Want to read a book about porn? These are your choices. There's the celebrity twist: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale and Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. There's the right-wing polemics: Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families and Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future. There's the academics: XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. There's the anti-porn feminists: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and Pornography: Men Possessing Women. There's the photographs: The Valley and XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. There's oral history: The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. There's an autobiography: Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. Where's the book that's about the porn industry, that reveals why Americans watch pornography, that tells the true story of porn at the dawn of the 21st century? I don't know. It's a mystery.
Perhaps it's that buried under all the nervous stereotypes of pimply teenagers, furtive perverts in raincoats, and anti-social compulsively masturbating misfits, is a sneaking recognition that pornography isn't just an individual predilection: pornography is central to our culture. It's not just its immense popularity -- although estimates put its sales at over eleven billion dollars a year. It's that pornography is revealing. It exposes the culture to itself. Pornography, it might be argued, is the royal road to the cultural psyche (as for Freud, dreams were the route to the unconscious).
So the question is, if you put it on the couch and let it free-associate, what is it really saying? What are the inner tensions and unconscious conflicts that propel its narratives?
When writing about the pornography of the past, whether visual or literary, scholars and art historians routinely discover allegorical meanings within it, even political significance. Historians have made the case that modern pornography (up until around the 19th century) operated as a form of social criticism, a vehicle for attacking officialdom, which responded, predictably, by attempting to suppress it. Pornography was defined less by its content, than by the efforts of those in power to eliminate it and the social agendas it transported.
Despite knowing this, it's difficult to envision contemporary pornography as a form of culture or as a mode of politics. There's virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense -- the only expressing it's presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay. That it might have more complicated social agendas, or that future historians of the genre might produce interesting insights about pornography's relation to this particular historical and social moment -- these are radically unthought thoughts.
I've proposed that pornography is best understood as a form of cultural expression. It is a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm; it neither reflects the real world, nor is it some hypnotizing call to action. The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters. It doesn't and never will exist. But what it does do is to insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy. And this is the basis of so much of the controversy it engenders, because pornography has a talent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous, socially destabilizing things.
Like any other popular culture genre (like sci-fi, romance, mystery, true crime), pornography obeys certain rules, and its primary rule is transgression. Like your boorish cousin, its greatest pleasure is to locate each and every one of a society's taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties, and systematically transgress them, one by one.
Pornography manages to penetrate to the marrow of who we are as a culture and as psyches. As avant-garde artists knew, transgression is no simple thing: it's a precisely calculated intellectual endeavor. It means knowing the culture inside out, discerning its secret shames and grubby secrets, how to best humiliate it, knock it off its prim perch. A culture's pornography becomes, in effect, a precise map of that culture's borders: pornography begins at the edge of the culture's decorum. Carefully tracing that edge, like an anthropologist mapping a culture's system of taboos and myths, provides a detailed blueprint of the culture's anxieties, investments, contradictions. And a culture's borders, whether geographical or psychological, are inevitably political questions.
Pornography is thus a form of political theater. It's a medium for confronting audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, mainstream culture and political discourse. And that encompasses more than sex. --Laura Kipnis
