Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (23 page)

Porn star Pam is right. Porn is expression. It may even be used as a kind of persuasion. But not all persuasion is the same. Let’s compare Pamela topless on TV with the preacher’s religious speech. Suppose you are driving down the interstate and you see a billboard rented out by the preacher you saw on the show last night. It says “Going to church is good for your soul” and there is an appropriate religious picture. Maybe it is more offensive:”Get sanctified at our church or get French fried in hell.” Now you are not opposed to religion per se but the billboard makes you annoyed. It might be offensive to suggest that a lot of people will be burnt to a crisp in hell.

But there is a kind of distance between you and the conclusion of the argument, isn’t there? Sure you are exposed to some offensive sight, but you haven’t engaged in any act against your will. If, for instance, instead of a billboard, the prudish preacher started a revival on your front lawn and you had no choice but attend, you still would not be “going to church.” You would be captive at a church service.The same would be true if, in order to convince you to buy into a political agenda, you were handed a sign saying “Vote for President Schmoen” and carried on the shoulders of a crowd against your will, you could be confused with the crowd but you would not be said to be “campaigning for Schmoen.”

The point is that when Pamela shows her boobs she’s not just exposing you to an offensive sight, she, in effect, causes you to engage in an act – looking at her boobs.You are not just considering an offensive message. You are engaging in looking at a sexually suggestive performance – one you didn’t seek out.You may or may not be sexually aroused by this act, but even amateur porn performed by unattractive people is still porn. However, when someone says something offensive without your consent, there is still a distance between their speech and your actions. Religious speakers cannot make you pray by praying in front of you. Neither can politicians make you political by exposing you to their rhetoric.

The idea of showing naked people having sex on a billboard would ostensibly have only one kind sexual message. It would be something like “Sex is good” or “Looking at pictures of naked people, especially ones having sex, is good.” However, such displays attempt to convince a person that looking at pictures of naked people having sex is good by making interstate drivers look at naked people having sex.

In philosophical terms, public displays of porn would persuade without consent because they do not just express, they make the audience do something they may or may not want to do.This is the one good reason for all those warning signs in red letters.The signs make it clear,“If you walk in here, you want to look at naked people and people having sex.” However, political and religious expression persuade without making the audience do anything. In fact, it is impossible to make someone engage in religious acts or political acts without their consent.

The upshot of these examples is that to treat porn as the same as any political or religious heresy would end up being very
illiberal
. Public displays of porn, unlike public displays of political opinion, coerce others by causing them to engage in the act of looking at pornography.This bullet is hard to swallow indeed. But if we do not bite this bullet then we are left with the conclusion that we should not treat boobs the same as bumper stickers.

Hard Cases

But some might object that if you buy this argument, there could be some other bullets to swallow and they may be far worse.Two such objections come to mind. First, if porn is not protected, what about offensive art? Second, what if porn is expressive of some other opinion? Just because pure porn is not persuasive does not mean it cannot convey some other message than “It is good to look at porn.” Let us look at these one at a time.

Hard case 1:The gallery downtown vs. the “downtown” gallery

What makes art a hard case for my argument? The difficulty is found in the pun. The gallery downtown displays works of art. It says so right on the sign outside. Websites have galleries, too. “Downtown” is a euphemism often used for oral sex. There are plenty of “Downtown galleries” on the web with page after page of oral sex.The problem is where to draw the line between the arts on display in the gallery downtown from the galleries on the web.This is a tough call for anyone to make, but – make no mistake – laws are designed to stop us from having to make these tough calls. That is after all the nature of law – to take the moral judgment out of the hands of individuals in favor of legislation based on moral principles. But it has been notoriously hard to draw this line.When does literature become obscene? As one of those stuffy Supreme Court justices, Harlan, said of Cohen’s “Fuck the Draft” slogan, “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.”
⁴

To make this a little more concrete, consider a case recently at my own Bowling Green State University. A sculpture by the renowned James Parlin was removed from an exhibition at a satellite campus because the sculpture depicted an adult male receiving oral sex from an underage teen. The work bore the ponderous title: “The Middle School Teacher Makes a Decision He Will Live to Regret,” which implies that the artist may not necessarily be trying to glorify this act of pedophilia.The powers that be at the university told the gallery director to pull the sculpture. The gallery director refused to censor one work and shut down the exhibition in protest.

Was anyone’s freedom of expression violated? I don’t think so. The university did not want negative publicity for the gallery since it shared a building with a children’s theatre. James Parlin was not arrested for making the sculpture. Freedom of expression allows one to persuade, as Parlin wanted to do, but it does not imply that the artist has a right to any particular audience.

The same holds for the galleries on the net.They probably are not art, but suppose they are art? Does this entitle them to public display on a par with political or religious speech? It does not seem so.

I do agree with Nadine Strossen about one thing, however. If we shielded everyone from every offense, we would have a world of warning signs. Galleries and museums have tons of nude art that might force some people to look at something they do not want to see. Do we hang red lettered signs 20 feet from Michelangelo’s “David” or the Venus de Milo? The problem with obscenity is that it is subjective. It certainly is not defined by the presence of nudity. If we say persuasion is what counts, not expression, then a lot of the arts are going to be at the mercy of any half-wit who wants to paint fig leaves on classic works of art.

But do we really have to play the obscenity game? Justice Potter Stewart said that he could not draw the line between art and hardcore porn but he knew it when he saw it.
⁵
I am not as confident as Stewart and anyone should be nervous about the state drawing that line for them.The convoluted mechanizations of constitutional interpretations aside, one does not have to draw that fine a line to accept that porn is not sexual speech though it is expression.

That most people do not emerge from the Metropolitan Museum exhibition of Rodin shocked and befuddled by all the porn is proof that museum-goers know that they can expect some displays of nudity, just as those who punch “sex galleries” into Google know what they are getting into and do not confuse it with the displays at the Met. If, however, lots of people start getting shocked by the Met’s sculpture, then it might be prudent to warn, but doing so would not be censorship.The point is that warning labels are a matter of judgment often best left to the museum in question, not the state.

Hard case 2:“Is that supposed to be the vice president in a thong?”

I have argued that porn is an expression but not on a par with religious and political speech. But what if the porn is expressing some political opinion? This is a hard case because porn as a form of political satire could be said to be the medium for a political opinion designed to persuade others.The most prolific purveyor of porn as political statement is Larry Flynt. Flynt’s political satire famously raised the hackles of conservative minister Jerry Falwell. Recently, Flynt has upped the ante by producing a porn piece using look-a-likes for Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, among others.Artist Jonathan Yeo also expressed a political sentiment with porn when he made a collage portrait of George W. Bush out of porn magazines.

As Sher says, it may be a difficult question just what we are supposed to be persuaded to believe by Flynt’s satirical porn or Yeo’s collage. Flynt’s speeches and articles defending porn are far more clear and compelling than the bad acting in his movies. But whatever the exact content of these messages, this is one bullet I am willing to bite. Porn as political satire is something more than just pure porn. There may still be issues with consent. If Flynt pushed for public displays of his
Who’s Nailin Paylin?
he might be forcing others to look at porn to convince them of his political message and this seems illiberal, but it is no worse than parades or protests which force others to deal with loud noises, offensive language, or displays of violent imagery as the medium to persuade others of some opinion.

If Porn Isn’t Free Speech,What Is It?

So if you have stayed with me, maybe you are convinced that the free speech argument for porn just does not hold up. Does this mean that the gates are wide open for censorship? Not by a long shot. Just because porn is not free speech applied to the sexual realm does not mean we can sharpen our censor pens or start fining the publishers of
Penthouse
. This is because we protect all sorts of expressive acts that are not speech.

There are several other arguments for why porn should be tolerated. Privacy, individuality, and autonomy might make arguments against state censorship just as well or better than freedom of speech without confusing bumper stickers and boobs. How these arguments hold up will depend on the premises of the arguments and the criticisms against them. If the argument in this essay holds up, however, it means that porn advocates must abandon the notion that censoring porn is like censoring political or religious speech. In the end, the porn star, the preacher, and the prude would have to change their arguments. But that can be a good thing for everyone.

NOTES

1
Wendy McElroy.
XXX : A Woman’s Right to Pornography
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 141.

2
George Sher, “Freedom of Expression in the Non-Neutral State,” in George Klosko and Steven Wall (eds.)
Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 219–30.

3
Nadine Strossen,
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights
(New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 69–71.

4
Cohen v. California
403 US 15 (1971).

5
Jacobellis v. Ohio
378 US 184 (1964).

PART V

THE ART OF DIRTY
Porn and Aesthetic Value

CHRISTOPHER BARTEL

CHAPTER 12

THE “FINE ART” OF PORNOGRAPHY?
The Conflict Between Artistic Value and Pornographic Value

Can pornographic works have artistic value? Much pornography closely resembles art, at least in many superficial respects. Films, photographs, paintings, literary works – all of these can have artistic value. Of course, films, photographs, paintings, and novels can be pornographic, too. Is there any reason to believe that pornographic works cannot have artistic value?

We might get a better grasp of these issues by examining the kinds of attention that we pay to works of art and works of pornography. When attending to an object, whether it is an image, a text, or a piece of music, we can take an
artistic interest
in the work.Typically, when we do this, we will offer criticisms, interpretations, or judgments of the work; and the result of these activities seem to be fundamentally what we are concerned with when we attend to an object artistically. We can also take a
pornographic interest
in a work – our interest in the work is in the service of our own sexual arousal.That these two kinds of interest in a work are distinct should be immediately obvious – one need not be sexually aroused in order to appreciate the artistic value of a work, and one need not appreciate the artistic value of a work in order to be sexually aroused. But is it ever the case that one actually must be sexually aroused in order to appreciate the artistic value of a work?

Of course, I imagine that it is possible for someone to take a pornographic interest in a work at one time and take an artistic interest in the work at another time.A viewer could take an artistic interest in the texturing on Michelangelo’s “David” at one time, and at another time simply take an interest in David. That is not very interesting. Think again of the initial question I asked – can pornographic works have artistic value? While some philosophers and art theorists have argued that they cannot,
¹
other philosophers have argued that they can, but these “pro-pornographic-art” philosophers also seem to suggest that the artistic value of the work is somewhat independent of the work’s pornographic content – that is, a work can have artistic value
despite
its having pornographic content.
²
I think that is probably true; however, I also find that to be a fairly weak argument.This claim is essentially the observation that one is able to take multiple kinds of interests in a work, which is not surprising. There are many kinds of interests and many kinds of values that one can attribute to a work – artistic, historical, financial, sentimental, and of course pornographic. Certainly, while these interests and values can sometimes be related, often they are not – a child’s finger painting might be artistically poor but still have great sentimental value to the child’s parents, or a work that currently demands a high financial value might turn out later to be historically unimportant.
³

A stronger argument in defense of the “pro-pornographic-art” view would hold that a work has its artistic value
by virtue of
its having some pornographic content.This would be the claim that, in some instances at least, one discovers the artistic value of a work through taking a pornographic interest in that work – that it is a necessary condition for appreciating some work artistically that one take a pornographic interest in that work.That would be very interesting if true. Unfortunately, I think that it probably is not.The purpose of this essay is to explain why.To explain this, we will need to address the following questions:What does it mean to take a “pornographic interest” in a work? What does it mean to take an “artistic interest” in a work? And finally, is it ever the case that one discovers the artistic value of a work through taking a pornographic interest in that work? This last question is the philosophical “money shot” of this essay.

Two Caveats

Before I begin, two caveats. In this essay, most of the examples I discuss are taken from the visual arts. Despite this, the argument I am making is general enough,
mutatis mutandis
, that it would apply to all cases of pornography in whatever form they make take. The general question I am asking is whether or not the aims of the production of pornography are consistent with the aims of the production of works of art. This general question could be applied equally well across all genres, styles, and forms of art, and in each instance the question is a pertinent one. Certainly, special problems may arise in the case of some art forms, problems that other art forms would avoid. Is pornographic literature necessarily artistically inferior as it seemingly must rely on clichéd or repetitive literary devices that limit the work’s artistic scope?
⁴
Is it possible for pure music to be pornographic?
⁵
While these are certainly interesting questions, it is not my intention to address them here. Additionally, most of the examples I discuss are works that are typically intended for heterosexual males. However, this choice is not because I wish to promote any heteronormative conception of sexuality. Rather, this choice is motivated by a desire to write with some authenticity! The validity of the argument presented here is not dependent on my choice of examples; rather, my argument should be general enough to apply to all cases of pornography regardless of what sexual orientation that pornography assumes.

Second, I really do not think that my question – can pornographic works have artistic value? – has very much to do with whether or not pornographic works should count as
art
. My thinking is that whether pornography should be classified as art or not has little to do with the interests that these works serve for us or the values that we attribute to these works. Still, should works of pornography count as art? Seeking an answer to this question would be frustratingly complicated. We would first need to establish a satisfactory definition of
art
, which would be a particularly difficult task, and an examination of these problems would take us too far afield. Even if we had a satisfactory definition of art, we would then need to understand the reason to ever think that pornographic works might be restricted from being art. Is there some moral reason to think that pornography cannot be art? While some may be tempted to think so, this seems intuitively groundless to me. Is it necessarily true that all pornographic works are immoral? And if so, then why should an object’s moral value have anything to do with its art-hood status? Some philosophers have argued that immoral works of art must be necessarily bad works of art,
⁶
but we should keep in mind that for something to be a “bad work of art” it must first of all
be
a work of art! For instance, in 1990 Rick Gibson constructed a piece of performance art that would become infamous. The work consisted of a 25-kilogram weight suspended above a rat, named Sniffy. Between the rat and the weight were two sheets of canvas. Gibson would take this contraption to a street corner where he would offer “art lessons” to any of the passersby. He would instruct his new-found art student to pull a lever that would drop the weight and crush Sniffy between the two sheets of canvas. Gibson never had a chance to complete the piece, however – an angry mob forced him to stop. He then returned the rat to the pet shop, where Sniffy was later sold off to be fed to a snake!
⁷
Some would argue that Gibson’s piece is not art by virtue of the fact that it is immoral.Without offering an argument for this here, it is my view that Gibson’s performance is an immoral work of art – meaning that the piece both
is
a work of art and
immoral
for its use of animal cruelty.While this might be a rather extreme example, my thinking is that what makes something a “work of art” is quite different from what makes something “morally blameworthy”; that evaluative criteria like “being morally good” have little to do with an object’s being a work of art; and that the concept of “immoral art” is
not
an oxymoron. So I would not think that an object’s being “morally bad” should count against its being art, and that it matters not whether we are talking about Sniffy the rat or works of pornography.
⁸

Alternatively, some argue that works of pornography cannot be art because they must rely on clichéd or repetitive artistic devices. It has been argued by some that pornography is too fantastical, or too predictable, or too sexually explicit to be art.
⁹
But again this seems to me a bad reason to restrict pornographic works from art. At best, these arguments could only serve to show that such clichéd, repetitive, fantastical, or predictable works are not very
good
works of art – but so what? It is not a necessary condition for something’s being a work of art that it must be “good” (whether moral or aesthetic). So, in the end, should works of pornography count as art? I really do not care.The question that I wish to address in this essay is essentially about the interests and values we may attribute to objects.While an object’s ontological category may affect the way in which it is valued, I am inclined to agree with Michael Rea that “pornography” is not itself a genuine ontological category.
¹⁰

Distinguishing Interests and Values

One might think that the natural place to start is to examine what makes a work pornographic. The idea would be to determine what the necessary and sufficient conditions might be for a work to be considered pornographic; however, there appears to be no straightforward answer to this question. If we take all of the works that might be considered pornographic as a class of objects, then we would likely find that there is nothing that all objects making up this class have in common – nothing that is either necessary or sufficient for an object to be a member of the class of “objects that might be considered pornographic.” Some pornographic works are not very explicit (e.g., the images in a
Playboy
magazine certainly depict nudity, but they are not terribly explicit), while other pornographic works do not even involve the depiction of nudity (e.g., Fragonard’s painting
The Swing
may have been titillating to a contemporary viewer for its coded suggestion of illicit sexuality, but everyone in the painting has their clothes on). In the end, we should simply acknowledge that it would be complicated and rather tricky to define pornography, and even more tricky to explain away all of the seemingly idiosyncratic cases. Luckily, we do not need to define pornography in order to address my question. Rather, it would be sufficient for our purposes to determine what it means to take a pornographic interest in an object, whether that object is an innocent shoe catalog or a really hardcore, sexually explicit video.

A “pornographic interest” is a kind of attitude that a person can take towards a certain object. As stated previously, there are many kinds of interests we can take towards an object. Taking a pornographic interest means essentially two things: that the consumer identifies something in the content of the work that would normally excite his or her sexual interest, and that the consumer imaginatively engages with that feature of the work in a way that would normally result in his or her sexual arousal.
¹¹
Of course, the kind of content that an individual finds sexually arousing will certainly differ from person to person, but despite this, instances of taking a pornographic interest always share this in common: that the individual focuses his or her attention on the arousing content in such a way that it would normally result in his or her being sexually aroused.

The necessity of the first condition of this definition – that one identify something in the content of the work that one would normally find sexually arousing – would appear obvious. If you are not into that sort of thing, then you are not going to take a pornographic interest in its depiction. It is the necessity of the second condition that needs some explaining. Imagine a case where someone identifies something in the content of a work they find to be sexually arousing, but they do not imaginatively engage with the object in the required way. Consider this example: I imagine that the editors of pornographic magazines choose which photographs to publish because they expect that one photograph will be more arousing to their consumers than another – that is to say, the editor identifies something in the content of the work that they expect would excite the sexual interest of the magazine’s consumers. Despite this, a particular editor may not actually be aroused by a photograph in a particular instance, and even if he did recognize the photograph to be sexually arousing for him. Imagine that the editor is working on the layout of the magazine, like cropping the photograph to fit the page properly – it would be highly distracting for him to be sexually aroused at that moment! When an editor is attending to the design qualities of the image (the image’s size, color, contrast, resolution, etc.), he need not at that moment take a pornographic interest in the image – that is, one might recognize that the image contains some content that one would normally find sexually arousing, but one is not at that moment imaginatively engaging with the image in order to be sexually aroused. Rather, the editor is just trying to get his job done.Without imaginatively engaging with a work in a way that would result in one’s sexual arousal, one is simply stuck in the mode of attention that the magazine editor is in: the content is identified as containing something that would be arousing in an almost detached, academic way. So, to take a properly pornographic interest in a work, the “imaginative engagement” condition must be necessary.