New Jensen Book: Porn and the End of Masculinity
IA recently featured a review of Bob (not Derrick) Jensen’s latest book, by Don Hazen at Alternet. Here’s a thread for further discussion.
I would like to direct (egad) the attention of the more strongminded (or -stomached) among us to recent threads at Alternet, that Librul Lair. 
Their editorial gang recently had the chutzpah to run two [gasp! two!] whole articles critical of porn (one is the Hazen review, one is a Riane Eisler op/ed on LIbrul denial about the connections between porn and war, and then there’s a followup thread summarising the outpouring of reader response — 80+ percent of it outraged that A’net dared to raise an eyebrow (no more) at the Sacred Cow.
The comment threads are marked by the usual dogpile of the porn posse, brandishing the standard well-worn talking points, predictable as freepers defending the Iraq invasion. It seems to me that the Eisler thread is more abusive, more strident, nastier than the responses to Hazen — but hey, he’s a guy so he’s allowed to have opinions about women and sex, whereas she’s just a woman so what does she know? And yes, you will find ostensible “progressives” slinging the Rush Limbaugh “feminazi” meme, proving (as if we didn’t know) that 90 percent of allegedly Librul men morph into diehard wingnuts as soon as their gender-privilege is mentioned, let alone challenged.
The comments are a goldmine for any sociology student: a deafening consumerist wail of Me-Me-Me-Me and My God-Given Right To Shop-Shop-Shop; flailing denial of porn industry abuses comparable only to the wackiest global warming “skeptics”; the usual jesuitical hairsplitting about why “my kind of porn is the good kind;” outright racist/nationalist rants about how porn makes America a free country where there is no abuse of women, as compared to those Bad Brownfolks Countries where there is Sexual Repression; classic whines about poor, poor men and the congenital testosterone disability which makes them totally the victims of their own uncontrollable urges (wow, the 19th century never dies); rampant women-blaming (if our wives would just put out more we wouldn’t need porn); smarmy condescending rants galore addressed to “the girls” and “you ladies” — the whole nine yards. Why, it’s like the Sixties all over again, and not the good bits.
Anyway, here’s a space for some discussion where the porn posse will not get to dogpile the thread and feminists might actually get a word in edgewise or on the other hand, you could spare your blood pressure and skip it — there’s only so much Non-Negotiable Amurkan Way of Life whingeing and special pleading and denial a person can absorb per diem you been warned. I did post a few inflammatory remarks on the Eisler and followup threads, but you’ll have to search for ‘em as A’net doesn’t seem to do permalinks.
Richard:
Very depressing. I read the review of and the excerpt from the Jenson book, but could only bear a small sampling of the comments.
I agree that people are just not willing to face up to what porn means. Liberals get so worked up over censorship, the “nanny state”, the slippery slope to totalitarianism, etc. This particular thread is typical of so many online message boards. No one listens. People have such widely divergent versions of the facts. The last comment I bothered to read had someone complaining that porn is not “the source” of misogyny, just as video games are not “the source” of violence. I mean, I don’t think anyone is arguing that porn invented violence towards women. As with so many message board points, that’s just a red herring. But any attempt to even talk about this brings out the hardcore libertarian impulse in people.
Sorry, I wish I had something more constructive to say. I’m glad you linked to the articles. I’ve thought about this topic a lot. I can’t deny that I’ve looked at plenty of porn in the past, before I was married. Some of the stuff out there is just awful–and I found myself responding to it in ways I didn’t like one bit–but even the relatively benign stuff gave me pause. The sheer proliferation of it, for one thing, is disquieting.
Some commenters argue that the problem is not porn but that our society is so sexually repressed, that we don’t communicate well about sex. As if it’s not possible to agree with the latter two points but still think porn is a problem, and that it speaks volumes about our culture.
I guess that’s all I can say right now. Maybe something more useful will come to mind later, or if someone else comments.
28 September 2007, 9:07 pmRichard:
Sorry, spelled Jensen’s name wrong…
28 September 2007, 9:08 pmStan:
The porn posse playbook is pretty shop-worn, as any of us who have dared to utter a word critical of pornography have learned only too well.
Straw men, shifting premises, conclusions smuggled into premises, ad hominem, et al. And the old stand-bys of naturalized sex (biological determinism) and accusations of being covert right-wingers. Oh yes, and the drive theory which compares male sexuality to an overheating boiler… my fave. Like a vinyl LP with a big ol’ scratch in it.
I’ve not yet seen anyone answer De’s McDonald’s analog though. Not once. Enclosure. Commodification. Addiction (er… demand production). And ideology to close the cycle. When I get the time in the near future, I plan to walk through the swamp to rebut the claims that “most porn is not this awful stuff,” and just do a quick ennumeration of the links to net-porn via Google that are degrading or humiliating to women, that express male performance as aggression, that objectify and commodify a particular act or body part, and do a quick average on the first 100 that come up. I invite others to do the same.
It’s late right now, and I am medicated, so the math would probably be wrong.
I also have a few things to say about liberalism in general, and about the whole notion of being “progressive,” because beginning with De’s McDonald/porn link, these two vile traditions don’t unpack as prettily as many may suspect.
Thanks for this, De.
28 September 2007, 9:49 pmDeAnander:
Perhaps I should be uncharacteristically optimistic and say that, as with the Walt/Mearsheimer book and other recent icebreakers opening up debate about Israel’s Occupation of Palestine, the mere appearance of these reviews/opeds at Alternet is a sign that a decade-long (or more) freeze in liberal discourse on porn may be breaking up a bit.
Radical feminists lost the “hearts and minds” struggle on the first go-round; I have argued in print that this happened not coincidentally during the Reagan/Thatcher years, and that it was the rise of market ideology and the cult of individualism and [consumer] choice that enabled the demonisation of radical feminists and the suppression/marginalisation of any critique of the highly lucrative sex industry. Not only is Ayn Rand’s writing fundamentally pornographic — in a way that has nothin’ do with with nekkid bods — but the porn apologists are fundamentally Randian on this particular count, no matter how “left” they may be on other issues, they become rugged individualists and anti-statists as soon as their porn consumption habit is questioned.
