Pornography

The debate about children in art and the surrounding morality started with Bill Henson's photographs of naked pubescent children. It is wider now, extending in several directions. In particular, into freedom of speech , and its association with freedom in art This article explores these issues with particular regard to Hensons photographs; and the application of several of the moral theories to this issue.

I argue that Alisa Carse's call for antipornography legislation sets a potentially dangerous legal move that could threaten to shut off the dialogue women need to redefine the meanings and terms of our sexualities. I also argue that the terms of legitimacy need to be re-examined outside a legal system that systematically fails to protect the rights of sexual minorities.

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Jennifer Saul has argued that the speech acts approach to pornography, where pornography has the illocutionary force of subordinating women, is undermined by that very approach: if pornographic works are speech acts, they must be utterances in contexts; and if we take contexts seriously, it follows that only some pornographic viewings subordinate women. In an effort to defend the speech acts approach, Claudia Bianchi argues that Saul focuses on the wrong context to fix pornography’s illocutionary force. In response, I defend (...) Saul arguing that Bianchi doesn’t show Saul has focused on the wrong context. (shrink)

This major collection of essays stands at the border of aesthetics and ethics and deals with charged issues of practical import: art and morality, the ethics of taste, and censorship. As such its potential interest is by no means confined to professional philosophers; it should also appeal to art historians and critics, literary theorists, and students of film. Prominent philosophers in both aesthetics and ethics tackle a wide array of issues. Some of the questions explored in the volume include: Can (...) art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better does that make it better as art? Is morally deficient art to be shunned, or even censored? Do subjects of artworks have rights as to how they are represented? Do artists have duties as artists and duties as human beings, and if so, to whom? How much tension is there between the demands of art and the demands of life? (shrink)

On the ten year anniversary of 2Girls1Cup, this article examines the complex balance of shock, pleasure and disgust elicited by this viral video.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of attempts were made to put into U.S. law a civil rights ordinance that would make it possible to sue the makers and distributors of pornography for doing so (under certain conditions). One defence of such legislation has come to be called "the free speech argument against pornography." Philosophers Rae Langton, Jennifer Hornsby and Caroline West have supposed that this defence of the legislation can function as a liberal defence of the legislation: in (...) particular, a defence of the legislation based on the value of women's liberty. This would be somewhat unexpected given MacKinnon's own antipathy toward liberalism. In this paper, I argue that the free speech argument against pornography cannot be used as a liberal defence of the ordinances. The legislation is, to some extent, self-defeating insofar as it understood in terms acceptable to a fairly standard kind of liberal. This becomes apparent when we consider the value pornography can have for women, which we can see if we consider what female makers, distributors and consumers of pornography have to say about why they make, distribute and consume it. (shrink)

The elucidation of Art. 4 Act No. 44, 2008 implicitly protects a person’s right to possess pornographic materials for his own use. This article argues that this reading opens up a number of moral problems. For one thing what is the limit of legal and illegal porn, a question which cannot be separated from our understanding of what is considered indecent behaviour. In addition, the porn industry, the source of pornographic materials, is considered immoral or against religious precepts in itself. (...) The right to posses pornographic materials will be discussed from this perspective. (shrink)

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any overlap between art and pornography, or are the two mutually exclusive? If they are, why is that? If they are not, how might we characterize pornographic art or artistic pornography, and how might pornographic art be distinguished, if at all, from erotic art? (...) Can there be aesthetic experience of pornography? What are some of the psychological, social, and political consequences of the creation and appreciation of erotic art or artistic pornography? This book will contribute to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the many representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes. It is sure to stir debate, and healthy controversy. (shrink)

This anthology takes the ever-controversial discussion of pornography out of solely academic circles; it expands the questions about porn that academics might tackle and opens the conversation to those who know it best—the creators and users of porn. Features essays on non-traditional issues in porn, including celebrity sex tapes, virtual sex, S&M, homosexual porn, and technology’s impact on the porn industry Features fascinating insights from psychologists, a lawyer, and an English professor, as well as industry insiders such as Dylan Ryder (...) A fun, entertaining, and philosophically provocative approach to pornography, written for the general reader. (shrink)

Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography—the word was not coined until the late 18th century—which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's _Fanny Hill_. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Lady Chatterly's Lover_, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, (...) Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. (shrink)

La porno straight est un genre littéraire, photographique et cinématographique socialement et historiquement situé, facilement accessible, jusque dans l’univers domestique – le câble – et le domaine professionnel – les écrans de veille. Je ne connais pas la pornographie..

