The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Calling Bullshit On The War On Porn

Stage magicians and devoted skeptics Penn & Teller made headlines in the adult industry this past week when their Showtime program “Bullshit” took on the War on Porn, asserting that “Porn is part of what makes us great; it’s as American as B-movie actors and pilgrims.”

But what is all this doing on a show about skepticism? Penn & Teller made their career by doing stage magic and then revealing the secrets behind it. They laughed their asses off at the old credo that a magician never reveals his or her secrets — “We don’t give a damn!” I remember Penn saying in the ’80s as he showed David Letterman how to surreptitiously replace a bag of jellybeans under his derby hat with a writhing mass of cockroaches, which did not lessen Dave’s discomfort when the non-ectoplasmic bugs flowed out of the headwear in a great writhing mass and made friends with his crotch. Once Penn & Teller came of age as Showtime skeptics, they seemed more interested in debunking Chinese medicine, cryptozoology and detox programs. But they also focused on Western Medicine’s sacred cows — the “obesity epidemic,” anger management programs, and more. They also argued against the war on drugs on practical grounds; surely the “war on porn” could fall into the same category, since, like the war on drugs, it’s a battle that looks pretty unwinnable to anyone viewing it objectively — rather than through the foggy lens of a scary Utopian belief that a future world could ever exist without sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Nonetheless, how did two stage magicians end up poking their way into the culture wars on porn? The answer lies in science, and the claims made by anti-pornography speakers. Penn & Teller have already addressed explicitly sexual topics before on “Bullshit,” arguing against circumcision, for decriminalizing prostitution, and against abstinence-only sex education. In all of these topics, the claims of the haters often rely on “measurable” scientific results to the topic. With circumcision, one can debunk its safety by pointing to the infant mortality rate; one can attack the watered-down claim that nonconsensually slicing off a part of a baby’s dick makes “cleanliness” easier. Similarly, those arguing the evils prostitution and the effectiveness of abstinence-only education often grab bits and pieces of dubious science, or make them up wholesale, to support their claims.

But as wacky as abstinence-only claims are, it’s with anti-porn arguments that the science really gets stinky. Those “measurable” claims quickly disintegrate into innuendo, prejudice and sexual determinism. There’s a rogues’ gallery making bizarre claims about violence and porn, including Diana Russell, who claims that “men become predisposed to rape from viewing pornography,” XXXChurch, which calls itself the “#1 Christian Porn Site” (Google must love that), Dolf Zillman, who asserts that porn makes viewers no longer want to be monogamous or breed, and Gail Dines, author of “Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality,” who asks “Is it OK to become aroused by images of sexual torture, which is what pornography is?” Clearly Dines has been watching plenty of mainstream porn, though she fails to mention that it’s only the audience being tortured. Of course, let’s not forget Catherine Mackinnon, who may not think all sex is rape, but certainly thinks pornography is.

These varying claims are often supported by dubious science, which becomes particularly irritating once one actually reads the assertions. For instance, Zillman claimed, in a 1986 paper published by the US Public Health Service reporting on the Surgeon General’s Workshop on pornography:

The values expressed in pornography clash so obviously with the family concept, and they potentially undermine the traditional values that favor marriage, family, and children . . . Pornographic scripts dwell on sexual engagements of parties who have just met, who are in no way attached or committed to each other, and who will part shortly, never to meet again . . . Sexual gratification in pornography is not a function of emotional attachment, of kindness, of caring, and especially not of continuance of the relationship, as such continuance would translate into responsibilities, curtailments, and costs . . .

 . . .to which I (and others) say, “of course it does,” because pornography is a fantasy. But there’s more to it than that, because many if not most radical sexual advocates believe that the sexual choices offered to all of us should look more like porn than like the monogamous model that most anti-porn advocates are pushing.

I remember hearing Patrick (then Pat) Califia speak in 1990, during the time I was really getting involved in the leather community. Califia praised porn “because it sends the message that the nuclear family doesn’t work,” which it doesn’t. If that’s a fundamental difference between anti-porn people and my ilk, whoopee — but no amount of arguing about rape and objectification is going to change my belief that people should do whatever the fuck they want. The rampant popularity of porn would seem to indicate that the last thing most people want to do is be stifled by sexual restrictions, whether that means monogamy, heterosexuality, or the missionary position. Any ambivalence that I have for pornography — and I have some, believe me — is about the unrealistic nature of it. It troubles me that while I got into porn because I believed it encouraged people to be sexually adventurous. While anti-porn forces claim that porn makes people sexually weird, I’m not sure it makes them weird enough. Too often people fall into a limited sexual repertoire, which can include watching plenty of porn — and the figures on the screen are doing the work for us, making real-life sexual adventures less of an option.

The potential of porn to encourage sexual variation is a very real one — I see it everywhere, every day, the ubiquity of porn helping erode social restrictions that never should have been there in the first place.

That’s what anti-porn forces are really against. Whether their view is that porn inhibits “real intimacy” by making boring sex seem boring, or destroys families because it makes adventurous sex seem adventurous, they’re afraid porn will help destroy society as we know it — and maybe it will.

Good riddance, I say. I hope porn can help open the doors to a wonderland where strangling sexual restrictions are no longer anybody’s problem, and we can all do whatever the fuck we want.

Thomas Roche writes about sex, science fiction, Bigfoot and complicated weaponry at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.