Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."
Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."
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Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804786706 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford Briefs |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 252 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
WHY INTERNET PORN MATTERS
By MARGRET GREBOWICZ
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8662-1
Chapter One
THE CRITICAL LANDSCAPE OF PORNOGRAPHY
WHY INTERNET PORN SHOULD MATTER TO PHILOSOPHERS
Given the number of different discourses and methodologies with which it is possible to define, examine, and evaluate pornography today, there is surprisingly little philosophical theorizing about it. There is certainly no shortage of feminist legal and sociological literature about the effects of pornography on women's lives and psyches and on the production of gender. The spectrum of positions extends from the most "anti-," through arguments that the industry is work like any other work, into arguments that pornography functions as a political speech and thus is not like any other work but a site of resistance, even a creative avenue for reclaiming the body and rescripting sexual practices. Recently, the emerging field of porn theory has successfully motivated the study of pornography as a form of culture. However, even as topics like sexual difference, objectification, and spectacle take on a life beyond feminist theory, and subjects like technology, capitalism, and the democratization of information do so beyond critical theory, philosophers have been slow to turn their attention to pornography, the largest and fastest growing commodity on the "information superhighway."
To begin, then, and if I may be allowed a tenuous distinction for the sake of making a point, this is a work of philosophy before it is a work of feminist theory. In the tradition of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume 1, a philosophical examination of sexuality, subjectivity, and knowledge, which was only later appropriated and put to good use by feminist thinkers, I make an argument concerning pornography's role in political ontology that is appropriable not just for feminist concerns but for critical social projects in general. I aim to show that turning to the philosophical register results in reorienting what might be called the politics of pornography. The feminist contribution so far may be summarized as the successful shifting of the debate from problems of censorship and freedom of speech to questions of gender, and particularly gender understood as power difference. I here argue that the intersection of pornography and Internet distribution effects yet another shift in what pornography means and how it functions in the world. Internet distribution is not merely a new, faster delivery method that results in nothing more than more and more porn. The Internet fundamentally changes the social meaning of pornography by embedding it squarely in the epistemological shift from knowledge to information, and the political shift to information becoming democratically accessible to everyone. These shifts, in which Internet pornography acts as a catalyst, effect a noninnocent, particular understanding of the sexual subject in relationship to the democratic state and to speech, one which, I argue, constrains the possibilities for sexual speech, pornographic or otherwise, to resist or intervene in the state's policies. To borrow Foucault's term, Internet pornography creates unprecedentedly docile subjects. At stake is the governability of the embodied subject that presents as simultaneously sexual and speaking.
My attunement to the philosophical register should not be read within an academic hierarchy in which philosophy and other "old school," "boy's club" disciplines take priority over feminist theory. It is a methodological decision in direct response to the sea of questions I encountered in the course of presenting my work. The one that consistently returned was What is to be done about pornography? As this book makes clear, a philosophical approach does not propose to answer this question. In fact, there are many aspects of pornography that cannot be properly, robustly discussed in the philosophical register. Some are more obvious than others. For instance, this approach does not yield statistics or interpret them. It does not have much to say about the demographics of pornography consumption or production, or about the psychophysical complexities of the experience of moving images, or about the market for French Catholic nun pornography in eighteenth-century England, or about the long-term economic effects of file sharing on the commercial pornography market, as opposed to the amateur market. It deliberately avoids the discourse of addiction, largely because I do not know how to think about addiction without relying on a framework of norms and pathologies, with its attendant ontological assumptions about autonomy, dependency, self-control, values—all of which are necessarily thrown into crisis by the thinking of the event and the inhuman that I invoke in my argument. It is ambivalent about the category of desire, because this category remains inextricably bound to psychoanalysis and the concepts and methods proper to it. A psychoanalytic approach to Internet pornography would be relevant and timely, but it is not the one I offer here, even as I gesture, somewhat obliquely, towards categories like fantasy and abjectitude. Porn theorist Laura Kipnis writes that pornography is interesting to talk about precisely because there is so much more at stake than just sexual pleasure, and the above are just a few examples of the possible alternative directions for analyzing this "more" (1999, 201).
