Some women love pornography, but I’m not one of them. Porn’s nature seems to me to satisfy men’s needs, and not the needs of women. (Admittedly, this deserves its own discussion, which isn’t going to happen here.) I’ve already owned up publicly, in previous posts, to being a prude and proud of it, so for those who might be offended by people who don’t love porn, I suggest you not read what follows.
Whenever I see porn — which isn’t very often, mind you, unless I happen to, pardon the expression, bump into it, it strikes me as ridiculous. I respond this way whether I encounter the high-art porn of Robert Mapplethorpe, his face turned around to leer slyly at the viewer, all the while with a bullwhip up his butt, or the low art porn of bored actors grinding methodically away on the Robin Byrd Show. Porn is a feeble, worn-out form of sex. Porn actors always seem to be acting, and their faces (not that anyone really cares) are hilarious. Watching porn seems a lot like observing sea anemones globbing onto one another before ending up in a messy, throbbing (sorry) entanglement of icky, slimy tentacles. But then again, I’m a woman.
I’m aware that almost all men practice self-gratification and use pornography to heighten the sensation. Moreover, out of respect for the First Amendment (I am absolutely certain that the Founding Fathers obsessed for hours over how to protect man’s right to watch porn), and because I have a basic conviction that I should adhere to a philosophy of live and let live unless directly threatened by someone, I try not to get too worked up about porn. If someone gets off on it (so to speak), that’s his (or her) business.
Recently, some have been getting their undies in a bundle (that definitely happens in some porn flicks) over the display of pornography in public. For example, following their chancellor’s recommendation, the University of Maryland’s Board of Regents declined this past week to set a pornography policy for its 11 campuses. Banning pornographic films on campuses, first proposed by a Republican state legislator, would have made the University unique among American universities. But the chancellor and Regents decided, rightly, I think, that the First Amendment was awfully powerful here, and trumped any putative taxpayer disgust with porn flicks being shown on college campuses.
In another example of the increasing presence of pornography in public places, The Washington Post ran a story on people watching porn movies while on planes, trains, and buses. The porn-hungry now think nothing of flipping open their laptops, or even peering into their tiny iPod screens to watch tiny people doing tiny sexual acts. The problem is that people who happen to be sitting next to or even near the porn-hungry, who have nowhere else to go if all the seats are taken, and who themselves don’t want to see porn images, can’t escape them. Secondhand porn, it turns out, is steadily sneaking into our lives.
I’ve heard said that a hefty 20 percent of Internet traffic at any given time (during the day, no less!) is taken up with pornography. Wow. Hmmm. I have a hunch that lying beneath (oops yet again) those top windows laden with stats and statistics in the research departments of many an investment house on Wall Street, or — should I say it? — in many an office in our colleges and universities, is a fair amount of porn.
I wonder if prehistoric man loved porn. Anthropologists tell us that the presence of erotic images and statues in such places as ancient Crete mean no more than that people long ago yearned for fertility — the last thing on the mind of any modern man whose eyes are glued to laptop or iPod porn. Besides, it seems hard to imagine that after a hard day spent inventing the wheel, a man would come home to huddle in a corner with his pornographic cave paintings. There just plain wasn’t enough light.
Last night, sitting alone in the back of a cab while stuck in (oops again) traffic at the corner of Houston and Crosby, I had firsthand experience of secondhand porn. Out the cab window loomed the largest billboard I’ve ever seen in my life, lit by a gazillion kilowatts directly and continuously sucked out of (ohmigosh, oops again) the northeast grid. At the top was a one-word message, from Calvin Klein, one of our fiery engines of capitalism: “Underwear.” Beneath lay a young man in skimpy drawers nestling a young woman (un)dressed in transparent bra and panties, with her legs … heck, I’ll let you use your imagination. But picture panties the size of Nebraska to understand the scale of the thing.
OK, so the billboard wasn’t outright porn in the “I-know-it-when-I-see it” way that the late Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography. Can’t I just lighten up and enjoy a bit of sex in the public sphere? I suppose I am indeed a prude for objecting.
Yet as I sat there in the cab, closing my eyes against the hot and white bright light, occasionally looking up to confirm that the image was indeed what I thought I’d seen the first time I glanced at it, I couldn’t help but think what a sorry, sad, and dreary public life modern man has made for himself.
