"Frenzy of the visible," Indeed!

When I first published my book on hard-core pornography in 1989 (Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible, ¹ ) I was talked out of including pictures by my editor and the press. At that time books with pictures about sex in movies tended to be rather exploitative—just an excuse to bring together the pictures. The press wished to avoid that stigma and so eschewed illustration altogether. Indeed, that edition had everything it could to make the book look safe, including a cover that gave the title soft pink lettering. I succumbed to the press s wishes though I especially lamented the loss of a whole series of images from Eadweard Muybridge s Animal Locomotion around which I had built careful arguments. What was worse was that in this book s very pages I then had the bad faith to defend myself with the following argument: there is no getting around the ability of such images, especially if quoted out of context, to leap off the page to move viewers and thus to prove too facilely whatever truths of sex seem most immediately apparent. Rather than run that risk, I wrote with what now seems to me to be a very false nobility: I forgo the luxury of illustration. I note, however, that nearly all the feature-length hard-core films, and some compilations of stag films, are readily available for rental in the adult sections of many video outlets. ²

Even then I knew better. I knew that it was important to run the risk of readers and students experiencing the pleasures and/or the shock that such images are designed to elicit. Already, in this very same book I had cited the emboldening example of the beautiful magazine called Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship.³ Part feminist tract against censorship with a number of lively polemical essays and part porn magazine for women with a mix of old and new dirty pictures, ranging from turn-of-the century French postcards to contemporary bondage and domination, lesbian and gay explicit images, it was a beautifully produced collage that titillated at one moment, shocked at another, and mixed the experience of being caught looking at the images. It was interspersed with provocative essays by Kate Ellis, Barbara O Dair, Abby Tallmer, Pat Califia, Lisa Duggan, and others. This new kind of dirty picture magazine was my model for a new kind of feminist writing about moving-image pornography that could counter the horror chambers of the Women Against Pornography slide shows of that era. I deeply regret that I did not find a way to do something similar—to use the sheer diversity of bodies and images to open up possibilities for thinking about pornography.

Not every word written about pornography needs to be illustrated. It would be as false to force unnecessary illustration as it is to avoid it. But if we are going to do scholarship about pornography, and if we are going to teach pornography, then it seems self-evident that there are times when it is necessary to show the images of which we speak and to run the risk that the images will do what they aim to do: arouse, disgust, amuse, and even malign. Let me cite one example out of many possible. In 1998 the World Conference on Pornography positively brimmed over with pornographic videos, photos, and lithographs. Though wildly uneven and all-too-often simply celebratory of the existence of pornographies, it was a diverse, lively hodgepodge that impressed by the sheer variety of approaches, legal, economic, sexological, textual, historical, etc. I gave a talk and, in keeping with my newfound resolution not to avoid images or clips when I spoke about pornography, I showed slides with it. When I was informed that I could not include these images in the published version of the talk, and that, indeed, there would be no images of a hard core nature published in the proceedings of that conference, I withdrew my contribution. Where I had once foregone the luxury of illustration I now forewent the luxury of publication...