I have countless times found myself wandering in the purgatory of Feminism’s Great Pornography Debate. Is pornography a form of sexual liberation for women and erotic celebration of the body that works to subvert the prude, sterile and oppressive laws of archaic religions? Or is pornography something more sinister? Is pornography a form of propaganda used to perpetuate and aggravate damaging and hierarchical gender relations and individual identities? What about pornography has always left me feeling betrayed, inadequate, furious, degraded, and unsatisfied, numb? Does it have something to do with a large proportion of pornographic films, magazine and novels that focus on the dominating, perverted male characters coupled with the submissive, humiliated female characters?
I believe that the pornographic mind and religion share the same metaphysical principles, in that both choose to deny a part of the self (nature/femaleness/body/flesh) and define themselves as masculine, spiritual, objective, of culture. Further, with its philosophical roots and influence in Western Christianity, pornography has attempted to completely destroy what “woman” might be naturally and has replaced her body and disposition with what it has denied in itself and projected onto her. Namely, that woman is deceitful, guileless, vulnerable, fearful, animalistic, hairless, virgin, blond, small waisted, large busted, feeling, seductive, slutty and servile. In a word, everything that culture and religion has forbidden “man” to be. How did woman become this fictitious thing? And if I reject this image of woman for myself, who am I?
Prior to this exploration, I want to take a quick detour and distinguish between sexual imagery and pornography. As far as I can realistically imagine, I define sexual imagery as various depictions of “a love of the life of the body” and “healthy” sexual acts while pornography is characterized as a “fear of bodily knowledge” as the reduction of a woman to a thing, as either a virgin, whore, animal, thing in coitus with an animal, or sexual slave created for servicing men. I define pornography as the transformation of woman into an object for the sole purpose of being “rejected, humiliated, punished, tortured, bound up, silenced, [or] murdered.” My definition of pornography is any violent or humiliating act against the body or psyche.
During my blind and groping walk for answers, I stumbled across Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature, where she explains that the unhealthy gender relations and claustrophobic gender identities themselves are the product of an age old antagonism between culture and nature, or what I see as humanity’s never ending quest to deny the reality of nature’s ultimate power over our bodies (death) and desire to reconstruct that reality into the illusion that we have “overcome” nature, brought her under our control.
“Every culture . . . is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms . . . by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interests.” (Sherry B. Ortner)
And these systems of meaningful forms created by culture, which give us a perception of “transcendence” over nature, are most notoriously embodied in religion. Western Christianity specifically has always “opposed itself in violence to the natural, and takes revenge on nature” (Susan Griffin). Christianity prizes the spiritual, the mind as the pathway to Light, enlightenment, Heaven and condemns the body as a slippery slope to darkness, banality, danger, and, ultimately, destruction.
To answer my original questions, we need to pair the above information with the knowledge that “we find women subordinated to men in every known society. The search for a genuinely egalitarian, let alone matriarchal, culture has proved fruitless” (Ortner). Why the universal devaluation of women? What could there be in the fabric and circumstances of life that would cause all societies to bestow a lesser value on women?
Well, secondary status comes from women being identified with and symbolized as “nature,” a thing that all cultures define as “being of a lower order of existence than itself” (Ortner). To settle any skepticism on these views, we need merely recall Eve, who had discourse with a serpent “and brought death upon the world,” the Whore of Babylon: the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth, and Carl Jung’s equating of naturalness to femaleness. Simone de Beauvoir tells us that woman’s “animality is more manifest” due to the anatomy of her body and its functions. And perhaps most influential to Western culture is Plato’s view of reality as divided between mind and body where the mind is eternal and divine (blatant denial of mortality) and the body is secondary, the origin of evil, “in the form of physical sensations to be mastered by the mind” (Val Plumwood). Plato extends this hierarchy of mind over body to male over female and finally to human over animal, as does Genesis 2, which has been used by orthodox Christians to justify male domination: “The man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man; and besides, the man was not created for the woman’s sake, but the woman for the sake of man” (Elaine H. Pagels). Overall, the historical perspective of woman (and nature) is that she is threatening, lowly, and wild chattel, in need of charitable domestication from the guiding, dominating hand that owns her.
What does all of this have to do with pornography? Images shape human behavior.
“And now this mind, which is so terrified of woman and nature, and of the force of Eros, must separate itself from what it fears. Now it will call itself ‘culture’ and oppose itself to woman and nature. For now culture shall become an instrument of revenge against the power of nature embodied in the image of a woman. And so now, within this mind which has become “culture,” woman will either be excluded, and her presence made an absence, a kind of death of the mind, or she shall be humiliated, so that the images we come to know of woman will be degraded images.” (Griffin)
Christian ideology and pornographic thinking are the same. This may be surprising, for we believe that the array of bodies displayed in pornography are acts of rebellion and sexual liberation from controlling religions. We recall Saint Paul’s warning that “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” and feel that we are choosing the healthy alternative as we gaze down at the sprawling bodies of a pornographic magazine. But what we are not seeing is that the pornographic (like the Christian) mind is making a division of the self, claiming that spirit is associated with man and matter with woman. This mind separates flesh from the spirit; it distorts the self into macabre zombie and angel ghost, woman as sexual object and man as voyeuristic spectator, slave and master.
