At Home with Pornography

Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life

Jane Juffer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780814742372
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814743225
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn.
Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women, made available in increasingly mainstream venues. In asking "what is the relationship of women to pornography?" Juffer maintains that we need to stop obsessing over pornography's transgressive aspects, and start focusing on the place of porn and erotica in women's everyday lives. Where, she asks, do women routinely find it, for how much, and how is it circulated and consumed within the home? How is this circulation and consumption shaped by the different marketing categories that attempt to distinguish erotica from porn, such as women's literary erotica and sexual self-help videos for couples?
At Home with Pornography responds to these questions by viewing women's erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a "dangerous" pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals. She shows how, for instance, the Victoria's Secret catalog is able to function as a kind of pornography whose circulation is facilitated both by its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and on its appeals to the selfish pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the varying degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption.
Representing the next generation of scholarship on pornography, At Home with Pornography will transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.

1
Home Sweet Pornographic Home?
Governmental Discourse and Women’s Paths to Pornography

On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed a “welfare reform” bill that effectively eliminates the federal guarantee of cash assistance for the country’s poorest children, saving the U.S. government $55 billion over six years. The bill abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which, according to the New York Times, provides monthly cash benefits to 12.8 million people, including 8 million children (Pear, A10). It established a lifetime limit of five years on welfare payments to any family and required most adults to work within two years of receiving aid. In a little reported but telling provision, the bill mandated that mothers who refuse to divulge the identity of their children’s fathers will immediately have their aid withdrawn.

Critics were quick to condemn the bill for punishing children for the sins of their mothers. No one, however, at least in the mainstream debates, took objection to the demonization of single motherhood and the implication, sometimes overtly stated, that “illegitimacy” has caused a whole series of social problems. As William Bennett proclaimed, “Illegitimacy is America’s most serious social problem” (16). This polemic was central to the political discourse on welfare reform, from conservative guru Charles Murray’s December 1994 broadside in Commentary to Clinton’s decision to sign the bill. In urging passage of the bill, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas lamented the fact that “When we started the current welfare program, two-parent families were the norm in poor families in America. Today two-parent families are the exception. When we started the current welfare program, the illegitimacy rate was roughly one quarter of what it is today.” For Gramm, fathers are the victims of the welfare system, mothers the manipulative benefactors: “Our current welfare program has failed. It has driven fathers out of the household” (Pear, A10).

Similarly, in Charles Murray’s analysis of welfare mothers in the United States, their sexuality, expressed outside marriage, indicates a degree of agency that must be dissipated by containment within a traditionally gendered marital relationship. How to achieve this containment? Cut off their financial resources and force them to find a husband. Better yet, start earlier, with fathers who run a properly patriarchal household. Let’s not make this complex, says Murray; the answer to the rise of babies born “out of wedlock” is not “sex education, counseling, and the like”; change will occur only when “young people have had it drummed into their heads from their earliest memories that having a baby without a husband entails awful consequences.” He adds, “Subtle moral reasoning is not the response that works. ‘My father would kill me’ is the kind of response that works” (31). In this manner, the single mother is hypothetically recontained within a nuclear family, a sexuality deemed too mobile is reined in, and a simple answer to a complex social issue is proposed: marriage in the family values tradition.

The welfare repeal law was one of a series of governmental acts in the election year 1996 that showed just how narrow the attempt to define “family values” has become, at least in Washington. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole took swipes at Hollywood for its violence and lack of sexual standards,¹ echoing then vice president Dan Quayle’s 1992 attack on the television show Murphy Brown, when Candice Bergen’s character decided to become a single mother, flouting, said Quayle, the importance of fatherhood.² In the summer of 1996 the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman; Clinton signed it into law in September. Again, “aberrant” sexuality was blamed for the “demise of civilization.” The bill’s author, Representative Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia, said the act was needed because “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit” (qtd. in Jerry Gray, A8). With Clinton staying just one degree to the left of Dole, election year 1996 had become an exercise in scapegoating sexuality and gender in lieu of taking on a series of complex social issues. Rather than addressing issues like poverty, inner-city joblessness, racism, violence, and education inequities, Congress and the president saw fit to blame single mothers and same-sex marriages and reassert the importance of a traditionally configured, heterosexual family.

