| Compiled by Luke Ford
No civilization can be indifferent to the ways its citizens publicly
entertain themselves, writes conservative economist Walter Berns.
"Bearbaiting and cockfighting are prohibited only in part out
of compassion for the suffering animals. The main reason they were
abolished was because it was felt that they debased and brutalized
the citizenry who flocked to witness such spectacles."
Porn brutalizes and debases similarly argue the father of neoconservatism
Irving Kristol. "We are not dealing with one passing incident
- one book, or one play or one movie. We are dealing with a general
tendency that is suffusing our entire culture. Pornography differs
from erotic art in that its whole purpose it to treat human beings
obscenely, to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension."
Susan Sontag, a supporter of porn freedom, writes: "What porn
does is drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being
and one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a
healthy person is one who prevents such gaps from opening up."
Kristol notes that we have no "offhand, colloquial, neutral
terms for our private parts. The words we use are either (1) nursery
terms, (2) archaisms, (3) scientific terms, or (4) a term from the
gutter.... The genius of language is telling us something about
man...that it is an animal with a difference: He has a unique sense
of privacy, and a unique capacity for shame when this privacy is
violated. Our "private parts" are indeed private, and
not merely because convention prescribes it.
"...Masturbation is a natural autoerotic activity, as so many
sexologists assure us. And it is precisely because it is so natural
that it can be so dangerous to the maturing person, if it is not
controlled or sublimated... That is the true meaning of Portnoy's
complaint. Portnoy grows up a to be a man incapable of having an
adult sexual relationship with a woman; his sexuality remains fixed
in an infantile mode, the prisoner of his autoerotic fantasies.
"What is at stake is civilization and humanity. The idea that
'everything is permitted' as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise
of nihilism."
Bob Rimmer: "After ten years, patrons of adult theaters who
have seen hundreds of pornos are either jaded or desensitized to
normal sexual experience on the screen. To compensate, many sexvids
offer bondage or discipline sequences or entire tapes in which the
participants get sexually aroused by tying each other up or whipping
each other while they wear leather clothing. There are sexvids that
offer enemas, golden showers and probably even Marquis deSade defecation…
Most adult film reviewers rate the films on their ability to produce
a hard-on. Continually seeking after novelty, producers and directors
of even the best sexvids offer kinky sexual behavior that often
borders on cruelty or sadism. These sexvids degrade not only the
participants, but human sexuality in general." (X-Rated Videotape
Guide, p.34)
"No one can prove that films with graphic sex or violence
have a harmful effect on viewers," says Arthur Lennig, "but
there seems to be little doubt that films do have some effect on
society and that all of us live with such effects... The question
of how society will function when all checks that a few thousand
years of civilization have imposed have disappeared... has yet to
be answered."
Against such troubling questions is the fact that only a tiny portion
of men who use pornography ever commit violent crime. And the main
sources of violence in this century come from places relatively
free from pornography - such as Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia,
China and Cambodia. "If exposure to female flesh causes violence,"
notes Dennis Prager, "then Muslim countries like Iran, which
ban the public exposure of women's knees or elbows, should be among
the most peaceful countries on earth.
"Japan, which has one of the world's lowest rates of violent
crime, not only allows pornography, but specializes in bondage pornography
and it even features striptease acts on its state run television…
"It is tempting to distort truth for the sake of a moral cause.
Many people, understandably repelled by the proliferation pornography,
feel that it's acceptable to offer just about any argument against
it, so long as it is effective. But when truth is compromised, no
one is served, and ultimately the cause suffers.
"Porn does raise important questions. What impact does having
sex with a picture have on the user? Does pornography detract a
man's attention from real women such as his girlfriend or wife?
How does a man feel after using pornography? Better, worse or unchanged?
"What does the expenditure of billions of dollars a year on
pictures of naked women and men say about our society? We are all
highly sensitive to air pollution, water pollution, and the pollution
of our bodies. But isn't there such a thing as pollution of the
spirit, of the individual, of a society? Porn does violence, not
to bodies but to souls, to the divine image within the model, the
user and society." (Dennis Prager 310-558-3958)
In the 1960s and 1970s, conservative thinker Ernest van den Haag
testified for the prosecution of pornographers. "I thought
pornography not only offensive but harmful to the social fabric,"
he wrote in the National Review, 11/1/83. "Further, the crime
stimulating effect of pornography seemed only to exceed any crime-replacing
(cathartic) effects. Thus, the harm appeared to outweigh the masturbatory
pleasure that vicarious sex may yield, and I favored punishing purveyors.
