Pornography

Mens sana in corpore sano:  Satine caloris tibi est?

ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη.

And though she made use of three openings, she used to take Nature to task, complaining that it had not pierced her breasts with larger holes so that it might be possible for her to contrive another method of copulation there.

Procopius, Procopius VI, The Anecdota or Secret History, translated by H.B. Dewing [Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1935, pp.108-109], speaking of the Empress Theodora in her days as a courtesan (ἑταῖρα).

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8th February 1668. Away to the Strand to my bookseller's and there staid an hour, and bought the idle, rougueish book, "L'escholle des filles;" which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolved, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.

9th (LORD'S DAY). Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office doing business, and also reading a little of "L'escholle des filles;" which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not asmiss for a sober man to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys [edited and with a preface by Richard Le Gallienne, Modern Library, New York, 2001, p.253].

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This day closed with an odd Scene at the Gate of the Fort where a young fellow above 6 feet high lay with a little Girl about 10 or 12 years of age publickly before several of our people and a number of the Natives. What makes me mention this, is because, it appear'd to be done more from Custom than Lewdness, for there were several women present particularly Obarea and several others of the better sort and these were so far from shewing the least disaprobation that they instructed the girl how she should act her part, who young as she was, did not seem to want it.

Captain James Cook, in Tahiti, 14 May 1769, The Explorations of Captain James Cook in the Pacific as Told by Selections of His Own Journals, 1768-1779 [edited by A. Grenfell Price, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1971], p.31

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Two-plus decades of making men's magazines has convinced me men are basically thrilled to give women orgasms. Not only does it plump the ego, guys view orgasms as tokens of affection, kind of the way women feel about snuggling. Reading male fantasies, confessions and longings five days a week for 23 years has also taught me men yearn to be objects of female lust. Everything women detest in male lust, men crave from women. Catcalls on the street? Harassment on the job? To be used callously for personal gratification with no concern for his needs or desires? Men masturbate to these scenarios, simply because they bespeak female lust.

Dian Hanson, Leg Show, November 1999, p.5

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Pornography's critics take porn very literally, as if it purports to be social realism, but a better comparison would be sci-fi, another genre that takes the "what if things were different?" approach to bodies and societies. Besides, what's so great about reality anyway, and if realism can't compare with pornography, why is it porn that's supposed to do the apologizing?

Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing, Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, Pantheon, 2006, p.66

Anne Rice, the author of a well known series of vampire novels, starting with Interview with the Vampire (a 1994 movie), also has written classic pornographic novels, originally under the pseudonym "A.N. Roquelaure":  The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty [1983], Beauty's Punishment [1984], and Beauty's Release [1985, all now by Plume, Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1990, 1999].

Rice's take on the Sleeping Beauty story has the young Princess, simply named "Beauty," all of 15 years old, awakened, not just with a kiss, but with a rape, by the handsome Prince. He introduces her, not to the equal queenly rule of his kingdom, but to the status of a completely nude and submissive (under age) sex slave. In three novels, she passes through various owners, kept naked, largely silent, often bound and gagged, and enduring countless humiliations, punishments (mainly spanking), and rapes. The sado-masochistic element is relatively mild, but it is definitely there, with many spankings, paddlings, whippings, and humiliating penetrations and bondage.

This is all not, to say the least, politically correct. The idea that rape fantasies might be innocently enjoyed by men or women, although casually invoked, for instance, in Woody Allen's 1972 movie Play It Again, Sam, has been driven so far out of polite consideration that Alex Comfort deleted references to them from his popular The Joy of Sex [Pocket Books, 1974, 1986, 1987, "Bondage" section, pp. 153-160].

An interesting comparison of Rice is with some science fiction books by John Norman, whose "Counter-Earth Saga" became increasingly absorded with bondage and sado-masochism. In Norman's "John Marshall" triology, Fighting Slave of Gor [Daw Books, 1980, 14th Gor book], Rogue of Gor [Daw Books, 1981, 15th], and Guardsman of Gor [Daw Books, 1981, 16th], Marshall goes from a slave kidnapped from Earth, and a sex toy to some female owners, to the free owner of another kidnap victim, the girl who wouldn't give him the time of day back on Earth, whom he then gets to whip, humiliate, and rape until she is properly submissive.

