There is a very interesting article in the Atlantic, “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even For Consenting Adults“. Being the Atlantic, although thorough, it also relates some very dogmatic and (to me) quite offensive responses. But the author has written a fairly well-reasoned piece. It is all in response to this essay by Emily Witt on N+1 “What Do You Desire”
I don’t want to spend a long time summarizing either the article or the essay. If you are interested in examining the impact of certain kinds of sex and its remediation (porn) on the concept of sex itself, cultural constructions of it, and personal experience, it’s really worth your time to read both. Nonetheless, the essay in question is basically an account of the writer who witnessed and interacted with some of the participants in the production of a piece of porn vaguely reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Snuff” – but perhaps a little edgier and with far less narrative. One girl, an audience of willing participants, and the appearance of pretty much anything goes that isn’t life-threatening.
It’s funny how the presence of sex blinds us to looking at something dispassionately. Because the narrative of the essay contains sex, society dictates that we must view it and dissect it in a very specific way. We must talk about it in terms of morality, of feminism, of how it colours are perceptions of sex. In reality, there’s very little difference between Public Disgrace and what the Romans used to do for entertainment at the Forum. What Public Disgrace shows is that a lot of us haven’t moved on much, emotionally or intellectually, in terms of what we find entertaining. Luckily, we don’t require the death of the participants anymore. The symbolic and very public decimation of identity seems to be enough. So, one could say, we’ve become more nuanced.
For me, there are two interesting and rather disturbing aspects to the articles and to the production of things like Public Disgrace itself.
The first is this insistence that the public decimation of identity is a perfectly acceptable entertainment commodity. There is a blatant hypocrisy going on with the producers of the porn. The unspoken sub-text is that this is all good clean fun and there is no lasting damage. If it were all good clean fun, it wouldn’t turn us on. Sporting a sign saying ‘I am A Worthless Cunt’ is a lot of things, and it may be entirely consensual, but marketing it as spectacle which has no lasting impression on either the recipient of the sexual degradation or the participants and witnesses to it is disingenuous. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning someone’s penchant for sexual humiliation. I’m condemning the selling of it as superficial entertainment. Because you’d have to be almost brain-dead to walk away from that spectacle, whether participant or witness, unchanged.
And before you start feeling smug (“Well, I’d never watch or participate in anything like that”), you should stop and think. Because if you’ve ever watched a reality TV show and felt the shiver of pleasurable Schadenfreude to see someone get publicly torn to shreds on American Idol, or any other program where a set of co-participants or a panel of judges take great pleasure in proclaiming how abysmally the participant has failed, then you’ve dipped into that rather murky pond yourself. Don’t let the absence of explicit sex fool you.
The other thing that disturbs me is a pattern I’ve seen emerging for some time, facilitated by our technological ability to remediate things fast and broadcast them to a wide public. The reveal of this comes at the end of the “What Do You Desire” essay, in the form of a snippet of interview – when the girl who features in the porn was asked what she liked the best about the experience:
PENNY
Probably, uh, just the getting handled by everyone and not really knowing how many hands were on me, or who was touching me . . . And then the—I don’t know, did you get your fist in my butt?
DONNA
I did.
PENNY
Well, that was awesome. Yay! I can’t wait to see it!
Buried in this interchange is a creepy little statement. That having a fist in her ass was not the ultimate experience. Viewing the video evidence of it will be.
For me, it is not the mainstreaming or openness of explicit sex or kink that is the problem. The issue is that there is something inherent in its marketization that shifts the value off the interior experience of the sex itself and onto its status as a publicly remediated product. This is no longer about the pleasure or intensity of the lived experience. It is about the broadcast of its evidence.
It is as if the gaze of others, the knowledge that others have consumed the remediation of your experience that has become the only real site of pleasure. As if we no longer simply require sex organs to experience erotic pleasure. We require a viewing audience to confirm that we felt it.
