Porn as Distraction

"It is perhaps only people who haven't felt the full power of sex over their logical selves who can remain uncensorious and liberally 'modern' on the subject. Philosophies of sexual liberation appeal mostly to people who don't have anything too destructive or weird that that they wish to do once they have been liberated.

However, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general and internet pornography in particular to reroute our priorities is unlikely to be so sanguine about liberty. Pornography, like alcohol and drugs, weakens our ability to endure the kinds of suffering that are necessary for us to direct our lives properly. In particular, it reduces our capacity to tolerate those two ambiguous goods, anxiety and boredom. Our anxious moods are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so they need to be listened to and patiently interpreted – which is unlikely to happen when we have to hand one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, it is a deliverer of constant excitement which we have no innate capacity to resist, a system which leads us down paths many of which have nothing to do with our real needs. Furthermore, pornography weakens our tolerance for the kind of boredom which is vital to give our minds the space in which good ideas can emerge, the sort of creative boredom we experience in a bath or on a long train journey. It is at moments when we feel an irresistible desire to escape from ourselves that we can be sure that there is something important we need to bring to consciousness – and yet it is precisely at such pregnant moments that internet pornography has a habit of exerting its maddening pull, thereby helping us to destroy our future."

- Alain de Botton, from Let's Talk About Sex, Live Q&A on Guardian.co.uk

"Porn is Not a Dirty Word"

“Many men believe pornography is harmless and women should stop banging on about it...”

So begins the article, “Porn is not a dirty word,” by Bettina Arndt for The Age newspaper.
(image above is taken from the article posted on theage.com.au website)

What follows in her article is, predictably, an apology for mindless male entitlement; in this case, for the right to remain blissfully ignorant about some of the reasons that people might 'bang on' about it in the first place...
I’d like to unpack some of Arndt’s arguments one by one, and offer my response to it given my recent deconstruction of porn-as-unproblematic-product.

“Everywhere men look there’s another woman banging on about the dangers of porn.”
Not even preceded by an ‘it seems’ nor with a consideration of the many women who enjoy porn, nor also of the men who bang on about porn’s dangers as well.

According to the article, a recent Q&A program (a television program exploring current affairs and topics of general interest, often with guest speakers and audience participation) featured British sociologist Gail Dines, whom the article insinuates is one of those women ‘banging on’ about the damage done by “body-punishing, brutal, dehumanizing and debasing” pornography.

The choice of Dines’ admittedly extreme words, accurate or otherwise, is then contrasted with the level-headed voice of reason by a male audience member, Jeff Poole. Poole states on the program that he “had been watching porn for more than 30 years” and “In all those many thousands of hours of wobbling pink bits, I’ve never seen any of the things you talk about. I’ve never seen the degradation of women or men for that matter. I’ve never seen rape, real or simulated. I have never seen violence.”

According to Arndt, Poole “spoke for a huge audience of men who hear constant negative discussion of pornography and wonder why their own experiences are so very different… bewildered at women’s outrage at what they see as a harmless outlet for the strong male sex drive…” Arndt then adds, “To many men, porn seems a perfectly normal aspect of male sexuality that provides comfort and entertainment, and redresses the serious sexual imbalance between male and female desire.”

There are several problems with resting on men's perceptions of our own porn use as plainly acceptable, particularly just because it seems a "normal aspect" of our sexuality.

Simply:
1. What is normal is not necessarily good, true, healthy, or wise.
2. Arendt makes no further effort to problematise this normative assumption of the differences between male and female sexual desire, nor does she address the equally problematic assumption that porn actually SATIATES men’s presumably 'excess' desires (relative to...?).

Arndt does at least mention that there seems to be a difference in the types of stimulation that men use today compared to a generation ago, when she writes,
"While the older men in my project wrote about poring over dad's stolen Playboys, today's young men grow up with an internet sexual smorgasbord. Most report roaming far and wide, from vanilla sex to the ''oh my God'' offerings. One mentions breakfast conversations at his university college, dominated by boys sharing notes on the latest online ''girl shagged by donkey'' type video. Throughout history there has been sexual material designed to stir male loins, from Roman frescoes and Japanese screen prints to Victorian ''dirty postcards''."

However, Arendt does not seem to make a link between these generational differences and the reasons why some people might 'bang on' about the potential problems of porn use.

