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elfsNormally, the intellectual descendents of Andrea Dworkin and I don't see at all eye to eye. After all, I produce erotica; Dworkin loathed it. I celebrate a sense of masculine sex and role that she found abhorrent, a respect for the difference in the sexes that she found incomprehensible, and an appreciation for physical pleasures that require more vigor than mere cuddling. (Oh, I'm all for cuddling, too. Even as the only thing for some ocassions and the appropriate reaction to some people. It just not the only thing, and writing about it would become dull eventually.)
Robert Jensen is considered one of those intellectual descendents. He has an observation in his book Getting Off that I've made on more than one occassion, and for a while I could point at the misogyny of Japanese porn. (I used to think it was patriarchial-- and perhaps it is. But what I've read of women Japanese writers in the original, I can only conclude that when the tables are turned and women have power, they would mistreat men just as readily. It's not about sex: it's about power, and having it, and showing it. It might just be revenge fantasy for them. I have no idea.) But I'm seeing more of it in the United States.
There are two primary strains of pornography: the traditional kind, in which there's a script, and an intent to follow some thin thread of a storyline from beginning to end. And then there's gonzo, in which two people are put in front of the camera and just told to have sex. There's no justification, no emotional connection. Here's your paycheck: now fuck for it.
Over the past three years, gonzo has gotten mean. I can no longer deny this. The epithets fly: 'tramp', 'bitch', 'whore', 'cunt,' 'slut.' Women are slapped, choked, gagged until they throw up. All kinds of nastiness is thrown at women: comments about the way they look, the way they smell, the sounds of their voice. Gonzo these days starts with the assumption that women are stupid and cheap and exist only to be used by cruel men, and often include the subtle message that you're not a real man unless you can use women and throw them away like that.
The alarming fact is that this cruelty-based gonzo outsells all other kinds of hardcore pornography right about now. Jensen's claim, and it's one I'm having a hard time arguing with, is this: We aren't as civilized as we claim to be. This industry thrives because the vast majority of American men who buy pornography, who sit in darkened rooms and masturbate to this stuff, like the cruelty. It's a passive cruelty: we can claim that it's vicarious, and it's on TV so it's "make believe," and the actresses all say they like it. (I know, I know, I'm supposed to believe what they say and accept their empowerment, but the one time I watched a Hillary Scott film I couldn't even watch to the end; she did not look like she was having fun, and she's Adult Video News's "hottest actress" two years in a row.)
Even if that's true, why do men buy it? Jensen believes it is because we do not, as a society, reject cruelty as much as we would wish. We reject the commission of cruelty, but we're perfectly happy to watch it. Degradation and deliberate cruelty are becoming more commonplace even as pornography becomes more commonplace.
This disturbs me on so many levels. If this is the audience, do I even want to write smut anymore? I've tried to make my characters human; the ones who degrade and demean end up unwanted and unloved by the end, served with cosmic justice of the authorial sort. If people are going to engage in "merely friendly exercise," as Heinlein put it, they should at least like each other and treat one another with the kind of respect that wishes they'd come back and do it again.
I don't like what I'm seeing in porn these days. I'm hoping I'm wrong about this. Are my perceptions off, or is the market, as it widens, as men become saturated with it, now appealing to more coarse, vicious, and base instincts?
Maybe this is why I read romance novels instead these days, and ask my women friends for their favorite one-handed girly reading.
Robert Jensen is considered one of those intellectual descendents. He has an observation in his book Getting Off that I've made on more than one occassion, and for a while I could point at the misogyny of Japanese porn. (I used to think it was patriarchial-- and perhaps it is. But what I've read of women Japanese writers in the original, I can only conclude that when the tables are turned and women have power, they would mistreat men just as readily. It's not about sex: it's about power, and having it, and showing it. It might just be revenge fantasy for them. I have no idea.) But I'm seeing more of it in the United States.
