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Title: Objectification & Pornography
Author: William Gillis
Date: 26th January 2012
Language: en
Topics: pornography, sexuality
Source: http://humaniterations.net/2012/01/26/objectification-pornography/

William Gillis

Objectification & Pornography

Obvious trigger warnings. Further this is gonna be an abstract

conversation on concepts. If you’re one of those rare folks who feels

the war against patriarchy can’t ever afford side conversations for the

sake of curiosity/clarity that aren’t rhetorically perfected weapons

pointed towards teh enemy or if you figure there’s nothing new under the

sun to be heard from cis-ish male-bodied people I totes understand and

sympathize and I hope you will take my disagreement for what it is. I

abhor speaking to a choir and try not to write until I’m assured I can

at least contribute something at least moderately original and

challenging, but c’est la vie.

No one would disagree that porn is a major site of importance in modern

patriarchy. And there are usually three broad categories of critique

leveled against it: 1) That the means of its production are

exploitative. 2) That it pushes narratives and perspectives reinforcing

of patriarchy. 3) That the very act of getting off to or sexualizing

visual stimuli mentally reduces other people to objects.

It’s this last critique, rarely addressed head-on or in good faith,

that’s the most fundamental. The first two, while undoubtedly

significant, are ultimately just matters of detail. There are folks who

produce porn through egalitarian collectives just as there are now

literally millions of exhibitionists who freely share images/video of

themselves in open forums, repositories and networking sites. So too is

there queer porn. Indeed even the most cursory overviews would reveal

the last decade has seen the exponential spread into the mainstream of

increasingly complicated and diffuse presentations of gender and desire.

At this point the conventional for-profit “Porn Industry” is basically a

tiny antiquated sideshow dwarfed by a hundred million digital cameras

and sketchpads. (In this piece I’ll stick with a more Dworkin-esque

definition of porn as inclusive of things termed ‘erotica’ because any

distinction between the two either begs the question or is wildly

arbitrary not to mention usually classist. Plus it would be more than a

little haughty to completely ignore how the term is actually used.)

To be clear however just because porn is a wide category growing more

diverse daily doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of freaking evil shit out

there. Recognizing complexity shouldn’t mean throwing up our hands and

failing to critically engage, nor should it temper the intensity of our

rage. Rapists are being made. And porn is a medium used to champion this

in a variety of ways. Sometimes deliberately and explicitly, but at the

very least huge swathes of what’s produced today still effectively

contributes to, buffers, and insulates rape culture. This is no small

issue and pretty much every other conversation on porn pales before it.

Yet having our priorities in line shouldn’t equate disregarding those

complexities. True ‘radicalism’ means exploring concepts down to the

roots rather than settling for totalizing banners, no matter how

generally adequate they seem. Individuals engage with things in a

variety of ways with a variety of effects; done right analytical nuance

and strategic dexterity doesn’t have to lead to equivocation or lost

momentum. In fact, for those of us outside institutional power such

precision and nimbleness is arguably our greatest natural asset.

What I find attractive about the notion that pornography is innately

objectifying is not its obvious intuitive resonance but the promise of

an inarguable underlying reality leading to clear-cut prescriptions. Yet

there are actually quite a variety of arguments leveled in practice,

working from significantly differing fundamentals. One can argue, for

example, that sexual objectification derives from any divorce between

desire regarding another’s physical body and desire regarding their

mental existence, while alternatively one can argue that objectification

stems from any desire regarding another’s physical body fullstop. Those

are obviously very different approaches and frankly I find the latter

far more secure. Most of us would surely find the former more pleasant

or at least lenient in prescription but it reeks of unjustifiable

arbitrariness. It’s not at all clear what would constitute such a

divorce, nor what degree we should recoil from.

The fact is our minds change focus all the time. Does spending a minute

or two reveling in some aspect of physical sensuality or desire mean

hardening our neural pathways to perceive the existence of a partner

more exclusively those material terms? Obviously there is a risk

present, but how innately or concretely can we speak of it? If we spend

a masturbation session primarily remembering a partner’s body/touch

rather than anything specifically related to their character will that

necessarily have any lasting effect upon us? What if it’s a child trying

to imagine what sex would be like? Or a sickly person? Or a deformed

person? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the danger in focusing on

the physical nature of sexual pleasure and desire is entirely dependent

on things like the awareness, vigilance, and plasticity of a given mind

— a conclusion that would lead to wildly variant prescriptions and

significantly problematize any uniform social policy or campaign. If we

can ever temporarily shift the focus of our desires/pleasure towards

physical attributes/actions of a person and avoid generating any

tendency to think of them as objects then the same would be true when it

comes to pornography of one another.

