I used to think that in a more enlightened age, maybe even soon, pornography would be like goat cheese or 19th-century German opera. Some people would get off on it and some people wouldn’t, but nobody would feel the need to ban it. Pornophiles might find the reaction of pornophobes mysterious, possibly indicative of an unsophisticated palate. Pornophobes could simply avoid adult bookstores. No big deal. Consenting adults, chacun a son gout, et cetera.
And how can you reconcile the rise in local legislation against porn with the fact that 100 million X-rated videos were rented last year? Are Americans just getting weird about sin again, trying to protect their neighbors and children against something they’re into themselves? Is this national schizophrenia or what?
(In 1986 the Meese Commission finally got it right. Although it had only $500,000 to work with, it scrimped and saved and based its conclusions mostly on public hearings and letters from concerned citizens. The Meese Commission reported that there was indeed a causal link between pornography and sexual violence. Two scientists on the commission protested that the data were being massaged into showing cause and effect, but their voices were lost in the general public and legislative enthusiasm.)
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Well, not really. I want to believe them; no, I do believe them. It’s just that believing them takes every ounce of belief I have. Their findings are totally counterintuitive, which of course doesn’t mean they’re wrong. (Relativity is counterintuitive, God knows, and the idea of evolution by natural selection boggles the mind.) It’s just that every time some horrific mass murderer is found to have a stash of pornography in his den, my conviction starts to fail me.
What remains interesting about Pornography and Sexual Deviance is how stubbornly optimistic a view it takes of human nature. What Goldstein and Kant have concluded is that the U.S. needs more sex education, more free and open discussion of sex, more sixth-grade hygiene classes. Then, they argue, the need for pornography will disappear. We don’t need legislation–we need the truth, and the truth will make us free.
He starts at square one with the obvious but mostly unasked question, “Why is pornography arousing?” He answers it by drawing on psychoanalytic literature. This is an approach I often wonder about, but in this case it makes a lot of sense. “Instinctual sexual energies are not . . . eradicated, but the ‘moral’ resolution of the Oedipal conflict and the formation of the superego provide a lifelong psychodynamic base for conscious as well as unconscious sexual reticence and self-restraint.”
The elite standard is applied to communications that assume a bit more education for their consumption, and is far more tolerant of sexual expression. Books, magazines, and the theater have always been less closely regulated than TV or newspapers.
