Porno? Chic!

how pornography changed the world and made it a better place

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415572910
• eBook ISBN: 9781136481093
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Porno? Chic! examines the relationship between the proliferation of pornography and sexualised culture in the West and social and cultural trends which have advanced the rights of women and homosexuals.

Brian McNair addresses this relationship with an analysis of trends in sexualised culture since 2002 linked to a transnational analysis of change in sexual politics and sex/gender relations in a range of societies, from the sexually liberalised societies of advanced capitalism to those in which women and homosexuals remain tightly controlled by authoritarian, patriarchal regimes.

In this accessible, jargon-free book, Brian McNair examines why those societies in which sexualised culture is the most liberalised and pervasive are also those in which the socio-economic and political rights of women and homosexuals have advanced the most.

Part I
Porno? Chic!

1
Introduction

This is a book about the relationship between sexual culture (the spheres of mediation and representation of the sexual) and sexual politics (the system of socio-sexual stratification which characterises late patriarchy). How, if at all, have trends in one sphere shaped and influenced the evolution of the other?

Porno? Chic! explores, first, the pornographication of mainstream capitalist culture, that process whereby the once heavily stigmatised and marginalised cultural form we call pornography has become not only more plentiful, and more visible, but also fashionable, or ‘chic’; routinely referenced, pastiched, parodied, analysed and paid homage to in a host of non-pornographic cultural forms and genres, as well as being more plentiful and accessible than ever before in human history. Not only has the pornosphere – that cultural space where the sexually explicit texts we call pornography circulate – expanded dramatically (Chapter 2); pornography has, as the authors of The Porning Of America put it, ‘become the dominant influence shaping our culture’ (Sarracino and Scott, 2008, p.9).

The influence of pornography on mainstream culture is certainly substantial, part of that wider set of trends often referred to as cultural sexualisation. The sexualisation of culture has unfolded in parallel with what has been substantial progressive change in the position of women, gays and other sexually-defined groups since the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. That the two processes have occurred, and coterminously, are demonstrable facts. But has one influenced or impacted on the other, and if so, how?

The question is important, because we live in a time of widespread anxiety about sexual culture, reflected in the pressure to roll back the tide of what some view as degenerate filth, or at least as the excessive visibility of inappropriate sexual imagery in mainstream culture. As Chapter 4 describes, since 2004 or so we have seen in many liberal democracies a backlash to the preceding two decades of pornospheric expansion and the steady spread of porno chic into many areas of cultural practice and production. As in the Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-porn campaigns of the 1980s, the post-2004 resurgence of that movement has united sections of the feminist movement with moral conservative forces in anti-sexualisation and anti-porn campaigns. These traditional opponents of cultural sexualisation have been joined by other voices roused by what are genuinely new features of the media environment, most notably the historically unprecedented ease of access to pornography enabled by the internet.

There have probably always been these anxieties, let us concede, which appear to be nearly universal in human culture. But the convergence of three sets of factors has, after a period of relative sanguinity around sexual culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, acted to place them high on the public agenda again. The first of these factors is political change, and the transformed political economy of desire that change has encouraged. By this I mean that sexual liberalism in general, and the growing social acceptance of feminism and gay rights in particular, have generated a societal demand for more sexual culture, and for forms of sexual culture that deviate in various ways from those long associated with established or traditional patriarchy because they are desired not just by men but by women, and not just by heterosexuals but also by homosexuals of both sexes, as well as bisexuals, transsexuals, and all the other sexually-oriented consumer sub-cultures which now inhabit the marketplace. These forms deviate, too, from what traditional feminists thought they were fighting for when they campaigned against sexist imagery in advertising and pornography in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of the resistance to pornographication and cultural sexualisation described in this book comes not from the churches and moral lobbies but from feminist women, directed against other, often self-identified feminist women such as Lady Gaga.

