by Pete Hamill
For the past few decades there has been a growth in the making and distribution of pornography. The reasons are complicated: the liberalizing of obscenity laws, the development of cheap offset printing and desktop publishing, the triumph of the VCR, the fear of women among some males that was caused by the ferocious oratory of the early days of the feminist movement itself and, lately, the fear of AIDS.
But there is no proof that pornography — even as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin — causes all human beings to act upon the bodies of women. As MacKinnon herself points out, pornography is essentially an aid to masturbation. And as Gore Vidal once wrote, masturbation is “normal” sex, in the sense that it is surely the most frequent practice among all the world’s billions. Certainly the old Victorian belief that masturbation itself is a loathsome evil, a mortal sin, underlies much of the public rhetoric about pornography. But there is one effect that it may have that the New Victorians can’t admit. Rather than inspire men to loathsome acts, pornography may actually prevent them. For every rapist who is discovered to have pornography at home, there may be a thousand men who are content to look at the pictures, read the text, whack off and go to sleep. Nobody can prove this, but MacKinnon can’t prove that pornography creates monsters, either.
At the various public hearings she and Dworkin have staged, MacKinnon has brought fcfrth a number of women to relate tales of horror. Some were forced into the making of pornography, others were forced by lovers or husbands into imitating the sex acts described by pornography. Those stories were painful and heartbreaking, and their narrators were clearly damaged by their experiences. But it is unlikely that any future hearings will present balancing testimony from a man who says that he lives a perfectly respectable life, except when he gets off a few times a week in private with a copy of Water Sports Fetish. As far as I know, even Geraldo hasn’t done a show on the joys of masturbation and its amazing social values.
The Meese Commission on Pornography, called into existence by the antiporn forces of the Reagan administration, asserted in 1986 its belief that pornography causes sex crimes. But the fine print in its 1960-page report showed that it couldn’t prove it. Six of the 11 commissioners were committed to the antiporn position before studying the evidence and they still could not make a convincing case. They heard from many experts, including MacKinnon. But even an examination of those incidents where pornography was found in the homes of rapists couldn’t prove the longed-for assumption.
The reason wasn’t elusive. It is a classic error in logic — heightened into an ideological certainty by the New Victorians — to confuse correlation with causality. A survey may discover that 97 percent of heroin addicts consumed white bread in grade school, but that would not prove that white bread caused heroin addiction. Pornography, as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin, may inspire a small percentage of men to experiment with more elaborate forms of their own preexisting sexual deviances. But it is just as likely that if they had never seen the material, they would have committed sexual crimes anyway. Alcohol is probably involved in more sex crimes than pornography is, and there have been many cases where religious or social repression led to the explosion, particularly among the young.
But one legal and social principle that the Bundy Bill and other New Victorian legislation casts aside is one of the most cherished conservative beliefs: personal responsibility. In a court of law, you can’t go free by saying that your upbringing made you do it, or your environment, your mother, father or friends. Still, many try to make that case. Whining has become one of the most widespread characteristics of Americans, even among criminals. In my experience, the classic excuse of the amateur American murderer has been “God made me do it.” Guys shoot up post offices or obliterate entire families and claim that God was in the getaway car giving orders. Charles Manson said he was inspired by the Book of Revelations. John Hinckley said he knew he had to shoot President Reagan after reading The Catcher in the Rye, and though J. D. Salinger is God only to a small number of fans, the reasoning is the same. When Ted Bundy said that pornography made him do it, the New Victorians cheered. But he was still only copping a plea. He did it. Nobody else. Murderers are responsible for their murders. And in every country on earth, rapists do the raping, not some collective called men.
The legal theory that endorses pornography-made-me-do-it, if accepted, would have no limits. Someone could claim that his family was destroyed as the result of published feminist theories attacking the family, and that feminist writers and their publishers must pay for the damage. Environmentalists could be sued for articles and speeches that place the spotted owl above the jobs of loggers.
