other people enjoy in sex. I think a lot of my ideas about what my hypothetical partner might enjoy used to come from seeing how people in porn react to people doing certain things. Like, Oh, that person in the video seems to really enjoy a finger up their arse. Then it becomes, Do I even like fingering or do I just think my partner might enjoy it?
And then, Do I know that they are actually enjoying it or are they performing this enjoyment because they also watch porn and think they should be enjoying it?
Are we just acting out porn every time we have sex? Are we just watching porn and then recreating it? Where’s the enjoyment? Where’s the actual pleasure? It’s so easy to go into autopilot and forget how fun sex can and should be.
Do you feel like the stage at which you start watching porn and the way in which you watch it is important in this? Does it matter whether your first encounters with sex are IRL or through porn?
Is anyone having sex before they’ve watched porn?! I’ve got this really vivid memory of being a young teenager—me and my friends at this particular train station with a news kiosk on the platform. You’d wait for a train to pull up to the station, and you’d time it right so that you could grab the porn magazines from the kiosk and run for the train. Some weeks we might do it more than once. That was where my consumption of sex began, because that was my first interaction with porn. It was theft and it was on a train platform and it was part of this heist.
Would you then take the magazines home?
I would and I’d be confused by all these boobs. So many boobs. Being a gay boy but still thinking to myself, I’m meant to like this, all of my friends like this, why don’t I like this?
As a gay boy looking at those straight porn magazines, was there enough male presence in there to be stimulating or was it all women?
It was basically all women. On some level, I was always searching through the pages to see stuff where women were interacting with men, and I don’t think I often found what I was looking for. Most of the people reading them don’t really want to be confronted by a dick. I preferred the images where there were men and women, but I never got into straight porn—it never made much sense to me, so I had a big period in my teens where I just didn’t watch porn. When I realized what homosexuality was, I didn’t switch to gay porn—that felt too scary. I just had no porn.
It felt too scary?
Being unsure about who I was then, consuming gay porn at that point might have tipped me over the edge. A gateway drug. Catholic schooling, through and through.
So what was it like when you eventually started watching gay porn?
It felt right and wrong at the same time. It felt right because I could tell I was more excited about what was going on, but it felt wrong in that it was so tied up with feeling uncomfortable in that identity and in my skin at the time. Once I started watching it, I couldn’t stop. It’d be daily consumption, in secret, with headphones on, blinds closed, when nobody else was home. It was a real shame cycle. Instant feelings of real aversion after I’d finished—clear browsing data, clear cookies, clear cache, whatever that even is. And my relationship with porn was really marked by that almost immediate feeling of discomfort after. I don’t know what motivated me to continue to watch porn, but I wouldn’t say it was pleasant.
At that time, all the bodies seemed identical—masculine-appearing men, having sex with what looked like their siblings. They were mainly white, everyone had abs, and all the bedrooms were the same. It was as if every studio had one bedroom and they just went in and used that one space.
Did you have a clear sense of what was missing or was it a sense of, This is what porn is?
I went as far as saying, This is what sex is. Sex is intercourse between models. I didn’t even start to think about what other people who didn’t look like that would be doing—maybe reading, or watching TV, but not having sex. Sex was for skinny, attractive, masculine men, at least in my consumption of gay stuff. That was partly because I probably wasn’t doing that much looking around. I went to the mainstream sites for gay porn because I didn’t really want to be online searching through lots of different stuff. I had it in my head that if I got too exploratory, that would be how I got caught, and I couldn’t get caught.
That sounds like a very powerful script to be going into sex with. Did it make your first real sexual encounters quite difficult?
It didn’t, because it made me very selective about whom I would have sex with. I went on to perpetuate those ideals in my sexual partners. The first few guys I slept with were all tall, built, and more masculine. It took a while to unlearn all of that. I’m still unlearning it.
Would you say that unlearning process was conscious?
More recently, it’s been conscious, to do away with the ends of that. I still have to regularly remind myself of basic shit that I’ve got to learn. I realized that being with someone conventionally attractive doesn’t have anything to do with their personality. It doesn’t mean they’ll be nice. It doesn’t mean they’ll be funny. I was dating people because I thought they were “hot” and realizing, Hold on a second, we have nothing in common. I don’t even think I realized I was unlearning it. I was just connecting dots and realizing that whatever gauge I was using to pick people whom I thought I was interested in just wasn’t working. It’s not easy looking back on my behaviour.