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film (...) as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts. (shrink)

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative, triggering questions about the nature of desire, sex, sexuality, and the politics of our sexual behaviors. However, the notion of zombie sex has been largely unaddressed in scholarship. -/- (...) This collection addresses that unexamined aspect of zombiedom, with essays engaging a variety of media texts, including graphic novels, films, television, pornography, literature, and internet meme culture. The essayists are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, film studies, and gender and queer studies. Covering The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, and Bruce LaBruce’s zombie-porn movies, this work investigates the cultural, political and philosophical issues raised by undead sex and zombie sexuality. (shrink)

Torture Porn is a term that has generated a great deal of controversy during the last decade, critics utilizing the term to dismiss contemporary popular horror cinema as obscene and morally depraved. Arguing primarily in defense of torture-themed horror films, this book seeks to offer a critical overview and examination of the Torture Porn phenomenon, discussing the generic contexts in which it is situated, scrutinizing press responses to the sub-genre, and offering narrative analyses of the sub-genre’s central films; including the (...) highly popular Saw franchise, the Hostel movies, and recent revamped versions of slasher movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the multitude of independent direct-to-DVD films that have been influenced by these theatrically successful films. (shrink)

Torture porn has been vilified on grounds that are at best unconvincing and at worst incoherent. The subgenre’s remonstrators too often ignore the content of the films themselves, and fail to make sufficiently detailed connections between the subgenre and the cultural sphere. Reactions to torture porn rarely consider what values the films apparently contravene, and why, if the films are offensive, they are simultaneously so popular. The central derisive mechanism in operation is the ill-conceived combination of ‘torture’ and ‘porn’ itself. (...) The use of ‘porn’ as a label works to illegitimate torture porn and demand that body-horror retreat to its more ‘fitting’ position on the outskirts of the cultural radar. However, this approach is too busy pointing at violence, and fails to deal with the fact that sex is displaced. If violence is now pornographic, it is unclear what position sexual portrayals occupy, or whether they are still perceived as more offensive than violent representations. Furthermore, it is uncertain how we are to describe sexual images if that is the case, since the lexicon of offense has been waylaid. Torture porn’s critics commonly fail to account for the new context of ‘porn plus horror’, and what that combination says about visual representation and its limits. This chapter is a step towards rectifying that oversight. (shrink)

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched (...) upon in relation to its "extremity". -/- Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics). (shrink)

This chapter explores the tentative line between erotic spectacle and horror; a judgement that is problematic given that is based on an axis of moral or ideological normality. The contexts of viewing impact on the status of ‘obscene’ images, both in terms of the communities that view them and their motivation for viewing; for sexual arousal, out of morbid curiosity or malevolence, or perhaps all three simultaneously. The reception of an obscene image is largely based upon the issue of viewer (...) consent, but this itself comes at the expense of the reality of bodies depicted, that are pushed to (and beyond) their limits. The chapter examines the moral and philosophical implications of desires that place the body in extreme states of sexualized deconstruction - both real and faked – and how these apply to images and communities in cyberspace. (shrink)

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can (...) we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital? (shrink)

