Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (32 page)

Once again, consider the staggering occurrence of extramarital affairs in 2008, skyrocketing since the advent of the Internet in the past decade. Now introduce veridical virtual worlds – profuse with opportunities of sex and romance, and absent of the dangers of cheating.We can imagine these statistics would explode upward even further.

As our society sails toward the future, a new virtual world approaches on the horizon. As we near its shores, the sirens’ call of hypersex and hyper-romance will beckon louder toward its temptations. If we give in to such seductions in the virtual world, it may make us realize tragically that what we want is exactly what we need not to have.

User Malfunction: Virtue Theory for a Virtual World

The Garden of Earthly Delights
is a famous 1503 oil-on-wood painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
²³
It traces the decadent devolution of humankind from the Garden of Eden in the first panel, to a deviant orgy of nude figures – incorporating fantastical animals and oversized fruit – on the next panel.The last panel portrays a hellscape: human beings tormented and damned. Art historians interpret this triptych as a warning of the path of temptation and its ultimate destination.

This religious painting provides an archetype, which figuratively expresses the real dangers of human beings indulging in unbounded desires. While residents in virtual reality perhaps need not fear religious damnation, we all need to fear the negative effects of unbounded desires upon the human person and the community which they comprise.

Virtual worlds where “anything goes” will allow human beings to realistically engage in any fantasies they have imagined, and many that they would not. Users can explore all manners of deviancy with safety and utter anonymity. Not only can such indulgences undermine romantic relationships, but they may harm the user himself. Users may find themselves unable to function well as human beings, and unable to flourish in their lives.

Traditional ethical theories would seem to condone, or even endorse, pornographic or deviant virtual sex. Utilitarianism might endorse maximizing pleasure, happiness, or user preferences while subjects are immersed in the virtual experience machine, Robert Nozick’s thought-experiment made real.
²⁴
Immanuel Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative only prohibits a person using another human being as a mere means.
²⁵
It says nothing against using pornbots, since a computer program has no intrinsic or unconditional value. Perhaps the users are using themselves as mere means – as sex objects from which to extract pleasure – but such condemnation seems weak when it would as readily condemn masturbation and casual sex in the real world.

Among the big three traditional ethical theories, virtue theory seems to stand alone in identifying why such pornographic and deviant sex might prove unethical. It is not unethical in being distasteful or objectionable to others, but because of the effect it may have on the subject himself.The user inhibits his own flourishing and functioning the further he departs into the hyperreal and deviant darkness. To be virtuous, a human being needs to have character traits in moderation.Yet the unbounded virtual world tempts with indulgences that may progressively encode vices into the user: lust, immoderation, avarice, cruelty, and so forth.

Intimacy is one primary need an individual must satisfy to function and flourish as a human being.Virtual sex threatens to undermine such intimacy via virtual cheating, hyperreal sex and romance, and sexual deviance. Virtual pornography consumers would malfunction, as they frustrate rather than cultivate real-life intimate connections.

Perhaps our current population can resist the temptations proffered by
Second Life
and other virtual environments. But what of the next generations, born into a society dominated by virtual worlds? By 2011 an estimated 53 percent of children 3–18 years of age will be using virtual worlds on a monthly basis, at the very least.
²⁶
This percentage and usage are sure to dramatically increase as virtual reality comes to pervade our world in decades beyond.

Consider the possible damage that already has been done to children born into the Internet age, where pornography saturates cyberspace. Statistics indicate that 93.2 percent of boys, and 61.1 percent of girls, have seen Internet pornography before the age of 18.
²⁷
Most exposure began between the ages of 14 and 17. A considerable percentage of children had, at least once, viewed images of paraphilic or criminal sexual activity, including sexual violence and child pornography. In 2007, the company behind
Second Life
was sued. The claimant alleged
Second Life
had been allowing minors “free access [where] users can mimick sexual acts, going as far as rape scenes, bondage, zoophilia and scatophilia.”
²⁸

How many children in the “virtual age” will be exposed to sexual deviance before they are ready to cope? How will children resist virtual temptations before they can develop their autonomy? Even if we adults in the present age would have a fighting chance, these children of the future may not, delivered into an age pervaded by virtual worlds.