Porn and Desire

In her blog, Cupid's Poisoned Arrow (which she co-writes with her partner Gary Wilson), Marnia Robinson has written in a series of different different articles...
(a few, for example:
"Sexual Superabundance Part I"
"Sexual Superabundance Part II"
"Porn and Perception: Is Your Limbic Brain Distorting Your Vision?")
...that porn, far from sating our desires, is actually complicit in ratcheting them up. To defend porn because it temporarily sates our 'excess' desire is like defending the marketing of an itch cream that temporarily soothes our itch, while actually also being one of the very conditions which further entrenches and exacerbates the itching itself, making it far more difficult to ignore later.

Robinson writes, in her Sexual Superabundance - Part I essay,
"Men... have been learning to pursue orgasm even more efficiently and frequently--with a lot of help from today's media. They can also generate super-stimulating porn with a mouse click. In fact, as my husband says, 'an Internet user can see more hot babes (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his ancestors saw in a lifetime.'
Are men more satisfied and happier? Are their relationships stronger? According to psychiatrist Norman Doidge, patients report increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, spouses or girlfriends, though they still consider them objectively attractive. Initially porn helped them get more excited during sex but over time had the opposite effect." (information that Robinson cites from Norman Doidge's excellent book "The Brain that Changes Itself")

In an earlier post of mine, I've already covered my thoughts about the limitations of Robinson's writing, particularly in prescribing and reproducing tired heteronormative relationship types. Nonetheless, I reiterate that Robinson's strength is in helping to address the problem of Arndt's defence of porn as a harmless, sexual-excess-satin' tool for straight men...


The Sexless Marriage

Arndt writes, “The problem comes when men try to bully women into things they don't want to do - but arguably porn has nothing to do with the insensitivity causing men to behave in that way, which stems from their cultural and social backgrounds.”

Um... As if porn isn’t ALSO a part of culture and society, as if porn was not a PRODUCT of culture and society, as if porn does not also SHAPE, CHANGE and AFFECT culture and society.

It would be pretty ludicrous to assume that, for example, fast-food chain advertising in mainstream media plays NO part in influencing how we experience our desire for food, and concurrently, how we might articulate this desire when we choose to share food (or avoid food) in the company of others. So similarly, it is pretty ludicrous to assume that pornography would play NO part in influencing how we experience our desire for sex, and concurrently, how we might articulate this desire when we choose to share sex (or avoid sex) in the company of our partner(s).

Robinson’s writing is here far more sophisticated than anything I can render, in her compassionate reading of the neurochemical basis for the transition into sexlessness from what may once have been passionate liaisons. Habitual orgasm to a single stimulus (either a single woman, e.g. one’s wife, or a single image on a computer screen), diminishes the capacity for that stimulus to titillate in the same way. i.e. One requires more diversity of stimulation, or increased novelty, in order to achieve the ‘same’ orgasmic outcome.

This is not inherently a problem, of course, if one is able to understand the dynamism behind this bio-logic. However, the problem in this sexless marriage between a man and a woman requires multiple ignorances:

Two at least:
1. Of the woman, for the man’s need for variety / stimulation in order to achieve orgasmic ‘satisfaction’
2. Of the man, for the fact that this underlying dynamic is actually further reinforced, reinscribed and exacerbated through the use of porn. It is not necessarily a harmless remedy.

Arendt’s proposed remedy, one which poses itself as sex-positive, is for these women to just get over their prudishness, and be open to the inherently different needs of their innocent male partners’ militant libidos which will always be in relative overdrive because of their sex.

(which, while posing as a liberated, sex-positive view, seems to me frankly gender-reductionist and regressive)

Sure, we may ask our partners to be more compassionate about our use of porn, and we may even experiment (with their consent) to a MUTUAL use of porn. We may certainly insist that we should not be shamed because of our use. These are legitimate calls for autonomy, and the basic need we have (no matter our sex or gender) to be respected as decision-makers around the organisation of our sexual impulses.

However, another remedy, which is one that I am and have been proposing throughout my few pieces on porn, is for men to actually catch ourselves in the thick of this cycle of habituation to variety and stimulation, and our tendency to ignore the addictive potential of this game of habituation (desensitisation to stimuli).

We can learn to de-condition ourselves from this cycle. We can actually consider that there IS an alternative to normalising and habituating to porn use for managing one’s libido, including within the context (or confines?) of a sexless marriage.

Here are some thoughts:
1. Sexlessness is not necessarily a problem.
2. To the extent that it is a problem, it does take at least two in a relationship for there to be a problem... In other words, acknowledge our own complicity (as men) in creating and/or maintaining this problem.
3. Consider that habitual porn use may be a part of how we are complicit.

