Anyone searching the newsstands for political opinions veering more than slightly from the mainstream may find the task frustrating. Yet most newsstands carry an astonishing variety of pornographic magazines, appealing to the most specialized tastes. My local convenience store carries magazines catering to everyone from breast fetishists to fans of older women, and those willing to venture into the local adult bookstore will find (alongside giant dildos and inflatable sex partners) publications appealing to even more specialized fetishes. When the Meese Commission attempted in 1986 to catalog the extent and variety of the porn industry, it carefully recorded the existence of magazines ranging from Teeny Tits, Big Boobs to Chew & Suck On to Squirt ‘Em (“Five blown-up photographs of an engorged breast expressing a jet of milk into a glass”) to Big Tit Dildo Bondage to Every Dog Has His Day (“Four photographs of a nude man licking the testicles of a dog”).
By the late 1970s the talk of sexuality (at least among the more self-consciously sophisticated crowd) began to reach the saturation point; the transgressive rhetoric of the sexual revolution had run out of steam. Pornography began to lose what little artistic and political cachet it had. Since then the aura of transgression has shifted to the margins–to gay and lesbian sex, to transvestism and transsexualism, to wilder variations, while heterosexual pornography has retreated to the closet. To many, the homoerotic, fetishized images of Robert Mapplethorpe are still shocking, still carry with them the whiff of the transgressive. Heterosexual pornography, by contrast, seems less shocking than simply pathetic, the province not of sexual revolutionaries but of the raincoat crowd.
The few porn defenders who haven’t been entirely intimidated form an odd coalition: a few pornographers who cling uneasily to the hackneyed language of sexual transgression, a few sexual rebels and feminists who attempt to disentangle the pleasures of porn from the perils of patriarchy, and a motley collection of civil libertarians. It’s an uneasy coalition, in large part because the three groups don’t quite agree on what it is they’re defending. The more disreputable pornographers celebrate porn in all its varieties (which pushes them mainly to the edge of the debate). The more reputable pornographers, like Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione, try hard to distinguish their “classy” porn from the hard-core genres. The promoters of politically correct feminist erotica try to distinguish their work from the misogynist crudities of Juggs magazine. And the civil libertarians would be much happier if they didn’t have to discuss any of the details.
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The assumptions underlying such a view–partially obscured by MacKinnon’s deft, sweeping rhetoric–are startling. She rails, for example, at any depiction of “a penis ramming into a vagina.” Unless one equates all heterosexual intercourse with rape, it’s hard to imagine what’s inherently awful about that. Her distrust of any expression of sexuality is almost palpable: “Once you are used for sex, you are sexualized,” she writes. “You lose your human status.” At least the Meese Commission on pornography was more open (and perhaps more honest) about its assumptions and its censorious ideology. According to the commission, any and all explicit depictions of sex are beyond the pale, even representations of sex that is “intervaginal and between two married adults who find mutual pleasure in it and for the sole purpose of procreation.”
MacKinnon is as sloppy with her evidence as she is with her assumptions. She claims a small stack of “scientific” surveys backs up her startling conclusions, but doesn’t discuss the evidence she says is embedded in these reports or the methodologies of the research. We must take her word for it that science has concluded decisively that pornography “change[s] attitudes and impel[s] behavior in ways that are unique in their extent and devastating in their consequences.” Curiously, she then goes on to argue that “there is no evidence that pornography does no harm; not even courts equivocate over its carnage anymore.”
Arcand concludes, “Few subjects have lent themselves as easily to peremptory, but gratuitous, statements, doubtful interpretations, ill-considered conclusions, distortions and bad faith as pornography. . . . A considerable number of public declarations on the subject are little more than the open expressions of opinions that bear no weight other than that of total sincerity.” Insofar as they prove anything, the various studies have done little more than confirm common sense. “Pornography is amusing, beastly, repugnant, useful, menacing, fascinating, and disturbing,” he writes. Sometimes it’s all these things at once, which is undoubtedly part of its appeal.
