The Pornographic Heart of Culture

Pornography is but another commodity in a capitalist culture that exploits sexual fantasies to feed consumerist desires. If some pornography is sexist and misogynist, it reflects the larger culture of such mass messages. Simply observe the day­to­day fare on commercial television and radio, in magazines and on billboards, and in our ordinary conversations and social dealings. Like the commercial culture generally, pornography holds sex out as a disposable commodity­­"a commodity to be turned in for next year's new, brand new model." ¹¹⁹ Pornography is to the mass commercial state what blood is to the body; efforts to withdraw it "would be futile because pornography is not some wart on the surface of capitalist culture" ¹²⁰ but is at the heart of that culture. Mindful of the culture's life­flow, Wendy Kaminer is blunt: "If society is as sexist as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon claim, it is not about to adopt a feminist agenda when it sets out to censor pornography." ¹²¹ What are we to make of this?

If the antipornography feminists realize the futility of censoring pornography while tolerating rampant commercialism, then lurking below the harm principle is a more grandiose lie. Is it possible that the larger hidden agenda is to perpetuate the lie of pornography's harms simply to subvert the male­driven capitalist state? Could it be that for antipornography feminists "the dirty secret at the heart of our culture is not sex, but money"? ¹²² Obviously, a great deal more than pornography is put into issue by the harm principle; it ultimately challenges the socio­economic structures at the base of today's republic of eroticized commercial images. A move toward a (radical) feminist theory of the state inevitably hacks at the very roots of mass commercial entertainment society. "The alternative to pornography, then, stands or falls with the alternative to capitalist and patriarchal society as a whole." ¹²³ Little wonder, then, that even a full­blooded conservative such as George F. Will could label the radical feminist agenda "the most radical assault on free speech in American history." ¹²⁴ Antipornography is the practice, anticapitalism is the theory.

The legendary rock hero Jimi Hendrix quipped: "Once you are dead you are made for life." ¹²⁵ Ironic as it "sounds," there is a curious ring of truth in Hendrix's whimsy. As the old Madisonian discourse dies, it is remade in pornotopia's images of intercourse. Enlightenment logic gives way to erotic logic. Ambivalence toward pornography surrenders to love of body politics. The common good lapses into a common sexual death wish. Deliberative democracy becomes a democracy of desires, and sexual harms become sexualized. America is not yet pornotopia. Ambivalence remains. The old discourse is not yet dead. Still, as the vital signs of Madison's First Amendment weaken, they make way for life in the pornographic state.

Clad in a long trenchcoat, Anthony enters the Venus Envy cinema, sits down in an empty row, and watches Caligula as the Roman emperor collapses in a bacchanalian revelry of sex and violence. ¹²⁶ Anthony is too preoccupied to realize, however, that in the theatre of pornotopia the climactic moment is the death of discourse.