One response is to turn the focus explicitly on whether a physical

desire initially arises in response to personal associations or

narratives predicated on the other’s existence as an agent. (eg ‘I only

became in any way physically attracted to them after I got to know

them.’) This might still allow forms of pornography to slip by when tied

to a substantive narrative (the already large field of romance novels /

pornographic comics offering many noteworthy candidates) yet at least

allows us to critique the characterizations, etc presented.

Unfortunately at the end of the day it’s not clear what could justify

holding the original prompts of a given physical desire in such

significance. The argument seems to be saying implicitly that what

matters is what perspective or desire is ultimately prior or more

fundamental in someone’s head than a momentary perspective/desire. And

surely this is a matter of choice for anyone with even the most basic

vigilance or agency in the construction of their own thoughts. We

frequently choose to dabble in limited perspectives and focuses in ways

that avoid overwriting our more core and motivating perspectives.

Certainly corruption is a danger, and the social context of patriarchy

can contribute significantly, but that’s no more innate a threat with

one versus the other. Momentary desire for physical aspects of a partner

can lead to ingraining objectifying patterns of thought just as easily

as focus on those feelings more abstractly. There’s no straightforward

reason to disallow taking such a risk in the one set of cases but not

the other.

So what are we left with? Well, as previously mentioned, the other major

approach is to reject sexual desire of physical things (at least in any

way relating to people) wholesale.

I should note that at its greatest extreme this can even mean rejecting

all sexual desire (arguing that surrendering one’s mind to desires

arising from one’s own body counts in some sense as objectification of

oneself). Frankly, I’ve always found anti-sexual positions kinda cool. I

have a lot of admiration for people who bite bullets and in my mind the

audacity of the proposition speaks positively of it. Plus I spent my

teenage and young adult years seriously debating whether to go on

chemical libido suppressants just to get by, so suffice to say I have an

appreciation of how sexual desire can subjugate and reduce one’s own

mind. But the same holds true of practically anything. The fact that one

can get lost compulsively surfing Wikipedia for the dopamine fix of new

information, while worth consideration, obviously shouldn’t speak to its

proper utility. Sexual desire and sensuality interface socially,

pharmaceutically, and psychologically in a host of ways, providing a

vast array of tools that can be extraordinarily useful. Chucking it out

would be akin to chucking any other field of technology. Sadly, to get

started on anything even approximating an appropriate overview would

require its own blog post so let’s skip that for now and just press on

under the working assumption that sex is acceptable in certain forms.

What we can still at least conclude is that sexual titillation by

compassion, mathematical aptitude, or say pine trees clearly wouldn’t

involve preferences directed at anyone else’s body. There are still

valid concerns to be had about the preformative aspect of mental actions

(‘dance monkey dance‘ is obviously objectifying in any form), but I

think we’ve clearly achieved enough distance from concerns about

objectification to stop and take a look back. Does this resemble what

hardline opponents of pornography within feminism are actually saying?

In almost every case, no. (The exceptions, insofar as they’re honest

about it, are really cool. But again as above I will avoid exploring

that direction in depth here for space.) Instead it’s almost universally

conceded that the biological prompts of sexual desire are just too

strong overall. We get turned on by certain forms of touch and smell for

example without conscious choice. There are a wealth of hardwired

physiological circuits capable of triggering chemical responses. Some,

possibly even all, can be fiddled with or cut but the effort required

can be functionally unfeasible and there are a multitude of them. That’s

not, obviously, to throw up our hands in surrender (some of us are

transhumanists after all). But it does generally seem to prescribe a

certain pragmatism towards sexual desire that allows us to embrace the

positives while staying alert to the negatives. It’s okay, in short, to

do things like turn one’s focus to a lover’s body or fantasize about a

fictional character or imagine what a certain experience would be like.

So what then is such a fundamental problem with pornography?

In practice it seems to be centered around an objection to the visual

(as opposed to tactile or aromatic) component of the sensation. While

most feminists left the Porn Wars with a nuanced perspective on porn as

a medium capable of conducting good as well as bad (with effects

dependent on a vast array of context both social and individual), the

horrified lot that wrote us off as heinous apostates didn’t seem to do

so just because they were wedded to rhetorical trenches or sumsuch;

there was a notable tone of alienation and disgust at the very notion of

visual desire. It was declared obviously suspicious because it was

‘unnatural.’ Anecdotal evidence can only go so far but time and again

I’ve found an exceptionally strong correlation between my stridently

anti-porn friends (of different genders) and ‘just not really getting

the whole visual attraction thing‘.

