Last time I exhibited any interest in “adult” literature I was in my local newsagents whipping a copy or two of Razzle, Jugs or Spank into the deep inner pockets of my existentialist wannabe trench coat. Parkside High School was a single sex comprehensive (do they even exist any more?) and I decided to turn this misfortune to my advantage. As tallest in my class, and the most daring shoplifter of my year, I liberated the vile products of bourgeois patriarchal ideology and supplemented my meagre proletarian pocket money with regular raids on the top shelves of the seedier convenience stores of South Leeds.
The trade in purloined pornography was brisk. So lucrative in fact that I managed to complete “O” levels without lowering myself to the indignity of a Saturday job. Whenever anyone asked how I earned the cash to pay for my huge collection of Lawrence and Wishart hardbacks and the rows of French post-structuralist theory that were growing daily I’d smile knowingly and say “paper boy”, which I didn’t consider lying exactly. Back then I conducted myself as quite the entrepreneur, though one without any moral scruple or ethical awareness. Dubious means of acquisition aside, I doubt my early exposure to smut caused any lasting psychological damage – well, none that I’d own up to at least.
The magazines were actually gorgeous in their own tawdry fashion. They were professionally produced and no matter what you thought of the industry you could tell there was skill behind the staging, lighting and composition even if the narrative was less than convincing. And you knew what you had bargained for when you chose your particular title.
The people who appeared in porn imagery were pretty interchangeable. Ladies all had big hair and fabulous toothy smiles and the chaps dangled medallions between collars the size of light aircraft. The action took place in mansions decorated in the taste of an international arms dealer – often on one of those X-shaped rugs that still have the head of some poor beast attached – or else onboard a very well-appointed yacht circumnavigating a private island in the Med. Female bodies were invariably flawless. Men occupied the income bracket of a James Bond Villain. The message was clear: porn exists in a fantasy world. Sexist, certainly, but you would have to be sixpence short of a shilling to think any of this stuff had much to do with reality.
The Internet changed all this and changed our lives – our very notion of reality even. Everybody is aware of this, mostly because we’ve been hearing the same thing repeated daily since Tim Berners-Lee was in short pants. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking at what the internet has done to pornography (owing to thinking about Lizi Patch’s article published here) it seems the main consequence of widespread access to a fast broadband connection has been to unleash the inner pervert – well, those who want it to be unleashed; apparently there’s even a niche for leash.
Click on any porn site nowadays and the majority of images seem to be shot on a mobile (and you do have to wonder what they were doing with the other hand) in an abandoned carpark, featuring guys who appear to have come straight from retarmacing your front drive. These people certainly wouldn’t figure in anyone’s wish fulfillment fantasy. Doesn’t it make you wonder what they were all doing a couple of decades ago? Can you imagine them turning to a mate and saying, “wouldn’t it be great if thousands of total strangers could masturbate along to videos of us collectively assaulting a drugged-up female on the bonnet of a Ford Sierra … but sadly there just isn’t the technology: fancy a pint and a game of billiards at The Queens Head instead?”
This confuses me. I’m a liberal and anti-censorship to my bones. I know the feminist argument against porn and I’m sympathetic but unconvinced; even the darker stuff always seemed to me to be fantasy, just dressing up and playing cowboys and Indians for grown ups, so I don’t believe that porn is the theory and rape the practice. In fact, the more liberal and tolerant a society the more porn it tends to produce. I remember years ago being told by friends who had travelled to Portugal after the 1974 revolution against the Salazar dictatorship that they’d seen bookshops opening that sold glossy American porn alongside worthy pamphlets by Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Even these days explicit sex acts can be politically progressive. Look at what some of the members of Pussy Riot were up to before the gig that got them arrested (Google fuck for the heir puppy bear): or don’t look if you are easily offended by a nine-month pregnant woman having a very public orgy in a university building – imagine protesting against Thatcher’s funeral by getting naked with a bunch of friends and doing it doggy style in the Henry Moore Institute library (please, nobody take that as a recommendation.) Even Femen and the sextremism movement are using what could be considered sexual imagery to provoke social change – though in this case it seems about as coherent a political statement as YouTubing a clip where you are bashing your own face and claiming it is a protest against cyber-bullying. But I’m a man so not really my place to judge.
