The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers

by Неизвестный

  Somehow the free being is, in his own eyes and in the eyes of all those in a personal relation with him, the being who he is. He is never merely an instance of some useful attribute. To treat him merely instrumentally is always in a measure to abuse him; and while I can employ you for a job and in doing so recognize that someone else might have served my purpose just as well, I must, in employing you, respect your individuality, and not treat you as a tool or a slave. You are for me, even in this functional relation, the free being who meets me I to I.

  It follows from this that, in those relations between persons in which self and other relate as subject and object, each views the other as unique, without a substitute. This has an immediate impact on sexual desire. John, frustrated in his desire for Mary, cannot be offered Jane as a substitute. Someone who says “Take Jane, she will do just as well” does not understand what John wants, in wanting Mary. It follows also that desire requires complex, compromising, and potentially embarrassing negotiations, and that without these negotiations sexual intimacy is liable to induce self-disgust. When girls complain of date-rape, it is this kind of thing they have in mind. It is not necessarily that they didn’t consent to what happened. Outwardly maybe they did. But inwardly they did not, and didn’t realize, until too late, that this was so. Consent has to be prepared by elaborate games and intimacies, in which freedom and responsibility are alertly deployed by both parties to the transaction.

  What I have said points at every juncture to difficult philosophical issues concerning the nature of persons, of freedom, of responsibility and self-awareness. I am consciously refusing to address those issues, because my task is simply to remind you of what you all know and what you all have experienced in moments of desire. Arousal and desire are not bodily states or even states of individual persons: they form one pole of an I to I encounter, and involve a going out to the other, in which his or her freedom and responsibility are intimately involved in what is wanted. It is only in this way that we can explain some of our most immovable intuitions about sex.

  Consider rape. On the instrumentalized view of sex surveyed earlier, rape is a crime of the same order as leaning on a woman without asking her permission and at the worst like spitting on her, doing something that disgusts her without caring what she feels. It involves using someone for a purpose that could have been achieved with any other instrument, but without troubling to seek her consent and even by ignoring her resistance. As we know, however, rape is next in line to murder, by way of an assault. It is a violation of the other person in the very depths of her being. The view that I have offered immediately explains this. The rapist is not merely prepared to use his victim as a means: He steals her most precious possession, the thing that she wishes to offer only as a gift and in a condition of mutual surrender. He does not merely disregard her freedom: He poisons it, removes from it the most important thing for which it was made, which is the mutual self-giving of desire. And that is why rape is experienced as an annihilation and not just an abuse.

  This account of desire explains why we feel disgust at pedophilia, impose a taboo on incest, and regard bestiality and necrophilia as perversions. It explains the role of modesty as an invitation to correct behavior, and shame as a protection against abuse—a point vividly made by Max Scheler in his long paper on shame. I do not think I need to spell these things out, since anyone who recognizes the core of truth in what I have said will be able to spell them out for himself.

  DISOWNING THE MYTHS

  My purpose now is to sweep away the myths I began by enunciating. All of them, it seems to me, arise from a fundamental mistake about the intentionality of sexual arousal and sexual desire. These states of mind are not directed toward pleasure, orgasm, or any similar thing. They are directed toward one free being by another.

  That last point is worth lingering over. You might think that the rapist is indifferent to the freedom of his victim. On the contrary, however. It is precisely her freedom that he wishes to seize, to overcome, to force to bow before him. For this reason you cannot rape an animal, even if you can sexually abuse it. The victim of rape is a free being, compelled to accept what she does not consent to.

  The myths depend upon removing from the picture of sexual activity both the self-conception of the subject and the other-conception of the object. The subject regards the other as a tool with which to induce excitement and pleasure, and conceives himself as a sensory organism. The myths remove from the picture of desire both the person who feels it and the person toward whom it is felt. The myths, in other words, do not describe desire at all, but something else—something that we might observe in animals or children, or, as Socrates put it (according to Xenophon) in pigs rubbing against a post.

  One thing that tempts people to endorse the myths is the very obvious fact that sexual activity involves bodily changes and bodily sensations, leading (though not always) to orgasm. This has made the caricature of desire believable, in the minds of those who take an accountant’s view of human satisfactions. It looks as though you could enumerate the benefits of sexual activity in terms of pleasure, and the costs in terms of the time and energy needed to find the person willing to stimulate you, and on that basis proceed to give a utilitarian morality of sexual behavior. If that sounds ridiculous, do not be deceived. It is ridiculous, so ridiculous that Judge Richard Posner has written a whole book, called Sex and Reason, devoted to treating the phenomena in this way.

  There is a downside to such books, and to the myths they reinforce. Myths can work on reality in such a way that they cease to be myths and become true descriptions instead. Thinking of sex in the instrumentalized way that Judge Posner exemplifies you actually prepare yourself to experience it in this way. Henry James had an inkling of this when he wrote, in the Preface to The Bostonians, of “the decline in the sentiment of sex,” meaning the loss of that full-hearted, self-committing form of sexual desire which animates the heroines of Jane Austen, and its replacement by short-lived, titillating forms of seduction. And the more people think of sex as a means to the production of pleasure or a means for obtaining orgasm (as was famously believed by the madman Wilhelm Reich, who even invented a machine to help the orgasm-seeker to reach his goal), the more the other drops out of consideration as irrelevant, and the more sex ceases to be a form of interpersonal relation and retreats into narcissistic solitude.

