Barry’s Blog # 90: Porn, Part One

Have I got your attention? Are there any other one-syllable words in American English that can provoke such strong – yet mixed – emotions?  Some hear the word and anticipate private pleasure, immediate gratification or opportunities for male bonding, but may be unaware of shameful feelings that lie just below the surface, while others who express disgust, anger or condemnation may well be covering up a sense of titillation. As George Lakoff reminds us, only about five percent of thought is conscious. It’s all so complicated…

Indeed, opinions about pornography do not break down into conventional right-left polarities. Religious conservatives hate it and everything it represents (even as they consume more of it than the rest of us), but so do many feminists who lament the objectification of women. Andrea Dworkin helped frame laws in the 1980s defining porn as “a form of discrimination…sexually explicit subordination of women.” To Susan Griffin, porn is a “sadistic act” which humiliates all women.

And hasn’t the easy proliferation of internet porn actually increased such objectification? According to David Simon, it has had a huge impact on politics as well:

The vernacular of pornography is now embedded in our culture. Even if you’re not consuming pornography, you’re consuming its logic. Madison Avenue has seen to that…(It has)…affected the way men and women look at each other, the way we address each other culturally, sexually…I don’t think you can look at the misogyny that’s been evident in this election cycle, and what any female commentator or essayist or public speaker endured on the internet or any social media setting, and not realize that pornography has changed the demeanor of men…the aggression that’s delivered to women I think is informed by 50 years of the culturalisation of the pornographic.

Others, however, argue that censorship of any type always limits liberation struggles, or that anti-pornography activism preserves the virgin/whore dichotomy that denies women access to erotic pleasure. The mere existence of the gay and feminist porn industries counter the argument that porn by definition subordinates women. Wendy McElroy suggests a “value-neutral” definition: “explicit artistic depiction of men and/or women as sexual beings.” Janice Radway insists on women’s right to their own fantasies. In romantic novels: “… if he is ‘mad with desire,’ rape reflects her power over him.” Is this is the real source of the puritans’ hatred – powerful women?

Perhaps the only thing we can all agree upon is that porn is big business.  Annual U.S. profits are $6-10 billion; worldwide revenues are $100 billion. In 2009 there were 15,000-20,000 adult bookstores in the U.S. The industry employed 100,000 people and produced 13,000 movies/year. Seventy percent of young men visit porn web sites monthly. Some argue that porn is the economic engine that actually drives the Internet; in 2005 there were over 6,000 sites devoted solely to child porn. So the real question we need to ask is: Why is porn so appealing to so many of us?

James Hillman took a broad, archetypal approach and argued that porn represents the return of the repressed. Denied access to our cultural consciousness, the goddess Aphrodite has cast a spell over Western culture, reappearing in images of the female body. But the only way she can reach us is through fantasy. Hillman suggested that we replace dictionary definitions that link “pornographic” with “obscene” with this one: “lustful images, or imaginal lust” that appear in the fantasies of those who lack any connection to Aphrodite or any of the pagan deities in their actual lives.

Myth tells us that Aphrodite had a son with Dionysus: Priapus, the grotesque, hard-core character with the enormous erection. For some reason, Hera cursed the pregnant Aphrodite, and the misshapen child resulted, along with our condemnation of porn.

Hillman saw repression of Aphrodite everywhere, not simply as the condemnation of sexual pleasure, but also as the loss of the “sensate quality of the world” – beauty – from ugly buildings and tasteless tomatoes, to talk radio and the soul-less language of psychotherapy. Consumerism, for all its marketing of sex and free choice, he said, actually limits our modes of encountering the world to the economic and the therapeutic. Because it has banished the aesthetic, we live “an-aesthetized” lives.

Jon Millward adds another complication:

So when I hear somebody claim that porn is ‘degrading’, I can’t help but ask: which porn? Is an anal scene involving three men and one woman more or less degrading than a scene in which three women have sex with strap-ons? How about a solo scene in which a woman appears alone? And if they’re equally degrading because they’re all part of the same industry, is homemade porn that couples sell on their own personal websites part of the same monster? Much like sport, or violence in films, or cruelty to animals, I don’t think you can really drill down into the topic on an intellectually respectable level until you’ve strictly defined your terms.

This brings us back to definitions. From the start, New England Puritanism attempted to regulate the internal fantasies of all members of the community. Three hundred years later, as recently as 1936, the U.S. government defined smut so broadly that the circulation of birth control information through the mail remained a federal offense.

But legislation cannot limit fantasy, and the market for sexual imagery persisted. Still, the censors tried. The Hollywood production code, adopted in the early 1930s, measured a film’s moral standing by its portrayal of crime and violence, but its chief criterion for a negative rating was sexual content. Images of men taking life were not obscene, while images of women giving birth were.

Cold Warriors claimed that porn would weaken America’s moral fiber. In 1995, Texas still banned heterosexual sodomy. Just before the invasion of Iraq, North Dakota’s state Senate explicitly voted not to repeal its anti-cohabitation law.

As recently as 2011, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA, refusing to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. It was a move that her boss, Barack Obama – yes, that Obama – publicly supported.

The federal government has spent over $1.5 billion on abstinence-only education, despite its own studies that show that such programs have no effect on sexual behavior among youth. Why?

Of course, maintaining virginity among young girls and the fear of female sexuality that it “reveals” is one of the oldest characteristics of patriarchy. And evangelical Christians – who have become, stunningly, Donald Trump’s core constituency – continue to be obsessed with this theme. Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, writes about “purity balls”:

…father-daughter dances featuring girls who pledge to remain virgins until marriage and fathers who promise to protect their daughters’ chastity…In a clip from a Nightline Prime episode on these disconcerting events , a father tells his braces-clad daughter, “You are married to the Lord, and your father is your boyfriend.” (Update: As part of a purity event over the weekend sponsored by the Las Vegas police department, one of its officers told girls that if they had pre-marital sex they would end up rape victims, gang members, drug addicts or prostitutes.)

One might well wonder why these cops would have such images in their minds, and why they make such a big deal of them, and we’ll get to that question below. And if you think these images of purity balls appear to be mildly salacious, even kind of soft-core, you’re not alone.

     

Meanwhile, let’s get back to our national fascination with porn. Hillman says that Our American insistence on denial and innocence makes the obscene wholly sexualized. Dislocated from its actual, daily occasions (toxic dumps, rape, clear-cut forests, TV tortures, homelessness, mangled Iraqi children, etc.), obscenity is displaced onto the body, the source of all those desires, the thing that must, above all, be controlled. From the beginning American innocence has defined itself by its condemnation of The Other – the stranger, the outsider beyond the pale, the terror from the dark forests, or the black threat from within the inner cities. And the most basic characteristic that America has projected onto the Other has been its Dionysian refusal to restrain its own animal impulses.

But the padres knew something: “The Devil,” said John Milton, “has the best music.”

Read Part Two here.