There are two primary strains of pornography: the traditional kind, in which there's a script, and an intent to follow some thin thread of a storyline from beginning to end. And then there's gonzo, in which two people are put in front of the camera and just told to have sex. There's no justification, no emotional connection. Here's your paycheck: now fuck for it.
Over the past three years, gonzo has gotten mean. I can no longer deny this. The epithets fly: 'tramp', 'bitch', 'whore', 'cunt,' 'slut.' Women are slapped, choked, gagged until they throw up. All kinds of nastiness is thrown at women: comments about the way they look, the way they smell, the sounds of their voice. Gonzo these days starts with the assumption that women are stupid and cheap and exist only to be used by cruel men, and often include the subtle message that you're not a real man unless you can use women and throw them away like that.
The alarming fact is that this cruelty-based gonzo outsells all other kinds of hardcore pornography right about now. Jensen's claim, and it's one I'm having a hard time arguing with, is this: We aren't as civilized as we claim to be. This industry thrives because the vast majority of American men who buy pornography, who sit in darkened rooms and masturbate to this stuff, like the cruelty. It's a passive cruelty: we can claim that it's vicarious, and it's on TV so it's "make believe," and the actresses all say they like it. (I know, I know, I'm supposed to believe what they say and accept their empowerment, but the one time I watched a Hillary Scott film I couldn't even watch to the end; she did not look like she was having fun, and she's Adult Video News's "hottest actress" two years in a row.)
Even if that's true, why do men buy it? Jensen believes it is because we do not, as a society, reject cruelty as much as we would wish. We reject the commission of cruelty, but we're perfectly happy to watch it. Degradation and deliberate cruelty are becoming more commonplace even as pornography becomes more commonplace.
This disturbs me on so many levels. If this is the audience, do I even want to write smut anymore? I've tried to make my characters human; the ones who degrade and demean end up unwanted and unloved by the end, served with cosmic justice of the authorial sort. If people are going to engage in "merely friendly exercise," as Heinlein put it, they should at least like each other and treat one another with the kind of respect that wishes they'd come back and do it again.
I don't like what I'm seeing in porn these days. I'm hoping I'm wrong about this. Are my perceptions off, or is the market, as it widens, as men become saturated with it, now appealing to more coarse, vicious, and base instincts?
Maybe this is why I read romance novels instead these days, and ask my women friends for their favorite one-handed girly reading.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 03:44 am (UTC)Porn gives us the opportunity to enjoy it - however that verb may be defined - without the necessity of taking any personal responsibility for it.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:04 am (UTC)While my employer was courting the adult industry (the on-again, off-again relationship is off-again) I went to a few Internext tradeshows and I still have subscriptions to adult trade-rags AVN Online and Klixxx at the office. A lot of what I saw from 'gonzo' turned my stomach. I knew there was a really hardcore niche with some intense stuff, but it seems to have spread over the past few years such that what used to be extreme five years ago is just 'edgy' now, and what is extreme today is just vile.
I Do Not Get It.
I mean, I feel fairly vanilla compared to a lot of people I know - present company included. I remember you once posting about a party you attended where you were whipped by two women until you bled, then doused in something flammable, set alight, and pushed into a swimming pool before you had an serious burns - and how *incredible* you thought that was. And I read that thinking "Well, OK, I'm a pyro and being set on fire and pushed into a pool sounds like a rush... but the whips and blood letting just don't do it for me." But I can understand it, comprehend the appeal.
Ramming my dick down a woman's throat until she vomits around it? No, I can't get my head around the appeal. Sex that is so abusive and violent it seems like rape on film - revolts me.
I've seen it in hentai anime too. I mean, there was always good old tentacle porn. And titles like Bible Black have some strong scenes (I recommend Bible Black for hentai), but I've seen more titles in the past few years featuring animated sexual torture. E.L. is one that comes to mind, where a woman is captured by the 'bad guys' and raped with a cattle prod, amongst other nasty events. I FF'd through the rest of the scene and gave it away since I never wanted to see it again.
