Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (6 page)

3
We assume that minors are not cognitively developed or informed enough to rationally decide to engage in sex with those older than them.

4
Again, we are not interested in deciding the source of those standards, such as desire-satisfaction, personal pleasure, and so forth. Our goal is not to elaborate a fully defended account of welfare, but we are convinced that whatever it is, it is essentially subjective.

5
Ron Amundson, “Disability, Ideology, and Quality of Life: A Bias in Biomedical Ethics,” in D. Wasserman et al. (eds.)
Quality of Life and the Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Healthcare and Disability
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110–13.

ANDREW ABERDEIN

CHAPTER 2

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The Interpenetration of Philosophy and Pornography

Have You Anything
Philosophical
?

Patrons of pre-revolutionary French bookshops who requested “livres philosophiques” did not receive what their modern counterparts would expect.As the book dealer Hubert Cazin explained to the officers holding him in the Bastille, the term was “a conventional expression in the book trade to characterize everything that is forbidden.”
¹
Research by historian Robert Darnton in the extensive archives of the eighteenth-century Swiss publisher Société typographique de Neuchâtel has shown that this use of “philosophical books” was widespread. The term encompassed categories of book we now keep separate: the irreligious, the seditious, the libelous, but above all the pornographic.

What should we make of this curious practice? An initial suspicion would be that Cazin and his colleagues were just trying to put the authorities off the scent. Satisfying the French appetite for clandestine literature was a risky endeavor, but lucrative for the determined and ingenious. One stratagem was to “marry” the unbound sheets of such material with sheets from blameless works, interleaving them to escape detection by customs officers.
²
Perhaps the euphemism “philosophical books” worked the same way – hiding the explicit and salacious in a tedious-sounding category censors would be quick to overlook. However, reality is considerably stranger. Firstly, many of the ideas which the French censor found too controversial were in some respect philosophical, such as challenges to the authority of the monarchy or the Catholic Church. But that does not explain the classification of overt pornography as philosophical. Secondly, although some of the works fit happily into modern categories, whether as respectable Enlightenment classics or disreputable libertine smut, many others are hopelessly hybridized: improbable marriages of philosophy and pornography.

Closer inspection of some individual works and their authors may make the situation clearer. Denis Diderot (1713–84) was one of the giants of the French Enlightenment. Best known as the principal editor and contributor of the
Encyclopédie
, a 35-volume treasury of scientifically and politically progressive thought, and as the author of works disseminating innovative philosophical ideas, he was also responsible for
Les Bijoux indiscrets
(1748).
³
This novel concerns one “Sultan Mangogul” (a thinly veiled caricature of Louis XV), who acquires a magic ring with which he may command women’s genitals to speak. The central conceit, that the women’s lower lips speak truths their upper lips disavow, is not original to Diderot, and may be traced back to the thirteenth-century fable “Le Chevalier Qui Fist Parler les Cons.”
⁴
Despite its apparent misogyny, this idea has been appropriated by feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray as a positive metaphor for the subtleties of female communication.
⁵
Diderot’s excursions into the erotic were not restricted to his youth. At the opposite end of his career he published
Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
(1772).This fictional work expands the description of Tahiti by the explorer Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (1729–1811) into a utopian vision of free love, and a powerful statement of the Enlightenment myth of the “noble savage”: that life in a state of nature would be free and blissful.

The philosophical writings of Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens (1704–71) were almost as numerous as those of Diderot, but are now little read. His principal claim to literary immortality may be
Thérèse philosophe
(1748), a sexually explicit work he never publicly acknowledged. The title translates as “Thérèse, Philosopher” and may allude to an early Enlightenment manifesto,
Le Philosophe
(1743),
⁶
attributed to César Chesneau Dumarsais (1676–1756) and later reworked by both Diderot and Voltaire. Dumarsais presents an ideal of the (male) philosopher: committed to reason, which he follows wherever it leads, impatient with religious superstition and conventional morality, conscious of how subject he is to external causes, but determined to understand their influence upon him. Argens’s novel concludes with a similar statement of Enlightenment values:

[W]e do not think as we like. The soul has no will, and is only influenced by the senses; that is to say by matter. Reason enlightens us, but cannot determine our actions. Self-love (the pleasure we hope for or the pain we try to avoid) is the motivating force for all our decisions. . . . There is no religion for God is sufficient unto Himself.
⁷

However, Thérèse acquires these insights from primarily sexual experience.Withdrawn from her convent by a mother concerned that celibacy is fatally weakening her constitution, she first seeks refuge with a celebrated divine, Father Dirrag, an anagrammatic allusion to Jean-Baptiste Girard (1680–1733), a Jesuit whose alleged seduction of a female pupil was a recent scandal. Dirrag is revealed to Thérèse as a hypocrite – she eavesdrops as he persuades a naive (or concupiscent) pupil, through materialist arguments masquerading as Christianity, to accept as spiritual exercises a series of increasingly sexual acts, culminating with an orgasm the pupil mistakes for a transport of religious ecstasy.Thérèse is rescued by a family friend, Mme C., who it transpires is cheerfully cohabiting with another priest, the Abbé T. Again, the still virginal but increasingly voyeuristic Thérèse observes them at close quarters, as they alternate between sexual and philosophical intercourse. Eventually, after an interlude conversing with a retired prostitute (a venerable theme, as we shall see), Thérèse finds contentment as the mistress of an intellectual count who bets his library against her virginity that she will be unable to spend two weeks reading the former without volunteering to surrender the latter.Thus, the textual and the sexual intermingle in the novel’s form and content.

