Frenzy of the Visible

As director of education at my parish, I came across faith formation resources on sexuality provided by the synod. “There has been a need in our church for entering into conversations about sexuality with our youth.” My own sexual education as a youth can be summed up in that old anti-drug slogan: “Just Say No.” Of course, given the conservative makeup of the congregation, were I to propose any such curriculum, I’d probably be relieved of my position.

I’d venture to say that the response of “Sally” would be typical in the parish. Sally was a classmate of mine in college. I first noticed her in chapel. Tall and slender with light brown hair, she emitted a devout, cheerful wholesomeness. Naturally I developed a crush on her which went unconsummated in even the slightest way; we simply remained “friends.” She was the quintessential virginal, unattainable girl.

I hadn’t thought about her in quite some time until I recently stumbled upon a profile of her online. I discovered she had earned a Ph.D. in Christian ethics, specializing in marriage and family life. She had married and already had a quiver full of kids. She was featured in a news article opposing a sex education bill at her state capitol.

Naturally she’s vociferously anti-porn. She called it a “toxin” and compared it with the coronavirus. “A pure gaze focuses our desire alone on our spouse.” An impure gaze she said is like Lot’s wife looking back to Sodom and Gomorrah. She bemoaned the fact that porn negatively impacts a couple’s “lovemaking.” (Perhaps these husbands turn to porn frustrated by the infrequency of “lovemaking” confined to the bed in the dark in the missionary position.) Her Twitter posts are abuzz with purity talk:

Those who believe they’ve found liberation in sex positivity are deceived.

Lust objectifies women.

The biggest impediment to evangelization right now is pornography.

I would say personally that porn has been invaluable as a source of sex education. “[Porn] has drastic limitations in representing real sex,” sex educator Gigi Engle told that esteemed academic journal Teen Vogue. “Porn is like real sex on steroids.” She also complained, “Porn films don’t show the power of intimate and emotional connectivity.” That lack of intimacy and emotional connection is a significant part of porn’s appeal for me. The same goes for its ugliness. It’s aesthetic (if it can be called that) is what porn scholar Linda Williams calls the “frenzy of the visible.” Porn sex is marked by its unabashed physicality. It displays lust. The “lovemaking” Sally extols is not to be found. A review in Variety of a film based on the contemporary L.A. porn scene bemoans what porn has become in the Internet age:

In porn, extreme is the new normal…. I’m talking about the “rough” vibe that now courses through so much online pornography, and how it has turned porn into an increasingly dark arena for acting out a kind of ritualized, eroticized aggression. Porn used to depict, more or less, what was known as vanilla sex. Now, to put it bluntly, more and more of it is about hate-fucking…. Porn, when it’s just a click away, can no longer be called underground, yet the emotions of porn, which increasingly fuse lust and brutality, adoration and degradation, are something that as a society we still tend to bury.

The gauzy, cheesy sex of Deep Throat has yielded to something darker. The performers, the review continues, are “letting out their ids, tapping their inner sexual beings. And what they’re now encouraged to channel is a sadomasochism of the spirit.”

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Camille Paglia

Porn exposes sex at its rawest and most honest. In porn, it’s all about the fuck and nothing more. Personal gratification is valued to the exclusion of other goods. The aggression inherent in male sexuality is exposed. Orgasm is exalted above commitment and romance. The selfishness of porn appeals to me. There’s a radical freedom portrayed in porn. As a Parisian libertine has said, “Fucking is our liberty.”

Porn scenarios are outlandish (I generally prefer my porn “straight,” that is, without scripts or storylines), but they can hint at psychic shadows. In one memorable scene, a church-going blonde MILF prays on her knees for “strength” to not give into temptation. She does, of course, explicitly. After getting thoroughly fucked like the slut she is, overwhelmed by her sin, she tearfully gets back on her knees. It’s actually a fine (if sexually idealized) depiction of the guilt-arousal cycle.

