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Pornography

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grant
Jun 18 2007
01:14 pm

What is it? I think it was John Waters who said the only difference between pornography and prostitution is that with pornography, someone has a camera. Well, what’s the difference between pornographic and artistic displays of sexuality. And is pornography pornography only when there’s sexual content?

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kirstin
Jun 18 2007
07:12 pm

I don’t know that I have much to add to the answers to Grant’s interesting questions at this point, but wanted to add to the conversation fodder: I’ve heard someone say that there’s a distinction between pornography and erotica. I think Cal Seerveld has some wisdom to offer on this topic related to art, but I’ll have to track that down, unless anyone else can recall…

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Matt
Jun 19 2007
09:44 am

Grant, your question immediately reminded me of the famous response given by Justice Potter Stewart back in 1964, in the Supreme Court ruling on [i:fe40cb85fd]Jacobellis v Ohio[/i:fe40cb85fd]:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But [i:fe40cb85fd]I know it when I see it[/i:fe40cb85fd], and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Back a few years ago we lost a staff person over a picture that was displayed in a hallway of our church. It was part of a series of photographs taken of street life in Bangkok, Thailand. The offending photograph showed a young woman, bare breasted, having her body painted by a local artist. Where I saw the rich beauty of a culture that I know little about, she saw a pornographic photo that should not be displayed in a church.

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kirstin
Jun 19 2007
10:06 am

that’s an interesting quote, Matt, and it also raises the question of interpretation. the photo you mentioned, for example—having known from the photographer that the photo of the Thai woman was taken in a strip club, I couldn’t focus on the beauty of the culture, but rather the hollow, detached look in the eyes of the nude woman. either way, I wouldn’t consider that photo pornographic, as in ‘obscene…having little or no artistic merit’ or ‘sexually explicit…whose purpose is to cause sexual arousal’.

I think Grant’s question of whether pornography is pornography only if there’s sexual content is getting at something that this article about ‘torture porn’ explores in relation to horror film. (be warned—the article itself contains some descriptions of film segments that, while more disturbing on the screen, are also disturbing in words.) if ‘torture porn’ is horror for horror’s sake, is ‘sex porn’ sex for the sake of sex and are they both negative abstractions in similar ways?

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CanadianIre
Jun 22 2007
04:30 pm

I would think pornography would be that material explicitly created for the sole purpose of providing a masturbatory aid. Erotica would be that subject matter not created for this purpose. Sometimes erotica is called pornography because those persons see something in that subject matter that may be an aid to masturbation (i.e. the bangkok breast). Matt disagreed with the criticism of the photograph because he did not find it masturbatory, but the detractors did. There is very little consensus on what would provide a definitive aid to masturbation, and so it can be very difficult to decide which is porn. When I was a little boy, I liked looking at the Sear catalogue around Christmas. My parents removed the section containing images of women clad in brassieres. They did this on the off-chance these images would produce some kind of sexual arousal. I don’t think Sears intended to create porn, but their images were none-the-less treated as porn by my parents. So, I suppose, in that sense my parents were simultaneously the producers of porn, and the with-holders of porn. It only became porn when they decided it was. Sears didn’t decide, I didn’t decide. Porn, in this case, was born in the fear of porn — the fear of porn turned the catalogue into porn. I do think that the fear of porn sexualizes many things that wouldn’t normally be thought as sexual. In a sense, the fear of porn can be the source of many unusual fetishes…

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kirstin
Jun 22 2007
05:26 pm

thanks for your thoughts, Canadianlre. the idea of fear of porn creating porn is interesting. knowing something about the theological debate behind the photo of the Thai woman, I think more foundationally there was a disagreement about the goodness/badness of the body itself.

if pornography is ‘material explicitly created for the sole purpose of providing a masturbatory aid,’ is it still pornography when a married couple uses porn as an aid to arousal for sex? if something not intended as pornography can be turned into porn (ie. the Sears catalog), can something intended as porn be turned into something else…redeemed?

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actionsub
Jun 22 2007
10:51 pm

There is very little consensus on what would provide a definitive aid to masturbation, and so it can be very difficult to decide which is porn. When I was a little boy, I liked looking at the Sear catalogue around Christmas. My parents removed the section containing images of women clad in brassieres. They did this on the off-chance these images would produce some kind of sexual arousal. I don’t think Sears intended to create porn, but their images were none-the-less treated as porn by my parents.