The Pornographic Singularity:A Bleak Prophecy

The purpose of this essay is not to denounce virtual reality or pornography, but to forewarn of the future effects their coupling will breed. A pornographic Pandora’s Box will be opened by virtual technologies, releasing hypersex and hyper-romance, virtual cheating, and unbounded sexual deviancies. Such Freudian Ids run rampant will effect the corrosion of intimacy and social relationships. If so, what might be left? Users corrupted by desires, individuals bereft of committed relationships, a community without families, and a town square without neighbors.

We are headed toward a technological fall, where forbidden fruits will abound in virtual gardens. I cannot sufficiently convey the inexorable temptations promised by virtual advancements, nor statistically establish their far-reaching effects. After all, the future is not here yet, and by then it will have been too late for warning. For the present, I can only extrapolate based on current statistics regarding the dangers of pornography, coupled with the temptations promised by these eventual virtualities. This extrapolation provides sufficient reason to fear the future.

Like the prophecies of Cassandra in Greek mythology, warnings of the future often fail due to our “failure of imagination” in the present. But as technology outpaces civilization’s ability to constructively adapt to it, we need to acknowledge that the downfall of civilization need not come from without, in the form of excessive carbon emissions, food shortage, or nuclear annihilation. Civilization’s downfall may come from within; the tree of technology dangling before our mouths, fruits too abundant to ignore, too tantalizing to resist.

NOTES

1
G. Mudur, “ ‘Porn’Art in Ivory, 35,000 Years Old,”
Telegraph
, Calcutta (May 2009).

2
Larry and Andy Wachowski (dirs.)
The Matrix
(Warner, 1999).

3
See Dove’s award-winning television ad campaign and commercial, “Evolution.” Available online at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
.

4
Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation
, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

5
Naomi Wolf, “The Porn Myth,”
New York Magazine
(October 20, 2003).

6
Lynne Segal, “Sweet Sorrows, Painful Pleasures: Pornography and the Perils of Heterosexual Desire,” in Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh (eds.)
Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate
(London:Virago, 2006).

7
Wolf, “The Porn Myth.”

8
“Rom-coms ‘spoil your love life,’”
BBC News
(December 16, 2008).

9
Kate Connolly,“Second Life in Virtual Child Sex Scandal,”
Guardian
(May 2007).

10
Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting,”
Nerve.com
(2001).

11
American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, 3rd edn. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1987).

12
Diana Russell,
Rape and Marriage
(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982).

13
D. Zillmann and J. Bryant, “Shifting Preferences in Pornography Consumption,”
Communications Research
13, 4 (1986): 560–78. See also, R. J. McGuire, J. M. Carlisle, and B. G. Young, “Sexual Deviations as Conditioned Behavior: A Hypothesis,”
Behavior Research Therapy
2 (1965): 185–90.

14
S. Rachman and R. Hodgson, “Fetishes and Their Associated Behavior,”
Sexuality and Disability
20, 2 (1968): 135–47.

15
D. Zillman and J. Bryant, “Pornography’s Impact on Sexual Satisfaction,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
18, 5 (1988): 438–53. See also, D. Zillman and J. Bryant, “Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values,”
Journal of Family Issues
9, 4 (1988): 518–44.

16
R. J. McGuire, J. M. Carlisle, and B. G. Young, “Sexual Deviations as Conditioned Behavior: A Hypothesis,”
Behavior Research Therapy
2 (1965): 185–90. See also F. M. Osanka and S. L. Johann,
Sourcebook on Pornography
(Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989).

17
Danny Shea, “Second Life Divorce: Woman Catches Husband in Virtual Gay Affair,”
Huffington Post
(February 2009).

18
Lindsay Richardson, “Percentage of Married Couples Who Cheat,” available online at www.catalogs.com/info/relationships/percentage-of-marriedcouples-who-cheat-on-each-ot.html (accessed August 14, 2009).