Why do I say Rand’s work is pornographic? that might take some explaining… as feminists pointed out long ago, the root of the word pornography is the noun porné, or “whore” — the lowest class of prostitute in ancient Greece. Pornography literally means “writing by or about whores.” But women of the porne class were not literate — the upper-class courtesan or hetaira might be literate, but not the back-alley hookers. So pornography, from its inception as a word in ancient Greek, meant writing that purported to be by whores, and purported to describe the goings-on in brothels (as low comedy and farce), but was actually written by men — literate men, citizens (women could not be citizens, whether respectable or prostituted), the customers of brothels, not their workers. A relation of power has been expressed from the very beginning, that pornography is something written by men, for men, about women who have, implicitly, no citizenship and no social or political power sufficient to override or challenge the messages (propaganda) being written and published about them by men. It reflects institutionalised power as surely and accurately as a minstrel show or the “Uncle Remus” stories (purporting to be authentic Afro-American slave narrative, but written by a white man and a defender of slavery).
Pornography is inherently a lie, written about a person with relatively little power, created and marketed by people with relatively more power, and marketed to people with relatively more power. It’s not only a transaction of power but a depiction or reification of power. And it’s this celebration and ritualisation and reification of power that — to me anyway — is “pornographic.” The structured power is reflected not only in the content of the media but in the commerce that produces and markets the media. The consumer buys not only the content, but also the structured relations which enable the production of that content, just as Americans when they buy gasoline for an artificially low price are also buying the destruction of Nigeria and colonial occupation of Iraq.
This knowledge (that porn is a lie, and a lie that serves and preserves privilege and caste defined by gender under male supremacy) is implicit in our culture, no matter how often denied: it is why we — liberal pornophiles included! — refer to “eco-porn” when corporations package outrageous lies in “greenwash” text and images, telling lies about a natural world that has no citizenship or legal standing or ability to defend itself. It is why we refer to “war porn” when we see the slick and fundamentally dishonest imagery of war on Faux News, cleaned up and glorified and prettified into a consumer entertainment: it is not only a lie, but it is a lie encoding enormous power, a public celebration of the power of one caste over another, one nation over another, a celebration of the global institutions of inequity and powelessness that — as lefties — we are allegedly committed to dismantling.
Ayn Rand’s work is from start to finish a celebration of dominance and power; adolescent and tin-eared as its prose may seem to the sophisticated reader, it is a seductive and highly effective love-song to hierarchy, domination, and might-makes-right. For me, the working definition of pornographic is “that which celebrates, rather than critiquing, the dominance of one person or caste over another.” We could expand that, in the case of eco-porn, to the celebration of the dominance of humankind over the entire biotic world. Whatever sells us the Total Awesome Kewlness of domination and power-over is pornographic, it is the original spirit of the word “pornography” and its historical legacy.
The argument that porn contradicts or undermines structured power relations because it contains examples e.g. of Black male “tops” (gay porn), or female dominatrices, is feeble at best. Are these “tops” and dominatrices in command of the porn industry? Are they its customers? Do they own the cable broadcast networks? No, they are paid servants acting out roles that a master has written for them; no matter whether that role requires them to wear a “bottom” hat or a “top” hat (so to speak), their permanent role in the economy and the porn industry is as paid underlings, service providers: and that is the power that porn celebrates, the power of men to command the labour and the bodies of women, of whites to command the labour and the bodies of PoC, of adults to command the labour and the bodies of adolescents and children, and of the relatively affluent to command the labour and the bodies of the relatively insecure.
The newer genres of Internet exhibitionism — amateurs “sharing” their sexual acts with the world via pornoblogs and webcams, allegedly out of sheer erotic high spirits — are hard to decipher. How many are genuine and how many are the same old paid porn models, now instructed to pretend to be amateur “co-eds” and “hot young hunks”? Provenance of internet material is notoriously difficult to ascertain. I’m willing to believe that a percentage of this material is genuine, and it falls into a category that I can’t label as “pornography” unless the sexual activity being “shared” itself celebrates domination and hierarchy.
The protestations of the “BDSM community” members in the Alternet threads puzzle me in their naive essentialism. The argument “I just happen to enjoy/’need’ sexual fantasies of being raped [or raping], being hurt [or hurting], and that is who I am and my identity must be respected,” seems to me as naive and as unreasonable as “I just happen to feel a strong antipathy and fear towards people of colour or poor people, and that is just who I am and my identity must be respected.” It is a plea for the unexamined life and for a free pass to conform to the values of the hegemonic culture (while pretending to “transgress”, which is kind of hilarious when you consider how grimly conformant BDSM is with received patriarchal ideology).
If we are not allowed to ask why we desire what we desire and what our desires mean, then we are unable to talk about capitalism, about food politics, about consumerism, about why people desire SUVs and McMansions and McBurgers and Nike shoes and what those desires mean. We are not allowed to talk about how culture constructs desire, how marketeers stimulate desire, and how received desire, just like received fear, is used to manipulate the people, against each other and to distract us from the power of the state and the merchant princes. We are not allowed to talk about the cultivated desire for domination as it influences the people’s enthusiasm for war and conquest, and how the envisioning of masculinity as conquest plays into the pragmatic programme of war for profit.
This whole realm of discourse is walled off when we accept desire as essentialist, extracultural, falling from the sky into our brains with no human agency. Why porn and prostitution should be given a special exemption from the same analysis that we direct at the rest of capitalism and consumerist behaviour I have never understood, except that this form of consumerism is closest to the heart of male power and gender identity — third rails even more terrifying, and in some circles eliciting even more panic and rage, than a critique of Israel!
29 September 2007, 12:48 amRequired:
A friend of mine harshly criticized Don Hazen’s review for his uncritical use of the term “anti-sex” as well as his statement that he still watches some types of pornography and the he does not think there should be a national campaign to snuff (interesting word choice) out all porn. She was surprised, well actually outraged, that such an article would make it onto Feral Scholar/IA.
I’m undecided on it as of yet.
