Often scorned as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography actually has a lot to tell us about ourselves and our culture.
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For at least five decades, from Susan Brownmiller to Gail Dines, some feminists have denounced pornography as faking and inciting violence against women, turning its viewers into psychologically passive consumers or, worse, sexual assailants. Andrea Dworkin expressed this view in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), where he defined the genre as "the blueprint of male supremacy ... the fundamentalism of male dominance ... the essential sexuality of male power." For such reasons, Dworkin, along with Catharine MacKinnon, opposed the constitutional protection of pornography as free speech and proposed legislation for its ban, arguing that it did not say or represent the degradation of women, but rather concretized it and made it real.
Dworkin's contributions to feminist thought about pornography are radical and profound. He insisted that we examine and take seriously what pornography shows us: the documentation of the sexual use of the female body, as well as the consolidation of their "social power" by men. Showing genital action, hard-core pornography – especially the visual genre popularized during second-wave feminism – shows to an unusual degree the ways in which bodies collide with gender. Social dynamics such as misogyny, heteronormativity, xenophobia and racism shape these conflicts. With such conditions informing pornography and its consumers, sex becomes a stage for mixing faces. Often – but, above all, not always and not uniformly – this interaction implies a hierarchy: demands are made, often by men. Actions are coerced, often by men. Body parts are pushed or placed or put into operation, often by men. Recognizing these patterns has led to many feminists to they conclude that pornography promotes – that it desires and celebrates – the devaluation of women.
Having spent years in library archives reading obscene works, I have discovered that pornography says many things at once. It can make us think. It can encourage people to look at sex from many angles and think about how it shapes our respect for other people. The actions captured in pornography convey more than meets the eye – as do all cultural works. Dworkin's indictment is so sweeping that she claims that pornography, from Greek antiquity to the present day, has leveled all women to the same status, making them the "lower class of whores," the "whore of the brothel available to all male citizens ». There is much to question in this way of thinking, not least its undervaluation sex work, but also the lack of accuracy, the unsubstantiated notion that all pornography celebrates the extreme subjugation of women. My objection is to Dworkin's recommendation that we not consider what an individual work of pornography says about the actions that occur within it. It is trite to collapse millennia of sexual representation into a single mode, an overgeneralization that prevents us from approaching millions of works of pornography with a curious, even critical eye.
For those of us who want to think more sophisticatedly about pornography, we won't get there simply by adopting a pro-porn position, an argument that, say, sex is inherently good, that everyone has a right to it, that we should take the shame out of sex. Such a position promotes its own kind of dogma, enforcing the view that sexual pleasure is necessary for full human potential, and thus potentially alienating those who – for various religious, cultural, gender or physical reasons – have a more restrained or estranged relationship. with sexual activity. Furthermore, pornography proliferates persistently and resiliently across media forms and suffers no existential crises. He doesn't worry about people he doesn't like.
A more open and universal approach, invested neither in condemning nor defending pornography, encourages us to tolerate examining pornography without knowing in advance what we will find. Literary critics like myself recognize this as close reading: a methodical one examination of the content of pornography. All of its contents, not just the juicy bits. Encountering examples from past pornography can also tune us into what is actually happening in pornographic works, then and now. What we find in historical examples of pornography sometimes resembles what Dworkin believes in all pornography: sometimes the brothel workers are the main characters and sometimes suffer coercion and humiliation by men. But sometimes sex workers refuse sex, sometimes they seek it and enjoy it. Sometimes young women object to toxic masculinity, even when they clap a penis to create erotic sensation. Sometimes men in women's clothing, heterosexually identified men find themselves desiring a penis more than a vagina.
If we refuse to acknowledge the enormous diversity of pornography, we miss the complex description of sex and desire as it is experienced by different people in different social positions. When we refuse to grasp the full content of pornography, we inadvertently overlook that it often knows how the regimes of gender, misogyny and heteronormativity shape intercourse. Dworkin and other anti-porn 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 only does one thing to women, over and over again, and thereby robs them of their humanity and dignity. Imagining history as an undifferentiated state of violent sexism, and imagining pornography as the primary form of propaganda, disables the ability to see it for its scope throughout history, for its content beyond dominant, male-dominated narratives.
