Friday, August 29, 2008

Pornography and the Death of American Liberty

This essay is a bit rough. I could make my argument better. I may revise it considerably later, I might not. But here's something to chew on one way or the other.

-AD

“If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country—and you would be very foolish not to be right now—then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.”
--Andrea Dworkin, 1983

There is an assumption that American men of a certain age—young—are natural consumers of pornography. It is so natural as to need not be said, and those of us with an acquired aversion to the medium are considered to be strange, gay or lying. Tell a group of men that you find a group of young men that you find porn to be repulsive, oppressive, wrong or dangerous and they will immediately question your sincerity. It is to our time what Scripture was to a previous: a literature of deep cultural significance calling for daily study and engagement. Its hallmarks and vernacular are normalized in the broader culture, so that jaded New Yorkers and giddy tourists to the cultural capital of our country stroll unphased through Times Square where a massive image advertising the rarely viewed television program Gossip Girl features a conventionally good-looking man and woman at the peak of coitus alongside the internet age abbreviation OMFG: “Oh My Fucking God.” Giuliani got rid of the peepshows, but mainstream media have kept the porn flying high on Broadway.

Video and then the internet have made porn something everyone can consume, not solely the dirty old men of yesteryear sneaking into unsanitary cinemas. As this has happened the US has taken an extreme tilt to the Right, two seemingly unrelated and distinct phenomena. It is my position that this tilt represents the clattering end of the US’ democratic charade and that our pornography culture is a vital part of the emergence of populist autocracy—in short, fascism. Fascism thrives in a culture of heightened masculinity and pornography creates just the kind of male sexual identity necessary for its taking root. It is undeniable that pornography has materially reworked American culture, and the result is the emergence of a politic of conquest, domination and possession—one that denies even the tepid liberal lip service to self-determination, liberty and individual independence. The line from porn to Abu Ghraib (where tortured prisoners were pornographed by soldiers in positions of sexual humiliation) is a bright one and the implications domestically are grave.

Few writers have captured the amorphous essence of fascism like the Italian witness Umberto Eco, whose 14 points of Ur-Fascism form the single best distillation of the movement’s fundamentals. A consistent theme of his analysis is fascism’s passionate exultation of the masculine and damnation of the feminine. Point twelve states “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies… disdain for women…).” Fascist movements demean their enemies as women—assuming the title an insult—and embrace the prima facie benefits of manliness. Robert Jensen, a contemporary critic of pornography, notes that this manliness and masculinity generally are defined by a will to conquer: real men seek to control situations and express superiority in all relationships. Masculinity is defined by dominance and thus it should surprise no one that emphatic and publicly masculine political systems would be ones that seek to dominate all—whether they be the brutalized citizenry of manly fascist states or the unlucky inhabitants of lands they seek to subdue in the name of their superiority.

Selling campaigns costly in wealth, blood and energy to a populace necessitates an acclimation to the ethic of possession; it thrives in cultures where rapaciousness and ravishing are eroticized. Imperialism—a system that pursues the taking and bleeding dry of unwilling peoples under the guise of giving them what they really want deep down—is nothing more than a political movement of rape writ large. Fascism is a movement that could only come out of and which celebrates a domineering definition of masculine identity, and central to this identity and the cultural groundwork of fascism is rape culture. Imperial populism is fascism is the natural political organization of a rape culture.

Pornography is the propaganda of rape culture, as it posits sexuality as a possessive venture. This message is both textual and contextual. The text (or rather photos and films) portrays women begging for sexual humiliation and possession. Women are fucked in painful, uncomfortable, degrading and violent ways and always hungry for more. They are littered with bodily fluids to emphasize their dirtiness and ownership. They are “cunts,” “sluts,” and “whores” who are merely the titillating objects of sexual conquest for men cast primarily for their phallic supremacy. The very categorization of the medium into “softcore” and “hardcore” gives an idea of its prerogatives. Hardcore porn (also known as “the good stuff”) is distinguished by showing penetration footage—porn reduces sex to an act of aggression (“banging,” “pounding”) by men as opposed to a more meaningful connection. Hardcore is also distinguished by “money shots”—scenes of the men evacuating their semen onto the women’s bodies (rarely inside them)—blatant messages of sexual domination of men over women. The message of pornography is self-evident: women are for fucking and he who fucks rules. Their orifices are used as places for branding, and the owners are always hyper-masculine (read: big dicked) men. The sexual possession of women is a cultural assumption that finds the purest distillation of its propagation in pornography.

Contextually, pornography is the physical act of possessing women’s sexuality. Pornography is cheap prostitution, its ubiquitousness means that men can be assured access to women’s sexuality at all times. It is called “speech,” but the images are the empirical documentation of the degradation and ownership of real women. Engaging in the pornographic conversation amounts to the purchase of an act of sexual domination over a real woman’s body. This body is laid out in ways that reduce it to a collection of body parts, and this objectification means that the use of pornography is an act of sexual conquest for the user. The protection of men’s “right” to pornography is a bald-faced assertion that men have a right to sexual access to women. This assertion is the basic philosophy of rape culture, and a society that seeks to protect a literature of sexual possession at any cost is one that can be defined simply as a rape culture.

In the contemporary United States pornography is thoroughly mainstream. A $13 billion a year business, pornography can be found at almost every newsstand and bookstore, every video store and cable package, in virtually every airport, hotel room or gas station, and in every home with internet access. It is sent to us unsolicited in our email, its aesthetic towers over us on thousands of billboards. On the show Friends Joey and Chandler—characters a more quaint literature would label “heroes”—celebrate when they find they are receiving free porn on their cable. The Hollywood teen hit The Girl Next Door is about a boy who falls for a porn star in his neighborhood. All this to say pornography is undeniably a part of our mainstream culture. It even acts as the school age American boy’s primer on female sexuality. Long before most boys have so much as kissed a girl they are consumers of pornography, a state so common as to give rise to cutesy nostalgia for the “innocent” days of hiding a Hustler under the mattress. The first lesson in female sexuality American boys receive is the first law of patriarchy: men have a right of sexual access to women. This is repackaged for public consumption as “men think with their dicks,” female flesh being a constant necessity for a healthy man, human distinction between bodies unwelcome distractions in the hunt. Pornography initiates American men in this mindset, and the result is prostitution[*], rape and incest. When exposure to this literature is a right of passage for adolescent and “tween” boys, it tills the earth for the thriving adoption of masculine politics and from thence follows fascism.

Fascism, it can be argued, is the natural resting place of liberalism. Liberalism and its attendant capitalist economic organization serve as environmental conditions which select for greater and greater concentrations of power. At the basis of its political arrangement is that power over all should be granted to an allegedly representative few, and that the pursuit of greater power among these few should be “harnessed” for its progressive energy, kept in check by separations of power and the paper protection of constitutions. At the economic basis, it frankly endorses accumulation, competition and class privilege for the wealthy. Over time these bases will mean that fewer and fewer will hold political and economic authority. Political proposals that expand the ranks of the powerful may occasionally prevail, but those that empower the tiny elite who decide whether the power ought to be contracted or expanded are obviously selected for. Among those elite the limitations of constitutions only go so far as those same elite are willing to recognize, and as time goes by various branches of the state come under the control of various shrewd or capable personalities which vault those branches over their supposedly coequal fellows. And while or whether this evolution of political autocracy goes on, capitalism redistributes wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Each firm is a miniature tyranny—hierarchical structures of authority unaccountable to the individuals ruled over. Under liberalism money is power and ultimately the monied interests bend political structures to the wills of their private autocracies. No conscious or measured effort is needed on anyone’s part—the fundamental inertia of liberalism leans toward fascistic systems.

