Consider how we treat pornography, on either side of the Atlantic: living in cultures that have been deliberately sexualized for purposes of commerce, it is not unlikely that some of the population will find themselves over-stimulated and will seek release from this condition, usually by resorting to whatever form of porno is most readily available. Unfortunately, in societies that have followed the early church’s lead by letting people view pornography on the sole understanding that to do so is a sin, such a release will be accompanied almost immediately by a reflex reaction of guilt, shame, embarrassment and maybe even actual self-disgust.
To understand how this conflicted situation could conceivably afect an individual’s hard-wiring, let’s imagine one of B.F. Skinner’s rat experiments, albeit one that’s even more perverse than usual. In our new experiment, the rat is given first his stimulus by means of, say, that schoolgirl promo-piece by Britney Spears we mentioned earlier. Stimulated thus, our rodent is conditioned to respond by pressing on the porno-lever to achieve the requisite reward of sexual release. Once this reward has been acquired, however, our rat will receive a strong electric shock of shame. Reward and punishment, therefore, become perversely linked. The only route to pleasure involves pain, humiliation. Would this treatment, carried out millions of times across whole rodent populations, have a beneficial or a deleterious efect upon their mental health, do you suppose?
With human beings, in the socially constructed Skinner Boxes of our sexuality, it isn’t going too far to suggest that certain individuals are thus deprived of the release they seek, unable to accept the shame and loathing by which it’s accompanied. Extended over an entire society, this means the pressure cooker lid is kept securely on, while the release-valve isn’t functioning the way it does in Holland, Spain or Denmark. Subsequently we are subject to more frequent and disastrous explosions of the sex drive, ugly eruptions into real life by what should have been a harmless fantasy. The outcast status of pornography appears to drive some people into shadowy and claustrophobic isolation where their sexual daydreams can turn into something dark and dangerous that is to nobody’s advantage, neither themselves, their victims, nor society at large. Worse still, in sexually restrictive cultures where pornography is seen as causing sexual crime (rather than as providing an escape-valve that might possibly prevent it) the instinctual response is almost certainly a fresh attempt to bear down on the pressure cooker’s lid.
Where does this leave us, and where does it leave pornography? With each new technological advance since William Caxton it would seem pornography has both proliferated and degraded in its quality. Today’s society, thanks to the internet and other factors, is entirely saturated with erotica of the most basic, rudimentary kind; convict pornography for convict populations shufling through life’s mess-hall, without any other options than the slop they’re given. Porn is everywhere, just as it was in ancient Greece, but nowhere is it art. Nowhere is it an afirmation of common humanity the way it was in classic culture but instead afirms only our alienation and our distance from each other, and despite its mass availability does not appear to be making us any happier.
Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether, as control-leash, lure and lash combined in one, a cattle-prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before us everywhere we look it leads us on. Then, in the guilty aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod of shame with which to flog ourselves.
This is especially true of the United States as it negotiates its current Georgian era, although as with the unreasonable influence Victorian England had upon the world back in the nineteenth century, the repercussions of a faith-based presidency in America are felt across the globe. They’re felt in terms of their effect on foreign policy, on the sciences and arts, and on how we think about our sexuality and its entitlements. Soaking in cyber-porn and promo-porn, the sexual heat within society is higher than it’s ever been, the needle on the boiler’s dial tipping alarmingly into the red, yet at this point in history we’re governed by a mindset that is programmed to respond by clamping down on the escape valve, on pornography. Wipe out pornography, the idea seems to be, and we’ll have also somehow wiped out all the urges that first prompted us to sculpt Bog Venus in the first place.
Clearly, the eradication of pornography is never going to happen. Porn’s been with us since our Palaeolithic past and will in every likelihood be with us until we succeed in tidying our species from the planet. ‘No porn’, then, is not a realistic option. I suggest the only choice we genuinely have is between good pornography and bad pornography. This obviously begs a bunch of questions, the first being as to how we diferentiate between the two. Just for the purposes of argument let us define ‘good’ porn, like good Judge Clayton Horn, as that which is of noticeable social benefit, with ‘bad’ porn as its opposite, that which is noticeably to our social detriment. Of course, this raises a much bigger question, namely, does ‘good’ porn even exist? If not, could it conceivably exist at some point in the future, and what would it look like if it did?