The anti-porn zeal of Sally typifies the repression of the flesh that characterizes Western Judeo-Christian culture. Feminist critic Camille Paglia observed, “The problem with America is that there’s too little sex, not too much. The more our instincts are repressed, the more we need pornography.” Porn deflowers the ideal of female chastity. The female figure in porn is decidedly carnal. According to Roger Horrocks, “To masturbate over her is a kind of black sabbath.” The sentimentality and romanticism which define Western femininity are perverted. There is something about watching a girl get fucked that is subversive. It’s what one sex blogger calls “the ultimate kink”: the lure of the forbidden.

Porn Star Experience

PSE in escort nomenclature stands for “Porn Star Experience.” “Sex workers that offer a Porn Star Experience for their customers engage in kinky and taboo sex acts similar to those seen in pornographic films. This kind of sexual experience opposes the sensual and romantic sex characteristic to the Girlfriend Experience.” Activities “might include sex in adventurous positions, loud moaning, dirty talk, hair pulling, light spanking, anal play, extreme gagging, facials, and sex with toys or costumes” (Kinkly).

If money was no object, and fantasies were no obstacle…ask yourself this tonight: Who will she be, and how will you have her? The premise of one porn site consists of porn stars offering their services as escorts. It captures some of the dynamics of paid sex: the knock on the door of the hotel suite, the introductory banter, the exchange of cash. The sex that follows is decidedly PSE.

The ubiquity of pornography has left an imprint on sexual tastes. Cindy Gallop delivered a TED Talk a decade ago recounting how her sexual experiences with young men had become pornified. (Their most frequent request was to come on her face.) She urged them to “make love, not porn.”

But how unrealistic is porn?

Make Porn, Not Love

In its sexual acrobatics and wild erotic phantasmagoria, porn certainly seems unrealistic. Stephanie once complained about an inexperienced client who tried to replicate what he saw in porn. (“I’m flexible, but I’m not Gumby.”) There is nevertheless a profound sexual realism in pornography, for it does, according to Camille Paglia, “represent the brute reality of sexuality.” The pornographic narrative subverts the ideal of monogamous romance and decouples physical passion from emotional intimacy. It exalts raw pleasure over any procreative intent. In porn we confront the darkness of eros.

What critics of pornography have decried as objectification might be better described, according to a Yale philosophy professor, as animalification. Women in porn are appreciated not for their rational faculties but for exercising their sexual instincts. For me, much of the appeal of porn starlets comes from their unabashed sexuality. The message I received growing up in the purity culture was that the female libido is passive, tethered to the desire for emotional intimacy. Girls are naturally modest and pure; they must guard their bodies and hearts comes from the sexually assertive male. (Hence the need for modesty.) Female sexuality is marked by restraint. “Sugar and spice and everything nice.” Porn disrupts that myth.

Not so nice….

Porn can affirm female sexual agency. Angela White says, “Pornography functions as a space where I’m able to be very creative with my own sexual desires. I’m able to express myself and explore the boundaries and depths of my sexuality.” Porn depicts women as sexually voracious, an antidote to the forced illusion of modesty. The constraints of chastity or fidelity no longer apply. Yet it does so through the prism of the male gaze in which women are presented as objects of desire. The women in porn present themselves as always sexually available. As Gail Dines notes, sex in porn is “something that the woman seeks out because she loves to be sexually used.” The subtext is that women function as vehicles of pleasure designed to satiate a man’s needs.

One of the well-worn tropes in porn (which nevertheless still entices me) is that of female innocence defiled — the schoolgirl, the cheerleader — even if the ostensible ingenue turns out to be the sexual protagonist. The stereotypical “porn star look” appeals less to me than “the girl next door turned hardcore.” Charles Stember writes, “The gratification in sexual conquest derives from the experience of defilement — of reducing the elevated woman to the ‘dirty’ sexual level, of polluting that which is seen as pure, sexualizing that which is seen as unsexual, animalizing that which is seen as ‘spiritual.'” A moralistic sexual ethic which exalts chastity and makes sex “dirty” interweaves sexual gratification with the violation of taboos. Porn exploits that dynamic.