This meltdown is happening right now in the United States. Under the Bush Administration we have had ludicrous advances in executive power and open contempt for what recently passed as assumptions rooted in the constitution. The president may now ignore the laws he or she signs at his or her leisure. The president may identify anyone as an enemy combatant and have them imprisoned secretly, tortured, denied a jury trial and executed. He or she may also work with private (that is to say, autocratic) telecommunications companies to listen in on anyone’s telephone or internet conversations with impunity. Much of the military’s heavy lifting is now done by private mercenary armies unbound by law, loyal first to political benefactors and outside of meaningful civilian oversight. The danger of this development is perversely reduced as Bush (like Clinton before him) has argued that he can start wars with the formal military without congressional approval, and he has. All this has occurred alongside cooperative GOP congresses, a complacent Democrat congress and courts the Administration has run around or ignored. His popularity has sunk, but the bright liberal hope for replacing him—Barack Obama—has declined to delineate any executive overreaches he would repudiate. He further extols a rhetoric wherein our greatest political terror is not creeping fascism, but rather political division. He says he will replace conflict with “Unity,” a feat only capable of being accomplished by a tyrant. Christopher Hitchens, among others, has noted that division is the natural outcome of a system that allows dissent and encourages debate. Unity can only be achieved by eliminating these freedoms and so Obama at best represents a hydra of naïve politics which cynically refuse to embrace liberal restoration. At worst he will deepen the downgrade.

And where is the outrage? Bush hating is a hot new national pastime, but the fervor is markedly reserved. Its nature is an unsophisticated one, as it declines to turn its critical eye towards neither the ravages of Clinton’s time in office nor the promise of Obama’s. All meaningful dissent to the decline of America’s already paltry freedoms are outside the mainstream. If we are a culture dedicated to freedom, how can this be? Many will just assert the stupidity of the masses, a convenient position in an increasingly authoritarian state. But these same masses drive the world’s most powerful economy, generate the globe’s dominant popular and high culture and populate its most fearsome military. It makes more sense to recognize that this culture gives only lip service to freedom, while placing its energy in rape. Pornography keeps us jaded to human suffering. It keeps us lusting after dominance. It teaches us that freedom extends only as far as a tumescent cock, and that masculine values cast off their waste onto the feminine. It is also the core of our contemporary American culture—it makes more money (the way liberals keep score) than the US’ celebrated film industry and our music industry combined. These industries look to porn for artistic inspiration. A culture so oriented cannot denounce tyranny while keeping a straight face; it can at best attack efficacy and image while keeping silent about the emergence of a domineering, aggressive, dehumanizing and swaggering elite tossing their excretions into the eyes of the girly. American liberty’s evaporation is a bipartisan affair borne of the same impulse that hustled to protect porn and turn it into a household product.

If this essay is to have a lesson, it is this: the dissident struggle against liberalism’s long awaited collapse into fascism, against capitalism’s expropriation of billions of human lives and against imperialism’s shrinking the globe to a sandbox for brutal elites to entertain themselves in is not solely a political struggle. It is a fight against a culture that sees people as things and sees the degradation and ownership of these things as arousing to the point of climax. This culture is deepened by the mainstreaming of pornography, and a nation that accepts, protects and celebrates pornography cannot assume its continued liberty. The enemy is as distant as Wall Street and as close as your Download file. The problem is as rarefied as Capitol Hill and as vulgar as a basic cable Girls Gone Wild commercial. To pursue justice without condemning and battling the $13 billion pimps of the pornography industry is to break off a weed rather than pulling up its roots. We have left this battle to rightward forces that simply seek to replace pornography’s sense of men possessing women with a clerical one. Their quarrel can hardly be with brutality (look at their holy books), but rather with explicit sexuality. The revival of a radical opposition to porn is absolutely vital if we are to have any hope of smashing the fascist scourge before it devours the world—once again—in a tragic conflagration.

This fight will be harder than ever before, but the difficulty arises from the source of its necessity: pornography’s iron grasp on our culture. If we must destroy all the culture to root out the porn, so be it. The vicious sensibilities of our declining age deem destruction as (as Bakunin would have it) a beautiful creative act. Specifics will arise after discussion and experiment, and we must recognize that the time for internal bickering is over amidst universal distress. Only we who refuse to be owned can break this fascist creeping, and we will only be worthy the honor if we break its backbone of pornographic rape culture.

[*] I realize that prostitution (the world’s oldest profession) existed long before pornography, but perhaps it is a further sign of pornography’s spot in our culture that it has replaced the wretched institution as American boys’ first exposure to women bought for a price.