The Imperialism of Porn.

Photo: Susannah Breslin, who blogs at http://reversecowgirlblog.blogspot.com.brPorn. It’s the elephant in the living room – assuming that the elephant in question is actually an enormous, elephant-sized dildo and it’s spurting foam all over your favourite armchair, or your grandma. Which is a roundabout way of saying that we all know porn's there, trumping away merrily in the corner and making a right old mess of the place, but we pretend we don't. And our delicate refusal to engage with the issue creates a perfect self-sustaining system, since it is large-scale denial that enables the kaleidoscopic pollen of Trojans, gifs and mpegs, of pages, sites and anonymous credit card transactions, to flourish unchecked where they can best fulfil internet pornography's highest goal of hooking onto our thoughts and propagating itself endlessly.

In other words, if we don’t talk about this stuff, we’ll never understand its effects or check its inexorable infiltration of our advertising, our fashion, our films and our lives. That's why I want to take this opportunity to think about what pornography means and what it does, particularly in its current manifestation. 

The first point to make is that this stuff is not innocent, but that the compulsion towards sexual fantasy is – well, if not innocent, then at least innate. We’ve been looking at representations of naked women more or less as long as we’ve been making fire, cultivating crops and baking bread. We were doing it when someone drew that amazing metamorphic image of a woman’s pubic triangle crossed with a bison’s rear-quarters at the back of the Chauvet cave, between 27-37,000 years ago. We were at it again 24,000 years ago with the Venus of Willendorf, 9,000 years ago with ithyphallic satyrs chasing maenads across black figure pottery, 3,000 years ago when David gazed on Bathsheba and 1,500 years ago at the frankly eye-scorching temples of Khajuraho in India.

Venus of WillendorfSo, the instinct is natural. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the manifestations of that instinct are either natural or wholesome. It’s also worth noting that in nearly all those early iterations of the body beautiful – with the exception of David and Bathsheba – femininity appears not merely as a source of titillation, but also of wonder and reverence, often associated with a fertility cult.

I guess all that started to change with the arrival of patriarchy, as epitomised in the west by the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Motivated, one imagines, by fear of the other and a desire to consolidate their authority, men gradually diminished the sacred dimension of women, transforming those goddesses and queens into wives and slaves, houris and harlots, the objects of their desire rather than the partners in their pleasure.

Khajuraho – not the best place to take little old Blossom for a walk late at night.Pursue that trend to its logical conclusion and you arrive at the present condition of pornography, in which women could not be less sacred, nor more profane. That, I would contend, is where the problems, and loss of innocence, begin: not in the medium itself, or our innate predisposition towards sexual fantasy, but rather in the type of narrative we are sold and the various ways in which it traduces our dreams and sells them back to us like pirate DVDs, with the iridescent smoke of our subconscious grubbily imprinted and all the smeared colours overflowing the lines.

In itself, that might be forgivable – not ideal, but forgivable – if the action presented in those films was equally fictive and unreal. However, for these sequences to be presented to us in the kind of detail which has become standard, real people have to have sex. Now, I have no objection to people having sex. I’m all for it, actually, providing that no one gets hurt. The problem is that there can be no such guarantee in the world of modern pornography. Indeed, if we’re honest, we kind of have to assume the opposite.

The bison with the lady bits, Chauvet.As in finance or the arms trade, or indeed anywhere in which vast quantities of money are to be made, it is rich white men who move the pieces around on the board – and they do so with the intention of ensuring that the apparatus of power and profit remains squarely in their hands. The inevitable flipside to such a high regard for profit and self-enrichment is a proportionate disregard for professional ethics and the suffering of others. In the case of porn, the damage such a value system is capable of inflicting is multiplied many times over by the fact that the commodity they’re selling is not frozen orange juice or derivatives, but people. Let’s put it frankly: porn is a manifestation of modern imperialism by which those with vast quantities of cynicism and power induce others with less money or prospects than themselves to do their fucking for them. Will the employees working in such a set-up get fair treatment – or will they find themselves on the receiving end of exploitation and abuse?

Moreover, the pornographers aren’t just fucking the people who appear in their films. They’re also, as I hinted above, fucking us by co-opting our dreams and turning them into something darker and crueller and infinitely poorer than we would choose to make them. Their version of sex tells us that it’s a formulaic act devoid of magic, reducible to two minutes of licking, ten minutes of pumping, some affected squealing and a messy finish. Moreover, it’s in their interest as businessmen to discover ever more lurid and therefore exploitative ways to stimulate our arousal – so these guys generate supply not only to lead but also to shape demand, and in doing so, to shape men’s conceptions of what is acceptable. Like pigs with brass rings in their noses, men, ever suggestible, are led down dark alleys into corners of their psyches that they would never otherwise visit.

Finally, as witnesses to this foreclosed loop of mechanical fucking, men become complicit in a level of exploitation far worse than the standard inequalities to which women are habitually exposed in their relationships or the workplace: women in these depictions are reduced to objects, receptacles and vessels for male fantasies to be dumped into, without any reality beyond their plastic surface – and such a message must surely leave a toxic residue on the consciousness of the man or boy watching this stuff. Perhaps the soothing white anonymity of the screen lets him tell himself that it’s all harmless fun and no one got hurt; perhaps it seems to absolve him of responsibility. But, even if this were true, the witness to these films takes that misogyny with him when he stands up from his computer and goes out into the world to meet his mother or his sister, his girlfriend or his wife.

Woah! Is that even legal? Attic red figure kylix, ca. 510BCAll of which leads me to think that the pornographers are now generating a disproportionately large part of the discourse around sexual love – and we are powerless to stop them for as long as we remain paralysed by the taboo that continues to surround this most natural of subjects. Meanwhile, the rich white guys make more and more money, and laugh behind their hands at the trick they’re pulling.

So what can we do? For me, the most important thing to do is drag the subject out into the light. If that happens, it should become possible to start demanding that the tools of production are shared equally between the sexes, and that actors of both sexes receive a fair share of the profits with reference to the owners. It would help, too, if the fantasies on the screen were generated equally by the imperatives to desire of both women and men (crazy, I know).

However, none of these industrial changes are going to happen overnight because, as we’ve established, it’s in the interest of rich white men to resist changes that affect their profit margins. So, in the meantime, I reckon the most important thing an individual can do is ensure that they’re responsible for their own choices. A useful yardstick here is the ‘if it was your own kid’ test. As you can imagine, that’s when you ask yourself if you’d be happy for your own kid to be doing whatever. Another way of putting it would be to say that you should never trust anything which encourages you to forget that the person you’re looking at is a human being with a mother and a father (or two mothers, or…well, you get the point).

All hands on dick: heterosexual couple in a wall painting at PompeiiOK, I grant you that no one likes to remember that their partner is someone’s kid or even, sheesh, someone’s parent when they’re on the job. But it’s normally the case that by the time you’re ready to bump uglies with someone, you’re pretty much reconciled to their essential humanity. So, unless you’re doing something really out there, you won’t need to worry about the ethics of the situation because your conscience and your feelings have already been engaged. That’s not the case when you watch someone else having sex. There’s a different power dynamic to spectating which seems to place the viewer outside the action, and thereby outside responsibility or moral consequence for what’s happening. Of course, this is false: by watching it, you’re condoning it.

Perhaps the last thing thing to do is confront the hypocrisy squarely. Remind yourself that this is a multi-billion dollar industry, one that was large enough even back in the eighties before the internet to ensure that Betamax, which refused to carry hardcore pornography, went bust. By that rationale, there must be someone else using it besides yourself. So, don’t be cowed by the thought that you are the only person in the world who’s susceptible to these faintly ludicrous travesties of good and proper sexy time. If it helps, remind yourself that you are, quite literally, a fucking animal. Then remind yourself that you’re also a dreaming animal and a talking animal, a loving animal and a laughing animal. And now go outside and do something entirely different.

Further reading:
On the male gaze: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze
On captation: http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/captation.html
On l’objet petit a: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a

Postscript:
I think the only thing I haven't considered here is jouissance, or transgressive pleasure. Human beings are pretty messed up, and in no area are we more messed up than our attitudes towards sex. Perhaps we don't need pornography to confuse things; perhaps we'd be messing ourselves up just fine without it. However, it isn't helping us to be freer, is it? Or to talk about things in a more progressive way? That being the case, it still sucks a whole load of donkey balls.