Pornography and erotic madness

About a week and a half ago, D called my attention to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, about pornography. It's a good article; and even if you don't have the slightest interest in anything I have to say next, I recommend you take a few minutes and read it. D wrote me, "Much of what today's article said I slowly agreed with, but none of it is very comforting or flattering or makes me feel great about sex. Much of it is repugnant and disagreeable. Sigh." At that point I had not seen it at all, nor even heard of it yet. But I figured I had to look it up. Anything that can make D feel bad about sex must be pretty powerful stuff.

What follows is based upon the thoughts that I sent her back in response, once I had read it.

There are two things that caught my notice on the very surface of the article, right away: both are important. One I like, the other not. What I like is that the author makes it very clear that the huge growth of Internet porn doesn't mean anything fundamentally new. So many people have written easy diatribes, either against the new technology (because we were all so purer in the old days) or against those wicked pornographers who are spoiling sex for the rest of us (because we would all have purer desires without Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt). This author, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, by contrast, makes it crystal clear that "The fault, dear Horatio, lies not in our web servers but in ourselves." The Internet has made it possible for people to access things they couldn't reach before, but there wouldn't be that much porn out there if a lot of people didn't want it.

What I dislike is how often Vargas-Cooper reduces the discussion to a focus on men's sexual response, men's desires, men's aggression. Is there an aggressive component in male sexual response? You bet! Absolutely true. Can it push a normal, inoffensive nebbish of a guy into brutal or degrading actions that would horrify him once he was back in his right mind again? Sure thing. We all know this. But is it really so very different with women? Here I have to pause a minute. Now obviously I'm not a woman, so I can't speak with first-hand authority about female sexual response. But Vargas-Cooper herself makes it clear between the lines that whatever it is "women want" -- even if it does turn out to be different from what men want in some ways -- is nonetheless not "nice," not "refined," not "dignified," not "cultivated," not anything of the kind. Whether it is in some details the same as or different from what men want, it has the possibility of being (in any event) just as nasty, dirty, elemental, and savage. She says this explicitly when she remarks that, "If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex ["extreme", "raw", "unpracticed", "beyond our control"], and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life — or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life. " More intriguingly, Vargas-Cooper makes the same point even when she is trying to make the opposite one. She says, for example, that Internet porn (the extreme, degrading stuff) appeals "overwhelmingly" to men. Her proof is that men make up two-thirds of all porn viewers. Two-thirds is overwhelming? Let's do a little math. Right at the beginning of the article, she says that in January 2010 -- one month -- almost 60 million people visited a pornographic website. If two-thirds of them were men, that means that one-third of them -- that's 20 million -- were women. If 20 million women in the United States are viewing Internet porn in a single month, ... gosh, that sounds like a pretty big sample to me. So maybe it's not just men who get off on the crude stuff.

But what's important is not cavilling about little points like this one. What is truly important is to try to understand just what is going on here. How is it possible that sex -- the blessed gift of golden Aphrodite, that softens the sternest soul and brings beauty and joy and song into the world -- how is it possible that this very divine gift can be so aggressive, so brutal, so degrading? And note that I am not asking about perversions of sex -- we all know that anything originally good can be spoiled by evil. That's the whole point of the story of Lucifer. But Vargas-Cooper is clear-eyed enough to brook no confusion over the fact that it can sometimes be the nastiest sex that is the most enticing. So what does this say about us? Are we ourselves incurably corrupt? Are we somehow in our nature attracted to evil? That's certainly one legitimate reading, and it seems to be the one D was mulling in her remarks that I quoted above.

But I think there is another way to approach the question, and it appeals to me for a couple of non-intellectual reasons. One is that I enjoy paradox; another is that it is kind of fun to run smack dab against any kind of received wisdom. So this approach starts by admitting everything Vargas-Cooper says, but then also noting that -- as we all know from first-hand experience -- sex can be very good. It can even (sometimes) approach to the highest good human beings are able to experience. It is important not to forget this fact. And things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Therefore: If, on the one hand, sex is (or can be, at certain times and under certain conditions) brutal and dirty and degrading; ...

And if, on the other hand, sex can also be very very good; ...

Then surely it follows that [somehow, in ways we don't understand] what is brutal and degrading can be [sometimes, in some respects, from some points of view, with other qualifiers that we don't even know yet or can't think of right now] good.

If I were to repeat that without all the cotton batting in my mouth, it would come out as: what is brutal and degrading can nonetheless be good.

