On Pornography

Andrew Koppelman has a post at Balkinization about pornography as protected speech.

Freedom of the mind should be understood to forbid the government from extending protection only to those uses of the mind that it regards as sufficiently dignified. Freedom of thought should include the freedom to be playful, and to toy even with dangerous thoughts. Playing with thoughts is precisely what the arts do.

The effort to separate pornography from the arts is the rock on which the argument I stated at the beginning has always come to wreck. Thought is contained in every work of art – that’s why the arts are protected by free speech -- but the point applies equally to every fantasy constructed by human beings, sexual or otherwise. Freedom of the mind means the right to imagine other worlds, and to tell one another what we have imagined.

The question of the boundary between art and pornography, particularly that line where the "erotic" stops being erotic and becomes pornographic, is one that has interested me more and more in recent years. I have created a number of images that I'm sure some people would consider pornographic simply because they are unashamedly sexual. I'm certainly not the only one to be interested in this -- a host of photographers have, for example, created images of masturbation or men with erections as art, and the German photographer Thomas Ruff recently did a series of images culled from online porn sites, although he felt the need to blur them beyond recognition. And it goes without saying that much of Robert Mapplethorpe's early work centered around this very question.

The issue of the state's interest in banning pornography is different. It seems these efforts always revolve around the idea of harm, as they must to have any legal justification, and one of the stock answers has always been that pornography leads to sexual violence. I ran across a reference to a recent study that indicated just the opposite, and if I can figure out how to google it, I'll put in a link. There was that idiot woman who embarked on an anti-porn campaign because it "demeaned women," which I always had trouble reconciling with gay pornography -- are they demeaned because they're not included? Of course, I also came up with the theoretical question of "What if the women are willing participants and actively enjoy doing it?" I suppose it would then devolve into questions of commodification, but in this country, everything is a commodity.

The politics of pornography is one of those phenomena that reveals how little we really think about some issues. It's a given that pornography is "bad." Therefore, it should be illegal. As it stands, it's only provisionally illegal because the courts have recognized that adults can look at whatever they damned well please. The exceptions are things like snuff porn and child porn, because it's quite obvious that a crime has been committed in their making. Congress keeps making attempts to censor the Internet under the guise of clamping down on child porn -- "Save The Children!" which has become the new rallying cry for those who want to govern your thoughts. I have no objection to protecting children, because children need protection. I object to using it as an excuse to censor everyone else.

One question that I haven't seen directly addressed in this, although it's implicit in all the arguments, is "Why ban pornography?" Maybe it's just that we have a problem with sex and, by extension, nudity. I'm reminded of the logical backflips performed by the late Kenneth Clark in his attempts to differentiate between "nude" and "naked" in an attempt to give the nude in art some dignity. I didn't find his arguments convincing, particularly in light of contemporary nude photography, which does not fulfill most of his criteria for "nude."

The sketchier argument is that pornography causes "moral harm." I don't have much truck with the state regulating private morality, since that's a completely subjective standard -- just exactly what is this "moral harm" and how is it measured? By what standard does it count as harm? Absent real, quanitifiable, perceptible harm, I consider those arguments specious. Koppelman refers to another paper he's written on that subject which I haven't read yet. When I do, I'll probably comment on it, somewhere.

In the meantime, read Koppelman's post. Read the comments, too -- they're pretty interesting.