This essay originally appeared in Critique #29 (1988), a special issue on "Sexuality".

Pornography is not easy to discuss, although by now — ten years into the media debate on the subject — it probably seems like it has been discussed to death. For starters, no two persons' definitions of what consititutes pornography ever quite agree. When one person equates pornography with "incitement to rape," while another sees it as "exciting portrayals of human sexuality in all its variations," it rapidly becomes clear that little agreement is going to be reached any time soon.

Unfortunately, most people discussing the topic have such an emotional investment in their perspective, be it feminist, first amendment absolutist, fundamentalist, or hedonist, that the reality of the topic is soon lost amidst the buzzwords, kneejerk reactions, and angry projections.

In view of this, I'd like to approach pornography from a different angle than usual, with the hope that a few insights may result. This approach is one that suggests that pornography is only incidentally about sex or sexual politics. Rather, its origin is in something we might call the "pornographic impulse." I define this as the tendency to create (or seek out an already created) media image or fantasy which substitutes for that which is represented.

This image or fantasy evokes a response from the viewer which he or she has been programmed to associate with the situation or event which is pictured. This is usually achieved by the media employing a narrowing or focusing approach which zeroes in on the evocative imagery at the expense of any surrounding scenery. In addition, the image is romanticized and simplified so that no negative realities intervene: pornography is all dessert.

Pictures of drugs in High Times can't get you busted; women on paper in Playboy don't talk back or refuse your advances; birds in photos don't fly away; and nature pictures don't include the buzzing insect. In their symbolic two-dimensionality, all can serve as pornography and illustrate the pornographic impulse.

Clearly, sexual pornography is only one manifestation of this impulse, and hardly the most pervasive. If porn as a concept applies not only to heterosexual porn but to homosexual porn, to political porn, to nature porn, to spiritual porn, then we have a cultural phenomenon which is not restricted to sexual politics but extends to a broader social psychology.

Pornography becomes a matter of cultural fetishes (in the same way that Marx spoke of commodity fetishism, i.e. the alienation of substituting a commodity for real satisfaction) which usually develop around unresolved tension-producing dichotomies: male/female (sexual porn), life/death (war and violence porn), civilization/nature (nature-ecology porn), and spirit/matter (spiritual porn).

The picture of a beautiful waterfall which an office worker has over her desk in an office building becomes an attempt to mentally lessen the cleavage between the extreme of working in a steel structure at abstract tasks every day, and the extreme of u nrestrictured nature. To the extent that the office worker is unable to bridge that gap in real life (by quitting the job and moving closer to nature) the picture serves as a substitute. It is a form of pornography.

Because of its very obviousness sexual pornography is, in some ways, not as pernicious as other varieties of the pornographic impulse which are so widespread that they have become almost invisible. Yet it would be rather tendentious to assert that D eep Throat is equal in all respects to a McDonald's TV ad or a painting by Norman Rockwell, although all may manifest a substitution of fantasy for reality. If nothing else, few people are on record as getting sexually excited while staring at a Rockw ell scene, while such arousal is the selling point of most pornography. In this respect, sex does set sexual pornography apart and must be discussed.

Unfortunately, in discussing human sexuality two opposing interpretations of our sexual nature seem to monopolize the stage and most participants are forced to side with one or the other. The first interpretation, which I'll call the Release Model, derives from biology and psychology, and sees sexual desire as a product of natural human instincts, a manifestation of the sex drive which all reproducing creatures have. This sex drive, or libido, may be channeled or sublimated in non-sexual outlets at times, but, on the whole, a vigorous sex-life is presumed to be the healthiest (and most natural) means of satisfying this innate urge. This interpretation, which prizes the release of se xual tension, might be characterized by the venerable phrase "let it all hang out." The second interpretation, which I'll call the Control Model, currently derives from two primary sources: conventional religious morality, and certain feminist theory.

The religious view sees humanity as imbued with a tendency to sin and stray from virtuous behavior. Our very sexual nature is credited to Adam and Eve's eating of the forbidden Apple in the Garden of Eden. Accordingly, sexual desire is, at root, proble matic, and in need of strict control. Scripture condones sex under certain conditions - in heterosexual wedlock, and fully accepting the possibility of pregnancy as a result - but humanity's fallen nature constantly exerts a pull towards adultery, pervers ion, and licentiousness.