I want to re-stress... This is not strictly a moral issue for me, nor do I mean to condemn the use of porn, any more than I would condemn the consumption of sugar. Sexual desire and hunger are two inevitable and indeed, even joyous and pleasureable parts of human experience... particularly with good company. I also certainly mean no lack of compassion, empathy or understanding for those of us who truly do feel stifled by sexless marriages, or sexless partnerships (or indeed, unwilled singlehood or partner-less-ness). Indeed, I empathise with the genuine belief in pornography’s benign role in assisting in relief, and its role in sexual liberation. After all, I have certainly felt this way myself for much of my adult life.

My main concerns have to do with the lack of insight into the impermanent nature of the relief that comes from porn, indeed, into the fact that porn is one means that the original itch is exacerbated (and then essentialised and assimilated as a 'normal' aspect of male libido), the potential problem of the increasing ubiquity of porn (particularly of the escalating normative standards of stimulation) in men's lives (and increasingly, women as well), and also in Arndt's hypocrisy of hinting at women's prudish hysteria while contrasting them with the calm innocence of men in sexless marriages. 



Further Questions to Explore
The issue of the assumed problem of sexlessness (asexuality as pathology?)


Some of my Previous posts on Porn:
--> Abstinence From Porn
--> Integral Theory and Pornography

Integral Theory & Pornography

In my previous post on Abstinence from Porn, I attempted to delineate a 'middle way' between two philosophical extremes, between being 'Anti-Porn' and 'Pro-porn.'

I wrote about abstinence from porn as an opportunity to gain mindful perspective on the nature of sexual desire. And how it manifests itself differently in simulacral form (online internet porn) as compared to the textures of interpersonal, tactile Relationship (being sexual/sensual with others, embodied, and in person).

In this post, I am going to try and speak more about porn from an integral perspective.


AQAL and Porn



According to Ken Wilber's AQAL model, all given phenomena can be apprehended from at least four different perspectives from four 'quadrants,' as shown in the image above.

The top row is about the Individual
The bottom row is about the Collective
The left hand side refers to Interiors
and the right hand side refers to Exteriors

To put them into quadrants, we thus have:
an Upper Left (UL) "Individual Interior"
an Upper Right (UR) "Individual Exterior"
a Lower Left (LL) "Collective Interior"
and a Lower Right (LR) "Collective Exterior"

Let's use porn as an example.

Porn would have a UL, Individual Interior manifestation, these comprise our interior, subjective responses:
e.g. the experience of titilation, yearning, horniness, intentionality, freedom, or disgust, aversion, apathy, boredom, compulsion, guilt, etc.

It manifests in the UR, Individual Exterior, as in its measureable effects on our individual, objectifiable physical body and behavioural change: e.g. bloodflow to genital region, neurotransmissions in our limbic brain, increased heart rate, etc., as well as masturbation, etc.

Porn has LL, Collective Interior or CULTURAL aspects... The "who and what" that is represented, as conditioned by certain cultural expectations of propriety and impropriety, the specific 'fetishisms' that arise, the meaning of certain bodytypes, acts, humiliations, triumphs, cultural tropes that are explored or undermined in the narratives of pornography given diverse cultural contexts etc... For example, Japanese porn and German porn are different not just because of different body/phenotypes, but also because of how these physical types are racialised by consumers both within and outside of their cultural boundaries, for both intended and unintended consumers...

Its LR, Collective Exterior aspects have to do with the measureable, material conditions and its effects on collectives/populations
e.g. How porn is produced and distributed? What is the medium of its expression (print? online video?)? What are the physical sites of its consumption (e.g. in a bedroom? in a cinema?)? What are the political systems are in place that condition its production, distribution, and consumption, and what are the aggregated effects it has on people on a population-wide level (e.g. epidemiological data of correlations between porn use and certain sexual health outcomes), etc...

Any given phenomenon (in this case, porn), exists in the way that it does in ALL FOUR QUADRANTS (there is no phenomenon that ABSENTS its manifestation in any single quadrant).

The study of porn, from an integral perspective, therefore requires the careful consideration of the methodologies for studying the contents of each quadrant.


Considering my Previous post on Abstinence from Porn

In my previous post, I explored the UL by studying the subjective states that arose in me from my consumption of or abstinence from porn throughout the narrative of my personal experiences. I also included the study of some subjective reports from others who had themselves used porn, or who had explored their sexuality with partners who had used porn.

The UR perspective I gave through an amateur elucidation of the material workings of the mind-body in its exposure to pornographic material. Here, I have found Marnia Robinson's blog, Cupid's Poisoned Arrow especially helpful. She talks about the neurochemical differences between pornographic sexual stimulation and interpersonal touch, and how habituation to porn can be argued on the basis of noting brain changes through habitual porn use.

