Notes from Evil Bender

(Side note: as I was typing the title above, I didn’t hit the “s” hard enough and almost wrote “getting tarted.” Make of that what you will.)

Today’s must-read is Courtney’s response to Robert Jensen’s Getting Off. I’m going to discuss some details below the fold, but first read the excellent piece, and consider taking in a few of the thoughtful comments.

Welcome back. I’ve not read Getting Off, I intend to. I suspect, though, that it won’t change my basic opinion on the subject: porn certainly isn’t as universally beneficial as its proponents sometimes claim, and it is also not the root of all evil. Furthermore, I’ve never been convinced that censorship is an acceptable answer to even the most objectionable speech, so I’m unlikely to be convinced that even if porn is bad it should be banned.

That said, let’s jump in. Courtney notes that the book observes a few things about popular porn:

All women at all times want sex from all men;
Women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand; and
Any woman who does not at first realize this can be easily turned with a little force. Such force is rarely necessary, however, for most of the women in pornography are the “nymphomaniacs” that men fantasize about

To me, this is why analysis of porn is difficult: the subject is both too varied and too predictable. For example: in a porn, everyone wants sex all the time. How often to you see anyone on screen that isn’t quickly engaging it sex?  I can’t help but feel that this observation isn’t helpful. In action movies, things explode, in romances two people fall in love, and in porn people have sex. With whoever is around. Eagerly. And with bad dialogue.

Which brings me to my real objection to the above points: I’m not convinced that everyone wanting sex is in any way a strike against porn, and when it is linked to the third observation–that in much porn, men will use violence (simulated rape) it conflates a horrible tendency of some porn with what I would consider a generally good thing: lots of porn presents sex, as Maud Lebowski would have it, as a “natural, zesty enterprise.” It’s essential we talk about the problems with pornography, but there is, unquestionably in my view, good porn out there: egalitarian porn designed to arouse without reinforcing stereotypes.

Courtney observes another such problem with the book’s analysis:

I don’t believe that masculinity is inherently evil or that there is no room for the representation of sex, or the so-called “objectification” of bodies. I know I get turned on by abstract images of beautiful bodies—both male and female; does that mean my mind has been infected by porn culture? It actually feels quite authentic and loving to me, not degrading as Jensen claims all images of body parts are.

This is a great observation about a larger problem: it isn’t clear where erotica–which no one I know claims to object to–ends and porn begins. Every definition I’ve ever seen either encompasses erotica, excludes much of what most of us would call porn, or can be interpreted so freely as to be meaningless. Feminists and pro-feminist men seem often to define porn as those elements of porn which are most abhorent: that doesn’t seem helpful.

Nor does it seem helpful to use the worst of porn to give ground to those people who are truly only interested in silencing expression. Can’t we admit that much porn is bad without conceding that there may well be a place for images and videos whose purpose is to arouse?

Courtney also notes an important problem with Jensen’s work: “He doesn’t allow for much natural variation in what turns people on.” If she’s right about the books treatment of the subject, and I have no reason to think she isn’t, then that is a problem. After all, most of us would agree that kink can be a healthy thing. I know men and women who are into being both top and bottom, for example, and their interest in BDSM has more complicated roots than hatred of women spawned by porn.

In fact, aside from porn which abuses those who produce it and openly misogynistic porn, my biggest objection to the industry is the Disneyfication of porn: legitimate, healthy interests are glossed over, made appealing to a mass audience. Interesting porn, like interesting art, gets chewed up by the Capitalist machine and mass-marketed. I’d be hard pressed to name a form of expression that has no merit, and I can think of no reason to believe porn is the exception. I do think much porn is marketed to misogynists, but so are many movies, books, magazines, etc.

Which brings me to Jensen’s disturbing argument, as I understand it: that we need to move beyond masculinity. This, to me, has the sound of something which is true and yet almost meaningless. I’d love, for example, to move beyond global Capitalism, but I think it’s smart to start with reforming the system rather than believing it can easily be torn down. I’d love to live in a world where gender bias wasn’t a fundamental aspect of the culture, but since we don’t live in that world yet, I’d argue the best way to approach the problem isn’t to rail against the idea of masculinity, but rather to talk about how masculinity ought to be interpreted. One commenter asks what attributes we should teach boys that we might not teach girls–i.e. what should a healthy (healthier?) masculine identity? I can think of one thing right off the bat: healthy masculinity would teach that growing into a real man means understanding that women our men’s equals and treating them as such. The same lesson should of course be communicated to girls, but as long as we have power imbalances the terms of the discussion will have to be different. Young boys need to be shown that they can have authentic identity without putting down women, just as we should emphasize that healthy sexuality doesn’t mean being a misogynist, but also doesn’t mean being afraid of sex.

And that brings me to my final point: we should worry about porn not because porn corrupts (though some of it surely does) but because the corrupting porn is part of a larger cultural problem. Focusing on porn-as-problem can sometimes cause us to forget about porn-as-symptom. Jensen is right that there is a crisis in our culture, but I don’t think condemning porn as a single entity is the best way to deal with that crisis.