I’m not sure I’m on-board with this part:
“I’m condemning the selling of it as superficial entertainment. Because you’d have to be almost brain-dead to walk away from that spectacle, whether participant or witness, unchanged.”
Experiences can be affecting, of course but this sails close to the idea that indulging in fantasy warps your reality. I’m wary of this for many reasons in many arenas but most particularly around sex and violence in pornography and games. I don’t buy into this idea much as I don’t buy into objectification because the object (the film, the photograph, whatever) is not the same category of ‘thing’ as the person.
We can enjoy a horror film, or an extreme porno, or a comic, or a mass-murdering computer game without it having to have a lasting effect on us.
What concerns me as a putative consumer of this sort of material is mostly public reaction and condemnation thereof and secondarily that it almost always lacks context. More and more I find I crave the kind of ‘connection’ and humanity that one gets in erotic fiction but which is almost entirely missing from visual pornography.
Dehumanising the subject is, I suspect, a somewhat deliberate way of avoiding the issue of humanising the subject of degradation/humiliation/punishment whatever and thus avoiding empathy which, IMO, is an important aspect that’s missing and why these things are so often, ultimately, unsatisfying as media.
Is not the need for an audience simply exhibitionism and would not performers be more likely to be exhibitionistic? That doesn’t necessarily make them representative of a wider trend in human sexuality – though the increasing prevalence of the ‘selfie’ and the ‘sex tape’ (as well as revenge porn) does support that idea.
I’m more confused now than when I started writing this comment, which is probably a good thing 🙂
Hey, I didn’t say that consuming porn turns you into a rapist, or consuming violent games makes you violent. What I am suggesting is that the insistence that it has NO impact at all is a very convenient one. All experience has impact, and if it turns you on, it has lasting impact because it forms part of your fantasy life. And to say that fantasy DOESN’T affect your reality in any way is just plain madness. It may not affect your behaviour because you choose not to let it as a responsible member of a civil society, but to deny that it doesn’t affect your perceptions is… well… saying it’s like water off a ducks back. And if you feel that sort of spectacle is actually water off a ducks back it’s because you’re too stupid to read the semiotics.
I am wired with extreme sensitivity on this topic. I thought I had misunderstood and am glad I had 🙂
Before videos like Public Disgrace, streaming porn and amateur porn humiliation videos there were blogs with photos and photo porn pay sites. I have nothing against sites like Publice Disgrace as long as everyone is consenting adults. A lot of the times I will see porn actresses playing these “normal” roles in these films so people shouldn’t be too apaled because she is getting paid but again people are into this and there are what seem to be normal women agreeing to this public treatment. I am not going to pass judgement on someone’s sexual kinks and neither should the public. I have conversed with many unsuspecting individuals and you would be amazed what lies beneath the surface in the dark crevices of the mind. I was observing extreme BDSM behavior in blogs long before The Armormy was even thought of. I was shocked and amazed at the photos and the stories I read. I will tell you I detest reality TV and I refuse to watch it. I lose brain cells when forced to watch it BUT I still read blogs, tweets & Facebook statuses and therefore I add to the epidemic, we all do.
With most people being so public with social media outlets we tend to glorify the revealed. It’s almost like a show and here is your 15 minutes of fame. It seems that sex is a race to some finish line of “oh I’ve done that.” and said so non-chalantly. It’s not the experience anymore, it’s a check list. It’s a badge put on display instead of cherished.
As a mental exhibitionist I assure everyone that I do not reveal all that is hidden in my mind. I don’t write about every sexual experience that I’ve had. I don’t talk about all lovers openly. Some things are sacred to me. Call me a romantic or sentimental but it’s true. I don’t need the high five from Internet strangers. I want sexual fulfillment.
Some people may be into public forms of humiliation and the inherent is a perfect soap box for that. In the end who are we to judge what people want in an out of the bedroom. Those that judge the loudest tend to be the most hypocritical of them all.
