Morality

Pornography raises important issues about human nature, censorship, exploitation, violence, hypocrisy and differences between the sexes.

I begin this chapter by examining the charge that porn exploits women. Then I trace the arguments both for and against sexually explicit material given by leading thinkers and examine some of the insights that porn gives us into the human condition.

If porn ruins women, it ruins them with their eager consent. Contrary to myth, few persons, if any, are forced to perform in sexvids. Though females in the industry are the most likely to complain about it, women in all areas of life are more likely to express negative feelings.

After a PBS Frontline documentary on the suicide of porn star Shauna Grant, women eager to perform explicit sex on camera deluged porn talent agencies. Production companies receive intimate photos every day from women desiring to meet producers and even sleep with them for the chance to perform.

Many women seek auditions on the cashing couch. Few, if any, are seduced against their will. The industry is diverse, so women who don't like one entrance to Porn Valley can choose another or another.

Talent agent Reagan Sentner is generally looked down upon in the industry, particularly by Adult Video News, for his practice of sleeping with the talent. But none of them are forced to sleep with him. He is no powerbroker. Many persons, including myself, respect Reagan for being so open. What's the big deal if he sleeps consensually with talent?

Bill Margold says he discourages nine out of ten women who see him from joining the industry.

Most female performers, and almost all male performers, tell me they haven't had a problem with sexual harassment from the bosses of Porn Valley. I can't say the same thing for the actors I know in mainstream entertainment.

What About the Men?

As many men appear in porn as women, so why does no one cry that porn ruins men? The answer is that in today's America, only women and "minorities" can ever be victims. Because the squeaky door gets the oil, men, who are less likely to squeak about their problems, lose out in today's mad race for victim status.

It's hard to argue that the sex industry exploits women when they consent to shed their clothes for the camera, get paid for it, and frequently appear on TV's Tonight show and other programs. Many actresses view posing nude for Playboy as a career advance.

Some women who hate all forms of porn feel exploited because other women disrobe and perform sex for the camera. But there's no inherent reason for all women to feel demeaned because of what a minority of their sex do. Why not feel demeaned as a woman because other women gossip and destroy lives? As Dr. Robert Stoller put it, "only those who can be humiliated, can be humiliated." I don't know any man who feels demeaned because other males have sex on camera. Any man who said he felt exploited by that would be laughed at.

Nadine Strossen, the president of the ACLU, reveals in her book Defending Pornography why many persons believe that porn exploits women.

Central to the pornophobic feminists - and to many traditional conservatives and right-wing fundamentalists, as well - is the notion that sex is inherently degrading to women (although not to men).... Consensual non-violent sex is an evil from which women, like children, must be protected.

MacKinnon puts it this way: "Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike. The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it." And from Andrea Dworkin: "Intercourse remains a means or the means of psychologically making a woman inferior." Given society's pervasive sexism, she believes, women cannot freely consent to sexual relations with men; those who consent are, in Dworkin's words, "Collaborators...experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority."

Female performers earn twice as much as their male counterparts. In what other fields is that true? Porn does chew up unhappy unbalanced men and women. But such persons are vulnerable to crack up anyway, especially if they do drugs. And there's little evidence that pornographers do any more drugs than mainstream entertainers.

The porn industry saves as many performer's lives as it destroys according to its most popular member - Nina Hartley. She notes that porn provides opportunities for the sexually confused or adventurous to work out their sexuality. As for those who feel dragged down by porn, they are free to leave. Moreover, those who are truly unhappy about performing sex on camera will perform badly and will not be rehired.

Most if not all the well-known suicides in porn came from persons who led drug-filled lives - Savannah, Alex Jordan, Megan Leigh, Shauna Grant and Nancy Kelly. Yes. the frantic pace of porn predisposes some persons to unhappiness, but many professions are unhealthy - such as journalism.

Given traditional values, performing sex on camera is demeaning, but so are many acts, such as pretending to be someone's friend to get information from them. Performing sex is especially demeaning only if you view sexual sins as especially wicked.

Porn provides a home to many of society's misfits. To the lonely and psychicly homeless who join its ranks, porn provides close community. Many performers love what they do. "I can't believe that I get paid to do this," says Tyffany Million.