I reckon your parents weren’t "National Geographic" subscribers, were they? :lol:

Time was when young boys would read that religiously, not that they were all that interested in faraway places and cultures…except maybe those Third World nations where there wasn’t that large a stigma placed on topless women… :roll:

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CanadianIre
Jun 23 2007
02:50 am

thanks for your reply, kirstin. i’m not sure it would still be called porn if married couples used it for stimulation. Such a couple would probably not think of it as porn. By this, I am thinking that the word ‘porn’ is less a proper noun, and more a swear word — a term of denigration (For instance, "Passion of the Christ" has been called "porn for Christians"). The word ‘porn’ carries with it connotations that are so negative — one is already starting deep in the hole if one wishes to defend, or redeem it.

i would think that married couples need not be entered into the equation for pornography to be redeemed. why not start with masturbation? the redemption of stimulation, even self-stimulation via various aids — including "pornography" - might be a place to start when contemplating the redemption of sexuality. Such a conversation, though, would require —at the outset- a suspension of whatever negative connotations porn implies.

Alan Moore, the comic book writer, recently published a comic book (with his fiance, Melinda Gebbie) called "Lost Girls", which he calls "an elaborate pornography". The publishers of this comic book wanted him to call it erotica, but he preferred stepping down into that steamy abyss, and wallowing in the low-brow of sexuality, and sexual fantasy. And so he calls his comic book ‘porn’ — deliberately including all negative connotations! It struck me that Alan Moore may be attempting a redemption of pornography. I suppose it waits to be seen if singular efforts like this alter perceptions of the sacred and the carnal, especially given the deep artistic intent of both Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie.

Is this perhaps your point? That it is precisely porn’s negative connotations that are the source of titillation or excitement — even within the security of a stable relationship like marriage?

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kirstin
Jun 23 2007
11:48 am

I don’t think I intended a specific point—just asking questions to stimluate the discussion…ha, ha. I’m not so concerned about whether the forbidden nature of porn makes it more stimulating in a physical relationship, but more interested in whether the context of its use affects its definition/name. maybe for clarification—are you using the terms ‘porn’ and ‘pornography’ differently, ‘porn’ being a more denigrating term?

so here’s another one. let’s say someone has moved beyond a particular part of this debate and made a judgment that ‘pornography’ is an appropriate aid to masturbation and intercourse—is there an ethical distinction to be made between consuming a video (a form that involves humans with all of the culture that attends it) and a comic book (a form that emerges out of imagination and artistic skill without requiring human actors)?

I think there may be have been some fruitful related discussion a while back in the Masturbation kills kittens? thread regarding the possibility of redeeming masturbation.

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CanadianIre
Jun 25 2007
12:27 am

i didn’t really think that i was making a distinction between ‘porn’ and ‘pornography’, but i suppose you are right — porn seems like a more familiar use of the term — maybe the term preferred by partakers. ‘pornography’, on the other hand, sounds more formal. it is probably the term preferred by detractors — the distance of the formal language can then function as a claim to distance from pornography. this can be especially important to male detractors of porn — they want to show that porn effects them little, even though the attempt to distance is, in effect, a confession of closeness…

your distinction between drawn porn, and performed porn is something i have also wondered about. i am not sure that we ought to make a distinction between these two, in the same way that we don’t treat an actor who murders (Othello) as if such a person is actually a murderer. He is only playing a part. In the same way, a porn actress/actor is acting sex — she, or he isn’t actually having sex. the difficulty with seeing such a performance for what it is, is i think, a testimony to a profound crisis of meaning in terms of what sexuality is. could it be true that even the performance of sex can equal the actual sexing of sex? if so, what comes of actual sex between two people? what does it then mean, when it can so easily be equated with its mere performance? there may be a clue here into the crisis of sexuality, especially for christians, in the coming to an understanding of what counts, or qualifies as sex — its limits and its contours.

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grant
Jun 27 2007
12:48 pm

Good points, all. I think the way to make distinctions between art and pornography is to take into consideration the uses of that art. Not in a utilitarian sense because it is sometimes difficult to define "use" in a very practical sense for art. The example of "Lost Girls" is a good one because it is also possible to use pornography artistically. I am always impressed with the way Tarantino uses blacksploitation cinema techniques in a way that completely redeems it. And in fact when I watch blacksploitation films, I don’t just see the sensationalism of busty black women getting revenge against "the man". I see it through Tarantino’s eyes as an interesting genre of cinema and a cultural phenomenon of African-American culture.