In Defense of Porn Part 1: The Introduction

Yes, but does porn love you back?

I'd like to do a new arc now, one about sex, pornography, and gender, building off what I thought was the best post of the Mike the Broken GI Joe arc, which was about masculinity.  Talking about sex is kind of a paradox for me, because while I am disabled now, I am planning on seeking employment in the future and these are the sorts of materials online that come back to haunt people on graduate school and job applications.  So, let's start with a few ground rules.  I do not want to talk about the specifics of my sex life or my sexuality if I don't have to.  Therefore, as a general disclaimer, you can safely assume that everything I talk about here is in the hypothetical.  Second, we need to draw a couple of important distinctions.  The most important of these distinctions comes in paying for sex.  I draw a huge distinction between downloading a pornographic picture from the internet and even paying for a lap dance, and so should you.  The key difference is that there is no personal, face-to-face interaction, and thus the opportunity for harm is somewhat limited.  The second distinction has to do with legality.  This should almost go without saying, but the exploitation of minors is not just wrong, it's illegal.  So even if I talk about men being say attracted to teenage girls, there is a very big distinction between thinking this and actually acting upon it.  The former is a commonplace occurrence, the latter is a crime depending on each state's statutory rape laws.

Okay, I think that covers the ground rules.  Now let's get into the meat of this post, where I defend pornography from would-be foes on both the right and the left.

Porn has long been scorned as a moral and cultural abomination, yet few people ever stop to think about where contemporary society would be without it.  There is certainly the classic argument that it's exploitative of women, but it an age of celebrity glamour and fetish models and practicing "lifestyles" I don't know how necessarily true that is.  True, there will always be exploitation in the sex industry.  But a simple Google search for several fetishes (e.g. "schoolgirl," or "maid," or "latex"), or even simply "nude," draws up at least as many well-fed, healthy-looking women who have neither tired eyes nor dark circles and seem genuinely willing to be there.  This is not to say that every model is there entirely of their own free will, but certainly neither is pornography some universally degrading and exploitative experience for women.  In fact, it's essential that it not be.  The reason is two-fold, and has to do with two technologies that pornography helped to bring into the mainstream (as it were): home video, and the Internet.

Back in the late 70s, seeing something pornographic typically involved trekking to a seedy theater in a disreputable part of town, sitting down with your feet on a disgusting floor, and being surrounded by sketchy perverted men.  That all began to change with the invention of Betamax and VHS.  Much as we have a copyright controversy today with digital music, the home video era began with a similar public battle over whether or not it was okay to tape shows and songs on the radio.  For a while, there was a real possibility that home video may never have caught on.  Enter the pornography industry, who knew a good thing when they saw it.  By vociferously defending the right of the public to watch movies in their own home, they not only brought us the video store and the concept of movie rental, they also revolutionized our sexuality.  So many conventions about society seem held together only be collective pretense--if we don't see others doing it, we assume that they don't do it, and if nobody does something, it must be wrong.  How many times has there been bubbling weirdness simmering just beneath the facade of normality in modern American society, only to be released at the first available opportunity of free expression?  Home video did that for sex and in particular fetishism in a big way.  But that was to be eclipsed a little more than a decade later by an even greater revolution.

This was exactly what Al Gore had in mind.

Big ideas seldom work as intended.  The phonograph was originally envisioned by Thomas Edison as a means of secretaries to keep records for their bosses.  In fact, he fought against using phonographic records for music.  But his only part was to bring his invention to the market.  The market ultimately decided what the most profitable use of it was.  The internet started out as a way for academics to talk to other academics, and rapidly became the most powerful tool of self-expression ever invented.  I was on the internet since about 1990.  I remember what it was like.  And I remember what society was like, even though I was only six years old.  Over the course of my life, I've watched that completely change.

What pornography did was give the average person on the street a reason to be online.  I highly doubt eCommerce would have been the resounding success it was without it.  Here at last, gays, lesbians, and the transgendered, many of whom were isolated, had a way of connecting with other like-minded individuals, overcoming geography and local hostility.  Fetishists too could for the first time connect with other fetishists.  Internet porn's effect on our sexuality was as total as it was rapid.  I hold it largely responsible for taking LGBT rights mainstream.  Every weird kink and quirk now had its own community, and people could see for the first time that they were not alone.  Porn had become mainstream almost overnight, taking with it acceptance of sexual orientation and alternative lifestyles such as BDSM.  We were, as we discovered an incredibly kinky nation of small-scale closet perverts.  And because of porn's early investment, the Internet took off, and brings us everything we take for granted today such as Google, Facebook, and smartphones.

I haven't met someone who was opposed to pornography who wasn't also opposed to sex in principle. This position is more common among feminists than conservatives (many of whom research shows oppose it publicly but privately are some of porn's greatest consumers).  Acceptance of sexuality has become in this era an acceptance of pornography as an expression of said sexuality.  There is, however, a frightening double-standard in place, particularly in the way women view men.  I will fully admit that I both own and view porn on a regular basis, even in my relationship with Kari.  Porn was, like for many people, among my sole means of expressing myself sexually for a long time in my life, and that has simply become a rite of passage for males in this society.  Moreover, porn was educational, and helped clarify many things about sex for me.  But there is still a stigma attached to this, and it has come into play in my life more than once.  This post has gone on long enough already.  There are so many things I want to talk about on this subject, and it's fully deserving of its own arc.  Let this post serve as an introduction, then.  I will leave no stone unturned, no kink left out, and no popularly-held conception erm, unconceived.  Sex is an important part of life, and porn is an important part of sex.  So let it all be said--in defense of porn.