According to The New York Times, Rashida Jones has changed her mind about pornography. In 2015 the actress produced a documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, about the harmful effects of pornography. Hot Girls Wanted revealed an industry that manipulated naive young women into the “adult” film industry, then asked for ever-escalating performances before discarding the performers for fresher faces (and bodies).
Jones wrote an essay for Glamour in 2013 against the ‘‘pornification’’ using the hashtag #stopactinglikewhores to highlight the mainstream of V-strings and stripper poles.
Now Jones has changed her mind, admitting she watches porn and was wrong about the harmful effects of the sex industry. Or was she? The Times Q&A with Jones reveals someone brainwashed to talk the talk of porn as a personal liberation as well as a strike against patriarchy, but whose conscience keeps telling her otherwise.
When asked by the Times why she changed her views, Jones replies: “What changed? I was impulsive. Being old isn’t a good excuse for it, but using the word ‘whore’ was absolutely not appropriate. I didn’t even know what ‘slut shaming’ meant at the time, and I have educated myself. But that was sort of the beginning of my relationship with all this work—I wanted to see if my feelings had any validity in the real world, or if I was just being close-minded.”
Asked if she watches porn now, Jones replies: “I do. When I was single, it was a great way to stay at home. It’s nice that you can separate the idea of personal pleasure from the pressure of a relationship. But I had a hard time finding the kind of porn I wanted, because I had to sift through so much stuff that isn’t for me—like abuses of power, dark porn—and I know we aren’t supposed to criticize people’s fantasies, because everybody has their own thing, but unfortunately, the first thing you see when you go to a tube site is often pretty violent stuff.”
This interesting answer reveals that perhaps Jones hasn’t completely repented from liberal orthodoxy about porn. While nodding towards the modernist mantra that you can’t judge anybody for anything, she nonetheless uses terms like “dark,” “abuse,” and “violent” to describe the porn she sees on the way to more mild stuff. The Times would’ve been accurate to say that Jones still has serious concerns about the kind of harmful porn that the industry always seems to evolve towards and steer consumers to.
Jones’ confusing ideas are right out of a feminist theory class. Asked about the “difference between the politics of sexual practice versus what someone might produce for money,” Jones replies, “The feminine power that is sometimes called feminism comes from capitalism. If you are making money, you are powerful; therefore, anything you do to make that money makes you powerful; therefore, anything you do to be powerful is feminist. That has been the narrative that was presented to me, and that’s what I’m trying to ask questions about.”
The argument that porn is a weapon against patriarchy is silly—as Ruth Marcus from The Washington Post once noted, to call dirty movies “a jujitsu move against the patriarchy” because, in the words of porn star Belle Knox, “a woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body… ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society,” avoids some unpleasant facts. Marcus: “Letting a man ejaculate on your face is not empowering under anyone’s definition of the term. It’s debasing.”
Feminine power comes a woman's nature as a tender, beautiful, powerful and life-giving force. Men have always been in awe of women for that reason. Porn is an effort to capture, control, and degrade the feminine. Rather than a brave rebellion against patriarchy, it’s a form of cowardice.