18th-century British experimental fiction entangles pornographic description with feminist principles
I have spent over a decade reading pornography from the 18th and 19th centuries. Far from silencing women and sexualizing their subjugation, pornography sometimes takes the personhood of sex participants into account, often giving voice to women who know – expertly – that penetrative sex will transform their identity and that they have little power over what comes from their body under patriarchal culture. At key intervals, pornography envisions alternative realities in which sex could take place under conditions of equality and freedom, even if it evokes amorous feelings. Pornographers merge these ideas into sentences and paragraphs describing genitalia. Or they use footnotes and digressions to make sex share the page with social criticism, especially as told by gender-bending women or men. Admittedly, radical ideas are quickly sidelined when, after a moment's discussion, a pornographic plot resumes its sexual course. Readers may therefore ignore, bypass or forget social criticism. But pornographers did not allow readers to see sex without also seeing the social hierarchies occupied by sex actors.
Sex, pornography tells us, is an encounter shaped and informed by its social world. The entropic, experimental fiction of 18th-century Britain combined pornographic description with explicitly feminist principles. Consider this passage, which examines how moral customs place disproportionate demands on women. This meditation on femininity comes from the little-known novel The History of the Human Heart. or, the adventures of a young gentleman (1749), which follows a young man's sexual pursuits through his rural adolescence, his coming of age in London, and his grand tour of Europe. The anonymous author challenges the dominant cultural belief that women are inherently modest. She calls modesty "the greatest ornament" of women, but she doesn't think it's a natural state. Rather, it is a learned behavior reinforced by a sexually conservative culture, "a simple habit, based on comfort and nurtured by custom," that is mistaken for a natural quality because it is so common among women in a culture that demands their virginity for a respectable marriage. The pornographer, a keen observer of human behavior, knows that modesty is socialized and not innate because every little girl "tends to do what her brother does, and if her lower belly itches, she'd scratch it if she were twenty in Intercourse". Far from being modest by nature, girls will masturbate before intercourse – “the lower part of the belly” is the top of the vulva – and call her clit “by its proper name, if they knew it” . Left to their own devices, girls and women will have an ostentatious, clear relationship with their bodies.
This passage is a fragment of a long footnote in Human Heart. She challenges the idea that women have a natural trait that makes them blush at the mention of sex, and runs through several pages that, at the same time, describe an erotic dance by female sex workers. The pornographer expects the reader to enjoy the display of genitals and erotic stimulation at the same time. As they get details about female masturbation at the top of the page, they read below that modesty mandates women's natural openness and honesty about their bodies. The idea was invented, the note conjectures, by moral philosophers who, "foreseeing these annoyances, pretended a hypothetical Virtue, which they called Modesty, and recommended it to the fairer sex." The effect of this psychological conditioning is to restrain women from independence and ambition, "Keep them within bounds, they would naturally be quite prone to jump if they were not guarded by this imaginary Fence." Such a discussion should surprise anyone who assumes that pornography is only interested in the dumb presentation of sexualized bodies.
The footnote claims that modesty is a good thing that maintains the sexual order, but disputes that it is innate in women. Questioning the naturalness of human characteristics, this pornographic work is part of the philosophical debates of its time. At the end of the 17th century, John Locke questioned the innate nature of ideas and character, sparking decades of debate about the extent to which we possess certain forms of knowledge at birth. Its author Human Heart he adopts a Lockean position on female chastity – that it is not innate – but also clashes with moral philosophers who nevertheless promoted sexual abstinence to contribute to social order and stability. Women were the targets of this enforced chastity, an inequality reinforced since the 18th century by natural philosophy (what we now call science). Medical discourse reinforced the belief that women and men are fundamentally different at the level of anatomy and psychology. Indeed, the modern gender binary ossified in this period. But here, in a pornographic novel, we find a claim that freedom and autonomy are longed for by all people, all sexes. The passage discusses women not to woo or subjugate, but to enliven and justify themselves, and to do so on a philosophical basis. What would Dworkin say to this, since she is convinced that pornography from every moment of history reduces women, violates them, restricts them in their sexual function?
When genitalia were revealed by the pornographic narrative in the 18th century, they did not only or always serve the pleasure of men. As the works were drawn to the details of genitalia, they also tended to talk about the social aspects of sex, making readers think about how sexual freedom is limited for some people but not for others. Such an analysis is easily overlooked when we are caught up in the notion that pornography not only documents but produces misogyny. Theories about the wrongness of pornography are alive and well in anti-pornography. Recent book by Bernadette Barton, who laments that "culture spewing" unwittingly overwhelms the sexual lives of young people today, echoes Dworkin's argument that all pornography renders women as sex workers, and that the depiction of a sex worker it is humiliation. However, 18th-century pornography often portrayed sex workers as psychologically complex human actors irreducible to a reproductive function—indeed, erotic dancers in human heart they end up reducing penetrative sex work. Eighteenth-century Anglopornography was sometimes as devoted to challenging a sexist culture as it was to titillating readers with lewd images. He experimented with the kinds of things we can know or infer from intercourse.