Most vitally, porn affirms my experience of sex as detached from love. Sex has little to do with expressing love or affection. Outside the niche of so-called “couples porn,” the sex in porn is brutally depersonalized. Philosopher Roger Scruton observes, “It prizes sexual excitement free from the I-You relation and directs it to a nameless scene of mutual arousal, in which arousal too is depersonalized, as though it were a physical condition and not an expression of the self.” In that manner, porn replicates much of my experience with escorts. One artist distinguishes the “pornographic element” in that “what you’re left with is a sense of estrangement, not a sense of connectedness,” for porn is “never about warmth or emotional proximity.” One study documents that repeated exposure to pornography weakens among both men and women valuations of marriage and monogamy. In its baseness, porn nevertheless depicts a stark truth.

Contra Ms. Gallop, I say: Make porn, not love.

Porn Verite

While searching for “adult entertainment” recently, I found porn star Angela White in a “gonzo”-style video. It shows the busty Aussie starlet in a variety of rough scenes shot in a hotel suite, culminating with her getting sodomized with her head stuffed in a toilet. Gonzo porn has a reputation for being degrading and misogynistic. “I wanted to release a gonzo DVD that challenges the assumption that women cannot or should not enjoy rough sex,” White said. “[It] is as much a political statement as it is another step in my sexual exploration through porn.”

Gonzo movies are, according to Chris Hedges, “porn verite.” “Gonzo films push the boundaries of porn and and often include a lot of violence, physical abuse, and a huge number of partners in succession.” They discard stylized cinematography, scripts, and storylines, focusing almost exclusively on the physical action. Philosopher Robert Jensen examines it in the context of the evolution of porn. “[Porn] could have explored intimacy, love, the connection between two people…. It has descended to multiple penetrations, double anals, gagging, and other forms of physical and psychological degradation.” It’s found an audience. “And many men–maybe a majority of men–like it.”

Gonzo porn is, writes Hedges, “not about sex.” That’s a common critique of pornography. Gail Dines complains, “Porn sex is not about making love” in Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. “And when porn men are done, they are really done–there is not the slightest show of postcoital intimacy with the woman they have just ejaculated onto to.” Porn promotes “an orientation to sex that is instrumental rather than emotional.” Actually what’s compelling about porn is that it’s only about sex. Jensen’s lament about the absence of intimacy, romance, and connection betrays a naive conception of sexuality. “Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted,” critic Camille Paglia writes. Jensen’s definition of “patriarchal sex” comes close to capturing the essence of all sexuality: “Sex is fucking.” He continues, “What matters…is the male need to fuck…. A man is a male human who fucks.”

“Sex wasn’t a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.” That was the feminist message Natasha Vargas-Cooper received in the 1990s. In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, she conceded the folly of that presumption. “[T]he egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.” The men in porn “fuck with impunity.” Vargas-Cooper continues:

The heated act of sex often expunges judgment, pushing the participants into territory they hadn’t previously contemplated. The speed at which one transgresses, the urge to reach oblivion, the glamour of violence, the arbitrary and shifting distinction between acts repulsive and attractive—all these aspects that existed only in sex are now re-created through Internet porn. You could be poking around for some no-frills Web clips of amateur couples doing it missionary style, but easily and rapidly you slide into footage of two women simultaneously working their crotches on opposing ends of a double-sided dildo, and then all of a sudden you’re at a teenage-fisting Web site. All of this happens maybe by accident—those pop-ups can be misleading—or maybe, and more likely, it happens because in that moment it’s arousing, whether you like it or not. Consuming Internet porn, then, mimics many of the sensations found in sex. It’s overpowering and immediate; it is the brute force of male sexuality, unmasked and untethered.

She relates a revealing vignette from her personal life to illustrate the “brute force of male sexuality.” She once had a one-night stand with a fellow who couldn’t stay aroused without the prospect of having anal sex. “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable,” he candidly told her. And she submitted to his request.

Both conservatives and feminists miss the point when they condemn porn for its “unrealistic” portrayal of sex. Porn is shocking because it is all too real, shattering the illusions of a domesticated sexuality.

