Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (16 page)

Good Will Humping

The concerns above remind us to be careful to avoid false consciousness. While, for example, a female porn star may appear to be consenting to, benefiting from, and possibly even enjoying the activity, this may be because cultural forces have made her inadvertently complicit in her oppression. Her consent may be an illusion. Nevertheless, we must also be wary of other social forces, such as religious teachings and traditional sexual morality. Our objections to, rather than our approval of, pornography may be the greater culprit in upholding a patriarchal status quo with its traditional gender roles and rules for sexual morality.Additionally, whatever harms may be associated with pornography under the best of conditions may be outweighed by the potential goods of pornography – among other possibilities pornography may be beneficial as sexual education (for anyone from beginner to the highly experienced), provide otherwise unavailable economic opportunities, and, let us not forget, provide hours of carnal enjoyment. So, stop worrying and enjoy your pornography, or, if it is not for you, at least leave your neighbors alone while they enjoy it.

NOTES

1
If the existence of snuff films is mere myth, it is just as well.

2
Except in some counties of Nevada.

3
www.caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=488&invol=1311.

4
John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), p. 13.

5
Ibid., chapters 2 and 3.

6
Danny Scoccia, “Can Liberals Support a Ban on Violent Pornography?”
Ethics
106, 4 (1996): 785.

7
Ibid., pp. 786–7.

8
Ibid., p. 777.

9
Debra Satz, “Markets in Women’s Sexual Labor,”
Ethics
106, 1 (1995): 81.

10
Ibid., pp. 81–5.

11
Scoccia, “Can Liberals Support a Ban on Violent Pornography?” p. 794.

12
David Dyzenhaus, “John Stuart Mill and the Harm of Pornography,”
Ethics
102, 3 (1992): 534–51.

13
Robert Skipper, “Mill and Pornography,”
Ethics
3, 4 (1993): 726–30.

FIONA WOOLLARD

CHAPTER 7

CHEATING WITH JENNA
Monogamy, Pornography, and Erotica

Kelly was supposed to be out all evening, but her book group was cancelled at the last moment. She is secretly a bit relieved; it will be nice to relax with her boyfriend, Zach, and a glass of wine.When she gets home, she can hear Zach in the study. As she opens the door, Zach turns towards her, clearly startled, his face bright red and guilt-stricken. She takes one look at the computer screen and runs out of the room.

Kelly walked in on Zach masturbating while looking at pornography. She is very upset by this. She feels like Zach has betrayed her and their relationship. Using pornography, on his own, behind her back, seems almost like cheating. Kelly’s reaction may be a little extreme, but it is not completely off the wall. Many people would feel betrayed if they found their partner using pornography alone.This essay will consider whether this reaction is reasonable: do partners have the right to forbid this kind of behavior, to feel wronged or betrayed by it?

I focus on the solo use of pornography by a person who is in a monogamous relationship. I consider cases like that of Zach and Kelly, where two partners have agreed, implicitly or explicitly, to be faithful to each other and yet one partner uses pornography on his or her own.There are many interesting issues about the use of pornography in general. However, I think that the solo use of pornography within monogamous relationships raises some special questions. When Kelly is upset by Zach’s masturbation in front of the computer, she feels that Zach has wronged
her
, betrayed
their relationship
. I want to explore whether there should be relationship-based restrictions on the use of pornography.

I will look at two different objections that a partner might make to the solo use of pornography. The first objection suggests that sexual activity using erotic material depicting another person is a kind of infidelity. I will argue against this suggestion. Although Kelly may feel betrayed, she has not been cheated on. I will then consider the suggestion that solo use of pornography by a partner is objectionable because it displays or involves attitudes, usually attitudes towards women, which are incompatible with a loving relationship. I will suggest that this objection holds against some, but not all, erotic material. The upshot of my discussion will be that whether Kelly’s outrage is reasonable or not will depend upon the nature of the material Zach has been using.