To answer this, we could do far worse than refer back to those few dissenting female voices that were raised, back when the feminist debate upon pornography was at its hottest and perhaps its most intelligent. Taking some inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s influential essay Must We Burn Sade?, the wonderful and greatly-missed Angela Carter muses on porn in her book The Sadeian Women, finally suggesting that there might be some form of pornography yet undiscovered, glorious and liberating, unencumbered by the inequalities of sex and sexuality that dogged it in the past. Even porn’s most uncompromising and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable, even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given that we don’t want ‘bad pornography’ and can’t have ‘no pornography’, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility of ‘good’ pornography that the one ray of light in an intractable debate resides.
The question still remains, however, as to how pornography might have a beneficial influence upon society, exactly? If we can’t imagine such a situation, then how would we recognise it if it should arise? Even if we accept along with Andrea Dworkin, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker and Simone de Beauvoir that our hypothetical ‘good’ porn is possible, that doesn’t help us much unless we have a clear idea of just what good, what benefit, pornography of the right kind might work within our culture.
We’ve observed already that in places such as Denmark, Spain or Holland porn appears to act to some extent as a release valve, venting sexual pressures harmlessly before they can explode in sex crime or abuse. We also noted that this doesn’t seem to work in more restrictive cultures where reflexive guilt and shame seem to attend the very notion of pornography. What if it were possible to bring such a degree of artistry to our pornography that this immediate link between erotica and dire social embarrassment was severed? Might pornography in this way be allowed to function as it does in more enlightened climes, reducing our appalling score of actual men and women scarred and violated, actual children raped and killed and dumped in a canal? Isn’t such a thing at least worth the attempt?
Pornography, if it could be expressed artistically in such a way, might welcome our sexual imagination in from the cold, into the reassuring warmth of socio-political acceptability. The power of art is that it lets us see, in someone else’s work, an idea that we dimly formed but lacked the skill to realize or convey, and in this way makes us feel less alone. Pornography as we conceive of it today, however, does the opposite. It isn’t art, cannot be openly admired or discussed, serves only to convince us of our isolation, to increase our sense that we are in our secret and most intimate desires alone save for the reeking company of other sweaty, masturbating perverts and social inadequates.
If we could redefine erotica, restore it to the venerated place in art that it was once accustomed to, this might defuse a number of our personal and social tensions with regard to sex in much the way it seems to have done at the dawn of western civilization. Realized properly, pornography could ofer us a safe arena in which to discuss or air ideas that otherwise would go unspoken and could only stale and fester in our individual dark. Our sexual imagination is and always has been central to our lives, as individuals or as a species, and our culture might be much enriched, or at least more relaxed, if it acknowledged this. There’d be no more divine pornography by any future William Blake incinerated after his demise, no future Aubrey Beardsley on his deathbed, frightened, coughing for his finest work to be destroyed. No frilly decadent or bearded Beat compelled either to cower behind a pseudonym or add to the prolific oeuvre of ‘Anonymous’.
Ennobled thus, pornography could take its place once more as a revered and almost sacred totem in society, could be brought full circle to its origins in the pneumatic pinhead babe of Willendorf. It seems we only have two choices in the way that we regard our own erotic dreams: either we can accept them and restore Bog Venus to her natural and proper place in culture; or we can reject them and attempt to stigmatize them, can attach arousal to so much conditioned shame and guilt and pain that in efect we have contained our sexuality within a spiky 19th century German cock-ring.
In the end, it’s in the hands of individual people, individual artists, writers, filmmakers or poets. If they have the nerve to plant their flags in this despised and dangerous terrain despite its uninviting nature, then in time the dismal wilderness might be transformed into a scented garden of enduring value. The erotic might be elevated from her current status as a hooker everyone keeps chained up in their cellar but nobody talks about, unmentionable but available, back to her previous position as a goddess.
