Questions rolling around my mind...

Hey, Y’all

I haven’t been around much because of the kidney (or whatever) problem I’m having, but it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about my gentle readers. I’ve been struggling with some concepts, and having been unable to reach a firm position on them myself, I thought I’d put the debate here and see what you think.

If your goal is to create a more functional society, is it better to start with the people you have or do you start with the people you want to create? The context here is pornography. Someone recently asked me to write about the Republican assault on sex in its many and varied expressions. I also occasionally get emails from feminists who are stridently anti-pornography. Then, recently, I’ve been getting a lot of correspondence from women who identify as “sex-positive.”  

First, I think it’s telling and tragic that women in American culture need to label themselves as “sex-positive.” A human being should be sex-positive by default – that’s how we are built. America has this nasty Puritanical underpinnings in everything from popular culture to the legal system, and we need to address that.  The Puritans were so uptight that they couldn’t get along with the same Europeans that brought us the Inquisitions, so they came to America where they could commit genocide and run their own Witch Trials. These tight-asses still affect us in some very specific and detrimental ways. The “Puritan Ethic” is the reason Americans work longer hours and have less vacation time than any other Western country. It’s the source of our repressed sexuality and the adolescent obsession with sex that permeates our culture. It’s part of the reason we let rich white people quite literally get away with murder. We need to excise it from our culture like the cancer that it is.

Second, the “sex-positive” label is a direct result of an egregious tactical error on the part of the American Feminist movement. We should never have called it “sexual discrimination” because men are going to object to anything they think will inhibit their sexual activities. The more accurate term would be “gender discrimination” and that’s the one we need to be careful to use now. Now we’re back to pornography. Feminism became synonymous with being anti-pornography, and there was a classic  duality embodied in the persons of Hugh Hefner vs. Gloria Steinem. What feminists really objected to was the sexual and financial exploitation of women, but that got lost in the shuffle. Any positive effects feminism had in freeing women from the restrictions placed on them by a patriarchal system that counted them as chattel were attributed to a “sexual revolution” rather than feminism, which most people even now define as being anti-sex.

In the context of my original question, I believe that we need to define the term “pornography.”  I don’t think Playboy counts as pornography. It’s an idealized yet unhealthy representation of beauty, like that in the fashion industry, but it isn’t pornography. It’s just pictures of pretty girls. We can take issue with the idea that the girls are too thin, and usually have plastic breasts, but they are just bodies, and I don’t believe a picture of the human body is pornography, even if it is an explicit one. I’m not even sure depictions of sexual activity should be considered pornography. Adult material, certainly, but not pornography. Restricting access to certain material or images based on relative maturity isn’t censorship – it’s simply parenting. We have an obligation to protect children from adult issues for which they are psychologically unequipped. Once a person attains the age of majority they have an inherent right to choose their own limits of exposure to explicit material.

For me, in order to consider something pornographic, it has to cross a legitimate legal boundary. Depictions of non-consensual sex, sex with minors or animals are pornography. Even the idea of “non-consensual” has to be limited to situations where the participants have not agreed to participate. A picture of two people who have agreed to participate in a simulation of non-consensual sex would not be pornography in my definition. That’s going to upset a lot of people, but I’m not talking about a legal definition that has to meet judicial standards. I’m talking about a human definition that has to meet human standards without regard to enforcement. I don’t know if that’s a legitimate distinction or not – that’s one of the things I’m still thinking about. Child pornography is never ok, of course, nor is abusing animals. The issue of consent, particularly in a culture that engenders dominance/submission and sadomasochistic practices, is not so clear.

We live in a culture that produces certain types of people. Because we live in a patriarchy, we produce men who feel superior to women, and a large number of women who feel they are inferior to men. That same patriarchy creates attitudes of entitlement in many of those men, and that entitlement leads them to abuse weaker individuals. Unfortunately, that abuse includes things like rape, child molestation, and other forms of violence. My ideal culture would create none of those, and I do not think these behaviors are natural in healthy human cultures. The sickness/repression/oppression inherent to patriarchy creates offenders and victims; victims will go on to offend or to relive their victimization in one way or another. That is a psychological reality.

I don’t believe it is possible to retrain a bad sexual imprint. The compulsions that result from sexual trauma are profound and I know of no cases where they have been successfully retrained. (If anyone out there does, send me a link.) I know of cases where the behavior can be limited, but the compulsion is there to stay. We live in a culture that creates damaged imprints. Ideally, I’d like to live in a culture that creates healthy sexual development in everyone. Getting from point A to point B is the problem.

Now, the question becomes: does pornography allow an outlet for damaged sexual imprints that can prevent the individual from creating more bad imprints in others, or does it encourage or feed the compulsion to offend? I believe it does the former – it gives the compulsion some way to work its way out without involving other people. That is an important function, because those compulsions will come out, one way or another. Better to do it alone, best to do it with therapy as well. Some will point to a statistic that says most offenders use what the culture defines as pornography. Frankly, most people use some kind of “pornography” by the cultural definition, so I think that statistic is misleading.

To create a culture without victims, we have to stop further offenses. I’m in favor of special sentences for predatory serial offenders because the only way to keep the worst offenders from repeating their crimes is to keep them completely away from others. As far as fantasy, and material used to play out those fantasies, I think we need to allow people free expression. Removing the stigma is part of defusing the oppression and creating an environment where people feel safe in seeking treatment when needed. I believe that if we create a culture that doesn’t perpetuate cycles of violence and molestation, the demand for “pornography” will wane. People will always be interested in healthy expressions of sexuality, but we aren’t talking about sex, after all, we are talking about violence.

What do you think?