Michael Eisenbrey—Response 2

QUESTION

Does Jensen adequately consider the role that pornography plays in sexually educating American youth today?

ABSTRACT

In the service of the nebulous goal of "eliminating masculinity," Robert Jensen calls for his readers to abstain from pornography and implies that, ultimately, it should be legally prohibited. This stance proposes to leave negative trends in pornography unchecked, despite the fact that pornography is a major source of sex education for American children; it also overlooks the pernicious effects prohibition would have upon labor practices in the pornography industry.

BODY

Jensen's content analysis of pornographic films is sound, as is his analysis of the warping effect pornography use can have on viewers' attitudes, emotions, views of others, and sexual preferences (i.e. desire for particular sex acts, not sexuality in general). He is right that "pornography as a mirror shows us how men see women" (14)—or he would be, if he clarified that here, as everywhere in the book, by "pornography" he means "mainstream pornography consumed by a heterosexual male audience." He acknowledges that gay pornography exists (and per Escoffier p. 534 we know that gay pornography represents "probably from ten to twenty-five percent" of the market) but never attempts to involve it in his argument; he acknowledges that as many as twenty percent of consumers of heterosexual pornography are women (98), but essentially ignores this fact as well.

Contrary to Jensen, I believe that the most troubling thing about pornography today is its ubiquity and the ease of access everyone in the developed world has to it. Jensen talks about his own grade-school experience of learning "the idea of prostitution" (39) but doesn't consider the environment in which kids today are growing up. I'm skeptical of the claim that "the idea of prostitution has to exist in a man's head first if he is to consider using a woman that way…a necessary component of this idea is that it will be sexually exciting to so use a woman" (39); Jensen takes this quotation part and parcel, and quite uncritically, from Sheila Jeffreys. In so thoroughly commercialized a culture as ours, do we not understand that everything is for sale? In fact, in so thoroughly digitized a world as ours, do we even bother with paying? Kids today—boys and girls, gay and straight—will see pornography, for free, on the internet. They don't need "the idea of prostitution" to go looking for it; they just need a little curiosity (or an older sibling).

Some of Jensen's analysis is relevant here—his remark that he "listened to young men tell me that pornography had taught them a lot about what women really want sexually" (44), for example—but he applies it too narrowly and then draws an unreasonable conclusion. Pornography plays a huge role in constructing the sexuality of all young people: it shows them what to do and how to do it; it gives them the rules of what's good, what's normal, what roles people play, and what other people enjoy. In our country, at this time, sex education in school is woefully deficient and perpetually under attack from the Christian right; in some states, it is practically non-existent. Pornography is all the sex ed many kids get. Is the "right thing to do" really to abdicate all responsibility for its content? Jensen acknowledges the role market pressures play in determining the production of pornography: "when a man buys or rents a DVD, he is creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being used…no matter what he knows or thinks he knows about a specific woman" (88). He also makes a good point about the lack of a clear line "between the bad guys and the good guys" (108) when it comes to male sexuality.

Unfortunately, Jensen turns away from both of these ideas. Towards the end of Getting Off, he takes an abstinent line: his male readers must not participate in any form of the sex industry: "men should do that because there is a compelling argument from justice, because it's the right thing to do," (166) he says. He doesn't explicitly name such men "good guys," but how else could the difference between those who do "the right thing" and those who don't be construed? By constructing "the right thing" as complete abstinence from pornography and disengagement from the pornographic industry, Jensen leaves the direction of pornography—the primary sex education of American kids—in the hands of the "bad guys." Worse still, he sets a long-term goal which is bound to push pornography even farther in the wrong direction.

Jensen dances around taking a position on the legality of pornography, hand-waving the question away by explaining that "we are a long way away from building the understanding that would be required to create appropriate legislative and legal approaches to the harms of pornography and build support for those initiatives" (183). In his phrasing there, though, and in his positioning of his present view in opposition to his erstwhile, now disavowed "fairly typical liberal/libertarian ideas about pornography" (6), Jensen strongly implies that he is for prohibition of pornography. Considered in this light, his several conflations (e.g. at the top of p.123) of pornography, which is legal and regulated in the United States, with prostitution, which almost everywhere in the US is neither, are troubling but illuminating. Whatever its faults, pornography is much less dangerous for sex workers than prostitution, and its legal status means that (in the US), those workers are much less likely to be abused, trafficked, unfairly compensated, or exposed to STIs. Jensen makes a few passing references to pornography before World War Two, noting that it was a smaller industry then; he does not give any information about safety or labor practices in that bygone era. If prostitution can in any way be fairly compared to pornography, it should illustrate the likelihood that prohibition of pornography would make life harder and more dangerous for the performers involved.

A twenty-seven year old college-educated man can make an well-informed choice about whether or not to use pornography. The average thirteen-year-old boy probably can't; he's certainly very unlikely to read Andrea Dworkin or Robert Jensen. If the pornography industry that will sexually educate that boy is moving in an increasingly violent, degraded, misogynist direction—and Jensen makes a strong case that is—then pushing for abstinence from and prohibition of pornography, and letting the industry continue in that direction unchecked and unquestioned, is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

DMU Timestamp: March 15, 2012 22:35