Male performers are the most disposable persons in porn production and are the least likely to bond. The male performer has the toughest job, for there can be no intercourse without an erection, and the penis is the one muscle in the body that can't be voluntarily flexed. Porn is hardest on men physically and women psychologically.

The careers of the leading men in pornos last much longer than those of the women. Performing sex comes more naturally to men and they are willing to work for less. As Holliday puts it, men are in porn for the sex and the women are in it for the money.

Women tend to have more negative feelings about porn than do men, just as polls show that women more strongly oppose abortion than do men. Both porn and abortion run counter to the female desire to bond.

George Weaver, a prominent prosecutor of pornography from Georgia published Handbook On The Prosecution of Obscenity Cases where he gives the characteristics for the ideal jurors he'd like to be facing while prosecuting an obscenity case. In order of preference, they should be: female; older; from small communities; from less metropolitan areas; lower income; read less and see movies less; less socially and politically active; more conservative politically; attend more religious services; less education; from Southern or North Central states as opposed to Northeastern or Western states; white as opposed to a minority; with families, especially daughters or granddaughters and/or small children or grandchildren; blue collar; conservative religious beliefs; little or no expose to explicit materials...

Almost everything I've read on porn asks the wrong questions and therefore can't come up with the right answers. I begin my selection of various views on porn with an essay by Dennis Prager which forms the basis for my approach to this subject.

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 communist Russia, China and Cambodia.

"If exposure to female flesh causes violence, 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."

On the other hand, 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."

Prager doesn't blame violence on inanimate objects like pornography, TV, or guns, for example, because he sees its true source within the human being. Violence springs up naturally from within us and it takes self-restraint to act good.

"It is very 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." www.dennisprager.com

Kenneth Tynan writes "In Praise of Hardcore."

Pornography is expressly designed for those who are not lucky. If your taste is for earrings or high heels or spanking or any of the other minority appetites, you may have trouble finding a like-minded bedfellow. You will be 'one of their own', and that can create a strangulating sense of guilt. Pornography loosens the stranglehold and assuages the solitude.

Worse by far is the plight of those who are villainously ugly and unable to pay for the services of call girls. To be poor and physically unappetizing is to be sexually condemned to solitary confinement, from which pornography offers the illusion of release.

It's difficult to be an enemy of pornography without also disapproving of masturbation. To condemn the cause, it is logically necessary to deplore the effect.

The debating society at my school was discussing the motion 'That the present generation has lost the ability to entertain itself.' Rising to make my maiden speech, I said with shaky aplomb, 'Mr. Chairman - as long as masturbation exists, no one can seriously maintain that we have lost the ability to entertain ourselves.' The teacher in charge immediately closed the meeting.

In a letter to the Sunday Times, a respected liberal clergyman wrote: 'To be sexually hungry is the fate of thousands, both young and old. There is nothing evil in this hunger, but it is hard to bear. To have it stimulated when it cannot be honorably satisfied is to make control more difficult.'

Here, in three short sentences, all the puritan assumptions are on parade - that sexual deprivation is the normal state of affairs, that it is morally desirable to grin and bear it, and that masturbation is a dishonorable alternative.

Because hard core performs an obvious physical function, literary critics have traditionally refused to consider it a form of art. [But] As Lionel Trilling said: "I see no reason in morality (or in aesthetic theory) why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions, of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no ground for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.."

But I mustn't lurch into the trap of suggesting that pornography is defensible only when it qualifies as art.... A reviewer in the International Times declared: "In the brave new world of sexuality, perhaps we can forget about art, and read Henry Miller as he was meant to be read: as the writer whose craft describes intercourse better than anybody else's. If we have learned nothing else from Genet, we can be sure of this: his result may have been art, but that's not as important as his intention, which was pornography."

[One frequently raised argument against porn is that it does our imagining for us.] It sounds like a fearful affront, a chilling premonition of 1984; but it is exactly what all good writers have done since the birth of literature. The measure of their talent has immemorially been their ability to make us see the world through their eyes. If they can heighten our perceptions, we should thank them, not resent them.

One inalienable right binds all mankind together - the right of self-abuse. That - and not the abuse of others - is what distinguishes the true lover of pornography. We should encourage him to seek his...pleasure as and where finds it. To deny him that privilege is to invade the deepest privacy of all. (The Sound of Two Hands Clapping by Kenneth Tynan. New York, 1975.)