Things like 'Bang Bus' in the porn industry seem to be getting out of hand.
I like porn, but I'd rather watch some older Asia Carrera or Nina Hartley movies than the 'gonzo' trash.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:25 am (UTC)Film has a hard time conveying that, but sometimes it succeeds. The whole point of gonzo, though, is to not convey it but, instead, to simply show women being used as disposable, interchangeable hunks of meat.
I don't get it either.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:29 am (UTC)"What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates."
- Marquis De Sade
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 09:03 pm (UTC)And yes, I know that the difference between writing about brutality and filming actual brutality is vast. But that's not the point. My point is that de Sade was a sick fucker who sold the hardest of hardcore porn, to a public that lapped it up. The sort of things that he wrote about (and, um, did) would make even Max Hardcore blanch.
The reason that people bought his books in the 18th century is the same reason that people consume mysogynistic porn today.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 08:15 pm (UTC)Witnessing cruelty
Date: 2007-09-25 04:48 am (UTC)I've watched some of these, and I always walk away feeling quite ... disgusting, vile. That initial period of morbid curiosity over, I can't bear to watch them anymore. But it does make me think about the people who enthusiastically consume these sorts of video clips on a regular basis. I wonder if their motivations are the same as the people who consume the cruel pornography you describe. They would quail at committing these acts of violence, but they will endlessly witness the same acts.
These people though? They're not your audience. Your audience takes the time to read, and they like what you're doing with these very human characters and the cosmic justice and everything else you've got going on.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:49 am (UTC)I don't think porn is the engine that drives American sexual culture. I think it is one of the gauges on the dashboard that tells us what's going on. There's something really nasty going on in the American collective psyche. It's showing up in our porn, and it's also showing up elsewhere. Abu Ghraib didn't happen in a vacuum.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 05:42 am (UTC)To a smaller - but not lesser - degree, the political cult of power and humiliation feeds upon whatever underlying factors are at work as well. And once you get into politics, you find actors who work actively to strengthen the trend, so it becomes self-reinforcing. It has generally taken the form of absolutism, as seems fairly inevitable (see above), in two major forms so far. The first form is militaristic absolutism occasionally bordering on fascism (c.f. multiple calls for Mr. Bush to arrest opposition figures and stage a coup d'etat); the second is religious absolutism in the form of fundamentalism, which thrives on a similar submission to an absolute authority. Giuliani seems to be running on non-religious authoritarianism platform on the right, with Romney as the wanna-be religious authoritarian. It has been argued that Clinton is running a nascent Democratic equivalent to Giuliani's platform on the (semi-)left. Regardless, they don't really oppose each other - check out the utterly unimportant differences between the Clinton and Giuliani health plans, for example. Or more importantly, examine their support for open-ended war. Their real opposition comes from their in-party antagonists, Paul and Obama, who represent the counter-trends.
I hope it says something about at least the Seattle area that the only yard signs - the only yard signs - I see so far for presidential candidates are for Ron Paul and Barak Obama.
Regardless, this urge doesn't thrive on being correct, on having the right idea; that's utterly irrelevant. It doesn't even matter what the positions are, just as long as they are absolute and unquestioned. The movement derives its joy from not just the defeat but the humiliation of its enemies, not from reality. So the fact that this same desire shows up in the porn doesn't surprise me at all. And I don't think it's the porn causing it either.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 07:10 am (UTC)I hope I'm making a little sense - Im recovering from a cracked skull ...but this post is really singing to the choir down here. As for your writing, I think the pervasiveness of this trend makes it all the more important that people have the opportunity to access different sexual material than what we are discussing.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 09:43 am (UTC)It seems to be a lot more class-based than anything else. On one hand you have the porn actors who are probably of a low social class simply because the higher social classes plan out their education and future better, and on the other you have that same low social class seeing people acting the way that they want to. It all feeds into itself.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the porn studios have been avoiding this type of thing for a long time because they didn't think that there was any money in it.