Norman's books are not of much literary value compared to Rice, have rather boring political passages complaining about feminism, and, although sporting sections of male bondage and sexual slavery, explicity endorse the idea that women are "natural slaves" and require bondage and domination to be personally and sexually fulfilled. Rice's novels, by contrast, are pretty much "equal opportunity" bondage, humiliation, and domination, with loving detail devoted to rape and subjugation of men, especially in the second and third books. In the third book, there is a veritable gay paradise among the all male "ponies," who are kept in stables, rented out to draw carts, wagons, and carriages, and who copulate freely, on all fours, among each other during recreation periods. A very thorough treatment of the real world "pony" scene, which is largely heterosexual, can be found in the recent Deviant Desires, Incredibly Strange Sex, by Katharine Gates (Juno Books, New York, 2000) -- we see a fantasy bridle at right from the straight bondage S&M side. Further down the page is a full pony outfit from Tranceptor, a comic book by Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning (Amerotica, New York, 1998). These are more like what we would have found if Beauty herself had been in the pony business.

On the other hand, Rice, overall, would appear to be more of a feminist sinner than a saint. Her books are not what hairsplitting feminists would called "erotica" -- politically acceptable androgynous sexuality -- but real "pornography" -- i.e. the politically offensive sort of thing that men like, with the "sexually explicit subordination of women," penetration, etc. Much of the male slavery and homosexual material is narrated by male characters, Beauty's lovers Tristan and Laurent; and the chapters about Beauty are always in the third person. This is a grave political infraction, for Beauty is denied her own "voice." The woman is "silenced" more than the men. Indeed, the very last chapter, narrated by Laurent, details his rather abrupt courtship of Beauty -- "You will marry me, Princess." Not quite as abrupt and invasive as the original rape that awakened her, but little less dominant. "You will be my Queen and my slave." Laurent and Beauty are no longer slaves, but Laurent immediately applies bondage devices to Beauty, including nipple clips and a butt-plug. Beauty had been yearing for her lost slavery, and Laurent begins to supply it. Laurent himelf had been a paradoxical slave who liked to enslave and whip others. He takes naturally to domination, as Beauty takes naturally to submission. So Rice does not end up so far apart from Norman, with husband as dominant master and wife as submissive slave.

In his examination of romance novels Nicholas Davidson (The Failure of Feminism, Prometheus Books, 1988) actually found something very similiar, though not so sexually explicit. Romance novels are largely written and published, and almost entirely read, by women; and although by no means pornographic, the drift is often similar to what we see in Rice's Beauty triology. Romance novels are popularly known as "bodice-rippers," with the heroines in the cover art often in déshabillée, which implies the rather forceful initiation of sexual relations, as we see in the following example, of the Raven, a pirate, raping his victim Season, with Davidson's setup.

To feminism, "pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"; and the idea of a fantasy causally unconnected to reality is a dangerous political confusion. The exceptional case in real life, where the true rapist confuses reality with fantasy and cannot detect, or doesn't care, about whether a woman is truely attracted to him or not, is taken as the rule by feminists, whose classic theory (cf. Susan Brownmiller) is that all men are essentially rapists. Unfortunately, this blanket condemnation can have the desensitizing effect of any kind of emotional overkill. When impoverished women from places like the Ukraine are tricked into real sex slavery in, say, the Czech Republic, with corrupt officials and the Russian mafia standing behind the trade, it would seem rather important for activists themselves to maintain the distinction between reality and fantasy. Anne Rice and her readers do not need to be rescued. Ukrainian (or Thai, Mexican, Filipino, etc.) women beaten, starved, and raped in criminal brothels do need to be rescued (see the recent movie Taken). Such a trade in women, indeed, can hardly be blamed on the modern existence of pornography, when nothing is more familiar from much of history, as in traditional China, as girls being sold into prostitution by their parents. The Hebrew Bible goes out of its way to prohibit this [Leviticus 19:29]. It is poverty and lawlessness that now makes this possible, the desperation of women in economies ruined by socialism and the lawlessness of those who have merely changed hats, communism for gangsterism.

The idea that women can achieve sexual fulfillment or conquest by passion or suffering is particularly repugnant to feminists, since it is simply seen as political propaganda for male dominance and patriarchy -- and for rape itself. Women who enjoy the fantasy of romance novels like this, or even someone like Rice who creates a whole world of sexual slavery, suffer from what Marx called "false consciousness," and cannot know their true situations, minds, or wills.