I still haven’t read the whole thing, but I would suggest that these type of statements are an added reason why “the Eisler thread is more abusive, more strident, nastier than the responses to Hazen.”
* * *
STAN: I share your friend’s criticism, and I also have criticisms of the McLeans piece on kids porn-fasion at IA. There are ritual disclaimers in both that indicate the authors do not share our deep critique. But we are not posting exclusively to recapitualte some party line. As De has pointed out, wee also post to show where there have been “thaws” in certain cultural orthodoxies. Feral Scholar is exactly where such piece belong, because there is a community here that can identify and deconstruct this “anti-sex” business… accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, as it were. If we solely stand in judgement, that is, merely put a plus or minus sign by everything else that is written, we really are drifitng from critical engagement into apolitical sanctimony (good versus evil?).
For the record, the term “anti-sex” is the logical correlative of “pro-sex,” a purley polemical term adopted by liberal-left porn apologists to describe themselves… it means “pro-porn” not pro-sex, and is meant to paint porn critics with the same brush as religous conservatives. It is also a big fat red herring, because it intentionally shifts the conversation away from one of our main points: desire cannot be immune from critique. “Sex” in the context of this polemical nonsense is a lingusitic marker for a reified and naturalized notion of sex that floats in the ether, innocent of social power.
29 September 2007, 1:11 amRichard:
“If we are not allowed to ask why we desire what we desire and what our desires mean, then we are unable to talk about capitalism, about food politics, about consumerism, about why people desire SUVs and McMansions and McBurgers and Nike shoes and what those desires mean. We are not allowed to talk about how culture constructs desire, how marketeers stimulate desire, and how received desire, just like received fear, is used to manipulate the people, against each other and to distract us from the power of the state and the merchant princes.”
In my opinion, this is exactly what people don’t want to talk about. I’ve gradually, over recent years, stopped calling myself “liberal” or “progressive”, because I see those words as linked directly with capitalism and free market ideology. Capitalism has become so naturalized in our minds, and we so want to believe in the associated rhetoric of freedom, that we refuse to accept that things we think we have freely chosen we have really been conditioned to accept. Since too many liberals or progressives still have a problem with the notion of “manufactured consent” (for people like them, anyway; they have less problem seeing the political manipulation of others by Republicans), it’s not surprising that they would resist the idea of “manufactured desire”.
The essentialism point is a good one. Among the women I know, it seems to be just accepted that their boyfriends/husbands look at porn, because that’s just what men do. And that’s it. I know about this from my wife, mostly, so they must talk about it to some extent. But as far as I know, men do not talk about it, and they most assuredly don’t talk about it with women. It’s like something done in private, in secrecy almost (though I’m sure some people are more open about their consumption of porn). This can be ascribed to the lingering puritanical ideas we might have that, say, it’s wrong to masturbate, but I think it also means that enough men know instinctively that it’s degrading–but they’d rather not admit to their partner the kinds of porn they get off on, they’d rather not have that conversation. They’d rather not look at how their real-life desire might have be different than it would have been without the consumption of porn. So when it comes up they get defensive and start shouting about censorship and repression.
29 September 2007, 8:42 amfolktruther:
Jensen’s comments can’t separated from his support of journalistic censorship. Both he and Solomon publically resigned from Project Censored because they reprinted Jones scientific article arguing the internal demolution of the World Trade Centers. Project Censors reprints 25 articles every year that have been censored in the mainstream press. Jone’s was number 18.
Jensen is a professor of journalism at Texas U. Solomon is national columnist. If pseudo-progressives like these try to censor views they disagree with, like evidence of Bushite complicity in 9/11 or Zionist influence on the US power system, then their other views should be seen in that light.
[moderator's note: this poster, like so many in the pro-porn posse, seems to have difficulty distinguishing censorship from disagreement. if Jensen and Solomon do not believe that the WTC was subjected to controlled demolition, then they believe that papers asserting this are misguided or deliberately sensationalist (and I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with their position); and they have every right to resign from the masthead of a publication that implicitly endorses a theory they believe to be unfounded. whether Jensen and Solomon are on the right or wrong side of this controversy, history will tell; but this is not the same thing as censorship. did they attempt to prevent the publication of Project Censored this year? did they seize the printer-ready copy and destroy it? did they threaten the author of the paper or the editors of PC? no. they simply followed their conscience in a nonviolent way, without attempting to suppress the point of view w/which they disagree.]
29 September 2007, 12:41 pmDeAnander:
A friend of mine harshly criticized Don Hazen’s review for his uncritical use of the term “anti-sex” as well as his statement that he still watches some types of pornography and the he does not think there should be a national campaign to snuff (interesting word choice) out all porn. She was surprised, well actually outraged, that such an article would make it onto Feral Scholar/IA.
I tend to agree with her critique, i.e. Hazen’s piece is cowardly, or at least “insufficiently advanced” — whether this is because this is as far as he has travelled in his personal deconstruction of the memes of sexual conquest, or whether he was toning it down for the Alternet audience, knowing full well that there would be a Mass Whine and Hissy Fit as soon as he admitted even the slightest sympathy with those Evildoing Feminazis — I dunno. Given the general tenor of Alternet articles on sex and gender, it’s astonishing that Hazen wrote this at all, or that they published Eisler’s piece. Alternet can usually be counted on to support the porn industry wholeheartedly — with all the usual hifalutin feelgood excuses of course — so for them to stick their timid little necks out even this far was noteworthy.
It would be wonderful if Hazen had a pro-woman, reality-based, anticapitalist epiphany sufficiently strong to make him disgusted with the institution of porn as well as its “excesses”, but then it would be wonderful if everyone stopped driving cars and took public transit and rode their bikes [and it would be wonderful if everyone stopped supporting militarism and nationalism, period, instead of just objecting to "Bush's war" as if it were the exception rather than a typical example in a long series]. When a behaviour is so socially normative, as well as absolutely convenient, as well as (short term and superficially) beneficial to the individual, as well as ego-stoking, it’s really, really hard for people to give it up. They keep thinking they can “manage” it or tame it or make it benign somehow, even when it’s structurally an expression of hierarchy and power that, like water flowing downhill, will inevitably find and create victims. Whether porn is addictive in any physical, medical sense seems to me highly questionable, but that power/status is addictive in an emotional sense I think is well documented, and the vast majority of porn (what I would call pornographic, see above) delivers a hit of power (both imagined and real) not just “along with” its “sexual content” but intrinsically as its sexual content. It’s sexy because it’s about power, and it’s about power because it’s about sex in a gender-hierarchical culture, and about commoditised service provision in a capital/labour culture.