In the '60s and '70s, conservative thinker Ernest van den Haag frequently testified for the prosecution of pornographers. "I thought pornography not only offensive but harmful to the social fabric," wrote van den Haag (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 van den Haag believes that his past testimony that porn is not protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech is correct.

"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 discrete 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."

In my view, van den Haag is right that porn is not speech protected by the First Amendment. Rather, it is expression which is not protected.

Porn does have a message. It's personal, social and philosophical - sex is fun!

I also agree that banning porn would not end liberty and democracy. Even though I oppose such censorship, I wouldn't give my life to fight it.

Pornography literally means writing about prostitutes. Prostitution and pornography are linked. Performers may be a type of sexual prostitute though legally performers are regarded as actors not hookers. Supporters of access to pornography for adults, like Kenneth Tynan, Ernest van den Haag and Dennis Prager, also support decriminalizing prostitution. Thomas Acquinas wrote that "prostitution is like a sewer, despicable but necessary."

As for Dr. Van den Haag's other points: Not just pornography users view others, at times, as interchangeable and available for impersonal sex. That's been an inherent part of human, particularly male nature for millennia, and if controlled by good values, is harmless. Porn may not be a key ingredient in a happy life, but neither does its use damn one to unhappiness.

Morality in Media gives a normative Christian approach to pornography.

Human sexuality was made by God and is good as long as it is used according to God's design. In Genesis we read of God creating man in His own image and likeness,...then God joined the first man and woman together and blessed them and said: 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth'; thus sex was designed by God to be used only within the context of matrimony. It is something sacred and is necessarily related to the origin of human life as well as an expression of conjugal love and unity.

Secular criminologist Bill Thompson summarizes the Christian perspective: "Humans, even in ignorance, are not supposed to tamper with any of God's designs, or this will have serious consequences for both the individual and society. Pornography, however, is not ignorance; it is a deliberate challenge to God's wish for monogamous marriage and procreative sex, because of its display of 'perversions' from His design; the most important being the negation of a necessary spiritual dimension, expressed through love. (Soft Core by Bill Thompson)

As the 1974 Lausanne Congress of World Evangelism made clear.

"Sex is ordained by God in the context of Love, which is essentially a spiritual factor. Christians must not underestimate the damage caused by over-emphasis on sex by adultery and promiscuity to the individuals involved and to society itself. Overemphasis on sex goes together with the loneliness of the young. There is a preoccupation with physical sexuality and this tends to heighten loneliness felt by young people. Christians must not let go unchallenged the flood of pornography which involves the exploitation of the weakness of man and the corruption of his spiritual and moral nature. By attacking man in this way he is made an object of lust rather than a person made in the image of God. Pornography, in attacking the image of God in man, is an attack upon God. In short, pornography is a destructive dehumanizing trade which exploits the weakness of consumers."

Today's best known thinkers opposing pornography are feminist professors Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Dr. McKinnon writes: "'Woman' is defined by what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction.

"Pornography is a primary means by which women are turned into objects for sex.

"What is sexual is what gives a man an erection. Whatever it takes to make a penis shudder and stiffen with the experience of its potency is what sexuality means culturally.

"What do men want?

"Pornography provides an answer... Women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed, or, to be fair to the soft core, women sexually accessible, have-able, there for them, wanting to be taken and used, with perhaps just a little light bondage."

Andrea Dworkin sounds a similar note. "Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and unable to bear looking...are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do, from the worst of them to the best of them, they do.

"She is the pin-up, centerfold, the poster, the postcard, the dirty picture, naked, half-dressed, laid out, legs spread, breast or ass protruding. She is the thing she is supposed to be; the thing that makes him erect."

Dworkin and McKinnon, like most feminist theorists, see no innate differences between men and women aside from the plumbing. Rather, it is patriarchal society that creates the differences. Patriarchy defines what is feminine.