18 Responses to Secondhand Porn
22238751 - November 16, 2009 at 9:18 am
Harry Potter was never Chief Justice, at least not in the Muggle world. The “I know it when I see it” line is from Associate Justice Potter Stewart.
uconnche - November 16, 2009 at 9:51 am
Yes, it seems that teen idols must get increasingly provocative in order for their career to transition into adulthood—sad commentary on our public life.
laro1470 - November 16, 2009 at 9:58 am
Since this author has written articles on Nudes, Nudes, Nudes and Clevage and the F word, methinks she protests porn and sex a little too much. I’m not a psychologist but I suspect she really likes to write about this stuff, if you know what I mean…
dank48 - November 16, 2009 at 10:29 am
What the ancient Athenians objected to about Diogenes the Cynic was not that he urinated, defecated, and masturbated, which wasn’t terribly newsworthy; what bothered them was that he did all that in public. I have no idea how much time most people or some people or the average person spends with pornography (or smut or erotica, depending on whether one likes the particular instantiation), or how that would compare with past generations. My guess is that easy availability means more time spent with it, up to the point where one’s interest is saturated. So far as that’s concerned, other people’s business is their business, not mine. Personally, I’d rather live in this rude, vulgar, crass, mannerless society than in one so repressed that e.g. sanitary products are available in your choice of blue or green unmarked boxes. (I still don’t know which were which.) Or one so incredibly ignorant of sex that “strict Freudians” were still trying to promote the founder’s looney-toon notion of two kinds of female orgasm.On the other hand, not every human activity is appropriate to the public sphere. I’ve always admired Judith Martin’s formulation: “Miss Manners has never confused a sense of privacy with a sense of shame.” If someone wants to get pierced or tattooed or whatever, fine. But please, please, please: I have the right not to look at it. Play with it inside.
akafka - November 16, 2009 at 10:29 am
Hi, 22238751. FYI, Professor Fendrich fixed Potter Stewart’s name very quickly, but there was a delay in regenerating the page. Thanks for keeping tabs on us, though!Best,Alex, an editor at Brainstorm
dank48 - November 16, 2009 at 11:51 am
On the other hand, who buys all those cookbooks? Who reads cookbook recipes without the slightest intention of cooking that stuff? I’ve looked at a few cookbooks in my time, in search of such information as how hot the oven should be for baked beans or how many teaspoons there are in an ounce. One might be forgiven for such formulations as:sex:men::food:womensex:women::food:menThat seems clear enough. Now, could someone please explain makeup, nail polish, and all those damn shoes?
11159995 - November 16, 2009 at 1:53 pm
It’s an interesting question whether we should worry a lot about being exposed to overt public displays of sexuality as we do about, say, exposure to second-hand smoke, which has been proven to be harmful to one’s health. I use that phraseology because Dr. Fendrich herself fudges the issue of pornography with her example of the large billboard, which wouldn’t seem to be any more pornographic than many of the ads featuring half-naked people in provocative poses that fill the pages of a lot of popular magazines on our newsstands. In fact, of course, this is a sex-saturated society that remains yet curiously Puritanical in many of its attitudes toward sex, and this ambivalence echoes in Dr. Fendrich’s own article, which applauds prudery of a sort while also being chock full of not so thinly disguised sexual innuendos. I confess I don’t spend much time being concerned about how adults may or may not be offended by unwilling exposure to any types of sexual material, pornographic or not, but I do worry about the effects on our youth of exposure to the crasser forms of really hard-core pornography that exists to feed practically any imaginable human fetish. The Internet seems to be awash in freely available pornography, and so some of our youth think nothing about taking nude photos of themselves and sharing it with “friends” via social networking sites or cell phones. There probably is some connection between the two. And one wonders how distorted a view of sexuality our youth might acquire by fixating on online pornography as some kind of norm of human sexual behavior. Since they no doubt view pornography furtively, without parental involvement or advice, who is to tell them what is normal and what not? And, indeed, one wonders what long-term effect such early exposure might have to the changing construal of what is deemed normal among adults. How does our society address this problem without extending controls over publication beyond what the First Amendment allows?
dogood1776 - November 16, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I know what the courts have decided, but to anyone with common sense, pornography is not speech. The First Amendment was established to ensure the freedom of political dissent. Pornography has nothing to do with dissent. The bottom line is, society has a right to regulate public behavior. If the majority of people do not want to see certain things displayed in public, the majority should have a right to establish laws that prevent that display. Again, I want to make this one point clear – political dissent is not behavior that should be regulated. Public display of sex is.