Pornographers found penetrative sex particularly important for critical speculation because vaginal sex was a tool for organizing society at this time. It ended marriages, made unmarried women single, led to pregnancy, and otherwise caused permanent changes in women's social identity. Men, of course, enjoyed a great deal of sexual freedom, both within and outside of marriage. The weight placed on chastity was a matter of great cultural concern for young women and the male relatives responsible for overseeing their marriage. Pornography, which honestly examined the conditions under which penetrative sex occurs, regularly showed women objecting to sex, asserting the importance of their virginity, and expressing distaste for the men who pursue them – often to no avail, who anyway or else they are forced to have sex.The Human Heart he "suffocated" and "subdued" a resilient virgin before raping her. The 18th-century reader was not simply called upon to find this dynamic stimulation, but was trained in its disparity. Contrary to the perpetuation of patriarchal rule, these works show the fraud of gender hierarchies that locate men's primacy in their sexual power.
Long before Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler, this pornographer saw the phallus as something illusory
Vibrators sometimes lead to a feminist breakthrough in 18th century pornography. In one project, The Progress of Nature: Exemplified in the Life and Surprising Adventures of Roger Lovejoy (1744), teenage girls find a vibrator in an aunt's bedroom and spend pages discussing its purpose. Drawing on a centuries-old European tradition of prostitute dialogue, where a seasoned con man trains an initiate in the arts of the sex trade, the more experienced Miss Forward explains genitalia and sex toys to her innocent friend Polly. They recognize the penis as a source of power and ambition, and notice that the vibrator – strong, erect and durable – somehow resembles it. It is the penis that arbitrarily enters, dominates and destroys everywhere... in the satisfaction of its pleasures. He rushes into all recesses, demanding everything, denying nothing, enjoying and bestowing every ecstasy." Patriarchal right, so far, derives from men's sexual power.
But women soon qualify for penile strength. Miss Forward finds it, in crucial ways, contrasted with the vibrator: while the vibrator remains perpetually erect, the penis "contracts like a snail," becoming "mean and pitiful, insidious and malleable" in the absence of feminine beauty. Men, the young women realize, lack strength and power in their essence. Instead, they require an object of desire to motivate them to act. Men's claim to undisputed social dominance is therefore based on a faulty anatomical analogy. Long before Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler, this pornographer saw the phallus as illusory, a feature associated with masculinity through a series of unstable connections. A penis, the girls agree, is “just something he has on him, which may be equivalent but very different from what we have. These girls obviously recognize their genitalia as valuable and beneficial. And other scenes describe the vaginal and clitoral pleasures of masturbation and penetration. Anatomical sexual difference is accepted, even celebrated, but gender hierarchy is not – equality is the relationship established between men and women.
The perpetual alignment of the vibrator made waves throughout pornographic writing. It raised existential questions about men. In the A Spy on Mother Midnight (1748), a cross-dressing male narrator convinces a woman of the superiority of his penis so thoroughly that she incinerates her vibrator. A fantasy indeed, since ivory – like glass, a common material for vibrators – would be amazing to burn in a bedroom fireplace. Amidst the hubris that leads this narrator to brag about his penile triumph over this "lifeless Competitor," the narrator considers becoming a vibrator. He finds himself desiring 'that it may be the Fate of my Spirit to inform, in the next Transmigration, the Body of one of these Applications. What a delicious thought… how many dolls I have to make on this Figure, more than I can make on my own Real Face!”
A vibrator – always erect, never flagging – can penetrate more often, seduce more women, humiliate more husbands. Women may also show greater sexual excitement on a vibrator, a state of joy they are usually embarrassed to share with men: “Oh! to embrace them, handle them, caress them, and put ——- them with their own beautiful hands, and find them yielding to the Imperatives of bright blood and stimulating nature, without that reserve and kindness sometimes guess… when a man is on the case!”. The dashes playfully punctuate a key detail – that women "put [vibrators in their bosoms] with their own pretty hands," and it's precisely this extreme, unfettered intimacy that the man craves. The object of sexual desire itself shifts: it wants not to dominate a woman through penetrative sex, but to become an object directed by a woman into her body – an object that, ultimately, disappears.