By far the best known, indeed infamous, of French Enlightenment pornographers is Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). He is less well known as a philosopher. None of his publications are primarily philosophical in the twenty-first-century sense, although commentators have professed to extract significant philosophical content. This should not surprise – his works are similar in structure to
Thérèse philosophe
: explicit sex interrupted by philosophical argument, or vice versa, depending on your priorities. For example, in his dialogue
La Philosophie dans le boudoir
(1795) the initially virginal Eugénie receives (enthusiastically) a hands-on sexual education from three older debauchees, one of whom breaks off mid-orgy to read aloud a recently purchased pamphlet, “Frenchmen! One more effort, if you truly wish to be republicans!” This argues for the abolition of capital punishment, on the novel grounds that the crimes for which it was traditionally exacted, calumny, theft, immorality, and murder, are not crimes at all, since entirely natural.This argument is typical of Sade – he categorically rejects the cheerful optimism about human nature we saw in Diderot’s vision of Tahiti, while apparently endorsing the Enlightenment argument that laws of nature should trump the laws of man. Sade’s view of life in a state of nature is at least as bleak as Thomas Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish and short,” and the nastiness is explored in remorseless detail and at prodigious length. Even
Philosophie
, the shortest and most light-hearted of his pornographic works, culminates with Eugénie raping and, by implication, murdering her own mother. The tricky question Sade’s interpreters have never resolved is whether he should be read as a satirist, showing by the blackest of comedy how the Enlightenment project can lead to an abominable conclusion, or whether he sincerely embraces those abominations.

These three examples demonstrate not only that some “philosophical books” were written by actual philosophers, but also the intimacy of the synthesis of philosophy with pornography widespread in the literary undergrowth of the French Enlightenment.

A Deeper Exploration

One way of understanding the surprising connection between pornography and philosophy is to explore their shared history. The history of pornography, however, raises questions of definition which go beyond the scope of this chapter. Firstly, I shall make no attempt to distinguish pornography from erotica; secondly, I propose to understand them both as texts and images intended to produce sexual arousal. This is a conscious oversimplification, even for twenty-first-century pornography. It may be criticized as excluding some material, or including too much, or as resting on a fundamentally wrong-headed approach. Matters become far worse when we go back in time. It has been argued that the word “pornography” is a nineteenth-century neologism.
⁸
Of course, we could say with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart that we know pornography when we see it.
⁹
Surely historical “pornography” had a similar effect on its consumers as the modern sort, whatever they called it? This appeal to common sense is plausible, but can lead us astray the further back we go.Victorian archeologists excavating Pompeii confidently designated any building with sexually explicit wall paintings as a brothel, eventually identifying 35 of them, 80 times as many per capita as Rome itself.
¹⁰
Modern classicists interpret the material differently, concluding that the Romans had, by modern standards, an astonishingly broad-minded approach to interior décor. Shorn of context, the Pompeiian wall paintings strike us as pornographic, but perhaps the Romans saw them differently. Projecting our own standards into the past can lead to profound misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, these worries can be answered directly for at least one work:
L’Ecole des filles
(1655), whose pretensions to philosophy are explicit in its subtitle,
La Philosophie des dames
. Its authorship has never been satisfactorily established, although its publishers, Jean L’Ange and Michel Millot, were respectively fined and hanged in effigy as putative authors.
¹¹
The reader response to this book is unusually well documented.The English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) records encountering it at a bookshop on 13 January 1668. His initial expectations of a suitable present for his wife are overturned by a quick browse, but on 8 February he returns to buy a copy for himself.The following night he reads it:

I did read through
L’Escholle des Filles
; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for information sake (but it did hazer [cause] my prick para [to] stand all the while, and una vez to decharger [to discharge once]); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame; and so at night to supper and then to bed.
¹²

The ejaculatory effect, ineffectually concealed by Pepys’s macaronic jargon, and indeed the subsequent incineration, are recognizable in more modern porn consumers. The book which so moved Pepys is a dialogue between two women, in which the experienced Susanne instructs the prospective bride Fanchon in sexual technique. Its claims to philosophical interest may seem slim, but it has been read as both satirizing and utilizing the new scientific method of René Descartes – after a “discourse on method,” a “process of discovery . . . unfolds: isolation in a heated room, elimination of customary prejudices and external authorities, introspection and lucidly ordered exposition of the fundamentals derived from it.”
¹³

The device of a young woman receiving sexual education from a more experienced woman is widespread; we saw it in
Thérèse philosophe
and
La Philosophie dans le boudoir
.The older woman is often, although not invariably, a current or former prostitute, hence such works are sometimes described as whore or courtesan dialogues. Numerous other contemporary examples could be cited; the common inspiration seems to be the
Ragionamenti
, or
Dialogues
, of Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) which first appeared in 1536, with a sequel in 1556. Aretino, a Renaissance humanist, made an even more influential contribution to erotic literature, the
Sonetti sopra I ‘XVI Modi’
(1524), or “sonnets on the sixteen ways of doing it.” These verses were inspired by a series of prints anatomically detailed enough to land their engraver in a papal prison. Aretino successfully lobbied the pope for his release – and then composed the accompanying sonnets.
¹⁴
The first of the
Ragionamenti
is a debate between two women, Nanna and Antonia, as to which of the three careers available to women – wife, nun, or whore – Nanna should choose for her daughter Pippa.They decide on the last, since “the nun betrays her holy vows and the married woman murders the holy bond of matrimony, but the whore violates neither her monastery nor her husband.”
¹⁵
In the sequel Pippa receives an education in her future career.