What is Porn? A Psychoanalytic Reaction.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

-          Justice Potter Stuart

Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

-          Online Dictionary

I will tread today where Supreme Court Justices have dared not go in a delayed response to thinking about the movie “Y Tu Mama,Tambien?”  This movie includes very frank depictions of sexual interactions and one of the reasons that I didn’t see it in theaters when it was released is that the titillating aspect of the movie was played up in the trailers – and perhaps out of some sense of taking the moral high road, I did not see it.  Now, having said that, my moral high road is an interesting one because porn is something that I have seen and used in various forms since I was first introduced to Playboy magazine by my peers when I was 10 or 11 years old.  OK, maybe Playboy isn’t generally classified as porn, though my definition (below) may allow it to be included, but throughout my adolescence and adulthood I have seen hard-core porn in various forms and have found it arousing and enthralling.  The sex in “Y Tu Mama, Tambien?” is neither – it is poignant at its best and downright comic much of the time. 

I think that the reason the frankly depicted sexual scenes in “Y Tu Mama, Tambien?” is not porn is because the intent of pornography is to provide the viewer with visually and/or auditory (and probably in the not too distant future tactile) stimuli that fuel sexual fantasies.  We watch it not to see the interactions between the people depicted, but to imagine ourselves engaging in the actions being depicted or to imagine ourselves engaging in actions with the individuals depicted.  To this end, the depiction of what is occurring should be seamless – it should not interrupt our engagement with our own experience of pleasure.  The purpose of porn, then, is to stimulate us – to physically and sexually arouse us when we are actually (generally) by ourselves (though porn is also viewed in various group settings – from stag parties to its use by couples to stimulate their desire).

A movie that contains frank depictions of sex within the context of psychologically meaningful relationships will depict sex in a very different way.  Instead of being seamless – meaning somewhat repetitive and long lived with relatively little to distract the viewer (this does not mean that there aren’t changes that occur in porn – but those changes occur in a prescribed and choreographed manner), organic sexual interactions include bumps and disruptions – and what allows the interaction to remain being a sexual interaction, one that requires a certain consistency of focus, is that the participants, not the viewers, stay focused on their experience of being pleasured by and pleasuring the other – and that the one who is giving pleasure can sense when the other who is receiving it is no longer needing whatever type of pleasure is being offered and can shift to offering – or asking for – a different kind of interaction.  Porn cannot sense the needs of the observer so to protect the fantasy space of the viewer, it is oddly static.

This means that porn becomes an object for the viewer.  It is something that stimulates the viewer and is manipulated and controlled by the viewer – especially in the age of internet porn.  The danger is that the viewer will generalize from the level of control that they have over porn to exerting that control in actual interactions and treating living beings as pornographic objects; that they will experience others as being there simply to pleasure them.  That said, most run of the mill porn depicts some sort of reciprocal relationship between the participants – and pleasing another is a form of pleasure that is depicted to a greater or lesser degree.  Some of the arousal comes from imagining providing pleasure.  I don’t mean to reduce this too far, for even here the providing of pleasure that is imagined is imagined towards an object – one who is responding onscreen or in photographs or in writing, but not to the viewer.

Ironically, then, porn can be used to preserve relationships – for instance, out of a sense of connection and loyalty to a partner who is unavailable for whatever reason.  That said, its lure can pull the user away from being connected to that partner, even when the partner returns and is interested in engaging in a mutually pleasurable interaction – the porn user may want to slip off to a place that feels more gratifying.  Using porn, rather than being used by it, is a very slippery slope.  Whether its power to overwhelm the desire for human connection that is intimately tied up with human desire is realized partially depends on the strength of the individual’s interest and ability to connect with others.  Worse, of course, it can contribute to broader objectification that would support the imposition of our sexuality on unwilling individuals.

 

Could some sort of virtual porn – a version of Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron from his movie Sleeper – provide an interaction-like state that would mimic sexual interactions in such a way that participation would not be pornographic?  This leads us into the world of Artificial Intelligence and what it means to be in connection with another person, whether through conversation, cuddling, or sexual intercourse.  In “normal” sex, are we bridging a human gap that can be, at least partially, bridged by the sexual interaction or is that something that is actually a fantasy – and we are only given the illusion of being in contact with the other?  Is imagined contact as good as (or even better than) real contact with another person?  As I think about the arguments for why that isn’t the case (building a shared history of trust and contact, carrying the sexual interaction into other spheres such as parenting or discussing a good book) it becomes possible to imagine that this might take place with an AI partner (see the movie Her, for instance).  I am also aware that I am introducing false dichotomies – just because we can never view the world exactly as another person does doesn’t mean that our efforts to understand another’s perspective doesn’t bring us closer to that perspective than we otherwise would have been.

