Consumers of pornography have a line they will not cross—or perhaps one they flirt with crossing. It’s a key component of every man’s experience of Internet pornography: I enjoy this, but that is reprehensible. The line is more or less arbitrary, though felt deeply. Sexual identity becomes a series of negations: I am not the kind of guy who wears sunglasses while screwing. I am not the kind of guy who chokes women. I am not the kind of guy who likes to watch women get fucked by donkeys. Masculine desire becomes a map with missing margins: beyond that line there be dragons. And in some cases the monsters are literal. In Japan “tentacle rape porn,” women violated by squidlike monsters, is increasingly popular. Here we have the pornographic imagination in its most complete, perfect expression: degradation by the abyss.
What are we looking at when we look at pornography? What exactly are we exposing ourselves to? Pornography is famously indefinable, which may explain why its content is so easy to ignore. The narratives in pornography are famously irrelevant, the man who reads Playboy for the articles a stock figure of the sexual liar. In Boogie Nights the porn film director played by Burt Reynolds dreams of making a film with enough suspense that the viewers stay after they’ve come. Nonetheless, before the Internet almost all pornography in magazines and videos had story lines—that’s why Penthouse had women hanging from trees and Santa Claus penetrating the elves and so on. Nudity is only half of pornography, the pleasure of the flesh. The story lines of pornography offer a vision of the world sexualized, a world in which every situation can be turned into an opportunity for intercourse: pizza delivery, soccer games, classic novels, the Supreme Court. Pornography creates an alternate universe of quasi-infinite sexual plenty.
Today narratives of this type survive only in the “classier” productions of the larger companies, like Vivid or Hustler. Since pornography long ago exhausted most settings, the story lines tend to be super topical, drawn from the news or parodies of hit movies and television shows. The stories need only to be stories, but the stories are as important as the naked bodies. They declare, “The world is there to be fucked.”
The Internet has accelerated the metabolism of pornography. The Internet vaporizes, atomizes: online porn is free and instantly accessible, more extreme, with less context. Narrative persiflage diminishes. Internet pornography, and digital pornography that preceded it on DVD, is mostly gonzo. It is composed of single scenes, separated from the others, often categorized by fetish: Anal Sluts #19, Bad Babysitters #17. On a site like Pornhub the thousands of videos are moderated only by search terms and by the name of the performer. The vagueness hides the narrative. The narrative within the videos parallels the narrative of the performer’s career and also the narrative of the consumer of pornography. The individual scenes move from teasing to whatever sexual act is slated for performance to the inevitable cumshot. The women go from nude poses to solo poses to blowjobs to regular sex to double penetration to gangbangs to a world of vicarious degradation that’s nearly infinite in its elaboration. In each case there is an arc of increasing degradation.
This degradation works on a self-feeding loop. The description of Hugh Hefner’s orgies from Izabella St. James’s Bunny Tales is a litany of this agony of desensitization. The Wednesday and Friday night group-sex sessions at the Mansion had a set pattern. Hef had sex with four girls at a time, for about two minutes apiece, while his “main girlfriend,” Holly, organized everything, wiping his penis off in between: “After that came (no pun intended) the grand finale: Hef masturbated while watching the porn, and Holly sucked on his nipple, trying to spread herself all over him so that no one else had physical contact with him during the moment of his ultimate ecstasy. I never saw him come while having sex with anyone; he always masturbated. And it was always the same: too much baby oil, his hand, and the visual support of porn or the better alternative of a couple of the girls making out.” This scene is the nightmare at the bottom of pornography, the frozen erotic lake where Judas is devoured by Satan. Medicated, surrounded by identical pneumatic women, swamped by plastic flesh, able to orgasm only by his own hand—what could be more grotesque or less erotic? What scene could demonstrate the decline of human sexuality into empty pantomime more entirely? It’s a warning, that scene, a warning that sexual novelty can devolve into ever-failing attempts to outflank our own craving for tenderness.
The narrative arc of Internet pornography ends in the display of cum every time—this is the key to understanding its power. The cumshot is the real difference between pornography and fleshly sexuality: you cannot make yourself come by watching yourself come in real life. The cumshot is the essence of the pornographic process, the marking of the particular feminine reality by the generalized goo of indistinct masculine spirit. What happens with the cum is the absolute first descriptive marker of the category of pornography. Cream pie. Tits. Belly. Feet. Is it a gesture of dominance or the simulation of a woman taking pleasure in the production of semen? Or both?
Every scene in Kink.com, the world’s most popular BDSM site, begins with an image of the woman, about to be degraded, smiling. That is the story of all Internet pornography, the key to its significance and a narrative wildly different from the earlier, softer narratives found in Penthouse and Hustler; it is male power over women right along the line of consent, threatening always to slip over. Every pornographer knows somebody who “hates women,” but it’s not them, not them. No, it’s somebody else. The women all consent to be powerless. That contradiction is the core of all pornographic expression on the Internet. The subject of Internet pornography is the acceptance of the force of male desire.