So I don’t give Hazen a big bouquet for his cautious, qualified, grudging admission that gee, there just might be a problem with commodifying women, industrialising sex, and sexualising contempt; I give him about the same exasperated “it’s about bloody time” welcome mat that I’d give Arnie the Governator if he got rid of his SUV collection and drove a Prius. It’s far from a solution, and it’s far from radical, but it’s way more than I expected… I owe Jensen a review of the book but am in the endgame of a major relocation so it may be a while before I get around to it. Sorry to disappoint a reader; maybe I should have headlined the article “Stop the Presses! Alternet Editor Gets Half a Clue!”
29 September 2007, 2:44 pmaudrey:
On another fairly active forum for liberals, there is an area set aside specifically for discussing women’s rights. Someone posted the Eisler article that’s linked above, and several men stopped into the women’s rights group to tell us that “The Link Between Porno and War” was not a legitimate topic for discussion. The thread got locked by the moderators and called flamebait both times it was posted. That freeze on the liberal discourse on porn looks alive and well from where I sit.
As I put it to De privately, when it’s pointed out that porn and violence are related, folks like to fall back on The Delicate Flower Defense: I am a delicate flower with sensitive feelings, how dare you crush my fragile ego by suggesting I am not the next Ghandi just because I enjoy watching women get pseudo-(or otherwise) raped while they are being called whores and bitches?
29 September 2007, 9:10 pmRequired:
@ De and Stan,
She was pretty happy with your responses. She laughed her ass of at me for being chicken shit by not stating my own position on the article but putting hers out there instead. I got mocked quite nicely
. She said she just found it unusual that it went up without critique (yeah I reckon “Stop the Presses! Alternet Editor Gets Half a Clue!”) when most of the time either Stan or De would have said something if similar stuff had been in the comments section. She doesn’t have as much net access as I do, if your wondering why I’m posting on her behalf.
30 September 2007, 5:58 amStan:
CAUTION: offensive content
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***
I was going to start the ennumeration, but I have other things to do. Just open these top 10 and look at the links in sequence for your own ennumeration. From Number 1, “Porno-Shack”:
Homemade teen fucks boyfriend on Moms bed
Hot Blonde Gets Fucked Outside
Watch me fuck my sisters hot friend
Blonde Has A Shaking Pussy
White euroslut fucks black guy
Gorgeous Teens With Huge Tits Gets Fucked
Hot lesbian college babes drunk after party
Gorgeous Blonde Gets Bent Over A Couch
Schoolgirl gets fucked by teacher
Tan slippery ass gets filled…
Sexy Heather Takes A Huge Cock In Her Ass…
***
…and so it goes. So much for the “objectification, domination, and humiliation are in the minority” fable.
30 September 2007, 9:57 amDeAnander:
PenisBot ????
well that about sums it up, don’t it just.
30 September 2007, 6:51 pmStan:
(-:
If I understand correctly, Google list sequences are based on the traffic sites get. What you see above is a direct reflection of consumer demand, likely the same consumers who will insist that the “bad” porn is someone else’s… they just like the harmelss, egalitarian “erotica.”
See how far down the Google sequence you have to go to find whatever that is.
30 September 2007, 7:47 pmRequired:
The “most porn’s good” argument can be easily debunked by the study showed at an anti-pornography conference (I forget the name, but Gail Dines and I think Robert Jensen talked) a while back. They did a massive study into the top rated porn films.
It conclusively ruled out that degrading stuff was the vast majority. At one point they gave the stats for (I forget the word they used but it was something like) “positive interaction between a man and women”. This could include stuff that was still potentially degrading such as saying “you’re pretty” or even kissing between a man and a woman, even if it was a caricatured porn kiss. The frequency of this “affectionate” behaviour, even though it was construed in the most broad terms, was very, very low.
30 September 2007, 8:22 pmJanet W:
I read some of Jensen’s book this past week, standing up in my favorite SF bookstore (Modern Times.) I couldn’t bear to read it all, so I didn’t buy it. It made me feel depressed, though also impressed that he was taking these issues on.
I have two things to introduce into the discussion:
One: I am married to a man who long ago decided not to consume porn because he didn’t want another man, or men, to influence his sexual desires and behavior so that he/they could make money off it. I’m not saying that’s a perfect analysis, ’cause obviously it’s incomplete, but it worked for him. I suggest this is something men could talk to other men and/or adolescent boys about. He refused/refuses to believe the (transparent) lie that De exposed in her much earlier post. It’s not even a lie as we usually understand it. It’s more of a commonly agreed upon fiction, or “the suspension of willing disbelief.”
Two: I’m not saying this to bring on the usual “hey, women are just as bad as men, only different” trashing, but I feel safe enough in this forum to bring up something that I am examining in my life and I hope other women will as well. It’s what I call “emo-porn”, a pornography of the emotions, especially envy and schadenfreude (joy in another’s suffering/pain — German). It exists most clearly in the tabloid magazines, but also in tabloid TV, in “domestic dramas”, in “mainstream” journalism to a lesser, but increasing degree, and elsewhere in culture. I have been habituated to it and this fall I have made a decision to stop buying/consuming/viewing/reading it, but it IS tough, because it’s for sale in so many public places, is socially acceptable (more or less), and it’s considered “harmless.” There’s a lot of overlap between “regular” porn and “emo-porn” but there are differences too.
My use of this material was definitely a response to anxiety about the condition of the world, the war/occupation in Iraq, my own tiny efforts to respond to those crises, and the looming deployment of my nephew, a Marine lieutenant.
