Junk for Code

"Gorging" on porn?

The debate on pornography continues to splutter along in Australia. It is still between the between conservatives who talk about censorship and the libertarians who talk about free speech. Around and around in the conservative/libertarian maze we go.

Helmut Newton, Work, 2000

The conservative interpretation sees sexual desire in a negative fashion (they engender deception and manipulation) and that sexual desire can only be morally redeemed through love or marriage. The conservative readings of pornography emphasize the worst examples of the pornographic genre; read pornographic images too literally and ignore reading sexual images in multiple and flexible ways; and read the images from the various perspectives of male viewers. This conservative interpretation of porn culture is then counterposed to an assumption that all sexual relations are, and should be, carried out in a context of trust, love, commitment, intimacy, and mutual respect.

What is displaced by this interpretation is the casual sex of both men and women. Sexual liberals presuppose that sexuality(eros) is a wholesome bodily activity that involves pleasing the self and the other at the same time.
. A libertarian sexual ethics is described by Alan Sobel in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). He says that:

"If oral and anal sex, gay and lesbian sex, bisexual and group sex, contraceptive coitus, wearing lingerie and cosmetics, adultery, prostitution, making or viewing pornography, and the paraphilias--the things often condemned by conservative sexual ethics--can be carried out without harm befalling the participants or others, by consenting adults who know what they want, how could they be morally wrong? According to libertarian sexual ethics, as long as the persons involved are participating voluntarily, they are not merely using each other for their own purposes; the free and informed consent of each to the acts that occur is sufficient to eliminate mere use and thus to make sexual activity, of whatever flavor, morally permissible. The paradigmatically wrong sexual act is not buggery, but rape, in which the absence of consent makes the mere use obvious. Consensual participation in sexual activity implies that each person is respecting the other as an autonomous agent capable of making up his or her mind about the value of the activity."

Recently, there have been attempts to move out of the conservative libertarian discourse and find other ways of talking about sexuality and pornography. In the latest intervention
Tim Ferguson has responded to an article in The Age by Simon Castles.

What did Castles say? He said that:

"...ours is a culture gorged to the max on pornography. It is everywhere. Yet we don't particularly like to talk about it. The silence is almost total - like for an office worker downloading an image they shouldn't, hours after everyone's gone home."

My comments on the "everywhere" of porn culture can be found at philosophical conversations and Public opinion.

Elle McPherson Intimates

You can also see the 'everywhere' in Confessions of a Webcam Girl, which is sold as living in the porn underground as a Webcam whore. It is all so exciting, enticing and avant garde. In offering titillating images of their bodies online Webcam girls gesture to the celebration of sexual openness of contemporary urban life in Sex in the City. Here the sexual practices of autonomous urban professional women are fluid and experimental and challenge the traditional boundaries and conventions.

Today, Livian, plays at constructing herself as the discreet, voyeuristic object of masculine desire with her online web-cam. The dressing up to the black frock, naked shoulder and blackbra strap is for the male audience coming in from The Age. When linked to Sex in the City this dressing up signifies glamour, being cool and full of fun. Such a girl is more than a lifestyle girl: she has the right to choose her own sexual experiences and to talk about them.

Many of the webcam whores expose lots more flesh than a naked shoulder. They need to because behind the webcam live fed sits a porn industry hustle. The webcam girls are an enticement, as they are part of a media fed to seduce you into paying a monthly fee to webcam.com to become a member. Then you can both access porn and chat with real cam-girls while watching them live. Web-cam girl is another new face of porn culture.

So what did Castles say about all this porn culture in everyday life? He connects it to loneliness of men and porn chic and says that:

"Whatever our feelings about porn culture, I think we kid ourselves if we believe it doesn't exact a toll. Porn takes its pound of flesh just as it gives it. We are all diminished, deadened, by the constant barrage of sexual imagery - not just from hardcore sources, but from the advertising and media industries, which become more porno every day. Sexual imagery chips away at us, as transitory thrills give way to something more depressingly permanent. Something that really should have a name - perversion fatigue, perhaps."

He concludes by saying that I think it's time we at least started talking about the issue.

So we should. Porn culture takes many different forms:

Helmut Newton Cyberwomen 2, 2000
and our readings of the images are diverse and full of slippages.
So what are others saying?

In response to Castles' suggestion to talk about porn culture Tim Ferguson says that:

"Pornography is now beyond the control of its friends or foes. Freedom of speech is a side issue here. In Western society, it is the freedom of the market and the power of the consumer that govern all. Most of the 8 million porn sites exist because there is a vast, insatiable market for them."

That is pretty right. But "porn" is not just the porn industry. We also need to talk about the porn culture, given the way that Elle McPherson is appropriating "porn" imagery to sell her Intimates range of women's lingerie:

That image of a women masturbating can hardly be called perversion.

Tim rightly questions Castle's term of 'perversion fatique.' Tim says that:

..."the term perversion fatigue is inappropriate. Perversion relates to the abnormal means of obtaining sexual gratification...The majority of porn sites are heterosexual, pedestrian and even mundane. "Sex fatigue" is a better term, although the acceptance of such a term begins a new stage in the pornography debate. Liberal-minded psychologists have identified gambling and drinking (both legal) as addictive. Is "porn addiction" to become the next Western disease?... Seriously, there may come a day when free speech advocates agree to restrictions on porn for the sake of our mental health."

Tim reduces the issue of porn to consumers choosing in a global market culture:

"Pornography makes money because people like watching other people having sex. If people wish to "gorge" on porn, do we care? If too much exposure to it decreases their enjoyment of the real thing, doesn't it serve them right? Isn't it their business? And if it is our business, what can we possibly do about it? We may be embarrassed, offended or made to feel inadequate by the increasing sexualisation of the internet, the media, advertising and emails offering a gorilla's arm holding a pumpkin in the pants of every male.... But the process will not stop as long as consumers consume. In the meantime, it's only sex. And sex is where the money is. Just deal with it."

If we are shopping for sex, then sex is a commodity and women are shopping for sex as well as men. What Tim misses is 'talking about the culture' bit associated with the pornographic imagination, sexual taboos and the historical attempts to regulate the sexuality of single women in the urban jungle.

Thus we have women film makers and writers casting a critical eye over a debased cultural form that has historically been associated with men.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 30, 2003 01:32 PM | TrackBack