Politically correct sex would be completely mutual, equitable, and reciprocally androgynous, without "gender" distinctions. Ironically, the idea that women want, or should want, sex just in the same way that men do may have spawned the (reported) epidemic of "date rape" cases, since young men had been indoctrinated, by feministic rhetoric itself, to expect that their dates would have the same desires that they did -- that's how it worked in a gay bathhouse, didn't it? One especially comical response to that was the Antioch College rule that men had to ask explicitly for permission to proceed to each new act of sexual intimacy. There had been few male complaints that women had been proceeding without permission. A similar asymmetry can be seen in the feminist principle that when a drunk woman has sex, she was raped, while when a drunk man has sex, he, if the woman was drunk too, is a rapist. This is all theorized in terms of the oppression and powerlessness of women, but it clearly is simply a roundabout way of reintroducing forms of Victorian sexual propriety, previously stripped away, to protect the vulnerable and diffident nature of women -- who evidently are so childlike and inarticulate (or so beaten down and mortally fearful of expressing themselves, as the feminists would say) that, unlike men, their wishes have to be drawn out, not just with explicit questions, but with heavy indoctrination and "re-education" also (to tell them what their "self-expression" should be). The alternative, that women in general cannot tolerate casual or anonymous sex the way many men can, has to be ruled out a priori as requiring different natures, different psychological characteristics, for men and women -- a thesis upon whose denial all of feminism is founded.

The disturbing Marxist principles of establishment feminism are addressed elsewhere, as is the question of the naturalness of gender stereotypes. Here the question is sex, and that is no more forcefully treated by anyone than by Camille Paglia. Her classic essay, "The Joy of Presbyterian Sex" [Sex, Art, and American Cutlure, Essays, Vintage Books, 1992, pp.26-37, reprinted from The New Republic, December 2, 1991], attacks the insipid and politically correct report on sexuality (Keeping Body and Soul Together) issued by the (tragicomically) liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) early in 1991.

Keeping Body and Soul Together dramatically demonstrates the chaos and intellectual ineptitude in the fashionable liberal discourse on sex that now fills the media and the academic and political worlds. All human problems are blamed on an unjust social system, a "patriarchy" of gigantic and demonized dimensions, blanketing history like a river of molasses... Humor, irony, satire, and bawdiness are evidently politically incorrect in the eyes of the new sexual commissars. [p.27]

Political moralism will predictably achieve its characteristic anhedonia and anaesthesia when applied to sexuality. "Life without guilt or shame would be found only in sociopaths and the lobotomized," says Paglia [p.32], and it is not hard to perceive the pathology in an obviously disburbed person like Catharine MacKinnon, or the moral equivalent of a lobotomy in the ideologues who have to worry about whether they are having sex in the politically correct way, or even whether they should have sex at all, which might endanger their political purity. The most characteristic things about sex are its uncontrollable naturalness, its exhuberance, and the power with which it threatens all the other structures of the self, whether personal or social. People almost always find it unpredictable who they will find sexually attractive, and are often disturbed to find sexual attraction where their judgment would disapprove of it. On the other hand, when people are led into relationships with someone they think they "should" like, attaction may never develop. This unpredictability and uncontrollableness is the root of the appeal of the rape fantasies. The curious history of the word "rape" itself is suggestive of this, since in Latin rapio does not mean "involuntary sexual intercourse" but just "to seize, snatch, tear away" [Cassell's New Latin Dictionary, Funk & Wangalls, 1960, p.500]. "Rapture," from the same root, still means "carried away." Sexuality is the kind of thing that "seizes" people and "carries them away," often, for those who like to always feel in control, to their own distress (like General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove).

Paglia's sensible view is that neither life nor the mind and body are simple. The complexity of what we want and don't want, or don't know that we want or don't want, sets up tensions that are not easily resolved or navigated.

While I was reading the Presbyterian report, the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" came on the radio. As I listened to its jaunty epic saga of a force of evil spiraling through history, inciting riots, wars, and assassinations, I was struck by how much more truthful the song seemed than the document before me, with its optimistic patter about "empowerment" and "mutuality" and its blissful obliviousness to human perversity. The Presbyterian committee, seeing evil only in institutions and society rather than in our hearts, strips from us the possibiity of heroic conflict. The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face. [p.37]