Governmental attempts to regulate pornography must be situated within the political context of the policing of sexuality for the sake of a mythical set of family values. The same legislators who vote to eliminate welfare proclaim their concern for women and children in hyperbolic debate about pornography on the Internet. By juxtaposing the welfare debate with the pornography debate, we can understand some of the hypocrisy of governmental policy: women are dangerous sexual agents when they take money from the state yet, according to reports like those issued by the Meese Commission, helpless sexual victims in a society saturated by pornography. These governmental positions legitimate the withdrawal of necessary and humane funding and substitute a much less costly rhetoric about the evils of pornography. Both, in different ways, work to limit women’s sexual freedom. An effective politics of pornography, as I argue in my introduction, must not answer the governmental strategy by inflating the importance of pornography as a transgressive text, the common retort of prosexuality feminists; rather, access to and consumption of erotica and pornography must be situated in relation to women’s everyday lives, as only one of the many elements that potentially constitute part of their everyday routines.

Much governmental discourse on pornography in the last twenty years has sought to use the “problem” of pornography to reinstate certain norms about what constitutes a healthy sexuality and a proper family. The fact that pornography consumption has increasingly become concentrated in the home, moving from the more public and regulatable spheres of adult theaters and bookstores to computers, cable television, and home video recorders has made it easier, in certain respects, for government to claim that pornography threatens the sanctity of the home and the innocence of its (young/female) inhabitants. In the first part of this chapter, I trace the gradual shifting of governmental prosecution of porn from its presence in relatively public spaces to its circulation via technologies within the home. Governmental reports like the one issued by the Meese Commission, congressional regulation of cable, and attempted policing of the Internet combine to set up a model of domesticity that demonizes pornography in several ways. According to this model, pornography is consumed by men who are likely to mimic its purportedly violent and objectifying representations of women; the porn industry literally oppresses women; and women who consume pornography either are forced to do so or, if they claim to like it, are victims of false consciousness who need to be educated about their proper sexuality. We must understand this governmental discourse in order to effectively formulate a politics of pornography that reclaims the home as a site where women can consume pornography—if they so choose—rather than abdicating it as a site of conservative regulation. The study of pornography in relation to domesticity is thus important at two levels: as a strategic way of analyzing the methods through which patriarchal institutions attempt to use pornography in order to recontain female sexuality and as a practical inquiry into the material realities of pornography consumption for women.

Reclaiming the home means making it a site where women can consume pornography that they like without feeling guilty about its relationship to their other roles within the home. This involves asking questions about women’s movements, both within and outside the home: Where can women find pornography or erotica? Why might they consider it inimical to the home? Do they feel comfortable and safe buying it in locations outside their homes, or through technologies inside their homes? How do women’s other activities—work, household chores, child care, leisure activities—affect their abilities to consume pornography? And how are the home and relations within the home redefined through these movements? Does the governmental demonization and regulation of pornography make it easier for women to access erotica? The effects of this regulation, except in the case of direct prosecutions of obscenity, are often hard to gauge, in part because the consumption of pornography via cable, video, and computer technology in the home is a much more difficult and complicated act to regulate than the public display of sex that characterizes adult theaters and strip bars. Governmental discourse shapes local consumption in a highly mediated but nevertheless material way, dependent on a series of other facilitating and restrictive factors that occur at the local level. In the conclusion to this chapter, I consider how the different governmental attempts to regulate porn converge with local efforts to police public displays of sex in my community of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Pornography and the Struggle for Access

Throughout the twentieth century in the United States, attempts to regulate pornography across a number of spheres—legal, medical, governmental, antipornography feminist—have often been undertaken in the name of protecting a class of victims most threatened by pornography’s presence. Regulation intends to protect these victims from access to pornography by preventing its circulation in the places where those victims are assumed to reside. Usually there is a strict dichotomy between the public sphere perpetrators—producers, disseminators, and users of porn—and their private sphere victims—women and children who are connected to the sanctity of the home. With the exception of some historical periods of relative deregulation of pornography, we can say that from the Comstock laws of the early twentieth century through the latest debates on Internet pornography, regulators have tried to pinpoint pornography’s victims and define them as virtually powerless against a growing tide of increasingly violent and harmful pornography. The state, in various manifestations, thus becomes the agent, authorized to protect pornography’s victims by preventing them from exposure to the harmful texts as well as to limit pornography’s use by potential “victimizers” who supposedly imitate the texts.

