Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

the aspirational aesthetics of ‘gentlemen’s pornography’ 43
apparently aesthetic distinction that commodified obscenity found its
reprieve. The battle between freedom of artistic expression and the
curtailment of obscenity is one that has raged within public and
private discourse from the time when obscenity legislation was
established in western society in the 1950s. Since then, there have
been many examples of the manner in which the delineation of
obscenity or ‘pornography’ is related to accessibility, class and
societal perceptions of public morality. D H Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's lover was canonised as a work of art in the test case of
the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959, when it was found to be
for the ‘public good’ because of its literary value. Not only did this
ruling establish the concept of the pornographic as something likely
to deprave and corrupt, but also implied that the ‘erotic’ was
something that more refined minds could enjoy without risk. 4 In a
similar vein, the canonical paintings and photographs today lauded as
erotic art are in many cases the ironic articulators of the codes of
display that frequently form the visual markers of contemporary
soft(est) pornography, such as that presented by ‘glossy men’s
magazines’ 5 like GQ and FHM (figure 1). These magazines, in other
words, merely represent a new gloss on an old theme, that of sex and
materialism (or exclusive, moralistic elitism) as a commercially
profitable alliance. 6 This chapter investigates the manner in which GQ
creates a façade of exclusivity by manipulating the gloss of
‘acceptable’ sexualised display established in canonical erotic art. GQ
is singled out for analysis because it boasts a more ‘high-brow’
editorial tone than the other glossy men’s magazines published in
South Africa. GQ seems the most appropriate glossy men’s magazine
for the analysis of an aestheticised objectification since it attempts
4 Most legislative definitions of ‘pornography’ follow the criteria set out by the
United States Civil Rights Ordinance of 1985. It is defined as material that is
simultaneously sexually explicit, subordinating and complies with the ‘proof of
harm test’. Rembar argued that in the seminal case concerning Lady Chatterley’s
lover, it was ‘social-value’ that distinguished the erotic from the pornographic,
and that artworks have some redeeming intellectual significance that
pornography lacks. Although fraught with polemical ambiguities, these definitions
are used for the sake of consistency within the scope of this article. See C Rembar
The end of obscenity: The trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny
Hill (1969) 467; I Tang Pornography; the secret history of civilization (1999) 13.
5
A Dworkin & CA MacKinnon Pornography and civil rights: A new day for women’s
equality (1988) 138. This is Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A MacKinnon’s term for
expensive, (therefore ‘glossy’) up-market magazines aimed at a male readership,
in which the content is sexually focused. These magazines are also known as
men’s general interest magazines; see S Nixon Hard looks: Masculinities,
spectatorship and contemporary consumption (1996). This phrase or category
does not include overtly pornographic magazines such as Playboy or Penthouse.
6 A question that results from this statement is whether GQ’s superficial
appropriation of canonical erotic art unveils any pornographic qualities in this
art. This question will not be addressed here, but rather it is assumed that
Manet’s Olympia, for instance, although ‘art’, is also in some ways pornographic
and that, as a result, ‘art’ and ‘pornography’ are not mutually exclusive
categories, but slippery rhetorical devices, easily coaxed into one corner or
another.