A human nature that is both fully animal, with the ferocity of tigers, and fully divine, with a perspective beyond the flesh, is something that Paglia, with extraordinary perspicacity, is willing to acknowledge. What we usually find today is the divine dismissed as otherworldly and meaningless (even misogynistic) and our animal nature facilely domesticated into a harmless and nurturing Mother Nature -- accomplished by nothing more than leftist political correctness. The divine itself, by the denial of the physical, is often seen as the villain, distorting nature by suppressing it. That nature might itself intrinsically be "red in tooth and claw," dominance and submission a universal characteristic of mammalian life, and natural sex a violent and ferocious thing, is then overlooked. To feminism, in the tradition of Rousseau, traditional socialization created patriarchy and rape. To Paglia, traditional socialization limited and contained the violence of nature, which occasionally spills out in rape among those insufficiently disciplined or emotionally disturbed -- in short, the wicked. Pornographic fantasies, whether they sublimate nature or not, are at least a window into the hidden dynamics of the psyche.

Unlike political conservatives, who really do want to suppress sexuality, Paglia understands the compromises of an integrated civilization.

In an ideal syncretism, all institutions would be strengthened and honored, from the sex industry, with is pornographic pagan truths, to organized religion, with its austere, enduring legacy. [p.37]

Interestingly, this is what we actually see in the ancient civilizations of "pagan truths," where Rome, so infamous for debauchery, also contained the Vestal Virgins, who could be buried alive if found to be unchaste. Classical India exhibits a similar spectrum from pornography (often on the temples themselves) to asceticism -- a degree of asceticism now generally viewed as pathological in the West, despite the popularity of sanitized and dumbed-down versions of Indian practice (like Yoga). Thus, liberal Catholics disparage the celibacy of Catholic Priests, who are commonly presented as frustrated (or, worse, active) pedophiles, even while vast crowds turn out to listen to a celibate Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama, in Central Park. Of course, vast crowds also turn out to see Pope John Paul II, but his views are subject to a public critique and even derision that the Dalai Lama is spared. Paglia is almost unique among contemporary popular sages to accept and honor both ends of the spectrum, from the "sex industry" to the most austere practices of traditional religion.

The unreal universe that we find in pornographic works like Rice's "Beauty" triology is rather like what Walter Kendrick calls pornotopia:

The ideal pornographic work would be set in "pornotopia," a never-never land where time and space measure nothing but sexual encounters, where bodies are reduced to sexual parts, where even those parts are merely counters in a game of increasingly unlikely recombination. Sade's "novels" approach this ideal state more nearly than any others, but no known work actually achieves it. [The Secret Museum, Pornography in Modern Culture, Viking, 1987, p.76]

This definition goes a little too far. It is not clear why any such definition would be useful if "no known work" measures up. A more useful definition would simply be to say that "pornotopia" occurs where the only human activity that counts is sex, either as act or foreplay, and that any real world practical, prudential, or moral limitations on sexual practices are either vanishing or erased. Troubling details like birth control, veneral disease, or children are ignored, and everything else in life -- food, work, world history, literature, science -- is irritating and irrelevant detail, to be reduced to a minimum or eliminated. While the most hardcore pornographic movies are simply all sexual activity, Rice's novels are still "pornotopia" in the sense that everything is either sexual activity or periods of foreplay in which sexual tension is increased. A good sign of that is that the slaves, like Beauty, really don't seem to eat or drink enough to stay alive, and their periods of bondage do not accomodate obvious human needs like the processes of elimination. No one seems to ever defecate or urinate while enduring hours of bondage. Tied down at night so that she cannot masturbate, Beauty is never found to have had an "accident." "Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom," is not going to occur in pornotopia, unless we are dealing with the pornographic variety where excretory functions are seen as erotic (and there is a B&D scene of "catheter play" where a bound and catheterized victim may need to beg to be allowed to urinate). Rice does not fall into that category -- no "water sports" or the like (one of the more "shameful" forms of erotica, though Penthouse magazine has featured photos, and a contest, of urinating women). Bondage stories, like Rice's, in one sense ideally represent pornotopia, since a person tied up or partially restrained can't do anything else than participate in whatever sex scenario is being conducted. Beauty is reminded of sex, not to mention available for it, every waking moment. Nothing else matters.

Do we find "pornotopia" in romance novels, like the one with the rape scene above? Not really, but, mutatis mutandis, there is a relationship. The old saying is that men use love to get sex, while women use sex to get love. If that were the case, we could imagine that if men could get sex without love, they would, and that if women could get love without sex, they would. Now, there do seem to be some men and women like that. The gay bathhouse scene was definitely sex without love (or even acquaintanceship), while it really does sound like Queen Victoria would have been happy to have the love of Albert without the sex part (though I have seen this disputed) -- Lawrence Durrell has a character comment in one of his Alexandria books (1957-1960) that the situation in D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) didn't make any sense, because an English wife with a paralyzed husband would have found that quite ideal.