When I started learning how to date in my twenties, I’d gravitate toward masculinity.
I appreciate the scare quotes around “hot.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to find your partner attractive, and potentially that is something that you have to weigh up against them being a nice person. But I’m fascinated by “hotness” as received message, as social capital—how much do you think they’re hot because you think they’re hot, and how much do you think they’re hot because society has told you to think they’re hot? It’s easy to stand on your high horse and say, No, no, no, this is my personal taste, it’s nothing to do with social pressures, but it’s only once you start that process of unlearning, intentional or not, that you realize, Okay, no, I’m much more affected by these standards than I thought I was.
If the porn I was watching when I first found gay porn featured people with size 38 jeans, then the people I would’ve been drawn to when I first started dating would’ve looked different. Obviously, it’s not just porn—a lot of industries are to blame for how skinniness is so prioritized across genders. But fuck me, there aren’t many things that teenage boys consume on such a regular basis during that critical period of identity formation. It’s like learning a language. That’s what I was doing—I was learning a language of sex. I do want to watch more porn, I’ve realized. I just don’t know where to find it anymore. Of course this is not practical at all, but sometimes I think that the type of porn that I want to watch, I’d have to make or direct myself.
Have you ever felt that prospective sexual partners’ expectations of you are shaped by the porn that they’re watching? Are there special expectations that attach to you as a Black man?
Yeah, absolutely. Before I came out, whenever I interacted with women, there was an expectation that I’d be very masculine, very dominant and aggressive, and in fact, that’s pretty similar with men. That’s been my experience navigating the world through heterosexuality and navigating the world through homosexuality. A lot of people expect what they see in porn to be recreated in person, though that’s rarely explicitly verbalized. Even in relationships, I think the ideas people have gotten from porn have shaped people. Not expecting me to have an emotional anything, really. I can’t see a better candidate for what has shaped this other than porn.
That’s heartbreaking. It’s also illuminating, if not surprising, to think that what lies on the flip side of the “aggressive” stereotype is a total denial of someone’s emotional reality.
It’s not that I don’t want to be dominant sometimes. It’s just that that’s not how I always want to have sex. The expectation is that that’s where my preference has to begin and end whereas I’m like, Well, sometimes I want to be thrown around too. Being boxed in like that pretty much ended one of my earlier relationships. I’d initially accepted how fixed his views of me were, and it transferred outside of the bedroom, where he didn’t expect me to have feelings. It made me feel like a piece of meat. I’m a whole person! He wasn’t a bad person, it was just a bad fit.
Have you felt in the past like you’re being fetishized?
Definitely. There have been times where I’ve been talking to a white guy on an app and they’ve used the N-word. People have asked me if I’m into race play. There’ve been times where I’ve felt ignored. Obviously it’d be problematic to demand I get a response from everybody, but my experience and the experience of other friends of color who have navigated apps is one of being second-class citizens in that context.
For dating, or for sex as well?
I find there are more people who want to have sex with me than want to date me. For some people it can be about fulfilling a sexual fantasy, whether they say so or not, but it’s not meeting a potential partner. People are allowed not to be looking for anything serious, of course, but I’ve had the thing where someone’s not looking for something serious, so we just have sex, and then maybe a week or so later they’re in a committed, exclusive relationship with someone who looks like their sibling. I’m like, Okay, cool.
Are people ever vocal about the fact that you’re their sexual fantasy?
Oh, they’re not just vocal, they expect you to be grateful. I chatted with a guy on Tinder about it once. It was a debate more so than a conversation. It went on for hours until I realized it wasn’t my job to shift his understanding. Pouring energy into those debates is a trap for sure. If I’m just a thumbnail for someone, that person isn’t necessarily going to care about my comfort and safety during sex. So, not having certain conversations has implications for my welfare and health. I also have to remember that I’ve been watching porn for a really, really long time as well. What am I doing to people?
TWO
A queer person in their late forties. They live in Japan and are in a long-term relationship.
Is porn something you talk about with people around you?
