Chris, over at Sex In The Public Square, begins his review of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity thusly…

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it.   But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.  I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s  is absolutely right about this in general…

And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.

Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny.  Amazon describes it thusly…

Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.

If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it.  More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals.  Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease…  You’re damn right we’re anti-sex!  It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian".  I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something.  But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence.  If anything, it wants the silence to continue.

Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature.  It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates.  It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon.  Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably.  Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately.   Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig.  Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge.  You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.

Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:

There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.

You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash.  There’s a couple reasons for that.  First..because it mostly Is trash.  In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does.  But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose.  It’s job is to happily push our buttons.  But everyone’s buttons are different.  And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another. 

When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them.  Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex.  Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on.  I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion.  That is me.  My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one.  But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit.  Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else.  I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact.  They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection.  It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was…  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem.  It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way. 

It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality.  I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women.  Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females. 

This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality.  But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality.  That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women.  The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice.  That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced.  But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.

Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator.  But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away.  And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming.  Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.  

But that’s exactly what some people want.  Better we feel ashamed then proud.  Proud people don’t passively take orders.

There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.

If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within.  It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover.  If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature.  There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane.  We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt.  That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women.  So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.