Porn caused Abu Ghraib?
Date: 2007-10-13 02:07 am (UTC)Haven't you ever heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)? The Abu Ghraib events were pretty much a real-life replay of that event, and the Stanford experiment took place in 1971 – a year or two before Deep Throat. Guess what – put people in situations where they have absolute power over another group, especially one that's seen as "the enemy", don't have any checks and balances against abuse, and something like this will inevitably happen. In fact, has happened for centuries, long before there was gonzo porn.
Robert Jensen's idea that contemporary America is somehow uniquely cruel or misogynistic and that this has something to do with widespread availability of porn is one of the more staggeringly ahistoric views I've seen from a so-called scholar.
Try Reading for Content (was Re: Porn caused Abu Ghraib?)
Date: 2007-10-13 07:37 pm (UTC)On the contrary, to rephrase what I wrote, I see both Abu Ghraib and the growth of violence and degradation in porn are symptoms of some other, deeper cause.
Re: Try Reading for Content (was Re: Porn caused Abu Ghraib?)
Date: 2007-10-13 09:22 pm (UTC)You never saw gonzo porn arising in Nazi Germany, for example. So what's the connection between "cruel" porn and war atrocities, either as cause or effect? I just don't see it.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 05:02 am (UTC)Cheers,
- Eddie
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 06:26 am (UTC)I don't want to know what you do. I very likely wouldn't want to do it. And I can, alas, imagine some vile possibilities in a continuing relationship. People might even descriobe what you do as un-sane. But using people and throwing them away--treating people as fungible things--looks to me to be at the core of what is wrong with the USA.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 02:13 pm (UTC)There is a place for the expression of base impulses. The problem is with the appalling lack of discernment as to where doing so is appropriate.
Cheers,
- Eddie
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 05:47 pm (UTC)I don't think I'm explaining myself very well. Maybe I should resort to Marlon Brando impressions about respect.
But I've often been told that the fantasy of rape is about sex, while the reality is about power.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 02:11 pm (UTC)"But I've often been told that the fantasy of rape is about sex, while the reality is about power."
This is a significant improvement on the usual formulation, i.e., "Rape is about power, not about sex." I think it was initially posited in part polemically, to rebut those who would excuse rape on the basis of "boys will be boys" or similar. However, I still consider it a false dichotomy, one intended to demonize the element of power that is often intertwined with sex.
- Eddie, lacking time to develop this response further
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 03:55 pm (UTC)"X is primarily about Y" is certainly the sort of qualification that often gets dropped. In a large population, whether a city or the internet, you can find exceptions.
Sometimes I wonder if I assume that fuzziness more than I should.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 06:16 am (UTC)Except that the photographs don't have to be obviously misogynistic. Take a picture of a naked woman. no sign of a man in the picture, and somebody just uses the vile language of social dominance and humiliation for the captioning. A couple of sample pages from a porn site, and you've just about seen all the current sland for "whore".
Some of what I call my "semi-fantasies"--things I could imagine myself doing for real--are a bit unconventional. But I want there to be an afterwards. I want to be able to day, "I think once was enough for me," without wrecking a relationship.
What this gonzo meme also seems to be saying is that the only way to be sexually unconventional is to pay a whore. Nice girls womn't do that.
That stuff sells. A lot of people must be buyiong it, accepting the message, and continuing to buy it. It doesn't matter how hot they look: they're not coming into my bedroom.
(And if I had daughters I'd be worried about what it meant for them: it's not just that it's OK to be nasty, the photo-captions I see often present flimsy plots where it's OK for the man to lie to get sex with a naive woman. I envy you your kids, but not the world you're going to have to teach them to live in.)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 10:19 am (UTC)A quote that says it all
Date: 2007-10-13 02:12 am (UTC)Re: A quote that says it all
Date: 2007-10-13 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 11:03 am (UTC)My own pet hypothesis is that it has to do with Americans turning away from the future, and sinking into a sort of mass insanity as a result, but as I can't think of any way to prove that I won't go into detail. I do think that Bob Altemeyer is onto something with The Authoritarians (http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/).