19
Ibid.

20
Jane Brody, “Cybersex Gives Birth to a Psychological Disorder,”
New York Times on the Web
(May 2000).

21
Ibid.

22
Phillip Victor, “Virtual Affair Ends in Real-Life Divorce,”
ABC News
(November 2008).

23
The painting is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

24
Robert Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(Basic Books: New York, 1974), pp. 42–5.

25
Immanuel Kant,
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785)
, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

26
Debra Aho, “Kids and Teens: Virtual Worlds Open New Universes,” EMarketer (September 2007).

27
C. Sabina, J. Wolak, and D. Finkelhor, “The Nature and Dynamics of Internet Pornography Exposure for Youth,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 11, 6 (December 2008): 691–3.

28
“French Watchdog Organization Targets Second Life,” GamePolitics.com (June 2007).

PART VII

KINK
Alternative Porn and BDSM

CHAD PARKHILL

CHAPTER 17

WHAT DO HETEROSEXUAL MEN GET OUT OF CONSUMING GIRL–GIRL PORNOGRAPHY?

“At the very least, curious”

The American feminist scholars Cindy Jenefsky and Diane Helene Miller preface their survey of seven years of what they term “girl–girl” pictorials from
Penthouse
with the observation that there is something “at the very least, curious” about the fact that heterosexual men frequently consume images of women having or pretending to have sex with one another.
¹
After all, wouldn’t such images threaten the image of dominant heterosexual masculinity that the magazine thrives off? I agree with Jenefsky and Miller’s observation, but it is clear that their article is also curiously uninterested in whatever that thing might be. Their analysis, like many others by higher-profile second-wave feminist scholars such as Andrea Dworkin, seeks to make heterosexual men’s consumption of girl–girl pornography depressingly explicable. In Jenefsky and Miller’s case, they conclude by arguing that the role of girl–girl sex in
Penthouse
is to present a fantasy image of the sexually available lesbian, a woman whose “experimentation” reinforces the naturalness and superiority of heterosexuality. Presumably, what men are supposed to find attractive here is the idea that all women are eventually sexually available to men.

The aim of this chapter is to tell another story about the pleasures that heterosexual men experience when consuming girl–girl pornography. More specifically, I will argue that it is entirely possible to argue that what heterosexual men find most arousing about girl–girl pornography is the
absence
of male heterosexuality from the scene. In order to make this argument, I will critically interrogate Jenefsky and Miller’s reading of girl–girl pictorials in
Penthouse
, which I take to be representative of a certain kind of second-wave feminist thought about the issue, and examine other ways that the issue can be thought through. I have chosen to focus on Jenefsky and Miller’s analysis because their article is, in fact, clearer, more detailed, and better-structured than the disparate comments about girl–girl pornography in more famous feminist texts such as Andrea Dworkin’s
Pornography
. Being so clear, it brings to light some of the problems with how second-wave feminist scholars have understood the question of what heterosexual men get out of consuming girl–girl pornography.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not out to prove that Jenefsky and Miller are decisively “wrong” about girl–girl pornography. I owe thinkers such as Jenefsky and Miller a debt, as their work has influenced mine in ways too detailed to elaborate upon here. My aim, instead, is to think in other ways about what makes the phenomenon of girl–girl pornography so curious, hopefully in ways that maintain its curiousness. But, of course, curious things are rarely simple, and girl–girl pornography is not an exception.

What Do Jenefsky and Miller Say About Girl–Girl Pornography?