Which makes a lot of sense. A straightforward experience-gap would

explain in a sympathetic light why so many discussions on pornography

within feminism, even when approached in good faith by both sides, so

often grind up against a wall of mutual incomprehension. Well no

freaking duh. If there was an entire avenue of physiological desire

other people experienced that you didn’t (or didn’t experience with

anything approaching the same intensity) and intersected with patriarchy

the way porn does you’d be overwhelmingly inclined to write it off as a

construct of patriarchy too. I mean good god! It’s a neat hypothesis at

least in regard to some anti-porn feminists because experience-gaps

don’t speak to intelligence, and over the decades I’ve encountered more

than a few brilliant people with incomprehensibly absolutist stances on

pornography. Sending pictures to your partner? Objectification. A

pubescent kid drawing boobs? Objectification. An incredibly popular porn

site consisting of user-submitted videos of the faces they make during

masturbation and orgasm? Objectification. (Because getting off solely to

indications of someone else’s pleasure is clearly… wait, what?) The line

drawn is always between visual and tactile sensation. Dildos and even

fleshlights no matter how evocative are almost always given a pass by

the same people who assume any reasonable person would be grossed by the

notion of getting off to imagery.

There may not be hope of persuading everyone stuck in such a trap. At

this point the paranoia and war-effort frame of mind probably runs too

deep for some and that’s perfectly understandable. But it’s at least

another opportunity to drive home the so easily forgotten reality that

people’s physical and neurological experiences can be quite different;

our own are not necessarily a good baseline by which to judge others. Is

it really so weird to consider that just as most brains are built with

certain circuits tailored to recognizing and responding to faces there

might also be circuits that automatically recognize and respond to other

bodily details? Are we really so scared of the “but that’s just the way

biology is babe” bros that we can’t allow ourselves any explorations in

empathy?

At the end of the day the only question that matters is What Is The

Mechanism? Because statistical correlation isn’t enough. There’s

unbelievable diversity to how people think, what frames of mind they

inherit or choose in approaching a given thing in a given context, and

we’re not going to win by going around voting up or down on aggregates.

I’m not saying, for example, that the societal and cultural effects of

pornographic saturation aren’t significant or something that we should

in any way shirk from attacking. But things are rarely cut and dry. Nor

would it necessarily be better if they were. Complexity allows us a lot

of directions from which to attack things, just as, in conjunction with

our agency and proper vigilance, it allows us room to maneuver. Porn is

just a medium and even Mein Kampf can be read for diverse reasons

without corruption. Over the last decade various mainstream cultural

ecosystems of porn (from imagefap to deviantart) have acted as virulent

contagion vectors for a number of incredibly positive perspectives on

consent and queered notions of gender/sexuality as well as broadly

countering patriarchal narratives through direct interaction and

omnipresent diversity. They’ve also served as vectors for the standard

horribly fucked up shit, but in many cases the payloads have been

subverted or partially neutralized as play made less potent by the

surrounding free-wheeling context. Folks can no longer avoid recognizing

the complexity of desire and identity in society and with less and less

uniform social pressure a particular fetishization coming from a fucked

up place no longer feels the obligation to form a totalizing

counter-narrative and push it fascisticly. Porn as a whole has taken the

form of a conversation.

That doesn’t make it anything close to a utopia yet. We still live under

patriarchy and a diffuse post-modern fascism is still fascism. But it

does make pornography a hugely dynamic and vital theater of conflict.

And it does mean that the agency of the various speakers is creeping to

the fore in undeniable ways among even those realms of kink that its

hard at the outset to see any excusable mindset for. We can exploit

this. And indeed a good many folks have rolled up their sleeves to get

their hands dirty. So it’s sad to see a tiny remainder of otherwise

brilliant feminists filled with right and glorious rage still bashing

their heads together with sweeping practically deontological 70s-era

frameworks. (Incidentally calling ourselves “sex-positive” is in most

cases just incredibly underhanded and douchey and not making things any

better.) This isn’t about some whiney liberal appeal to ‘free speech’ or

chucking core principles out to win over bros. As I’ve picked apart

there simply isn’t any root principle that pornography falls afoul of

inherently; getting off to imagery relating to other people isn’t

magically objectifying because people both differ and have agency in

their self-construction. Socialization is anything but uniform and it

certainly doesn’t create mechanistic people with mechanistic

perspectives. Treating people like it does is itself objectifying.