lycanthropia

As many of you know, I have a personal interest in this topic; but given the way my mind works, my personal situation also threw me into a year of thinking really hard about both the abstractions and instantiations of pornography and prostitution. I collected scores of links, read hundreds of articles and arguments, debated it for hours and hours in my head, even made my students debate it in class for me (all the while never brave or clear-minded enough to hold my own opinion).

What follows are my more or less incoherent notes on the topic, written over the course of several months. I can’t include all the links and don’t really want to. I just hope some of it makes sense and/or is halfway interesting, but I’m publishing these thoughts, no matter how poorly they hang together, just to draw a mental line under the topic and to put myself on notice that I’m done thinking about it, anyway for now.

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At the heart of the debate lies a question about interventionist leftist government versus laissez-faire libertarian ideals. While it seems clear that the government should step in to regulate corporations, it’s harder to state conclusively that the government should also regulate individual businesses, though taken together they may comprise “an industry.”

And what are the parameters of an industry such as sex work, which in the US alone spans every single socioeconomic class of worker and employer and customer, and every conceivable motivation for undertaking or consuming such work? No disputing that it’s work—per Elaine Scarry’s definition from The Body in Pain; sex workers can have their bodies altered by everything from RSI to STDs to scarring from violent assault. So that it’s work isn’t the question. The question is, do we regulate work? And the answer seems to be yes, ever since Upton Sinclair and Frances Perkins, anyway. Workers should receive a certain level of wage; workers shouldn’t be mistreated or overworked; workers shouldn’t be coerced into working.

Of course all of these things happen at all kinds of levels of employment—my partner’s 18-year-old nephew, for example, is about to enter a service academy, and does he really do so because he genuinely wants to be an officer in the US military? He has a lot of very convincing arguments about why he wants to be nominated, and how it will be a wonderful opportunity for him—but it’s hard to overlook the fact that his own father washed out of Annapolis 25 years ago. Is this an anxiety of influence, an I-can-do-what-you-couldn’t, type of move? Who knows? Did my sexually abusive childhood mean that I was going to grow up and, especially during one troubled period in my life, think certain sexual activities involving domination and humiliation were hot? Is it my twisted culture which has altered my brain? Or is it merely an excess of estrogen that makes me feel this way? And aren’t these questions sickeningly simplistic?

Good luck having an opinion without being RIPPED TO SHREDS by someone’s else’s oppositional rhetoric, is all I can say. The Internet is stalked at present by rapacious binary arguers who are determined to pull you down and make you a) burn your porn or b) burn your legitimate concerns about sex work. In general, though it’s fiery and fulminating, on either “side” of the debate you encounter astonishingly poor rhetoric. There are consistent logical fallacies—mistaking the part for the whole (“I’m one happy call girl/porn star who wasn’t abused as a child, is well-paid, and genuinely enjoys her work!”), mistaking correlation for causality (“research indicates that married couples have the most frequent, and conservative Protestant women have the most enjoyable, sexual relations” and “sexually oriented businesses lower property values” are a couple of examples from thepinkcross.org), and, possibly most infamously of all, the slippery slope (porn will inevitably turn hapless teenagers into Ted Bundy).

It’s irritating, to say the least, to try to read through the bad rhetoric in search of anything meaningful or actually descriptive of the complexity of human felt life. The only psychologist I’ve found who even comes close to touching this is Michael Bader, and I don’t know that a single other writer, in all the books I’ve read, has managed to pull it off. (Though having said that, here’s a fascinating article by Robin Turner about the Lakoffian metaphors used and misused in anti-pornography rhetoric.)

NB by the way I’m including pornography and prostitution under the same subject heading (sex work) because it seems very clear to me that both lines of employment ultimately offer pretty much the same thing: I am earning money (however much or little, however happily or unhappily, however freely or unwillingly) by displaying/using my sexuality in such a way as to stimulate yours. Whether I’m actually there in the flesh touching you, or whether I’m touching some other person onscreen, the intent is very obviously the same: you get pleasure and I get paid. (And perhaps I get some pleasure too, though there’s literally no way for you as a customer to ever know, whether I’m there in person or on film.)

The much-vaunted difference, of course, is that if I’m in a pornographic film, I never have to see or interact with the real consumers of my product. One theory is that this is why the men (still mostly men) who use pornography (and let’s don’t say “view” or “look at,” which is a far more passive designation than the reality—let’s say “use,” because porn is used) are able to enjoy it—there’s no emotional relationship. There is, of course, an economic one; but the consumer doesn’t necessarily realize that he’s been sexually stimulated by an actual person—not because I was two-dimensional, but because I didn’t see or speak to them. I performed for them invisibly; I never saw them.

Baden says, the reason men like porn is precisely because they think it isn’t real; the reason women are threatened by porn is that they think it is. Like every such sweeping claim, this is patently overgeneralized and therefore/nonetheless usefully so.

Women who view a film are usually going to put themselves in the position of the women. Why I cry when I watch stupid sentimental movies with other women crying (e.g., I don’t know, Stepmom). It’s Pavlovian—a woman cries on screen, I cry too. I am her. As Salinger’s Seymour wrote in his journal of Muriel’s rapt attention, “The Warner Brothers identification is complete.”

(Someone really wise and not all strangled in rhetorical binaries wrote a strong blogpost on this, in which she said: “Theoretically, I don’t have a problem with sex work. I don’t think there’s anything inherently, fundamentally wrongdirtybad with sex as a job, or sex for pay. But that’s based on a concept of sex work in a vacuum, and we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a patriarchy.”)

My partner said, “After all, you’re hardly a libertine.” Oh. Really?

