Back in the 1980s, a radical feminist extremist and gender separatisr named Andrea Dworkin gained notoriety as a prominent anti-pornography activist. Her writings analyzed pornography, a lot of which was literary in the form of the written word, and her interpretations were full of fallacies of composition, appeal to emotion arguments, ad hominem attacks on men as a collective whole, massive cherry picking, conspiracy theories, misattributions, and an extremist hyperbolic tone that made her difficult to take seriously as the social critic she claimed to be. She argued that male sexuality is inherently violent, that the male orgasm is a form of violence, that pornography was invented to oppress women, and that female porn performers are bigger victims than people who died in the Holocaust because, according to her, Holocaust victims didn’t have to be photographed playing with their genitals before being killed. All of these brilliant ideas can be found in her hate-filled rant Pornography: Men Possessing Women. And while that information can easily be found, if anyone can find empirical evidence that death camps for porn stars are real, than I will concede that argument to the she-demon Ms. Dworkin. Even worse, she used her phallic symbol of a bullhorn to protest horror movies and collaborated with the conservative Christian right wing of the Reagan administration calling for a ban on all pornography. But if there was an ounce of truth in anything Andrea Dworkin said, it was that some people get sexual thrills out of seeing women being tortured and humiliated.
There is a cautionary tale here. Andrea Dworkin took her views to such an extreme that she looked like a loudmouthed buffoon. Having such a prominent voice in the feminist movement possibly set the cause back by at least a decade. By turning the volume up to maximum on her anti-pornography crusade, she wasted a lot of people’s time that could have been used to address more prominent issues affecting gender politics. And by setting the impossible task of banning pornography, she almost guaranteed that the sex industry would continue to grow and flourish. The lesson to be learned for activists of all kinds is that taking the wrong approach to your issue can kill your credibility when a more modest approach can yield more results and possibly even keep your pet issues alive in public discourse.
As time has gone on, the availability of pornography has become more widespread, more mainstream, and in some cases more degrading and extreme. Adrian Nathan West addresses this phenomenon of extreme pornography in his short book The Aesthetics of Degradation. While he didn’t make the same exact mistakes that Andrea Dworkin made, he does wind up in a similar space by constructing an ineffective argument.
This extended essay starts off describing some porn the author has watched. I’ll spare you the stomach-churning details here but I will say that what he describes is gross. For some reason, West feels compelled to explain why it is disgusting and degrading as if the audience couldn’t figure that out for themselves. But in case you couldn’t, he offers a semi-Freudian interpretation of why anal sex makes him feel sick. Then he goes online and finds an interview with a female performer in which she brags about her ability to do extreme sex acts while being filmed. What was he expecting? Besides he doesn’t consider the possibility that what she said in the interview could be part of a marketing strategy. He also doesn’t consider the possibility that her interview could have been written by someone in a porn studio’s advertising department. Porn is a business after all. Is this even important? Well maybe because I feel like West missed some opportunities to further examine his subject matter and the strange space that pornography occupies in the way that it combines performance and authenticity presented through the filters of editing and marketing.
But in any case, this leads the author to ask the ever mystifying question of: why some women choose to do this. He finds his answer in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ll give West some credit here. He makes a key idea, common to both philosophers, comprehensible which isn’t easy considering the arcane style of writing they both have. West explains that chronological time is the basis for building an individual’s identity since memory is a building block we use to make us into ourselves. Chronological memory is a resource we use to navigate our way through life. In the case of female porn stars, this personal chronology has been disrupted at some point, through trauma like neglect or abuse, that compromises their ability to make effective decisions. This appears to make sense, but my objection to this claim is epistemic, He writes as if this claim is absolutely true and yet I don’t see how he can claim it as such without accessing the subjectivity of a representative sample of all female porn stars. It’s an easy over-generalization. It certainly is plausible, but without enough data I can’t accept it as anything other than speculation. I’m also wary of his concept of decision making; just because a woman doesn’t make the choice he thinks she should make, it doesn’t mean that she made a wrong choice or even an ineffective choice. West never takes the broader picture into consideration here.
A lot of the rest of the book is a mishmash of odds and ends, abruptly switching from one subject to another without any clear transitions. West alternates between descriptions of pornography that get more violent and disgusting as the essay progresses, testimony from female porn stars, philosophical musing, and commentary from the serial killer Ed Kemper who describes his feelings of lust and violence toward his victims. The Ed Kemper quotes are problematic since, not only are they non sequiturs, but it amounts to a false analogy considering West doesn’t include any quotes from male porn stars or directors who express the same sentiments. This is a dirty rhetorical trick because we are supposed to associate the feelings of a serial killer with pornographers and porn consumers without any clear connection between them. As far as I know, there haven’t been any male members of the porn community who have been serial killers and actually the number of them who have murdered people has been too small to be statistically significant. A guilt by association argument is especially bad when there is no grounds for association to begin with. As for porn consumers, articles on the Psychology Today website show only a weak correlation between pornography consumption and acts of violence. An article I found on NPR stated that violent pornography is somewhat popular with women consumers, particularly if they are suffering from PTSD. So again, I don’t feel that West has taken the full range of possibilities into consideration when writing this essay. Even worse, his style of writing is disorganized and disorienting. I can’t tell if this is meant to be some kind of deliberate postmodern derailment or if it’s just bad writing, but it doesn’t work for me.
