Porn, exploitation, violence and sexuality

04.09.2006 23:09
Grammatoncleric - interesting posting. I too watched the TV show on C4 about AIM and the HIV outbreak in the porn industry and found it provocative and disturbing. Certainly as a consumer of many years in fits and starts, collections and purges, my relationship with porn is certainly not one without its dilemmas, guilt, shame, and libidinally charged arousal. Having worked therapeutically with sex offenders for many years, I also had to make peace with a lot of my own craziness and perversity, facing the uncomfortable fact of becoming (psychologically) aroused at clients reporting offence narratives, when all of my other senses were screaming that lines had been crossed and women and men severly impacted as a result of the behaviours being described. But, these are all aspects of one's own response to sexuality that one has to make peace with very rapidly as a forensic psychotherapist and is the day-to-day stuff of supervision and practioner therapy. Anyway, for whatever it is worth, I thought that I'd share some of my own thoughts from a relatively unique perspective (I'm not sure how many people who post to IM have this kind of professional background to draw from) about pornography, sexuality, deviance, arousal/pleasure and addiction.

1. Pornography is - as Danny has already alluded to - both a business as well as a series of graphic triggers, and before any serious discussion about porn can commence, I'd strongly recommend that we separate porn as a business from sexuality, arousal, and fantasy. Porn is the parallel market to Hollywood and romance novels: it is the marketing of fantasy. What is different about porn of course is that the fantasy being marketed here is solely concentrated on sexuality. This makes it an automatic target for controversy, largely because our western culture is replete with mixed messages about sexuality (our own and what we take as normative parameters). This is one of the reasons why advertisers have exploited this anxiety for so many decades with varying degrees of explicitness, and why it still works despite the significant contributions of feminsism and post-structuralism in deconstructing the pornographic image/discourse. To use a hackneyed example: while men know that it is a really low class dumbing down advertising trick to use a bikini-clad woman on a car's bonnet to sell a car, it is still used because it still works! What is triggered is something that some might call biological, or natural (whatever that is), but irrespective of what one calls it, the fact still remains is that the eye (male and female!) will be drawn to the bikini-clad model. Studies using the plethysmograph and retinal tracking on males will illustrate that both homo and heterosexual men will "scope" the female model, but the plethysmographic measures will differ as will the duration of attention given. Females (obviously, no plethysmograph!) will spend the same amount of time looking at the model, but usually for different reasons. The heterosexual male will however usually respond in terms of plethysmograph readings (unless his conditioning has pushed his arousal patterns in different directions). It is easy to slip into using language about biological or procreative conditioning here (for the male) or "mate competition" for the female, and I'll leave that to the scientists to fight over.
The point here though is that arousal to sexual stimuli is a trigger point that advertisers take advantage as do pornographers which is advertising (in the bikini mode sense) where what is "advertised" (and sold) is the "advert" itself! Adverts are stimuli triggers that are typically imagery and fantastical. Porn is exactly this as well. So we have two issues here then: the selling of stimulation (which is the "addiction" part) and the issue of arousal. The business side of things is the triggering of arousal, and what ends up happening gets quite messy because these two themes become quickly enmeshed.

2. Because the multi-billion dollar/euro/pound/yen business of pornography is a business designed completely around triggering arousal, everything is geared toward this: this includes a number of mythologies (e.g. women are sluts, easy, wanting it just as badly as you do, etc.) that are used in exactly the same reality constructing ways as the friendly and normalising attitudes of casino staff and even bar staff. If the reality constructing discourse were dropped, the "reality" configuration would be beset upon by other discourses that are also very powerful - e.g. the gambler's guilt, the porn consumer's shame, the boozer's promises to reform. However, many of these mythologies are woven into a sufficient layer of truth to make them increasingly believable - women are sexual beings, and who knows how the description, expression and experience of their own libidos might have been had men not acted like a bull in a china shop and enacted his dominance and controlling frenzy, limiting women to approved modes of expression? The feminist movement was great in being able to help women off-load centuries of oppression, and this led to many rejecting men and well as dominant (dominating) forms of masculinity. Many women reported feeling "liberated" - politically, libidinally, creatively, etc - as a result, even to the point where women began to explore their own eroticism (i.e. soft porn!). However, by and large, these dominating mythologies still persist and in persisting create a world - a parallel universe - where women are wanton sluts who can't get enough of YOUR (whatever one's particular "niche" is). The business is of course, that the pornographer can supply you with a seemingly unending diet of this mythology, with images for consumption.