Now, while these extremes in the real world may be rare, there is really little difficulty in finding both extremes and all parts of the spectrum in between in literature. Jane Austen's novels are romances, albeit profound and interesting beyond the bounds of popular romance literature, but they very definitely portray love without describing any sex. Movies like Sleepless in Seattle (1993) or You've Got Mail (1998), both with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, devote their entire length to bringing the lovers together and then, before there is even time to get in bed, the story is over. These are "pure" romances -- also popularly known as "chick flicks." The other end of the spectrum are porno movies with nothing but sex scenes. Although the pure romances are dismissed by feminists as trivial and deficient in political consciousness, the pure porn movies are anathematized as direct attacks on women.

The rape scene in the romance novel above is obviously not in a "pure" romance. Similarly, the movie Titanic (1997), although largely a tragic romance, does have one bona fide sex scene, though not, of course, despite some literal steam, very explicit. The rape scene above is definitely more explicit, and more morally problematic, since it is a rape, however effectively it may lead to true love. Rice's novels are far more explicit, and beyond the point of even worrying about the category of "rape," but they still end up as romances, since in the end Beauty does find her true love. De Sade's books are beyond the point of worrying about anything as ridiculous as true love (the murder and dismembership of one's lover would usually mess that up anyway, except for necrophiliacs); but the boundary into pornotopia, for which I think Rice's books qualify, occurs well before we get to that point.

Both romances, of any variety, and pornography, of any variety, deliberately focus on fragments of life. Many people may have no more than one or two great romantic experiences. Some have none. But literature, classic and popular, is thick with great romances. Great sex is also something that doesn't just occur all the time. In life, it would be nice to have the great romance and the great sex at the same time. Sometimes this happens; sometimes it doesn't. Great literature has usually contained both a romantic and a bawdy aspect. Chaucer and Shakespeare were censored in the 19th century, because the sexual allusions were no longer regarded as appropriate, either for the "young person" or for the propriety of public presentation. It was quite a fight to get the sex back into literature in the 20th century. Has it gone "too far"?

What would be "too far"? One aspect of definition of "obscenity" is that the material must appeal primarily to a "prurient" interest. The dictionary definition of "prurient" is "having lascivious thoughts or desires," "arousing such thoughts or desires," or "lewd." "Lascivious" is defined as "lewd" or "lustful"; and "lewd" is defined as "sexually unchaste or licentious." Now "unchaste" or "licentious" refers to sex with inappropriate persons or in inappropriate ways. Such actions may be questionable, but most are no longer illegal, at least in California. "Lustful," on the other hand, is not necessarily a bad thing at all. The purpose, indeed, of any literature is to heighten one's intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional perception of matters. Romance novels heighten the aesthetic and emotional perception of love, while pornography heightens the aesthetic, emotional, and erotic perception of sex. In practice, the definition of "prurient" was really anything that heightened erotic perception and arousal, whether chaste or unchaste, licentious or otherwise. But there is really nothing wrong with that at all. Indeed, long term, chaste relationships often need a bit of help to achieve agreeable levels of arousal. Pornographic literature and movies can do that, and recently women film makers have been trying to produce pornographic movies closer to the "romance" end of the spectrum, to appeal better to women. Thus, sex toys can be conveiently defined as "marital aids," which they can indeed be, but still get banned in repressive political venues, like Alabama. On the other hand, structuring pronographic videos as "educational," allows them pass the gate in Britain, where "educational" films are fine, however explicit, while mere "pornography" is suppressed (this may be changing).