I have changed my mind. I no longer believe the actual harm is great
enough to bother."
Ernest believed that his past testimony that porn is not protected
by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech is correct, but,
"the slippery-slope theory is wrong. Throughout history it
is the loss of political freedom which leads to a loss of artistic
and literary freedom, never the other way around.
"Providing it is truly private, I now do not think any consensual
sexual activity, including discreet prostitution and pornography,
should be regulated by the government.
"History demonstrates that, when tolerated, porn and prostitution
tend to be contained. Neither seems likely to seriously damage the
social fabric. To be sure, pornography fans may think of others
as interchangeable and available for impersonal sex, or savor its
depiction. (They won't lead happy lives). But they remain rather
few. Non-fans occasionally join out of curiosity but seldom stay.
For most people porn is no more damaging or habit forming than coffee."
Sexual desire is complex and frequently nasty, even without the
stimulus of pornography. As the late psychiatrist Robert Stoller
put it, "Humans are not a very loving species and this is especially
so when they make love." Sexual excitement usually flags without
"scripts in which one wishes - consciously or unconsciously
- to harm, by means of humiliation, one's erotic objects..."
At the heart of all perversions, including pornography, is "a
fantasied act of revenge which condenses a life history - memory
and fantasies, traumas, frustrations and joys. The perversion of
pornography, which provides restitution for men, comes in different
genres, each created for a specific perverse need by exact attention
to detail and each defining an area of excitement that will have
no effect on a different man." The feminists are right that
male heterosexual porn insults women. But it insults men too, showing
their need to be cruel and marking their failure to relate better
to live females. Men abuse women because they are uncertain, fearful,
angry and envious.
"Erotic daydreams in pornography represent fantasies of revenge
in which the consumer imagines he is degrading women. Men fetishize
- dehumanize - women to be erotically stimulated."
Robert agreed with feminists that in porn "there is always
a victim, no matter how disguised: no victim, no pornography…
For most people most of the time, a touch of cruelty may be a trace
element in erotic fantasy."
Dr. Stoller believed in significant differences between male and
female arousal. Men, heterosexual and gay, focus on body parts and
make them into fetishes while women, heterosexual and lesbian, look
more at personality. Their focus is more psychic than anatomical.
These differences appear "insoluble. Maybe if the need for
orgasm, once excitement is instilled, were always as driven in females
as in males or as bearable in males as in females, the two sexes
would understand each other better."
These theories, and the success of porn upon which they are based,
challenge Judeo-Christian and feminist notions that one person's
pleasure should never come at the expense of another. Christianity
and feminism want no sex masters and no sex slaves. Gloria Steinem
claims that erotica, as distinct from pornography, "doesn't
require us to identify with a conqueror or a victim." The Kensington
Ladies Erotica Society insists that its members not portray female
characters as victims.
Defining sin as the desire to harm others, Stoller suggests that
feeling sinful about sex comes in part from the awareness that much
sexual excitement depends on the desire to harm others. Believing
oneself to be sinning often increases sexual excitement. All sins,
however, are not morally equal. A rape fantasy is not an act of
palpable violence, "and the transvestite's unconscious fantasy
of revenge leads to nothing more violent than his masturbating into
a lady's hat."
Stoller acknowledges that destroying the human in our sexual objects
diminishes our capacity to love and that "unchecked sexuality
dehumanizes erotic life and this thwarts love."
The most visceral entertainments, however, both amusing and erotic,
depend on hostility. "Some humor is painful, some gentle, some
malicious, some warm, some mocking, some insightful. But there is
no humor without victims and victors, implied or manifest. One person's
joke is another's insult. Both people have been touched by the hostile
theme, but the one who has laughs has gained an insight the other
had to reject. Hostility...is a sine qua non [for humor and sex],
whether it is scarcely there or thickly larded in."
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