Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 13:41:42 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Porn


Mark wrote:
>Of course, I have observed
>porn, and I have reached the conclusion that it is a form of rape.
>It is sharing the sexuality of another, and by definition, it is
>done without their consent.

This sounds almost Biblical to me. Looking at others with lust or some form
of sexual interest when their consent is not obtained beforehand is a rape?

>I think that one cannot observe porn
>without sensing this violation, and that in fact is what makes it
>pleasurable.

Some viewers, I believe, take pleasure in porn for this reason, but I don't
think that all viewers enjoy porn in this way.

>The Internet, the apogee of porn, is actually a form
>of mass rape. The humiliation and powerlessness of the victims is
>immortalised in a new way.

Are all people who appear in pornographic images are 'humiliated,' 'made
powerless,' 'victimized,' etc.? Who is doing the humiliating, victimizing,
etc.? Producers? Consumers? You? Think about it: you have not obtained porn
actors/actresses' _consent_ to represent them in this manner either. They
might feel violated by you. It seems to me that your morally charged
representation is at the very least compounding the problem and doubling
porn's pleasure yield for the allegedly sadistic porn consumers.

>And if
>some forms of porn seem dreary, soul-destroying and repugnant, is
>this for any reason other than that the sexuality of the observed
>has escaped from us, leaving us (rather than them) paradoxically
>vulnerable, powerless, a beached bystander?

This makes porn comparable to the ideology of romantic love and its
interdependence upon misogyny. Have you ever read Samuel Richardson's
_Clarissa_? Isn't _Clarissa_ more 'pornographic' than, say, John Cleland's
_Fanny Hill_? In any case, this is a problem for male lovers/viewers, not
for women in lit/porn.

>Since porn is by definition non-consensual, it hardly matters if
>the enjoyment sometimes evident among the objects is real or feigned,
>or whether the specific form of power we feel is that of identifying
>with the object/victim him/herself in their travail.

Well, the working conditions of porn actresses/actors matter to marxists.
Doesn't it ever occur to you that some people might enjoy being watched by
others while engaged in sex?

>It is still objectionable, not just because we cannot know whether
>they consented, but because in any case their enjoyment was not
>intended for us.

Why is this a problem? A consumer complaint?

>Perhaps that foreknowledge made their self-abandon
>still more exquisite, but we cannot know that, either, can we?

No, but in the exactly the same way, most (almost all?) straight guys
CANNOT know--or don't want to know or sometimes even care--if their female
sexual partners (in consensual non-commercial sex) are really enjoying it
or just faking it. How can you tell?

>So it is not just a matter of the fact that the observed may actually
>be a chattel-slave of (say) an Asian sex-industry. It is the fact that
>we cannot know  AND THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT
>PLEASURABLE, which makes porn problematic (if irrepressible).

To destroy such 'pleasures,' one must attack slavery, not porn.

Yoshie




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