Most of these political and legal debates, of course, are now about movies and photographs. Written pornography, even the Marquis de Sade, now hardly raises an eyebrow, except among the most extreme advocates of feminist censorship -- after Catharine MacKinnon convinced the Canadian Supreme Court to buy into her definition of pornographic "civil rights" offenses, Canadian customs seized books by her own fellow sociopath and collaborator, the late Andrea Dworkin (cf. Camille Paglia, "The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin," Vamps & Tramps, Vintage Books, 1994, pp.107-112, reprinted from Playboy, October 1992). Both have said that they would just as soon have their own books seized as have pornography allowed. Less disturbed persons, however, do only see the problem in film and photo, which the standard feminist analysis finds to be causes of violence and sexism. But, as Kendrick says,

There is a strange incongruity in tracing a violence said to be endemic in Western culture back to some pictures and films that could not have existed a century ago and that have been promiscuously on sale for only about twenty years. [op. cit., p. 232]

The most dismaying aspect of the feminist antipornography campaign is its exact resemblance to every such effort that preceded it, from Lord Campbell's and Justice Cockburn's, through that of Comstock and all the Societies for the Suppression of Vice, to the modern vigilantism of Leagues and Legions of Decency. [p.239]

But if the antipornography feminists glanced at history, the only lesson they learned was that past procedures had been incorrect, not that the effort itself was both tyrannical and hopeless. [p.232]

The hopelessness, of course, of censorship is that it is never effective with those who have had enough power to evade it. Thus, Victorian London seems all but awash with prostitutes, the mistress of King Edward VII accompanied him to many private functions, Puritanical America boasted the most interesting clubs and shows, for the connected, even in Kansas City, and John F. Kennedy, who had to fight off the stigma of being a good Catholic, was actually a "good" Catholic who consistently commited adultery, often by the use of prostitutes. No sensible person could ever believe that such men will deny to themselves the pleasures and indulgences that they publicly advocate denying to others. Thus, while men are arrested every day in America for trying to hire prostitutes, the Secret Service calmly and knowingly escorted Kennedy's prostitutes into the White House.

In our day, the means of sexual arousal, in the privacy of one's own home, are easily available to the many. Since the many are by definition vulgar (i.e. "common"), most of the material does not rise even to the level of quality of Ann Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy. But, in fact, that is nobody else's business. Those who, as they always have, commit violent crimes, deserve the appropriate punishment. The means of innocently heightening sexual arousal for those who wish to enjoy their sexuality cannot be blamed because of that, or just because pathological, sex-negative crusaders never liked the stuff in the first place -- and are probably afraid of what lurks in their own psyches. Indeed, Camille Paglia thinks that Catharine MacKinnon's constant talk about "snuff" films (where an actress is actually killed), which don't seem to have ever existed, is actually the product of her own sado-masochistic nightmare fantasies. MacKinnon betrays fascination with, even an unconscious desire to live in, a kind of porno-distopia where such things happen.

MacKinnon's collaborator in the feminist anti-porn crusade, Andrea Dworkin, didn't even believe that women should engage in ordinary sexual intercourse with men. A very interesting discussion of her book Intercourse, which argues this thesis, is found in F. Carolyn Graglia's Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism [Spence Publishing, Dallas, 1998, pp. 328-354]. Graglia is a true conservative, and so has no evident love for pornography. Her interest in Dworkin, however, is about Dworkin's description of the experience of female sexuality. Dworkin's description of sexual intercourse at its most intense is that for a woman it is an experience of overwhelming invasion, conquest, possession, and annihilation of self. My own experience is that a woman can so far lose herself as to be unable to remember afterwards what she said or did ("I put those scatches on your back?"). Because of this, Dworkin doesn't think that women can function as equals with men while this is going on, and so recommends only the relatively superficial clitoral stimulation & oral sex for women. Graglia finds Dworkin's book important because she agrees on the nature of the female sexual experience, and also agrees that the kind of equality that Dworkin and other feminists want cannot happen if women derive the overwhelming female experience from their sexuality -- which also includes pregnancy, childbearing, and nursing, all things alien to male experience and sensation, or to the life of the external workplace. Graglia says, "Her book has touched me more than any other feminist writing; reading it, I consantly exclaimed 'she's absolutely right'" [p. 336]. The difference, of course, is that Graglia thinks that this overwhelming experience, with these uniquely female occupations, is natural and fulfilling, and any resultant inequality simply part of the natural division of labor and psychological differences between men and women.