Much of this anxiety is focused, as always was true, on the growing visibility of homosexuality in culture, even (or especially) when the images are softened and sweetened for mass consumption, as in Britney Spears’ kissing of Madonna on a 2004 MTV awards show. Representations of homosexuality in mainstream culture remain vulnerable to criticism and attack despite, or perhaps because of, the real transformations which have been occurring in the lives of gay men and women. There is backlash because there has been progress, and the homophobes know it (although they are on the retreat: Chapter 7 shows how breathtakingly rapid the advance of gay rights in liberal capitalist societies has been since the 1970s).

Progressive sex-political change has produced specific forms of cultural sexualisation, which have in turn generated political reaction. From one side – moral conservative and religiously fuelled perspectives – pornographication and cultural sexualisation are feared because they are perceived as threatening to male heterosexual hegemony and the stability of the nuclear family. From the other – anti-porn feminism – they are opposed because they allegedly reinforce patriarchy and heterosexist hegemony. The obvious contradiction between these two perspectives is one reason why we may justifiably scrutinise the political response they share. If both the moral conservatives and the anti-porn feminists cannot be correct in their reasons for opposing these cultural shifts, then perhaps neither is?

The second anxiety-inducing factor is the emergence of digital communication technology as the main means of pornographic production and, more importantly, distribution. The internet has transformed the consumption and production of sexual culture, breaking down boundaries and barriers here as it has in journalism, music, book publishing and other spheres. The pornosphere has emerged and expanded from the shadows of the patriarchal underground into a vast, highly visible global network, most of it open and accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This is unprecedented, and poses different problems for democratic and authoritarian societies respectively.

The politics of pornographication

The implications of digitisation and cultural globalisation for authoritarian regimes accustomed to controlling the information circulating in their societies are particularly serious, although concern about who is watching porn also drives current anxieties in the liberal capitalist world.

In the former, mass access to sexually explicit material subverts the female subordination and institutionalised homophobia present in all of them without exception and which their leaders may view, rightly or not, as essential to regime maintenance. For religiously legitimised patriarchal regimes especially, the notions of sex as a resource for autonomous female pleasure and individual expression, or of the legitimacy of same-sex love for purely hedonistic reasons and without regard to the holy books and theological dogmas, cannot be tolerated. In these countries, typically, the pornosphere is heavily and often brutally policed (although many who live in these dictatorships find ways of bypassing state censorship and accessing restricted sexual material, see Chapter 9).

As for the non-religious despotisms, from Stalin’s Soviet onwards, all ‘socialist’ regimes have sought to control and restrict the expression of sexuality amongst the ‘people’, correctly understanding it to be an anarchic and potentially subversive force in human action, undermining the Party’s need for ideological and behavioural conformity. If some contemporary dictatorships, such as that which exists in China, have a more complicated and ambivalent attitude to sexuality and its pornographic representation (Jacobs, 2011), and to the concept of individual freedom in general, they still find the internet intensely threatening and constantly seek ways to limit the general population’s online access to sexually explicit material.

For the liberal democracies, meanwhile, where mass access to pornography on the internet is practically unconstrained, anxiety has been focused on the vulnerability of those who might view sexual images without the emotional maturity to process them safely. The sexualisation of children, girls and young women is of particular concern, echoing earlier waves of anxiety around prostitution in the fin de siècle. Concern is also focused on adults who may become ‘addicted’ to the limitless supply of porn now available to them and thus inflict harm on themselves and their families. From this perspective, pornography consumption is viewed as an activity open to psychological dependence and abuse, like gambling or drug taking.

