The Zen of Porn: If Pornography Is Everywhere, Is it Nowhere?

By Shannon Rupp, The Tyee. Posted January 22, 2009.

When Vancouver mom Trina Campbell went public with her outrage over American Apparel adding a porn mag to a clothing display, I considered sending her my copy of The Porning of America, along with a good-on-you note. She deserves a prize for saying something no one else has the courage to utter.

Oh, the book won't help Ms. Campbell feel any better. Might even make her feel worse. Authors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott, an academic duet from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, have overwhelming evidence that the most dehumanizing style of porn has infected every aspect of life, and they trace the history of just how this came to be.

Readers learn about all sorts of things they were probably lucky enough to have overlooked. Like "toilet cams." Apparently, not content with web cams documenting the action in dorm rooms, some enterprising folk started attaching them to public toilets and posting the results. Who knew?

The book is subtitled The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here, and while they're short on ideas about the latter, the authors are brilliant at mapping out the former. In short: we have "normalized the marginal." Starting sometime in the 19th century, and with increasing enthusiasm and speed in the 20th, we have given over much of the public square to pornographic ideas and degrading, humiliating and gory sexual imagery. To the point that the non-stop sexualization of women and children is so common that our conscious minds just shrug it off.

What Are We Normalizing?

Most of us noticed the trend to skankwear, but unless you have children you probably missed the thongs-for-all movement. As the book relates, you can get your pre-schooler a thong emblazoned with cartoon characters, which serves to simultaneously impress upon her the importance of buying brands and being hot. She can also tart up her Bratz doll in streetwalker ensembles.

Do manufacturers even consider the implications of sexualizing children? Am I alone in thinking it gives pedophiles license when we normalize the notion of children in garments designed to inspire desire?

The authors cite Madonna for taking slutwear mainstream, and making huge leaps in getting us all to embrace taboos. Sometimes for the good -- in the U.S. she was among the first to talk about AIDS and safe sex -- but just as often she broke down barriers that would have been better left in place. Rounding out the half dozen cultural icons who led us down this path are pimpin' rapper (and professional pornographer) Snoop Dogg, literal porn star Jenna Jameson, crusading pornographers Russ Meyers and Al Goldstein, and yes, I'm sorry to say, we must always have Paris. That's Hilton.

Porn Baron with Regrets

In the surprisingly sweet rom-com Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the insightful Zack notes that Paris went from doin' it doggy-style on the Internet to selling perfume to tweens. Porn was a career-maker for the heiress, whose only talent seems to be for exhibitionism, and he plans to follow suit.

Of course, the movie's jokes rely on widespread knowledge of porn conventions. The mass audience has to know all about the cheesy imagery, the wooden acting, the boom-chuka-lucka music, the peroxide-hair and fake-tits aesthetic, and the fetishes and situations that lead to one of the movie's grosser gags, the frosting incident. (If you don't know, don't ask. If you do, well, there's no shame in knowing. It qualifies as cultural literacy now.)

We get the gags because, as Porning of America details, the blue movie went mainstream in the '70s with Deep Throat, which played ordinary theaters and was a fave reference for TV comics. A decade before, legendary racy-flick-maker Russ Meyers had made what was known as "tittyboom" -- the marriage of naked mammaries and violence that still graces our screens today. That bushwhacked the way to our current fascination with BDSM. Before that came graphic novels combining sex and violence -- only in the 1940s they were called comic books. (Yes, as long as comic books have existed, grown-ups have read them.)

The history of thin-edge-of-the-wedge techniques used to install porn in the public square is fascinating. Anyone who opposes its march is labeled a censor or worse, a prude. That's about as low a blow you can deliver in an era when every middle-aged mom supposedly aspires to be a MILF. Even more interesting is that some of the mid-century porn purveyors are now disgusted by the torture and degradation that characterizes the bulk of contemporary smut. (Gore-laden porno is so common it even has a nickname -- gorno.) Al Goldstein, a 1960s anti-censorship advocate who founded the magazine Screw, calls today's streaming video offerings a "fleshy catastrophe" that displays the "worst possible kind of sex."

" ... it desensitizes us, it makes [sex] more boring ... " Goldstein told the authors.

A Nation of Porn Stars

Today, at the click of mouse, there are hundreds of sites with names like pornhub.com, redtube.com, and youporn.com. The latter is one of a myriad of DIY sites aimed at enthusiastic amateurs who like to film themselves in the act and throw it up on the web.

See more stories tagged with: culture, media, porn, censorship

Shannon Rupp is a contributing editor at The Tyee. Read her previous columns here.

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