I then briefly mentioned Robinson's failings. She does not adequately address her own biases from a LL and LR perspective. My criticism is of her heteronormative assumptions, and her privileging of monogamy as the ideal social arrangement, through biological determinism: that is to say, through a REDUCTION of the phenomenon of porn/sexual stimulation to its measureable UR manifestations in the brain.

In my last post, I noted how critiques of porn centre around the depiction of women and people of colour (which is a LL analysis using cultural theories: feminist/queer/anti-racist/postcolonial theories), as well as around who owns the means of production (which is both a LL socio- and LR economic analysis). I also surmised that there are liberatory uses of porn in this way as well, in terms of reclaiming porn through a radical emancipatory lens.

My own attempt in finding a 'middle way' here was around integrating the wisdom and perspectives of the LL (feminist, queer) and LR (materialist/Marxist) with those of the UL (phenomenology, personal experience) and UR (neuroscientific understandings)...


And then what?

By integrating these various perspectives in my project to apprehend Porn-As-Phenomenon, I believe I have grown in my own understanding of pornography. I see the limitations of the strictly UL perspective (i.e. ONLY personal experience of porn, which doesn't situate personal experience in a framework of socio-cultural-biological relations), the limitations of Robinson's UR commentaries (which rely on unsophisticated LL assumptions around the primacy of monogamy, heterosexual male experience, etc.) and the limitations of the LL 'culture war' debates.

Neither pro-porn nor anti-porn advocates adequately address the more morally-neutral neurochemical implications of habituation. According to Robinson's commentary, pro-porn proponents do not adequately consider the addictive and escalating potential of porn use, even if it begins innocuously... And of course, anti-porn advocates who shame others into quitting porn for moral reasons themselves inadvertently HEIGHTEN the addictive quality of porn (because that which is forbidden elicits a greater 'hit' of dopamine rush, which is implicated in experiences of addiction).

In other words, while Robinson's UR reductionism could use some LL deconstruction, the LL perspectives that I delineated as strawmen in my last article could also use the wisdom of the UR (made possible because of advances in neuroscience) and the LR (made possible because of emerging epidemiological/social research data, for example, on the correlation of endemic porn use with erectile (dys)function).


That said, I would like to address some of my own assumptions in my critique of porn use, and in my personal decision to opt for abstinence... and I will raise some further questions for pondering.

1. That Authenticity is important in sexual experience
and that porn is 'less authentic' than relating to another person in person. What IS authenticity? What are measures of authenticity? To be informed by neurochemical affect (UL & UR) is one thing, but to assume that 'authenticity,' however it is arbitrarily defined, is impossible through porn... That was a bit of a philosophical leap. I also did not consider the specific sorts of intimacies that could hypothetically be enabled by using porn with a partner.

2. That the Interpersonal is more central to sexuality than Solo sexuality
What role does the Other play in my experience of authentic sexual experience? Are there hierarchies of contact with the Other? Who draws these lines where? Why do I privilege certain sorts of contact with Others as compared to another (sort of contact)?

There are all sorts of sexual relationships one can have with others...
There could be an Orgy / Group Sex encounter
A one-on-one sexual encounter with One other
The contact with the Other through porn (which involved real people in its production)
The contact with the Other through fantasy while masturbating solo
The complete non-contact with the Other through masturbating solo and intentionally focusing on one's own body.

Perhaps Porn is LITERALLY a middle-way between certain extremes?

Still, I would argue that mindful masturbation (remaining present with the sensations of my own body) is more emancipatory, from a strictly meditative component, as compared EITHER to mindless pornographic consumption OR mindless sex with others. This likely will require a future post for elaboration...

3. That the 'producers' of porn are the empowered, owning classes
I have a slightly different perspective on this now, based on an amazing conversation I had yesterday with a group of folks on this piece on Integral Sexology by Ray Harris... Factoring a more traditional, Marxist, class-critique of porn in a late-capitalist world... We can consider how sexual experience has historically required that all of us identify with Labour. We work to have sex. We court, we date, we buy dinner, we flirt, we dance; We have to increase our skills in these ways in order to reach orgasmic satisfaction in interaction with Others.

However, now, the ubiquity of porn means that consumers of porn no longer require the Marxist revolution, i.e. identifying with Labour and empowering ourselves by taking control of the means of production, such as the people depicted in porn simultaneously owning the cameras, and the channels of distribution if any at all...

Instead, we now identify with the owning classes: That we are ENTITLED to others' sexual Labour, that we need only click a mouse or a button with high speed internet access in order to be titillated... We require no introspection, no wresting of control of the 'means of production,' etc. etc.

