Beyond Explicit

Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

Helen Hester

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438449609, 9781438449616
• eBook ISBN: 9781438449623
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words "porn" and "pornographic" are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as "torture porn" and "misery porn, " Hester's argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particular—transgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticity—can be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.

PART I

FEMINISM, PORNOGRAPHY, TRANSGRESSION

This section contends that there is a clear clustering of issues detectable in contemporary responses to pornography, with certain key ideas suggesting and feeding off of one another in a manner that makes them difficult to disentangle. Specifically, there is an evident assumption that there is an organically occurring link between the concepts of the transgressive, the pornographic, and the feminist. We find something resembling this linkage in Porn Studies, with theorists frequently making a case for the significance of the genre of pornography by depicting it as oppositional to the values and standards of mainstream patriarchal culture. Laura Kipnis, for example, suggests that “Pornography provides a realm of transgression that is, in effect, a counter-aesthetics to dominant norms for bodies, sexualities, and desire itself” (“How to Look at Pornography” 121), and Constance Penley argues that “porn and its white trash kin seem our best allies in a cultural wars insurgency that makes camp in that territory beyond the pale” (328). The author and sex therapist Marty Klein, meanwhile, suggests that the “revolutionary implications of empowering people sexually challenge the cultural status quo” (254), and even goes so far as to state:

Pornography’s truths are subversive because they claim that people can empower themselves and create their own erotic norms. Political structures just hate when ideas or cultural products empower people. This is the recurring lesson of Copernicus, Guttenberg, Margaret Sanger, Lenny Bruce, and Timothy Leary. (254)

It is easy to appreciate the motivations behind this kind of celebratory account of pornography, even if we do reject the suggestion that its “truths” have the same kind of revolutionary import as the thinking of Copernicus. The limitations of analyses that set out to exalt pornography for its transgressive potential are obvious, however. By suggesting that porn’s transgressions liberate “exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, from mainstream culture and political discourse” (Kipnis, “How to Look at Pornography” 120), they encourage a largely uncritical understanding of transgression as a straightforwardly useful tool for feminism and liberal left-wing politics. This risks producing a partial and somewhat one-sided conceptualization of transgression as that which only ever violates the oppressive norms and rigid demands of heteronormative society. Transgression, of course, does not operate with this kind of politically correct fastidiousness. As Paasonen notes, contemporary pornography can be viewed as a genre in which “irreverence to social codes regulating appropriate behavior is rather programmatic and […] the attraction of porn stems from its ability to disturb such codes. In other words, the incorrect becomes somewhat dogmatic” (“Repetition and Hyperbole” 69). Indeed, as is seen throughout this book, many pornographic texts appear to rely precisely on the flouting of those taboos surrounding the ethical, respectful, and appropriate treatment of others—such as taboos against sexual violence, underage sex, and the perpetuation of sexist and racist stereotypes—for much of their transgressive force.¹

In addition to this failure to engage with the many possible objects and directions of transgression as it operates within pornographic discourse, many of the more simplistically “porn-positive” accounts tend to ignore the complex manner in which transgression and taboo necessarily interpenetrate—the fact that transgression “presupposes the existing order, the apparent maintenance of norms under which energy accumulates thereby making transgression necessary” (Klossowski 19). The importance of this co-dependence is made plain by such influential studies as Georges Bataille’s Eroticism, in which the author remarks, “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63). In other words, the act of transgression actually reinforces the taboo that it violates because it depends on this taboo for its own subversive energy—indeed, for its very existence as transgression. As Bataille states:

If we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it. But in the act of violating it we feel the anguish of the mind without which the taboo could not exist: that is the experience of sin. That experience leads to the completed transgression, the successful transgression which, in maintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit by it. (Eroticism 38)

He makes a similar case in relation to periods of carnival or festival, stating that such periods represent “the cessation of work, the unrestrained consumption of its products and the deliberate violation of the most hallowed laws, but the excess consecrates and completes an order of things based on rules; it goes against that order only temporarily” (“The Festival” 249).

In using the notions of transgression and carnivalesque subversion merely in order to make a case for the dissident potential of pornography, Porn Studies often oversimplifies the relationship between the taboo and its own violation, thereby disregarding much of what is most compelling and complex about transgression as a concept. Linda Williams is a Porn Studies scholar with a more sophisticated understanding of transgression than most—her excellent work on race in “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border,” for example, draws on Bataille to emphasize the centrality of taboos for the concept of eroticism—but even in her case, an investment in an anti-censorship position can manifest itself as a marked tendency to actively seek out the disruptive potential of pornographic discourse, while dismissing or overlooking some of its more troubling aspects.²

The discourses of pornography, feminism, and transgression are, as I shall endeavor to demonstrate throughout Part I, being persistently brought into conversation. Indeed, it seems that the usage of any one of these terms is haunted by the specter of the other two. We cannot hope to understand this clustering of concepts, I suggest, without looking back to some of the key debates surrounding sexuality and pornography that took place within the feminist movement in the late 1970s and the 1980s. These debates, known as the “sex wars,” have had a lasting impact on our understanding of sexually explicit representations, and any comprehensive study of pornography cannot hope to avoid feeling their effects and acknowledging their influence on the study of the genre. In what follows, I offer an extended discussion of the feminist sex wars, particularly in relation to notions of transgression and pornography, before going on to look at what these debates often inadvertently obscure. In helping to tie sexuality to the violation of taboos, I argue, the sex wars skewed the way in which our culture understands transgression. These debates therefore contributed to a certain slippage in terms of the idea of the pornographic that, as I demonstrate, has led to the term loosing much of its specificity and meaningfulness.

