The Great Porn Misunderstanding: Pornography Is Mostly About Fantasy, Not Reality

The following is a response to Robert Jensen's recent AlterNet article, "Porn's Dirty, Dangerous Secret."

When I was 13, a new friend, Andy, came over my house to watch television. We were watching the show, Time Tunnel. As the show neared its climax, I noticed that Andy was quite nervous. When I asked why, he said that it looked like the hero was about to be killed. I said, "Are you an idiot?! Of course he won't be killed ... this is a TV series and it's on again next week!" It turned out that Andy's family didn't allow him to watch television and, therefore, he didn't know that the hero of a television series never dies. He didn't know the code.

Robert Jensen writes about pornography like someone who doesn't know the code. He seems incapable of differentiating fantasy from reality. He keeps mistaking the reality of the sexual enactments depicted in gonzo porn with their meaning in fantasy to the men masturbating. If the woman on the screen is having 4 penises shoved into her, something that would demean and degrade any real woman reading Jensen's article (and probably the actress performing such scenes), he automatically infers that the degradation must be the source of the male viewer's arousal. It isn't.

Jensen and other feminist critics of porn seem unable or unwilling to admit to the presence of an unconscious mind. This is the mind that animates our imaginations, that confers personal meanings on perceptions and events, and that ultimately is responsible for sexual arousal. I'm not talking about some Freudian mumbo-jumbo, but the fact that we interpret the world; we don't just objectively read it like we would a thermometer. When a woman sits at a café and gets turned-on by a big hairy biker standing at the cash register, she is inferring something about him, perhaps that he's tough, sexual, aggressive, and/or selfish. She's unconsciously interpreting the image. For reasons that have to do with her personal psychology, reasons about which she may well be unaware, these traits trigger her libido. In reality, this man might be gay, easily frightened, passive and solicitous. It doesn't matter. At that moment, her mind transforms a three-dimensional being into an object that stimulates her desire. She objectifies him.

This is what happens to each of us when we get aroused by an image, a body-type, a situation, or a story. Arousal happens in our minds, not out there in so-called reality. I might get aroused by the thought of being the President of the United States getting fellated under my desk while talking to a congressman on the phone, while you get turned on by the thought (or enactment) of a couple inviting discovery by having a hot "quickie" in a doorway. A woman I treated used to masturbate to the fantasy of being held down and sexually ravished against her will by the janitor in her office building, another by group sex with Mick Jagger. If these fantasies became realities, however, the fantasizers would likely feel something on a spectrum from uncomfortable to traumatic. Reality, however, doesn't matter. Our unconscious minds creatively interpret scenarios and perceptions that help us get aroused.

This process of creative interpretation is identical for men and women. As I show both in Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, and in my new book, Male Sexuality: Why Women Don't Understand It -- and Men Don't Either, the male libido is neither more powerful than that of women, nor can it be adequately explained through trite generalizations about the cruelty of men under patriarchy. Instead, sexual arousal for both men and women depends on one thing -- the momentary elimination of feelings and beliefs that inhibit it.

Our psyches have to contend with all sorts of threats to sexual excitement. We can't get aroused if we're too guilty about hurting the other, or too worried about him or her. We can't get turned on if we're feeling rejected, inferior, damaged, or helpless. All of us feel these things at some point or another, the mix and intensity of which depend on our particular histories. It turns out, for example, that both male and female desire gets shut down when guilt and worry squelches the capacity for selfishness and aggressiveness. Good and healthy sex requires not only affection and love, but also the capacity to not worry about one's partner, to "let go" with selfish abandon. I've had dozens of men and women who have consulted me about sexual boredom say some version of, "I wish s/he would just throw me on the bed and fuck me!" So-called "lesbian bed-death" often results from just such an inability of the partners to feel selfish, separate, and aggressive enough to "use" each other in a pleasurable way. The sexual ideal of two people lovingly gazing into each other's eyes is belied by powerful needs for something more out-of-control, perhaps forceful, and transgressive. As Woody Allen said: "If sex isn't dirty, you're not doing it right!"