Then the author goes from bad to worse. He goes from vilifying pornographers for using money to exploit women of lower financial status to vilifying them for exploiting stupid women. He really does classify female porn performers as literally stupid after comparing them to retarded people. He really does use the word retarded too. His argument is that retarded people need to be protected from predatory and exploitative adults and stupid people are only one step above retarded people in intelligence levels. Therefore stupid people need to be protected from those who exploit them too. Stupid people are incapable of making effective choices for themselves and therefore end up allowing pornographers to make choices for them. The solution to this problem is for intelligent people with good intentions to make choices for stupid people so they don’t get exploited. I’ll concede that some female porn stars probably are stupid, but when your defense of them involves their humiliation and degradation with terms like “retarded” and “stupid”, I think you might want to re-evaluate how you go about approaching this problem and what your true intentions really are. Spitting on the people you claim to be defending is kind of a low blow.
The remainder of the book involves the author hanging out with a Catalan performance artists who reenacts scenarios from violent pornographic films as an art project. This guy doesn’t get around to saying much and most of these passages serve no useful purpose in the essay. But what he does do is make an argument of determinism to say that female porn stars do degrading porn because they have no choice; they are only responding to stimuli in the environment and this is a symptom of capitalism. He doesn’t explain this concept beyond merely making the claim. But anyhow, I suppose that means that people producing violent porn also have no choice other than to obey capitalist stimuli and porn consumers have no choice either. I guess nobody anywhere, no matter what they do or who they are, have any choice other than to obey whatever environmental stimuli come into their empirical range and goddamnit if we just got rid of the capitalist system than that could never happen again. Yeah right.
In the end, I wondered why West bothered to write this essay. He doesn’t actually argue for or against anything. What is he trying to prove? That violent, degrading, disgusting pornography is...violent, degrading, and disgusting? Why not argue that the sun is hot or that ice is cold? He makes no demands on the reader or society either. He proposes no solution to what he describes as media created with the intent to humiliate and degrade women. He sounds to me like a guy who spent a lot of time watching this crap until it made him sick to his stomach and he wrote this as therapy, complete with some philosophical concepts and postmodernist name dropping to make it look academically legitimate. (See what Alan Sokal and Noam Chomsky say about that in their criticisms of postmodernist pseudo-intellectualism) I might actually be inclined to agree with West if I could actually pinpoint what it is he is arguing for. He presents no thesis to defend, just a collage of information all related to one subject.
As for extreme pornography, here is what I think is going on. Being the kind of business it is, it is going to attract some unsavory people. Some men want to abuse and humiliate women so they get into the pornography business. With enough money to produce films and hire lawyers, they get female performers to sign legal contracts and forms of consent, some of which are vaguely worded and don’t specifically say what the performers will do. Since the films are made as works of art produced for commercial purposes, these abusers have found a loophole in the First Amendment and their films are protected as freedom of speech.
Pornography involving the use of minors is illegal, as it should be, because the need to protect children overrides the luxuries of the First Amendment. In most cases I am opposed to censorship and pornography won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be banned. Andrea Dworkin went on a fool’s errand when she tried to have pornography censored. Besides, most pornography is neither violent nor extreme. If you can’t see a difference between depictions of consensual vanilla sex and the things described by West, you might be a bit of an extremist yourself. But I do think more regulation is necessary. People involved in the production of pornography should be held to the same OSHA standards as people working in factories or any other occupation. If sex workers are truly workers, they have the same rights to health and safety standards as anybody else. Part of that means drawing a strict line of demarcation between “consent” and “informed consent” because the two are not the same. Porn producers need to be held legally responsible to prove that their performers know what they are getting into and they need to prove that consent is no given under coercion, intimidation, manipulation, or any other form of duress.
In the end, I might be inclined to agree that the kinds of violent pornography described by Adrian Nathan West is disgusting and is a sign that we live in a sick society. The problem with The Aesthetics of Degradation is that his writing is so poorly executed, depending on appeals to emotion, disorganized writing, and failing to make a definite point about anything, that I don’t feel he sufficiently made his case, whatever that was meant to be. It’s hard to agree with somebody when you aren’t sure as to what you are agreeing on. He makes the Andrea Dworkin mistake of over-emphasizing his case to the point where it becomes trivialized and rendered ineffective. I can’t say this book is of much use unless you just want to read about something that disgusts you. If you are that kind of masochist then there are better places to get what you want.
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