Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (34 page)

2
Butler, in Jenefsky and Miller, “Phallic Intrusion,” p. 383.

3
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Sara Salih and Judith Butler (eds.)
The Judith Butler Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 129. Emphasis in original.

4
Andrea Dworkin,
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
(London:The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 47.

5
Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson,
On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

6
Jenefsky and Miller, “Phallic Intrusion,” p. 383.

7
Annamarie Jagose,
Lesbian Utopics
(New York: Routledge, 1994).

8
Monique Wittig,
The Straight Mind and Other Essays
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 32.

9
Michel Foucault,
The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume One
,trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 17–49.

10
I have taken this term from Dennis Giles, as cited by Linda Williams in
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible
” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 81.

11
Ibid., p. 82.

12
David Loftus,
Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), pp. 58–9.

13
For an overview, see Jane Gallop, “Beyond the
Jouissance
Principle,”
Representations
7 (1984): 110–15.

14
Cited in Gallop, “Beyond the
Jouissance
Principle,” p. 114.

15
Roland Barthes,
The Pleassure of the Text
, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 4.

UMMNI KHAN

CHAPTER 18

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT
The “Violent” Controversy Surrounding SM Porn

Aisha’s Coming Out

Do you remember the first time that philosophy rocked your world?

For Aisha, it was during the heady excitement of freshman year. She had an ultra-cool prof. who introduced her to concepts like “hegemonic gender roles” and assigned women’s liberation texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
to Catharine MacKinnon’s
Feminism Unmodified
. Later, Aisha joined the editorial board of Out
Rage
, a student-run journal that addressed female sexual subordination and strategies of resistance.The staff often worked into the night, hashing out their own experiences of oppression and connecting these traumatic personal incidents to patriarchal political structures. Aisha emerged from this cocoon of radical theory and consciousness-raising as an enlightened feminist in the mid-1990s. She understood that mainstream culture eroticized male dominance and female submission, resulting in the ubiquity of violence against women, from marital abuse to date rape to stranger danger in a dark alley.

Unfortunately, Aisha’s body betrayed her politics during unexpected moments, particularly when cloistered in a movie theatre. Rape scenes in films left her riveted.When she saw
A Clockwork Orange
, excitement unexpectedly intruded on her rage and fear. In defense, she vehemently derided the filmmaker for his gratuitous exploitation of female victimization – surely not done for an artistic purpose, but instead to titillate with eroticized violence.The rush of arousal instigated by the rape scene in
Thelma and Louise
was more difficult to rationalize. Particularly when Aisha found herself more turned on by that moment of brutality than by the consensual sex scene with Brad Pitt. Even more shameful, she could not help getting hot and bothered after seeing a documentary that graphically displayed the horrors of the porn industry: a woman’s nipples clamped tight, her legs pushed too far apart. Of course, the beauty of not having a penis is that your
hard on
, such as it is, can be discretely hidden away, and your flushed cheeks can be chalked up to indignation instead of arousal.

But this quarrel between feminism and flesh was disconcerting. The mind–body dualism – where intellect is elevated as human and spiritual, and corporeal impulses are disparaged as animal and base – was something Aisha had studied as an example of patriarchal philosophy and religion. Surely this was not the answer. Of course, Aisha was also familiar with the “myth of female masochism,” perpetuated by early psychologists who claimed that women secretly yearned to capitulate to male domination.
¹
She knew, however, that she had no desire to actually
be
violated. Yet the
representation
of sexual abuse continued to prompt an unwelcome tingling response. Aisha desperately sought an explanation, seeking answers in more feminist theory in the way that others might turn to the Bible for guidance.

It did not take long to discover a valid and exculpatory account for her treacherous excitement. According to feminist psychology, Aisha had internalized patriarchal prescriptions of sexuality as a result of relentless social conditioning. Apparently, she got wet at imagery of sexual abuse the way a Pavlovian dog salivates when it hears the bell. It was a learned response, not a natural one, so it could and should be unlearned. As Susan Brownmiller stated, “The rape fantasy exists in women as a man-made ice-berg. It can be destroyed – by feminism.”
²
Aisha just had to persevere. Read more theory, join more support groups, and masturbate to images of healthy sexuality. And so she did. Until one day . . .

Aisha fell for Gabriel. Hard
.

He was a roguish graduate student devoted to “sex positive” feminism and postmodern ideas about the ambiguity of meaning. Later, after the argument, Aisha and Gabriel talked about what had prompted him to present her with a copy of
Whiplash
, a Canadian magazine featuring sadomasochism (SM), fetishism, bondage, and discipline. SM porn had initially shocked the hell out of her system.They almost broke up over it.

“How
dare
you impose your perverse fantasy on me?” she sputtered, attempting to conceal a fervid arousal that seemed to leap out of her skin. “I thought you were progressive. I thought you cared about the issue of violence against women; I didn’t think you got off on it!”

“It’s not violence,” Gabriel had protested. “It’s role-playing.” He captured her tiny wrists in one hand and bent down to kiss her. “Besides,” he said arrogantly, before his lips closed the distance, “methinks thou dost protest too much.”You can imagine how hot the sex was that night . . .

The Legal Controversy

Does SM porn signify insidious sexual violence or innocuous sexual variation? The answer to this question can have a determinative effect, not just on Aisha and Gabriel’s love affair, but also on whether a court will find a sadomasochistic text to be obscene.