We might find she’s changed some since her chunky limestone origins, might find she now resembles something more along the lines depicted in Pornocrates by the magnificent Félicien Rops. This superb work, begun by Rops in the late 1870s, depicts the spirit of pornography herself, a gorgeous woman seen in profile treading carefully from right to left across the image, clad in only boots, gloves, stockings, jewellery and a drifting sash, topped by a Gainsborough hat. Pale flowers are in her hair, and, similarly pale, there is a blindfold tied across her eyes. Held on a ribbon-decorated leash as though it were a well-clipped poodle is a lean young pig that seems to lead the sightless beauty in the manner of a guide-dog. At a pace sedate and dignified, it navigates for its blind mistress what may be only a decorative lower border to the picture but which looks like the embellished stonework of a wall or ledge, along the top of which the elegant embodied spirit of Victorian pornography is guided by a snuffling hog; a swine before The Pearl.
A frieze runs in relief along the wall or border’s topmost edge, depicting effigies of the fine Arts, sat with their parchment, lute or easel and yet hanging down their heads, looking away embarrassed as the goddess of pornography parades there brazenly above them. Similarly, hovering in the air before her as she walks there are three anguished cherubs, tearing at their hair as they berate her lewd display. Behind her blindfold, unaware of how she looks and rightly unconcerned by the controversy she’s causing, utterly unworried by the precipice she steps along, the voluptuous essence of pornography is calm, serene. She trusts her safety to an animal conventionally seen as the epitome of dirtiness and brutish instinct, this despite its widely-mentioned cleanliness and keen intelligence. The goddess walks along her wall, proud and unmindful of the drop to either side, secure in her conviction that she is a thing of loveliness, safe in the knowledge that by following her noble and yet much-despised animal urge she will be led unerringly towards her rightful Queenly destiny.
Shameless and blind to all the outraged posturings occasioned by her presence, Venus promenades along the moral tightrope of her path, walking the pig, sure-footed and invulnerable in her glamour as she wanders, one step at a time, towards the hoped-for glow of a more human and enlightened future.
PREV
To understand how this conflicted situation could conceivably afect an individual’s hard-wiring, let’s imagine one of B.F. Skinner’s rat experiments, albeit one that’s even more perverse than usual. In our new experiment, the rat is given first his stimulus by means of, say, that schoolgirl promo-piece by Britney Spears we mentioned earlier. Stimulated thus, our rodent is conditioned to respond by pressing on the porno-lever to achieve the requisite reward of sexual release. Once this reward has been acquired, however, our rat will receive a strong electric shock of shame. Reward and punishment, therefore, become perversely linked. The only route to pleasure involves pain, humiliation. Would this treatment, carried out millions of times across whole rodent populations, have a beneficial or a deleterious efect upon their mental health, do you suppose?
With human beings, in the socially constructed Skinner Boxes of our sexuality, it isn’t going too far to suggest that certain individuals are thus deprived of the release they seek, unable to accept the shame and loathing by which it’s accompanied. Extended over an entire society, this means the pressure cooker lid is kept securely on, while the release-valve isn’t functioning the way it does in Holland, Spain or Denmark. Subsequently we are subject to more frequent and disastrous explosions of the sex drive, ugly eruptions into real life by what should have been a harmless fantasy. The outcast status of pornography appears to drive some people into shadowy and claustrophobic isolation where their sexual daydreams can turn into something dark and dangerous that is to nobody’s advantage, neither themselves, their victims, nor society at large. Worse still, in sexually restrictive cultures where pornography is seen as causing sexual crime (rather than as providing an escape-valve that might possibly prevent it) the instinctual response is almost certainly a fresh attempt to bear down on the pressure cooker’s lid.