Far from being the Enemy, producers of porn are simply pawns... They are rewarded by consumers, who pit the Labour of the producers AGAINST the Labour of the actors...

My previous proposed solution was from the perspective of the 'owning class' of the Consumer of porn. That is: To abstain from consumption altogether.

But another potential solution (or attempt at redress) can be in the form of identifying with sexual Labour, and to then work more closely with Producers and Actors of porn, indeed, perhaps even dissolving that distinction altogether. To be producer, actor, AND consumer of porn that I co-create with a community of folks who are similarly committed to emancipation and de-habituation (from compulsive patterns of consumption) as well as to Love.

Indeed, while this may look nothing like porn as we know it, it would be helpful not to toss porn out of the window... Far more dangerous and liberating to completely demystify it, and feel THAT freedom. The only way out as Through...

Abstinence from Porn

It is amazing how so many men in general are colonised by porn.

A friend of mine (who does not watch porn) told me about a recent sexual encounter of his, with another gorgeous younger man. This younger man, in his early 20s, was unable to reach orgasm with the conventional, lovingly hot sex they were having, and then later confessed, "Well... I really need to watch porn in order to cum."

As Marnia Robinson has reflected (her husband's thoughts) about it in her piece on Sexual Superabundance:
"an Internet user can see more hot babes (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his ancestors saw in a lifetime."

This level of habituation to such a myriad of partners means that many consumers of porn are gaining HAREMS of sexual partners in their minds, and then losing the capacity to experience fulfillment with even just one...

Now I am not against multiple sexual partnerships per se, but the incapacity to be present with a single partner seems like a sorry place to begin one's forays into multiple ones... I am thus not 'anti-porn' in the sense of wanting to ban it or destroy it, similarly to how I am not anti-sugar... However, there is something a little bit sinister, for example, about the globalisation of high-sugar Coca-Cola (and the concurrent obesity-anorexia pandemic), just as it is with pornographic colonisation of our minds with high-speed internet access...

(incidentally, for an exploration of 'sexual anorexia' metaphor as pertaining to porn consumption, check out a link to this New York magazine article, "He's Just Not That Into Anyone"...)


Anti-porn, Pro-porn

I think we need to be more critical about how the ways we consume sexual imagery can and DO impact how we relate to others in real life. It is also pitiful that the debate on porn (to the extent that the average person is engaged in any debate about it at all) is polarised into the 'anti-sex/anti-porn' and the 'pro-sex/pro-porn' camps. While I recognise that these are but straw-people whose arguments against or in favour of porn are far more complex than my diluted reflections would indicate, I still think it is helpful to paint these broad brushstrokes to understand why I take the position I do (my attempted "Middle Way" view).

Anti-porn arguments are varied, of course, but, at their best, typically include feminist and anti-colonial objections to how the structure of the industry as it stands typically degrades and humiliates women (and men/women of colour). For a multi-billion dollar global industry, it is disproportionately owned and run by (white) men who control female labour (and that of workers of colour). Men do the hiring, men control the cameras, and men make up the bulk of porn's consumer base. Then, of course, there are the equally important criticisms of the contents of pornographic imagery, which disproportionately fetishise depictions of the subjugation and humiliation of women, the exoticism of people of colour, phallocentrism, and the privileging of male ejaculatory orgasm (as the 'culmination' of sexual interactions). These are, of course, important criticisms of porn, but these are but limited criticisms, as I will explore in a moment, and in future posts.

Sex-positive pro-porn arguments, at their best, tend to defend porn as a medium of sexual expression, arguing that while the porn industry may be, currently, disproportionately run by men in exploitation of women's bodies, this patriarchal structure is certainly not LIMITED to the porn industry, nor is it ubiquitous in ALL visual depictions of graphic sexuality for the purpose of titillation (which, for now, is my working definition of pornography). Indeed, there are plenty of far more egalitarian gay and queer porn, as well as women-owned pornographic enterprises. There is also the democratisation of pornography, to wrest it away from big producers into the hands of 'amateurs' who simply want to document their sex lives and post reflections of their fragmented exhilarations on sites like XTube. There are some ways that porn can be and has been used to assist in the exploration of sexuality for 'average' people with 'average' bodies, for people with non-normative bodies, and people with marginalised or non-normative sexual expressions. For both reclaimant producers, as well as renegade consumers, porn may well be very empowering in these ways.