3. By separating the business from the arousal, identifying the mythologies that support the business by appealing to the arousal, it helps to undo some of the messiness that porn debates get caught up in: arousal is fine, but the marketing of the arousal requires that somewhere along the line someone is getting taken advantage of for the entrepeneur to make a profit: no profit, no business! This is then, in theory at least, no different than the kids engaged in sweatshop work for Nike and other logo-branded consumerables; it is no different than the pig grown fat for the slaughter, or the produce grown and flown in from far away (different thematics of exploitation). In the case of porn (and this includes the sex industry generally) someone has to produce that which is sold - models are required to be photographed. The woman (in the typical case of porn) is the product: it is almost inevitable that she is going to be commodified - she has been converted into a commodity. Trouble is, it is not her as such, but rather the image she portrays ... the mythology she feeds into. She as a person is emptied of her personhood: her body doesn't count after a while because it is not her body per se either, but the "saucy bits" that becomes the prize. But, because this is an image, rather than a full genuine encounter with the other that is about negotiating relationships, the exploitation is built in from the start: just as a fan has a pornographic relationship (arousal fantasy) with a celebrity (image), so the consumer of porn has a pornographic relationship with the porn model's body parts (image). The arousal is to the image, NOT the person pictured, who will remain unknown to the consumer. Often, when any kind of bio is offered about the model it is usually twisted to reflect some or other sexualised re-telling. Most porn media won't even bother with bios or even plot lines: it is not about relationship, but it is the fantasy rapture of body parts.

4. This is where it starts getting tricky. The image is now open and available - there is a sense in which the model has come into the consumer's possession: her legs are opened for him, and her body is displayed for his eyes to consume, for him to become aroused to and to reach satiation (the Pavlovian associative reflex, as previously noted by another poster). The consumption of pornography is however, generally very unsatisfying: there is no relationship, just a picture/film/magazine and a used kleenex. For some men, masturbating to porn is done on the sly and is permeated with various degrees of anxiety (arousal) which, when combined with release, produces an extended associated pairing. Couple this with feelings of guilt, and one has a very powerful hormonal narcotic! Like a junkie, the come down feels worse than the pre-aroused state, arousal feels great and so the cycle is repeated until the association becomes such that it has been habituated. It is not too surprising then that for some men this association becomes so compelling that the fantasy is preferred to the reality, and some men will forego actually human sexual relations (with a wife or girlfriend) in favour of a fantasy encounter with a porno model. The porno model however gets extinguished rapidly, which drives the consumer to seek out newer images in order to recreate that arousal (a parallel issue happens with junkies: their tolerance increases, necessitating them to have larger doses to reach the same level of high as before). Wives and girlfriends become boring because the porn consumer is so familiar with their bodies and then of course there is all that stuff about human beings who don't strike the poses found in magazines, and don't do the things "she" does in the mag/film, etc. Again, a vicious circle of self-perpetuating reinforcement.

5. Finally, pornography does not cause sexual violence: what sex offenders (and serial killers, who often have sexualised violence to its logical end and no longer respond to the normal range of sexual stimuli) tend to do is to find - and latch onto - that porn that reflects the fantasies they have already been entertaining. Interestingly enough, it is not at all uncommon for this material to hardly rank as porn at all, but this is not true in all cases - some will find out and out violent stuff an immense turn on while others will find it too threatening and prefer the hyper-idealism portrayed in Playboy. But, what is critical, is that the causal direction is less from porn to rape (despite what Robin Morgan claimed!), but rather from rape (as sexualised violence and control) to those forms of images that will help keep those fantasies active in an on-going trigger/release of self-stimulation. The majority of the sex offenders I work with will almost have the equivalent to a radar in their heads, always on, looking for the slightest sign of something that can be worked into a fantasy. Rape is the practice of the rape fantasy. Pornography merely adds fuel to the fire, but cannot be said to cause it.