1

The Sex Wars

Transgressive Politics and the Politics of Transgression

Anti-Pornography and Pro-Sex Perspectives

Carole S. Vance describes the feminist sex wars as “the impassioned, contentious, and, to many, disturbing debates, discussions, conferences and arguments about sexuality that continued unabated until at least 1986” (“More Danger, More Pleasure” xxii), and she remarks that these debates “often explicitly focused on the anti-pornography movement’s fetishized Big Three—pornography, sado-masochism, and butch-femme roles” (xxiii). Mandy Merck, meanwhile, traces the origins of this “period of fabled conflict over the politics of sexual practice” (247) to three specific events: “the 1980 National Organization of Women’s resolution condemning sadomasochism, pornography, public sex and pederasty; the 1981 ‘Sex Issue’ of [the feminist journal] Heresies; and the 1982 Barnard conference ‘Towards a Politics of Sexuality’ ” (247). Although the areas of dispute that came to the fore during the sex wars were in fact fairly numerous, I concentrate primarily on the intense debates that occurred around the issue of pornography. What were the key positions taken on porn? How did these positions use and exploit ideas of transgression and taboo, and what light can they shed on these complex concepts?

The anti-pornography feminism of the sex wars era was, as its name suggests, critical of the role that it believed pornography played in the subjugation of women, and strongly opposed to its continued existence and availability within contemporary society. Porn was perceived as possessing the power to have a profound and negative effect on the lives of real women, and in 1975, Susan Brownmiller felt moved to set herself against the proponents of the so-called sexual revolution by declaring that “Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition” (38). Many of the most high-profile advocates of the anti-pornography position similarly linked pornography with violence against women. Andrea Dworkin, for example, suggested in 1980 that the “basic action of pornography is rape: rape of the vagina, rape of the rectum, and now, after the phenomenal success of Deep Throat, rape of the throat” (“Women Lawyers and Pornography” 238), and she speculated that “the popularity of throat rape in current pornography” might lead to an increase in real deaths from suffocation (238). Although the debates surrounding the effects of pornography on violent behavior are still contentious, ongoing, and inconclusive, Dworkin here invokes the alarming specter of sexual deaths directly initiated by pornographic texts in order to provoke anxiety and to garner support for the anti-porn cause.

However, Dworkin suggests not only that pornography is a potential trigger for male sexual violence, but also that pornography is in and of itself a form of that violence. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin defines pornography in terms of the “dominance and violence” that she believes it necessarily involves (10), and she argues that sexually explicit visual materials “document a rape, a rape first enacted when the women were set up and used; a rape repeated each time the viewer consumes the photographs” (137). When it comes to pornography, then, not only is its production, like the behavior of its viewers, a near-inevitable site of male violence, but also the very process of looking at and gaining pleasure from a pornographic image is perceived as in itself constituting a form of assault.

If this position seems like an unsophisticated and somewhat extreme analysis of the hermeneutic process and of the relationship between reader and text, even more remarkable is the anti-pornography movement’s simplistic equation of pornography with acts of historical violence. In her analysis of a photo spread originally published in the German edition of Playboy magazine, which depicts a racially ambiguous woman with “her ankles manacled, laser beams appearing to penetrate her vagina” (Pornography 153), Dworkin explicitly relates soft-core pornographic images to real-life atrocities. She suggests that the photographs, “like all pieces of pornography, do not exist in a historical vacuum. On the contrary, they exploit history—especially historical hatreds and historical suffering. The witches were burned. The Jews were burned. The laser burns. Jew and woman, Playboy’s model is captive, bound, in danger of burning” (Pornography 143). The images are here unequivocally equated with genocide, and this rhetorical tactic is not exclusive to Dworkin. Catharine A. MacKinnon, another high-profile anti-porn feminist and Dworkin’s frequent collaborator, similarly evokes the specter of historical violence and mass death when she suggests that activism against pornography is a form of “resistance to a sexual fascism of everyday life” (23), and that any sexual pleasure generated by the consumption of pornography is akin to “masturbating to the violation of […] human rights” (18).