So I don’t think it’s the sex I’m particularly perturbed by. Nor is it for me a question about children accessing inappropriate imagery – that’s something for the parents to sort out. It’s more about what “adult” material says about adults today. Mainly it says that we have liberated sex by commodifying it. Sexual freedom is subject only to the rules of the free market and if you want a specific sexual thrill there is no moral obligation against an enterprising person sourcing a supply. If you want to look at pictures of plump, pig-tailed, bespectacled Korean schoolgirls (and seemingly any 35 year old in a pretend uniform sucking a lollipop counts as a schoolgirl these days) then there is no impediment if you can afford a broadband connection and a smartphone. Similarly any combination of race, breast size, bottom shape, eye colour, age, hair distribution etc can be accommodated for, though in the end women only come in two varieties: sluts and whores, though the hybrid “fucking slut whore seems to be gaining popularity, at least according to the clever calculators of Google.
As I said at the beginning I went to an all boys school in the seventies. Imminent nuclear war was an ever present threat that fueled nihilistic fantasies of impotent rage against life, the universe and everything. We would only get four minutes warning before being universally incinerated in a blinding flash, and the thought of the final four minutes became a kind of fetish. My class-mates invented a game devising the most elaborate, brutal and disgusting sexual rampage imaginable in those final four minutes (remember, we were full of hormones and completely devoid of experience) and some of the stuff we made up was pumped straight out of the collective unconscious. If the porn that’s currently available is a report on the state of adulthood today it does seem that we’ve regressed to the mentality of a bunch of ignorant, anxious, scared teenage boys who would get away with murder if they could because there’s nothing left to stop them. And we seem to be living in an endless four minute warning. I didn’t like the feeling back then. I’m not sure that I care for it any more now.
These were the thoughts I had earlier, Phil.
I don’t understand porn like I don’t understand food blogs. If you were hungry, you wouldn’t read food blogs, you’d eat. And if food wasn’t available, looking at pictures of it wouldn’t make you feel better either, particularly impossibly gorgeous souffles or whatever foody porn consists of.
If the idea is that one needs porn/food to make one’s solitary experiences better, it seems to me you’d be better exercising your imagination than your right hand.
Yes I agree that I don’t think porn leads to rape, but it is a reflection of the existence of a bunch of sad lonely gits with a distorted understanding of other human beings, male and female. Maybe we should pity them.
Not sure this is the feedback you’re looking for as I suspect the most controversial point is my heresy about food blogs…
I think that’s what I said didn’t I, that porn seems to be the product of tech savvy but emotionally stunted geeks … and yes, you have just un-enrolled from Delve Club, ha.
Phil
I think a better question would be ‘why do some people have a problem with porn – internet or otherwise?’. I’ve no doubt there’s a minority of people out there who have an unhealthy relationship with porn – as some do with Star Wars or football. They need to get out more and do something with their lives. But those most obsessed with it seem to be the anti’s, who give porn a power and importance it just doesn’t have. For most people it’s an aid to imagination and nothing more. But it seems a lot of people want to exaggerate its influence to justify some form of censorship – but don’t always have the guts to admit that. This usually comes via the anecdotal effects it has on children – who are always seem to used as the human shields of illiberal policy: as if the whole of adult society should be organised around child safety.
There are moral and political arguments to be had, as you say, about what its proliferation says about society today. I know many feminists would say it reflects our ‘patriarchal and misogynist culture’. But I think that’s bullshit based on a view of women as victims of men’s biological urges – the ‘porn is the theory rape is the practice’ argument you state – and which ignores the fact that women enjoy porn as much as men, and even the phenomenon of ‘feminist porn’ itself.
Maybe the current, heightened concern/interest with porn is a passing phase of a sexually hung-up culture in which adult material has only recently been liberated, not through any political arguments for the freedom of the individual, but through the simple fact that censorship became untenable in the internet age. Or maybe it reflects more serious, longer lasting trends: a withdrawal from the public into the private sphere; an avoidance of relationships; a prolonged ‘adultlescence’; or that people just aren’t ‘getting enough’. I’m not sure. But I suspect that any growth in ‘porn culture’ is a symptom rather than the cause of such trends.
Paul
Agree, though I think there are fascinating questions about the science and economics of porn too. For instance, at a recent conference on brain chemistry and addictions one American psychopharmacologist – and government advisor – argued there were such things as “erototoxins” which explained addiction to internet naughtiness. And she’s getting serious funding for this kind of nonsense!