And it could go beyond such possibilities. Violence permeates American society, and most of its victims are male. If the producers of Debbie Does Dallas can be held responsible for the crimes of someone who watched the video, why can’t the same be done to the producers of Terminator 2 or Halloween 5 or The Wild Bunch? You could go after the Road Runner cartoons, too, or Hamlet or the opera Carmen, In order to cleanse the American imagination, you would need to eliminate the works of Hemingway and Faulkner, along with hundreds of thousands of other novels and theoretical works that could make violence socially acceptable, thereby causing murder and mayhem. You would end up abolishing boxing, hockey and football. You would be forced to censor all war reporting, perhaps even the discussion of war, on the grounds that Nightline is the theory and war is the practice.
Obviously, this is pushing the argument to the frontiers of the absurd. But there is an absurd assumption behind the suppressionist argument: that men are a kind of collective tabula rasa on which the pornographers make their indelible marks. An innocent lad from Shropshire picks up a copy of one of the books that MacKinnon cites — say, Enemas and Golden Showers — and goes rushing out into the night, enema bag in one hand, cock in the other. That might have made a glorious scene in a John Belushi movie, but common sense tells us that it doesn’t happen very often in what we laughingly call real life.
One minor problem with this theory of human behavior concerns MacKinnon and Dworkin. They’ve obviously pored over more pornography than the ordinary man sees in a lifetime. “Look closely sometime,” MacKinnon writes, “for the skinned knees, the bruises, the welts from the whippings, the scratches, the gashes.” If human beings are so weak and pornography so powerful, why aren’t MacKinnon and Dworkin playing the Krafft-Ebing Music Hall with the rest of the perverts? There are two possible answers. The first is that MacKinnon and Dworkin (and other researchers for the New Victorians) are morally superior to all men and most women and are thus beyond contamination. The second is more likely: The material is so vile that it is a psychological turnoff to all human beings except those with a preexisting condition. Those people do exist. They have been shaped by many variables, none of which are excuses for what they do. But from the experience of the Victorian era, we know that if such people can’t find their preferred reading at adult bookstores, they will not give up their sexual fantasies. The fantasies will simply fester in the dark. And they will use what such people use in countries where pornography is now banned — their imaginations.
In such countries — say, Saudi Arabia, Ireland or Iran — the equality of women hasn’t been established by banning pornography, but I’m certain that the sexual impulse, and the instinct to dominate, remains alive. Those instincts are part of human nature, and in spite of centuries of effort by archbishops and commissars and even a few philosophers, they are not truly alterable by the power of the state. The sexual impulse, including sexual fantasy, is not subject to the force of reason. Recent history teaches us that most tyrannies have a puritanical nature. The sexual restrictions of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China would have gladdened the hearts of those Americans who fear sexual images and literature. Their iron-fisted puritanism wasn’t motivated by a need to erase sexual inequality. They wanted to smother the personal chaos that can accompany sexual freedom and subordinate it to the
granite face of the state. Every tyrant knows that if he can control human sexuality, he can control life. In the end, every tyrant fails.
MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies in the American right insist that they speak for freedom, for the liberation of women from the demeaning or disgusting images of pornography that motivate the male ruling class. They would not be the first human beings who limited freedom while proclaiming allegiance to its virtues. All of these Utopians would benefit from a study of the first Victorian era. There was a legal ban on pornography, but women had no rights at all (they were later won by a coalition of brave suffragist women and liberal men). Pornography certainly existed, but it was rarefied, expensive and available only to rich “gentlemen.” Official London adhered to the supermoral antisexual codes, but in real London syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant. Some 80,000 women were engaged in prostitution, virgins were sold to the highest bidders and the most infamous character of the era rose from the festering sexual underground and called himself Jack the Ripper. What reasonable man or woman would go back to that future?