Where does this leave us, and where does it leave pornography? With each new technological advance since William Caxton it would seem pornography has both proliferated and degraded in its quality. Today’s society, thanks to the internet and other factors, is entirely saturated with erotica of the most basic, rudimentary kind; convict pornography for convict populations shufling through life’s mess-hall, without any other options than the slop they’re given. Porn is everywhere, just as it was in ancient Greece, but nowhere is it art. Nowhere is it an afirmation of common humanity the way it was in classic culture but instead afirms only our alienation and our distance from each other, and despite its mass availability does not appear to be making us any happier.
Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether, as control-leash, lure and lash combined in one, a cattle-prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before us everywhere we look it leads us on. Then, in the guilty aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod of shame with which to flog ourselves.
This is especially true of the United States as it negotiates its current Georgian era, although as with the unreasonable influence Victorian England had upon the world back in the nineteenth century, the repercussions of a faith-based presidency in America are felt across the globe. They’re felt in terms of their effect on foreign policy, on the sciences and arts, and on how we think about our sexuality and its entitlements. Soaking in cyber-porn and promo-porn, the sexual heat within society is higher than it’s ever been, the needle on the boiler’s dial tipping alarmingly into the red, yet at this point in history we’re governed by a mindset that is programmed to respond by clamping down on the escape valve, on pornography. Wipe out pornography, the idea seems to be, and we’ll have also somehow wiped out all the urges that first prompted us to sculpt Bog Venus in the first place.
Clearly, the eradication of pornography is never going to happen. Porn’s been with us since our Palaeolithic past and will in every likelihood be with us until we succeed in tidying our species from the planet. ‘No porn’, then, is not a realistic option. I suggest the only choice we genuinely have is between good pornography and bad pornography. This obviously begs a bunch of questions, the first being as to how we diferentiate between the two. Just for the purposes of argument let us define ‘good’ porn, like good Judge Clayton Horn, as that which is of noticeable social benefit, with ‘bad’ porn as its opposite, that which is noticeably to our social detriment. Of course, this raises a much bigger question, namely, does ‘good’ porn even exist? If not, could it conceivably exist at some point in the future, and what would it look like if it did?
To answer this, we could do far worse than refer back to those few dissenting female voices that were raised, back when the feminist debate upon pornography was at its hottest and perhaps its most intelligent. Taking some inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s influential essay Must We Burn Sade?, the wonderful and greatly-missed Angela Carter muses on porn in her book The Sadeian Women, finally suggesting that there might be some form of pornography yet undiscovered, glorious and liberating, unencumbered by the inequalities of sex and sexuality that dogged it in the past. Even porn’s most uncompromising and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable, even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given that we don’t want ‘bad pornography’ and can’t have ‘no pornography’, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility of ‘good’ pornography that the one ray of light in an intractable debate resides.
The question still remains, however, as to how pornography might have a beneficial influence upon society, exactly? If we can’t imagine such a situation, then how would we recognise it if it should arise? Even if we accept along with Andrea Dworkin, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker and Simone de Beauvoir that our hypothetical ‘good’ porn is possible, that doesn’t help us much unless we have a clear idea of just what good, what benefit, pornography of the right kind might work within our culture.
We’ve observed already that in places such as Denmark, Spain or Holland porn appears to act to some extent as a release valve, venting sexual pressures harmlessly before they can explode in sex crime or abuse. We also noted that this doesn’t seem to work in more restrictive cultures where reflexive guilt and shame seem to attend the very notion of pornography. What if it were possible to bring such a degree of artistry to our pornography that this immediate link between erotica and dire social embarrassment was severed? Might pornography in this way be allowed to function as it does in more enlightened climes, reducing our appalling score of actual men and women scarred and violated, actual children raped and killed and dumped in a canal? Isn’t such a thing at least worth the attempt?