Anti-pornography activism came to a head with attempts to push through new civil rights ordinances, authored by Dworkin and MacKinnon, in cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. These controversial local ordinances sought to allow “victims” of pornography to bring a civil action directly in court, and defined pornography as “a form of discrimination on the basis of sex,” and as “the sexually explicit subordination of women” (“Minneapolis Ordinance, 1983” 428). They tried to make it possible for people to take “the maker(s), seller(s), exhibitor(s), or distributor(s)” of pornography to court for “Discrimination by trafficking in pornography,” “Coercion into pornographic performances,” and “Assault or physical attack due to pornography” (429–30). They also were designed to allow “Any woman, man, child, or transsexual who has pornography forced on him/her” to take legal action against “the perpetrator and/or institution” responsible (430). These ordinances were either vetoed by municipal officials in the cities in which they were passed or eventually ruled unconstitutional, but even so, they drew significant attention to MacKinnon and Dworkin’s brand of feminism and provoked substantial debate about the issue of pornography within the wider culture.

Located on the other side of the sex wars of the 1980s was the anti-censorship or pro-sex feminist position referred to in my introduction. Perhaps because of the extremely high profile of the anti-pornography feminist movement, much of the pro-sex feminism of this era feels reactive or defensive, with activists and critics directing much of their energy toward agitating specifically against the anti-pornography civil rights ordinances. Nan D. Hunter and Sylvia Law, for example, both members of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), produced “The FACT Brief” in 1985. This document was expressly designed to

mobilize, in a highly visible way, a broad spectrum of feminist opposition to the enactment of laws expanding state suppression of sexually explicit material; and to place before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit a cogent legal argument for the constitutional invalidity of an Indianapolis municipal ordinance that would have permitted private civil suits to ban such material, purportedly to protect women. (207)

Similarly, in the early 1990s, Feminists Against Censorship, a group of British pro-sex activists, produced a slim volume entitled Pornography and Feminism: The Case Against Censorship. This pamphlet largely focused on encouraging people to oppose a bill, sponsored by the Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, which was designed to restrict the availability of certain types of sexually explicit material.

In addition to this kind of targeted activism, pro-sex feminists engaged in responding to and refuting the claims of anti-pornography feminism more generally. Carole S. Vance, for example, argued that “Women are vulnerable to being shamed about sex, and the anti-pornography ideology makes new forms of shaming possible” (“Pleasure and Danger” 6). Ellen Willis, meanwhile, suggested, “If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt, and hypocrisy—this time served up by feminism” (83).

A primary strategy of pro-sex feminist resistance to the anti-porn movement can be found in the presentation of sexually explicit texts as agreeable and politically useful cultural objects, with critics such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter, and Carole S. Vance arguing that “Just as the personal can be political, so can the specifically and graphically sexual” (59). One of the key ways in which this foregrounding of porn’s political potential was achieved was via a certain gesturing toward pornography’s radical or transgressive qualities—via an investment in, as Jane Juffer puts it, “inflating the importance of pornography as a transgressive text” (At Home With Pornography 34).¹ This is suggested by the frequent invocations of rebellion in the writings of the period. The influential pro-sex activist and “sex radical” Pat (now Patrick) Califia, for example, stated the following in 1986:

Even given the constraints under which it is currently produced, pornography is valuable. It sends out messages of comfort and rebellion. It says: Lust is not evil. The body is not hateful. Physical pleasure is a joyful thing and should not be hidden or denied. It is not true that women have no sexual hunger. There are other people who think about and do the things you dream about. Freedom is possible. There is a choice. (“The Obscene, Disgusting, and Vile Meese Commission Report” 52)

In a similar vein, Willis argues that pornography “expresses a radical impulse” (85) and that “a woman who enjoys pornography (even if that means enjoying a rape fantasy) is in a sense a rebel, insisting on an aspect of her sexuality that has been defined as a male preserve” (85). More recent pornography scholars have picked up this kind of celebratory account of porn, along with all its windy rhetoric. However, as I demonstrate here, this position is largely based on a misconception of, or an uncritical attitude toward, the concept of transgression. Indeed, I suggest that the complex operations and conceptualizations of transgression at work within the feminist sex wars render problematic the seemingly clear-cut division between the pro-sex and anti-pornography positions. These two standpoints, as will become apparent, are not engaged in separate, diametrically opposed political projects, but are in fact both engaged in the same endeavor—that is, in a concerted effort to redeem human sexuality.

The Operations of Transgression Within Pro-Sex Feminism

Although the pro-sex and anti-pornography positions outlined here may appear to be inherently antithetical, they do in fact have more common ground than one might assume. For example, Leo Bersani suggests that Dworkin and MacKinnon’s “most radical claim is […] that so-called normal sexuality is already pornographic,” and he argues that the “ultimate logic” of their critique “would be the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented” (“Is the rectum a grave?” 214). He is therefore able to position the anti-pornography strand of the feminist movement within a “more general enterprise, one which I will call the redemptive reinvention of sex” (214). I argue that this redemptive urge also can be detected within the work of certain pro-sex feminists.

In her essay “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Passion and Pleasure,” Amber Hollibaugh suggests the following:

Feminism must be an angry, uncompromising movement that is j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Critical Voices in Porn Studies
• Part I: Feminism, Pornography, Transgression
• Part II: Intensity and Prurience: Pornography After Sex
• Part III: Pornography and the Real
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover