One of the few positive developments over the past several years has been the growing recognition of the damage pornography is doing to our society. A non-stop stream of studies confirms it; mainstream media outfits like the New York Times publish pieces like “The Children of Pornhub”; even celebrity singers and actors have been willing to talk about their struggled with porn. When famously irreligious folks like Bill Maher publicly observe that pornography is poisonous, the cultural milieu is changing.
All of that makes Lena Dunham’s new film Sharp Stick an aberration. In the film, actor Scott Speedman plays a porn star named Vance Leroy who, while not the main character, is a key figure in the story. The decision to portray the porn industry positive was intentional.
“I think many of us were — especially people who started maybe, like, reading second-wave feminist literature early — were shaped by the kind of feminism that maybe didn’t give porn it’s due as something that can be really healing for people,” Dunham said>.
“I think we have enough messaging in society, and probably in my 20s I contributed to it, that said, like, ‘porn is ruining sex, and it’s making it so hard for people.’ But I really wanted this to show the way that porn can liberate people in that it’s an industry that’s just as complicated as Hollywood, and as vast, and probably more prolific. And I think that it’s really important for us to recognize the very healthy role that porn can play, and the important role that porn actors play in shaping people’s identity.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that Dunham is taking this position in her work — her HBO series Girls, which ran from 2012 to 2017, contained pervasive nudity and pornographic scenes, and Sharp Stick features the main character attempting to lose her virginity by having an affair with a man she babysits for. This sort of thing is pretty standard Hollywood smut. But to defend the porn industry is certainly a step further than most are willing to go these days, and Dunham’s frank admission that many people’s lives are shaped by porn actors is an indictment of the digital age as much as anything else.
Dunham’s comment that her views are informed by second-wave feminist literature is particularly interesting, considering that much common ground once existed between feminists and social conservatives on the dehumanizing and degrading nature of pornography and the sexual violence it so often portrays and spawns. That coalition does still exist to some extent — the strangest conference I’ve ever attended was an anti-porn convention in Texas, which featured radical feminists, Catholics, Mormons, and speakers of every imaginable background.
