Okay okay, this will be my last post on this subject, I hope. In a book review of Robert Jensen’s "Getting Off" from Sex in the Public Square, a community of blogs which describes itself as "working to expand the space available for discussions of all aspects of sexuality, so that participants in democratic community life can be fully seen and recognized, can share information, and can become more educated and informed," a poster named "Chris" takes aim at Jensen as disingenuous and as someone whose definitions of not only porn but gender itself don’t even vaguely reflect the multi-identititied sexual landscape of today:
It’s this failure of honesty that lies at the heart of Getting Off’s failure to be the radical treatise that Jensen intends it to be. Nothing about Getting Off deserves to be called radical. It’s just old wine poured into a not-so-new bottle.
Jensen starts immediately with some sleight-of-hand regarding pornography. In explaining where he wants to go with the book, he says very specifically that he’s going to focus on a textual analysis of the content of mass-produced heterosexual pornography. In short, the main product of good old Porn Valley. In itself, that seems like a fair strategy. It wouldn’t be illegitimate for a literary critic to write a book focusing on post-war hard-boiled fiction instead of writing about every subgenre of mystery fiction from The Murders in the Rue Morgue to Carl Hiassen’s latest. But we would expect such an author to draw conclusions about the style of Jim Thompson vs. Raymond Chandler — not about Arthur Conan Doyle’s place in Victorian culture. The conclusions that Jensen draws from his narrow survey, in contrast, are sweeping in nature about how sexually explicit imagery affects our views of ourselves and others. Jensen’s conclusions are not a critique about the mentality of Porn Valley, or of the specific kinds of porn that Porn Valley specializes in, but are an assault on porn as a genre. Porn isn’t a good thing made bad by greedy and stupid people. It’s just rotten to the core.
Thirty years ago, Jensen might have been able to get away with that. Both the production and the audience for porn were more homogenized before every American home was equipped first with a VCR and then with a PC linked up to the Internet. More importantly, the conversation about genders and sexualities was much more homogenized. In those days, there were men and there were women; there were gays and there were straights. But some remarkable things have happened in the last twenty years or so; sexual politics has become radicalized in a way that Jensen and his ideological allies couldn’t have imagined back then, and seem unable to appreciate even now when they’re staring those radical notions straight in the face. We’re now faced with the notion that gender isn’t just x and y, but z or xy or yz *x or any number of other combinations. The notion of orientation as binary and immutable is considered by many of us not only as antiquated but repressive. Sex workers now demand the right to call themselves feminist without calling themselves victims of their work. Queer and feminist activists now look at power play of all kinds as a part their sexuality that enhances, rather than opposes, their radical politics. And women actively create and critique porn, not just for men, but for themselves.