“This is no longer about the pleasure or intensity of the lived experience. It is about the broadcast of its evidence.”
Yeah, but if she’s turned on by the exposure, then that IS her lived experience.
I’ve viewed some Public Disgrace. I didn’t find it erotic. Not how that experience actually changed the way I think.
“Yeah, but if she’s turned on by the exposure, then that IS her lived experience. ”
Um… you missed my point.
RG, last graf! Yeah. Oh man so perfectly said — of course, what I hated in all that was the sign around her neck, but what you said? That’s really putting the finger on that.
One last thing? I went and looked at the place you reffed, at the pics. I really loved that you wrote this. It’s a way of thinking about this — “This is no longer about the pleasure or intensity of the lived experience. It is about the broadcast of its evidence.” — in some ways this a huge place inside that dissertation — huge? I mean huge.
xxoo!
from me
“Brilliant” is a word I like to think of around you RG, means that. I can’t even imagine what that work is going to be but is it ever necessary and I hope you turn that to a book?
You’re raised a bunch of issues in this post that are really interesting.
At the end you talk about the ‘I can’t wait to see it’ comment, and out ability to remediate things quickly. As you imply, that’s not just porn but a wider social trend. It’s very common for people to film themselves and their friends even if they’re just having a drink in a pub. The video is ‘evidence’ of them having a good time, to be consumed and shared at a later date. It has a bunch of functions (or perhaps not functions, but motives or rationales. Arguably it enables people to recapture the emotions and feelings for that time; to publicise and reinforce one’s social identity; and I suspect increasingly people do things not necessarily because they enjoy the experience of it at the time – they may, they may not – but because they expect to enjoy its consumption on video in the future. We live so much of our lives in a state where delayed gratification is normal and it’s not surprising it extends as far as this. The downside is probably the persistence of evidence of activities (or relationships with people) that, a year or two on, you might rather forget. Video is a double-edged tool.
Eroticism: it occurs to me that while we might have an experience we feel is ‘erotic’, a great deal of eroticism isn’t about what happens ‘in the moment’. It’s in the story, the retelling, the pictures. It’s in the ‘what if’ possibilities and the ‘I actually did that!’ sense of accomplishment or the ‘Imagine yourself in this scenario’ invitation. Eroticism is to a large extent a matter of memory, imagination, and triggers of past emotions.
Degradation spectacles and ceremonies: there’s a lot of sociology on these (Erving Goffman’s ‘Stigma’ etc., but a key source is : Harold Garfinkel ‘Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 61, No. 5 (Mar., 1956), pp. 420-424. And yes, they can be marketed as entertainment now as in Roman times. The re-mediation is faster because the technology has changed – but consider the erotic charge of paintings such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘The Slave Market’ (1866), paintings around the Andromeda myth, even the eroticism inherent in many images of Christ’s crucifixion.
All this makes it oddly normal that someone might (a) consensually participate in a scene in which they are degraded, for both their own gratification and for payment (b) genuinely want to see the recording, both to evaluate their own ‘performance’ and for their own gratification and (c) others may be prepared to view it as entertainment and consider it erotic.
While you want to condemn it as superficial entertainment, but nonetheless entertainment from which people won’t walk away unchanged, I’d be sceptical about these points. I’d hazard a guess that the majority of people who view the video will do so because they’ve been looking for this kind of material – it speaks to their pre-existing interests and sense of eroticism. Many others will be changed by it, but only in the same way that seeing a great deal of what passes for reality-show TV, or even images on the TV news, change people. And if the video does speak to someone’s pre-existing sense of eroticism, or triggers their sense of it, in what sense is it ‘superficial’? You or I may not see one person fisting another’s ass as erotic, but we both know that eroticism and fetishism come in many, many forms.
I think the key point is your first one: ‘It’s funny how the presence of sex blinds us to looking at something dispassionately’. The construction of moral discourses in society tends to do this – though again it’s not just sex. You could say the same about crime, for example.