In a way, the work of MacKinnon and Dworkin is some of the saddest writing I’ve ever read. It’s narrow and sectarian, often vicious and totalitarian in its insistence on submission by other feminists. But it is also thoroughly without joy or wonder. In this bleak house, nothing else matters except the cruelties of sex and power. Not laughter. Not love. Not the simple luminous pleasure of a summer afternoon. There is no room in this dark vision for Fred Astaire or Buster Keaton, for Lucille Ball or Maria Callas, for Betty Comden or Willie Mays. There is no fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual or carnal union. Nobody closes the door for a night of joyous, heart-busting, time-bending, mind-obliterating full-out human fucking. Nobody goes to the racetrack, either. Nobody dances at the midnight hour. Nobody plays the blues. In this airless, sunless world, we don’t encounter the glorious moment when a child learns to walk or to read. We hear nothing of decent husbands and loving fathers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, or mothers who have lived hard lives with their intelligence, heart, sensuality and pride intact. Such people exist, in the millions, but they are not in this fiercely correct world of rules and anathemas. Above all, in the sad and bitter world of Catharine MacKinnon, there is no wide tolerant understanding of a species capable of forgiving our endless gift for human folly. There are only the lacerated and the harmed and the odor of the charnel house. I don’t envy their dreams. And I hope I’m never forced to live in their fearful new world.
PLAYBOY,
January 1993
ENDGAME
I.
As this dreadful century winds down, its history heavy with gulags and concentration camps and atom bombs, the country that was its brightest hope seems to be breaking apart.
All the moves toward decency, excellence, maturity, and compassion have been made. They seem to have come to nothing. Everyone talks and nobody listens. Boneheaded vulgarians are honored for their stupidity. The bitterly partisan debate on the crime bill in the U.S. Senate is remembered only for Al D’Amato’s rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The Christian Coalition commandeers the Republican state convention in Virginia, and among the slogans on the wall is one that says WHERE IS LEE HARVEY OSWALD WHEN AMERICA REALLY NEEDS HIM? The American social and political style has been reduced to the complexity of a T-shirt. Outta the way, asshole: Give us gridlock, give us Beavis and Butt-head, give us room, man, give us respect, and get outta my fuckin’ face!
We are approaching Endgame, the moment when the chessboard is clear and victory is certain. Victory over everybody. The reduction of the opposition to rubble.
American civil society, long founded on the notion of “from many, one,” e pluribus unum, is being swept away by a poisonous flood tide of negation, sectarianism, self-pity, confrontation, vulgarity, and flat-out, old-fashioned hatred. Politics is an ice jam of accusation and obstruction, the hardest vulgarians honored for their cynicism, its good men fleeing to tend private gardens. Pop culture both feeds and reflects the larger society, and as evidence of collapse, it is chilling. Snoop Doggy Dogg and Al D’Amato have triumphed over Wynton Marsalis and George Mitchell. Good taste lies up the block with an ax in its back.
Day and night, from millions of car stereos and boom boxes, gangsta rappers and skinhead semi-demi-quasi-neo-Nazis give the nation its most persistent, defining soundtrack. Some call for the killing of cops, the raping and abandonment of ho’s and bitches, the battering of whites or blacks or one another. Rob the weak, they croon. Stomp the soft. Rap videos are pathetic fantasies of force and power, visual tributes to the cult of the Big Gun and the Big Dick. There is no past and no future, only the eternal American present tense. Suburban white kids happily buy the CDs and lean into the lash. There is no room in the music for lyricism, melody, or wit. The only acceptable human emotion is rage.
The fake, the illusion, the performance, are everything. The truth? Hey, buddy, I got your truth, right here. At The 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, Michael Jackson walks on with his bride, the daughter of Elvis Presley. They hit their marks. They engage in a rehearsed kiss. Jackson whispers some clumsy joke about how nobody thought this would last: marriage as Special Material. They get a standing O. Of course. Nobody mentions that Jackson had to pay an estimated $20 million to settle a child-molestation rap in California. Hey, man, lighten up. The man’s got a multimillion-dollar career to save! Who cares if we’re watching a big press-agented lie? He paid for his sins. Cold cash. Now he’s redeeming himself with access. And if he acts as if he wants redemption, that is redemption.