D was really unhappy with this conclusion, at any rate when I stated it so baldly. She talked about obvious examples of human degradation like the concentration camps as clear examples that were not good. Coming back to sex, she added, "I might disagree with your assertion that brutality does not leave a mark on one’s psyche and character; I deal with too many rape victims at my school to accept that assertion. And of course, rape is a form of sexuality; it cannot be labeled only ‘violence and a desire for power’, although has elements of both apart from sexuality. Rape and other forms of brutal sexuality can be devastating, and not just to children."

Well of course I never meant to deny any of that. To say that a few very special brutal things can also sometimes turn out to be somehow good in some special way is not at all the same as saying that all brutal or degrading things are always good, always simply good, or good without further qualification. That latter would be crazy talk. In the same way, I never imagined (for example) that "Degrading = Good" could ever become some kind of slogan for social engineering or reform. That is the direction that the Marquis de Sade tried to go (almost exactly) and his results were nauseating. So this insight (or deduction, or whatever it is) can apparently not be easily or simplistically generalized outside of its original sphere of application.

It is also true that sexual brutality can leave deep scars on the soul. D wrote of the rape victims she meets at her school; Vargas-Cooper, in a very different way, writes of "Last Tango in Paris." There is no question that these scars can be deep and real. Again, I would not dream of disagreeing.

And yet, somehow there is a great mystery here. Because while it is patently, undeniably true that what is brutal can be evil and scarring, I think Vargas-Cooper is pointing to a more hidden truth which is that it need not always be so in 100% of cases. Of course I agree that the Shoah was evil; and of course it is clear that the rape victims in D's school are shattered and scarred by it. But what about Vargas-Cooper's one-night stand, the one where her young man could only be excited by something that made her uncomfortable? There are a lot of things I could say about that story -- first among them, that I would hate to be that young man because it must be sad to be him, to live with a soul shaped like his. But I think we cannot say that the event scarred or brutalized Vargas-Cooper, ... even though at some level it was intended to. But there are many levels here. One one level, she and the young man were friends, apparently. On a deeper level, he wanted to find something that would hurt her, because he found it exciting. And on a still deeper level she was happy to comply ... partly, I think, out of kindness or affection to him; but also partly, she seems to hint, because it was at least possible for her to be excited by it too. (She never says this explicitly, but I think it is implied by the other things she does say in other parts of the article about being excited by things that revolt one.) I don't think that necessarily means it would have excited her on a different night, or under other circumstances. Maybe it is just that she hoped his reaction could be contagious. Or maybe it is something else, ... I am really not sure. But I am certain that she would not have written about it so matter-of-factly if the experience had truly scarred her. So there is something mysterious going on here, where aggression is wounding ... except once in a while under special circumstances, when it isn't; where degradation is degrading ... except now and then between just the right people at just the right time, when it isn't ... or isn't exactly. It is very difficult to pin down with any precision.

Is there any way of understanding how it could have come to be in the first place, that these kinds of things can be exciting? Yes, I think so. The place to start is the observation that in some ways we appear to be made with parts that have overlapping uses. It is undeniable that one of the places in the soul (or brain, if you prefer) from which we draw the power and fantastic energy that fuel our sex drives is from that same pool which also feeds anger and fighting. Here is another point at which I have to correct Vargas-Cooper just a bit. She quotes Freud on "'emotional ambivalence' -- the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one's sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal." But I have to disagree with her use of the words "ambivalence" and "hate". Oh sure, I suppose it happens sometimes. But she writes as if it is fundamental to male sexual arousal that we have to both love and hate our partner, and that's not true. I would go farther and say that even if you accept the description of male sexual arousal as "aggressive, hostile, and humiliating" (at least in part) it still does not follow that it springs from hatred. The thing is, somebody who did those things while sane, while in his right mind, in the light of day ... that man would have to be motivated by hatred. Fully agreed. But to act that way in bed ... I'm not so sure. I won't deny that there are some guys who do feel that kind of ambivalence. You can find guys pretty easily to prove just about any disreputable point you'd like to make about men. [That was a small joke.] But I think it's also possible for a guy who feels no such ambivalence nonetheless to act in bed in this same kind of aggressive way. Why? Because he has gone temporarily out of his mind. Because he is in the grips of erotic madness, and so in a sense is no longer himself. Or you can say that is also a part of himself, but it's not a persona he would be willing to admit to the next day at work around the coffee machine. It is a persona that is so different from who he is the rest of the time that he can look back at the nighttime in wonderment. "Was that me? Did I really do that? To her?? And she let me?? Wow ... what could ever have possessed us ...?" Of course, what possessed them both was lust, erotic madness; and while a man is in the grips of it, that madness upends all his values. Things that he honors and cherishes in the daytime become of no account; things that he finds sordid or repugnant may in that moment shine with a new light. I expect that this is true of women too, although probably in somewhat different ways. But it is still madness. It still draws its power from the same pool of energy that fuels rage and cruelty and ferocity under other circumstances. And so that pool of energy colors the experience of erotic madness with its own special hue. It is because we draw power from the same undifferentiated pool of energy that sexual madness acquires a flavor of aggression and wrath. There is no need for it to involve any actual hatred or ambivalence ... it just makes us act as if we felt those things. Because it makes us crazy.