The feminist view (which, like the religious view summarized above, has many variations and notable exceptions) disagrees with the religious view on almost all major points and derives from an entirely different set of assumptions, but ends up with a C ontrol Model of human sexuality just the same. Its version of The Fall isn't God's expelling of Adam and Eve from Eden, but rather the eclipse of an ancient benign Matriarchy by an oppressive Patriarchy. For the millenia since, human sexuality and the sex drive have been colonized by male prerogatives. It thus follows that the sexual desires of most men and women are not to be trusted, since they manifest conscious or unconscious patriarchal values. Such desires and their expression need to be remolded in to forms free of sexism, inequality, and "objectification." This control-oriented interpretation might be summed up with the phrase "disaster lurks at every turn."

Not surprisingly, most modern criticism of sexual pornography has come from religious and feminist camps utilizing control models of human sexuality. Thus the religious right condemns pornography because it portrays adulterous and licentious sex and en courages the viewer's sinful predilections (usually dreaded onanism, which is apparently a waste of perfectly good sperm). Similarly, the feminist left condemns pornography because it objectifies women, portrays patriarchal sex characterized by an inequal ity of power, and encourages the viewer's oppressive predilections (usually rape or sexual harassment.)

Those few who defend pornography for its own sake (as opposed to merely defending its first amendment right to exist) usually do so by citing a release model of sexuality. Thus Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy defends even mediocre sex (which porn-incited masturbation might be characterized as) as better than no sex, while the champion of casual sex, Dr. Albert Ellis, holds the thwarted sexual drive to be psychologically crippling, in view of which a copy of Hustler and a strong right hand are inexpensive aids for mental hygiene.

Exceptions to these generalizations should be mentioned. Some psychoanalytic champions of release, such as Wilhelm Reich, criticize pornography and any attendent masturbation as offering a stunted sexual release unaccompanied by a full emotional exchange or proper pelvic undulations. Conversely, a minority of radical feminists (sometimes ironically self-described as "bad girls") have defended pornography as a repository of fantasies that often rail at the constraints of patriarchal culture and allow women to broaden their own repertoire of sexual expression.

In all of these cases the fact remains that no matter how one characterizes human sexuality (whether as healthily ubiquitous or relentlessly sinful), sexual porn exists as a subset of the larger "pornographic impulse" and shares the same mechanism of stimulus/response. This impulse has been ruthlessly analyzed and critiqued by the '60s radical theorists, the Situationist International, and their latterday successors such as John Zerzan and the anti-civilization tabloid, the Fifth Estate.

Briefly, what I've termed an impulse, is seen by them as a tendency of the present world economic engine to stimulate desires and then produce representations of those desires' fulfillments as commodities to be purchased. Similarly, the system offers up superficial representations of political power in the form of candidates who proceed to enact a facsimile of democracy. Having long since lost any sense of real connection to nature, or their own social or internal life, most people are caught up in a dreamworld of media-created pseudo-events, disposable celebrities, and unnecessary products (the Spectacle) whose primary purpose is to keep the economy moving. Zerzan has gone so far as to locate the fundamental alienation of humanity from true lived reality at the moment of the introduction of language and the concept of time, when humans shifted from being hunter-gatherers to an agricultural existence. In this drastic analysis, art or literature of any sort is a kind of lie, with the entire heritage of human culture reducible to an exercise in the pornographic impulse. Atheist though he may be, Zerzan is clearly a prophet of biblical dimensions, for here we have yet another version of The Fall.

Undoubtedly, a sweeping analysis on this scale begs for an equally sweeping solution, thus Zerzan and the Fifth Estate call for the end of civilization as we know it as a first step in the right direction. Little do the self-appointed moral guardians of our culture such as Jerry Falwell suspect that their efforts to wipe out one corner of the pornographic colossus dovetail nicely with the radical project to undercut the Spectacle of pseudo-satisfaction. Today Penthouse, tomorrow the web offset presses themselves. By fighting the pornographic impulse, one can have the satisfaction of both preserving and demolishing civilization at the same time; truly a rare and delicious paradox.

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