So shut up, asshole, and listen to Roseanne deliver her spontaneously written opening remarks: “I’m not upset about my divorce. I’m only upset I’m not a widow….” Pay attention to Kennedy. You know, the veejay. Look what she’s doing. She’s standing behind New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, sucking off the microphone! Is that hip or what? You know the gag. Kennedy is a right-winger, man. That’s why Roseanne said she saw Kennedy backstage and “she asked me to leave because she was blowing Rush Limbaugh.” But Kennedy doesn’t take any crap. Later on, she tells the audience: “I was backstage giving Rush Limbaugh a hummer. That’s a [simulates fellatio] in case you guys didn’t know…. I have to concede to Roseanne. He said that she gives a much better blow job. So the Prozac’s working.” But here comes Roseanne right back: “I would like to respond to Kennedy. I’m no longer on Prozac, bitch. Rush Limbaugh told me you swallow.”
God bless America.
But if Rodgers and Hart are long gone, so are Edmund Wilson and Ralph Gleason and James Agee. The greatest critics loved the subjects of their examinations: literature, music, movies. They celebrated quality and dismissed the fraudulent, examining each new object of art the way a master watchmaker looks at another man’s watch, admiring the accomplishments, pointing out the flaws. There were always literary ax murderers among them. But in a way, the best of them were attorneys for the defense. They’ve been replaced by prosecutors. And the penalty they demand for imperfection is death. Behind them have arrived the successmeisters, those who rank artists as if they were entrants in the National Football League, failure the unforgivable sin. Book didn’t work? Record didn’t make it? Movie opened on Aeromexico? That’s it: Arraign him, convict him, get him outta my sight. Sentence him to teach. Book him as a lounge act. Make him an usher. Drop him off the gibbet.
In sports, the style established thirty years ago by Muhammad Ali has been appropriated by his inferiors, who emphasize the “dissing” but leave out the irony and the humor. (Only Charles Barkley really gets it.) Prizefighters learn how to demean a man before they’ve mastered the uppercut. Reggie Miller isn’t satisfied with playing better than most men in the NBA; he has to make choke signs and grab his crotch and keep up a torrent of trash talk. No football player seems able to carry a ball for a touchdown without following up with some taunting dance in the end zone. Goodbye, Jim Brown; farewell, Gale Sayers;
hello, Neon Deion. No baseball player since Don Baylor has been able to endure the occupational hazard of a knockdown pitch without charging the mound in retaliation. In all sports, grace is treated like a character flaw. Athletes snarl and mock in triumph — and whine in defeat.
But they have one large excuse: They are only part of this America, the torn, violent country where everybody now plays for keeps. The nation approaching Endgame.
Everybody seems infected with the virus of argument and the need for triumph. Leaders of tiny sects are granted huge television audiences, provided their messages are sufficiently drastic, violent, or stupid; more people know about Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, than know about Octavio Paz or Isaiah Berlin. Hour after hour, across the day and deep into the night, talk radio spews forth a relentless message of contempt for democratic institutions, from the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to the governors, state legislators, and mayors. Rush Limbaugh is the master of this electronic genre, but his imitators make him sound like Henry Adams. They have none of Limbaugh’s gift for brittle humor and venomous sarcasm. Anyone with compassion is a target. Anyone with a sense of complexity is scorned. Callers with accents are jeered. Complicated issues are reduced to cartoons. Maybe it’s an act. Maybe it’s just cashing in on Limbaugh’s success. But the drumbeat from these electronic kraals is ominous: Hate Washington, hate the media, hate the liberals, hate the blacks, hate the dark-skinned and their babies, hate democracy. All disguised, of course, as a love for America.
In the rest of the media, virtually all public activity is treated as a fight in an alley. If the subjects of stories are not shooting down opponents, they usually don’t get covered. Murder is the best story, of course, but even the more tedious stories can be treated like homicides. Health care, welfare reform, GATT, NAFTA: Answer me, baby, who struck John?