Let us begin with the thought that by using pornography on his own Zach is being unfaithful to Kelly; he is “cheating with Jenna.” After all, they are supposed to be in a monogamous relationship. Zach has been indulging in sexual activity that has involved another person – or at least the representation of another person. Isn’t this a kind of cheating?

Zach and Kelly might have made some explicit agreement about the rules of their relationship.They may have agreed that solo use of pornography should count as cheating. However, very few couples actually do this.We assume that our partners will implicitly understand what is forbidden. Additionally, the way we govern our relationships is a
normative matter
: we can ask what rules a couple
ought
to accept, as well as what rules they actually accept. A couple might agree not to eat chocolate-chip cookies with anyone else.This is one of the rules of their relationship and breaking it would involve “cheating.” We can evaluate this rule; barring special circumstances, it is a silly rule. It is unreasonable to forbid extramarital cookie eating. In general, any relationship-based rule that restricts the partners’ access to something valuable, such as cookies or sexual pleasure, requires some justification.Would it be a good idea for a couple to have a rule about monogamy that restricted the use of erotica? I shall suggest that the reasons that support adopting a rule of monogamy in the first place do not support an extended rule of monogamy which forbids the solo use of erotica. In fact, there are good reasons to permit the solo use of erotica within a monogamous relationship.

As I and my co-author Bryan R.Weaver have suggested elsewhere, the rules of monogamy involve two restrictions: sexual activity is restricted to relationships with a certain feature and the number of others with whom one can be in a relationship with that feature is restricted to one.
¹
A monogamous person is only permitted to have sex with another if he is in a loving relationship (a relationship of erotic love) with that person; he is only permitted to be in such a relationship with one other person at a time.
²
Clearly, only the first of these restrictions will be relevant to the permissibility of solo use of pornography within a relationship.The consumer of pornography is not forming an additional relationship of erotic love.Thus, I shall focus only on the part of monogamy that restricts sex to loving relationships.

We argue that some, but not all, couples have good reason to be monogamous; that is, they have good reason to accept, and to keep faith with, each of the restrictions involved in monogamy. Again, in this essay I will focus on the first restriction: the restriction of sexual activity to loving relationships.Why does this make sense?

The nature of sex makes it natural for a couple to see sex as a significant activity. Sex is deeply connected to intimacy. It goes without saying that sex involves a high degree of physical intimacy. But sex also involves another kind of intimacy. It is a shared experience of intense pleasure. This pleasure is a product of the partners’ interaction – it is pleasure found in and with the other.This intimate activity can be both symbolic of and partly constitutive of the love in the relationship.Thus, it is reasonable to attach great significance to sex – to see it as something that plays an important role within the relationship. I will call sex that has this kind of significance “lovemaking.” It is reasonable (although not obligatory) to attach significance to all sexual intercourse involving either partner: the actions involved in sexual intercourse are special because they are seen as the things that the partners do as part of the intimate relationship. Once either partner sees sex as significant in this way, it will be hurtful if one partner has sex with someone outside the relationship with whom he or she is not in love. In having sex without love, the cheater implicitly denies that sex has the kind of significance that his partner understands it to have. The hurt partner sees the performance of those actions by either partner as lovemaking; the cheater is able to have sex without making love. This can undermine the partners’ understanding of previous episodes of sex within the relationship. This will be deeply hurtful to the other partner. If loveless sex would cause reasonable hurt to one or both partners, it makes sense to restrict sex to loving relationships.
³

If our argument is correct, it can make sense for partners to be monogamous and to see their commitment to the relationship as excluding non-loving sexual encounters. What does this imply about solo use of pornography? Should the rules of monogamy be extended to exclude solo masturbation using pornography? Should solo masturbation count as cheating?

This rationale for monogamy might appear to lead to restrictions on solo use of pornography. Like a one night stand, masturbation might be seen as loveless sex. Engaging in this kind of sexual activity could be seen as an implicit denial of the partners’ understanding of sex as symbolic of and partly constitutive of the intimacy that they share.

However, I do not think that this argument goes through. For solo use of pornography to undermine the significance of sex within the relationship, it must be relevantly similar to the sex within the relationship. Unless solo use of pornography and sex with one’s partner involve the same kind of act, solo use of pornography without love cannot be a denial that the partners’ performance of acts of the kind is significant. Unless solo use of pornography involves having sex, it cannot undermine the connection between sex and the love in the relationship. Eating jellybeans in September does not challenge the special connection between chocolate eggs and Easter.

We should draw a distinction between sex between partners and solo use of pornography. Solo use of pornography typically involves auto-masturbation. We
could
describe pornography based masturbation as a sex act that involves another person: the image of the model (let’s call her Jenna) stimulates arousal and she will often play a role in the masturbator’s fantasies. However, Jenna is involved in an attenuated sense. There is no real interaction between Zach and Jenna.This makes masturbation significantly different from lovemaking. Masturbation is clearly a
sexual
activity, guided by sexual arousal and usually leading to orgasm. However, it does not involve what we might call “sexual intercourse,” referring not to penetrative sex but to sexual interaction between two or more persons. Unlike a casual affair, solo masturbation does not involve sexual intercourse without love, physical intimacy without emotional intimacy. The significance of lovemaking comes from the fact that it is a deeply pleasurable and highly intimate interaction between partners.Thus the absence of interaction in masturbation means that this solo activity need not be seen as undermining the significance of lovemaking.
⁴
Partners may see sexual
intercourse
as the significant activity.This would lead to a norm of monogamy that restricts only sexual intercourse, not auto-masturbation, to loving relationships.

Kelly might respond that although there has been no actual sexual interaction between Zach and Jenna, Zach has been fantasizing about Jenna, perhaps picturing himself having sex with Jenna, and he has used this fantasy to bring himself to orgasm. So Zach has been fantasizing about loveless sexual intercourse, endorsing the idea of sexual intercourse without love and thereby implicitly denying that sexual intercourse is something significant connected to the love in their relationship.

This response treats fantasy as a type of wishful thinking. It assumes Zach wants to take the place of the hero of his fantasy. However, fantasies need not be this way. People fantasize about situations they would find very uncomfortable in real life, for example, fantasies about sex in public seem to be common. I suggest that we should understand Zach as imaginatively taking the viewpoint of a person who has casual sex with Jenna. His enjoyment in this imagined viewpoint does not imply that
he
wants to have sex with Jenna.The character in the fantasy may be called “Zach” and may even look a little like Zach (although probably better looking). Nonetheless, he is not Zach. Zach can imagine this situation while still maintaining that sexual intercourse is something significant for him because of its role in his relationship with Kelly, so that he would not want to have sex with someone he did not love.

There is all the difference in the world between fantasizing about sex with Jenna and having sex with Jenna. If Zach had actually had sex with Jenna he would by this act have threatened the significance of sex for him and Kelly. He would be performing an act in which sex is separated from love. In fantasizing about sex with Jenna, Zach merely imagines being a person for whom sex and love are separable.There is no separation for him in fact.This has two aspects: first, Zach is not involved in an actual case of loveless sex, but merely an imagined one. Secondly, it is not Zach but “Zach” who has loveless sex. For Zach himself, sex is still bound up with his love for Kelly. This means that sex can continue to play a significant role, expressing and constituting the love in their relationship.

The key thought behind the constraint against loveless sex is that when the partners have sex this is both a way of expressing their intimacy and partly constitutive of that intimacy. When they have sex, they make love. For one of the partners to have sex with someone he does not love undermines the significance of sex within the relationship because it involves
him
performing the usually significant act without its usual significance. If he has sex without love, then his actions in lovemaking no longer have the same meaning, they no longer express or constitute loving intimacy. But merely imagining or fantasizing about loveless sexual intercourse does not involve either having loveless sex or seeing loveless sex as a real possibility for him. It remains true that when he has sex, this is a way of making love.