But the philosophical offers critical trajectories that no other register does. Although it is easy to make the case that thinking and writing about pornography requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining resources from visual studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, economics, media studies, political science, and history, I contend that certain discipline-specific questions should be prioritized. The case for interdisciplinarity tends to be made in any analysis of popular culture, and it could be argued that the philosophical register is the one most "allergic" to this kind of work. But how can we propose to examine pornography without considering the weight of the following: What is freedom? What are norms? What does it mean to be embodied? What does it mean to be a speaking subject? What makes something "sexual"? And then there is the normative aspect of what philosophers do, which results in questions not about what is, but what should be. What should be the role of the state in the production of sexualities? What is the best way to conceive of rights in liberationist projects? Should we attempt to define pornography or not, and what is to be gained (and by whom) from either approach? This is not to say that the feminist insight that gender is a power differential should no longer be important for those of us working on pornography. That would be a ridiculous claim. Neither is it to say that critically examining the contents of pornography is not important work. It is simply to indicate that a trajectory has been overlooked and should be incorporated into our discussions of this issue, which has been so hotly contested by feminists for the past four decades. There are many glaring, important issues that this book deliberately does not explore—for instance, how race functions in pornography—only because in my research I did not find them fundamentally changed in response to the technology of Internet distribution.
There are also philosophers appearing only in the peripheries of this book—most notably, Luce Irigaray—whose work offers important contributions to the pornography debate but does not engage with the role of technologies in the formation of subjectivities directly enough to help us interrogate the intersection of pornography and the Internet. My trajectory requires moving from discussing the contents of pornography to discussing something like its form, those structural and logical particularities which allow it to play a pivotal role in the democratization of information. My main critical paradigm for this is Jean Baudrillard's development of the idea he calls "America" in his book by the same title. In Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's analysis of the social meanings and political effects of commercial pornography, a polemical and aggressive critique that has been championed, caricatured, misread, rejected, and reanimated by feminist thinkers since its appearance, we encounter the claim that pornography is symptomatic of America. Starting from this and following Baudrillard, I argue that Internet pornography is symptomatic of and central to a kind of modernity that may be called "American" in its particular production of governable subjects. My claims will not concern the United States as a concrete pornography market, but America (or what Dworkin calls "Amerika") as an imaginary. This book presents a poststructuralist critique of the politics of the First Amendment and their central role in the formation of this imaginary, interrogating the relationships between speech, freedom, sexuality, and power as they are produced and maintained by the commodification of information, as well as the effect of the dematerialization of commodities on the idea of the real.
DEFINITIONS, DEBATES, AND CRITICAL PARADIGMS
To begin with the most obvious of philosophical questions, what is pornography? The problem of definition is well known and often invoked as part of the argument against the legal repression of pornographic materials. If we decide to censor, the worry goes, what will be the fate of works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Norman Mailer? What should be done about ad campaigns like those of Victoria's Secret, which openly draw on soft-core tropes, and American Apparel, which invoke the semiotics of amateur "teen" hard-core sites? Won't we have to censor more things than necessary? I encounter this question from the audience every time I present my research: what do you do about the fact that pornography is so difficult to define and circumscribe? If it is impossible to point to exactly what makes something pornographic, then how is that elusive thing to be theoretically examined, much less politically acted upon?
Harriet Gilbert writes that "the recent obsession with a definition—especially with a foolproof, clear-cut, legal definition—has not only distracted from but positively harmed understanding" in the debates concerning pornography (1992, 217). Is it possible to understand the phenomenon of pornography without arriving at a definition of it? Arguably, definition must precede analysis, so that, at the very least, we all know what we're talking about. Equally arguably, however, the reason pornography remains such a complex and daunting topic that it demands ever more analysis is precisely that it is so difficult to define. The p-word is loaded, to put it mildly. Gilbert advocates suspending the use of the word and discussing instead something like literatures of sex, a category in which the stuff that is easily recognizable as pornography would commingle with art and other cultural production in which explicit sexuality poses some degree of threat to personal boundaries and the social order. It is this broader phenomenon that we should be trying to understand, she argues, rather than looking for ways to define the pornographic so that we may then affect it legally, whether by posing constraints or protections. Linda Williams also argues against a stable definition, beginning from the position that what we call "pornography" is actually an irreducible plurality of pornographies, a diffuse and complex family of phenomena to be treated as such, and that the question of its political belonging (on which so much feminist intellectual energy is spent) is only one of many theoretical problems posed by the existence of pornographies.
