by Ann Regentin
(04/07/04)
"I know it when I see it."
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court tried to define obscenity with that line, and while the country's highest court has put a bit more thought into the issue since, "I know it when I see it" continues to be the most commonly cited difference between porn and erotica.
So what is it exactly that we know when we see it? And why do we care so much?
I was, as a child, a trifle precocious and when I raided my mother's bookshelves, I was prone to running off with such things as Lady Chatterley's Lover and a small paperback entitled Lady Lust. The titles alone are a bit of a giveaway. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a classic, not just of erotica but of literature in general. Lady Lust, however, appears to have been less memorable, at least in literary terms. I can find references to a film by that name but not to the book, which seems to have vanished unnoted from the face of the planet.
There's no doubt that there is a big difference between these two Ladies, but what is it, exactly? The easy answer was given by the Honorable Justice Stewart, but I think that if we're going to discuss it sensibly, we need to go beyond the knee-jerk reaction test.
Before we can, we have to come clean about why we want to, and I think the best place to start is, once again, the Supreme Court. Justice Warren Burger, in Miller vs. California, stated that a work is obscene when it, "...taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." In other words, a work is obscene when it does nothing more than incite lust.
Is lust really a problem? I've read the arguments that pornography-incited lust further incites men to violence, but I've never bought them. Based on my own observations and input from male friends, porn seems to incite most men to masturbation. The only harm this causes is a bit of chafing, easily remedied with hand lotion, unless one gets carried away with the power tools or isn't careful about what one introduces into one's back door.
Some say that porn is obscene because it encourages sexual experimentation. This may be true, but I'm not sure I have a problem with this, either. While it often takes a good sense of humor to cope with the fall-out from "Honey, why don't we try this thing I just read about?", mutual exploration can open up new avenues of communication and strengthen the bond between lovers. Porn can also help someone explore fantasies that frighten them or might cause harm. In reality, receptive sex with a horse is a bad idea, but some find the idea of it a sure-fire ticket to solitary orgasm.
There's an argument that exposure to graphic descriptions of sexual acts makes people inclined to force them on others, regardless of what their previous attitudes toward those acts were. Once again, I don't think this holds up. It may indeed make someone more open to something they previously had no experience with, but can it really make someone into a predator? One of the tricky things about sex is that it involves dealing with other people who have tastes and quirks of their own. Learning to negotiate that minefield, both in and out of bed, is part of growing up. An inability or unwillingness to do so isn't limited to sex and isn't caused by pornography, and we've known that for decades. In its report to then-President Richard Nixon, the National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography stated that "The Commission cannot conclude that exposure to erotic materials is a factor in the causation of sex crime or sex delinquency."
Still, there remains the issue of whether or not porn is obscene by virtue of being exploitative. I think it might be, but I also think that the sexual parts of our brain might be a bit exploitative from time to time. As much as we like to think of ourselves as a noble species, we aren't always. Both men and women have rape fantasies, bestiality fantasies, incest fantasies, even pedophilia fantasies. Even when we're not dabbling, mentally at least, in the truly nasty sides of sex, we're not always being very nice. We fuck out of anger, revenge, and depression as often as for kinder things. While we're capable of some intensely transcendent moments, we're also capable of a fair amount of the worst kind of selfishness, and a lot of that gets played out in porn.
Most of us can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but we rarely give anyone else credit for the same ability. We know instinctively that our masturbatory daydreams, no matter how grim they get, are just that, but we entertain dire suspicions about everyone else's. This is the result of the infamous pornography defense used by rapists and serial killers, with a certain amount of success, to absolve them of responsibility for their behavior. "The porn made me do it!" has probably done more damage than the entire oeuvre of Larry Flint by planting, in spite of The Commission's conclusions back in 1970, a nagging seed of doubt in the collective mind: If porn made this guy strangle sixteen women, what is it going to make my boyfriend do? That's a large part of why women cringe when they stumble over a man's secret magazine collection and men cringe at a shelf containing every book Fabio ever posed for, even though the accumulation and enjoyment of both is fairly normal, if sales figures and sheer ubiquity are any indication. For every criminal who blames their acts on porn, there are millions of people who enjoy it without ever committing a single sexual crime.
Given this, I think we need to forgive each other and lighten up. We might like a bit of selfish fantasy from time to time but in reality, we're more complex than that. Human mate selection and sexual response are multi-layered, and although we're susceptible to the lure of our lizard brain, especially when it's just us and our vibrators, we're not enslaved to it. Who we chose to sleep with and on what terms depends on a wide variety of factors, knee-jerk sexual response being only one of them. That and it's possible to have a happy, sexually fulfilling relationship and still enjoy steamy romance novels. An active fantasy life need not be a negation of one's partner.
If we can set aside the notion that desire is inherently harmful and accept anything that happens by mutual consent, the Supreme Court definition of obscenity becomes a good definition of porn. Porn is really nothing worse than a manifestation of the fact that the largest sexual organ is the brain. Humans tend to need more than genital stimulation to get off, and porn goes for our mental hot spots in the same way that our hands or toys go for our physical ones.
This still leaves us with the question of what distinguishes it from erotica. However, a look back at our friends at the Supreme Court can give us a nudge in the right direction. If porn is work that serves no purpose other than causing sexual arousal, then erotica is sexually explicit material that that has artistic merit beyond its ability to arouse.
Erotica, for that matter, need not even arouse. Sometimes the sex in an erotic story makes us laugh or cringe or cry. Where porn depends on its ability to inspire a stiff dick or wet panties, erotica has something broader to say about human beings as sexual creatures whether it gets us off or not. Erotica is stories about sex in its full breadth and depth, which is considerable given how complicated we really are.
If porn is the movies that play in our heads, erotica is the ongoing discussion of who we are in bed. If porn is what we wish could happen when we're feeling horny, erotica is our examination of what really does, or maybe should or shouldn't. Comparing the two is really a case of apples and oranges; both are sexual but otherwise they're two different things. The matter of quality has to be settled within each category, not by pitting them against each other, and there's plenty of good writing to be found in both. There has to be. Poorly written porn is even worse than poorly cooked pizza for its ability to induce nausea. Sexually explicit writing must be approached with skill and care.
The only reason we care so much about the difference is because of the tendencies of organizations with agendas to try to ban anything they think is icky. Even worse, in my opinion, than exploitative sexual fantasies is the exploitative behavior of those who try to make themselves feel morally superior by labeling other people as deviant or perverse. What "I know it when I see it." really boils down to is creating yet another dividing line between "us" and "them," with "them" being those who enjoy things that the "us" folks don't. Unfortunately, those with such tendencies have a poor track record of keeping it themselves, and that's why the dividing line between erotica and porn becomes so important. If we can prove that something we like has artistic merit, there's a chance we can save it from the censors.
The porn vs. erotica debate, then, is a question of determining genre, and placing a moral judgment on one or the other is as ridiculous as placing a moral judgment on cozy vs. hard-boiled mysteries. Whether one has a preference for one or the other comes down to what one is interested in at the moment. After some instant, physical gratification? Then Lady Lust might be just what the doctor ordered. Want something with a bit more emotional and cerebral involvement? I'd loan you my mother's copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, but I read it to death a couple of decades ago.