Well, leading up to chatting with you, I went off in all kinds of directions thinking about it. I made a Venn diagram, I was all over it. One of the things that really interested me was a presumption that I’m part of a community that’s all about sex positivity and body positivity, where we happily and freely talk about various sexual things at the drop of a hat, nobody’s shy at all, et cetera. It’s not necessarily true. I’ve got these random memories of porn-related incidents or conversations in my various queer circles, and aside from those related to my partners, none of them feel really deep-down. So I was thinking, Maybe I don’t really have a relationship with porn, fuck, what kind of a queer am I? That sense of disconnect goes way back. When I graduated from university, all the cool lesbians went on a camping trip. They went in their cars up into the mountains, and for some reason I got to go with them. There was a hailstorm, it was really atmospheric. The cool liberal studies graduates were talking about sex, and one girl, whose cool mechanic girlfriend Dusty was right there with her, was saying, I just got Dusty to let me touch her perineum for the first time the other day, and everybody was having this conversation. I was there thinking, Ah, that sucks for Dusty. If she hadn’t had her perineum touched before, maybe she didn’t really want to talk about it either. There’s a coolness that doesn’t always go with checking everyone’s comfort level. I’ve seen that a lot over the years—people are happy to talk about sex while also not talking about it.
I often sense that when we’re talking about things that are hard to talk about initially, such as sex and porn and intimacy, that need to be “cool” can present a barrier. There’s an echo of the way people worry about political correctness in this pressure to be pro everything.
“Well, of course we’re fine with all of this”—that becomes a given. As you say, in most circles we haven’t really got the language. That’s why those sex toy videos I emailed you about are so great: “I’m just sitting here talking in a very normal salesperson voice with a little bit of extra softness about something I’m suggesting that you’ll really enjoy putting in your anus.” The disconnect that’s there is fantastic.
When you haven’t got a language around something, how do you go about developing one? At the start of this project, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about porn or masturbation. It was absent from my life.
From your spoken life.
Exactly, from my spoken life. The distance between the discourse and what’s actually going on is odd. When we’re forming a new language, does it have to be a kind of “fake it till you make it” thing? Do you and your current partner talk about porn?
My partner is just getting over a bout of the dreaded virus. It’s been really rough, and he went away for a while to quarantine. We’ve been talking on Skype like we did back when it was a long-distance relationship, when I was still in the sheep field. Yesterday I told him, I get to do the porn chat tomorrow, and I asked him what he would say his relationship is with porn. He said that, right now, the virus has killed his libido, he has no energy for anything. The idea of sexual things right now is still up there with, um, what was it? Chilies and caffeine: things he’s not quite ready for yet. Back in the day when I was in the countryside and he was here, we would read porn to each other. Send each other little videos of readings, or read to each other live until my laptop battery ran out in the horse box. I don’t remember what came first, but there were also wanking videos sent back and forth, on memory sticks. We had our own little poor-relation Pornhub going on. I’d forgotten about it until I was thinking, Let’s see, porn, porn, porn … oh yeah, there was all of that.
Actually, we made a little video, using the videos we’d sent back and forth to each other during that time, and sent it in for an online screening of pandemic porn. I don’t know if we made it in, because it was three o’clock in the morning here when it was playing in the UK and we couldn’t get the link to work. I’ll probably die not knowing. Or maybe someone will come up to me one day on the street and say, Oh my God, was that you in the sheep field?
Do you have any anxiety around that? I’m incapable of sending people videos or nudes or anything of me, because the idea of them getting out is terrifying in quite a nonspecific way. It’s not a particular scenario based in my head. It’s just a sense that I need to not do that for fear of … something.
With unknown fears, it’s not “what if this happens”—it’s “something could happen.” But, people on the street, maybe not so much. When I was living in the city a long time ago, whoring, often I’d be thinking, What if I’m walking down the street and one of my johns sees me and says hello? How funny would that be? How weird would that be? What if someone who’s only ever seen me naked sees me now? But that wouldn’t really be any different in terms from one of my clients at the English conversation company I work at now seeing me in my not-work clothes. There are so many ways in which that work—selling my full attention and all of my words for forty-minute sessions one after another—feels more distasteful and more dishonest than selling my body for money. I’m pretty sure I think that, anyway.
Obviously the way porn and misogyny and patriarchy interact is massively tangled and anything but unidirectional, but I do find myself wondering about how porn radiates outward, in terms of shaping sexual practices and the things that people—particularly men, I suppose—want to enact in the bedroom. In your experience of doing sex work, did you see that play out, or see things that were clearly from porn?