I agree with both Gilbert and Williams to a certain degree. However, as someone for whom the question of political belonging remains pressing, I will continue to use the word pornography and to use it in the singular for strategic reasons. While I concur with Williams that "there is no monolithic pathology that can be demonized as obscene pornography" but instead there are only irreducibly plural and multivalent pornographies, within the boundaries of that claim it remains necessary to account for what one means by the word (1992, 264). I also take issue with Williams's claim that the question of pornography's political belonging, for which I will use the shorthand question Is pornography part of the problem or part of the solution? is merely one question among others. I contend that in the case of Internet pornography, the question of political belonging must be foregrounded. The shift from previous forms of distribution to the Internet forces us to consider the central role of contemporary pornography in the changing dynamics between sexual freedom and freedom of expression, as well as fantasy and social change.
All disclaimers aside, then, what is pornography? I have two answers to this, one literal and simple, and the other more complex. The first concerns specifically what I mean by "Internet porn" in the present study, namely materials created specifically to aid in masturbation and circulated on the Internet, largely (though not exclusively) for commercial purposes. I am not interested in a clear-cut legal definition but in one which will allow me to get on with the project of thinking critically about a cultural phenomenon, or at the very least a set of materials and a set of practices. The question for me concerns not what people are actually masturbating to, but what has been created specifically for that purpose. Someone may indeed masturbate while reading Lolita, but that is an issue for a different study. The pornography subgenre "lolicon" (short for "Lolita complex"), however, a kind of cartoon imagery depicting very young girls with infantlike bodies penetrated by penises, fingers, and sometimes monster tentacles, has been created specifically and exclusively to sexually arouse to the point of orgasm. Lolicon, not Lolita, is what I mean by "pornography." Likewise, the fact that someone somewhere may be masturbating to veterinary photographs of cow genitalia is not my concern. My concern is directed at a website like petsex.com, a bestiality pornography site, which features among other things films of farm animals mating. These were originally filmed for some other purpose but are placed on this site explicitly and deliberately packaged as pornography, edited and presented specifically for fans of bestiality sites to masturbate to. This kind of packaging and presentation of preexisting materials counts as "creating" pornography in my study.
As the example above illustrates, it is always possible to cite an image, from which it follows that it is equally possible to extract pornographic imagery like the aforementioned loli manga and present it in a different context, as artists sometimes do. This maintains the familiar controversy concerning the relationship of pornography to art (Is it pornography? Is it art? Can art be pornographic, and vice versa?). In the case of Mapplethorpe and Sade, for instance, the answer is clearly yes: artworks and pornography are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But the fact that the context of consumption is this important in determining whether the contents of the materials are properly pornographic simply underlines the point I will attempt to show: that in the phrase "Internet porn" the former word is at least as significant as the latter. In other words, in the age of Internet distribution, whatever question we ask about pornography's social effects and political significance cannot be answered without taking the mode of distribution into account.
On one hand, then, the question of definition is simply not that important except for practical or strategic purposes, so that we may agree, however temporarily, on what it is we are discussing with the aim of continuing the discussion. On the other hand, any serious theoretical encounter with pornography—including methodology, the particular shape of the inquiry, and something like a "position" vis-à-vis a politically divisive and inflammatory cultural phenomenon—depends precisely on stability of definition or, rather, on making a compelling case that pornography is better conceived of as this kind of thing rather than another. But this is a different meaning of the word is, one less concerned with delimiting a certain range of materials and more concerned with what we might call the ontology of pornography.
The political belonging of pornography is intimately linked to its ontology: any answer to Is pornography part of the problem or part of the solution? is in a coconstitutive relationship to any answer to What kind of thing is pornography? MacKinnon and Dworkin knew this when they first proposed that pornography is not speech, in an effort to dislodge it from anxieties about state infringement on First Amendment rights (see MacKinnon 1987, 149). If pornography could no longer be defined as speech, then it could not be protected under the constitutional right to free speech. MacKinnon and Dworkin could not have made as forceful, far-reaching, and controversial a critique as they did had they not essentially rebooted the debate on the ontological level, beginning with the proposal that we think of pornography as a different kind of thing. Most of the work done on pornography today refers obligingly (and almost always very critically, even dismissively) to them as pioneers of the antiporn position.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WHY INTERNET PORN MATTERS by MARGRET GREBOWICZ Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ix1 The Critical Landscape of Pornography....................1
2 Why Speech Still Matters....................16
3 Democracy and the Information Society....................34
4 The Ecstasy of Community....................50
5 Privacy and Pleasure....................64
6 Foreclosure and Its Critics....................82
7 Inhuman Openings....................101
8 Pornography, Norms, and Sex Education....................113
Notes....................125
Bibliography....................129