the case against porn

why being pro sex means being anti-pornography

in this age of infinite instant on internet pornography a number of questions have been raised about the health of such a thing and the risks, obsessions, and pathologies that it encourages and instills in its devotees. porn addiction has become a thing and so too perhaps has a basic desensitization and loss of contact with just what sex is and i fear the consequences of this may be greater than many, especially rising generations, realize. from my prior position of “well, it’s porn, who cares?” this has led me to the idea that porn is really not something one wants in their diet.

to be clear, i do not advocate banning pornography, itself a notoriously difficult and imprecise “well i know it when i see it” sort of thing to pin down definitionally but rather abstaining from and eschewing it in the same manner that one should avoid red dye laden processed sugars and for many of the same reasons.

i am far from a prudish or sheltered sort of cat. i’ve seen porn (though found it mostly dull), been to strip clubs in vegas, sex shows in amsterdam, and led the libertine life of the san francisco raver and the black rock city burner. i am far from chaste or reserved and certainly not proscribed or frightened. to use a terribly overused phrase, i’m actually very “sex positive.” this is, in fact, why the more i consider it the more i become so “porn negative” because porn is not sex - in many, perhaps most ways it constitutes its antithesis and abnegation but not, to my mind, in the manner in which many of the “get the vapors every time this topic is raised” class presume.

it’s easy to fixate upon the obvious: that, especially for the young, watching improbably caparisoned and proportioned people undertake comprehensively improbable acts with exceptional facility and blithe lack of concern while embodying all the sincerity of a politician giving a telepromomted stump speech is at once frightening, intimidating, desensitizing, and dehumanizing.

children and young adults are left stunned by out of context ideas that they lack a basis to grasp, insecure in that they are not endowed as performers are, wondering if all these most rarified of acts are indeed “normal,” beset by impossible ideas and ideals as a result, and subtly or not so subtly demoralized by the ingrained assumption that somehow the local basketball game is supposed to be played at the level of the NBA playoffs or that people are even supposed to like some of this stuff.

to at least some degree, probably all of this is true but for all of the issues and fell outcomes that may from such implications derive, to my mind there is a greater and more encompassing issue: porn is not sex; porn is performance and to quote the great tom stoppard “we’re actors! we’re the opposite of people!” and this is no basis by which to understand the intimate act.

many throughout time have ascribed all manner of inherent meanings to sex. it has been described as synonymous with love, as eros, agape, mere procreative act, duty, sin. to my mind, sex can be all those things (or none) for (apart from procreation as purpose) sex is at its real essence language, a means of communication and of sharing from the levels of genes to hormones to lizard brains, instinct, impulse, and intellectualism, a vast substrate upon which the finest of distinctions or none at all may be whispered or writ large.

sex at once embodies both itch and scratch and so there is much to talk about.

sex as language means that sex can be a burger king jingle or a sonnet of shakespeare, a magnum opus of virtuoso exposition or a terrible flat note offending all who hear it, beautiful, funny, joyous, sad, comforting, or provocative, binding or repulsive, silly and rapturous.

sex has all the gradations that the poet neruda ascribed to english with its fine distinctions of “fraternal vs brotherly,” words of near identical meaning yet such separate connotation coming together to create conversation and connotation, a shared space of shared comprehension and feeling, bodies and minds speaking to one another.

like any language, sex brings with it and encompasses that which we bring with us.

it cannot say or mean that which we ourselves cannot say or mean.

and this is the problem with porn.

because porn says nothing.

what have we just said?

pornography is a vapid thing, a superficial thing. it has no feedback, there is no conversation, no language. it’s more an exercise in geometry (or possibly logistics in cases like the one above) than any sort of dialogue. the fact that slightly out of frame there’s a guy holding a mic and eating a pastrami sandwich seems to somehow imbue the essential essence with falsity belied by the deadness of the whole of the sexual gestalt. it’s movement and moaning without meaning, a false non-conversation about nothing and if sex is like language then what can insincere sex feel like other than lies?

dazed and concussed.

if your childhood was anything like mine, no one really taught you about sex. in early days, it was a possibly awkward and sometimes mawkish experience, a fumbling but a sincere one. we taught one another. we listened and felt and explored and loved, lost, laughed, and learned about ourselves and our partners. such as we had was ours: our language, our experiences our intention and exposition. perhaps most important we learned was sex was, what it could be and we became fluent, accomplished, expressive, and astute. we began to share stories of depth and meaning, to have the great conversations, to tell jokes and intimate asides. we chased the words of hesse “and i took from her what she alone knew how to give and gave to her that which she alone knew how to take” as brave young steppenwolves (and wolfettes) following the age old path of “figuring it out” and “finding our voices.”

this is a good path. a noble path. a fulfilling path. perhaps the most human of paths, perhaps the story of humanity and human pairing itself.

and porn is not that. porn, especially now as it rarefies into the ever more explicit and outlandish on an internet of too many outlets all seeking to shock in order to capture scarce attention in an oversaturated eyeball economy is not that.

this has become a bad map working far greater mischief than no map at all ever could especially when placed in the hands of “generation online” who is so comfortable using online video to learn everything from excel to dance steps to how to fix the dishwasher.

these are, most decidedly, NOT “how to” videos.

there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of porn. it dates back to forever. the romans were notorious drawers of dicks and representations of intercourse on everything. but there is something inherently wrong with mistaking it for sex, for mistaking its flat affect and empty movement for the complex tapestry it pastiches.

imagine watching this empty athleticism and presuming it to be the whole of the game, that “how to do sex” is “like they do on the internet.” one might lose the idea of sex as language entirely instead mistaking it for some sort of compulsory routine on the uneven bars: transition from high to low, release and catch, 360 degree turn. you hit the marks and the judges go wild!

but it’s not like that, it it?

such a process of imitative athleticism sets one up for the worst of all worlds: success without satisfaction. i did the routine, i nailed the moves, i stuck the landing, why do i feel nothing? because you missed the game. you were never even in it. you played on the wrong field.

at best, you were an aspiring operatic memorizing phonemes and singing an aria in the sounds of a language you do not speak; at worst, you’re simply babbling full body word salad and hoping it elicits emotion and intimacy only to wind up consigned to losing all the deeper meaning of sex in superficial filler and wondering why that which should nourish instead tastes like ashes in your mouth.

the very existence of porn addiction demonstrates this potential. how, once one has eaten ripe and wholesome fruits and fine meats can one become addicted to awful heat lamp desiccated roast beef from an airport arby’s?

i would posit that you basically cannot.

you would never mistake that for dialogue, for meaning. such a thing could never suck you in were you aware of this other way. barring actual brain damage, we do not forget language or ideas of meaning and regress to baby talk. if one lands in such a place it tends to be because one never learned.

this is the trap of “sex as performance art” aimed at an audience and not a partner. your body is screaming at you that this act ought be imbued with meaning and yet you approach it in a fashion from which no meaning may derive. dissatisfaction will be your lot. you will not only lose the promise and pleasure of all the linguistic arts you could have known but perhaps even the idea of language altogether. and that is great loss devoutly to be avoided, especially among the young in their sexually formative phases.

and so, this is my case against porn. can it have a place? sure. in moderation and in understanding, but as a medium it’s more farce than titillation (and serves as a truly awful instruction manual) and this understanding is perhaps the key to being able to consume it safely.

it’s not an exemplar, it’s a cartoon and often not a terribly good one.

and it’s certainly not what anyone would want for “their first time.”