You can’t not go there, though. That’s the dark side, right? That’s the not sex-positive or person-positive side. The truly sinful side. I was only doing sex work for maybe four or five months. It wasn’t legal, I didn’t have a visa for it. It was how I was making a living, but it was also something I had chosen to do out of interest, something I wanted to know the experience of. When I thought about it in terms of temple priestesses, say, when I went all ancient Greece fantasy with it and was like, This thing that I’m doing and this service that I’m providing for this person is holy, and if I was with someone from whom I could get that sense of gratitude for the profundity of what was going on—because some people were like that, and that was amazing—that was pretty right on. Others were very clearly not like that—some people were doing things that they wanted to try out because they’d seen them on TV, and they weren’t nice things. Or they saw it that way. You can feel it. You can feel it in any situation when somebody is not seeing you as a human being. And that really sucks when you’re naked and you’re sucking their dick.
Did you have a sense before you got to the being naked and sucking their dick part—would you know which way the interaction was going to go?
There are probably a lot of people in the world who have better risk antennae than I do, but even I sometimes would walk into a room and think, Oh, this is going to be one of those. Sometimes I’d be wrong, and it would turn into something everybody could get something good out of. Other times it was just ugliness and abuse and it’s a real shame that that’s what people are capable of equating sex with. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the temple goddess strength to bring those people around. But how can anyone, really? All the ugliness is so deeply ingrained in us and so much of it is connected to not having a way to talk in a healthy way about it.
Do you think there was more ugliness because at that time you were in the bracket of sex worker in their heads? And therefore on the slut side of the slut/virgin dichotomy?
Absolutely. The commodification bit, right? If money is what I value and I can get it for money, then sure, the person doesn’t matter. That’s gross. Even if I was telling myself that it was just a job, the experience of commodification in sex work was still physical, it was going into my body, and there were unscheduled long, weepy baths on the bad days, soaking that stuff out. And that was without any of the truly bad stuff having happened. I don’t know how we fix porn, but it feels important.
It’s not just porn, though, is it? Porn has emerged from and plays into this enormous patriarchal capitalist system. And it’s so hard to imagine fixing just one part without fixing the thing in its entirety.
It’d be fine if we could fix everything.
THREE
A straight man in his early twenties. He is recently single.
Can you describe your current porn-watching habits?
It’s not something that’s set in stone. I probably watch it more in the morning than I do at night. I find that if I do it in the morning then I can just get on with my day. If I gave an estimate of how often, it varies on how I’m feeling, but say two to three times a week.
Would you ever masturbate without using porn?
I have done, but if porn’s available, then I’d probably use that. It’s more stimulating than my imagination. I’m fine with pictures, but if we’re talking videos, then these days I just use Pornhub.
What would you be watching on there? Do you go for the top-page stuff?
I’ll look through the top page first, and if there’s anything there that catches my eye, I’ll click on it. If I was going in looking and searching, I don’t search for anything too crazy, to be honest—maybe anal or orgies or something like that. Something maybe that I wouldn’t do in my own life. I don’t go out of my way too much. If there are things on the first page that aren’t too bad, I’ll watch them.
You said you tend to watch things that are things that you wouldn’t do in real life. Can you talk me through that?
Yeah, not as much with anal, because obviously I’ve done that quite a bit, but it’s not something that you do all the time. With orgies and threesomes and all that kind of vibe, it’s not that it’s taboo, but that it’s something that you don’t normally experience. So it’s living vicariously through that lens.
The full fantasy experience?
I don’t know if it’s my fantasy. I’d probably be down for a threesome, but with the orgies, I don’t think I’d actually want to do that in real life. It’s more that the chaos on screen of everything happening is quite stimulating. I wouldn’t choose to watch a porn of myself, basically, because I’ve got lived experience of that. Not that it wouldn’t necessarily be stimulating, but I think if you’re going to go to that effort, you watch something that you’re not going to do yourself.
Where do you stand on violence and rough sex—that whole aspect of porn?
Some people are into being a bit more rough, and I am as well, both watching and in my own life, but at the same time, there’s got to be limits to that. I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked. I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable. A bit of choking and a bit of slapping is fine as long as both parties are in agreement. Whenever that is happening in real life, you talk about it first and have safe words so you know that that’s what you want. In regards to porn, even the taglines are worded in a way that fantasizes violence: “small white girl getting brutally destroyed” and stuff. I do think that porn has created a fantasized ideal in people’s heads about sex, and the physicality can bleed into people’s lives. If you’ve seen James Bond jump onto a fucking train in a film, you wouldn’t then think, I can go and do that. But with porn, even though it’s all scripted and specially cultivated in such a way that that’s what the end result is, people take it too literally, and I don’t agree with that.