OK, that's a kind of quasi-biological explanation, that sex and fighting draw energy out of the same pool and both give their scent back to the energy itself. That's not really an explanation at the level of lived experience. Is there any way to make sense of this odd confluence of the repulsive with the attractive, that treats our immediate experience fairly? I have an idea, but I am not sure how well it works. But the fact is that our civilized selves -- our appropriate, refined, dignified, cultivated, self-controlled, "nice" selves -- are masks. They are roles we create, characters we play in the vast theater of Living With Others. We create them by overemphasizing some parts of our selves, cutting out other parts, and substituting plausible stories for the real reasons of our hearts. To that extent, they are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lies. They may be necessary lies, because we know that we would repel the very people whose love and attention we crave if we did not play these roles. And of course they aren't really lies because we all know that we all do the same thing. We all know that there are parts of ourselves we don't show to others, and so we can guess pretty easily that they all have dark corners of their own hearts they don't show us. Still, there is a good bit of artifice to civilized life; and while the goal of civilization is to make that artifice effortless -- so that it becomes nearly real -- it remains a mask. It separates us from the immediacy of life, the rawness of direct sensation and reaction.

Sex cuts straight through all that bullshit, at any rate if it is good sex. False sex, civilized and refined sex, is clearly bad sex. So I think part of what people may find attractive about the crudeness of much pornography is that it bypasses our masks directly. It speaks directly to the dark corners of our hearts that we won't admit to anyone. It may be low and nasty, but it is direct and raw in a way that almost nothing is any more. And after so many years of trying to make civilized behavior seem like second nature, it can be a relief to give up and stop pretending. Even if this or that kind of porn isn't exactly your cup of tea, I think the rawness and directness make it appeal to us on some lower level that resents all the polite manners and cultivated behavior we have to put on every day before walking outdoors to meet the world. Even if there are ways in which the message of much pornography is profoundly false, it can feel true in ways that we may not be able to articulate clearly. This is the same kind of truth that I was trying to write about in my post "Beyond Dignity?" although there I wasn't thinking about pornography at all.

At a more abstract level, the metaphysical system that Robert Pirsig outlines in Lila (not the rather different system in his earlier and more famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) would also accommodate this "odd confluence" very nicely. In Lila Pirsig sketches a metaphysics in which there are multiple standards of good-and-bad, ... all equally valid! What is more, something that is very good in this scale might well be very bad in the next scale. (He explicitly instances sex as an example here, although not with the kind of graphic detail that Vargas-Cooper provides.) In the end he has a system that subsumes all these partial scales into a larger picture, and I won't try to summarize it right now. But I do think it works as a framework for understanding the paradox Vargas-Cooper highlights in pornography.

Without scaling Pirsig's heights, though, I think we can agree that what is right and good -- and exciting and gratifying -- in sex is not necessarily right and good in the outside world. Sex is almost a kind of world unto itself. Of course it can color the outside world -- D has written me eloquently about how sexuality can be a spirituality, and about how it can orient one's entire approach to life. But still, the things that are right in bed are not generally right outside of bed. In that sense -- that very restricted sense -- sex is like madness. This doesn't have to be a bad thing -- in the Phaedrus, Plato writes of madness (and also erotic desire) as a divine gift, something truly superhuman that allows us momentarily to transcend the world and reach for the gods. But it does mean that what applies here doesn't apply there. For this reason, I think we don't have to feel bad about the nasty aspect of sex. Even if it attracts us in bed, that doesn't mean it would ever attract us outside of bed -- and I'll wager that 99% of the time it does not. To say (as Vargas-Cooper does) that sexual excitement can include these elements which look rather unsavory by the light of day does not mean (as D fretted back at the beginning of this post) that there is something wrong with us, that we need to condemn ourselves or feel bad about who we are. All it means is that -- really and truly -- we cannot judge sex by the same standards we apply to the light of day. They are different worlds; and to each, the other looks like stark madness. That doesn't stop it from being a divine gift, however. The ways of the gods often look crazy to us.

In the end, there is no simple answer. Any attempt to wrap up the whole question, the whole experience, in a tidy formula will be wrong. Questions like this remind me why intellectual humility is a virtue; because the most interesting questions are always the ones we can't figure out.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. Thoughts?