Intriguingly, women’s erotica contains the same contradictions. In “ ‘She Exploded into a Million Pieces’: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Orgasms in Contemporary Romance Novels,” researchers at the University of Ottawa found exactly the same sense of violence in erotic fiction marketed to women: “Many orgasm descriptions contained images referring to violence and death. In fact almost half of coded extracts (42%) contained references to this theme. Orgasms were associated with breaking, shattering, ripping, and exploding of the characters’ bodies. . . . Depictions of romance novel orgasms were often characterized by a sense that the character had become involuntarily vulnerable during climax. Over half of orgasm descriptions (52%) reflected this theme.” Fifty Shades of Grey, a book so successful it led to the unprecedented act by a publishing company of delivering bonus checks to every employee, is one long story of the consent to powerlessness, of a woman taken to the edge of the meaning of consent. Most of the book is the negotiation of a contract between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. Hot sex is bureaucratic, and the paperwork involves Anastasia enslaving herself, giving away all control over her body, even over what she eats. And this is erotica aimed at women, remember. If governments are going to restrict male pornography, they should consider restricting Fifty Shades of Grey too. One is images, the other is words, but both contain the same vision of sexual desire: women who want to be shattered, who consent to be powerless.
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Consent is the real subject of our sexual obsession. Straight pornography is only tangentially about the flesh; its proper subject is female submission. That obsession does not necessarily imply that pornography is a rejection of the newly emerging consent-based morality that defines postfeminist, post–gay rights sexual politics. Quite the opposite. When consent is the sole standard of what is sexually taboo, it should come as no surprise that consent becomes the all-consuming libidinal focus.
Internet pornography is no freak against egalitarian politics but a result of their triumph. And it always has been. Historically and intellectually pornography coincides with the empowerment of women. The most patriarchal countries in the world are the ones that ban pornography, exactly because pornography threatens patriarchy. Under patriarchy women’s sexuality is men’s property. In pornography women’s sexuality is a commodity women can exchange for other items of value. The Marquis de Sade wrote h
is fantasies of degradation in a period of French history that has been called “the golden age of women,” when independent salonistes like Julie de Lespinasse and Josephine were celebrated for their intellectual and social power. De Sade, who was at the financial mercy of his wife and mother for most of his life, created pornography in the context of such dependence. After the Second World War pornography became most prevalent in the most egalitarian societies, notably in Scandinavia. The first producer of high-quality color hard-core films, distinct from stag movies, was Lasse Braun, an Italian making films in Sweden, then the world’s foremost example of gender equality. From Sweden and later from Denmark the kind of visual pornography we know today spread to America. The rise of pornography in Western Europe and America coincided with the rise of women in the workplace.
Pornography could be taken as a backlash against feminism. Men, confronted by powerful women in real life, humiliate them in their fantasies, or so the argument goes. I think this would be a misreading of the reaction, which is less a backlash than a deflection. If you want to understand how men work, go to any large porn site around Easter: elaborate pink borders with eggs and bunnies decorate the website. They sell a cornucopia of sexual horrors, but they see no reason not to spruce up their foyer, like a grocery store, like a car dealership. They want their anal violations to look nice and be in keeping with the season. Men go to Internet porn because to them it isn’t about women; it’s about product. Men who would never go to a prostitute go to Internet porn. Men who would never go to a strip club go to Internet porn. The ethics of the production are gruesome, of course, although as much for the male as the female performers, who often earn as little as a hundred dollars a shoot. Besides, who demands products that are ethically manufactured? Certainly nobody who wants cocaine. Nobody who wants furniture or clothes, either. In the current state of capitalism, all logistical chains are morally suspect. To have a conscience and to eat you have to forget where the food comes from. The same is true for porn.
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David Cameron—who, again, may or may not have had sex with a dead pig—claims that porn pollutes the Internet. He couldn’t be more wrong. Porn is the avatar of the Internet, its metaphoric self-expression. Porn is more entwined with the technical means of its dissemination than any other content. Porn fulfills the destiny of the screen itself.
The screen has always been as much about the flight to intimacy as the flight from intimacy. The original cinemas reduced whole crowds into passive recipients of projected image, but the experience from the very beginning was understood as a kind of collective erotic rapture. In those dark rooms people were all the same and yet alone, their ecstasy a mass connection composed of utter isolation. The movie stars possessed the crowds and were possessed by them at the same moment; we gave to this communion the name of glamour. The screen reflects back the desires projected onto it. And there is always an edge of dissatisfaction to what should be a perfect reflection, the echo of Narcissus. Glamour is never satisfying or sufficient.
So powerful was the screen, so efficiently calibrated to the substructures of consciousness, that its presence has expanded endlessly since its invention. These are twin laws of the twenty-first century: Anywhere a screen can go it will go. Anywhere a screen is, porn is. The intermediation of projected images floods consciousness like liquid into a container that expands as it is filled. The dark rooms are everywhere now. Every room of the house is a dark room. Every person on the street carries a dark room in his or her pocket.