To a limited extent, I would agree with both these basic (Marxist-feminist) anti-porn critiques, as well as these (queer, sex-positive) pro-porn stances. However, they are still both limited in that they focus disproportionately either on abolition or on reclamation of the pornographic enterprise (these days, arguments tend to veer toward reclamation), or else the arguments that I have delineated are primarily about "Western" or Euro-centric pornography, which is most of the porn that I have consumed (I include ALL porn that is accessible in the "West" in this delineation, including Asian porn featuring Asian bodies, as they have been made available through the filters of my liberal democratic nation-state's internet providers). We need to consider on more morally-neutral, and even compassionate ground, the correlation between pornography and Addiction.

In other words, while I see porn (particularly mainstream, heterosexual porn), especially problematic as an institution of cultural production, and while I simultaneously ALSO believe there may be a value in exploring our own desires through the use of porn (thank you basic psychoanalytic theory), the fact of the matter is that these considerations and introspections are not typically encouraged by porn producers. Indeed, it is in their very best interests to discourage the studious or mindful engagement with porn, either during, or retrospectively, for this would surely undermine pornography's basic project: To Increase Desire.


Intimacy

This sort of dualism, of having to 'pick' between anti-porn and pro-porn stances in the consideration of how or whether to consume porn, does no justice to the reality of the complexity of the relationship between consumer and product. To put it another way, I am not so much anti-porn or pro-porn, as I am pro-intimacy.

From a Buddhist perspective then, pornography is de facto problematic, in that it is constructed to capitalise not only on our existing desires, but also to produce more desire, with the neuro-biological and social consequences of building up levels of insatiability. We can be hooked onto a computer screen or magazine, not only without ever having to interact with the human beings who facilitate the arising of our desires, but also by actively severing the link between sexual desire and interpersonal communication/physical touch.

This is a truly unfortunate amputation.

For me, anyway, part of the joy of sex lies in the pleasure of mutuality, of the bonds that come from gaining familiarity with another's sexual Being (through speech, touch, and the cadences of relationship), who in turn practices reciprocity and learns the naunces of our own libidinal waves... The oxytocinic nature of interpersonal sexual bliss. There is a sublime quality to this process of mutual education (learning and teaching by doing) that is cut off when we distill the sexual encounter to more dopaminergic drives (the encouragement, as porn does, of novelty rather than familiarity, distance rather than closeness, and the laziness of No-Relation rather than the hard work of Relationship (no matter its form; casual, romantic, short-term, or long)).

For more information on the neurochemical underpinnings of this, check out Marnia Robinson's writing
Porn and Perception: Is Your Limbic Brain Distorting Your Vision?

To those who may pick up on a hint of sex-negativity behind my rejection of porn, I will link you to an article I wrote back in university on Phone Sex, which stresses the sublime-ness of interpersonal sexuality, even without direct physical contact. I want to reiterate: I am not against Simulacral Reality; but I am intentionally stressing the hierarchical nature of sexual development. Porn is a sort of 'base' sexual pleasure. Not 'wrong' (once again, not a moral judgement), just a less sophisticated way of engaging our sexual selfhood.

I'll probably write a future critique of Marnia Robinson's uncritical acceptance of monogamy- and hetero-normative views in the structure of her own critique of pornography, but for now, her insights into the neuro-chemical bases for porn's contribution to sexual disharmony and disequilibrium are pretty sound, in my opinion.

In my own experience, my consumption of porn in my life has compromised my capacity to be intimate with a man... I begin to compare what I am doing with someone in person with what I've seen in porn... Which may not be bad, as far as demonstrably loving depictions of sex may go, but becomes particularly problematic given the 'escalating' nature of pornography (as sexual-methodology) normalises mindlessness and diversity over one-pointed concentration and remaining present with your partner(s). The longer I go without watching and getting off to porn, the more free I feel to be in the Flow of the What Is of partnership.

I love myself more, my own body is beautiful; Men around me are more radiant. My energy levels are up. I do not automatically leap to the sexualisation of all men I meet in person, and instead feel freer, energetically, to simply 'play' with my interactions in real life. I am more harmlessly flirtatious (rather than lost in self-recriminations for not being hot enough). I feel more sensitive to my partners' pleasures. I slowly wean myself off of other addictive behaviours, other sexual compulsions. My heart is more open. My capacity to love another is deepened.


Final Iterations

I have no intention of ever advocating for banning pornography or judging others (in a moral sense) for using it. In a sense, I see porn in a similar way to drugs... It can enable pleasure, and insight, but not without negative consequences, and it certainly need not be the exclusive or primary catalyst for these pleasures and insights. I personally am opting for an abstinent approach (difficult as this is, and relapses do happen), but I honestly think that we need to, particularly within self-professed 'liberal' spaces, start considering a harm reduction approach to the use of porn, one which does not simply assume a consequence-less-ness to its use, or an uncritical acceptance of its sex-positive qualities.

