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No civilization can be indifferent to the ways its citizens publicly entertain themselves, writes conservative economist Walter Berns. "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 similarly argue the father of neoconservatism Irving Kristol. "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." Kristol notes that 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." Bob Rimmer: "After ten years, patrons of adult theaters who have seen hundreds of pornos are either jaded or desensitized to normal sexual experience on the screen. To compensate, many sexvids offer bondage or discipline sequences or entire tapes in which the participants get sexually aroused by tying each other up or whipping each other while they wear leather clothing. There are sexvids that offer enemas, golden showers and probably even Marquis deSade defecation… Most adult film reviewers rate the films on their ability to produce a hard-on. Continually seeking after novelty, producers and directors of even the best sexvids offer kinky sexual behavior that often borders on cruelty or sadism. These sexvids degrade not only the participants, but human sexuality in general." (X-Rated Videotape Guide, p.34) "No one can prove that films with graphic sex or violence have a harmful effect on viewers," says Arthur Lennig, "but there seems to be little doubt that films do have some effect on society and that all of us live with such effects... The question of how society will function when all checks that a few thousand years of civilization have imposed have disappeared... has yet to be answered." Against such troubling questions is the fact that 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 Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia, China and Cambodia. "If exposure to female flesh causes violence," notes Dennis Prager, "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. "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… "It is 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." (Dennis Prager 310-558-3958) In the 1960s and 1970s, conservative thinker Ernest van den Haag testified for the prosecution of pornographers. "I thought pornography not only offensive but harmful to the social fabric," he wrote 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 believed that his past testimony that porn is not protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech is correct, but, "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 discreet 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." Sexual desire is complex and frequently nasty, even without the stimulus of pornography. As the late psychiatrist Robert Stoller put it, "Humans are not a very loving species and this is especially so when they make love." Sexual excitement usually flags without "scripts in which one wishes - consciously or unconsciously - to harm, by means of humiliation, one's erotic objects..." At the heart of all perversions, including pornography, is "a fantasied act of revenge which condenses a life history - memory and fantasies, traumas, frustrations and joys. The perversion of pornography, which provides restitution for men, comes in different genres, each created for a specific perverse need by exact attention to detail and each defining an area of excitement that will have no effect on a different man." The feminists are right that male heterosexual porn insults women. But it insults men too, showing their need to be cruel and marking their failure to relate better to live females. Men abuse women because they are uncertain, fearful, angry and envious. "Erotic daydreams in pornography represent fantasies of revenge in which the consumer imagines he is degrading women. Men fetishize - dehumanize - women to be erotically stimulated." Robert agreed with feminists that in porn "there is always a victim, no matter how disguised: no victim, no pornography… For most people most of the time, a touch of cruelty may be a trace element in erotic fantasy." Dr. Stoller believed in significant differences between male and female arousal. Men, heterosexual and gay, focus on body parts and make them into fetishes while women, heterosexual and lesbian, look more at personality. Their focus is more psychic than anatomical. These differences appear "insoluble. Maybe if the need for orgasm, once excitement is instilled, were always as driven in females as in males or as bearable in males as in females, the two sexes would understand each other better." These theories, and the success of porn upon which they are based, challenge Judeo-Christian and feminist notions that one person's pleasure should never come at the expense of another. Christianity and feminism want no sex masters and no sex slaves. Gloria Steinem claims that erotica, as distinct from pornography, "doesn't require us to identify with a conqueror or a victim." The Kensington Ladies Erotica Society insists that its members not portray female characters as victims. Defining sin as the desire to harm others, Stoller suggests that feeling sinful about sex comes in part from the awareness that much sexual excitement depends on the desire to harm others. Believing oneself to be sinning often increases sexual excitement. All sins, however, are not morally equal. A rape fantasy is not an act of palpable violence, "and the transvestite's unconscious fantasy of revenge leads to nothing more violent than his masturbating into a lady's hat." Stoller acknowledges that destroying the human in our sexual objects diminishes our capacity to love and that "unchecked sexuality dehumanizes erotic life and this thwarts love." The most visceral entertainments, however, both amusing and erotic, depend on hostility. "Some humor is painful, some gentle, some malicious, some warm, some mocking, some insightful. But there is no humor without victims and victors, implied or manifest. One person's joke is another's insult. Both people have been touched by the hostile theme, but the one who has laughs has gained an insight the other had to reject. Hostility...is a sine qua non [for humor and sex], whether it is scarcely there or thickly larded in." |
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