Pornography, if it could be expressed artistically in such a way, might welcome our sexual imagination in from the cold, into the reassuring warmth of socio-political acceptability. The power of art is that it lets us see, in someone else’s work, an idea that we dimly formed but lacked the skill to realize or convey, and in this way makes us feel less alone. Pornography as we conceive of it today, however, does the opposite. It isn’t art, cannot be openly admired or discussed, serves only to convince us of our isolation, to increase our sense that we are in our secret and most intimate desires alone save for the reeking company of other sweaty, masturbating perverts and social inadequates.
If we could redefine erotica, restore it to the venerated place in art that it was once accustomed to, this might defuse a number of our personal and social tensions with regard to sex in much the way it seems to have done at the dawn of western civilization. Realized properly, pornography could ofer us a safe arena in which to discuss or air ideas that otherwise would go unspoken and could only stale and fester in our individual dark. Our sexual imagination is and always has been central to our lives, as individuals or as a species, and our culture might be much enriched, or at least more relaxed, if it acknowledged this. There’d be no more divine pornography by any future William Blake incinerated after his demise, no future Aubrey Beardsley on his deathbed, frightened, coughing for his finest work to be destroyed. No frilly decadent or bearded Beat compelled either to cower behind a pseudonym or add to the prolific oeuvre of ‘Anonymous’.
Ennobled thus, pornography could take its place once more as a revered and almost sacred totem in society, could be brought full circle to its origins in the pneumatic pinhead babe of Willendorf. It seems we only have two choices in the way that we regard our own erotic dreams: either we can accept them and restore Bog Venus to her natural and proper place in culture; or we can reject them and attempt to stigmatize them, can attach arousal to so much conditioned shame and guilt and pain that in efect we have contained our sexuality within a spiky 19th century German cock-ring.
In the end, it’s in the hands of individual people, individual artists, writers, filmmakers or poets. If they have the nerve to plant their flags in this despised and dangerous terrain despite its uninviting nature, then in time the dismal wilderness might be transformed into a scented garden of enduring value. The erotic might be elevated from her current status as a hooker everyone keeps chained up in their cellar but nobody talks about, unmentionable but available, back to her previous position as a goddess.
We might find she’s changed some since her chunky limestone origins, might find she now resembles something more along the lines depicted in Pornocrates by the magnificent Félicien Rops. This superb work, begun by Rops in the late 1870s, depicts the spirit of pornography herself, a gorgeous woman seen in profile treading carefully from right to left across the image, clad in only boots, gloves, stockings, jewellery and a drifting sash, topped by a Gainsborough hat. Pale flowers are in her hair, and, similarly pale, there is a blindfold tied across her eyes. Held on a ribbon-decorated leash as though it were a well-clipped poodle is a lean young pig that seems to lead the sightless beauty in the manner of a guide-dog. At a pace sedate and dignified, it navigates for its blind mistress what may be only a decorative lower border to the picture but which looks like the embellished stonework of a wall or ledge, along the top of which the elegant embodied spirit of Victorian pornography is guided by a snuffling hog; a swine before The Pearl.
A frieze runs in relief along the wall or border’s topmost edge, depicting effigies of the fine Arts, sat with their parchment, lute or easel and yet hanging down their heads, looking away embarrassed as the goddess of pornography parades there brazenly above them. Similarly, hovering in the air before her as she walks there are three anguished cherubs, tearing at their hair as they berate her lewd display. Behind her blindfold, unaware of how she looks and rightly unconcerned by the controversy she’s causing, utterly unworried by the precipice she steps along, the voluptuous essence of pornography is calm, serene. She trusts her safety to an animal conventionally seen as the epitome of dirtiness and brutish instinct, this despite its widely-mentioned cleanliness and keen intelligence. The goddess walks along her wall, proud and unmindful of the drop to either side, secure in her conviction that she is a thing of loveliness, safe in the knowledge that by following her noble and yet much-despised animal urge she will be led unerringly towards her rightful Queenly destiny.
Shameless and blind to all the outraged posturings occasioned by her presence, Venus promenades along the moral tightrope of her path, walking the pig, sure-footed and invulnerable in her glamour as she wanders, one step at a time, towards the hoped-for glow of a more human and enlightened future.
PREV