The more aware we are of the ways we have been conditioned by sex-repression AND by its reactionary sex-positive expressions, the more we can decolonise ourselves from the false advertising that is pornography.

Reach out and touch somebody, and allow ourselves to be so touched in return.

"Modern Day Gender Equality – Uniting or Alienating?" panel discussion @ University of Sydney

What a privilege!

I was invited to speak at the University on a panel on "Modern Day Gender Equality - Uniting or Alienating?" It was hosted by the Women's Collective at the University of Sydney, and I was one of 5 panelists.

It was a real honour! I was sharing a stage with several remarkable people:

Professor Raewyn Connell, from the University of Sydney, an absurdly prolific writer on gender relations (and recently on masculinity) and international professor,

casual professor and media spokesperson Jane Caro

Alan Cinis, a Greens Council member for the district of Leichardt,

and

Nina Funnell, who is a journalist and researcher at the University of NSW (at the moment, I think she is working on a project on "sexting," or cell phone sex-text messaging, among young girls).


***

I had 3 main initial observations of the evening as the scene was set and began to unfold...

1. The audience was composed mostly of young people, presumably university students.

2. Amazingly, while a majority of the audience was female, a good quarter of the room was male (as far as gender-reading goes, anyway)! It was amazing! It has never been my experience, when I was at university, to see that large a proportion of men interested in an intellectual discussion on gender.

3. I was, as far as I know, the only queer person and person of colour on the panel, Les Sigh...

[16/08/11 update: Professor Connell is a trans-woman... my apologies for my cis-gender presumptiveness!]


***

The panel discussion was arranged in a Q&A style, with the facilitators Kate & Georgina posing questions for us as panellists, and then us choosing to respond or not.

A variety of issues were discussed...


Raewyn Connell



Professor Connell was quietly intellectual. While she contributed the least in terms of stage time, I felt that she always had incisive points to make. In particular, I was really pleased at her continuous nudging toward an intersectional (in terms of sexuality, class, region, etc.) and global (transnational) understanding of gender equity.



Jane Caro



Caro focussed primarily on the continued work that needs to be done (in the name of feminism) in order to achieve full equity for women, particularly in the public-professional domains, where women are still underrepresented in positions of high political power. While I definitely appreciated her important re-emphasis on the work that needs to be done in particular around the reclamation of the identity politic of 'feminism' away from stereotypes around 'man-hating' and 'bra-burning,' etc. (especially given my current professional work on young gay men's issues, and most of my social circle being men), I did take issue with one of her points around feminism being the world's MOST noble cause. I chipped in with my two cents about anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, etc. social justice issues. Caro, quite charitably, responded with an acknowledgement of the extremity of her polemic (she used to work in advertising). Then she also spoke out about the specific, somewhat unique nobility about feminist, and gay and lesbian social justice causes, as they involve often having to speak out against the oppression that is often perpetuated by our own very loved ones, our immediate family (rather than, say, an oppressive boss, or slave owner, etc.). She called this challenge the unique 'nobility' of gender- and sexuality-based social justice movements.

I suppose I tentatively concur.



Nina Funnell



I related well with Nina, in part because I'd actually worked with her previously on a Men and Feminism workshop that we co-presented at last year's "F Conference" (on Feminism) in Sydney, and in part because she is also my contemporary in terms of age. She talked about the meaning of 'mainstream media' and her support of affirmative action, women's autonomous spaces, and the ways that we might consider moving away from conceptions of the 'media' as a strictly monolithic entity.



Alan Cinis



I must admit that I did not relate to Alan's words quite as much as I would have liked; I think this was in part because, as he himself admitted, that he had some trouble hearing or understanding the questions, but I suspect it's in part because I disagreed with the fundamental position he was taking, which was encouraging a sort of individualism... In response to the question posed "Does affirmative action around gender work?" his response was Yes and No (true enough), but that we best understand it by looking at the individual merits of people, rather than simply through gendered lens (somewhat true... but of course the point here, one that he did not address, was the problem of both unconscious and structural sexism, so that the very merits we supposedly herald in all persons are ignored or passed over when they are traits exhibited by women applicants, if any even apply at all!).

At the same time, it was really good to be in the presence of another man who was at least willing and wanting to engage on the issue of gender in a way that was critically self-reflexive (he talked about his relationship to a former acting career, and the specific sorts of expectations of male as compared to female actors).



Me



When I first spoke, I first acknowledged my very real nervousness around being surrounded by quite conventionally 'successful' individuals (two university professors, a politician, and a journalist). Whew! But fortunately, I felt like my area of interest and focus was on the role of men in feminism, something which most of the other panellists had not categorically prepared talks around.

