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The honesty of pornography

#1
C C Offline
Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture
https://aeon.co/essays/what-andrea-dwork...ornography

EXCERPTS (Kathleen Lubey): Across at least five decades [...] some feminists have denounced pornography for enacting and inciting violence against women ... Andrea Dworkin put forth this view in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), where she defined the genre as ‘the blueprint of male supremacy ... On such grounds, Dworkin, together with Catharine MacKinnon, objected to pornography’s constitutional protection as free speech, and proposed legislation to ban it...

Dworkin’s contributions to feminist thinking about pornography are radical and profound [...] The recognition of these patterns led many feminists to deduce that pornography promotes – that it desires and celebrates – the denigration of women.

Having spent years in library archives reading obscene works, I’ve found that pornography says many things at once. It can make us think. It can urge people to consider sex from multiple perspectives and think about how it shapes our regard for other people. The actions captured in pornography convey more than they seem to – as all cultural works do.

Dworkin’s indictment is so sweeping that she claims pornography, from Greek antiquity to her present, levelled all women to the same status, making them into the ‘lowest class of whore’, the ‘brothel slut available to all male citizens’. There is much to challenge in this thinking, not least its denigration of sex work, but also its lack of precision, its unsubstantiated view that all pornography celebrates the extreme subjugation of women.

My objection is to Dworkin’s recommendation that we dispense with considering what an individual work of pornography says about the actions happening within it. It is tendentious to collapse millennia of sexual representation into a single function, an overgeneralisation that prevents us from approaching millions of works of pornography with a curious, even critical eye.

Those of us who want to think in a more sophisticated way about pornography won’t get there simply by adopting a pro-pornography position, an argument that, say, sex is inherently good, that everyone has a right to it, that we should rid sex of shame. Such a position advances its own kind of dogma, imposing the view that sexual pleasure is essential to full human potential, and thus potentially alienates those who – for any variety of religious, cultural, gendered or physical reasons – have a more reserved or alienated relationship to sexual activity.

Moreover, pornography proliferates tenaciously and resiliently across media forms and doesn’t suffer existential crises. It doesn’t worry about people who don’t like it.

A more open and ecumenical approach, invested in neither condemning nor defending pornography, encourages us to tolerate looking at pornography without knowing in advance what we’ll find. Literary critics like me recognise this as close reading: a methodical examination of pornography’s contents. All of its contents, and not just the juicy bits.

Encountering examples from the pornography of the past can also attune us to what is actually happening in pornographic works, then and now. What we find in historical examples of pornography sometimes resembles what Dworkin thinks is in all pornography: sometimes brothel workers are the main characters, and sometimes they do suffer coercion and debasement by men.

But sometimes sex workers decline sex, sometimes they seek it out and enjoy it; sometimes young women object to toxic masculinity even as they applaud a penis for creating erotic sensation. Sometimes cross-dressed, heterosexually identified men find themselves desiring a penis more than a vagina.

If we refuse to recognise the vast diversity within pornography, we miss its complex accounts of sex and desire as different people in various social positions experience it. When we refuse to apprehend the full contents of pornography, we inadvertently overlook that it is frequently aware of how regimes of gender, misogyny and heteronormativity shape sexual contact.

Dworkin and other anti-pornography feminists are right that pornography contains violence. But they are wrong that pornography contains only violence, that pornographic violence is inherently harmful, and that the genre does only one thing to women, over and over, and therefore deprives them of humanity and dignity.

To imagine history as an undifferentiated state of violent sexism, and to imagine pornography as its primary form of propaganda, deactivates the capacity to see it for its breadth and scope across history, for its content beyond dominant, masculinist narratives.

[...] I've spent more than a decade reading pornography from the 18th and 19th centuries. Far from silencing women and eroticising their subjugation, pornography sometimes minutely considers the personhood of sexual participants, often giving voice to women who know – expertly – that penetrative sex will transform their identity, and that they have little power over what comes of their bodies under patriarchal culture.

At key intervals, pornography envisions alternative realities in which sex might be had under conditions of equity and freedom, even as it provokes erotic feelings. [...] Granted, radical ideas are quickly sidelined when, after a moment of deliberation, a pornographic plot resumes its sexual path. Readers might therefore ignore, override or forget the social criticism. But pornographers did not allow readers to see sex without also seeing the social hierarchies occupied by sexual actors... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
I don't see pornography (in my case gay porn) as necessarily degrading if presented tastefully and artfully. But I do think it desensitizes us over time towards the naked body and to its performance of sexual acts. The loss of personhood and feelings thru the relentless magnification of on camera flesh and sensations. That's why I opted long ago for erotic art as a more subtle and creative outlet for my voyeuristic drive. The elevation of the nude form as a higher more nuanced expression of beauty without the "honest" activity of sex itself.
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