British pornographers experimented with philosophy piecemeal, floating into potentially transformative ideas and then retreating. In contrast, 18th-century French pornography, written in the decades leading up to the Revolution, produced politically disciplined theories of personal freedom. While the freedoms of French pornography promoted reckless desire fulfillment in enclosures such as convents and towers, British pornography experimented with sex as it dropped unremarkable characters (often inexperienced teenagers) into everyday settings – gardens, parks, almshouses, bedrooms, drawing rooms, salons. In these proximate contexts, sexual acts gained significance as everyday encounters available for examination by an increasingly wide range of readers as publications and literacy became more accessible. And as readers developed closer ties to books, pornographers brought together, spontaneously, various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience.
Stories of heterosexuality, seduction, rape, erotic performance and masturbation served as thought experiments on how people experience sex, but also how they experience the world. Pornography has always understood that perception and aesthetics do not occur in a vacuum. Sexual encounters between people raise questions such as: where does desire come from and what is its object? What do genitalia look like and should we see them? Is seeing them like feeling them? Is modesty a social good and at whose expense does it work? Can anyone refuse sex? Does sex cause harm? Pornographic narrative in the 18th century brought sex into relation to philosophical claims, asking whether there are epistemological limits, even dangers, to the kinds of generalizations philosophers made. It has been discovered that social orthodoxies about the two sexes are not descriptions of simple reality but a superficial overlay over wildly different social practices. Porn shows us that women are just as prone to ambition and freedom as men. It shows us that men's power is, like their erections, temporary, contingent, and it shows us challenged men who want to be objectified and sexually passive. Pornographers knew that life in an outwardly rigid heterosexual and patriarchal society was complicated and unfair. They resisted rules that intellectuals and revolutionaries would later attack.
Pornography highlights the potential inconsistency of theories of civil society
Philosophers, especially empiricists, aesthetic theorists, and moral philosophers worked toward a universal model of how individuals acquire knowledge, taste, and virtue. Amidst the conflicts of modernity, philosophers wanted to understand minds that functioned in predictable ways. Eighteenth-century pornography goes against the grain of contemporary philosophers, often depicting its characters, particularly men, in states of perceptual distortion. Men's lustful "Fantasy" can make them see firmness in a chest that is actually "flabby like a piece of tripe" ( The Progress of Nature ) or feel "Excitement and unspeakable rapture" with a loathsome partner while keeping "The idea of their beloved foremost in their minds (the Human Heart). British empiricist philosophy tried hard to rationalize the components of human knowledge by merging the "ideas" and "imagination" of individuals with an observable, objective world. But sex, pornography claims, disrupts this common sense, leading us to see what isn't there or imagine romantic ideals. By conceding the particular perceptions of individuals, pornography highlights the potential incoherence of theories of civil society, asking how social cohesion can occur if individuals perceive their reality differently, a conundrum that Enlightenment philosophy itself often failed to address. to admit. How can we believe that men enjoyed their autonomy when, as pornography showed us, they also wanted to be absorbed by women's genitalia?
Porn shamelessly highlights private experience and says that we can learn things from sex that we can't learn any other way. Or, learn not from sex itself, but by reading about it, seeing people having it, and recognizing the social contexts surrounding it. If we recognize that pornography says many things at once – like that the same sexual act can satisfy one person and violate another, or that satisfaction and humiliation can be the same thing, or that heterosexuality can feel good but and suppress – we can allow to activate our knowledge of the world and of other people. It can teach us that there is no one way to see an objective reality, that other people have their own perspectives, and that our own petty desires can put us at odds with a greater common good.
All this means that pornography is remarkably honest, and not simply because, as anti-porn feminists claim, it documents the patriarchy's degradation of women. Rather, it is honest because it shows the hard, often confusing work of reconciling private desire with public life, of admitting that sex with others can be immoral, of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Antique pornography makes these contradictions apparent, peddling knowledge that we believe, today, to be at odds with eroticism. But maybe it's not – maybe there's a utility in porn's mixed messages. Perhaps it was designed to confuse us, the better to emphasize the clarity with which we should enter into the messy endeavor of having sex with other people.
*Cover photo: The frontispiece to an edition of Aloisiae Sigaeae (The School of Ladies), a love dialogue by Nicolas Chorier, printed around 1690. Courtesy of the British Library
Source: aeon.co