These private/public debates point to—without often developing—the importance of access: that is, we must consider the history of pornography in this country as not only a battle over representation but also a battle for access to the specific spaces where those representations occur. The feminist struggle for access to public sphere representation is so critical because for much of this century, court rulings, other governmental proceedings, and the pornography industries have worked, in different but often overlapping ways, to limit access to pornography to men. Yet, as I argued in the introduction, too often the feminist arguments on pornography operate at a similarly general level, leaving intact reductive notions of public and private spaces and thus failing to analyze the material conditions that constrict and enable women’s access to pornography.

Great Britain established the legal precedent for protection of the private sphere with the passage of its first anti-obscenity legislation in 1857, the Obscene Publications Act; it sought to protect young middle-class women whose pornography consisted of the romantic novel. In 1868 the famous Regina v. Hicklin case, which was to become the basis of much early U.S. obscenity law, arose from similar concerns.³ In it, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn remarked, “This work, I am told, is sold at the corners of the streets, and in all directions, and of course, it falls into the hands of the persons of all classes, young and old, and the minds of the hitherto pure are exposed to the danger of contamination and pollution from the impurity it contains” (qtd. in Kendrick, 122). As Walter Kendrick notes, Cockburn’s concern was that the text in question circulated not among gentlemen in private but in the streets. Much pornography in late nineteenth-century Britain was circulated only among upper-class bibliophiles who amassed private collections that never drew the attention of the courts or the public because of their limited circulation and high price (Kendrick, 77).

In the United States, circulation of sex-related materials through the mail in the late nineteenth century provided the grist for the zealous mill of Anthony Comstock, the Post Office special agent who for forty-three years enforced an 1873 l^aw—which quickly became known as the Comstock law—prohibiting distribution of any “obscene, lewd, lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” (qtd. in Kendrick, 134). As Lauren Berlant describes it, Comstock “installed this regime of anxiety and textual terror by invoking the image of youth, and in particular, the stipulated standard of the little girl whose morals, mind, acts, body, and identity would certainly be corrupted by contact with adult immorality” (388). This standard figured heavily in court decisions on obscenity for much of the twentieth century and continues to haunt governmental commissions like the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and the 1995 Communications Decency Act.

The pornography that did circulate during and after the Comstock days was the stag film, the predecessor to the modern hard-core narrative. These illegally made, silent, one-reel films were often enjoyed privately by groups of men, providing what Linda Williams describes in Hard Core as a kind of male bonding experience that was narratively structured so as to create the need for the fulfillment of sexual desire in other venues, such as prostitution. Stag films were often shown in brothels in Europe and in exclusive male clubs in the United States, to which prostitutes were often invited. The circulation of the stag films thus limited women’s access to pornography at several levels—their illicit production, their private showings, and their association with prostitution.

Court cases in the first half of this century—even those that are hailed for their recognition that certain (literary) works should be freed from regulation—implicitly denied women the right to consume sexually explicit material. For example, legal scholar Edward de Grazia hails the 1933 decision freeing James Joyce’s Ulysses as the first step toward loosening the courts’ dependence on the standard of the little girl. De Grazia says that Judge John M. Woolsey fashioned a new legal rule to replace Hicklin: “Ulysses should not be judged by a tendency that novel might have to corrupt the morals of young girls, but rather by the effect on the judge himself—and two friends, whom he privately consulted” (de Grazia, xxi). When Joyce’s novel failed to arouse these three gentlemen, Woolsey ruled in favor of the novel; de Grazia writes that “the capacity to arouse lust in the ‘average person’ now became the prevailing American legal test of whether literature ought to be suppressed for being ‘obscene’” (xxi). De Grazia fails to note, however, the gendered nature of the ruling; women, presumably, did not figure as “average” people who consumed potentially pornographic texts but rather, still, as their potential victims.