Both the mind of the church and pornographer choose to deny and forget a part of themselves. And according to Freud, what we deny in ourselves is “pushed onto someone else” (Griffin). All that a man denies in himself is put onto the “blank screen” of woman. Just as man affirms all of his “masculine qualities” he is busy purging himself of all his so-called “feminine qualities.” But he is rejecting pieces of himself, the consciousness of his own body. However, his body will not be forgotten and it will come back to him in the form of “desire.”
“What he hates and fears, what he would loathe, he desires. He is in a terrible conflict with himself. And instead he comes to imagine that he struggles with a woman. Onto her body he projects his fear and his desire. So the female body, like the whore of Babylon in church iconography, simultaneously lures the pornographer and incites his rage.” (Griffin)
And thus the true form of the pornographic culture and the church is revealed as that of a dynamic interrelationship between masochist and sadist, object and subject. Both use language that encourages a sort of “mental mastery” over the body, and yet the pornographer still desires, for that is the nature of the body. And so we can easily understand the sadist images of Muki’s Kitchen, where women are transformed into the meat of cooking animals: bound, impaled, and fantasized as murdered by fire. This is symbolic of the master’s triumph over the body and nature in the image of a dominated woman.
“Just as the pornographic hero relishes in the subservience of his victim, so does he also glory in his own control.”
The pornographic mind would deny, punish, and transform part of the self into a mere controllable “thing” in its attempt to subvert nature. And so woman becomes a soulless object, a fleshy thing for the sole function of pleasing men. “She’s made for our kind of pleasure,” the pornographic hero of a novel tell us. “Her thighs and breasts are as firm and lovely as any I’ve seen’ ” (Griffin). A man says to his bride, of her body: “ ‘Knowest thou not . . . that his part of thy person is no longer thine, but mine by full and lawful right?’ ” (Griffin) Woman has no rights over her own body, man exercises mastery over it. The pornographic mind objectifies woman into a doll to be subjugated, humiliated and dominated. And to degrade a being into a thing is in itself humiliating and humiliation is in itself the essence of sadomasochism. And so we are given “humorous” (degrading) images of “Women Struggling to Drink Water” which is ultimately just a reproduction of the cum-shot and claim to a female lack of coordination that our pornographic culture is so obsessed with. Or we watch “Two Girls, One Cup” and are reminded of the image socialized into the pornographer of women as “soiled,” demented, insatiable. The pornographer wishes to deny his vulnerability and mortality by putting it onto the form of a doll-woman-object that he can degrade and control and ultimately destroy. The pornographer has erased the true identity of “woman” and replaced it with all of his dark desires and aspects of the self that he would deny. This is his attempt to separate culture and nature, to exert his power and triumph over the material.
And so finally we see the icon of culture’s construction of “man” in Christ crucified: “the spirit in the body sentenced to death.” Because of Christ the Western mind wishes and imagines that it is good and necessary to be free from the body in order to be Christ’s twin, the brain/spirit phantom that floats around in the sky in subservience to the “Father.”
Pornography merely aggravates the culture/nature, mind/body, man/woman split. It denies the wholeness of the human being composed of both male and female, hermaphroditic by nature moved both by cultural and natural forces. Further, its image of “woman” is a nonbeing, a fictitious and artificial collection of orifice, cream, virgin, whore, animal, dependent, servant, a fearful and vulnerable prey. But we should remember that these so called characteristics of femaleness are in actuality just the shadowy projection of the mind that created them, the mind that hopes to deny those very parts of itself. Therefore, the female figure is absorbed into the male and disappears.
And so I realized that this was the numbness, the gray world of non-being that pornographic images always left under my skin. Pornography had eliminated the essence of my female self. I discovered that another had created my body and disposition for me. Pornographic culture had decreed that my body should not be left to its natural form. Rather, it should be artificially hairless, painted, and its contours augmented and complemented with the most pleasant and submissive temperament. Further, its philosophy showed up in my bed where my desires were “his” desires, I was a vessel for someone else’s degrading desires. I used to be heavily influenced by the pornographic image of woman and it showed in my mind and body. But I began to wonder what my “true” feminine form might look like void of the influences of the pornographic mind? What would my “true” feminine psyche and emotional structure be comprised of had I been lucky enough to be left out of my pornographic culture’s socialization? And even creepier, how were my seemingly beautiful relationships shaped by this culture (i.e. Did he call me a whore, did I beg to be tied, did he desire to be violent to my breasts)? In what ways do we imitate the sadomasochism of church and pornography?
As I attempt to sweep out the remnants of this culture from the corners of my mind, I will examine and question the “normalcy” and “originality” of my sexual lifestyle. Ultimately, I will redefine my humanity and invent my sexuality into something natural that cherishes the body and praises Eros. I hope to reunite my corporeality to my spirituality, spiritual love to carnal desire, mix my masculine and feminine qualities together. I will acknowledge the transience of my being and in so doing achieve “a sense of union with all that is.”
“The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.” — Michael Foucault
“It may be that what is right and what is good consist in staying open to the tensions that [attack] the most fundamental categories we require, in knowing unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need, and in recognizing the sign of life in what we undergo without certainty about what will come.” — Judith Butler
*Note: I used the pronoun “he” to describe the pornographer because historically the majority of pornographic novelists, filmmaker’s, etc. have been male. “They transformed the visible surface into a transparent unreality.”
Written by Sarah Sydney Lane
Header image courtesy of Yeni Sleidi