This study represents an inquiry into the historical conception of "pornography" that developed in the 19th century in response to the invention of photography. The project focusses on the historical coincidence of the invention of photography, the accompanying realist debates surrounding the nude, and the etymological transformation of the word "pornography." In contrast to recent literary histories of pornography, the dissertation insists that its modern conception and history, coincident with art in the age of its "technological reproducibility," is primarily image-oriented. (...) The study demonstrates that contemporary objections to pornography are indissociable from the 19th century dispute between photography and painting, which concerned the former's perceived disruption of established paradigms of art and realism. By locating both controversies within the Western philosophic and aesthetic tradition that associates the materiality of the image with femininity and the feminine, the dissertation questions the "self-evidentiary" nature of pornography as distinct not only from erotica but from other representational genres as well, and draws a number of conclusions concerning the relation of pornography to modernity. ;A cross-disciplinary study in sexuality and representation, the study concerns a broader cultural revolution in the 19th-century of which pornography and obscenity are a profoundly underestimated manifestation. In order to demonstrate the mutual implication of photography and pornography, the dissertation reconfigures the reigning admixture of psychoanalysis with Foucauldian panopticism in feminist theories of the gaze. While my interpretation is indebted to this line of thought, it differs radically in its insistence upon the femininity of the metaphors of Western iconoclasm; the project describes and examines the relation of subjectivity to the work of art wherein the sensuous materiality of the image, likened to the flesh of the female body, is a motivating concern of debates over medium and mediation. Once pornography is situated as a re-invention within the terms of a particular historical and social moment, the questions photography raises for the nature of art in the 19th century begin to resonate with traditional concerns regarding the immoderate materiality of the image, as manifested in debates regarding the appropriate "medium" of art. (shrink)

The innovative core of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's critique of pornography is the claim that pornography is not merely the expression of ideas--i.e., "speech"--but a material practice of subordination. I maintain that the predominance of the speech paradigm has forestalled a full elaboration of what it means to understand pornography as a practice--particularly the use of pornography for sex. I thus have two broad aims: The first is to show how the entrenched speech paradigm obscures the innovative significance of (...) MacKinnon and Dworkin's claim that pornography is a practice; the second is to develop a conceptually more adequate framework which both captures and extends MacKinnon and Dworkin's arguments. In my critique of the speech paradigm, I first discuss Ronald Dworkin's liberal defence of pornography, an instance of the "received" view of pornography-as-speech. I show that R. Dworkin's differences with MacKinnon and A. Dworkin are rooted in fundamentally incommensurate understandings of social equality, and of the relation between social meaning and language. I then discuss Rae Langton's attempt to make philosophically plausible MacKinnon and Dworkin's claim by arguing that pornography can be understood to be a "speech act" with the illocutionary force to do what it says. I argue that Langton's account is too linguistically defined and relies too heavily on the sovereign model of power to adequately capture the constitutive processes MacKinnon and A. Dworkin attribute to the practice of using pornography. In my constructive argument, I appeal to Judith Butler's notion of social performatives and Drew Leder's phenomenological account of the lived body to construct a framework for understanding how, through our routinized practices, social norms are incorporated and experienced at the level of the lived body, and how they can become sedimented in the form of tacit personal know-how. Using this account, I show how the routine use of pornography can plausibly be understood to cultivate tacit forms of sexual know-how that are subordinating. In my conclusion, I argue that this account demonstrates the need for sustained critical pedagogy in sexuality education. (shrink)

The focus on the content of pornography has dominated traditional discourse surrounding pornography. However, pornography must be understood as a representational practice in order to adequately explain how pornography functions as an instrument of repression. ;Thus, my dissertation seeks to answer the question, "What is wrong with pornography?" by making use of psychoanalytic concepts drawn from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I identify some of the principal features of iconographic representation. The central iconographic feature to be found in pornography is (...) the patriarchal distortion of the glorification of the penis. ;What is perhaps the core theme in pornography is that women have no desires of their own and are entirely subject to the sexual desires of men. They are represented as requiring discipline, enjoying bondage, and prone to bisexuality. I use Lacan's concepts of perversion and fetishism in order to identify pornography as that perverse fantasy of women. ;I conclude with Luce Irigaray's effort to provide a vision of intimacy which preserves and protects the desires, and hence the identity, of both women and men. (shrink)