The screens connect us by being between us. Porn is the sexual reality that emerges out of that contradictory function. By allowing for a space for the projection of desire, rationality about sexuality converts sex into a consumerist commodity, but the desires being projected turn out to be monstrous because the rationality creates the hunger to pass beyond it. The intermediation of the screen, which creates the space for sensible decisions, also creates a distance that its sensible decision makers long to cross. The other instances of screened sexuality, whether Tinder or Grindr or OKCupid, have the same combination of the sensible and the shocking. Why else would men send women pictures of their dicks? In the matrices of swipes and clicks, the negotiations of various status markers, where the other can delete your file, the dickpic is a taboo violation, the primordial boast. Here’s my cock. Love it.
Sex itself has never been easier than now. Sex has never been healthier or more open or more available. Sex has never been, in a word, more negotiable. As a result sex doesn’t matter as much.III Thus the peculiar melancholy that haunts the hedonists of our moment. I’ve known many men who’ve slept with hundreds of women, but almost none who are happy about it, even fewer who are stupid enough to be proud of the fact. Sleeping with hundreds is much easier than sleeping with one, and we all know it.
The most expensive package prostitutes sell is the GFE, the girlfriend experience, which involves cuddling, kissing, the pretense of a relationship, the hard-to-fake pleasures of intimacy. Tenderness is more expensive than anal. Which makes sense: it’s rarer, more complicated, more desirable. Physical acts grow more and more extreme in the pursuit of something that physical love can only hint at.
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Diogenes the Cynic masturbated in the marketplace and called it philosophy. Of all the wisdom available in ancient Athens, his was the earthiest, the most practical. He refused to condemn the body out of social propriety. If he was built to ejaculate, he should ejaculate, and therefore he ejaculated where everyone could see him. The Athenians loved him for his frankness, which provoked laughter as much as disgust. When asked why he masturbated in public, he answered, “Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger.” Diogenes offered the pagan view of masturbation: Why be ashamed of the easiest expression of masculine desire? Why fear the erasure of male sexual appetite by the lightest, the most harmless of gestures?
The rise of Internet pornography is a symptom more than a cause, a symptom of egalitarianism itself, a method of dealing with the embarrassment of male sexual power in the context of gender equality. The idea that porn has produced sexual objectification of women is staggeringly naïve, really too obtuse to be considered seriously. Go and watch a movie from the pre-porn era and see. James Bond didn’t care too scrupulously for consent. The hero of Alfie, that fabulous missive from the beginning of the sexual revolution, looks in the light of the present like a rampant sexual terrorist. He had no pornography. He called women “it.” Sexual objectification exists in all times and all places. Modern pornography exists in worlds where women have power, exactly where they cannot be objectified in real life.
The mechanism at work in Internet pornography and in Fifty Shades of Grey is a classic case of repression. Michel Foucault identified a nearly identical mechanism in nineteenth-century sexual morality, with its discursive transposition of sexual language into what he called “polymorphous incitement.” The restrictive morality of the nineteenth century conjured a sexualized world. Most notably homosexual acts, which had once been mere acts, became markers of identity. Everything became sexualized: when you cannot say “the leg of a table” because it is too suggestive and must instead say “the limb of a table,” even the furniture is sexy. The definitive icon of Victorian England, after Victoria herself, is Jack the Ripper. They reflect each other. They need each other to exist. They are the result of each other. Every Doctor Jekyll makes his Mister Hyde. The size of the monstrosity reveals the size of the repression and the size of the virtue.
Just as the repression of sex in the nineteenth century spawned a vast array of perversions and an immense business class to service those perversions, so the repressions implicit in the morality of consent have generated a vast array of new perversions in our own time. How could it be any other way? We want equality, but sex is not equal. We want justice, but desire is not just. Nobody fucks justly. Andrea Dworkin once wrote that the only possible egalitarian sexuality between a man and a woman involved a limp penis:
I
suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and “love” begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male—clitoral touch and sensitivity all over the body (which needn’t—and shouldn’t—be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For me I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread—that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.
She was mocked for that comment, but it was her most essential insight. A fourteen-year-old with a stiff prick is the living refutation of the Enlightenment. He is an end in himself with an object attached to him. Of all the great feminist philosophers, Dworkin is the one who is most of our moment. What if she was right?
Dworkin’s anger is of very little use to real people, but that doesn’t mean she was wrong. The profundity of the feminist cause makes its achievement ultimately impossible. Dworkin wrote, “Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.” She loved mothers and daughters but hated procreation—this is honesty. No matter how triumphant the revolution, no matter how fair the laws, no matter how cleaned up the culture, at the end we are going to be left with male and female bodies and their desires, which are brutal. We all struggle with an irreconcilable contradiction: the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. At the very least we have to acknowledge the possibility that the two are simply incompatible. Nobody so far has solved human desire.
The Unmade Bed Page 11