January 3, 2013

• What defines “porn”?

  JDN 2456296 EDT 12:01.

   

  “I know it when I see it,” went the famous ruling, by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Well, that’s great… shall we show you every possible example? You’ll be the arbiter? The backlog shall be astronomical.

  Clearly if we are to make rules about “porn”, we need a better definition than that.

  One option, I suppose, would be to not regulate at all, just let people use the word “porn” to mean whatever they want and leave the government out of it. That does raise a problem however: Do we really want 7-year-olds to be given access to everything that’s on the Internet? (I suppose one could argue that they already do; but we at least try to prevent that.)

  Instead, I think we should ask: What are we worried about porn doing to us?

  For some people, the mere fact that children would be exposed to sexual content at all is horrifying; I’m going to set that aside, because frankly it’s ridiculous. Humans are sexual animals, and kids are curious about sexuality from a young age. There is such a thing as age-appropriate sexual content.

  In fact, the kind of sexual content that is in my books right now is toned down relative to what I wrote when I was a teenager, and yet I’m told that my books are inappropriate for young adults. Apparently what young adults write is inappropriate for them to read?

  I think when I worry about porn damaging impressionable minds, my fear is that it will distort sexuality, give people wrong ideas about how sex works and what it is like. Some of this is inevitable: You can’t smell the odors or feel the wetness on a computer screen. But some of it is not: Why do all porn actors shave their pubic hair off? Why are they so short, so thin, and with such enormous breasts and penises? Why do they use such awkward, bizarre positions?

  I suppose it’s too much to ask that ten-minute videos be honest about the psychological and emotional experience of sexuality. But what about two-hour-long films, or 50,000-word novels? Is it too much to expect that they be realistic about the joys and harms of sex? It seems to me that if we are going to define “porn” as something problematic, it would be this:

  Pornography is content that distorts sexuality. At best, it idealizes it; at worst, it makes sexuality into something degrading and commodified.

  I feel similarly about violent content: A historical drama on WW2 or the Civil War is bound to be violent; but done properly it could be honest about the violence, and show just how terrible and horrific it really is. I’m much more disturbed by something like Tom & Jerry cartoons, where violence is depicted as whimsical, harmless fun. A game like Call of Duty is actually about the horrors of war (when you die, you get a quote about how awful war is!), and Halo seems relatively harmless because it takes place in a futuristic world and you kill aliens. But Grand Theft Auto? It’s just pure nihilistic, psychopathic violence. You kill people because you can; the proper authorities are your enemy. If I had my druthers, Grand Theft Auto would be much more regulated than Call of Duty.

  It’s interesting though: By this definition, much of what is currently not considered “porn” should be! Supermodels, makeup ads, and teen pop stars all distort sexuality in obvious ways. Meanwhile, videos of a young woman masturbating? They don’t seem all that distortionary, and thus might not even be classified as “porn”!

  This result might seem counter-intuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense in terms of the real social impact of such media. Children who see airbrushed pictures of supermodels are subtly influenced toward unhealthy body image, which we know can lead to depression and eating disorders. Children who see videos of young women masturbating would be advanced in normal psychosexual development, and might well learn techniques for pleasuring themselves or their partners later on.

  This refined definition of “pornography” could also lead to some compromise between pro-sex feminists and anti-porn feminists; if depictions of sexuality are not automatically considered pornographic, then we can be pro-sex while still being anti-porn. Conversely, if pornography is defined as that which distorts our sexuality, it makes sense that we would find it problematic.

  And make no mistake: Most of what we currently call “porn” would still be called “porn”, because it does distort our sexuality, sometimes in terrible ways. Mainstream porn’s standards for what our bodies should look like and what we should do in bed are bizarre; given the prevalence of unprotected multi-partner sex in porn, they are outright dangerous. Some of the material that anti-porn feminists object to is genuinely objectionable. (Then again, sometimes they get pretty off-the-wall: I’ve heard it argued that gay porn objectifies women… by not including them. Also anti-porn feminists are notoriously unwilling to listen to complaints that mainstream porn objectifies men, even though it obviously does.)

  Should this be regulated? Yes, I think it should, though precisely how I’m not sure. There is a very delicate balance to be found here, between protecting impressionable minds and preserving freedom of speech. The LAPS test helps to some extent: Content with “significant literary, artistic, political, or scientificmerit” is already excluded from being regulated as pornography. The problem is, who decides that? Political and scientific merit are at least reasonably well-defined, but literary and artistic merit are notoriously indefinable. Also, I’m not sure we really follow this for political merit; I’d imagine we would probably censor a cartoon of the IMF graphically raping Africa as Dominque Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped an African woman, even though the political implications are ludicrously obvious (and not altogether inaccurate either). Come to think of it, we’re actually better about protecting literary merit: Lolita and Ulysses were both protected by Supreme Court rulings.

   

   

  • 12:12 pm
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