(I've posted an entry linking to this in my own LJ, btw; hope you don't mind.)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 12:24 pm (UTC)And I'm also with several of the other commenters, that this is something deeper and the porn is the indicator.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 03:10 pm (UTC)I think you and the other commenter's are onto something here, only you're still not seeing the whole picture. Porn is indeed a peek into the collective unconscious... but not just of America. This seems to be a phenomena that can be found throughout most of what we call Western civilisation, to a greater or lesser extent.
I'm not sure what it signifies, but I get the definite feeling that it's nothing good. Rome went this way, towards the end, with the Circus Maximus and various other 'shows'. And we all know how that turned out.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 03:38 pm (UTC)That's not what we're seeing here. There is no survival-oriented lesson being learned here; quite the opposite. We say we're a compassionate culture, but we also seem to have a contingent that enjoys watching "a bit of the ultraviolence" and is powering a disturbing market for this stuff. The rise in this kind of extreme pornography reflects a worldview far uglier than the underlying message of the Circus Maximus. This stuff implies a hateful attitude toward women that I cannot stomach.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 08:08 pm (UTC)Although I take your point about it not being a direct parallel, I think the circus had a negative effect on society, insofar as it produced a callousness towards cruelty in people that undermined the foundations of society.
But yes, I see the hateful attitude towards women, and the sick and, well, virtually anyone that's minority, in society..not just in this gonzo porn, but in mainstream as well... think of some of the "healthcare reforms", think of the attitudes of many of the right-wing religious lot.
This, is just a symptom of a much greater sickness of society's soul.
One I think that isn't even recognised, much less being treated, and one that may prove fatal.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:05 pm (UTC)Hey, I'm part of your audience and that gonzo shit disturbs the hell out of me. I like your stuff, been reading it for 15 years. I deplore most of the pornography out there. I stopped watching mainstream porn years ago because "the money shot" was always in the girls face. I hate that, its just disrespectful and degrading. (Not that disrespectful and degrading are bad things, but they just have to be in the right scene. If it happened in an S&M video, it wouldn't bother me so much. But just two "normal" people having sex? Bleh!)
I'm constantly disturbed at just the generally acceptable level of violence that our society allows. Heaven Forbid that a naked breast should appear on national TV, but you want to shoot someone in the face and have his brains splatter all over? Well, that's okay. I don't get it. And its getting really hard to shield my kids from it.
One-handed girly reading-I assume you've found the Skye O'Malley series by Bertrice Small yes? Her older books are better, but her more recent novels and short stories have gotten really interesting. Although recently I've been reading Carol Queen and Bill Brents Bi-sexual Erotica compilations. Good Stuff!
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:06 pm (UTC)You know far more about the ideas behind BDSM and their power relationships than I. More than 90% of the planet, I'd say. When I hear you state that such things are beyond your comprehension, I get very, very worried.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 04:23 pm (UTC)Even your description where the actress gets to talk about herself beforehand doesn't quite ring true most of the time. I don't watch nearly as much porn as I used to; I'm reading a lot more. But what I have seen recently I don't like. "Fat girl" porn used to be intentionally degrading; it would almost always involve smearing the girl with food or humilating her because she was fat. I watched one a few months ago when Omaha was out of town that didn't imply "feedie" on the box art. And up to a point, it was just intro, chit-chat, and wall-to-wall for a while. And then, for no reason whatsoever, it got cruel: he started slapping her, gagging her, and then he left her after tossing a wad of money at her. It went from "We're here to have fun" to "You're a whore to be bought and sold" with no warning.