But all societies through all of human history have revealed basic differences between men and women. Women tend to be less physically violent, more interested in the animate than inanimate, more monogamous and more grounded in relationships and reality. By comparison, the man is "more aggressive, exploratory, volatile, competitive and dominant, more visual, abstract, and impulsive, more muscular, appetitive, and tall. He is less nurturant, moral, domestic, stable and peaceful, less auditory, verbal and sympathetic, less durable, healthy and dependable, less balanced and less close to the ground. He is more compulsive sexually and less secure. Within his own sex, he is more inclined to affiliate upwards - towards authority - and less inclined to affiliate downward - toward children and toward the weak and needy." (George Gilder, Men and Marriage)

Almost all murderers are single men while violence rarely occurs when women are around.

What is sexual is not only what arouses men, but women also. Romance novels do nothing for men but they excite many women. Young men don't need romance to get hard, but we connote candle light dinners, flowers, chocolates and other forms of romance as having erotic overtones primarily because of their effect on women.

So this notion that patriarchy determines what is sexual is nonsense.

A strong element of male desire does wish to see women brutalized and f---ed, just as some women wish to dominate men and other women wish to be dominated. Porn reveals the stuff that men can't or don't want to do in real life, for porn is the stuff of fantasy. It reveals what persons want to watch rather than what they necessarily want to do.

Yes, men have nasty desires but so do women. For every man who wants to dominate a woman, there's a woman wanting to be dominated by a strong man. Men dream about sexually available women and many women dream about being raped.

Female porn performers, for instance, are notorious for shacking up with abusive men.

Pornography, notes Dennis Prager, is but the acting out of male fantasies. Porn did not create male desire for women as objects for sex, rather male desire for women as objects for sex, created pornography. (Porn may exacerbate this dangerous male tendency.)

In addition, sexual male thoughts only focus on women amongst heterosexual men. Homosexual men dream about other men as objects for sex.

Sexual desire is complex and frequently nasty, even without the stimulus of pornography. Men raped women at least as frequently before Playboy as since. As the late psychiatrist Robert Stoller put it, "Humans are not a very loving species and this is especially so when they make love."

In his book, Observing the Erotic Imagination, Dr. Stoller develops the following hypotheses: "(1) the overall structure of erotic excitement - not the content or the behavior - is similar in most everyone; (2) erotic excitement, due more to distortion of affection and tenderness than to direct expression, often flags without scripts in which one wishes - consciously or unconsciously - to harm, by means of humiliation, one's erotic objects...

"I see the particular moment of erotic excitement as a tangled compacted mass - a microdot - of scripts made up from impulses, desires, falsifications, truths avoided, and memories of past events, erotic and nonerotic, going back to infancy - a piece of theater whose story seems genuine because of the truth of the body's sensation. Though the moment feels spontaneous, it is... the result of years of working over the scripts to make them function efficently... to ensure that they produce excitement, with its end product, gratification, rather than anxiety, depression, guilt or boredom." (Observing the Erotic Imagination)

Irving Kristol wrote in 1971 that "Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want. For almost a century now, a great many intelligent, well-meaning and articulate people - of a kind generally called liberal or intellectual - have argued eloquently against any kind of censorship or art or entertainment. And within the past ten years, the courts and the legislatures of most Western nations have found these arguments persuasive - so persuasive that hardly a man is now alive who clearly remembers what the answers to these arguments were. Today, in the United States and other democracies, censorship has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist."

That last sentence is totally wrong. I wish that Kristol would have to face the hundreds of persons whose lives have been ruined by prying police and federal agents for simply watching or creating tapes of sex.

D.H. Lawrence wrote that pornography attempts to do dirt on [sex]...[It is an] insult to a vital human relationship."

As Walter Berns argues in his essay "Pornography vs. Democracy," in the winter issue of The Public Interest, which Kristol co-edits: No society can be utterly indifferent to the ways its citizens publicly entertain themselves. 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 our citizens similarly. "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."

Writes Kristol: "...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."

At the end of June, 1996, conservative columnist Don Feder reacted to a court decision against censorship on the Internet: "Little did James Madison realize when he penned his mighty bulwark of free speech that he was giving a pervert carte blanche to transmit pictures of group sex or oral intercourse to your 14-year old. That's the effect of last week's ruling [on the Communications Decency Act] from a trioof judicial pinheads... It takes a Silly-Putty view of the Constitution to see this as an intolerable infringement on the freedom of on-line smut merchants and perverts."

Conservative commentator George Will writes a bi-weekly column for Newsweek.

"New York City's government is acting against the pollution of the social atmosphere, and in the name of such conservative causes as neighborhood preservation and family values...

