Monday 20 December 2010

Why porn is a good thing

If you dont want to read about porn then dont read about porn. If you do, I have some thoughts. I want to explain why I watch and read porn, why I like porn, why I think it's a good thing, not just because it gives people physical pleasure, but as an art form. Why I think a lot of critiques of porn that go under the name of feminism are mad. Why I think attempts to restrict porn are doomed to failure, fundamentally dangerous and not a good way to address the many dangers of immoral forms of sex. And finally how all of this fits into the reality of immoral forms of sexual act. If you dont want to know, dont read, thankyou.



Can I start by saying I'm not talking about, and dont care about, that one porn film. You know, the one film that has been made over a million times with subtly different actors. Woman and man in room, say meaningless words, undress, they have oral sex, he ejaculates all over her, they have sex, he ejaculates all over her, they have sex from the rear, he ejaculates all over her. Continue until bored. I dont care. Yes, sure you can deconstruct this to make it be about the objectification of women, or power dynamics in the modern workplace, or about the bloody Korean War for all I care. This film is not expressing any of those ideas, this film has no ideas, it is utterly devoid of content, what's more, 90% of the time it's not actually that erotic. So whatever clever feminist interpretation of this you want to do, I dont care. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, works for smartphones, governments, soft mints, and porn. 90% of porn is Mills and Boon stuff, all throbbing manhoods and bountiful orbs, all quite boring.


Ok, so why do I think the good porn, by which I mean the stuff that has actual content, is good?


Well, first and foremost, it gives people pleasure and doesn't cause harm. I'll argue this below as it's sadly very disputed. And secondly, it's actually art, in the broad sense, it's a tool for the knowledge and study of beauty and for self reflection, for a more full understanding of our own desires and ideas.


First off, porn gives people pleasure, I would have thought this was a no-brainer, but apparently not. Now a lot of people will argue that this is bad, it distracts you from forming real relationships, by presenting air-brushed impossible images of beautiful people it can get in the way of real relationships. And yes, real relationships with actual human beings are really damned important, but I dont think they have anything to fear. Porn does one thing well, it gives people orgasms. A loving relationship is not about that. Yes, sex is a huge part of what it means to be in a relationship, but it's not the point, the point of a relationship is to be naked with someone else in an emotional sense more than a physical one. The point of loving someone is to be totally and completely open with another person, exposing freely all your flaws knowing you wont be rejected for them. ... That's not what porn is selling. Porn and relationships dont compete. You can have the most wonderful relationship in the world and want more orgasms, you can have the worst relationship in the world and have more than enough to keep you happy.


Secondly, porn doesn't hurt people. Now obviously some porn does hurt the actors involved, I'll cover this later. But the main argument against porn is the line (screamed more or less hysterically) "wont somebody please think of the children". I've got news for you, young people, very young people, dont care. If a young child sees something pornographic they either dont process it as such, or dont really care. For older kids this is different of course, there's a remarkable phenomenon called adolescence where suddenly sex and porn become really interesting, and you know what, it's not all that shocking. Adolescents are going to become sexually active, it's just a biological fact, all the abstinence-only brainwashing you can manage wont change the sex drive. Porn doesn't drive this, and I've yet to see any serious study to suggest porn changes it. 


But what about society. 

There is an argument (I wont do down the incredible work of the women's emancipation movement over the centuries by calling it a feminist one) that claims porn is damaging not to the user, but to society as a whole by reflecting bad images of gender relations, body image and sexual health. Now on the last point I agree, we need to see more condoms in porn, I wouldn't suggest that the law is even slightly competent to change this, but this is a decision individual actors and producers need to make. But on the first two, I can only walk away feeling confused.


Firstly, gender relations in porn are as varied as they are in life. Remember that for every degrading and humiliating thing a woman is made to do by a dominant man in porn, there's a man being made to do something just as bad by a woman. Porn does not have one view of what men and women are (or for that matter, who everyone else is). To denounce an entire industry because one faction presents as erotic something you find politically distasteful doesn't seem to me to make sense. And for the record, there's no contradiction whatever between being sexually submissive (whatever your gender) and being politically or economically second class. Shockingly people act differently in bed, and the power plays (of all kinds) found in porn are not and cannot be a reflection of what society is or should be.


