Academic

3/25/99

New Yorker on Academic Porn

In the 3/29/99 issue of the venerable magazine The New Yorker, writer James Atlas (who specializes in writing on academia and will publish next year a book on Saul Bellow, the University of Chicago don and novelist whose niece I once dated) analyzes academia's fascination with porn.

Writing under the headline "The Loose Canon," Atlas begins by describing his lunch with UC Berkeley Professor Linda Williams. Her 1989 book Hard Core (just reprinted in an illustrated version) inaugurated the current reign of leftist feminist pornologists whose ranks include Marxist Laura Kipnis (tenured prof at Northwestern who published Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Pornography in America), Chris Straayer (a New York University prof who published Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Reorientation in Film and Video), Constance Penley (film-studies prof at UC Santa Barbara), Alan Soble, Garry Leonard and Joanna Frueh.

Prometheus Books porn critic Pat Riley used Dr. Linda Williams' book Hard Core "to combat insomnia. Impenetrable prose, references galore to her mates in academia - there's really only one sociologist here doing any work out there, the rest are just quoting each other - and lack of a clear direction put this in the top ten of the most boring books to have even the slightest connection to the porno industry.

"With Hardcore, you know you're in trouble by page three when she starts quoting Foucault with the phrase "Foucault reminds us..." as though he were the great god from whose lips all wisdom falls. You don't know who Foucault was? He was the father of deconstructionism [not true - that was perhaps Jacques Derrida, Foucault was more of a poststructuralist], a method of generating psychobabble that is much revered by academia. But he's not quite so revered by the homosexual intelligentsia (although they don't talk about it) because, when he found out he was HIV positive, he hopped on a plane to San Francisco (he was French) to make a tour of the bathhouses and thereby infect others. Totally unrepentant, he justifies it in his diaries with more of the usual psychobabble."

Williams teaches a graduate course entitled "Pornographies On/scene" which appears in the syllabus as Rhetoric 241. Students must study such drivel as Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality and the essay "Pleasure: A Political Issue" by Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, as well as write a 20-page paper "on some aspect of visual pornography."

Williams: "I teach it as a genre - a genre about pleasures. Not that it isn't also about power, but mostly it's about pleasure, this elusive and almost philosophical problem, especially in the visual realm of representation. We know pleasure when we feel it, but what does that mean?"

I remember sitting in on Williams keynote address to the World Pornography Conference. No one appeared to have the foggiest clue what she was talking about.

Williams told the New Yorker: "When I taught a porn course to undergraduates at U.C.-Irvine, most of them just laughed their way through the films, and I've had a number of students say they couldn't do the course after the first day. They used to have trouble with gay-oriented films: when it came to anal penetration, they just couldn't watch. But I teach graduate students now, and they're a lot less homophobic."

James Atlas writes: "It's a little weird to contemplate Ph.D. candidates fanning out across the aisles of porn emporia with their Bic pens and spiral notebooks like Claude Levi-Strauss among the Nambikwara, but it has a certain logic... Cross-dressing as a literary theme, queer theory and S&M studies have displaced deconstruction and postcolonialism as the cutting-edge mode of discourse." (New Yorker, 3/29/99)

Almost all of the media famous writers on porn are women - from academics like Williams, Penley and Kipnis to social activists like Wendy McElroy, Susie Bright to porn stars like Annie Sprinkle to Nina Hartley. "Hiring a man to write on porn is like dog bites man," ex-porn star Richard Pacheco told me ruefully last year.

"Hartley and Sprinkle are well-known proponents of the "sex-positive" outlook," writes Atlas. "Sprinkle's secret of how to achieve a "five-minute orgasm is something of a legend in the porn world." Huh?

"I don't really like pornography," admits Kipnis. "I'm disturbed by it. I look at small numbers of examples and make big generalities. But I'm interested in things that disturb me."

Atlas concludes as a skeptic of porn studies. "[A] blue movie is still a blue movie, even if it's screened in Rhetoric 241."

His Holiness, Pope John Paul II wrote on RAME: "Probably the rapidly increasing social acceptibility of porn and adult video is driving academic interest as much as the need to shock. What would have been completely beyond the pale a decade ago, now only slightly tweeks the arts/ humanties crowd--they can get away with cheap gimmicks like adding off-the-shelf porn vids to their installations, so they'll do it (anything to get press). I expect this trend to intensify as they get into some of the hardercore materials (extreme anal, DPs, gangbangs). Who knows, they might even begin producing something on their own. But a basic start on the artistic front would be a comprehensive basic look at the aesthetics/poetics of porn, as well as the development of a canon of the most significant works. What makes a good porn film good? I rate "Latex" and "Shock" are two of the best works of porn ever, in any medium, but they don't do much for me (and many others) sexually. Is there a role for this sort of stylized porn in nonsexualized mainstream art forms, or can it only be taken in a context of pornography? What are the styles and forms of modern porn?