Porn objectifies women, claim hoary second-wave feminists such as myself. As if this were a surprise to anyone. When every cultural artifact we produce objectifies and denegrates women.

Denegrate. To blacken. To make dark and other.

The question then becomes, is there a problem with objectifying people?

The answer has to be, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re trying to accomplish a society where everyone has open access to their own physical pleasure, the jury’s still out on whether Internet porn in particular helps accomplish that. Frankly, no one can pull themselves up out of their rhetoric long enough to do actual human research—and they’d be trying to draw a bead on a moving target anyway. The Internet is changing our brain chemistry so fast that I don’t see how post-docs with spreadsheets tracking dopamine levels can really keep up.

For as subjects, we aren’t black-boxed; we’re dynamic, and the presently living generations who’ve been able to access pornography with unprecedented ease (and just not still photos, but films) have developed brains that are biologically different from those of the previous generations. If you don’t think that’s true, I feel sorry for you. You probably also think technological devices like smartphones don’t change how students learn or read or think. I invite you to visit my classroom and watch the core differences play out visibly in the process of education. That poor fucker Allan Bloom, talking in the eighties about “souls without longing“; he had no idea. And neither do we.

So the question “Is this a problem?” can only be answered if we have established an answer to the question “What kind of world are we trying to create/manipulate?” People with whom I live who’ve been squawking for years about my supposed “essentialism” and my nasty “reductionism” (e.g., testosterone makes it hard for my male students to sit still and think about logical fallacies because quite frankly I think they’re meant to be outside stalking animals in tall grasses)—have misunderstood me if they think that description equals prescription, or anatomy equals destiny. I accept that my brain and body are quantifiably different from those of: men: my students: my parents: my cat: and any other entities I could care to name.

Courtesy of behavioral therapy and Zen training and my innate thought processes, though, I also don’t believe that the hand I got dealt, or the hand I get dealt every day when I wake up with some new slightly adjusted set of chemicals raging through my brain, is the hand I have to play.

This all seems so self-evident as to be ugly when stated aloud.

Or, if the answer to the question of “What kind of society do we desire?” is “One in which biological genders are accorded equal respect and benefit,” then I cannot for my life figure out how the consumption of sex work contributes to that end. (Not its production; its consumption.) Not because adult sex between non-partners or for economic remuneration is morally wrong; but because I cannot see how it fosters a transitive recognition of the other as the self.

If this is my mental limitation, then I also do not have to take the hand I’m dealt. If I find it unarousing, in a mate, such consumption, consuming sex work, I can consider whether or how or if I want to change that emotional/physical response on my part—to a degree. It’s why the Serenity Prayer has three parts. There are things I can change, and things I can’t. I’d better be granted the wisdom to know the difference or I am in for a lot of additional suffering.

If I want to be a writer, and I have a hard time meeting deadlines, I can use emotion-opposite action (for example) to start rewiring my response to cues. I am adaptive.

If I want to be with someone who consumes the products of sex work, but I find this behavior unattractive, I can use emotion-opposite action to start rewiring my responses to cues. I am adaptive. If I choose to be. If I think it fits what DBT calls my wise-mind values or my long-term goals.

I pray daily for the wisdom to know the difference.

Is such consumption on a par with being overweight, with smoking, with eating fast food, with driving one’s car where one could have easily walked? or with not wringing out the kitchen sponge, with not wiping the coffee grounds from the counter, with not changing out the toilet paper roll when it is empty? Or is such consumption on a par with buying ostrich-skin boots, fur-collared jackets, cheap clothing made overseas by children? Or is it on a par with hiring undocumented Mexicans to do the yard work? Or is it on a par with shouting at the dog? Or using intimidation to browbeat the girlfriend?

I don’t know about equivalence, but I know about spectrums. I know that the same industry which makes available supposedly innocent massage-parlor handjobs is the same industry which maims, rapes, murders, trafficks and shatters. The exact same one. Which causes harm in ways most of us cannot conceive. When we know this, can we continue to collude? Despite the rare yet dazzling examples to whom we like to refer, the few but happy, the Sprinkles and Taorminos, the Brights and the Queens—do we like to point to them because they make us feel better?

When the argument depends upon the exceptions, it is fundamentally flawed.

Frankly I think the complexity of the debate can only be properly represented in theater, poetry, or the novel.

Or perhaps a film. That film has not been made. It could not be either a documentary or a feature film. There may not be anyone working today who could make it.

Rhetoric cannot get us out of every situation, or perhaps even out of very many. Cf. Steven Pinker on why the ridiculous yet tempting abortion-debate question of “when does life begin” will never be the right one, because it treats as if life could be switched on and off with all the subtlety of a circuit breaker.

I think I would respect the entire agon more if there were less hypocrisy on either side.

If sex work is good for sex workers, they will eventually become fewer in number and more highly skilled, trained, and remunerated. If instead sex work benefits primarily an alienated consumer class, we can expect to see it increase proportionally, as part of a gross national product, according to late capitalist income levels and leisure time.

Then too, if American men and women really want to be sex workers, why is there not enough supply for the demand. Why do we have to traffic in additional workers? If you ask this question about agricultural trafficking, the answer is harshly obvious.

If I think I want to remain with someone who considers himself non-monogamous, and is interested in relating with other women for spiritual, emotional, intellectual as well as sensual benefit, for pay or not for pay, then I have even more rewiring to do.

You can only experience compersion, mudita, or sympathetic joy for your partner, if she or he is truly experiencing joy in the first place.

Does consuming sex work increase compassion, toward oneself or toward its providers.

We don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a capitalist patriarchy and we co-create it daily.

What unalloyed pleasure is even left us to experience, given our straits, given our anomie.

The most libertine among us cannot recognize our enislement.