Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (17 page)

It is a crucial part of my argument that Zach can see sex as bound up with love
for him
without condemning all casual sex. He can imagine, and even enjoy the thought of, casual sex between “Zach” and Jenna. This directly contradicts John Finnis’s claim that attaching the appropriate significance to marital sex requires “one’s conscience’s complete exclusion of non-marital sex acts from the range of acceptable and valuable human options.”
⁵
Finnis argues that viewing casual sex as permissible involves “a present, albeit conditional willingness” to engage in casual sex. If casual sex is good for others, then universalizability implies that it would be good for me if I were in the same circumstances.
⁶
But my monogamous relationship involves seeing sex in a particular way, which rules out any willingness, even conditional willingness, to have casual sex. Finnis concludes that monogamous partners must see casual sex as
generally
impermissible, impermissible for all.

Nonetheless, I think it is possible for monogamous partners to attach significance to sex, the kind of significance that rules out casual sex
for them
, while seeing casual sex as acceptable, or even good, for others. For a monogamous couple, sex is connected to love
because
of the role it plays in the relationship. For those who are not in such relationships, sex need not be connected to love. The monogamous couple can recognize and endorse these other approaches to sex, without undermining their own understanding of sex as something emotionally significant
for them
. The ground for the partners’ rejection of casual sex is their relationship. Willingness to engage in casual sex that is conditional on the absence of this ground is very different from current willingness to have casual sex. Current willingness to have casual sex involves being willing to have casual sex while in a relationship in which sex is understood as an act with deep emotional significance.This implicitly undermines the significance of the sex in the relationship in a way that can be deeply hurtful to the other. Conditional willingness to have casual sex does not undermine the significance that the relationship bestows upon sex.

I have argued that solo use of pornography, even if it involves fantasizing about sex with the model and even if it is utterly loveless, need not undermine the emotional significance of sex within the relationship. However, masturbation, with or without pornography, may not be quite as loveless and lacking in significance as some might think. As Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer puts it, “Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”
⁷

We have, I hope, left behind the days when masturbation was feared to be physically harmful, turning boys blind and causing hairy palms, but there is still a tendency to look down on masturbation. Some still see it as emotionally harmful, fostering a selfish or base attitude to sex. At best, it is seen as a method for releasing sexual tension when the preferable option – sex with your partner – is unavailable. However, I claim that masturbation has a valuable role to play in a person’s sexual life and that solo use of pornography is a particularly effective type of masturbation for playing this role.

Masturbation, particularly when coupled with fantasy, is a personal sexual exploration. It enables one to make discoveries about both one’s body and one’s mind. By exploring one’s body, one can find out what sensations one enjoys, which areas of one’s body are particularly sensitive. Fantasy allows us to explore the sexual side of our minds, which ideas and images we finds arousing.

Pornography or erotica can be a great resource for such exploration. First, and most obviously, pornography can provide the stimulus to get things started – the erotic image is a springboard from which one’s imagination can leap. Additionally, pornography might make accessible sexual alternatives which one had never thought about before. Wendy McElroy observes, “Pornography provides women with a real sense of what is sexually available to them: masturbation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sex with a stranger, in a group, with the same sex.. . . It has been called ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Sexual Galaxy.’”
⁸
It increases the range of options available for fantasy, so the woman is not limited by her own imagination. As well as simply increasing the available options, pornography also helps to make the fantasy more vivid. We can vicariously experience the depicted situations. We acquire a sense of how the situation feels and of our response to it.

Such sexual exploration can be good for relationships. As magazines for young women often remind us, a good groundwork of solo sexual exploration makes it far easier to know what to do and what to ask for during sex with a partner. Masturbation brings with it an understanding of the physical stimuli to which each partner’s body responds best, which can be used to help the partners please each other. Partners may also try out ideas suggested to them by erotic material. For this, it is important that the partners be given space to perform such explorations on their own. Solo exploration allows us to discover our reactions to certain fantasies without commitment.We are able to stop whenever we wish, or to continue as far as we want, without worrying about disappointing or discomforting our partner.

But more than this, personal exploration and enjoyment of one’s own sexuality is valuable in itself. Masturbation is an important part of a person’s proper relationship to their sexuality. In part, this is a matter of self-knowledge and self-understanding: how can a person truly endorse their sexuality if they have not explored it fully? In part, it is a matter of lavishing positive attention on one’s own body, focused on one’s own pleasure. Masturbation will never be a substitute for sexual intercourse. It lacks the shared intimacy, the action and reaction that characterises sex with a partner. Nonetheless, masturbation has its own good points. In sexual intercourse, when done properly, each partner is always at least partially focused on the other, concerned to ensure the other’s pleasure, responsive to the other’s needs. In masturbation, the agent focuses on their own pleasure.This licence to be totally self-centered (without being selfish) can enable the agent to find a type of satisfaction that may not be available with a partner. Additionally, the acceptance that it is alright to focus on one’s own pleasure in this way, that one’s own pleasure is something worth pursuing, is part of self-acceptance.

Masturbation plays an important role in a cluster of aspects of a healthy sexuality: self-focused sexual pleasure, understanding and acceptance of one’s sexuality, the exploration of new sexual techniques and experiences. Pornography is a useful tool, helping masturbation to fulfil these various roles. We thus have reason to reject the extended version of monogamy which forbids the solo use of pornography.As I argued above, there are significant differences between solo use of pornography and casual sex. Forbidding casual sex need not imply forbidding solo use of pornography. The fact that solo use of pornography can play a valuable role in a person’s sex life gives us reason to choose the weaker version of monogamy – monogamy that forbids casual sex but not pornography.