Also, given that internet porn is so massive – so the people who are against it keep on saying – where is the serious economic study? And why don’t economists do any research – apart from one amusing Italian. It might be that porn isn’t so separate from the “clean” internet companies that supply our phones and run our browsers etc. and that’s a little inconvenient. So the people who profit from the increasing circulation of porn can profit from the secondary market in supplying porn filters (and did you know most filter companies are run by Christian organisations? Odd indeed)
Phil
I doubt there is, or ever will be, any credible ‘the science of porn’, and searching for it will only lead us further into obsessing about porn and fetishising its influence over us (as all addiction theories do). As for the economics, that seems simple – people largely produce it and work in it, like any other business, for money. But looking at both the science and economic arguments actually lead us away from the more important discussion you mention about what porn says about contemporary ‘adult society’.
Paul
Agree on addiction (have you ever read Stanton Peele?) but not economics. The majority of porn on the internet now is on tube sites; it’s user-generated, people videoing their sexual antics for free use … and some argue it’s killing the porn industry (much the same as proper journalists blame bloggers for the failures of print journalism). There’s a fabulous article about this in the New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/
Best thing I came across in my research.
And focusing on the “porn industry” lets the clean corporates off the hook. The real economic argument is how porn has stimulated innovations such as pay to view, high speed broadband, high definition TV, and even the whole idea of “personalisation” (Amazon seems to have learned a thing or two from porn sites how to target an individuals taste). And, let’s face it, most porn is accessed via Google … but they do no harm, do they?
Phil
You raise a very good point about home-made porn which is not connected to the economics of the industry, and one that raises further questions about contemporary culture more than porn itself; particularly the narcissistic and confessional, let-it-all-hang-out trends of today were people seem less reluctant to expose every aspect of their lives – whether it’s their mental health or body parts.
My argument against the economic argument though is not just that it takes us away from looking at society, but that I really don’t think it’s that interesting or important to focus on. It can also all too easily lead down an almost conspiratorial argument against ‘big business’, in which people try and dress up their desire for greater regulation, and their general opposition to porn, in some kind of ‘anti-capitalist’ garb (which some on the left did at a recent Leeds Uni FemSoc meeting on porn). Equally, if porn has stimulated innovation in other media, or vice versa, I don’t know whether that’s of any great importance. But I’m open to be convinced otherwise.
Cheers for the link.
Paul
Annoying that I can’t respond to your last comment … one of the quirks of the site.
I think it’s the economics that’s the key. Porn is just another commodity, and the free tubes are no freer than Facebook … you just pay in different ways. They want yr information. That’s not anti-capitalist conspiracy, it’s the explanation of why there’s a massive economic phenomena based on the appearance of free. I can’t be arsed with lefty posturing (is Page 3 really the evil they say it is?)
There’s a fabulous book called “Money Shot: a journey into porn and censorship” by an Aussie journo called Jeff Sparrow. Think you would approve of his analysis.
Phil
I would agree in general with porn being a fantasy experience that people can buy into if they want to and, if people want to feature in porn and make it available to the public for their consumption, I have no problem with that.
I acknowledge that the mobile phone/ tarmac guy porn might be the food equivalent of a Tesco horse burger, but presumably you can still opt for the higher quality porn mag or Aberdeen Angus if you wish to?
Surely the problem must be that there is a risk of vulnerable people being abused within the porn industry? This isn’t to say that it doesn’t only happen in a minority of cases or that it is a problem limited to the porn industry (I realise that vulnerable people may be abused in any situation in which their well being is entrusted to another), but surely it must be an argument in favour of some kind of regulation or protection?
I read something recently about sex workers who have started sharing information about people who pose a threat to them so that they can be more wary and help look out for one another. They said that they felt much safer as a result. Maybe there should be a porn trade union?
Kate
There are porn trades unions, and many more vulnerable people are making training shoes, t-shirts, and probably red wine (oh hell, please no!) Why are people any more vulnerable in porn than anywhere else? There are many more people in slavery than in porn movies.
I didn’t say that people were more vulnerable in porn than anywhere else, I just said that there was a risk there and that has to be recognised.
I agree with your points – in fact, I did expressly say that I realised vulnerable people could be exploited in any situation.
As a consumer of porn (or anything else), you have the option of prioritising price, making ethical purchases or not making the purchase at all.