How old were you when you first saw porn, and how did it happen?
My first experience of watching porn was when I was in first year, so I would’ve been about twelve. It was my dad who showed it to me. He was in this group chat and one of his pals had sent these two videos. One was just normal sex and the other was called “Super Squirter”—you can guess what happened in that. They were both short—one was maybe two minutes and the other thirty or forty seconds. He showed me them on his phone, and I was like, This is great shit, so I asked him to send them to me. Then I took them into school, showed all my pals. From there I just started searching myself—the thing with my dad is the part I vividly remember. As much as I probably wouldn’t send porn to my kids, I also think that when you do that, it opens up a dialogue. It makes a difference when you’re able to talk about the same things and you laugh and enjoy it.
Regardless of the kind of relationship you are in and how good the sex is, would you continue to use porn on the side?
It’s totally separate. It’s a means to an end, almost. Masturbating lets off steam. It’s not as if I’m choosing to not speak to you in order to go and do this. It’s when nobody’s around. But moderation’s a big thing. If I were doing it every day and it became not so much a habit as an addiction, then that’s dangerous.
Has the moderation come naturally, or is it something that you’ve achieved?
When I was younger, when I first started getting into it and falling down the rabbit hole, I was masturbating a few times a day for the full week, just thinking, Oh my God, this is amazing. Once I started having sex, though, the realization came that it’s a really different ball game. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, when I started having sex and understanding more what sex actually is and what’s involved, my porn usage really died down. It became more like I’m describing it now—a wee external thing for yourself. I would hate to rely on it. I’d hate it to be an end in and of itself, to think it’s better than the real thing. Maybe the first few times you have sex, it probably is. But then that brings up the question, How can I have better sex? That’s more of a task, it’s more interesting.
Do you feel that porn has helped you to know what you like in bed, and to talk about it with people?
I don’t want to give it the credit but I’m going to say yeah, I do think so. If anything, it gives you the language to explain and verbalize things. You see things in videos that make you think, That seems quite interesting, maybe I’d like that. It all comes down to doing it, but porn did help in giving me the vocabulary to be able to express it. Take how vocal people are in porn. I can’t speak for all guys, but I know that there are quite a lot of girls that aren’t that vocal in real life. I’m not talking about screaming in my ears, but just something, anything at all. That’s what gets people off sometimes, that’s what people really like. Even just moaning in somebody’s ear can go a long way. Let’s say you do see something and think, That looks good, I’d like to try that, I have the vocabulary to express that, you’ve still got to approach it with the understanding that, one, your partner’s got to be into it, and two, that it’s not going to be what you’ve seen on-screen. Even talking about it is difficult, especially when you’re younger and you’re just starting out. When I was younger, I was in bed with girls who wouldn’t take their tops off because they felt insecure. You can even go as far as having sex with somebody, and there’s still that stigma, especially when you’re in your late teens. To be able to talk about things, you have to feel comfortable. Everyone wants to talk about things deep down, but they find it difficult. Especially if it’s a newer relationship or if you’re sober, people really struggle. If you’re in a committed relationship, it becomes second nature to discuss things. If you don’t then your sex is doomed anyway. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are with talking, and if you’re comfortable then other people are comfortable. That’s the main thing: having a really good space to speak and to be judgment-free and to be like, I want you to feel pleasure, the same way I feel pleasure.
Polly Barton is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize. This piece is adapted from Porn: An Oral History, which was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions on March 16, 2023.
Written by Hazem Zohny, University of Oxford
Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die?
These questions sound like they have nothing to do with a government budget. These annual events are, after all, conveyed as an endeavour in accounting. They are a chance to show anticipated tax revenues and propose public spending. We are told the name of the game is “fiscal responsibility” and the goal is stimulating “economic growth”. Never do we talk of budgets in terms of sacrificing some lives to save others.
In reality, though, government budgets are a lot like those trains, in philosophical terms. Whether explicitly intended or not, some of us take those trains to better or similar destinations, and some of us will be left strapped to the tracks. That is because the real business of budgets is in distributing death and life. They are exercises in allocating misery and happiness.
Take the austerity policies introduced by the UK government in 2010 and the following years. Studies put the mortality cost of spending cuts between 2010 and 2014 at approximately 150,000 excess deaths. A more recent study suggested that 335,000 excess deaths could be attributed to the austerity of the 2010s.