In addition to these two sets of qualitatively new factors – a transformed political economy of desire, and a digital, globally networked technology to service it – both of which fundamentally alter the dynamics of sexual culture in a democratising and decentralising but also potentially threatening direction, we can view current anxieties about cultural sexualisation as a consequence of familiar economic factors driving the production and consumption of commodities in general. These include the profit imperative, and the efficiency of the market as a distribution mechanism, which have been active on cultural processes for nearly two centuries, when mass publics comprised of increasingly affluent and educated people first began to emerge as cultural consumers. Much contemporary debate around cultural sexualisation is centred on notions of the ‘commercialisation’ and ‘commodification’ of sex, and premised on the belief that sex is somehow too precious to be the object of market relations. Commerce is coarse and crude, goes the lament, whereas sex should be, if not sacred (and for many with religious beliefs, of course, it is precisely that), about the authentic expression of pure love, removed from the cash nexus.¹

This book rejects that view of the market’s coarsening effects, and the related assumption that commercialisation/commodification are bad things in themselves, even when applied to the most intimate of human activities and emotions. The impact of sexual commerce on political, socio-economic and cultural status has self-evidently not been negative in respect of the position of women and other sexually defined groups. I agree with Rosemary Hennessey’s observation that

capitalism is progressive in the sense that it breaks down oppressive and at times brutally constraining traditional social structures and ways of life. In this progressive capacity capitalism’s need for raw materials and markets has always enacted a quest for the new through a modernising impulse that is in many ways quite liberatory.

(2000, p.29)

This vision of how markets may promote or distribute social progress extends to sexuality and sexual orientation. She adds that

just because capitalism has made use of heteronormativity [in the maintenance and reproduction of the nuclear family and working class, as well as the regulation and protection of property rights through inheritance] doesn’t mean that it is necessary for capitalist production.

(p.105)

The role of sexual culture as an agent of sex-political progress is possible because ‘it is in the interests of global capitalism to celebrate and enhance awareness of local communities, cultures and forms of identification’ (p.29). Capitalism does not require any particular set of social relations to function, as long as there is consumption and systemic reproduction. The undermining of heteronormativity, and the advance of women’s and gay rights in particular, has proceeded further and faster in advanced capitalist societies than in any other type of social organisation precisely because of the adaptive features of the system.

Capitalism, moreover, in generating unprecedented economic surplus, produces what Hennessey calls a ‘widespread acceptance of pleasure, self-gratification and personal satisfaction that easily translates to the province of sex’ (p.103). The logic of cultural capitalism is to call forth, address and make visible, through acts of consumption and often in complex and contradictory ways, previously marginalised, subordinate or invisible sexual categories and communities.² It can be argued that in these contexts the commodification of sex is ethical. The exercise of enhanced economic power through cultural consumption reflects changes in the socio-economic status of previously marginalised groups, but it also helps to secure and advance that change by fusing it with the economic interests of service providers and industries dependent on its sustainability.

And then there is the demonstration effect. The commodities which signal ‘gayness’, for example, are also visible to the non-gay consumer, who may be educated, attracted or perhaps repelled (although the social survey evidence explored in Chapter 7 suggests not: reported levels of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality have doubled in the US and other countries since 1995). Markets are blind, and commodities do not have morals. They are rather mechanisms for the distribution of material and ideas, and since their emergence human societies have on average advanced hugely in terms of economic affluence, range of consumer choice, and the quality of life associated with those advances (Ridley, 2010). One can go further and state that the erosion of heteronormativity and patriarchy, as measured in the gains made by the women’s and gay liberation movements over 40 years or so, has proceeded further and faster in liberal democratic societies of the type where cultural sexualisation and pornographication have been most visible. Capitalism, on this evidence, appears to be the optimal mode of production for the generation not only of economic wealth and cultural liberalism, but of sexual equality and progress. Capitalism is not perfect, of course, and there is some way to go before equality is achieved between genders, sexual orientations, different approaches to families and relationships, and so on. But even in an era of economic crisis such as that seen since 2008, no other type of society has gone as far in this regard, so fast, as the advanced capitalist societies which have experienced the greatest degree of pornographication.

This should not be surprising. Cultural capitalism identifies, calls forth and serves new markets for commodities of all kinds. A Cycle of Liberalisation seems to operate, whereby subcultural lifestyles move from the avant garde margins into the mainstream, through processes of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I Porno? Chic!
• PART II How pornography changed the world and made it a better place
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index