SEXIS WRONG

institutions. Underclasses often embrace pornography as a
political act, say critics who find racism and class bias behind
attacks on erotic expression.
We still think of pornography as vulgar. In the past, we
thought of pornography as the expression of Others: East European
immigrants, African-Americans, communists, subversives,
and deviants. And we have traditionally justified laws
restricting expression by our desire to protect Others from
those voices, by shielding children, of course, and women,
and the weak-minded from the dangers of sexual knowledge.
Pornography can’t hurt me, the argument seems to go, but it
will absolutely corrupt my twit of a neighbor.
During the 1980s, pressure groups defined pornography as
a tool for oppressing women; during the 1990s, women, minorities,
gays, and lesbians recast pornography as a method
for discovering and enhancing sexual identities. Telling a sexual
story helps to construct a sexual self, 8 create a sense of
community among similar individuals, and—by giving weight
to constructed identities—foster social acceptance. Since
the larger culture for decades automatically classified gay and
lesbian speech as pornographic, as John Preston has said,
then an obvious strategy is to embrace the language and turn
it to different purposes. 9 Gays and lesbians today are deliberately
recovering a pornographic past by way of establishing
their history and legitimizing their presence.
Why would they choose such forms? Perhaps
because our society insists on transparency.
Cellphones, surveillance cameras, credit card
tracking programs, massive databases, voice- and face-recognition
technologies, digital scanners, and reality-based
television shows routinely reveal the intimate secrets of our
neighbors. Hundreds of thousands of Americans now exchange
erotic messages and photos of themselves over the
telephone and the Internet. 10 We have become a nation of voyeurs
and narcissists. Getting others to recognize an agenda
means working within that voyeurism and self-absorption.
Part of the dynamic involves conscious agency. Moving alternative
visions of eroticism into the arena of popular culture
allows straight women, lesbians, gays, African-Americans,
Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and so on to compete
for attention and acceptance. Collections of ethnic erotica
have poured into bookstores in the last five years, and Black,
Hispanic, and Asian performers are in high demand as video
performers. Given enough effort, say advocates, such groups
can assert their own preferences and advance their own mythologies,
their own ideas, their own standards of beauty and
objects of desire. Recognizing that pornography replicates
gender stereotypes and sexual myths but also undermines
them, female performance artists, often former porn stars,
create explicit stagings that deconstruct gender and sexuality.
They appropriate and invert older forms, which I take as a
sign of cultural health. If pornography were not important, of
course, it would not be worth hijacking.
Pornography as Folklore
Second, pornography is associated with folklore, in a double
sense. In one sense, porn draws on vast reservoirs of myth,
legend, belief, customs, and mores that work both for and
against establishing norms of behavior. Pornographic representations
often contain archetypal stories of women and
men in heterosexual and homosexual acts, often-told narratives
of smutty humor and sexual anxiety, and endlessly
recurrent motifs of desire, frustration, and satisfaction. Traditional
folklore embodies and stores obscenity, the (originally)
oral sources of “low,” vulgar, even scabrous forms of expression.
Modern media transmit the same pornographic images:
males with enormous penises, women with dangerous
vaginas, tales of ingenious seduction and gender trespass.
Today’s pornographers suck filthy jokes, transparent stereotypes,
hoary motifs, nasty themes, and quaint sexual notions
directly from folklore. “All folklore is erotic,” said Gershon
Legman; 11 it “is the voice of those who have no other voice,
and would not be listened to if they did.” 12
If pornography were not important,
of course, it would not be worth
hijacking.
Obscene folklore—the demotic rendering of human sexual
imagination—serves as the fountainhead of pornography, a
collective cultural id. Vulgar images and vulgar stories—the
kind born in folklore—often conflict with more refined, upperclass
revisions of sexuality—the nice kind called “erotic”—
especially since the latter types deny the sweaty physicality
of intercourse that dirty jokes and stories insist upon.
In another sense, pornography—and our reaction to it—continuously
fabricates modern sexual folklore, some of which
is surely mistaken. Call us puritan or not, Americans remain
deeply suspicious of the sexuality that pornography represents
so well and so badly for us, and thus attribute to pornography
a force that it may not deserve. Our attitudes toward
sexuality are tangled not only with social and political
values but also aesthetic and moral standards. As a culture,
we seem unable to acknowledge the biological origins of sex
and are only just beginning to sort through its social construction.
Some cultural critics refer to pornography as a “contested
cultural site” where gender and sexuality are “negotiated.”
I would go further: Pornography is our principal source of
information on gender and sexuality. Most of what we think
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