My 3 main points:

1. Our role as men is to listen to the concerns of women, and to engage and support feminist projects which are about the emancipation of all people from oppressive gendered systems (which, as they stand under patriarchy, disproportionately disenfranchise women and materially privilege men).

2. Part of this engagement is also about rehabilitating ourselves from problematic conceptions of masculinity. I mentioned the importance of male 'safe spaces' where we can allow ourselves to love other men without alcohol, and without homophobic/heteronormative qualifications (i.e. without the "No Homo" bullshit).

3. Not to misattribute our alienation as men to the important work that feminists have historically done (which, indeed, have paved the way for us to have language around this very alienation).

I also talked a little bit about the profit-driven industry of pornography and its role in enslaving men by commoditising our sexual desires, selling them back to us (i.e. selling us DESIRE itself), and then numbing us to relationships (rendering us socially awkward) by habituating ourselves to levels of stimulation that are usually unmatched by our interactions with others in-person.

This was also the first time I have EVER spoken about porn in this way in a public/group setting. It was an interesting exercise in humility, and also some good training for how I might want to bring it up in the future (without coming across as anti-sex, anti-depictions of sexuality, anti-pleasure, etc. etc.) Anyway, I think I did a decent job of conveying this point, and this was my covert anti-capitalist critique of the evening...

Professor Connell very wisely raised that these 'crises of masculinity' (of which my fretting about porn was but one example) have been going on for a long time in history, and that it is not uniquely in the age of feminism that men have started worrying in this way. I did suggest, in response, that while men have obviously waxed lyrical about our concerns which were unique to us as men across history, I don't think that we have, trans-historically, framed these concerns in emancipatory language (about our liberation as men from the problems of our socialisation into male gender, as gender, and as part of a larger project of gender equality and full liberation per se).

Also, inspired by Martin Luther King's rhetoric on extremism ("What kind of extremists will we be?"), I discussed the problem of assuming that "unity" is necessarily better than "alienation," when indeed, to be unified in support of oppressive systems (e.g. heteronormative patriarchy) is a LESSER unity, requiring first that we be, correctly, alienated, in order to then later unify under something more grand (e.g. queer-/feminism), which itself will be a unity that will meet its limits (e.g. racist/classist/nationalist assumptions, etc.), require a later alienation, followed by broader unity (e.g. under intersectional, self-reflexivity), meet its limits (e.g. impotent immobility), unify under something more grand etc. etc. ad infinitum.

And throughout all this, never compromising on the insights gained from previous unities and alienations...

We pick our alienations, and then we work with them accordingly. I suppose this was my attempt at speaking 'integrally' (integratively) without strictly using the language of Integral Theory (fucking trademark).

Lastly, in response to an audience member's question-comment on how men have been stunted because of a lack of clarity around changing gender relations, Nina first spoke out and said "Yes, these are some of the ways that patriarchy has crippled men."

And I responded to the question-comment by recalling this incident:

In Wynyard (the 'yuppie central' financial district of Sydney), last year, there was a photographic exhibition featuring the works of a female photographer who had travelled to different parts of the world taking pictures of different people. The exhibition was held in a public space, and also featured some inspirational quotes and captions under some of the photographs.

One of the photographs featured full frontal nudity of smiling black children. This was obviously considered unproblematic enough by the City of Sydney that the exhibition would go ahead without reprieve.

What I expressed to the audience about my experience with this exhibition was that:

1. What if the photographer had been a man?
2. What if the children had been white?

A great blog post by Ray Harris explores just this very issue:
The Naked Child in Art : Ethnographic Photography


Conclusive Reflections?

All in all, it was a really fantastic evening, with some really interesting and stimulating conversation, and I was very much honoured and grateful to have been invited to speak. As often, we never get to share all that we would have liked, and it is sometimes really challenging to cater a set of really complex perceptions and queries to a mixed audience... I personally would have appreciated an Acknowledgement of Country (of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land upon which our gathering was held), but I think I lacked the political tact to know how to bring it up after the fact of the event's formal commencement.

It does feel incredibly good to be able to share some of my thoughts on feminism, gender and manhood. I feel especially good that I did not speak from a place of ultra Reactionariness (in terms of aggressive ranting about white privilege, heteronormativity, etc.).

It has been precisely 6 years since I graduated from university with a degree in Gender Studies, and I really cherish these opportunities to be able to speak on, educate and learn more about these issues, especially since I have had WAY more life experience since university!

Muchos Gracias to the University of Sydney Women's Collective!