Hell, even humiliation porn has lost trying to be clever.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 02:18 am (UTC)Much has been made about people acting out online because they don't have to own up to their actions, but there is also the fact that everyone has some degree of solipsism and can sometimes have a hard time believing that the person on side of the screen is real. As one of the other posters mentioned, most likely the majority of consumers for gonzo porn wouldn't consider actually doing anything like that, but watching the video is okay because it's no-one they know, it's no-one they might meet, and there's no consequences to not considering them real people.
Wow, sorry, that was kind of long-winded for a summery. Here's an actual summery: Remember what Heinlein called this time period in his future history timeline. For that matter, I Will Fear No Evil, which is set during the Crazy Years, only seems a little bit exaggerated compared to reality, not really wrong in any particular way.
P.S. It does seem to be a mostly American phenomenon. Abbywinters over in Australia seems to be getting good results with the "just film people having sex" idea, but without the degradation. Actually, now that I think about it, there's a major difference right there. In even the most humiliating acts of a d/s relationship there is no loss of self worth because even a slave is valued by their master. Whereas a number of those participating in the videos you're talking about seem to feel that they are worth less than they would be if they were somewhere, anywhere, else.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 02:24 am (UTC)We reject improperly directed cruelty. Cruelty directed "properly," i.e. to people who deserve it, is often welcomed and celebrated. The comeuppance of the villain in any given shoot-em-up action movie is virtually a staple of the cultural narrative. Likewise, the abolition of Capital Punishment in this country has been a hard sell. Professional "wrestling" taps in to this vein by creating a theater of heroes and villains and having them go at each other.
The problem, of course, is that the criteria of who "deserves it" varies widely, with the result that everyone taps in to the visceral surge of energy, but doesn't know where to direct it.
Occam's Razor sez...
Date: 2007-09-26 08:30 pm (UTC)Then there's cost. There's a lot of cool stuff you oculd do with "gonzo" porn... IF you were willing to pay for it. People WOULD buy footage of people having sex in free fall, or on an elephant, or... But this is the sort of film where they don't even pay for a second cameraman. Calling the woman six kinds of ho is free, but not much else is.
None of this prevents watching this stuff from being morally corrosive. I think it is. It's just not made for the PURPOSE of doing that, and people don't really buy it because of that. Also, I just called porn "morally corrosive"... go me!
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 11:53 pm (UTC)Real men get laid. They get laid because they appreciate their partners, take the time to learn how, and make the experience worth their partners time and energy. Shape, size, age, plumbing, orientation and kink are side considerations. If gonzo porn and porn in general reflect average american male values about sexual behavior and attitudes then I'm not too surprised that average american women are deciding against them in the dating dance.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 12:33 am (UTC)The Rot has been creeping since my childhood. (I'm only a few years younger than you.) I grew up experiencing, firsthand, just how cruel other human beings can be. This country has let children torture other children for decades now, and written it off as, "harmless teasing." So they grow up inured to it, and let the next generation do a little bit worse.
So, it's no surprise to me that now American adults see nothing wrong with torturing other human beings, and even get off from seeing others tortured. Not shocking, at all.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 06:19 pm (UTC)American schools and the social system itself teach kids from a very young age to hate the different and torment them until they go away. Too many kids are getting bullied to the point of snapping, and people are dying from it. It's horrendous, but I think it's an even more telling indicator than porn that something is very, very wrong here. To our country's shame, this issue isn't something that folks are very keen to do anything useful about, and I suspect that violent porn is on the same shelf: both trends individually and taken together mean something, but it's too embarassing and painful to admit just what that something is.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 02:55 am (UTC)Frankly, I'm coming to the sad conclusion that most Amerikans are cruel, and that it's getting worse each generation.
It gets even worse
Date: 2007-09-28 04:03 pm (UTC)http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_7020027
I'm so upset by this that I'm having a hard time coming up with adequate words. Can this guy (and whomever is supporting this type of material) just be taken out of the genetic pool, please? Preferably publicly and loudly?