However, Kelly might object to Zach’s use of pornography for reasons other than a supposed violation of monogamy. She might say that Zach’s use of pornography reveals something about Zach that undermines their relationship. Zach is not the man that she thought she knew. She is hurt by the attitude towards women that is displayed by his use of pornography.

Zach is supposed to be in a loving sexual relationship with Kelly, a relationship based on equal respect. Even if, as I argued earlier, we do not necessarily wish to act out our fantasies personally, sexual enjoyment is a kind of endorsement. It involves seeing what is depicted as desirable. Thus, if Zach is turned on by degrading pictures of women, if his sexual enjoyment is rooted in the mistreatment, subjugation, or objectification of women, his relationship with Kelly is undermined. This is in part because, as Thomas Scanlon notes, there is something unsatisfactory about a personal relationship, be it love or friendship, with someone who does not recognize your independent moral standing.
⁹
A truly loving relationship with a woman requires appropriate respect for women in general. If Zack sees women as less than persons, he must see Kelly as less than a person. He may think that as
his woman
she should be treated with respect, but he does not recognize her status as a person in her own right. In the case of degrading pornography, there is an additional threat. Sex plays an important role in Kelly and Zach’s relationship. As his lover, she has particular reason to be concerned with the way Zach relates to women sexually. If Zach finds sexual enjoyment in the degradation of women, this casts a disturbing light on his sexual intercourse with Kelly. She may find it impossible to forget, impossible to relate to him in the same way.

Alice Walker’s protagonist in “Porn” has this kind of reaction to her lover’s pornography collection of “page after page of women . . . bound, often gagged. Their legs open. Forced to their knees.” Later, the couple try to make love. Walker describes the woman’s visceral reaction in two words: “She gags.” After seeing this other side to her lover’s sexuality, his enjoyment of material she finds “disgusting,” “sleazy,” and “depressing,” she can no longer make love with him.
¹⁰

Some people enjoy sadomasochism or bondage and dominance, often as part of a loving relationship. They claim that, when properly understood, these activities need not involve objectionable attitudes to others. For the purposes of this essay I do not need to debate this issue. All I want to argue is that
if
the pornography used endorses objectionable attitudes to women
then
this will have significant ramifications for the supposedly loving sexual relationship. Some types of pornography are objectionable in this way; anyone who finds them sexually arousing has failed to recognize women as persons. Andrea Dworkin describes a series of photographs of “a woman slicing her breasts with a knife, sticking a sword up her vagina.”
¹¹
Erotic pleasure based on serious harm, on terror, on torture, is incompatible with a loving relationship. Whether more nuanced forms of dominance and pain-play have the same implications, I leave a deliberately open question. Nonetheless, where it is reasonable for the consumer’s partner to interpret pornography as misogynistic, it is reasonable for her to object, to challenge the consumer to explain why things are not as they appear. There is a tension in the requirement that the consumer defend his turn-ons to his partner; part of the value of private sexual fantasy is as a safe place to explore one’s sexuality without fear of consequences. Unfortunately, this tension, this compromise of sexual freedom, seems an inevitable result of the fact that in forming a loving sexual relationship with someone we give them a stake in our sexuality.

Does all pornography consumption involve objectionable attitudes towards women? Anti-porn feminists sometimes incorporate the mistreatment of women into the definition of pornography.According to Dworkin and MacKinnon, pornography “means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.”
¹²
Subjugating pornography is contrasted with empowering erotica. However, this does not seem to fit with ordinary language, in which almost any explicit “naughty” picture or book will be called “porn.”The word “erotica” has overtones of sepia photographs or prints, porn with pretentions of grandeur rather than a particularly good attitude to women. I think that we need a new term, a term for violent pornography, so that condemnation of this type of material is not taken to imply condemnation of all erotica. Whatever words we use, we should understand that erotic material can fully recognize, and be fully compatible with, the robust autonomous personhood of its subject. A woman (or a man) can be depicted as a sexual creature, in a sexual pose, without being degraded. Unless we think sexuality is itself degrading, why should we see sexual depiction as degrading?

I have argued that using pornography is not a form of cheating. The most reasonable norm of monogamy will not forbid the solo use of pornography. Solo use of pornography is not a kind of casual sex. It does not undermine the significance of sex within a relationship. Additionally, we have reason to adopt a norm that permits the solo use of pornography, because solo masturbation and fantasy play an important role in a good sexuality and pornography can be an important tool for this. Nonetheless, the use of some types of pornography can be a betrayal. The erotic endorsement of the degradation of women can undermine the supposedly equal loving sexual relationship. Some, but not all, pornography is objectionable in this way. Some erotic material portrays women as sexual subjects, enjoying and controlling their own sexuality. The use of such material is compatible with, and may indeed contribute to, a monogamous loving sexual relationship.

NOTES

1
We originally stated that the norm of monogamy restricts the number of loving sexual relationships to one. I have modified this to avoid ruling out masturbation prematurely. For as Dave Monroe pointed out to me, the restriction to a single loving relationship seems to rule out being in a loving relationship with oneself and in a loving relationship with another at the same time. Some relationship-based norms may forbid masturbation, but the commonsense norm of monogamy does not do so. Restrictions on masturbation would be based on the inappropriateness of self-directed sexual activity, rather than on the claim that loving oneself and loving another involves too many relationships of erotic love.