Going back, for a moment, to watching the depiction of sex between people depicted in movies as people rather than as objects, in Y Tu Mama Tambien?, for instance, and seeing the disruptions in the relationship - this may mirror the process of realizing that, as much as we identify with the individuals being depicted in the film, they are also different from us.  We make trial identifications - and get a sense of our overlap with those characters - but also of how we differ from them.  And in doing this we re-own ourselves - just as in love, we expand by connecting with our lover, but then return to ourselves, richer for having been in connection. 

But if we imagine AI, as was done in Her, we do that from the perspective of a creature that is totally responsive to us and to our needs.  Isn’t this a form of porn?  Isn’t part of the inconvenient truth of being an adult and living with other adults that we don’t just want to meet the needs of a lover, we are sometimes forced to do that by circumstances or by the other’s needs even though we don’t want to?  Isn’t that part of the force of attachment that we (somewhat) willingly do things for our children that we wouldn’t do for anyone else?  And isn’t part of the mystery of the human interaction that we never, actually, know the other person – that they are always slightly beyond our reach – capable of surprising and, yes, frustrating us? 

From this perspective, perversions involve directing our drives towards objects that don’t allow for reciprocal and mutually gratifying (and frustrating) interactions – they are directed towards objects that we believe we have control over.  So, yes, using pornography would be a perversion.  But on the scale of perversions – where incest and rape involve turning unwilling humans into sexual objects in ways that harm the other – it is a minor one (and this is leaving aside questions about whether the porn industry, in the act of delivering porn, harms people – a big set of issues - I know).  One of the dangers in porn is that it can contribute to objectifying others in our actual interactions with them. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, porn operates to reduce the anxiety that is present for all of us in interacting with others.  For some of us, to interact with another individual that is free to act in whatever way they do is not something that we feel able to do.  This can be the result of trauma – our attempts to connect with others may have led to ridicule or worse.  For whatever reasons, we sacrifice the real pleasure of connecting with other living breathing humans for engaging with others in the context of controlling them – or seeming to.  This interaction, in which we are one up on the other individual, seems safe to us.  We are remote – untouched – but willing to take this in exchange for the safety it affords.  Providing a safe place to become vulnerable again is the intent of treatment – psychoanalytic and otherwise.  In the meantime, pornography and other means of objectification can protect us.

This way of looking at pornography – and objectification in general – that it is a function of fear and self-protection – may help us change the way that we approach others who are objectifying in whatever way.  They do this not primarily out of an intent to harm (though that is certainly the consequence), but out of a perceived need to protect themselves.  This can be really hard to wrap one’s head around.

When I was in psychoanalytic training, I was the only male trainee with a large group of women.  When one of the male patients we were discussing as part of the training was describing some sort of stereotypically problematic masculine behavior, the others in the group would look at me as if I were to blame.  It became my task, over and over, to work with the group to look at the dynamics that lay behind that behavior – to think about why this person who we also knew to be a good person – was behaving like a cad.  The point here is that even psychoanalysts in training don’t think  about what is driving cad-like behavior all of the time - when a person of whatever interest becomes objectified we the observers - whether we are a horny male (or a female who is being hit on by that horny male) - get locked into a reciprocal position of thinking, this girl is just a piece of meat (or that guy is just a jerk).  To break out of that mold is hard to do.  But I think that, in so far as we able to do that – as well as to work to confront those behaviors and make it clear that they are unacceptable, the more likely we are to make headway on reducing the objectification that takes place.

   

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who is a devout Catholic and whose professional life has been devoted to the formation of Catholic priests (this was before this week’s publicity regarding the harboring of more pedophilic priests in Pennsylvania).  We agreed that the shortage of priests could be quickly addressed by dropping the vow of chastity – if married men could serve, they likely gladly would.  We wondered together about a world in which sexuality was valued as a sacrament rather than a sin: where the potentials of sexual interaction were protected because they allow for our greatest expression of our humanity – but therefore can also be the theater for all that is problematic in being human and so should be doubly protected.  Of course, we would have to protect human interactions more broadly and treat them all with sanctity.  How would our world be differently ordered if this were the case?  What would it mean to protect a sacrament rather than to prevent a sin?  What would the place of porn be in that world?

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