clrelay - November 16, 2009 at 2:46 pm
@8 — “Freedom of Speech” has always been for more than political speech. It has always been for artistic, expressive, and even (to a more limited extent) commercial speech as well. Indeed, it is *precisely* about the limit of the majority to regulate and suppress the behavior of the minority.
minnesotan - November 16, 2009 at 2:48 pm
For someone who is apparently offended by porn, you obviously have no qualms about lewd sexual remarks. Consider how talking lewdly in a public forum compares to forcing people to see, smell, touch, or taste something sexually offensive, Laurie.
bking1000 - November 16, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Personally, I will continue to post to forums and other locations lamenting the saturation of porn in our culture. It’s degrading to all people, generally makes men less sensitive to women, and is documented as addicting. Sex as a natural act but is also a powerful drug (or, more technically, releases powerful drugs to our brains). This drug is being used by marketers to control our attention. It’s odd to me that many people on the left who generally disdain marketers and the manipulation of thought, seem so quick to defend porn, even with its manipulative effects. (Porn defenders on the right are a little more open about their desire for all types of self-gratification.)But, of course, there will always be the response “if you don’t like it, don’t look at it” to which this article clearly addresses the issue — it’s gotten so bad, that second-hand porn is difficult to avoid.
goxewu - November 16, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Re #10:First, Prof. Fendrich isn’t “offended” by porn. She uses the word in regard to people who are “offended” by people who don’t love porn. Second, what’s “lewd” in the post? The Mapplethorpe description is simply matter-of-fact (“a device for punishment rectally inserted” would be perferable?), and the “tentacles” passage is abstract. (Anyway, human beings don’t really have tentacles.) And regard to the billboard, she said she’d let readers use their imaginations. (Perhaps “transparent bra and panties” was too much of a spur for minnesotan.) Myself, I thought Prof. Fendrich was a little too decorous about the topic.Third, there’s a difference between a giant billboard and an unillustrated blog post in terms of “forcing” something sexually offensive on people. There are certainly enough warning signs–starting with the post’s very title–so that an unsuspecting minnesotan might have avoided encountering the post’s alleged lewdness. Minnesotan reminds me of the old joke about the lady who calls the police about the young couple’s visible sexual activity in the apartment across the street: when the cop says he can’t see anything, she says, “Sure you can–if you just stand on the couch and use my opera glasses.”
22232967 - November 16, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Is Pornography the New Tobacco?By Mary Eberstadt http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/41599902.html
blue_state_academic - November 17, 2009 at 5:53 am
@8 – “If the majority of people do not want to see certain things displayed in public, the majority should have a right to establish laws that prevent that display.”So if the majority of people don’t want to see an interracial couple walking hand in hand down the street, because they are offended by it, they should have a right to establish laws that prohibit it? Oh, please — go back and read the court decisions that have broadened “speech” as defined in the first amendment to include a variety of forms of expression. A democracy does not mean that the majority rules without any constraints placed upon it.
minnesotan - November 17, 2009 at 11:38 am
I didn’t realize interpreting double entendre was beyond your abilities, Goxewu. Oh, well. Way to argue your point through insult, yet again.
goxewu - November 17, 2009 at 4:15 pm
If having the slats knocked out from under each of his feeble arguments (“offended,” “lewd,” “forcing people”) constitutes an insult to minnesotan, well…
pbgough - November 18, 2009 at 4:01 pm
This post itself seems to me to be an apt response to a kind of speech that Laurie finds disturbing. The best answer to nearly all kinds of speech — whether political, expressive or commercial — is almost always more speech that engages what is troubling about the original speech. So if you’re disturbed by pornography or by the outlandish implications (not quite promises) made in, say, commercial advertising for pharaceuticals, then public comment and criticism should be the response that’s both accepted and expected by those on the left and on the right. It preserves everyone’s right to expression, the advertiser’s, the pornographer’s, and the citizens.Our constitution, as amended and interpreted over the years, is an admirable document indeed. I’m glad it lets all of us have our say, even if I don’t appreciate the tone of some comments.
blue_state_academic - December 4, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Most of the discussion (at least in the popular media, or here) about porn focuses on an individual watching it. But many couples – gay, straight, lesbian, or whatever – enjoy porn together, and use it to enhance their relationship or explore behaviors or feelings they wouldn’t otherwise experience. If Professor Fendrich thought about the role of porn in this way, she may have a different perspective on it.