Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

If you were to make a list of the ten things you normally wouldn’t talk about with anyone, where would sodomy be on the list? For me I think it is definitely up at the top and yet, somehow, I found myself engaged in this very conversation just the other day. I blame the prevalence of pornography. The ubiquitous nature of pornography has become a playground of the bizarre only the Marquis de Sade could only have dreamed. Why was I talking about Sodomy? Well my friend had recently attended a college lecture where the topic came up. I did not attend the lecture, so I have no idea how sodomy works itself into any public talk. I suppose the choices are 1) a lecture on same sex sexuality or 2) a lecture that included sodomy as a heterosexual practice. In fact heterosexual sexuality comprised the bulk of our conversation. It was his assertion that pornographic images might sanitize certain sexual practices for men and that this would result in men putting pressure on young girls to engage in activities that they might not necessarily consent to.

This is a veritable land mine. One that I find myself second-guessing whether or not to discuss with every sentence I write. But there are a couple of reasons why I am interested in this topic. 1) My wife wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the topic of feminine sexuality and the Internet and I spent long hours reading her drafts on the subject. 2) I think that it is important for men who have looked at pornography on the Internet to examine the behavior. “I am shocked, shocked to discover gambling going on in here.”

While the ubiquitous nature of porn is an increasing problem, so is the appetite for porn. Pornography is a billion dollar a year industry with pornographic images used throughout advertising, and with the consumption of explicit pornographic materials moving out of “dirty” bookstores, and onto newsstands, cable television, and home video. Our demand is insatiable, so an ever-widening market for porn is created.

I find it unsettling. Frankly I don’t care what a person, or even consenting adults, does in the privacy of their own homes. We enjoy safety, comfort, and prosperity unprecedented in human history -- functionally, we are living in the utopias dreamed of by 19th-century thinkers. The danger is that we live with few interests beyond our own comfort, and few social contacts beyond our narrow circles. Internet pornography is an excellent example of this as it conjures up images of alienation, one fueled by escapist fantasy and excessive behavior, men sitting alone in front of a computer monitor masturbating, is the quintessential image of modern alienation.

I think that this view is fairly wide spread, and there are those that argue that pornography is corruptive and decadent, but there is also a widening group of pro-sex thinkers, feminist and others, that see pornography as empowering and liberating. Sorting through the arguments of these two camps can be mystifying. Anti-porn advocates seem to make little distinction between violent pornography and pornography, between pornography and sex and between sex and violence. Pornography has become the center of a debate on the portrayal and valuation of feminine sexuality, one that decries any portrayal of women as sexual objects on the one hand and the empowerment and ultimate sexual freedom of women on the other.

I am one of those happy individuals who thinks that both are probably true to some extent, however there are obvious pitfalls to taking sides too vehemently in order to avoid being seen as either an enemy of the woman’s movement that seeks sexual empowerment and sexual liberation, or as a moralistic defender of vanilla sex.

I believe we have to ask what is the true definition of sexual freedom, balancing the moralism and absolutism on the one hand with the uncritical acceptance that pornography can be sexually liberating on the other. Alas there are no institutions to support feminine sexuality, civic or religious, and so women are left to fend for themselves, and risk being maligned as a prude or a slut.

The truth is that the distinctions between sexual liberation and institutional liberation are in fact part of the same problem. As long as women are raped and battered and this behavior is sexualized in pornography, and at the same time women continue to be denied equal access to jobs and pay as their male counterparts, we should not look at sexual liberation and social liberation as separate issues. This simplification allows individuals to seek the moral high ground that this or that behavior is socially unacceptable, while ignoring the wider problems of alienation and social repression. We should abandon over simplified or exclusionary categories in the discussion of sexuality and begin the difficult task of understanding the connections between behavior and fantasy, sexual expression and object relations, and sexual activity and ideology.