
The Paradox of Pornography
Date: Friday, February 03 @ 18:34:23 EST Topic: Sexual Politics
By Robert Jensen
Feb 1, 2006
Pornography’s
business has always been the exposure of women’s bodies for the
pleasure of men, and that was readily evident at the annual Adult
Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last month.
But also exposed
at the sex-industry gathering was the paradox of the pornography
business at this particular moment: At the same time that the
pornography industry and its products are more normalized than ever in
the United States, the images they produce are more brutal and
degrading toward women than ever. How can it be that a once-underground
industry that lived at the margins of society has become mainstream, at
precisely the same time that its sexual cruelty toward women is most
pronounced?
The resolution of the paradox offers disturbing
insights not just into the sexual ethics and gender politics of the
United States, but into the underlying values of the entire society.
The
AEE -- which attracted 350 exhibitors to the Sands Expo Center, one of
Las Vegas’ major convention facilities -- is part industry-insider
gathering and part public spectacle. About 18,000 fans, the vast
majority of them men, paid $40 a day to wait in long lines to pick up
autographs from their favorite women in pornography and be photographed
next to them. While fans indulged their fantasies, pornography
producers focused on deal-making, often sounding as if their business
were no different than selling shoes. In seminars, industry experts
talked about improving marketing and retailing practices to expand
market share and increase profits
On the convention floor,
most everyone would have agreed with Paul Fishbein, president of Adult
Video News, the trade magazine that sponsors the event: “[T]he industry
is ready to serve the needs of adult retailers, as well as consumers
that seek to celebrate their sexuality.”
And “celebrate” they
do, with no questions asked. In Las Vegas, no one was discussing the
social implications of the commodification of sexuality and intimacy in
the 13,000 new pornographic videos and DVDs released in 2005. Questions
about the effects of sexualizing male dominance in a $12-billion a year
business were not on the table. This was a venue for self-indulgence,
not self-reflection.
Pornography -- though still resisted by
some, from either a conservative/religious position or, on very
different grounds, from a feminist point of view -- has become just one
more form of mass entertainment in a culture obsessively dedicated to
the pleasure-without-thought-about-the-consequences principle. Not
everyone likes it, but few see it as worth debating.
But the
paradox remains: At the same time that it is more accepted,
pornography’s content is becoming steadily more extreme. In the “gonzo”
style (those films with no plot or characters, just straightforward sex
on tape) that dominates the market, directors continue to push the
edge, filming increasingly rougher sexual practices involving multiple
penetrations of women by two or three men at a time, or oral sex
designed to make a woman gag, while the language used to insult women
during sex grows harsher. Since legal controls on pornography began
loosening in the 1970s, pornographers have pushed the limits of
sexualizing the denigration of women.
Though the pornography
industry loves to talk about growing sales to women and the so-called
“couples market,” men are still the vast majority of pornography
consumers in the United States. Producers and distributors I
interviewed at the convention all estimated their clientele was 80 to
90 percent men.
What do these men want to watch? It turns out
they like viewing sexual acts that the majority of women do not want to
perform in their lives. While there is no survey data about women’s
preferences regarding multiple penetrations or gag-inducing sex,
informal investigation suggests such things are not common in the
day-to-day lives of most people and not sought after by most women.
So,
how can we explain the paradox? People typically do not openly endorse
cruelty or the degradation of women. Yet just as those features of
pornography are more extensive and intense than ever, graphic sexually
explicit material is more widely accepted than ever. How can a culture
embrace images that violate its stated values? Wouldn’t a society that
purports to be civilized reject sexual material that becomes evermore
dismissive of the humanity of women? There are two potential
explanations.
First, because of the way pornography works, most
of the consumers don’t see the material as being saturated with cruelty
or degradation; the sexual pleasure that pornography produces tends to
derail critical viewing and thinking. When consumers are focused on the
pleasure, the politics drop out of view. So, when fans I interviewed
said they didn’t think the material they watched embodied male
domination and female subordination, they likely were being honest.
They don’t see it, because they are too absorbed in feeling the sexual
pleasure to be thinking about such issues.
But some men are
quite clear about the gender politics in pornography, and they like it.
Most of the advertising for the gonzo style highlights the
subordination of women -- one company brags it is in the business of
“degrading whores for your viewing pleasure” -- which suggests that’s
exactly what some men are looking for.
The second explanation
is a painful reminder that, in fact, the United States is a nation that
has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. After all, there
was no sustained, collective outrage over the revelations of systematic
torture by U.S. military forces, epitomized by the photos from Abu
Ghraib in Iraq. One prominent right-wing commentator compared it
favorably to fraternity hazing rituals, which is not entirely misguided
-- fraternity hazing is routinely cruel and degrading, albeit at a much
lower level.
The United States is a society that uses brutal
levels of military force, including the illegal targeting of civilian
infrastructure (such as in the 1991 Gulf War, when power, sewage, and
water facilities were targeted) and the routine use of weapons that
military officials know kill large numbers of civilians (such as
cluster bombs that continue to kill long after the conflict is over, as
unexploded bombs detonate for years). The culture celebrates this as
evidence of our benevolence as we “liberate” other countries.
The
United States is a society that locks up more than 2 million people, a
higher percentage of its population than any other country,
disproportionately non-white. The everyday conditions under which many
of those human beings are kept in this prison-industrial complex are so
harsh and degrading that leading human-rights groups condemn U.S.
prison practices. The culture celebrates this as evidence of the
superiority of our system of “justice.”
And the United States is
a society that has built thousands of glittering temples to
unsustainable levels of consumption -- called shopping malls -- in this
wealthiest nation in history, while nearly half the world’s people live
on less than $2 a day. The culture celebrates this state of affairs as
the wondrous workings of the magical market.
So, there is no
paradox in the mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography;
pornographers aren’t a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the
mainstream shouldn’t be surprising, because they represent mainstream
values: The logic of domination and subordination that is central to
patriarchy, nationalism, racism, and capitalism.
What
pornography says about sexuality, intimacy, and gender politics in the
contemporary United States is frightening. What it says about our
entire society is even more disturbing.
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/index.html
Robert
Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center,
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of
Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights
Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_robert_j_060201_the_paradox_of_porno.htm
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