Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

Part I: Feminism, Pornography, Transgression

Part I Feminism, Pornography, Transgression This section contends that there is a clear clustering of issues detectable in contemporary responses to pornography, with certain key ideas suggesting and feeding off of one another in a manner that makes them difficult to disentangle. Specifically, there is an evident assumption that there is an organically occurring link between the concepts of the transgressive, the pornographic, and the feminist. We find something resembling this linkage in Porn Studies, with theorists frequently making a case for the significance of the genre of pornography by depicting it as oppositional to the values and standards of mainstream patriarchal culture. Laura Kipnis, for example, suggests that “Pornography provides a realm of transgression that is, in effect, a counter-aesthetics to dominant norms for bodies, sexualities, and desire itself” (“How to Look at Pornography” 121), and Constance Penley argues that “porn and its white trash kin seem our best allies in a cultural wars insurgency that makes camp in that territory beyond the pale” (328). The author and sex therapist Marty Klein, meanwhile, suggests that the “revolutionary implications of empowering people sexually challenge the cultural status quo” (254), and even goes so far as to state: Pornography’s truths are subversive because they claim that people can empower themselves and create their own erotic norms. Political structures just hate when ideas or cultural products empower people. This is the recurring lesson of Copernicus, Guttenberg, Margaret Sanger, Lenny Bruce, and Timothy Leary. (254) 17 18 Beyond Explicit It is easy to appreciate the motivations behind this kind of celebratory account of pornography, even if we do reject the suggestion that its “truths” have the same kind of revolutionary import as the thinking of Copernicus. The limitations of analyses that set out to exalt pornography for its transgressive potential are obvious, however. By suggesting that porn’s transgressions liberate “exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, from mainstream culture and political discourse” (Kipnis, “How to Look at Pornography” 120), they encourage a largely uncritical understanding of transgression as a straightforwardly useful tool for feminism and liberal left-wing politics. This risks producing a partial and somewhat one-sided conceptualization of transgression as that which only ever violates the oppressive norms and rigid demands of heteronormative society. Transgression, of course, does not operate with this kind of politically correct fastidiousness. As Paasonen notes, contemporary pornography can be viewed as a genre in which “irreverence to social codes regulating appropriate behavior is rather programmatic and [. . .] the attraction of porn stems from its ability to disturb such codes. In other words, the incorrect becomes somewhat dogmatic” (“Repetition and Hyperbole” 69). Indeed, as is seen throughout this book, many pornographic texts appear to rely precisely on the flouting of those taboos surrounding the ethical, respectful, and appropriate treatment of others— such as taboos against sexual violence, underage sex, and the perpetuation of sexist and racist stereotypes—for much of their transgressive force.1 In addition to this failure to engage with the many possible objects and directions of transgression as it operates within pornographic discourse , many of the more simplistically “porn-positive” accounts tend to ignore the complex manner in which transgression and taboo necessarily interpenetrate—the fact that transgression “presupposes the existing order, the apparent maintenance of norms under which energy accumulates thereby making transgression necessary” (Klossowski 19). The importance of this co-dependence is made plain by such influential studies as Georges Bataille’s Eroticism, in which the author remarks, “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63). In other words, the act of transgression actually reinforces the taboo that it violates because it depends on this taboo for its own subversive energy—indeed, for its very existence as transgression. As Bataille states: If we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it. But in the act of violating it we feel the anguish of the mind without which the taboo could not exist: that is the experience of sin. That experience leads to the completed 19 Feminism, Pornography, Transgression transgression, the successful transgression which, in maintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit by it. (Eroticism 38) He makes a similar case in relation to periods of carnival or festival, stating that such periods represent “the cessation of work, the unrestrained consumption of its products and the deliberate violation of the most hallowed...