I don’t think, tangentially, that we live in a “sexually repressed” society. I think we live in a sexually alienated and consumerist society with a tremendous amount of both sexual “action” and anxieties. How could our sexuality exist in a protected bubble outside of our alienation and consumerism? It’s tragic, but it’s also logical. When I think about it that way, I feel less judgemental, of self and others, and more ready to take on changing… well, what I can, along with others. Jensen’s book is an important tool in that effort, especially for men.
Men should feel compassion for the women, and other human beings, whose dangerous, painful, risky and difficult sex-as-work lives are being documented, in however manipulated a way, by commercial pornography. And I should feel compassion for the women, and other human beings, whose semi-private lives are violated, in however self-serving and/or manipulated ways, by commercial tabloid “journalism” aka “emo-porn.” It’s hard to. They seem very unreal, very doll or cartoon-like. But that’s just the Lie.
If we feel that compassion, our media choices will become clearer, and cleaner. Our lives, sexual and/or emotional, may feel “flatter” for a while, but I think we will have more sense of maturity and calm. Why do we “need” to get all excited?! We need to think about that for a while.
I highly recommend the movie “The Fluffer” which deals with a lot of these issues and with gay pornography. It’s one of the most sensitive films I’ve ever seen about desire, unrequited “Love”, and sex workers of all kinds.
1 October 2007, 12:57 amElaina:
Janet W- I really like the term “emo-porn,” tho before I read your explanation for it I thought it would reference the suicide girls or something like that. I have a question, and that is would you lump fashion magazines in with this kind of onslaught to our senses/emotions/etc or do you think that’s another monster entirely?
And I agree with the way that you’re analysing the phenomenon that you have cleverly named, here, but I think that the analysis has to move further into the realm of accountability; while it’s true that we have to learn to remove the superhero lenses from our eyes when we look at “celebrities” and famous people in general, and it’s ok to be empathetic in doing that, we have to also remember that these are JUST PEOPLE who, because of what they do or who their parents are or their beauty or other more or less superficial factors have been given way more relative power and access to resources than the rest of us. I think that the effect is more importantly seen in how it makes us treat the people who are closest to us, not so much in how we view these folks who, in reality, are complete strangers to us yet we adore and admire them for their public appearances. And while some celebrity people do more than others in the way of charitable work, it’s usually in a way that’s just as disconnected from the real world as the ways that we think of them.
As an example, I’ll use the recent Brittany Spears VMA awards debacle that a couple weeks ago was all over youtube/etc. where a less fembot-appearing Brittany was ridiculed for her “fatness” which wasn’t even really fatness, her lack of “talent” (which I don’t know about y’all, but if I tried to dance like she did I’d fail ’cause I’m not a dancer at all), and her audacity at appearing in public so fat and talentless and in a crappy wig, lip-synching poorly.
I think it’s important when confronted with this automatically-generated pop-culture response, especially from windbag white-guys, to counter it keeping in mind that this woman has lived a pretty highly-controlled and manipulated existence from the time she was a child and forced to primp and preen in pre-pubescent beauty contests by her parents; it’s important to remember that she probably doesn’t have complete control over her fortune and that she shouldn’t have to feel forced to do this work if it no longer inspires her just to fatten the pockets of her agents, lawyers, and every other hungry shark who’s got a couple of teeth sunk into her pie, so to speak.
It’s also important to remember that she DOES have a fortune. She does have pull. She could pull herself out of this, and work to pull other women out with her, if she so desired. And by all means, she should. Whether or not she will or does is more what calculates my actual empathy towards her as a person, I guess.
At the same time, we have to think about how all this bashing and hoopla manipulates our own personal relationships, and the ways that we criticize and bash other women who are in our more immediate sphere of existence. Women sometimes are our own worst enemies, we’re our own gatekeepers, and we do a lot to hurt each other in order to garner favor and actual material support, at times, from people who have relative power over us. Jealousy, over-criticizing each other’s appearances, fighting, gossiping, all those hurtful types of in-fighting are a result.
Also, we have to inject here De’s analysis of the lie that is celebrity, a lie that pornifies that entire world and reshapes it into something super-real- the obsession that we have with people with money and power is our own ascription to a modern-day fairy tale which, as unreal as our perception is of the lives of the people involved, probably harms US more than it does them, at the end of the day, and we are so entrenched with it that we feel utterly useless if it’s not something that we aspire to in our own lives- we’re never pretty enough if we aren’t as pretty as Angelina Jolie. We aren’t thin enough if we aren’t as thin as Portia Dirossi. We aren’t talented enough if we can’t sing like the next American Idol. We aren’t smart enough if we aren’t published in glossy “scientific” magazines or if we don’t have our own daytime TV talkshows. We are trained to aim for the stars and on our journey buy every bullshit product, procedure, diet plan, piece of overpriced clothing, hairstyle, etc. in order to fuel this economy.
The folks at the tops of the superstar pyramids just exacerbate that, a lot of the time, with their behavior and self-indulgence. Much as I hate it that Brittany was exposed to the abusive rigors of child beauty pageantry and that it’s fucked with her life to such an extent, I hate it more that she hasn’t been conscientious enough to examine why her life’s gone to shit and DO something about it and DO something, spread out her resources so that other little girls and other women don’t have to fucking suffer so much in this country and in this world. Sympathy might emeliorate pain for a little while, and empathy helps us understand pain, but empowerment is a different ballgame that requires action and accountability, even for those of us on the shorter end of the stick.
1 October 2007, 3:03 pmElaina:
P.S. In addition to exacerbating these attitudes the folks who we idolize for their sheer celebrity in this country make REAL CASH off of our dreams and aspirations, illusory as they are, and they know exactly what they’re doing most of the time. Which IMO makes them doubly accountable.
A superstar who KNOWS that little girls and young women are buying her products making her rich and imitating her and wishing so super hard that they can BE LIKE HER ONE DAY, while they struggle to maintain their own fame and fortune, can’t be excused from padding themselves from the effects of their own actions on other people’s lives. WE also, are responsible to a degree to turn off the god dang TV, stop buying the Cosmo and the Enquirer, and swallowing the myth.
