The bulk of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, which Jamie and I have been writing about for the last week or so, is devoted to describing the nature of contemporary pornography in such a descriptive, unsparing, unrelenting way that by the end it becomes almost impossible to pretend that there’s anything redeeming about the industry. All of the post-feminist, “pro-sex,” porn-as-empowerment arguments made by various people, most of them industry veterans, melt into air after reading so many pages about double anals, gang bangs, bang buses, money shots, cream pies, and cleveland steamers (okay, he doesn’t really talk about cleveland steamers).
Jensen is problematic for me, however, in two ways. One of them, which I’ll address in a later post, involves his commandments as to what men should do about pornography (in short: don’t use it, don’t talk about it except in a critical way, don’t laugh at misogynistic jokes, scold the tellers of misogynistic jokes and call out the men who dominate or subordinate women in any form, volunteer with or give money to feminist organizations).
The other objection I have to him is of more of a visceral nature. It has to do with his tone, and with the way he says certain things, that just rub me the wrong way, and make me think not only that he’s someone whose judgment on complex matters of human motivation and inter-relation I simply can’t trust.
He writes, for instance:
My sexual imagination was in part shaped by the use of pornography. I still have in my head vivid recollections of specific scenes in pornographic films I saw 25 years ago. To the degree possible, I try to eliminate those images when I am engaging in sexual activity today (whether alone or with my partner), and I think I’m pretty successful at it.
Or there’s this one:
One of the common discussions men have—and one that perplexed me even before I had any critical consciousness around these issues—is about what kind of bodies and body parts they like and what specific sex acts they enjoy. Men frequently say things such as “I like women with big breasts.” Others will say they like small breasts. ? This goes beyond objectifying a person; it’s the process by which men turn women into body parts.
I know there are psychoanalytic theories about fetishes that will explain objectification, if only I would take more time to understand them, or perhaps if only I were sophisticated enough to understand them. I’ve tried, but in the end I still come back to a sense that there is something dangerous about the process. As a person, I find something sad about it.
I don’t want to take the easy path here, and just dismiss Jensen for being a prude who not only polices his own thoughts when he’s jerking off, but who can’t bring himself to acknowledge, even in the presence of , say, Beyonce, that he’s a bit of an ass man.
The sins of which he tries to purge himself—misogyny, sexual objectification—aren’t the most popular targets in our porno-licious culture at the moment, but his basic moral-psychological operating principle is probably the dominant one of our political discourse. He believes that if something is bad to do, then it’s bad, or destructive, to think about doing it without, at a minimum, feeling pretty guilty about it a second or two later.
If it’s bad to exploit damaged women in the making of pornography, which most of us agree that it is, then it’s bad not only to use that pornography, but to masturbate to it 10 years later.
Or to frame it in terms that are more comfortable to, say, pro-war conservatives, if it’s bad for American soldiers to die in Iraq, then it’s bad for liberals, even in the privacy of their own thoughts, to wish that American casualties got high enough to push the American public to demand an end to the war.
Or to go another way, if it’s bad to act in a racist fashion—to deny someone a job on the basis of their race, for instance—then it’s bad to think racist thoughts.
My beef with Jensen, and with my hypothetical pro-war conservatives and anti-racist liberals, is that I don’t agree. I don’t think it’s wrong, in any meaningful way, to have a racist thought, or to wish for the death of abstract soldiers in a way that could have no possible effect on actual soldiers. I don’t think it’s wrong to be an ass man, or to jerk the gherkin to memories of Tera Patrick.
As these thoughts or reactions migrate from the purely private to the semi-public to the entirely public, they grow increasingly objectionable. It’s not great , perhaps, to pay for porn, and it’s worse to produce it. But to think about it isn’t bad. And for that matter, it isn’t always right to call out a friend for being racist, and it’s not necessarily wrong to sexually objectify a woman. Sometimes the way to help a friend see the light, racially, is to be a model of enlightenment, not a scourge of racism. Sometimes a woman wants to be objectified, because her fantasies involve being treated like a sexual object.
These things are complicated, as our friend Freud (whose theories Jensen doesn’t have the time or inclination to absorb) taught us. And speaking to them in a way that doesn’t deal with that complexity can’t, it seems to me, show us a way out of our morass.
