Porn is What We Have Done with Our Freedom

Relax. This is not your usual piece on pornography, your usual "We know porn does real and terrible damage to millions of human beings and their society, but no one seems to know how to deal with it." Nor is this to sneer at those simple souls who claim they do know. Bring back that old-time religion? Fine, if that’s what you want for yourself. But this is an essentially libertarian, diverse society that should remain so, and God is not a citizen. Nobody’s God. Other simple souls, religious or not, demand renewed censorship: an alternative that founders on the small matter of who does the censoring and what happens once they get rolling. Others, usually feminists and often not so simple, would like to see porn, carefully and narrowly defined, subject to civil action for damages because it hurts real women and devalues and contributes to the degradation of women as a group. An approach with some merit, especially for those directly hurt in the production of porn or by porn’s consumers, but one that misses a few larger points.

Rather, I should like to address this issue by noting a bit of etymology and then ask and answer a simple question.

The word "pornography" derives from the classical Greek; its literal meaning is "the graphic depiction of whores." The Greek pornē were not high-class hetaerae, mistresses, courtesans, or beloved companions. They were the sex slaves of public brothels, to whom virtually anything could be done with impunity. Nor are we talking here about fancy frescoes on walls or cute little paintings on urns. This is about, literally, the exploitation and degradation of some human beings for the profit and pleasure of others—a matter that is never noted in the standard definition of pornography as reading or viewing material intended primarily to excite sexual interest.

Now to the question. What is so great about pornography that we are willing to pay such a high price for it, individually and as a civilization, in so many horrific ways? If it were only a matter of sexual arousal for a Republic that would collapse without constant immersion in commercialized sexuality, we could conclude that we’re simply insane and let it go at that. But more is involved. Much more. For porn is something we do with our freedom and is, in many ways, symbolic of many other things we’ve done with our freedom. We tolerate it, not just for the titillation, but because porn is an accurate depiction of who we are.

Today, there is scant debate, even among First Amendment absolutists, that the harm ascribed to porn is real and irrefutable. The women and girls brought into porn are almost invariably poor and often desperate; some are slaves. Many have arrived via prostitution. (Here we might note that because porn involves the exchange of sex, this time public through the images made of it, for money, it is itself a form of prostitution.) Many others, perhaps nearly all, have experienced prior sexual abuse. Some have known little else; many accept such abuse as their normal way of life. As for how children are entrapped with pornography to be sexually used by pedophiles, and what it does to them: we need not itemize here.

Economically, porn is a means of making sexual slavery and trafficking more profitable. It is also an adjunct to other activities, some criminal. Porn really is used in sexual assaults: by the assailants to desensitize and arouse themselves, and to train their longer-term victims. Porn really is a factor in divorces and estrangement between lovers in less permanent but nevertheless profoundly important relationships. How would you feel if your lover or wife couldn’t approach you without first immersing herself in images of the degradation of other men…or simply preferred the company of such images to yours and proved it every night by locking herself away with her Internet products? When she reaches climax, can you hear it through the walls? And if she doesn’t, how happy are you to have her emerge and expect to be serviced?

An occasional psychotherapist argues that porn "legitimizes" the unusually intense desires of those who have them, but might be reluctant to explore them and seek their fulfillment. But it might be more accurate to say that porn forces these people to contend with the fact that their desires, wonderful when shared with a loving partner, have been dirtied by the commercialized degradation of women, and men, and sex,