These are contestable figures – and they cannot draw a direct causal relationship between specific austerity policies and number of deaths. But even if it is impossible to assign an accurate death toll to austerity, it should come as no surprise that reducing welfare spending will reduce, well, welfare. The same is true in reverse. An England-focused study suggests that by increasing healthcare expenditure by 1%, around 300,000 deaths could have been avoided in the wake of 2010 cuts.
This has a sobering implication: knowingly or not, a decision is effectively made to let 300,000 die if healthcare expenditure isn’t increased by 1%.
Similarly, there is a clear link between fuel poverty and premature deaths. It is difficult to derive a precise figure, but it’s almost certain that a government decision not to further subsidise energy bills will trigger otherwise preventable deaths.
There is a truism in all this: resources are limited, and decisions inevitably come with trade-offs and opportunity costs.
For instance, austerity was a response to a severe economic downturn. Recessions reduce how much revenue a government has to spend on services, which leads to the loss of lives and livelihoods. Even for those who don’t suffer in the extreme, life is generally less liveable for many of us. For all we know, the global financial crisis would have (eventually) led to tens of thousands of additional deaths no matter how the government responded.
Budgets are of course hugely complicated, but this is all to show that while it is true that they involve accounting, the morally relevant currency of what is being accounted for is ultimately our wellbeing, including its loss through death.
For instance, assume it is indeed true that 300,000 deaths could be prevented by a 1% increase in healthcare spending. Assume also that using these funds in some other way (such as on education and home insulation) would in the long term prevent far more deaths, or, significantly improve the quality of several million lives.
Suddenly, talk of fiscal responsibility seems to miss the point. We are faced with a much more philosophically loaded debate. It becomes pertinent to say, hang on, just how much extra wellbeing for some do you think can make up for the deaths of 300,000 others? And how sure are you about this?
It starts to become obvious how value judgments infuse and implicitly guide these fiscal decisions that, unwittingly or not, involve weighing up certain lives against others, present lives against future ones, and proxies for wellbeing (such as job creation) against others (such as preventing premature deaths).
The risk of the language of “boosting the economy” is that it gives these monumental decisions in ethics a veneer of being value-free budgetary exercises in “following the evidence”, stopping us from seeing how the economic sausage is actually made.
Of course, evidence-based policy is better than unevidenced policy. What is missing is values-transparent policy, and that starts with the philosophical task of laying bare the precise value judgments that go into constructing what we’re told are “good economic outcomes”.
While the Office of Budget Responsibility independently assesses the economic credibility of the budget, no corresponding institution works to uncover its ethical assumptions and value trade-offs. Welfare economists and ethicists need to forge a new relationship that initiates and guides the uncomfortable public conversation of how government budgets inevitably trade-off lives and livelihoods, now and against the future.
Equally crucial, by instituting norms that encourage uncovering all the value-judgments smuggled beneath the guise of sanitised fiscal and economic talk, we might reduce the chances of opportunistic politicians gambling with millions of livelihoods by redirecting the train in the name of one ideology or another.
Hazem Zohny, Research Fellow in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Growing up with movie-buff parents, the Academy Awards were required viewing, even when I was too young to watch any of the nominated films. The ceremony had an alluring sense of self-importance: All those beautiful people in their beautiful clothes, talking about the power of art, as millions of people around the world watched. I still vividly remember the year my parents shooed me off to bed when the show ran late (as it usually does), then hearing the muffled soundtrack of a movie I’d actually seen. Had it just won Best Picture? I tiptoed back to the living room to check, and my father beckoned me over to watch the acceptance speeches. Some milestones, it turns out, are more important than a good night’s sleep.
When I was older, I started hosting low-key Oscar parties for friends, having spent the preceding months catching up on as many nominated movies as I could. The show became less Hollywood spectacle and more highly contested sports playoff: We placed bets, cheered on our favorites, and groaned over what we saw as bad calls. No matter the results, we always had plenty to argue about, because there were always more losers than winners — people unjustly robbed of an honor they deserved.
But was it simply a matter of supply and demand? The Academy Awards stir up controversy because there’s too much talent fighting over too little recognition. The indignant coverage of each year’s Oscar “snubs” glosses over a humbling reality: Most professional actors, directors, and screenwriters will never be nominated for an Oscar, let alone win one. It’s a ruthless numbers game.