Ok, that’s all.
1 October 2007, 3:13 pmrootlesscosmo:
(Groundless speculation alert: this argument may be so vague as to be not much use by way of actually explaining anything.)
I like the term emo-porn and would like to suggest–very tentatively–one reason it’s appropriate, namely that (like porn) emo-porn delivers a reliable button-pushing payoff to the consumer. If, exposed to porn or emo-porn, we respond with solidarity for the exploited subjects or anger at the exploiters, we’re stepping outside the structured transaction, which is meant to evoke one and only one response. All communication aims at evoking a response, but there’s a wide range from the most “open” communication–an example might be the freeze-frame shot at the end of “The 400 Blows”–and the most rigidly mechanistic, in which the response is narrowly specified; producers of big-budget Hollywood “action” movies (another kind of porn) carefully calculate the maximum interval between “action beats,” their version of porn’s “money shots,” in order to keep the audience balanced between adrenalin highs and partial comedowns.
1 October 2007, 8:46 pmDeAnander:
I wrote along these lines some years ago — that porn and propaganda were branches of the same tree, in that they were both calculated to manipulate the consumer into a narrowly channeled response. They also are both self-administered in many cases, i.e. there’s a “psychic wage” payoff for the consumer in that the feelings/emotions/sensations stirred up by the stimulus are in some way rewarding, so they voluntarily consume the media, self-programming with its ideological content.
With porn this is pretty obvious, but e.g. racist propaganda (and o.c. much of porn is also racist propaganda), even without the sexual content, delivers a reward to the reader… perhaps by offering reassurance of his/her superiority to the despised Other being caricatured/slandered; perhaps by offering him/her an heroic, larger-than-life role in a mythic Struggle Between Good (Us) and Evil (Them); perhaps by provoking a good ol’ fit of hate and rage (vicarious violence) that can be justified by the ideology behind the propaganda.
What they all have in common is that they deliver primarily not information, not insight, and not questions, but sensations. The point of consuming porn is its first-order effect on the consumer (it’s all about the consumer, and this self-importance is imho displayed over and over again by the Me Me Me Me tone of the classic pornophile defences). This is where porn and hate speech (and maybe emo-porn as well) fit conceptually into a drug/addiction metaphor: like drugs they are self-administered in discrete doses to achieve a reaction in the consumer, and like drugs there tends to be a diminishing returns pattern, in which the intensity of response lessens with familiarity or frequent exposure and more extreme materials or larger doses are required to achieve the same “high”. Pretty well attested.
At the same time I shy away somewhat from applying the “porn” label too freely/widely, since “emo-porn” often focuses on the lives of the privileged and is consumed by the less privileged, in a (mho) rather pathetic attempt to feel that they are close to or part of the imagined celebrity world of influence, wealth and power (and this goes back a long way, at the very least to the newspaper columns dedicated to Court gossip and scandal in the Georgian era and probably a lot further than that); whereas porn-porn reflects a view downward, from the more privileged into the lives of the less so.
We are lacking (gee I wonder why) a useful language for categorising these attributes of media/literature/art: whether it celebrates power-over and dominance (pornlike, propagandalike), whether it is shallow in the sense of being tailored to manipulate the viewer/reader into a specific state of mind/emotion (propaganda, porn, advertising, tabloid journalism), whether it tends to produce a relationship of dependency or addiction-like diminishing returns for the consumer (because the “reader/viewer” becomes a mere “consumer” when the media become a dose of narrow-band stimulus rather than a means of conveying information, insight, or questions/ambiguities that provoke thought).
Maybe we should refer to stimulus-response media (ah, a Gary Larson moment) as Pavlovian Media or Little Pill Media; and to media that celebrate power-over and dominance as… I dunno, bootlicking media bullyphile media? because porn is both Pavlovian and deeply bullyphiliac.
2 October 2007, 12:15 amJames M:
Apologies in advance for this long post, and for the fact that it refers back to some older comments — I’ve been mulling these thoughts ever since the post went up, and only now have felt them ready for prime time.
A few points:
1) I am, like everyone else, astonished that Alternet even allowed this topic to be broached. You know DKos, for example, has already summarily banished an entire subset of the Left, referred to by that creepy Democratic Party sycophant Markos as “the women’s studies set.”
2) I am (a tiny bit) hopeful that the conceptual frame around this issue is moving beyond the old, tired, libertarian, “Puritans vs. ‘sexual freedom’” false dichotomy. The right way to understand this is that we are doing what leftists and other people of conscience do – we challenge the ethics of how the things we consume are produced, whether it’s the oil that goes into our cars, or the hamburger we eat, or the Gap shirts on our backs. Jensen’s reportage on porn seems to be in the same vein as a book like “Fast Food Nation” — exposing the truth and questioning the ethics of an industry whose products we Americans enthusiastically consume, but whose methods most of us would rather keep hidden from our awareness, so we can guiltlessly continue to consume them.
3) It’s interesting to me that distinctions and definitions are being made in these articles and on this site with regard to what this thing called pornography actually is. De’s earlier definition is extremely helpful, and it expresses to me what’s always been the crux of the issue, which is the depiction (as propaganda) of a certain set of power relations happening within the context of sex — the context being, in my mind, secondary.
We have, further, Riane Eisler making a distinction between “erotica” and pornography — a concession to the shades of difference within sexually-explicit media that I haven’t tended to see made by anti-porn feminists (in my admittedly limited readings.) And then we have De positing a difference between a “genuine” amateur porn and the phony kind.
And of course, the good porn vs. bad porn line of argument is one of the 1st defenses to emerge when the ethics of the industry are challenged; I’ve found myself, when in these arguments with people, experimenting with making distinctions between what I call “abusive porn” and, well … everything else, because I haven’t felt completely ready or willing to dismiss all of it absolutely. It seems ridiculous to staunchly assert that *every last bit* of media created to assist in vicarious sexual gratification reflects the previously-mentioned power dynamics, and is innately harmful.
