Porn again

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by David Colman

As New York City mayor Rudolph Giullani is preparing to rid Times Square of its legendary smut spots and Congress has charged into the on-line fray with the Exon amendment, which would criminalize the computer transmission of "obscene" material, there has been a landslide of serious attention in the press paid to the workings and consequences of pornography (Death-of-a-Porn-Star is the most fecund ground, yielding recent articles in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Out). Even Hollywood is interested, embracing rated-X matter in films like Showgirls and Striptease; a biopic on Hustler magnate Larry Flynt is scheduled.

Art, of course, has long trafficked in what is unsanctioned by society at large. Pornography is no exception. Artists have appropriated porn imagery in work ranging from Richard Prince's mid-'80s "Entertainers," electric-colored photos of porn stars, to Sue Williams' blood-and-guts paintings of copulating couples, to the output of a host of lesser-known artists, including Tom Burr, Jeff Burton, and Aura Rosenberg.

Today, pornography seems to be on everyone's mind. Can this be called a porno moment?

JOHN WATERS (director): Yes, I think it's a porno moment. I was recently a judge for the Male Erotic Video Awards, and at one point Jeff Stryker came out fully clothed, with his zipper down and a huge hard-on hanging out, and the entire audience gave him a standing ovation. I kept thinking that ten or fifteen years ago this sort of venue would have been raided. What amazes me about pornography is that men just don't seem to be embarrassed by it - and I do think that men in general, gay or straight, seem to love pornography. I was on a plane once, and a Japanese man sitting next to me took out a porn magazine - close-up shots of vaginas and so on, nothing softcore about it - and started leafing through it as though it were the in-flight magazine. He kept right on flipping through as if it were utterly natural. Porn really is everywhere now - anyone in any suburban town can go right out and pick some up - and the irony is that the one place trying to get rid of or regulate it is Manhattan!

AMY ADLER (attorney and senior research associate, Freedom Forum Media Center): It's not just a porno moment - it's a kiddie-porn moment. Children are one of the last good rhetorical weapons left in the culture wars. My theory is that all the anxiety about child pornography manifested in the media, law enforcement, and the courts is producing the very responses in popular culture that these forces are trying to regulate - look at Calvin Klein, or the kinderwhore look that used to be associated with Courtney Love, or the obsession with child sex-abuse cases, which has arisen only in the last ten years. All these things reflect a growing fascination in our culture with childhood sexuality, which I think the legal and regulatory climate may actually be stimulating. Perhaps making this material taboo creates desire for it. Repression is never complete enough, and it often produces the very thing it purports to repress. And as culture responds, the cycle only escalates, driving calls for greater repression.

I think the increased fascination with children's sexuality may stem from two other cultural shifts: the transformation of gender roles and the growth of cyberspace. Much of the focus on children as sexual objects represents a reaction to the changing role of women and a longing for the day when women as sexual objects were docile and easily controlled. It's interesting in this context that a lot of the anxiety over child sexual abuse started in day-care centers, places where women left their children when they went off to work.

Rapid technological change may also explain the new focus on children's sexuality. A lot of the outcry over child pornography specifically concerns cyberporn - parents' anxieties that they don't know enough about technology to control what their children see and a deeper anxiety about their inability to control their children's burgeoning sexuality. The way sexuality and technology are both seen as "out of control" may explain why pornography, especially on-line porn, has become such an incredibly popular target.

IAN GITTLER (photographer): People are always interested in sex and how it's dealt with in culture, but a number of things, like sex on the Internet, or a porn star committing suicide, or the tape of a famous mainstream actor that shows he was previously involved in porn, make it seem more like a porno moment than it really is. These are just ways for the popular media to look into sexual matter without the directness that might terrorize advertisers.

Most of the technological revolutions since the '70s have been linked to the distribution of pornography. The first video titles available commercially on Betamax were porn flicks, and the first CD-ROMS were porn CD-ROMS. Porn seems to be the greatest attraction to the Internet for the average person. The people who produce this sort of "entertainment" are always eager to pursue new avenues of distribution, because they're always facing limitations and legal hassles. It's a way of getting around obscenity laws and popular dissent about whether they have the right to do what they do.