On-screen Violence and Porn: Critical Priorities

Gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer revisits the porn issue on his blog this week with a response to critics who wonder why Christian activists are more concerned about porn than graphic violence in movies:

“Porn is just about sex”, folks say; “violence is so much worse.” Surely it’s misplaced puritanism to get so worked up about pornography and to be less concerned about violence….

I’m willling to sit through heavy violence as part of a larger story; I actully liked last year’s “A History of Violence”, and I’ve sat through my share of war movies in the “Saving Private Ryan” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” vein. And of course, I’m also comfortable with sex scenes in movies, particularly when those sex scenes serve the primary purpose of advancing the plot and providing a depth to the characters, rather than serving merely to titillate. (The graphic sex in “A History of Violence”, for example, fit that bill.) I’m not by nature prudish! I am reluctant to see the bodies of others exploited on screen for my pleasure, whether that pleasure comes in the form of chills (as in a slasher film) or arousal (as in porn). When bodies tell a story, that’s somehow radically different than when they serve only to arouse or shock.

But the thing about depictions of violence in films, television, or in print is simple: it is the graphic depiction of something that we know to be fundamentally bad. To use Dethboy’s example, everyone recognizes instinctively that throwing someone onto a bed of needles is wrong. There is never an instance where to do so is good and loving. In certain instances, killing a bad guy might be justifiable, but most of us are aware that violence itself, while perhaps necessary, is never an a priori good. The violence we see in these films is violence of the sort few of us will ever engage in, Lord willing. The violence we see depicted is what the vast majority of us would never want done to us, and would never want to do to another.

But sex is different. Most of us will have sex at some point in our lives, with ourselves or someone else. Most of us want to have sex, and most of us (it is to be most fervently hoped) will have very good sex at some point with someone we love very much. Sex is, at its best, spine-tinglingly, earth-shatteringly, transcendently good. And most of us know that, or very much want to know it!

Porn lies. Porn misrepresents sex. It takes something that is fundamentally good and joyful and mutual and makes it selfish. It teaches a strong connection between the bodies of others and one’s own pleasure without demanding an iota of concern for the well-being of the other. Ask women whose husbands and boyfriends regularly use porn: are they better lovers as a consequence? Though they might pick up a “trick” or two, they are also far more likely to be distant, remote, and concerned with their own pleasure as a consequence.

Pornography is ultimately more harmful than depicted violence because of the far greater likelihood that those who watch porn will want to imitate what they see. Dethboy refers to “facials”: the ubiquitous habit in modern porn of ejaculating onto a woman’s face. When I was growing up, facials weren’t common in porn. And none of my male friends with whom I talked in great detail about sex talked about the practice; now, I hear frequently from young women whose boyfriends are eager to “try it”. Most of the women, understandably, are at best ambivalent about having their faces and their hair splattered! “Facials” are just one example of a “learned behavior” from porn.

When we see axe murders in the movies, only a tiny fraction of us (thank heavens) will say “Gosh, I’d like to try that!” When we see porn, and particularly when the young watch porn, they are far more likely to draw inspiration from what is shown. (Think about it, people: A young man, watching “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with his girlfriend, is very unlikely to have an insatiable urge to trundle down to Home Depot, buy a Husqvarna, and dismember her. Watching the male star of “Cum Bunnies of Cleveland VII” ejaculate on the faces of his co-stars may spark a more imitative response!) For those who watch porn regularly, particularly in adolescence, their sense of what sex is and of how it is supposed to work is deeply affected by what they see. And what they see is almost never loving or mutual. What they see, alas, is a lie.

So yeah, porn bothers me more than violence. And while watching a horror movie might give a teen a night of bad dreams, watching porn may help shape a whole worldview about men, women and pleasure. I’m pretty clear which is more harmful.

Some further observations from the debate in the comments box under Hugo’s post:

“K” writes:

While I think the desire to imitate is self-evident, I will add that part of the reason is, in addition to sex being an activity that most people desire to practice at some point in their lives (quite unlike chainsaw dismemberment), sex is also private by nature. This private nature reduces the corpus of experiences of “normal behavior” to counterbalance the film depiction.

For example, suburban Americans ride home from the hospital in a car, and spend many hours each week in automobiles, progressing from baby seat to booster seat to big enough for a real seat. So when a 15-year old boy watches “Bullitt,” he has real-life experience to show that becoming 10 feet airborne in downtown San Francisco is not normative driving behavior. But when he sees a pornographic film involving a “facial,” his brain does not have any experience to say “no, that’s not how it works; this is just fantasy.”

And “Starfoxy” adds:

Porn is far more interactive than violent movies. You don’t get a bowl of popcorn and sit down to watch a porn flick then fall asleep. You watch porn to put yourself (and in some cases a parter) in a state of arousal. In other words, you are training yourself to be aroused by what is depicted.

Second is the private nature of sex. If we ommit instances of rape, sex acts are not illegal the same way graphic violence is. Hacking someone’s limbs off with a chainsaw will land you in jail pretty quick, giving your gf a facial won’t. The social cost of imitating violence is too high for most people, while the cost of imitating porn isn’t.