Parsing The Perverse
Pamela Church Gibson,
More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power.
London: British Film Institute, 2004.
ISBN: 0851709397 (pb) £16.99
ISBN: 0851709362 (hb) £55.00
360pp
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

In Andrew Delbanco’s acerbic view, cultural studies are the practice of people who used to like literature, but not any more, and whose methods can as well be applied to newscasts or cartoons as to novels and plays (Required Reading, Noonday Press, 1997). Pamela Church Gibson, senior lecturer in contextual and cultural studies at the London College of Fashion, may or may not be a former litterateur, but she does apply her critical powers to a wide range of texts, notably fashion (Fashion Cultures, co-edited with Stella Bruzzi, Routledge, 2000), film (World Cinema, co-edited with John Hill, Oxford, 2000) and pornography.

More Dirty Looks is actually a second anthology, a re-examination of themes first explored in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography and Power (British Film Institute, 1993). A new anthology is needed, she explains, because pornography still compels women to take opposing stances, the industry now commodifies both female and male bodies (hence the inclusion of male writers in this second compilation), and feminists and academics must recognize pornography’s oppressive aspects, yet affirm that women need to explore their own sexuality.

Here a book on porn stands on firmer ground than a book on fashion, which, Gibson and Bruzzi admit, academics tend to dismiss as “too trivial to theorise, too serious to ignore.” (The essays in Fashion Cultures, for instance, endeavor to link fashion aesthetics with postmodern ambiguity; but they also report that Cary Grant had six identical suits tailored for North by Northwest, and that Grace Kelly grew plain and jowly as she aged.)

More Dirty Looks‘ essays demonstrate pornography’s greater receptiveness to theorising – sometimes dense theorising, as contributors cite concepts like “implantation of perversions” from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality to assert, for instance, that sadomasochism shares with Christianity “a theatrical iconography of punishment and expiation” (247). The sheer range of topics, facts and findings render untenable any sweeping, hardline demonizing of porn on legal or scientific grounds. Indeed, the essays trash the strident contention, by feminists Catherine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin, that porn literally harms women and should be censored.

Lynn Segal, in “Only the Literal: The Contradictions of Anti-Pornography Feminism,” observes that the marketplace now engages women as desiring consumers, and not as mere objects of consumption. In the US, women buy an estimated 40 percent of adult videos (60); in Britain, Gibson reports, women operate upmarket boutiques that sell crotchless lingerie, handcrafted vibrators and bondage accessories (x-xi).

Access has likewise broadened. Porn has moved out of the brothels of the 1900s (Gertrud Koch, “The Body’s Shadow Realm,”), and into homes and hotel rooms, via satellite TV, DVD, and the Internet. Jane Gaines, in “Machines That Make the Body Do Things,” relates that vibrators, which started out in the early 20th century as medical instruments, became sex toys in the 1960s, and are now marketed from websites (34). Jane Juffer, in “There’s No Place Like Home: Further Developments on the Domestic Front,” notes that porn in the US is a $10 billion a year business whose major suppliers include subsidiaries or divisions of General Motors, AT & T, and EchoStar Communications (45).

Three essays further undermine the conventional equation between pornography and victimization of women by highlighting a niche market that ignores women entirely. Richard Dyer’s “Idol Thoughts: Orgasm and Self-Reflexivity in Gay Pornography” argues that visible, unfaked ejaculation renders homosexual male porn more exciting than heterosexual porn because the latter cannot show female sexual pleasure. Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo (“The World of All-Male Pornography: On the Public Place of Moving Image Sex in the Era of Pornographic Transnationalism”) discover in director Kristen Bjorn’s productions of all-male group sex in exotic settings an aesthetic that critiques US pornographic texts. Royce Mahawatte’s “Loving the Other: Arab-Male Fetish Pornography and the Dark Continent of Masculinity” focuses on porn that exploits the Western notion, dating back to the 19th century writings of orientalist Richard Burton, of Arab libidinousness.

Transvestite magazines (Laura Kipnis, “She-Male Fantasies and the Aesthetics of Pornography”) provide another kind of proof that porn doesn’t always perpetuate male power over female bodies. Their models are mostly male and at least partially clothed; the advice columns dispense tips on unwanted hair growth and rough skin; the ads tout breast enlargement creams. All of which complicate the question of what pornography is and who is to be protected from it.

But as Linda Williams shows in “Second Thoughts on Hard Core: American Obscenity Law and the Scapegoating of Deviance,” obscenity’s legal meaning has shifted over time. It once referred to that which should be ob (off) scene (stage); today, sexuality is remarkably on-scene. In 1973 US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger specified “ultimate sexual acts” as examples; subsequent rulings emphasize what Williams calls “scapegoatable sexualities” (171) – homosexuality, lesbianism, flagellation, and sadomasochism, not all of which depict “ultimate sexual acts.”

Collectively, these essays call for a more nuanced, discerning and, well, academic evaluation of pornography – which happens to be what this anthology offers. Still, Jennifer Wicke (“Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornography’s Academic Market”) is to be commended for bringing up (almost in passing, as her main concern is some very bad scholarship about porn), the academic’s predicament, after we have all agreed that banning porn creates more problems than it addresses.

The problem derives from the “intensely held beliefs of a text-based culture that people are what they read” (177). We believe, deep down, that good books make us good in some way – more knowledgeable, more judicious, more committed. If so, what does porn – whose overriding aim is sexual arousal – make us? If we would go beyond insisting on tolerance, if we concede that porn has a place in the scheme of things, how does an academic evaluate the pornographic texts made available for consumption?

Wicke doesn’t grapple with this issue. Edmund Buscombe tries, but “Generic Overspill,” his review of A Dirty Western (1973), illustrates the limits of what can be done. Buscombe notes that whereas rape in mainstream Westerns (e.g. John Ford’s The Searchers) is brutal and unpleasant, A Dirty Western depicts it as without menace: the wife makes the same sounds when she is raped by escaped convicts as when she has sex with her husband, the daughters who are taken hostage are brought to cunnilingual orgasm before they kill their kidnapers. Buscombe’s verdict: “A Dirty Western is more a porn film than a Western, because it’s essentially about fucking for fun.”

My curmudgeonly quarrel with this critique is not that it is wrong, but that Buscombe, an authority on the Western who has written monographs on Stagecoach and The Searchers, should invest his time and talent on a far inferior product, only to end with this underwhelming conclusion. The catholicity of cultural studies may justify the study of porn films alongside musicals, swashbucklers, war films and so on; but after reading Buscombe, one might wonder if the effort will invariably be an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

Jaime S. Ong
De La Salle University.
Created on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 | Last Updated: 19-Jul-05