Illicit Triumph of Sexuality

“Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives,” says Camille Paglia. But it’s more than just an escape. Porn can be profoundly liberating. Transgressing the traditional cultural taboos or religious mores surrounding sex, porn displays human sexuality in its raw and uncensored state. It subverts conventionally sanitized depictions of sexuality (“romance”). Porn is not bound by the constraints of marriage or bourgeois morality. Indeed, one scholar writes that “a sexual suspension of the ethical is a pre-requisite for seeing it pornographically.” Violating the taboos bound up with conventional morality is itself a source of pleasure. “To know that the sexual has triumphed over the moral could add to the sense of sexual liberation.” The “illicit triumph of sexuality” over morality is most vivid in “the fantasy of sexual desire overcoming some of the biggest taboos.”

One porn production company invites viewers to “give in to temptation,” boasting of scenarios where “mothers sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends, step-brothers shamelessly seduce step-sisters, and fathers eye their teen daughter’s best friend.” The premise is that “when passion takes over,” the moral compass is disoriented, and “what’s wrong seems right in the moment.”

“But behind closed doors, these Mormon girls are anything but innocent.”

“I always found things that are taboo attractive,” said the actress who depicts “Sister Rose” aka the Mormon MILF (“a total f*cking slut”) on MormonGirlz.com. As a dominatrix outside of adult films, she delved into religious role play. Eroticizing the religious can be a way of subverting sexual repression and its concomitant guilt. The sexual ethics of the Latter-day Saints are famously restrictive.

Yet there is also an inherent eroticism in Mormonism. One Mormon pornographer (really!) says, “Mormonism has always been seen as a place for secret sexuality. Ever since Joe Smith was secretly marrying [multiple] wives, people have thought of the Church as a sexually libertine one that was a danger to the mainstream way of life.”

MormonGirlz.com depicts sumptuous young women attired in temple garments as they navigate the rituals of a polygamous sex-crazed cult. Erotic explorations between missionaries in the bishop’s office and the insemination of these Mormon girls by the cult’s leaders in the precincts of the temple are standard fare.

A similar dynamic animates something else I’ve recently been getting off to: nun porn.

It’s not a theme new to the Internet age. Sally Munt remarks that “a whole subgenre of sexually titillating manuscripts” exploring the sexual desires of nuns has been produced for centuries. “Nun pornography is…one aspect of the vast, diffuse eroticisation of Catholicism enjoyed throughout Western culture.” Venus in the Cloister (1682) depicts a novice learning about sexual pleasure through frequent liaisons with monks. In La Religieuse, Diderot depicted a young nun ravaged by her lesbian abbess. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was the work of a 19th century Canadian which presented convent life as unrelieved debauchery. Italian filmmakers in the 1970s produced a series of “nunsploitation” films such as The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine.

“The nun is the woman above sex,” wrote a British psychiatrist. The habit and veil attempt to conceal her sexual identity. Yet veiled desires, nun-themed pornography suggests, cannot long be supressed. In the Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe writes of one alluring nun, “Hers was the contour of a Madonna, with the sensibility of a Magdalene.” There is a dialectic between the chaste and the erotic. Her attempt at desexualization is never completely successful. The nun’s habit is the testimony of her purity, a purity which is nevertheless precarious.

That purity is despoiled in porn. Profane lust overwhelms the sacred. Virtue is no match for vice.

Pornographic Imagination

Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
Camille Paglia

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Pornography entered my life at a relatively late age (post-college), but I soon became transfixed by it. Porn’s anarchic depiction of sexuality resonated with me as I began to express my own sexuality in ways that departed from the narrow prescriptions of traditional Christian morality. (Porn also served as a crude but remedial form of sex ed, which I had been denied at my conservative school.) The word itself is transgressive. In Greek, πόρνη (pórnē) and γράφειν (gráphein) mean “writing about prostitutes.”

I’m not supposed to look at it. Officially my denomination states “pornography is sinful.” Consumption of pornography by one in lay ministry is considered a form of sexual misconduct by my synod and subjects the offender to church discipline. Even the threat of sanction doesn’t deter me from watching porn.