Defendants define SM as a “consensual exchange of power” that can involve fantasy, erotic pain, and/or restraint for the mutual pleasure of the players.
³
The argument here is that SM text is not a representation of violence per se, but rather a coded expression of the complementary sexual desires of dominance and submission.Adherents to this view, such as Gabriel, may define SM as role-playing in order to differentiate the theatrical nature of the sexual practice from genuine coercive exploitation. Furthermore, people who enjoy SM porn contend that consent is either expressed or implied in these representations. Some defendants have argued that sadomasochistic desire can be likened to or indeed is a type of sexual orientation, and that censorship of these materials will have a discriminatory impact on a sexual minority.

Critics and prosecutors have countered that if aggression, humiliation, hitting, bondage, and/or skin bruising or breaking is portrayed in a sexual context, it is self-evident that this conveys violence. For anti-SM advocates, demonstrations of consent do not neutralize the harm, but indeed can actually compound the dehumanizing nature of the text. Anti-SM feminists might further argue that this pathology – particularly when manifested in submissive-leaning women – is born out of a patriarchal monopoly on mainstream sexual representation. As Aisha had initially determined, those who fall prey to SM arousal are victims of a society that does not offer egalitarian images of sexuality. Finally, the critics have suggested that even if SM desires constitute a sexual orientation, it is still a dangerous pathology that is justifiably discouraged by the state through censorship of SM texts.

Understanding the Context

The critics of SM and its representations have a point. Violence against women exists and persists. Every woman knows this, whether from personal experience or third-party accounts from loved ones. This is what mobilized Aisha and her co-editors to expose the pervasiveness of the problem in the journal Out
Rage
.

Thanks to a courageous feminist movement, governments have been forced to take heed of the issue and form committees, create policies, and change laws, all in an effort to eradicate this atrocity. One particular area that has received an inordinate amount of attention is pornography, often seen as both a product and perpetrator of sexual violence. According to theories espoused by anti-porn feminists and social conservatives, the creation of pornography involves coercion and exploitation of female porn stars, and the consumption of pornography creates attitudinal changes in the male viewer, rendering women objects to be used and abused.
⁴
The USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom have enacted and repeatedly revised anti-obscenity legislation in attempts to counter such harms.

Although laws that prohibit sexual expression are nothing new, their justifications have changed over the years. Traditionally, judges rationalized that it was the state’s duty to prevent the dissemination of sexual material on moral grounds. In the nineteenth-century case of
R. v. Hicklin
, an English court determined that society was entitled to censor material that “depraves and corrupts those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”
⁵
From this point forward, obscenity cases in the Common Law world were primarily concerned with protecting susceptible individuals from moral corruption.

In the twentieth century, certain jurisdictions sought to arrive at a more democratic definition of obscenity. Jurisprudence in the United States and Canada updated the test for obscenity by requiring decision makers to empathize with the “average” person. Under this approach, judges and juries applied contemporary community standards to determine if a work was “prurient,” “indecent,” “dirty,” or “dangerous.”

Most recently in the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom, justifications for the prohibition of obscenity have shifted from morality preservation to harm prevention. This brings us to our current time period, in which certain types of pornography have been linked to sexual violence, and are thus justifiably censored on the grounds of women’s safety and equality.

Of course, the question is how do we establish the causal connections required to justify criminal sanctions? How do we differentiate benign erotica from pornographic depictions that cause harm by detracting from women’s equal status and increasing their vulnerability to sexual assault? The most common answer has been that sexual texts eroticizing hierarchy or depicting violence are literally prescriptive. Such an approach almost invariably categorizes SM porn as obscene, along with many other more mainstream varieties of pornography.The argument is that such texts create an association between misogynistic aggression and sexual arousal, inciting the male viewer to recreate the depicted pornographic scenarios in real life. This is what I call the “monkey see, monkey do” hypothesis. As for the porn actresses or models, their victim status is established through their participation in the making of such a text. If any disavow the victim label, they are dismissed as too damaged to even recognize their own subordination.

Violence

The social science evidence that links adult porn to violence is, to say the least, not convincing.
⁶
You do not have to be a criminologist, or to have meticulously combed through the data, to know this. Consider the fact that for at least ten years the Internet has made every possible variety of pornographic material, from fetish flicks to virtual snuff films, available for free with just a few keystrokes. Despite this, we have not seen a spike in reported sexual violence. In fact, studies have begun to show that sexual violence has been steadily decreasing even as porn becomes more readily available.
⁷
And yet the “monkey see, monkey do” hypothesis persists in law: porn watching is construed as mere foreplay that leads to a reenactment with non-consenting individuals. And while this premise
may
hold true for some viewers, it may also be true that any number of texts – commercials, horror movies,
CSI
episodes – also have similar deleterious effects on
some
people. So why is one criminalized, while the other is not?

In law, if a text has “artistic merit” – that is, if a judge decides that it appeals to one’s intellect – then it is protected speech, even if one could present evidence linking the text to harm. If a judge decides that the text appeals solely to one’s “base” sexual instincts, then it can either be denied the label of expression or be deemed illicit expression, regardless of proof of harm.This is why some movies depicting graphic sexual violence, like
Death Wish
or
Deliverance
, may be protected, while SM magazines like
Whiplash
may not – always depending, of course, on the whims of the particular judge or jury who happens to be evaluating the text.

Defenders of SM porn spend a lot of their time distinguishing SM from violence and rebutting the “monkey see, monkey do” hypothesis. They pull out social science evidence, they emphasize the interdependency of the dom/sub encounter, and they insist that mutual pleasure (not violence) is the end goal of all SM text. I agree with this. But for the rest of this essay, I want to try to spotlight the ways sadomasochist lovers and practitioners are vulnerable to violence, not from each other, but from society and from the state.