On pornography

The Apostate is justly contemptuous of much of the content of pornography and the sex trade. There's much there to arouse the disdain of the thoughtful and sensitive, but the Apostate earns our philosophical admiration by not jumping to easy conclusions, e.g. that porn should be banned or even condemned as the cause of our sexual and emotional ills.

Like many other social phenomena, porn exists in a feedback system with individuals' sexuality. It is absurd to believe that porn is a pure symptom, that it has no causal effect whatsoever on its consumers' sexuality and emotional state and most importantly, on their subjective morality; everything that one experiences affects his or her mental equilibrium. Likewise, it is absurd to believe that porn is a simple cause, that its consumers are blank slates and accept literally whatever porn happens to pass before their eyes; because likewise everything affects one's mental equilibrium, and porn is only one of millions of influences, which include those (as yet unknown) ineluctable characteristics supplied by our genes.

The disturbing content of much pornography should, I think, justly give pause to even its most ardent defenders; on the other hand, the all too often simplistic condemnation of pornography should give pause to its more thoughtful critics.

One very obvious and critical problem in the discussion of sexuality in general is the almost total lack of scientific study of sexuality. There are seminal studies, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, but the point of seminal studies in science is to fertilize additional study, not to stand alone as absolute proof. By analogy, it is not Eddington's single observation of relativistic light-bending (an observation later found not probative) which conclusively proves General Relativity, it is the millions of experiments subsequently performed by the scientific edifice begun by Einstein. Likewise, had a scientific edifice been established around Kinsey's research, it would be the body of that research which would have separated what was true in Kinsey from that which was mistaken. Such an edifice was not built, and intellectuals even today can rely on little else but Kinsey's decades old research.[1]

Whenever you have a feedback system, with no clear hierarchy of cause, if you want to affect the system you must identify neither the most visible nor the most labile component, but rather the component where changes will be most magnified by the feedback processes.

What little scientific research exists suggests that every individual's sexuality is very stable, whereas his or her morality is quite labile. It is much easier to affect what a person sincerely approves and disapproves of than it is to change what he or she finds sexually exciting. Studies on pedophiles and rapists (and also—in of course a much different moral context—homosexuals) bear this out, as well as the tendency of consumers of pornography to focus on particular fetishes or narrow genres.

It is also clear to any student of history—and readers of Marx—that individual morality follows economic conditions. The bulk of both secular ethical philosophy as well as theology consists of justifying the moral superiority of the economically powerful, and the most obvious predictor of both political and moral revolution is when the government and the economically powerful become estranged. Again, we witness some evidence for this hypothesis in the context of the sex trade by the fact that indigenous prostitution sharply declines in those countries with both economic fairness and stability.

Another blatantly obvious factor in this context is that the social and economic dominance of men over women has definitely existed for millennia, and might stretch even farther, to the millions of years, even to our pre-human ancestors. This is a long enough time period that the idea of sexual inequality is almost definitely entrenched in our social structures, and may have even a genetic component. I am not one to indulge in the naturalistic fallacy, and neither tradition nor genetics is in any way a justification of objective morality, but facts are still facts, and cannot be changed merely by wishing them away.

The above is, admittedly, a thin basis for speculation. The most obvious starting point is to encourage serious scientific research into sexuality.[2] Absent such research, no conclusions can ever be reached with any degree of confidence. Thin though the factual basis, speculation is my privilege as a philosopher.

Sexuality does not appear labile, especially in adulthood, and all scientific study shows that children are labile in general, their minds positively optimized for the task of learning. It is thus critically necessary to begin honest and frank discussion of sexuality as early as possible in childhood. We should no more leave to chance and idiosyncratic parental influence whatever environmental influences affect a child's sexuality than we should leave to chance that which affects his or her morality. How can we expect our children to have a healthy, satisfying and fulfilling sexuality when the dominant paradigm is that sex is like smoking: Horrible, dangerous, and permitted to adults only because of the excessive cost of suppression, that "sex is so dirty and disgusting that it should be done only with someone you love very much."[3]

Sex is a primal need. Pornography and the sex trade (stripping, prostitution, etc.) fills that need where it is unmet by other means. It is therefore critically necessary to both legalize and legitimatize the trade itself so that criticism can be focused on objectionable content. Prohibition didn't reduce the number of drunks, it merely increased the number of gangsters and blind people, the unfortunate victims of poisonous wood alcohol. So long as parts of the sex trade remain illegal and the rest condemned in whole, it is impossible to have a differential effect on the content of that trade.

Because morality appears considerably more labile than sexuality, the criticism of the content of the sex trade would be more effective if focused on the moral context of sex work, rather than its specifically sexual content. For instance, one practice of some BDSM pornography which addresses the specific moral context is explicitly portraying the negotiation of consent prior to sexual activity.[4]

Lastly, the importance of economic factors cannot be exaggerated. Almost all forms of oppression, from sweatshops to sex slavery, have at their heart economic injustice. Working for both economic security and fairness cannot help but discourage all forms of sexual oppression.


[1] Furthermore, sociological research in general (with notable exceptions) seems often to not really "grok" the scientific method. Its practitioners all too often exhibit pseudo-scientific reasoning which, when not absurdly hyper-positivist, cannot be called anything but theological. I strongly suspect that such pervasive errors of reasoning are due in no small part to the inclusion of sociology in the humanities, where its practitioners have become intimidated by the Philosophy department's at best half-hearted endorsement and at worst venomously contemptuous dismissal of scientific epistemology. (It is no accident, I suspect, that physical scientists dropped "philosophy" from the origins of science in Natural Philosophy.)

[2] And, per footnote 1, work to place the scientific humanities, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc., on a firmer scientific footing, eliminating the fallacious positivism and theology. It might too prove necessary and beneficial to convict much of academic philosophy of High Treason against rationality for their resistance to scientific epistemology.

[3] The quotation is from memory, and I'm unable to quickly determine its correct attribution. I suspect Carlin.

[4] This practice is cited only as an example; I lack sufficient expertise to endorse or condemn the specific genre or its practices.