And yes, sadly people look at porn and see people who dont look like them, the problem is exactly the same thing is true of the paintings of the great masters and for the same reason. Porn is fake, and the only way you can sensibly remind people of this is bloody sex ed for crying out loud. If girls dont know that normal human being dont look like skeletons and die early if they do then TELL THEM, if they dont know that most people dont have breasts larger than a H cup and genuinely dont please their partners less as a result TELL THEM. If boys dont know that eating nothing but protein shakes in order to get an 8-pack if you're 4 foot high isn't what's expected of them TELL THEM, or that most people dont have a 10 inch penis, and genuinely dont please their partners less as a result TELL THEM. With proper, objective, factual, informative sex ed, featuring diagrams, statistics, actual facts about healthy and unhealthy people. Porn isn't the problem, the fact that there's no factual complement to porn is the problem.


Porn as art


The point on art is a seriously meant by the way, I'm not trying to BS. What art is for is as a tool for self reflection and as an expression of beauty. If you dont find porn beautiful then you're looking at the wrong websites, and let me tell you there's a lot of people in the same situation with paintings. Remember Sturgeon's Law, the fact that most porn isn't beautiful doesn't mean porn is bad, it means porn exists. Likewise the fact that most paintings are unmitigated tosh doesn't stop genuinely beautiful and moving ones existing.


But my main point on art is as a tool for self reflection. Great art allows you to explore yourself. Nobody ever got anything out of a great novel without thinking about themselves. Great art asks you what you want, it allows you to safely explore the areas of yourself you keep hidden in public. Post-apocalyptic stories of all kinds ask what would you really do if society wasn't around to stop you. War stories ask if you have the bravery to do what's right. Legal stories ask you to consider your idea of justice (and I'm not just thinking highbrow here, Star Trek The Next Generation was occasional master of this). Romances ask you what kind of people you want to spend the rest of your life with.


Porn can do the same things. Porn asks you a simple question "what turns you on". This is possibly the deepest and most hidden question most people get asked by something they see. What is going on deep in the animal part of your brain? What are your ultimate, primal, motivating desires? This is why I like the Marquise de Sade. For those not familiar, he is the man for whom sadistic is named. The horrors he inflicted on people were legendary, and genuinely evil in many cases. But his art (by which I mean his books), are a brilliant analysis of the dark forces that motivate us. "Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man" is a great example, a priest enters to perform last rights on a dying man, who, being an atheist, rebukes the priest for his wasted life, they argue, the dying man wins and they both join in an orgy with the several prostitutes the dying man ordered as his final wish. To read this and not ask yourself ultimate questions about the purpose and meaning of existence is to have not understood it. 


Likewise, many of the fetishes which are casually lumped in the category of "extreme porn" make us question ourselves, what is it that we're looking for. Are you interested in power, are you interested in extreme bodies, what about humiliation, what about disgust? Many people laugh about scatological porn, but asking yourself why it is that disgust per se is arousing to some people is an important question about what we desire. What is it that makes something disgusting to us, is it simply defying how we expect to find things? If so you've discovered that people are turned on by breaking society's rules, congratulations. Is it something deeper then? Are we aroused by being forced to confront something that scares or disgusts us? I dont know, but if you want to find out, you need to stop thinking about evolutionary biology for a moment and get some data. Go out there and feel, what disgusts you, what do these things have in common?


Theatre holds, as 'twere, a mirror up to nature. Porn holds, as 'twere, a mirror up to your animal hind-brain. Both are truly art.


So you like porn, we get it, what about politics though, this is the real world, people get hurt out here. 


Lets get the blindingly obvious out of the way. Bad, evil, immoral sexual acts exist. Remember the Marquis? He abused and tortured so many people he was arrested and sent to the Bastille. Rape exists, rape of children exists, rape of animals exists. All these things are evil, and all of them need to be stopped by careful, targeted police work. I'm going to use rape as a general word for all non-consensual sex acts, obviously including all sex acts whatever performed by a child or an animal. Sometimes people record these acts and peddle them as porn.