Making Pornography a “Household Word”

In the first half of this century pornography circulated in mainly private, male-defined venues and was associated with illicit sex. Several events in the 1950s indicated a gradual acceptance of certain kinds of pornography and also of more sexually explicit films that were not called pornography. The 1953 Kinsey report focused attention on the sexual needs of American women; mainstream cinema, according to Richard Dyer, became increasingly explicit in its treatment of sex (26). Marilyn Monroe appeared as the first nude centerfold in the first issue of Playboy, also in 1953. Playboy’s philosophy, one Monroe helped to foster, was to present female sexuality as healthy and natural, in the form of the “girl next door,” as I discuss more in chapter 6. The emphasis on sexuality as a “healthy” part of life would dominate much of the discourse that legitimated it throughout the 1960s; it was a characterization broad enough to encompass even the most hard-core pornography. By 1972, argues Linda Williams, “hardcore pornography had become a household word” (Hard Core 99).

Beginning with the 1957 Supreme Court case United States v. Roth and continuing into the 1960s, U.S. courts gradually freed all but the most “hard-core” of pornographic materials. Although the court upheld the conviction of Samuel Roth for mailing a magazine containing nude pictures and erotic stories, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan ruled that only material “utterly without redeeming social importance” could be declared obscene. De Grazia argues that Brennan’s ruling “produced a significant crack in the country’s century-old obscenity law”; during the next decade it became very difficult for prosecutors to prove that a literary, artistic, or social text was “utterly without redeeming social importance.” In fact, de Grazia notes, during the decade following the Roth decision, all kinds of sexually explicit texts were freed, from previously banned novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover to “blatantly pornographic pulp literature” (323–24). In 1964 the Supreme Court furthered the defense of literary and artistic expression in decisions, authored by Brennan, concerning Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Louis Malle’s film The Lovers. Lower federal and state courts “obediently put the Brennan doctrine to work in reversing obscenity findings in book, film, and magazine censorship cases throughout the country” (de Grazia, 431).

This period of relative deregulation was not without its own set of norms; most obviously, the courts continued to preserve a category—the obscene—that, bereft of social value, does potentially cause harm to its victims, usually posited as victims of men who consume pornography. Also, the process of proving that a work “as a whole” does have “redeeming social value” and that it does not appeal to “prurient interests”—all defining characteristics of obscenity that emerge from this period—continued to uphold aesthetic distinctions between the erotic and the pornographic, or between hard-core and soft-core. As Hunter et al. note, and as I elaborate in the next two chapters, this aesthetic distinction sets in motion a process of self-disciplining, emphasizing “individuals’ ability to mediate and order their own sexual interests and to balance the excitations of erotica with an aesthetic appreciation of the work as a whole” (211). The courts thus established a balance “between self-management and legal policing” (Hunter et al., 211). Although the figure of the little girl is not as predominant as it is in either earlier or later juridico-governmental decisions, the need to protect a class of victims from hard-core pornography’s users and the need to prove one’s own maturity, standing outside the class of users, remain.

However, there was increasing recognition in the 1960s and 1970s that women could join the class of consumers of erotica and even pornography. This is particularly clear in the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, known also as the Lockhart report, which emphasized the rights of adults to purchase and consume whatever sexually explicit material they desire: “In general outline, the Commission recommends that federal, state, and local legislation should not seek to interfere with the rights of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain or view explicit sexual materials” (U.S. Commission on Obscenity, 57). As Hunter et al. note, the arguments in the report are based on a problematic, liberal belief in the rational powers of an individual who is abstracted from particular conditions of ongoing regulation and disciplinization of desire. Nevertheless, the report’s insistence that government not interfere with adults’ rights to consume pornography represented a critical move away from the juridical characterization of (male) pornography consumers as infantile. In fact, said the report, the regulation of pornography actually creates impediments to a society that perceives sex in a healthy manner because it becomes the “scapegoat for Americans’ confusion and ambivalence about sexuality” (311). The report recommended that rather than attempting to regulate pornography—“an inferior source of information about sexual behavior” (312)—the country should devote itself to a massive sex education program, aiming to achieve “an acceptance of sex as a normal and natural part of life and of oneself as a sexual being” (54). In contrast to the Meese Commission and the Internet debates...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction From the Profane to the Mundane
• 1 Home Sweet Pornographic Home? Governmental Discourse and Women’s Paths to Pornography
• 2 The Mainstreaming of Masturbation? Making Domestic Space for Women’s Orgasms
• 3 Aesthetics and Access
• 4 The New Victorians Lingerie in the Private Sphere
• 5 Behind and Beyond the Bedroom Doors From John Gray to Candida Royalle
• 6 Eroticizing the Television
• Conclusion Revisiting Transgression
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author