In her article Hard Core in the Atlantic Monthly (Jan-Feb 2011, Natasha Vargas-Cooper expresses her disgust and contempt for the debilitating proliferation of internet pornography. It is an urgently written piece, although I don’t agree with her iterated assertion that “sexual aggression and the desire to debase women . . . are certainly an animating force of male sexuality” with particular emphasis on two of its manifestations, to which she returns on several occasions—the male propensity for “perversion” (notably anal sex) and “brute force.”

True, at the present moment, in spite of the so-called “sexual revolution” and “sexual liberation” of the sixties and afterwards, there is still widespread reluctance and fear in this country about speaking openly, candidly, and seriously about sex. As the Clinton and Weiner episodes show so clearly, rather than attempting to understand sexuality, we prefer to gossip, snicker, and make the crudest puns and jokes about sexual peccadilloes while reveling in the discomfiture of the high and mighty.

What is needed is informed education and fearless discussion rather than uneasy joking or the imposition of what Vargas-Cooper calls “strenuously enforced norms.” It is a stunning fact that in spite of a hundred years of Freudianism and fifty years of “sexual liberation,” sex education in schools here is still extremely rudimentary and repressive—if practiced at all. In fact, according to a serious and courageous video on the topic of women’s self-pleasure (which I saw recently at the U of M), there is virtually no example of any school in the USA that includes any information on, for example, the topic of female masturbation. And we may remember that Jocelyn Elders, the surgeon general under Clinton, was fired (by the President himself!) for her suggestion that masturbation should be openly and fearlessly discussed in schools. Elders herself (in the video) claimed that 90 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women admit to practicing masturbation “and the rest are liars.” Regrettably, we are still taught to ignore or reprove certain unique pleasures of the body, and many of us are still incredibly ignorant about what goes on with our own and others’ sexual bodies. And we have seen recently some horrendous examples of young people being driven to suicide by ignorant and bigoted vigilantes because of their sexual preferences or activities.

Another aspect of sexuality that is elided or sanitized in our culture is the vigorous and even fierce aspect of the sexual act. Freud, for example, a hundred years ago, was courageous in talking about the way in which the “destructive instinct” can become a component of sexuality and find intermittent expression in sadism and masochism in both sexes. It is perhaps symptomatic in a country founded on an undefined “pursuit of happiness” that this aspect of Freud has been almost completely publicly ignored and repressed here (as he predicted it would be after his visit to the States). It seems that his complex and sobering views about all aspects of human sexuality and “perversions” have tended to be publicly replaced in our culture by the anodyne and “lovey-dovey” aspects of sex, where all is sweetness and light, as if the urgent encounter of two erotic bodies can always be sublimated into the comfortable and comforting “joy of sex” or dissolved into the loss of self and the total union and fusion of two different human beings.

In this context, Freud and, notably, his French interpreter Jacques Lacan, have insisted on the “asymmetrical” aspect of sexuality, that is to say that male sexuality and female sexuality are recognized as inherently different, and that is a debilitating snare and a romantic delusion to think that we can abolish difference and become “One” through sexual conjunction. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud wrote about the dangerous illusion of what he called the pathological “Oceanic feeling,” when, in love and sex, boundaries are dissolved in the feeling that “I and you are one.” He links this back to the feeling of the infant at the breast at a time when there is not yet any distinction between the self and the Other or the self and the external world. This desire to lose oneself in the Other through sex and revert to the narcissism of our inner child-as-baby, together with the manifest impossibility of doing so, can lead to anger and even violence, especially when lovers also attempt to deny individual difference and the lack of symmetry between male and female sexuality. Jacques Lacan goes so far as to say that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” if that implies the union of the same, rather than the recognition of difference. Perhaps pornography is, in part, the frantic, isolated, and isolating quest on the part of “twenty million women” as well as “forty million men” not for the Other but for some kind of desperate, regressive attainment of the same, which aims to achieve the obliteration of what may be felt as one’s own tense and isolating individuality by means of the momentary extinction of self-propelled orgasm.

In her article, Vargas-Cooper’s displays a rather fashionable and tendentious pessimism by claiming, without any proof, that “the history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities,” that is to say “the unlovely aspects of male sexuality.” It is worth noting that she does refer on one occasion to Freud’s writing on history, referencing his discussion, in Totem and Taboo, of “emotional ambivalence”; however, she immediately and uniquely links this “ambivalence” with “the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.” In fact, it is quite clear in Freud’s essay that he is linking his analysis of “ambivalence” to contemporary persons (female and male) who suffer from neuroses; indeed, he connects the neurotic “need” for punishment or atonement for the violation of taboos to “all members of the community” (his italics), regardless of gender. This seems to me one of the several occasions on which Vargas-Cooper moves briskly from example to accusation, repeating such phrases as the following: “the typical male psyche”; “male sexuality as often a dark force streaked with brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges”; “pornography neatly resolves the contradictions—in favor of men”; “most men will take every inch a woman yields”; and “while sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouses all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality.” Thus pornography not only tempts men; it uniquely expresses and defines the core of their perverse and rapacious sexuality, according to Vargas-Cooper.

Is it really true that the history of civilization uniquely demonstrates what Vargas-Cooper calls “the unlovely aspects of male sexuality”? Actually, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, in his three-volume work, The History of Sexuality, argues that the Greeks and Romans, for example, had a balanced, sane, and moderate view of “the arts of existence,” the “care of the self,” and the ethical and esthetic quest for pleasure in all its manifestations, including sex; however, Foucault claims that the rise of monotheism and the centralized control of the modern state brought about restrictive notions of conduct that reproved the quest for pleasure and “illicit” sex as inimical to “good citizenship,” which itself became narrowly defined by the utilitarian and constricting discourses of church and state, based on power, rules, norms, constraints, and punishment. Order! Order!

It is disappointing to witness how the undoubted proliferation of the indignities of pornography can lead a writer like Vargas-Cooper to indulge in facile, unproven, and direly pessimistic generalities about the tyranny and waywardness of human (and, above all, male) sexuality. But it seems to me that it is possible and desirable to learn to study the varieties, vagaries, and potentially destabilizing aspects of sexuality and sexual conduct rigorously, openly, and honestly in a historical context, recognize the difference and uniqueness of each individual’s sexuality and discourse, and above all open up enlightened, ethical, and informative discussions in schools and in society as a whole. And in doing so, we may yet find ways to understand and celebrate the ethics and esthetics of the pleasures of the human body and come to accept and enjoy the qualities, complexities, and challenges of all aspects of all kinds of sexual relationships.

Firstly: Not all porn is made equal. Lots of porn doesn’t have a very realistic portrayal sex. It also barely ever features female pleasure or anything but subservience; and if it does it fetishizes it.

Re-reading the article that referenced gonzo and Abby Winters: She didn’t compare them and say they where on the same level. She didn’t say AW was about ‘making hate’ or being brutal, as gonzo porn without a doubt is. I find the comparison made in this article unfair and feel it has taken Dines out of Context.

While Dines over all is a total wing-nut, I don’t think it fair to ignore everything she has to say. As someone who has worked in various faucets of the adult industry I’ve seen first hand some of her points are correct- although certainly to the level she describes.

Pornography has it’s pros and it’s cons; it’s a shame most people can’t see them with a level head. Porn isn’t the end of the world evil Dines states; but its certainly not perfect and it certainly doesn’t have no ill effects on the lives of many.

I believe the author of this article refuses to acknowledge any down sides to porn- which in my opinion makes them as bad and illogical as Dines.