flexibeast.space - quotes
Kipnis' “How to Look at Pornography” (1998)
“How to Look at Pornography” [Google Scholar]
Those who take pornography seriously are its opponents, who have little interesting to say on the subject: not only don't they seem to have spent much time actually looking at it, but even worse, they seem universally overcome by a leaden, stultifying literalness, apparently never having heard of metaphor, irony, symbolism - even fantasy seems to challenging a concept.
I've proposed that pornography is both a legitimate form of culture and a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm; it neither simply reflects the real world nor is it some hypnotizing call to action. The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by characters. It doesn't and never will exist, but it does - and this is part of its politics - insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy. This is its most serious demand and the basis of much of the controvery it engenders, because pornography has a talent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous and socially destabilizing incendiary devices.
Like your boorish cousin, [pornography's] greatest pleasure is to locate each and every one of society's taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties and systematically transgress them, one by one.
A culture's pornography becomes, in effect, a very precise map of that culture's borders: pornography begins at the edge of the culture's decorum. Carefully tracing that edge, like an anthropologist mapping a culture's system of taboos and myths, gives you a detailed blueprint of the culture's anxieties, investments, contradictions. And a culture's borders, whether geographical or psychological, are inevitably political questions - as mapmakers and geographers are increasingly aware.
Pornography is chock full of these sorts of aesthetic shocks and surprises. Here's another one: in a culture that so ferociously equates sexuality with youth, where else but within pornography will you find enthusiasm for sagging, aging bodies, or for their sexualization?
Pornography provides a realm of transgression that is, in effect, a counter-aesthetics to dominant norms for bodies, sexualities, and desire itself.
[P]ornography's very preoccupation with the instabilities and permeability of cultural borders is inextricable from the fragility and tenuousness of our own psychic borders, composed as they are of this same flimsy system of refusals and repressions. Pornography's allegories of transgression reveal, in the most visceral ways, not only our culture's edges, but how intricately our own identities are bound up in all of these quite unspoken, but quite relentless, cultural dictates.
Pornography's ultimate desire is exactly to engage our deepest embarrassments,to mock us for the anxious psychic balancing acts we daily perform, straddling between the anarchy of sexual desires and the straitjacket of social responsibilities.
Pornography, then, is profoundly and paradoxically social, but even more than that, it's acutely historical. It's an archive of data about both our history as a culture and our own individual histories - our formations as selves.
[P]ornography would be nowhere without its most flagrant border transgression, this complete disregard for the public/private divide. Flaunting its contempt for all the proprieties, it's this transgression in particular that triggers so much handwringing about the deleterious effects on society of naked private parts in public view.
"Keeping things to yourself," the stiff upper lip, the suppression of emotions, maintenance of propriety and proper behavior, and the very concept of "bad taste" are all associated historically with the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and their invention of behaviors that would separate themselves from the noisy lower orders.
Class, after all, isn't simply a matter of income, or neighborhood. It's also embedded in a complex web of attitudes and proprieties, particularly around the body.
[Q]uestions of social class seem to lurk somewhere quite near all this distress over pornography. If culture is grouped along a hierarchy from high to low, and the rest of our social world is grouped along a hierarchy from high to low, then this puts pornography into analogy with the bottom tiers of the social structure. This isn't to suggest that the "lower classes" are pornography's consumers, but that insofar as porn is relegated to a low thing culturally, it takes on all the associations of a low-class thing.
Take the dual associations antipornography feminists make between pornography and violent male behavior. It hardly needs saying that the propensity to violence is a characteristic with strong class connotations - you might even say stereotypical connotations. A propensity to violence is in opposition to traits like rationality, contemplation, and intelligence, which tend to have higher-class connotations: the attributes associated with the audiences of higher cultural forms like theater or opera. The argument that pornography causes violent behavior in male consumers relies on a theory of the porn consumer as devoid of rationality, contemplation, or intelligence, prone instead to witless brainwashing, to monkey-see/monkey-do reenactments of the pornographic scene. This would be a porn spectator who inherently has a propensity to become violent (not presumably the members of the Meese Commission, who spent years viewing pornography without violent consequences). Maybe it becomes clearer how fantastical this argument is when you consider how eagerly we accept the premise that pornography causes violence - and so are keen to regulate it - compared to the massive social disinclination to accept that handguns cause violence (and it's certainly far more provable that they do): guns, without the same connotation of lowness, don't seem to invite the same regulatory zeal, despite a completely demonstrable causal relation to violence.
The fantasy pornography consumer is a walking projection of upper-class fears about lower-class men: brutish, animal-like,sexually voracious. And this fantasy is projected back onto pornography. In fact, arguments about the "effects" of culture seem to be applied exclusively to lower cultural forms, that is, to pornography, or cartoons, or subcultural forms like gangsta rap. This predisposition even extends to social science research: researchers aren't busy wiring Shakespeare viewers up to electrodes and measuring their penile tumescence or their galvanic skin responses to the violence or misogyny there. The violence of high culture seems not to have effects on its consumers, or rather, no one bothers to research this question
Pornography isn't viewed as having complexity, because its audience isn't viewed as having complexity, and this propensity for oversimplication gets reproduced in every discussion about pornography.
Shifts in economic ideology require a retooled social conscience, and arguments about culture are one place these new forms of consent get negotiated - and this is the subtext of what's come to be known as the Culture Wars.
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