  PORNOGRAPHY AND SELF-ABUSE

  In conclusion I want to touch on the relation of pornography to a highly unfashionable idea, that of self-abuse, a term originally applied to all forms of masturbation, in ways that led to much ridicule and scorn of our ancestors and their puritan hang-ups. It is surely obvious from my account that sex, in what I would wish to describe as its normal form, involves a moving out from the self toward the other—an attempt to know and unite with the other in her body. It involves treating the other as a free subject, and enjoying the mutual arousal which is possible only through the reciprocal interest in each other as conscious and free.

  The self is at risk in this: The other may refuse to cooperate, may turn away in disgust, may act in ways that elicit shame and humiliation. That is why you have to be ready for it, and one reason why it is such an injustice to inflict sexual relations on children. In the face of this risk people are tempted to retreat from the direct forms of sexual desire, and take refuge in fantasy objects—objects that cannot damage or threaten you, that cannot withhold consent since they cannot give it, that are without the capacity to embarrass or shame the one who watches them.

  Such objects are provided by pornography. The people displayed in the pornographic film have no relation to the viewer, nor are they displayed as being in any other relation to each other than that of each using the other’s body as a machine à frotter. It is impossible to know what they are feeling, and in any case their feelings are in no way directed to the person who is using them and at the same time abusing himself. The viewer’s pleasure is not the pleasure of desire, since there is no one he is des
iring. Nor is he really aroused except in the purely physiological sense, since there is no mutual arousal of which he is a party. Everything is cold, bleak, objective, and also free of cost and personal risk.

  Pornography exactly conforms to the myths about desire that I have rejected: it is a realization of those myths, a form of sexual pleasure from which the interpersonal intentionality has been surgically excised. Pornography takes hold of sexual desire and cuts away the desire. There is no real object, but only a fantasy, and no real subject, since there is nothing ventured of the self. To say that this is an abuse of the self is to express a literal truth—so it seems to me.

  Like all cost-free forms of pleasure, pornography is habit-forming. It shortcircuits that roundabout route to sexual satisfaction which passes through the streams and valleys of arousal, in which the self is always at risk from the other, and always motivated to give itself freely in desire. The short-circuiting mechanism here is in all probability not different from that researched by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey in their studies of gambling and TV addiction.

  It exhibits in addition, however, a depersonalizing habit—a habit of viewing sex as something external to the human personality, to relationship, and to the arena of free encounters. Sex is reduced to the sexual organs, which are stuck on, in the imagination, like cutouts in a child’s picture. To think that this can be done, and the habit of doing it fully established, without damage to a person’s capacity to be a person, and to relate to other persons as one sexual being to others, is to make a large and naïve assumption about the ability of the mind to compartmentalize.

  Indeed, psychologists and psychotherapists are increasingly encountering the damage done by pornography, not to marriages and relationships only, but to the very capacity to engage in them. Sex, portrayed in the porno-image, is an affair of attractive people with every technical accomplishment. Most people are not attractive, and have only second-class equipment. Once they are led by their porn addiction to see sex in the instrumentalized way that pornography encourages, they begin to lose confidence in their capacity to enjoy sex in any other way than through fantasy. People who lose confidence in their ability to attract soon become unattractive.

  And then the fear of desire arises, and from that fear the fear of love. This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness.

  PORNOGRAPHY: SETTLING THE QUESTION IN PRINCIPLE

  Hadley Arkes

  I would like to draw the strands of my argument by beginning with two vignettes or cases I recalled in a book of mine with Princeton University Press called The Philosopher in the City (1981). One ran back to the spring of 1977, with Dr. Judith Densen-Gerber testifying on Capitol Hill in hearings on child pornography and showing the only X-rated film going in the halls of Congress.

  There are congressmen whose lives could make X-rated movies resemble Disney films, but this showing of child pornography was quite unusual as a screening. In the course of her remarks, Dr. Densen-Gerber referred to situations as grotesque as the discovery of gonorrhea of the throat in infants as young as nine months and eighteen months.

  I was in the audience that day, and I was curious as to how she understood the wrong of pornography. When I posed the question, she remarked that the children involved in these productions were more likely to be drawn into prostitution later in life. I pressed the question one step further: Did she herself regard prostitution as morally wrong, in fact as a wrong that could be barred in the law? That question fired the reflexes I had sensed were there, and she quickly responded that she did not think prostitution should be regarded as morally wrong, and legally actionable, for consenting adults.1

  The “problem,” then, for Dr. Densen-Gerber, was that children drawn into pornography were likely, in their mature years, to be drawn to occupations she regarded as quite legitimate. If the children were likely to be drawn into careers as lawyers or interior decorators, would the indictment have been the same? Some parents have been anxious to hire out their children for work as models or as actors in Disney films, and those engagements often have been the source of experience quite corrosive of character. Still we have permitted parents to tender their consent for their own children here as in other places. And yet when it came to child pornography, the consent of the parents would not be taken as sufficient to make these engagements legitimate. Apparently the wrong ran so deep that the consent of the responsible adults was not sufficient here to dissolve the moral problem. There must have been something notably different then between pornography and the productions of Disney.