The Academy Awards are also a magnet for contentious social issues, the movies being a reflection of the society in which they’re made. The debate over whether the Oscars should be less “political” has gone on for more than 50 years (and has been mostly lost by the “non-political” side). When April Reign created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, she set off a discussion about representation that continues to this day. In 2017, there were calls to cancel the ceremony when some nominees couldn’t enter the country due to Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from certain —majority Muslim — countries. After Harvey Weinstein was finally called to account for his treatment of women, a group of actresses who’d gone public with their accusations introduced a #MeToo segment at the 2018 ceremony. It was a powerful statement that the movie industry, if (very) belatedly, was taking women’s concerns seriously.
The winners at this year’s Oscars will inevitably say something polarizing, odd, semi-incoherent, inspiring, and/or heartwarming in their acceptance speeches. And that’s why I keep watching. There’s a vulnerability in those moments that cuts through the Hollywood illusion, reminding me that everyone who makes it onto that stage is a person who has finally — improbably — had a dream come true. The Academy Awards have always been both inspiring and controversial, as the stories on this list make clear.
Hattie McDaniel made history by being the first Black performer to win an Academy Award in 1940. Unfortunately, that honor was complicated by the role she played: Scarlett O’Hara’s servant, the sassy but loving “Mammy,” in Gone with the Wind. The film was a hugely popular hit and won a then-record eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But even in the pre-Civil Rights era, McDaniel was criticized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) for degrading her race, as cultural critic Lynda Cowell makes clear in this commentary about Black female stereotypes.
McDaniel’s response that she’d rather be “paid $700 a week playing a maid than $7 working as one” was tart and to the point. Sadly, the night of her greatest triumph was marred by the casual racism that was endemic even in supposedly open-minded California. At the dinner ceremony, McDaniel was forced to sit at a remote table, separate from her co-stars, and she wasn’t invited to the celebration party afterward, which was held at a “no Blacks allowed” nightclub.
Cowell used to dismiss McDaniel as “a funny Black woman who provided the light relief in a three-hour long film,” while the petite Dorothy Dandridge was “the kind of light-skinned lovely every Black girl should aspire to be.” In this enlightening piece, she explains how she eventually realized that both were subject to the same racist limitations in their careers.
Mammy, cartoon or otherwise, was a character that had been a part of America’s collective imagination for a while. After appearing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mammy started to get around. Despite the fact that slaves were given very little to eat and were often worked into early graves, the notion of the large, middle-aged, dark-skinned Black woman who loved her owners more than life itself became cherished. And why wouldn’t it? With no husband, children or family to ever speak of, this loyal, motherly, sexless husk of a human being posed little threat to white society. It was McDaniel’s portrayal of Mammy that came to embody a character that still sets the standard for Black actresses today.
One of the first — and most controversial — political statements delivered at the Oscars was made in 1973 by a young woman named Sacheen Littlefeather. When Marlon Brando was announced as the winner for Best Actor in The Godfather, she strode onto the stage in a buckskin dress and announced that Brando had asked her to reject the award on his behalf, as a protest against Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans. She identified herself as being of Apache heritage, and though she was booed that evening, she soon became an inspirational figure in the Indian rights movement.
But what if all her years of activism were based on a lie? Whitaker, a lecturer on American Indian Studies at California State University, met with Littlefeather for a possible book project and ultimately came to doubt the woman’s claim of Native heritage, a doubt she kept to herself for fear of “outing” someone who’d become a role model for so many. After Littlefeather’s death in late 2022, two of her sisters confirmed Whitaker’s suspicions. Whitaker’s account is on the shorter side, but her personal experience with Littlefeather gives it particular resonance. Rather than shaming Littlefeather for lying, Whitaker explores the reasons why she did, and what she gained from it.
Littlefeather became a cultural icon in large part because she made a life playing to the Indian Princess stereotype, and she certainly looked the part. This was especially true during the Oscars incident, in which she adorned herself in full Native dress, for example, because it sent an unmistakable message about the image she was trying to portray. It should be noted that the outfit was not of traditional Apache or Yaqui design, nor was her hairstyle.
The stereotype Littlefeather embodied depended on non-Native people not knowing what they were looking at, or knowing what constitutes legitimate American Indian identity.
When Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture in 1970, it solidified a change that had been rippling through American culture throughout the 1960s: Shiny Hollywood escapism was out, gritty realism was in. But did an X-rated movie starring two relatively unknown actors really deserve the industry’s highest honor?