"AVN has some very practical categories--film, video, gonzo, wall-to-wall--that will manage, but only up to a limit. Any RAME reader could list at least fifty different porn categories, niches, and fetishes; a detailed examination of their similarities and differences would be a very basic first step. What's the role of music, of script, of individual personalities in porn? When is porn artistic and when is it merely functional? "Bad Wives" was clearly meant to be seen in different context than "f--- You Ass Whore", and vice versa. I'm not even scratching the surface with what could be done on the artistic/ critical front. Hundreds of thesis could be writen, dozen of professors could make tenure while analyzing this stuff, which heretofore has been forbidden. It's (almost) virgin academic territory.

"The growing size and prominence of the industry will bring more and more respectable researchers who will be able to offer more objective explorations of the history, business, and production sides of porn. How big is the industry, really? How many tapes actually sell? Or rent? (AVN puts out figures, but they are alternately dismissed as too low or too high.) How is the industry organized? What are the respective roles of talent companies, distributors, directors, video production companies, video rental stores, etc., etc. What is or was the role of organized crime, if any? Where does the
money go and how does it flow? Who rents porn? What do they really want? What are the different market subgroups? What techniques are best for infiltrating advertising into potentially hostile mass media? Again, just the first few things to come to mind.

"Legal research is one of the few areas where there is some work being done, from zoning to age-of-consent to the status of the concept of obscenity (apparently on life support)--there's room for much more. Gangbangs, felching, and urination are legal (in most states)--how is five finger fisting obscene where four fingers are fine? Should socially conservative local governments be able to set limits on forms of adult broadcasting (cable, satellite, internet) that cover their territory? Do porn stars deserve any--even the most basic-- forms of employee protections (which they now seem to lack). Porn has essentially been decriminalized, rather than legalized, and the efforts that it will take to bring it out of legal limbo are going to be huge.

"Feminists are going to need to refine, even redefine their ideas of porn, and they are going to be headed in different directions. Some are going to find the most extreme stuff (it almost proves some of their ideas, you know--it's not hard to argue that the appeal of Max Hardcore is his intense degradation and humiliation of women) and drag it out to shock and sicken the majority of people who don't know and don't want to know about it. Others are going to start watching Andrew Blake (especially his later works) and add him to the lesbian/ feminist canon of saints. The public flaunting of extreme forms of sexuality in the manner of Madonna during her "Sex" period is becoming fashionable in academic lesbian and feminist circles, to the horror of Dworkinites. This internal debate has started with (admittedly flakey) Camille Paglia--it will widen.

"The area where the most work has been done is the psychology of porn, yet this is probably the least fertile ground. Sexuality is likely to stay a mystery now and forever, and porn will remain impenetrable to analysis. It is always possible to document the forms and techniques (the aesthetics) of a given media, explaining why they work or how they function as part of a whole is much more difficult. We're never gonna know whether gang-bangs are great because the performers are closet homos, or the viewers are, or whether the degradation of the woman is important, or maybe an atavistic memory of war-rape and wife capture--...These are not areas for research, they are mysteries. The psychological appeal of porn for a given individual can be examined, and large- scale survey studies would be very useful, but the questions involving the psychology of sexuality are simply not going to be answered. Even asking them is borderline stupid. Hence the mediocrity of some much of recent academic work. On the level of the individual and large-scale survey, there are many possible topics for research. A look at the lives of porn stars and what effect their career has on their lives would be an important start. Robert Stoller did some brilliant work on individual psychological profiles of individual profiles, but this sort of work needs to be deeper on the individual level, and much broader when attempting a survey. Anyway, Stoller's dead, and nobody's doing anything now, with the exception of interviewers like Anthony Petkovich. The typical porn star interview, while useful, is not going to be able to support the weight of serious research. Are all porn stars victims of some sort of sexual abuse? Are they all drug addicts? Or just stupid? Does it really ruin their lives? To what degree does exhibitionism or desire for fame (of any sort) play a part? To what degree does on-screen bisexuality (and other relatively unusual sex acts) affect women's personal lives, both during and after their careers? What factors lead to their entrance to the industry, what causes their departure, and how many really leave (entering alternate forms of sex work--escorting, for example--seems a popular option)? All basic questions. We don't have authoritative answers to them. And I won't even start on how much practical large-scale survey research could be done on the viewers of porn. Not even gonna touch that one.

"Yes, many of the questions I have raised can easily be answered (and I personally don't need any answers) by many of us on RAME, either individually or by long-running posting threads. But few of them are getting the kind of academic scrutiny that can provide lasting answers, or at least solid progress towards a better picture. There are writers out there working on these questions, excellent ones, and AVN is always covering the progress of the adult industry, usually as well as could be hoped. But our writers, while experts in our field, are amateurs for the purposes of academic research. No offense is intended or should be taken--But until one of us is a tenured prof in an appropriate university department, we're all dedicated amateurs. And daily coverage of the AVN and Luke F-rd variety--while extensive--is essentially journalistic, and only a starting point for study. Ford's compilation of Subject materials and Bios is a good step in the right direction, as is RAME.net's archive. But any serious progress is going to come from the ivory tower, if it comes at all--and only if they ask the right questions, hopefully with the advice and guidance of all the dedicated amateurs."