While Graglia, as a conservative, seems to recommend a return to the culture of the fifties, her views are of interest here because this "overwhelming" female experience of invasion and possession can clearly be expressed as the sort of rape fantasy that we find in Rice's pornography or the romance novels. While Dworkin is the sort of disturbed person who sees all heterosexual sex as rape, there is a kind of truth in this in the sense of "rape" as as "seizing" and "carrying off." A rape fantasy for Dworkin is a nightmare of political oppression, while for Rice (perhaps even Graglia) it is no more than an expression of the sort of rapture found in female sex at its most intense fulfillment. Of course, the experience of being invaded and possessed also explains how women may have more concern than men for the moral worthiness of their possessor, which is why women have always tended to marry up in status and age. Other women, to the distress of both feminists and of normal men, are repeatedly attracted to callous, dangerous, and abusive men. To feminists this bespeaks a lack of "self-esteem" (requiring prosecution of the men even against the will of the women), but to the inoffensive men whom these women may pass over to get to the bastards, the reward is clearly one of sexual excitement. This is a situation expressed, in the sweetest way, in the classic Brazilian movie Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1978, with Sonia Braga), where Flor's worthless and irresponsible, but sexually exciting, first husband returns as a ghost after she discovers that her stolid and responsible second husband is sexually boring. Men may have trouble reconciling the ideas of "whore" and "madonna" in the same woman, but Flor does the trick in reverse with a ghost husband for wild sex and a living husband for respectable domesticity.

Two bondage drawings on this page are by the great erotic and bondage artist Alazar. An illustrated brochure of Alazar Portfolios can be obtained from Alazar Art, P.O. Box 179, Connelly, New York, 12417. Two comic drawings, with dialogue balloons, are from Flesh & Metal, Vol. 1, by Man [Eurotica, 2000, in Spanish, 2004, in English, Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine, New York]. Recent additions are identified as by Armando Huerta. The large "An Open Door to Wonderland" image above is one of Huerta's "Whoops!" images. The others are from "Vixen" [Pinup World Art, 2009].

A selection of representative pornographic stories, "The Secret Museum," has been assembled for this site. It was suspended for many years, during Republican Administrations. However, I suspected that the Democrats could not be trusted not to respond to influence from anti-porn feminists. At this point, after all the explicit pornography on the itnernet, I don't think anyone will notice -- certainly not for stories rather than photos or video. After the video of "WAP," i.e. "Wet Ass Pussy," this is small potatoes.

When Ed Meese announced his war on porn back in the eighties, it was in an auditorium at the Justice Department with the brazen bare breast of the goddess of justice visible behind him. Perhaps, if Ed even thought of it, he wanted to show that his objection was to Deep Throat, not to Classical nudes. Later, John Ashcroft spent $8000 of the taxpayer's money to conceal the goddess with curtains. So apparently even she was too much for his hightened sensibilities. This is one of the best testimonies to the absurdity of these people.

Carlos Cartagena	Danni's Hard Drive!!
Barbara Jensen	Armando Huerta
Blowfish	Centurian Publications
Playboy	Penthouse
Salon Magazine	Gauntlet Press
Alazar Art	Christy Canyon
Olivia	Breast Expansion Archive

In the table of links at left I have now removed the links. The sites should be findable at Google, etc. The links are removed because I do not monitor them very often, and sometimes a site goes dark and its domain is bought by someone using it for different purposes. I am not interested in keeping on top of such developments. Also, old standards, like Playboy, wimped out for a while and abandoned nudity, which was the whole raison d'être for the magazine in the first place. Those who lament the inhibitions of the '50's must ask themselves, who is inhibited now? This trend was apparent in the '90's when my local supermarket in Los Angeles, Gelson's, stopped carrying both Penthouse and Playboy on its magazine rack. Penthouse at the time was actually sexually explicit -- until Bob Guccione lost control of it -- then it reverted to simple nudity. Without Guccione, it wasn't worth it anyway. See the link to the discussion of decadence below.

The Carlos Cartegena decals, like "Cherry" at right, used to be available at "Slap On Art"; but the site seems to have disappeared. Carlos does have his own website. His luminous pinups are also available in print, in books like Flirt! The Art of Naughty [Volume 1, Konradin Druck, Leinfelden- Echterdingen, Germany, Modern Graphics Distribution, Germany]. Images on stickers by Huerta, Carlos Cartagena, Barbara Jensen, Oliva, and others are available (the last I looked) at "Sticker Chick."

Decadence, Rome and Romania, and the Emperors Who Weren't

Pornography Intro Page

Return to Links on Main Pornography Page

Talk Dirty to Me

Note on Sexual Hieroglyphics

Human Breasts

Talk Dirty to Me

The Erotic as an Aesthetic Category

Shame, Beauty, and the Ambivalence of the Flesh

Ethics

Philosophy of Religion

Home Page

Return to Vita

Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved