Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (28 page)

However, none of these conditions need necessarily be the case in the making of a pornographic film or image. There are many examples of exhibitionist amateur porn where no form of economic motivation is involved. But that is not so with our paradigmatic example. It is a professionally produced film. Given that, there is no reason to suppose in the example that the actors were not paid a fair wage for their time and performance and that they prefer to earn their money doing this than earn an equal amount of money in an office or teaching. Exploitation is wrong and it is the subject of legal sanction. If exploitation occurs in the production of pornography, it ought to be punished as it ought to be if it occurs in the picking of cockles or the manufacture of clothes. But the crime here is exploitation and not making pornography. The actual industry or product made is incidental to the moral wrongness.

Interestingly, if the ideal of a victim is upheld, then it seems that pornographic literature is not the subject of moral judgment at all because it does not involve any actors at all. Both the novels
Emanuelle
and
The Story of O
should rightly be considered pornographic and
Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover
was famously, of course, once described this way.
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Verbal pornography involves an author and a reader and no one else. One might want to bite the bullet and say there is a difference between verbal and aural-visual pornography, but then the problem of animated porn would raise new questions. However, there is a further participant: the consumer. Can the consumer be considered a victim?

To be unprejudiced, let us term the watchers, readers, and observers of pornography as “enthusiasts.” Can the enthusiast be a victim in the participation in pornographic practices? Well, children are excluded from the consumption of pornographic objects, whether aural, verbal, or visual, because it harms them in some way. In most countries, consumption of pornographic objects will be legally prohibited to a certain age group, usually those below eighteen. What if it were the case that the nature of pornography was such that even the most adult or rational among us is somehow harmed by viewing or reading it?

Like offense, it is very difficult to imagine how a legal or moral consensus could be reached on this point – at least within a constitutional democracy and not a theocratic state – because we are allowing certain people to decide what is best for others, and this contradicts our commonly held belief in personal autonomy. However, there is, in some very broad sense, a truth in the claim that experiencing pornography is harmful. Not, though, in a simple, measurable way and we shall return to this point below. Prior to this, there is a more obvious contender for the description of victim who is harmed by both aural-visual and verbal pornographic objects.

The feminist critique of pornography claims that women alone are wronged in the production and consumption of pornography. Some align this with exploitation, but that is not gender specific and has been discussed above.Women are specifically harmed because we live in a patriarchal society where equality is not yet institutionalized and that is wrong. So, females in our society ought to be equal and the present state of inequality is reinforced and maintained by the institution of pornography. (Much like the recitation of Irish jokes is thought to be harmless but, in fact, determines subconsciously how the majority in the UK perceive the Irish.) Pornography creates victims of the females in a society since they are denied equality as a consequence of its existence.There are two aspects to this critique: (1) pornography harms individual women; (2) pornography necessarily degrades women as a group.

It might be claimed that pornography harms individual women because it encourages their maltreatment at the hands of males, most extremely in a causal relationship with instances of rape, and more subtlety in ways such as harassment and objectification of particular females. Yet, the empirical claims of the influence that pornography has on the behavior of its enthusiasts, causal or otherwise, are controversial and contestable at best. What one report asserts, another denies and how one interprets the data is often very much from the perspective of prejudice. The concepts and definitions used in such empirical studies seem to support the desired conclusions from the beginning and no empirical study will ever be able to resolve the issue of pornography’s relationship to behavior in a way which is final and inveterate.

The more subtle claim is that women as a group may well be maltreated by males due to the latter’s consumption of pornography. The particular man may see women first and foremost as sexual objects, as inferior to him, as wanting him and, as such, his perception of women has been distorted by his use of pornography.The supposed relationship of equality between the two sexes has been distorted. In the paradigmatic example, there is no real difference between what the man is doing and what the woman is doing.They are reciprocally having sex. Nevertheless, it is very natural to use the active grammatical forms for male actions and the passive forms for female actions and that reflects the disparity; pornography maintains the unjustified inequality of contemporary society. He is penetrating, she is being penetrated. He puts his cock in her mouth, she takes it in her mouth and so on. Pornography reinforces these ways of seeing the scene; it represents women in hierarchical relationships with men.

There is, though, nothing specific to pornography about the representation of women and many rap and hip-hop music videos are far more demeaning because they objectify women and celebrate hierarchical relationships; 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” being a prime example.
⁴
But they too could be the subject of moral judgment akin to the moral judgment of pornographic objects and very often are. One might want to counter-assert the countless female producers and directors who are now taking control of large parts of the pornographic industry and state that it is possible that pornography could be a way to address and abolish the unjustified, cultural inequality between the sexes. One could make a pornographic film which empowered women and
Baise-moi
seems to attempt this, whether it was successful or not.
⁵

But the real problem with the egalitarian critique is that any hierarchical power relationship which is unjustified and rests solely on power is as injurious to men as it is to women; the dominator will have a distorted self-understanding because he is uncertain that his supposed understanding of a relationship will be reciprocated.The woman may play the role of the lover, but she may have no sincere interest in the man as a person. Without a reciprocal, honest relationship he is unable to know how she perceives him and, hence, how he really exists for others. The representations of social relationships at the heart of pornography allow neither men nor women (or other sexualities, races, and so on) to appreciate or partake in practices and relationships that would be beneficial to their own development and self-understanding. So, again, this is not a problem unique to women.

Does it make sense, then, to talk of our culture being a victim of pornography? Let us make a summary of the inconclusive comments above because they all embody some truth about pornography, but unfortunately only a partial one. If any wrongness can be perceived in pornographic objects, it must arise from these considerations. Certain practices, as determined by a particular culture, are considered taboo and not for accessible, public consumption. These practices are open to change and the production of certain films, literature, or images will open a space between the public understanding of what is taboo and what has generally, up to that historical point, been taken to be taboo. Hence, public kissing is
now
acceptable, but public intercourse is not. Public understanding is dependent on a particular culture which is malleable and undergoing change.These practices exclude certain groups (such as children) who are unable to understand them because of a lack of concepts or experience that will have the consequence of distorting their own experience of the practice. Some contemporary pornography is such that enthusiasts are prone to objectify social relationships in a distorted rather than a healthy way. Pornography is a representation of what is taboo but, even if not necessarily so, is arguably a contingent and historical representation of inequality between the sexes. Its wrongness, then, lies in its representing relationships between males and females which distort equitable relationships and maintain and support institutions of inequality.

Children, for example, are not allowed to consume violent material in the media because such images need to be clearly categorized as either fiction or fact. Mass media represent, almost universally, violence as desirable, as a resolution, and rarely represent the real consequences of actual violence. A child who is unable, due to a lack of experience and knowledge, to distinguish between the representation of violence and the reality of violence may develop undesirable behavior. If children were allowed undiluted access to these images they may well procure certain undesirable moral attitudes: that might is right, that power is desirable, that violence is a solution, and so on. Only the subtlety of “adult” drama, film, and literature can do justice to the complexity of violence and its relationship to our society. Similarly, adults who lack the requisite social and emotional intelligence may view pornography and form attitudes concerning social relationships that are undesirable: the lack of consequences of emotional entanglement, the superficiality of emotional exchanges, the over-determination of sex as a constituent part of a healthy relationship, the necessity of a sexual dimension in all relationships, and so on.These attitudes do not just relate to male-female relationships, but also to black-white, hetro-gay and gay-gay relationships. Unfortunately, as many Shakespeares, Tolstoys, and Dostoevskys as there are for the Seagals, Willises, and Schwarzeneggers of this world, there is very little adult pornography to compensate for the amount of the childish, immature sort. And that is the greatest wrong at the heart of pornography.
⁶

Culture is “harmed” or “wronged” because the taboo must function in accordance with the central principles of a society. A rational, axiomatic principle of our society is equality and the vast majority of pornography is incoherent with this principle. Note that this deviates from the feminist critique in saying that not just a specific group of society but all society and all human relationships will be harmed by the unrestricted production, exchange, and consumption of pornography. However, this is again no different from other aesthetic objects – film, television, music, literature, and so on – which supply some of the ways, concepts, and forms of social relationships through which individuals can form a self-understanding.

A Different Tack

The various moral objections to pornography are not wholly false.They do all grasp something of the wrongness of specific examples of pornography and so encapsulate an aspect of the truth. But they also over-extend their own objection into a definitional criterion of pornography: obscenity draws the line between the publicly acceptable and the taboo, but assumes that the “obscene” is somehow fixed and not cultural; the charge of exploitation concerns the freedom of people to participate in things they would or would not do, but rests on an assumption that there are limits to what we are free to do which are, once again, fixed. Feminists see all pornography as the expression of female subordination; if it is not, it is not pornography. Finally, pornography is assumed to harm culture because it distorts our own self-understanding, but no space is made for pornography that could help or aid our own self-understanding which it, like other aesthetic objects, could do. The problem is that we view pornography in isolation from other aesthetic objects, as though it is a “pretend” or a “disingenuous” artistic object.

Pornography should not be treated as different in kind from other aesthetic objects, but should also be subject to the same moral judgment. Is the work conservative or progressive? Does it encourage the violation of rational, social relationships? Furthermore, the judgment ought to be an aesthetic one, e.g., “this is a poor example of the pornographic genre because it misrepresents human reality.” One obvious illustration is the anonymous nature of most pornographic films, from the characterless (and faceless) actors to the current trend for glory hole porn. The message is obvious: sex is isolated from communication, interaction, and intimacy and is best when it is between available strangers with no consequences or involvement. Such considerations should never lead to legal sanction, but they are adequate grounds for moral approbation or condemnation in the same way the genre of “blaxploitation” films deserves moral condemnation. Morally it makes no sense to isolate the discourse of pornography from other spheres of art because the moral considerations are the same, but it does make sense to criticize and engage pornographic material as one would with all other aesthetic objects.We should not just brush it under the carpet and, by that, I mean
either
ignore its existence
or
haphazardly categorize it in simplistic moral terms.

Pornography’s relationship to culture is complex, but also necessary. A society will always identify taboo in order to regulate the norm and an experience of taboo should reinforce our understanding of the norm. The question is whether or not a particular social taboo is consistent with certain moral concepts important to that culture: equality, liberty, individual welfare, and so on. It is not a question of whether pornography should or should not be banned, restricted, or heavily regulated, nor a question of whether it is or is not moral, but a question of a dialogue between what is and what is not acceptable. If such a dialogue is not carried out – and pornography itself is one way to engage in this conversation – then specific cultural attitudes may well violate or obstruct agreed and public norms of right and moral conduct. Moral concepts and categories arise from our self-understanding and this is, in so many ways, ultimately related with a culture’s representation of itself. It is not a question of whether pornography is moral or immoral, but whether it identifies the correct taboos and norms of social relationships and represents an easy way for us to understand ourselves in relation to others. Art regulates culturally appropriate behavior by engaging with both actions of supreme wilfulness and eccentricity, but also with the public expectations of individuals. It oscillates between these two extremes to develop culturally appropriate behavior and limits of behavior while overthrowing taboos which, as Hamlet would have had it, are “out of joint.” Contemporarily, due to its almost exclusively capitalistic nature, the pornographic industry is more interested in making money than valuable art, as are so many domains of cultural production.