Examining the Porn Stigma

Warning: This entry deals with talk about mature subject matter (as if you couldn’t tell by the subject title).

Two TV shows I watched this past week got me thinking about the word porn.

One is the British show Coupling (currently in reruns on BBC America), one episode of which features Steve explaining to a dinner party how one of his videotapes, entitled Lesbian Spank Inferno, is “erotica” and not “porn.” It doesn’t take long for the dinner guests to agree that the major separation between erotica and porn is the existence (or non-existence, for the latter) of a plot, so Steve spends quite a long time explaining how Lesbian Spank Inferno actually has a plot. When he finally breaks down and admits it is porn (and not erotica), he admits the video is porn but asks what’s wrong with men looking at “naked bottoms.”

The other show was a mini-series on IFC called Indie Sex, whose last installment has a few film critics and actors musing on what separates “art” from “pornography.” One person says that if you have to ask whether a movie is art or porn, it’s art. Another says it has to do with subtext for the events being present—art having subtext, porn lacking subtext. One final commentator says the difference is lighting and budget, even going on to proclaim that a lot of movies produced by the porn industry are of higher artistic quality (with lower budgets) than their “art” counterparts.

Intellectuals and politicians alike seem to enjoy deciding on what qualifies as deserving the porn label, even though some jurisdictions follow an I know it when I see it legal “definition” of porn. But this theoretical or political examination of the border between art/erotica and porn is, in fact, not very practical, as the I know it when I see it approach indicates. There isn’t, as a matter of fact, much blurring between porn and art/erotica. If anything, the two have diverged paths as the decades since film’s birth have passed. Art/erotica almost always features actors who do not exclusively do sexually explicit work, who tend to have natural breast sizes, and who can actually be quiet during sex. Art/erotica does not follow the sex scene formulae outlined by Linda Williams in her book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” There’s a pretty clear separation, which I don’t think says much for art/erotica. If, as the commentators in the IFC mini-series seem to indicate, art and independent film seek to be subversive, they should be crossing boundaries and blurring boundaries. They should make people think and question: What makes porn so bad? Why isn’t this porn? Is this porn? Maybe this is.

Probably only one film in recent cinematic history (one brought up in the mini-series but not discussed extensively) does, in fact, blur the lines between art/erotica and pornography—Caligula. It is certainly not intended to titillate. Some of the scenes are actually quite disgusting. Nevertheless, it has a lot of extremely sexually explicit scenes that are not necessarily art-y. And the casting seems to involve well-known Hollywood stars and a few porn veterans (since the funding mainly came from Hustler).

The other side of the art/erotica debate has to do with “men looking at naked bottoms” (as Steve from Coupling so eloquently puts it). Second wave feminism has done much to analyze and deconstruct the inherent sexism of traditional pornography, which focuses on the heterosexual male by demeaning and objectifying women or implying that women cannot be whole or sexually satisfied without the use of a penis. Third wave feminism seeks to create “erotica” appealing to women (both gay and straight). But has anyone sought to create sexually explicit material (print, film, whatever) that could not be construed in any way to be sexist but that also focuses on appealing to heterosexual males? That would be a subversive move on the part of the artist, but I’ve yet to see anyone express interest in such an endeavor.

We’ll see what the world of independent film or the porn industry (whoever gets there first!) can come up with to actually challenge people… and maybe turn them on a little too.