SEXIS WRONG

Margins to Mainstream
Pornography Refreshes American Culture
Joseph W. Slade
On April 22, 2002, Linda Lovelace was killed in Denver in
an automobile accident, yet another of the car wrecks that
scarred her body and marked her life. The obituaries in the
New York Times and other newspapers were signs of the
country’s acceptance of her status as a trend-maker. Most
noted that the star of Deep Throat (1972) had published several
books decrying the pornography industry that made her
famous. None of them revealed, however, that in the last
years of her life Lovelace had once again begun giving interviews
to men’s magazines and had been attending Glamourcons,
the conventions of aficionados of softcore and hardcore
pornography, there to bask in the adulation of fans who never
stopped worshipping her.
The curve of Lovelace’s experience resembles the larger, justas-tentative
acceptance of sexual explicitness by a growing
number of Americans. The opposition of anti-porn feminists,
easily the most significant challenge to pornography for the
last two decades, has been muted. The argument that pornography
directly causes sexual aggression against women,
a thesis central to the anti-porn feminist position, has been
undercut by successive annual reports of the US Department
of Justice, which indicate that rape and sexual assault have
fallen dramatically over a period that coincides precisely with
booming sales of sex videos and erotic websites. Indeed,
feminists now write “Bad Girl” fiction, shoot explicit movies,
and endorse sadomasochism.
In short, sexual materials enjoyed in secret, long characterized
as insulting to religion, offensive to various genders, intellectually
worthless, and socially and politically subversive, seem
now to be operating as a source of cultural energy. As pornography
has moved front and center, scholars have begun
to study once-tabooed expression and imagery for what they
reveal about bodies and sexual orientation. The number of
academic texts on such subjects has swelled. Perhaps more
significantly, so has a popular conviction that pornography is
now important, as suggested by Pornified: How Pornography
Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
(Times Books), the title of a forthcoming book by Pamela
Paul. Pornography seems to be refreshing a culture that continuously
mines its own edges in search of novelty.
Some dismiss the trend as trivial, akin to the perennial surfacing
of phenomena such as astrology, a mere triumph of
kitsch. Others see it as a function of a society besotted with
physical beauty and fame at any price; after all, said the late
Katharine Hepburn, celebrity is just a sanctioned form of prostitution.
Some believe that citizens of an increasingly inhuman
post-industrial society simply need titillation. Still others think
of increased tolerance for pornography as all of a piece with
relaxed attitudes toward minorities, corporate theft, or capital
punishment. Others think of the change as more profound.
While suppressed voices and transgressive images have always
driven American culture, they say, pornography’s roles
as stimulus and inspiration have never been so clear. Somewhere
in between these two extremes, a sense that there
has been a massive shift in the plate tectonics of culture or
merely a conviction that pornography is an idea whose time
has come, lies the margins-to-mainstream dynamic.
Talking about pornography is a lot like talking about religion:
Nearly everyone brings to the subject assumptions that color
the debate. One can avoid some of the confusion by using
terms such as sexual materials or sexual representations,
but even there we swiftly find that we have no common discourse
for speaking about sex. For good or ill, pornography is
itself a principal source of sexual language and images, and
their very instability energizes the cultural dynamic. Three of
my own assumptions follow.
140 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG