Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

10: Conclusion

10 Conclusion Pornographication and the Explosion of the Pornographic In this book, I have explored a somewhat counterintuitive idea; the idea that sex has, to a certain extent, been displaced within contemporary perceptions of the pornographic. That which is signified by the word “porn” has, I have demonstrated, undergone something of a slippage.1 It is not simply a matter of adult entertainment having achieved a greater degree of visibility or having expanded into new cultural territories, but is in fact a matter of a more profound and perverse adjustment in popular understanding , whereby transgression, intense affect, prurient interest, and the real are rendered sufficiently central to conceptualizations of porn that they are seen as capable of displacing—or even replacing—the seemingly crucial element of sexual explicitness. The arguments advanced in Beyond Explicit may arouse certain issues, however. Widened understandings of the pornographic may not simply effect the usefulness or meaningfulness of the concept within popular discourse,2 but may prove dangerous if incorporated into a legal context. As Laurence O’Toole notes in his discussion of attempts to reform the United Kingdom’s Obscene Publications Act, certain anti-censorship activists have come to believe that “fuzzy legislation founded on openended definitions is actually preferred, to make it a catch-all kind of prohibition . Thus considerable extensions in the activities of the police, trading officers and Customs are apportioned” (147). The broad, indistinct usage of “porn”—at both the linguistic and the conceptual levels—may therefore 181 182 Beyond Explicit risk playing into the hands of those who would restrict the circulation of certain forms of representation; if sexually explicit material has long been at risk for being positioned as obscene, then to align other types of representation with the idea of pornography may risk rendering a great swathe of material more vulnerable to attempts at censorship. To be loose in our definition of porn may also be to invite or to make possible the emergence of “catch-all” legislation. A key issue with the explosion of the pornographic is that cultural objects that are not works of adult entertainment get dragged into the genre’s orbit in a manner that can result in unwelcome political and social side effects. This was demonstrated in Chapter 6 in relation to the socalled “pornographic” images at the center of 2004’s Abu Ghraib scandal. In the case of these images, it may not simply be that sex is displaced, but that other cultural anxieties are also displaced onto sex. As per Anne McClintock’s remarks, in the “storm of moral agitation about our pornography and our loss of the moral high ground” (“Paranoid Empire” 63), the torture was to some extent domesticated and rendered banal. Clarissa Smith makes a similar point, suggesting that to label the tortures pornographic “reduces the very real harms done to prisoners by US soldiers to individuals acting under the supposed influence of sexually explicit representations” (“Pornographication” 107). In the essay just cited, Smith also raises a number of points about the idea of pornographication—a term that applies to the seemingly increased influence and visibility of adult entertainment in contemporary society. She argues that the discourse surrounding pornographication is too “saturated in the languages and references of concern and regulation” to be a useful critical tool (“Pornographication” 104), and suggests that the term frequently exploits “the condemnatory potential of the associations with pornography” (“Pornographication” 104). She asserts the following: Those who use the term pornographication do so precisely so that they can avoid any of the particularities of sexually explicit media. The obviousness of the term should alert us to the ways in which pornographication is not something that can be “discovered,” “uncovered” and “challenged,” but instead it is a means of ensuring that behaviors, practices and actions can be labeled and assessed as problematic without addressing specific issues relating to their history, production and consumption ; and that can suggest “solutions” which are both 183 Conclusion intensely political and denuded of real politics at the same time. (“Pornographication” 106) What Smith suggests in this essay is that pornographication’s usefulness as a concept is dramatically limited by the negative connotations attached to the idea of pornography itself. Even if one does not employ the term pornographication expressly in order to denounce the increased visibility of sex, the associations of the term make it a particularly useful discourse for the censorious. For those hostile toward...