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Porn exposes the base desires inherent in human sexuality. Watching men and women fuck with impunity on-screen has confirmed for me that sex is untethered to emotional commitment or any other value. It’s all about getting off.

“The selfish trajectories of sexual excitement have been problematic for Christian theology since the time of Augustine,” Arthur J. Mielke writes in Christians, Feminists, and the Culture of Pornography. Feminist literary critic Camille Paglia says that there’s a dark power at work in sexuality which pornography illuminates. Psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller concluded that sexual excitement was rarely generated by love and affection. For feminist theologians, the locus of reflection on sexuality is the relational bond between two people rather than traditional strictures on particular acts. This putatively progressive reimagining of sexual ethics takes a wayward trajectory if relational commitment turns out to be largely irrelevant to sexual desire. As Mielke puts it, pornography’s challenge to theology in both its traditional and feminist expressions lies in its transgressive exposure of raw sexual desire. Pornography “subverts the communicative possibilities of sex, reminding its users that desire is a profligate and faithless master.” The “pornographic imagination” is “an inescapable part of the sin that sex is, whether sanctified by marriage or not.” A “psychodynamically informed Christian theology” must grapple with this reality and recognize that pornography testifies to “deep longings for sexual satisfaction.”

In my encounters with “progressive” or “liberal” Christian sexual ethics, I’m struck by how fundamentally conservative they are. Even ethicists who challenge the traditional paradigm, such as Margaret Farley and James Nelson, emphasize commitment and mutuality as values by which to judge any form of sexual expression. The notion of “sex as gift” is espoused. Susan Sontag countered in her seminal essay on pornography that “sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness.” Sex can easily be experienced as curse. After being expelled from Eden, the first thing Adam and Eve are recorded as doing is fucking (Gen 4:1). One aspect of porn I find fascinating is how joyless it is. Most of it is an endless spasmic succession of cold animalistic motion. Therein lies its appeal. And its power.

Playpen of the Damned

“Do you watch porn?” Stephanie asked me. Among the titles in the small bookcase at her incall apartment were A History of Pornography and How To Make Love Like a Porn Star.

I admitted that I did.

“I like noise,” she said.

Like many of my generation, porn has become an vital expression of my sexuality. I had little access to pornography growing up. My college filtered our Internet access, so my encounters with sexually explicit material were titillating but sporadic. It was only after college that I was able to absorb the cornucopia of porn available online. In absence of any formal sex education, porn has instructed me. Its unabashed physicality fuels my lust. Its presentation of sex without affection appeals to me. Having watched it only furtively, it feeds into my double life. Its exploration of taboos fertilizes my dirty mind. It offends bluenoses and feminists, feeding into the transgressiveness that characterizes the erotic.

There is no better window through which to view the darkness of eros than porn. Camille Paglia writes, “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.” I just saw a statistic that 88% of the scenes of the most popular porn depict physical aggression, of which 94% is directed against women. Outside of a few niche sites, intimacy and affection are absent in porn. Men and women fuck with impunity, liberated from the strictures of religion and bourgeois prudishness. Porn is nihilistic. Doing what it takes to produce the “money shot” is the only normative principle.

Some concerned citizens lament a “pornified” culture in which sex is commoditized and reduced to its brute physical components. This is precisely what I find so compelling about porn. Others complain that porn is unrealistic. Yes, it may be unrealistic in its anatomical acrobatics, but it taps into those dark forces that animate sexuality. It penetrates the mysteries of sex. It exposes romance as a chimera. It highlights the aggression that accompanies the sexual act. It reduces sexuality to raw fucking. It exalts personal pleasure over concern for the other. Women are defined, and define themselves, solely by their sexuality and their capacity to satisfy male desire. Orgasm, as evidenced by male ejaculation (the cumshot), lies at the heart of sexuality. It’s addictive qualities demonstrate the coercive power of sex over our own lives. One insider in the porn industry called it “the playpen of the damned.” “Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,” wrote Susan Sontag in “The Pornographic Imagination.” Porn documents the unleashing of those forces with brutal honesty.