But then again, I am damn hard-pressed to find an example of the “good porn” that makes me want to sing its praises as an empowering paragon of erotic virtue. Maybe that’s asking too much; perhaps a more realistic wish would be to find something that simply doesn’t turn my stomach, or set off one of those inner alarm bells that says “there’s something wrong here.” And I am by *no means* a prude.
Still, there persists the notion of “good erotica” (as opposed to De’s definition of porn,) which seems plausible at least as a concept. Or is it? Is this a silly question? I am very much wishing to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Is the tendency here to go with the definition of porn as patriarchal-propaganda, or “bullyphilia,” and allow room for the potential, at least, of there being “good stuff” out there? Or are we closer to being absolutists on the matter?
4) I question whether or not the serial viewing of erotic *imagery* of any kind (for gratification purposes) is a particularly healthy practice — as A) it involves a reduction of all the senses involved in sex to just one, the visual, and entrains one’s arousal over time almost strictly to it; and B) it precludes a relationship & communication with the “object” of one’s desires, making it a one-way relation to a 2-D image — further reducing the potentialites of sexual experience, and abstracting the woman (usually) into mere contours and shades on a flat screen or page.
And, because we have our choice (like a McDonald’s menu) of sexual scenarios to choose from in porn, a person can become highly specialized in terms of his turn-ons, and less apt to be present in the moment with the experience — he starts to require that events unfold according to a (porn-defined) script … as any number of women who’ve been requested to enact porn “IRL” can attest to.
What I’m getting at here is, it’s a pretty far cry from intersubjectivity. “Penis-bot,” exactly.
Thanks for reading.
2 October 2007, 12:58 amJosiah:
I think Deanander’s distinction between porn and “emo-porn” (looking down at subordinates versus looking up at idols) is to the point. Even in supposed counter-examples in the two genres, like women being shown dominating men in porn, or the rich and famous being dragged in the dirt and humiliated in tabloids, the hierarchy is strengthened. Men wouldn’t enjoy dominatrix imagery if they weren’t really in power when the fantasy was over (so the domination is not tied to domestic violence or rape against them). Similarly, tabloid consumers wouldn’t be entertained by celebrity law-breaking or weight gain if they weren’t rich and famous (and thus likely to get a slap on the wrist in court, or cosmetic surgery). In both cases, the transgression is “safe” to the status quo because of its fun-and-games, temporary nature.
There is a parallel with race and white imitation of black cultural expressions. The phrase “trying to be down” means a white person, who is really “up,” imitating someone lower on the racial hierarchy. Because they don’t really have to deal with job discrimination or racial profiling, there is no risk of white kids in hip hop gear really being “down” socioeconomically, politically or legally at the end of day.
In all three cases, there is a kind of show of power in flirting with a lower status for a short time period.
2 October 2007, 4:57 amStan:
This is where we are traversing a terrain for which neither classic leftism nor liberalism seem to have a vocabulary.
The “addiction-recovery community” — which has plenty of its own problems, imo — at least deals with the issues of feeling “compelled,” of obsession that runs laps in our heads, and from the perspective that there is something fundamenmtally amiss at a deeper level — a void (no pun intended) — that requires both willful behavior self-modification and a protracted period of fearless introspection to understand.
My own experience in 12-Step World is mostly positive, though the “program” has a tendency toward its own orthodoxies (another tendency that cries out for deconstruction), and its scrupulous avoidance of what it calls “outside issues” (politics) along with its strict focus on the individual, sort of disallows any public discussion of the culture and-or political economy as the etiology of the “disease” (another problematic metaphor that gets taken literally in 12-Step programs). Their organization is pretty anarchist, which I believe gives them a great deal of self-organized stability… but I digress.
My Methodist minister friend adheres to René Girard’s mimetic theory.
Research on “television addiction” also has something to tell us about this. MacKinnon’s post-marxist insight about important things like work and sex which are “most ours, yet most taken away.” McLuhan on media and message. Jessica Benjamin on “intersubjectivity”. Kintz on “resonance”.
Multiple viewpoints to see this phenom 3-D.
The thing is, the advertizing/PR industry — which permeates not only commercial, but political practice — already understands all this, the same way Nazi doctors came to understand hypothermia. This is an historical materialist phenomenon (based in a spatio-temporal and contingent set of structures)… the internet porn, the fashion porn-meme advertizing, the emo-porn, all of it. Trial and error, and massive R&D budgets, have been employed for many years now to see “what works” to get people to do things that are neither healthy nor self-fulfilling nor good for communities.
Consumerism is imbricated with a global economy that requires Americans to purchase a lot of things in order to valorize the total global capital (without the US consumption base, the system would grind to a halt), which necessitates not merely advertizing, but demand production (and here is where it gets pretty Pavlovian), whic in turn has become the production of culture… the enclosure of culture, and with it, the enclosure of meaning… that very point where the individual human being is interfused most inextricably with her social environment, and one that is imprinted on the personality with (Kintz here) deeply affective (seemmingly sacred) resonance, almost from birth…
Leftism — with some remarkable exceptions — has largely ignored this notion of the personality; and liberalism has copped to Homo economicus.
This discussion of pornography — a consumer product, as well as a mode of production, as well as power propaganda — by simply applying our well-tested logics (as De does with the McDonald’s comparison) — is an unfamiliar and uncomfortable space for leftist and liberal men (and even many women, themselves indoctrinated by the discovery of the reified world in the process of living in it).
Add the real privilege that accrues to some (men), and the vertigo of doubt about all those constructed meanings upon which we have thusfar relied, and the sensational reinforcement of orgasm after orgasm (people get off with porn), and you begin to get a sense of how deeply embedded this thing is… and an idea of why the reaction to those of us who shed doubt on the underlying beliefs that justify it is met with such anger and panic.
2 October 2007, 5:42 amDeAnander:
All communication aims at evoking a response, but there’s a wide range from the most “open” communication–an example might be the freeze-frame shot at the end of “The 400 Blows”–and the most rigidly mechanistic
Some communication aims at suppressing non-acceptable responses, i.e. “Shut up bitch” and a raised fist comprise a communication which demands a response of silence and submission, and forbids any feedback.