  There is of course a link between pornography and prostitution. “Pornography” is drawn from the Greek pornographos, writing about prostitutes. And it is telling, I think, that feminists in our own day have found themselves divided over whether it is legitimate to cast an adverse moral judgment on prostitution. That erosion of moral conviction about prostitution has to be bound up with the things that induce many feminists to recede from an adverse judgment on pornography as well.

  The two must be connected in principle—or so I would argue—and that late uncertainty about the moral ground for judging prostitution and pornography may account for why so many feminist writers seem to be affected by one of the false lures of social science or the more implausible formulas of the law, which converge in offering this seduction: They offer a rationale for condemning and barring pornography, while avoiding the vexing business of actually casting a moral judgment— and then taking up the discipline of supplying a moral justification for the use of the law in closing off this domain of freedom.

  As part of those converging strands, I would take my second case, and this one involves the audacity and imagination of the Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee. In the early seventies there was a rather entertaining ad for Fritos ® Corn Chips, involving the appealing animated figure of a small fellow, with a sombrero, mustache, and a rather caricatured Spanish accent, who was given the name of Frito Bandito. The Defamation Committee did not find the ad as fetching as did others in the country. The Committee argued that the ad offered a stereotyped version of the Mexican, and it went into court in an action for defamation.

  In a curious turn, the Committee brought the complaint as an action for personal damages, and it sought $100 in punitive damages for every Chicano in the United States.2 The concern here was long known in the law as the defamation of racial or ethnic groups, but the action brought out what was so singularly inapt in treat- ing that concern as a tort, seeking personal damages. There is nothing unreal about nurturing a climate of hostility to certain racial or ethnic groups. Nor are the injuries always intangible that spring from wounding words, from the inciting of hatred directed at these groups, and from the occasional outburst into racial rioting. But it is virtually impossible that every member of the group will suffer an injury, or that one could establish a connection between the diffusion of ethnic stereotypes and the decision of any employer or landlord to turn away from Mexican-Americans.

  I have argued myself that there is a distinct wrong of defaming whole racial groups, a wrong that may manifest itself in material injuries.3 But the law cannot hinge on the showing of material injuries in any case. It has to involve recognition of what is wrong with that kind of defamation in principle, and the matter is more aptly treated by a law that simply forbids that kind of defamation as defamation per se. It would be a matter of recognizing things that we could judge as libelous or hurtful in themselves, even if we cannot demonstrate quite yet that a material injury has been done.

  The law on the defamation of racial groups works properly through the criminal law, say in assigning a fine, perhaps of a couple of hundred dollars, or by issuing an injunction to stop the broadcast of the defamation. But it hinges, not on a measurement of the injuries to any person, as much as on the ground of our judgmen
t that certain words or expressions are clearly fixed, in ordinary language, as terms that carried the function of insulting or denigrating. Of course there would be nothing wrong with denigrating rapists, murderers, and arsonists. The wrong in principle came with casting an adverse judgment on whole racial groups, as though race or ethnicity “determined” or controlled the character of people—as though, if we knew solely a person’s race or ethnicity, we would know whether we were dealing with a good or a bad person, whose presence should be welcomed or shunned.4 I will forbear running through the complete argument here, but I would contend that the wrong of this kind of defamation is rooted in the logic of moral judgment itself: that if our conduct were determined by our race or ethnicity, none of us would be responsible for his own acts, and the whole language of morality and law, in assigning responsibility and blame, would dissolve in its meaning.

  I raise the matter because we have seen some notable feminist writers arguing against pornography in this way: that pornography teaches a degraded view of women, and that it incites all sorts of injuries to women, ranging from rape to demeaning gestures that humiliate. But once again, we find it exceedingly difficult or impossible to map a causal link between any version of pornography and particular harms suffered by particular women.

  My own pitch is that it would make far better sense to recognize that pornography may indeed be deeply wrong, but that it would be a wrong in principle. And in justifying that judgment to regard it as a “wrong,” and repress it through the law, we would need to explain that wrong in principle much in the way that we have to explain other things that are wrong in principle. The wrong of pornography may of course involve a denigrating view of women, and more than that: a denigrating, debased view of sex itself and the kind of love that rightly envelops sex between those creatures we can recognize as “moral agents.” They are those beings, “composed of eros and of dust,” who alone can give reasons in matters of right and wrong, and who may bring some exacting tests to the persons they would admit to this unparalleled intimacy. But whether that intimacy is unparalleled and rare, or whether it is frequently paralleled and offered widely, without a discrimination strenuously exacting, are matters at the heart of the question.