Review: Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature

Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature by Susan Griffin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a considered and detailed feminist takedown of pornography. Focus is made on European and modern writings with some special emphasis on Histoire d'O Story of O. Some that don't get reviled are Song of Solomon and The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.

Some say pornography, and I suppose violent imagery in games and films, cannot influence viewers. An interesting point made by this author is that that contradicts corporate money spent on advertising. This also is refuted by the interest and controversy around subliminal advertising. Also recounted is successful self-improvement techniques involving creative visualization.

If the social scientist who found no correlation between violence and pornography believes his studies to have proved that pornography does not cause violence, then we must wonder why he does not begin to examine pornography as a strange and extraordinary exception to all other imagery. For in this case, if he has discovered a form of culture which does not affect behavior, he ought to study this form to discover what is exceptional in it, and what it might tell us about the mind.

Both the social scientist and the pornographer collaborate on the assumption that pornographic imagery does in fact affect behavior. Millions of dollars are spent on research, which not only documents but discovers techniques by which an association between sexual desire and any activity encourages behavior. This research is financed by an advertising industry which used pornographic photographs of women and sublimi- nally embedded images of penises and breasts in the belief that showing these images in proximity to a given product, a kind of Scotch, or a brand of cigarettes, will cause the viewer to buy these products. Here research suggests that the pornographic image has such a powerful effect on behavior that it is worth millions of dollars a year. See Wilson Bryan Key, Media Sexploitation (New York, 1977) and Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1957).

I like the idea of science emerging from a cultural matrix.

As Ruth Hubbard has written of Darwin's thought: "There is no such thing as objective, value-free science. An era's science is part of its politics, economics and sociology: it is generated by them and in turn helps to generate them." In short, science is not fact: it is culture; and so science's definition of instinct can perhaps tell us more about culture's will and belief than about the natural limits of our behavior, more about our minds than about nature.

And indeed, a large body of scientific data exists to disprove the ideas of Freud and Lorenz and Stekel and Hobbes and Spencer regarding human nature. In his massive study of both instinct and our culture's biased view of nature, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm writes: "The anthropological data have demonstrated that the instinctivistic interpretation of human destructiveness is not tenable. While we find in all cultures that men defend themselves. destructiveness and cruelty are so minimal in so many that these great differences could not be explained if we were dealing with an 'innate passion.'

The author connects the pornographer to the chauvinist to the bigot to Hitler.

There are two kinds of delusion which it is possible for the civilized mind to embrace. The first delusion is a private one. The mind possessed by such a delusion is often perceived as mad. Certainly as strange. For the private delusion sets the one who believes in it apart from the rest of humanity. But exactly the opposite is true of the second delusion. This is the mass delusion: it consists of a shared set of beliefs which are untrue and which distort reality. A whole nation, for example, decides to believe that "the Jew" is evil. This type of delusion brings the man or woman who believes in it into a common circle of humanity. And because the mass delusion is a shared delusion, the mind which shares it is perceived as normal, while the same society perceives as mad the mind which sees reality.

Pornography is a mass delusion and so is racism. In certain periods of history, both of these mass delusions have been accepted as sane views of the world, by whole societies or certain sectors of society. The pornographic ideology, for instance, is perceived as a reasonable world view by parts of American and European societies today. And various forms of racism have been the official ideologies of societies, political parties, and even governments. Most notably, we remember the official racism of the Third Reich.

...

We know that the sufferings women experience in a pornographic culture are different in kind and quality from the sufferings of black people in a racist society, or of Jewish people under anti-Semitism. (And we know that the hatred of homosexuality has again another effect on the lives of women and men outside of the traditional sexual roles.*) But if we look closely at the portrait which the racist draws of a man or a woman of color, or that the anti-Semite draws of the Jew, or that the pornographer draws of a woman, we begin to see that these fantasized figures resemble one another. For they are the creations of one mind. This is the chauvinist mind, a mind which projects all it fears in itself onto another: a mind which defines itself by what it hates.

...

Hannah Arendt has observed precisely this pattern in Nazi propaganda. She tells us that the announcements of the Third Reich consistently contradicted themselves. Even within the same statement, contradictory assertions were to be found. Moreover, continually, with almost no attempt to conceal the divergence between fact and statement, the pronouncements of the Third Reich contradicted what the German people could see with their own eyes. But here we are at the heart of both the experience and the raison d'être of Nazi propaganda. Like pornography, the medium of propaganda itself speaks, gives us a message, and this message is that the knowledge of culture and of authority is to be trusted over direct sensual knowledge. "The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses," Hannah Arendt writes; the masses "do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience, they do not trust their own eyes and ears but only their imaginations."

...

In every detail, the concentration camp resembled an enacted porno- graphic fantasy. Even the hardware of sadomasochism was present. Men and women were chained and shackled; and the SS officer, who wore high leather boots, carried a whip. And just as in a pornographic fantasy, the Jew was beaten. He was "disciplined." A man who at- tempted to escape, for example, was "beaten to a pulp." And then he was made to stand for hours in this beaten state under a hot sun or in rain before being lashed again or "thrown into a dungeon for further torture, or hanged before the assembled camp."

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