What porn - especially the so-called "gonzo" porn of Max Hardcore and company - does do however is make one bored with standard imagery. Because the person is evacuated, it is only the model's body - her physicality, which gets reduced to its barest principles and orifices - that is responded to. But this is empty, flat and hollow (because there is no human there with whom to relate), and so one tires of it easily. This can be frustrating and the sensation becomes degraded, requiring higher and higher jolts to get a buzz going. In short, the porn consumer gets jaded. The pornographer will push new markets into existence, and it will become the new thrill. When I was a teen consumer, Penthouse was about as risque as it got, then came the Color Climax and Euro mags, and now there's double anal, scat, BDSM, pseudo-snuff and faux rape ... all outlyers of a fairly mainstreamed market for those who have become jaded and want something else for a kick, a buzz. This is really where porn gets dangerous, because the same old model of entrepeneurship has not changed - there is someone who has be photographed doing these things, and this is really where women are prone to be degraded radically and obviously. When this is combined with the use of actual narcotics to hook women into engaging in these activities, or they are showered with money (many performers come from poor and troubled backgrounds) for abusing themselves, much of their own internalised abuse kicks in, and they are ripe for the abuse in exchange for money (and/or drugs), which is seen by many as at least getting something back for a change, rather than just taking the abuse and getting nothing out of it. It is a volatile and destructive relationship on all sides: for the female (and gay-for-pay) performers it is more immediate and obvious, for the male performers it is risky (health wise) and leads into a severely distorted relationship with women (because of performer conditioning). This latter applies to the producers/directors too, for the same reasons: the reduction of humans to body parts. It also tends to lead to an arc of escalation - the pattern of abuse will escalate in extremism: the degradation will intensify, the humiliation will be more thorough and complete. This is also paralleled in serial sex offenders (and in serial killing): the offences become more damaging, the victim less likely to survive the assault, physical force and violence to her body will become more significant. This is usually one way for investigators and therapists to identify the dynamics and history of an offender by locating him on the arc of intensification. Again, there is a simple process going on: tolerance. However, this tolerance is complicated by the "hollowing out" of the performer, in the case of porn, as a person and her body becoming the object of frustration because it no longer provides satiation, the "thing" that satisfies is always and finally out of reach, no matter how many women are fucked in however different and extreme ways. In the end, the consumer (the abuser) is found facing his own emptiness - the search for the sacred (the frisson of encounter that is initially sparked as arousal) has finally eluded him, and he is empty. This is the land of despair: many addicts, offenders, and porn consumers are wracked with despair. Some may attempt suicide. Some "graduate" to try to find that spark that continues to elude him.

I apologise for the compressed way of writing: this is a vast and complex topic and I could not do it justice under these conditions. However, there is no simple answer to whether or not porn exploits, for the reasons outlined above. What exploits is the business, which is predicated on triggering arousal and selling an image for consumption that only leaves one hungry. The exploitation is not just of women, but also of the consumer ... albeit in different ways.
I could go on, but will stop for the sake of any reader who has managed to get this far ;-)

dr jeckyl does not hyde

"Perhaps you guys here can tell me why the pornography industry isn’t given the same berth of analysis, denunciation, and active protesting that all the other industries are?"

Radical feminism is broadly considered 'of the left', so I dont' know what your point is here. Not enough focus on porn with leftists, anarchists and communists in general? Feminist writers have extensively critiqued the pornography industry, there is no lacking in berth of analysis if you want to look for it. As for denunciation, that depends on whether you believe sex-work or pornography to be a special case in the context of wider capitalist exploitation. I'm not convinced that it is.

There is quite a strong correlation between the expansion of pornography and the growth of social liberation. First in the 1920's and again in the 1970's.

In fact you could argue that pornography has done more to challenge racism and sexual stereotypes then a whole army of placard waving leties have managed.