Let me get one thing straight, stopping these videos circulating doesn't stop the rapes from having happened. The question is not should we ban such videos because they are depictions of immoral acts. If we're going to stop that then the drama department of most TV shows really needs to be worried. You stop crime drama and cut all the crimes from the rest of drama and you've got a rather thin slice of the pie left. The question rather is, what do we do about these videos to best help the police to prevent future rapes?


Now clearly if an industry has developed that produces such videos in large quantity then tracking down the people involved and stopping them is vital. If this suggests banning such videos is something not immediately clear to me. I'm not interested in having the debate however because there's only so far you can go against what would ever become law before it gets dull. 


This does not however have an impact on the general discussion of pornography. There are several suggested links between rape and general porn. First off, the slippery slope. Watching porn makes people watch more extreme porn, which tails into rape, so if we can stop them slipping we can stop rape. ... This is at best lacking a base in fact and at worst is the working of a very strange kind of mind. The United States alone spends more money on internet porn per year than the entire national debt of sub-Saharan Africa, to suggest that watching porn leads to rape suggests to me that there must be an epidemic of rapes right now in the USA. I've not done a statistical analysis, but eyeballing historical crime stats suggests there was an uptick in rape (and a corresponding one in murder) around the end of the 60s, but no significant spike on entering the internet era. If this rather speedy look is wrong please tell me, I stand prepared to be amazed, but a causal link between porn and rape seems to me hard to find.


The second argument is that the availability of porn that looks like rape or which explores rape (by which I mean stories in which rape is depicted by consenting actors or by words on a page or images on a screen with no actual rape having happened) increases the likelihood that someone will try it for real. To me this makes as much sense as saying we should ban crime dramas or the reporting of violent murderers on the news (that genuinely would reduce the amount of insane gunmen, but the free press ramifications of such an idea are appalling). Here the lack of serious evidence that there is such a causal link and the thing I was saying above about art combine. Art only makes any sense, and is only valuable, if it's exploring, if it's pushing what can be done. If Mary Whitehouse approves of your art you've failed. If I'm shown a really good study that suggests that a well targeted block campaign would save people from sexual violence then I'd think seriously about it. But until then art trumps speculation.


Final thought: banning stuff on the internet


Ok, lets go over this for the thousandth time. I dont care if it's child porn, I dont care if it's regular porn, I dont care if it's secrets about your government, I dont care if it's advice on how to get round the police. 


You cant block stuff on the internet.


I dont mean you shouldn't, though that's true. I mean it's impossible, cant be done. Australia and China, bless them, are trying hard, but it cant be done. For a start, the definition of porn is impossibly slippery, extreme porn even more so. The nature of administering large black lists is that normal stuff gets put on accidentally. The Australian black list for extreme porn at one point contained a dentist's office. 


Supposing you can write a black list though, making it work is impossible.

"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it". ~ John Perry Barlow.
If you try and block a website the cold-war-inspired multiply-redundant brain of the internet assumes there's been an error and simply re-directs things round your block. Add to this the existence of proxies, you cant get around proxies, ask anyone who's tried to run a secondary school computer network, unless you're personally monitoring everything all the time they will get round all the blocks you put in place. The idea that your government has people better with computers than the combined power of teenagers looking for porn is frankly laughable.


Second and final point, if we did live in some bizaro-world universe where you could stop porn getting through, you shouldn't. You should nuke any such devices and plans out of existence. Because there's mission creep. Nothing sinister, no big evil conspiracy, just sad but inevitable reactions by do-gooding government employees. In Australia extreme websites on abortion and euthanasia have been blacklisted. Obviously, say the black listers, we do this only for the public good, it's for your protection. Next come the extreme cults, and things dangerous to national security, wikileaks, scientology. Next the neo-nazis, the national front, the KKK. Next the moderate neo-nazis, including the BNP. And by this time you're not living in a free country. China is doing exactly this. The fact that people can get round the great fire-wall of China doesn't stop the attempt being despicable.


Porn is good, banning it is dangerous.

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