Jenefsky and Miller divide girl–girl pictorials in
Penthouse
into five categories spanning a spectrum of heterosexualization. At one end of the spectrum is the
ménage-à-trois
, two women and a man being sexual with one another.This is followed by the explicit staging of girl–girl sex for the sexual pleasure of one or more men not visible within the images, but included within the verbal narrative. Next on the spectrum is girl–girl sex with no males present within the narrative, but performed by heterosexually identified females. This is followed by girl– girl sex as an explicit
imitation
of heterosexuality, but with no clues as to whether or not the women involved consider themselves heterosexual or lesbian. At the far end of the spectrum is the portrayal of girl–girl sex with no identified ties to heterosexuality.

As examples of the latter four categories, they read four narrative pictorials: “The Princess and the Clown,” in which two actresses put on an erotic performance of girl–girl sex for their director, Carlo (who is not pictured in the photos);“Tales of the Morning After,” in which two female roommates share stories about their heterosexual erotic adventures of the night before, get turned on, and have sex with each other; “The Wedding Game,” in which two women, presented by the narrative text as “lovers,” dress up as bride and groom and have sex; and “Lucy and Suki,” in which an experienced Japanese woman (Suki) initiates a naïve Western woman (Lucy) in “the art of love.” On the basis of these four pictorials, Jenefsky and Miller claim that
Penthouse
reduces lesbianism to a merely sexual identity, that pleasure within that sexual identity comes from penetration, and that the pictorials present penetration as a masculine prerogative. This, in turn, is supposed to support the notion that lesbian sex is somehow imitative of, or less “real” than, heterosexuality.

The structure of their argument allows Jenefsky and Miller to place the readings that best support their conclusion first, while relegating the two more problematic pictorials to the middle of the article. It is hard to argue with Jenefsky and Miller’s readings of the “The Princess and the Clown” and “Tales of the Morning After.” Both depict clearly heterosexual women having sex with each other either as an erotic performance for a man or as a convenient outlet in the absence of a man. However, their readings become more tenuous in the case of the last two pictorials. They understand the women in “The Wedding Game” to be heterosexual only because the narrative text does not explicitly identify them as lesbian. However, the narrative text explicitly calls them “lovers.” Similarly, the fact that the women have sex while dressed as bride and groom is, at the very least, ambivalent. Jenefsky and Miller claim that this presents lesbian sex as derivative of heterosexual sex, thus reinforcing the idea that heterosexuality is “original” and “natural.”

However, recent work by feminist philosopher Judith Butler (among others) emphasizes the destabilizing possibilities of gender imitation, presumably including the form of gender imitation performed by the “groom” in “The Wedding Game.” Her article “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” argues that the performative nature of drag demonstrates the artificiality of
all
gender performances, rendering the question of “originality” and “derivation” moot. Jenefsky and Miller themselves quote part of “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in their article: “if it were not for the notion of the homosexual
as
copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality
as
origin.”
²
Curiously, however, they neglect to quote a passage immediately following, in which Butler extends the argument and comes up with a decidedly different conclusion:

On the contrary,
imitation
does not copy that which is prior, but produces and
inverts
the very terms of priority and derivativeness. . . .These are, quite literally,
inverted
inversions, ones which invert the order of imitated and imitation, and which, in the process, expose the fundamental dependency of “the origin” on that which it claims to produce as its secondary effect.
³

Thus, contrary to Jefensky and Miller’s analysis of the butch/femme couple in wedding drag in “The Wedding Game,” it is by no means clear that the staging of a mock lesbian wedding followed by graphic girl–girl sex in
Penthouse
naturalizes heterosexuality. Indeed, as Butler’s argument indicates, those very same activities in a different context – say, in a performance piece at an art gallery – could, in fact, be read as subverting the very structure of originality and derivation that Jenefsky and Miller’s article relies upon to condemn the girl–girl pictorials in
Penthouse
. Clearly, there’s more to what men get out of girl–girl pornography than this – unless we believe that the average pornography consumer is too thick to notice when his sexual identity is being challenged by a subversive gender performance.

What Do Jenefsky and Miller Assume About Men,Women, and Pornography?