In this essay, film critic Koraljka Suton argues that Midnight Cowboy should be remembered for more than its edgy rating. “Midnight Cowboy [was] the first and only X-rated movie in history to have won an Oscar for Best Picture,” she writes. “Two years later, the rating was changed back to R without a single scene having been altered or cut.”
Why? Because the initial X rating had nothing to do with explicit sex scenes (there were none), but rather, the movie industry’s distaste for anything that hinted at homosexuality. The scene where Jon Voight’s character (Buck) gets paid to receive a blowjob was mostly implied, but it was shocking enough to make people walk out of the theater and create a public outcry. His co-star Dustin Hoffman was afraid he might never work again.
But the controversy might have also attracted curious moviegoers who discovered a more moving film than they expected — which might explain that Oscar. Suton makes a convincing case that Midnight Cowboy deserves to be remembered as a poignant story of two outsiders who find support in each other, not the supposedly shocking movie an X rating implies.
Schlesinger’s film is, ultimately, not at all about sexuality, although it did break new ground in terms of its acknowledgment of various sexual preferences and practices, but rather about the importance of connection and true intimacy. In a world that gave them nothing and expected nothing from them, Rizzo and Buck were, to steal a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “each the other’s world entire”—and we were given the opportunity to take a glimpse inside and really feel what it means to survive, as opposed to thrive.
Saving Private Ryan entered the 1999 Academy Awards as the undisputed favorite. A huge commercial success, it also met all the expected criteria for a prestige drama: a beloved leading man (Tom Hanks), a respected director (Steven Spielberg), and a sweeping, emotional story that capitalized on nostalgia for World War II’s “Greatest Generation.”
When it lost Best Picture to the charming but relatively lightweight romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love, though, the ground beneath Hollywood shifted. This wasn’t simply a surprise upset, but proof that an Oscar could be won with the right marketing strategy. As David Crow explains in this entertaining, behind-the-scenes account, the now-notorious producer Harvey Weinstein crafted a relentless, no-holds-barred campaign to boost Shakespeare’s chances — and the fact that it worked convinced other studios to follow his lead.
Miramax started a whisper campaign saying everything good about Saving Private Ryan occurred within the first 15-20 minutes on the beaches of Normandy, and the rest was sentimental hokum. It worked. Spielberg did not campaign like it’s the Monday before election day, and Weinstein did.
While Weinstein is thankfully gone, the crude lessons learned by Shakespeare in Love’s win over Saving Private Ryan are not. Awards seasons generally begin in early September with the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival … It then continues with each film being released between October and December, mounting months-long rollouts that never really end until Oscar night. Coupled with corporate studio interests leaning ever more heavily on “four-quadrant” blockbusters that are built on franchises, this system has created an environment where Oscar movies are often little-seen limited releases, and mainstream populist films are more concerned with superpowers than prestige … The generally accepted wisdom that Oscar movies and popular movies are mutually exclusive remains intact.
Dargis, the Times’s co-chief film critic, remembers the 2010 Academy Awards as the “Bigelow Oscars,” with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win Best Director for The Hurt Locker. “I hate the Oscars when I don’t love them,” she writes, “but that night I swooned.” Could Bigelow’s breakthrough inspire a wave of female filmmakers and producers to finally wield power behind the scenes?
It didn’t happen immediately, or all that smoothly. But as Dargis surveys the cultural landscape of the past 20 years, she sees undeniable progress. Female writers and directors who once would have been limited to romantic comedies are working on blockbuster action films, while creative powerhouses like Ava DuVernay have built their own versions of a mini-studio, directing, producing, and supporting other young creative talents.
Not all that long ago, I thought it would be best if the entire machine blew up, that the big studios just got it over with and died, making room for others to build something different and better. Certainly, the movie industry seems to be doing a fine job of self-combusting. Yet the truth is that despite the statistics and awards, the movie world looks different than it did 30, 20, even 10 years ago. The world looks different. There is, as I’ve suggested, no one reason for the shift in how we think about women and film, but it is a good and hopeful shift. Change has been slow. But change is here because women have followed their muses, honed their craft and heeded their voices no matter the hurdles before them and, in doing so, they have changed ideas about cinematic representation, about who gets to be the hero on set and onscreen.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
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This is the only acceptable (and palatable) way to watch Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro, in my humble opinion. Watch this hilarious creation by Zach Silberberg, who recently shared this ridiculous faux conversation between Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro. Joe kicks off the conversation by saying, "I think I would just love to get Ratatouilled." — Read the rest
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