This gets us back into the idea of intersubjective sexuality, i.e. sex as communication, interaction, eliciting mutual responses, vs instrumental sexuality, i.e. using the body of another person to elicit a sexual response in oneself. When the expected or acceptable response is very narrow — i.e. silence and submission, or only one or two acceptable predetermined outcomes — then the communication is “closed” or coercive, the Other is only allowed to respond in certain predefined ways (like consumer choice… you can have coke or pepsi). “Closed” communication always has an element of control about it, of someone telling the reader/audience/viewer what to think or feel.
Corporate porn, consumed from early ages, tells men how to feel sexual; like advertising it not only responds to demand, it shapes and trains that demand. And as with all corporate product, its primary purpose is to sell yet more product. G-d forbid the customer should ever be satisfied, then the selling would stop and the economy would falter — meaning, the wealthy would accumulate less or more slowly.
@james I suspect that if we analyse it to the last degree we will end up concluding that the investment of our sexual feelings in static external representations like text, audio or video, which can be replayed under our control and on demand, poses an inherent ethical problem. however, the degree of harm done to others may vary immensely.
ummm — say that eating chocolate in order to feel better when sad is a minor addictive behaviour, and theoretically it would be better to deal with those feelings another way. but chocolate’s less harmful to onseself than alcohol, and fair trade chocolate is less harmful to others than slave-labour plantation chocolate.
here’s one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole thing to me, and a meme space to explore when I have some time: the parallels between sex and food (we’re already on this turf with the junk food analogy). people — mostly men — often say they need sex as if it were food, that they are “starving” and so on. yet who, when hungry, seeks out a video of other people eating?
btw, some people refer to cooking shows as “food porn.”
little puzzle pieces to play around with…
2 October 2007, 1:57 pmKrl:
I just ordered the book from amazon and can’t [wait] to read it.
Re: Addictive theory/look at porn…there is a straight up utilitarian/violent indoctrination aspect (so far as archetypes/cultures etc) are concerned that reminds me of 1980′s WWF (violent pron for lil boys) wherein the treacherous ethnic evil villain who gets roasted and humiliated by the “all-American” hero is always ripped straight from the headlines…what’s that? Hezbollah bomb ur barracks? Have Hulk Hogan beat the snot out of that evil Iron Sheik (who believe it or not was part of the Shah’s palace guard in real life). Don Imus in trouble from these uppity black women, no problem, start a new video line called “Nappy Headed Hoes” (no joke-one of the higher ranking new lines). Ready to bomb some Arabs in Iraq? Don’t forget the “Arab Street Hookers” (no joke) and other assorted sites featuring dudes in mil uniform ripping the veil off of and sexually assaulting “Arab” women (Latina “actresses” mostly). What’s that? White girls talking about title 9? No problem, really degrade her by having her GB’d by the untermenshen (“White meat on black street” many others)….Neo-Nazi who got beat up by a black dude, get revenge by signing up at “Ghetto Gaggers” – racial slurs and forced sodomy/atms/ with a byline that reads “Don Imus approved” or even worse Nazi N***rs- site which featured neo nazi’s running trains on blk women on top of swastikas while sig heiling/spitting etc racial slurs etc- the fatter and more slovenly the white dude the better).
I worked as a film editor for a small CA porn company during college (Media Studies minor) and trust me, what yall have is a) the tip of the iceberg so far as the violent hate and contempt goes (becomes exponentially violent when issue is racialized or overtly politicized -when a white woman is a professional or attempting to “get something” from guy) and while one (male) may get sexual gratification while watching said images that’s just the icing to what the real purpose is — a Pavlovian type process where unbridled contempt/hatred/and violence against the other (however defined by film, women in general but types/colors of women in particular and more violently so) is rewarded with nature’s ultimate release of endorphins. I cant think of a stronger reinforcer of violent ideas and imagery.
I’ll Let u all know how the book is…
[very minor edits by moderator for readability]
4 October 2007, 5:03 pmDeAnander:
tip of the iceberg so far as the violent hate and contempt goes
I think Nikki Craft’s new site is brilliantly named:
Manufactured Contempt
the play on Chomsky’s book title is very powerful. it challenges liberal/lefties to face their cognitive dissonance: they believe that through propaganda and advertising and media control, corporate and elite power can influence public discourse and shape policy, yet they continue to deny that the overwhelming noise machine of pornography has any effect on the consumers’ thought or behaviour. in other words, they engage seriously with Chomsky but demonise Dworkin.
4 October 2007, 5:27 pmStan:
Damn.
I’m thinking we need to somehow combine this thread withthe latest post on “military sexual trauma.”
Krl, thanks for this insightful look from the inside. Invaluable.
The reason combination of threads comes up is pretty simple (for folks here at least). But at Huffpo, the comments are trickling in, and without even 10 reactions we already have remarks that claim women with guns can’t be raped, etc. The rape-doubt thesis, which is rape denial cloaked as balanced discourse.
One has to spoon-feed them over there at Huffpo, patient as patient can be. Sex as aggression; aggression as sex. Repeat after me…
@Krl, and WWF, there is a fine film by MEF called Wrestling with Manhood on exactly that topic.
“a Pavlovian type process where unbridled contempt/hatred/and violence against the other (however defined by film, women in general but types/colors of women in particular and more violently so) is rewarded with nature’s ultimate release of endorphins.” is the quote of the day, imo.
De’s point on Nikki’s website, then, has given me an idea. Since my blogging privileges haven’t been revoked at dKOS or Huffpo (yet), would y’all be willing to combine these points and anecdotes in package for re-post over among the librul-boiz?
Honestly, I hate bringing the issue of porn and violence up any more, because the inevitable and tediously predictable attacks — as anyone who has taken up this cudgel can attest — are like the drip-drip of some exquisite water-torture. Which is a kind of intentional Pavlovian conditioning, too, and therefore the reason we need to bring it up more an more (that’s some catch, that Catch-22).
5 October 2007, 6:49 am