In the introduction to this essay, I stated that it is not my intention here to prove decisively that Jenefsky and Miller are “wrong” about girl–girl pornography. Another way to put this is to say that Jenefsky and Miller’s article operates within a certain tradition of thought with its own rules for determining whether or not a given statement is true, false, or can even be conceived of as either true or false.Within that tradition, Jenefsky and Miller’s arguments are coherent and meet the rules for “truth.” But in order to open up a space for a
different
understanding of what heterosexual men get from girl–girl pornography, we must examine the tradition that Jenefsky and Miller’s article draws from, and sketch how its argument is limited by what this tradition takes for granted.

It is clear that Jenefsky and Miller position their article as a continuation of second-wave “anti-sex” feminist critiques of pornography. They approvingly cite Dworkin’s work on pornography, neglecting to articulate some of the very many criticisms of her position made by other feminists. In fact, Jenefsky and Miller’s description of the heterosexism in girl–girl pornography is entirely consonant with that of Dworkin, who summarizes a girl–girl photo in her book
Pornography
by stating: “The lesbian is colonialized [
sic
], reduced to a variant of woman-as-sex-object, used to demonstrate and prove that male power pervades and invades even the private sanctuary of women with each other.”
⁴

The position that anti-pornography feminists took was, in turn, a direct response to the sexual liberation movement, especially those legal theorists who sought to liberalize obscenity laws. Yet as much as these two camps engaged in prolonged intellectual and legal battles – exemplified by the fierce debates surrounding Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s proposed Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance – their arguments share much in common.As Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson argue, both positions share a
negative
understanding of pornography, both in the sense of moral valence and in the sense that pornography is understood to be the byproduct of an unhealthy social pysche.
⁵
Thus the obscenity law reformer does not want to promote pornography, but rather to promote the healthy expression of sexuality through a literature of erotic realism, whose aesthetic superiority will soon render pornography as we know it obsolete. Similarly, the anti-pornography feminist construes pornography as both the expression of the misogynist erotics of the average heterosexual man
and
the means through which misogyny is transmitted to average heterosexual men. Thus her task is to lay the groundwork for a new form of non-misogynist heterosexual erotics through the censorship of pornography. In both cases pornography is construed as an aesthetic and ethical failure.

Jenefsky and Miller do not go so far as to call consumers of pornography “dirty old men,” but they clearly do not consider
Penthouse
’s readers to be capable of critical reflection about their preferred one-handed reading. As I mentioned earlier, one can only cite Butler’s work on drag to support the argument that two women having sex in wedding garb portrays heterosexuality as natural and lesbianism as derivative
if
one assumes that the readers of
Penthouse
are not intellectually developed enough to register real gender destabilization when they see it. Jenefksy and Miller thus entirely avoid the question of how
Penthouse
’s audience might respond to its message. This avoidance goes all the way down to grammar:
Penthouse
, we are told, “help[s] to reassert male sexual mastery, reinscribing heterosexual dominance more broadly.”
⁶
In reply I would ask: to whom does
Penthouse
reassert male sexual mastery? Quite clearly it does not do so to Jenefsky and Miller themselves, otherwise they would not have been capable of publishing their feminist analysis of it. But if they have not been fooled by
Penthouse
’s attempts to use lesbianism to shore up heterosexuality, why do they not consider the possibility that
Penthouse
’s traditional target market might not buy it, either?

Since Jenefsky and Miller assume that the readers of
Penthouse
can only passively accept what the magazine tells them, they also assume that any action inside the photo shoots always signifies one thing: male dominance. Let me take as an example their discussion of the question of penetration. Having noticed that none of the women in these pictorials penetrates the other with fingers or a dildo, and that several shots focus on the “penetrable” vagina or anus, Jenefsky and Miller conclude that
Penthouse
constructs an understanding of penetration as a solely masculine prerogative. This is undoubtedly true. But it is also the case that if the pictorials that Jenefsky and Miller examine
were
to contain shots of women penetrating each other with, say, strap-on dildos or vibrators, they could nevertheless reach the same conclusion about what these acts of penetration ultimately mean.