"The city says those effects [of pornography] include decreased property values, retarded economic development, damage to neighborhood character and to children. And when such businesses are clustered, there is increased illegal sexual activities and other crime, as well as loitering and littering and other nuisances. The new zoning law will disperse such businesses...

"The pornographers say that precisely probing the various secondary effects is problematic. However, precision should not be necessary. One does not need a moral micrometer to gauge that the sex industry turned Times Square into a slum...

"Selling pornography is not a crime, but by catering to, and inflaming, vulgarians' sensibilities, it contributes to the coarsening of the culture which erodes civility." (Newsweek 11/11/96)

Doug McKay writes on RAME: "Porn has always been accused of indecency, of being filthy, of pandering to our lower nature - its representations being against our better selves. It is a corruption of the sexual impulse, some moralists say. Its portrayal of sexual pleasure detached from deep human love is immoral and destructive to human society. It is a menace and should be stopped.

"I doubt you believe this yourself, unless you're a hypocrite. But I think a few of you have thoughts very like this at times in regard to some of the things you see in porn. You would prefer it didn't exist. Not *that* kind of porn. Only your kind. Where is the line, and who draws it?

"Consent seems the final boundary. If there is no universal consent among the participants, the moral line has been crossed. If consent is there, no persuasive argument can be made against it . Consent, being the issue, it is also the point of attack. Surely *she * did not consent to *that* - how awful! This sort of thing must be stopped!

"Ultimately that is the point against under-age participants. They do not yet have the full capacity to consent. Their will is incomplete. It is beyond them to make a moral choice. They are easily persuaded to do what if they had clear vision they would not do. This susceptibility to persuasion is sometimes applied to adults, too. We hear how some or even all women in porn are acting essentially as children who don't know any better. Their will has been corrupted by social forces they could not control. Those social forces must be eradicated from the culture, and porn is a prime example of a corrupting force.

"Like the pied piper, porn seduces so that it may destroy. If you are going to allow the radical sexual vision of porn, you must allow it all. Only at the boundary of consent can you shout against any part of it. And if you admit the possibility of women as essentially children who lack the ability to truly consent in one area of sexual action then you may find yourself indirectly arguing against porn in general. And I don't think you want to do that. Don't bring in the window what you pushed out the door."

With few exceptions, American filmmakers have yet to produce the humorous sophistication of European sex romps such as Bordello (Danish), released in 1974. Nudity and sex seem more serious matters in America, in large part because of our religiosity which regards sex as holy rather than just another biological function.

American veteran porn performer and stripper, Porsche Lynn, articulates the secular and more European perspective. "Everybody needs to cum. Sex is a biological need. It's not an immoral disgusting thing. Sex is like drinking water and eating food. And just as you need to breathe air, you need to have sex.

"Any kind of sex is fine so long as your cumming. I masturbate two or three times a day.

"Guys will come into booths and ask, 'Is it ok for me to get comfortable?' I say, 'Yes, honey, it's ok to masturbate.' They need to hear that it's ok to masturbate because society pressures you not to have sex, and not to masturbate. But what's wrong with masturbating?

"The booths have become the nastiest, most promiscuous sexual experience you'll ever have in a safe way. The men feel that they can do anything on the other side of that glass because they feel safe. They can say anything they want to you and do anything they want to themselves. It's great. I enjoy it."

Sex on screen is usually more dramatic and self-conscious in this country than in Europe where women routinely bare their breasts at the beach. In the U.S., that's a crime. Breasts in Europe pop up everywhere - TV, movies, billboards, newspapers, etc.. French TV shows hardcore movies at midnight with explicit sex, penetration, cum shots and everything. Holland, Germany and Scandinavia are the most sexually liberal countries. England forbids all depictions of explicit sex that include male erections and penetration. But English TV and newspapers are racier than their American counterparts.

American concern over porn led to two presidential commissions on the subject. The first one reported in 1970 that porn was harmless. The second commission, stacked by persons opposing porn, found dirty pictures harmful.

The 1986 Meese Commission Report sold 100,000 copies, mainly to anti-porn Christians who were sickened by the large amounts of pornography in the report. The massive document contained explicit synopses of X-rated movies such as Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas and a 107 page list of porno books and magazines.