Lili Interviews Dr. Robert Jensen - Part Two

First published at:
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/erotica-patriarchy-and-pornography/

Lili Bee continues her interview with Dr. Robert Jensen about pornography and what it says about our society.

Read part one of the interview here.

Lili: Let’s switch gears a bit here, and talk about something that seems to come up a lot in discussion and on comment threads. It concerns the use of erotica vs. porn. Putting aside for a moment, that many porn users curiously morph into erotica-only users when pressed about the violence depicted in the great majority of online porn.

To me, this feels like cognitive dissonance—you know, the porn user claims to be a great guy or girl who just looooves, even worships women, but he has this super ability to compartmentalize his fantasies of porn that degrades women. Ahem. Ok, let’s put that on the shelf for now.

Can you talk about the difference between someone using erotica vs. someone using more hardcore porn? Would you consider it less damaging, equally damaging…what are your thoughts here?

Bob: The distinction between different forms of sexually explicit material—that world has been carved up in different ways: the old and sort of enduring one is the difference between erotica and pornography—the assertion that there is a category of sexually explicit material that is rooted in domination and subordination, and problematic that we’ll call pornography.

And then a category that’s rooted in mutuality and egalitarian dynamics which we’ll call erotica.

And the question is, Can we create a definition for a category that we call erotica that is not problematic?

Well, one overall point I would make is that the need to create that category, I think, has to be questioned.

Because in my experience, what that does is, then people create this category of “the bad stuff” which they call porn, which then they don’t use.

And then all questions about their use of so-called erotica become irrelevant, because that’s “the good stuff” and that’s the stuff that’s okay.

And I think we need to challenge that.

And we have to ask the simple question: “In this culture, in this moment, why do so many people seem to need pictures?” That is, what is it about living in a mass-mediated culture in which more and more of our experience not only of sexuality but of our world, is mediated… that apparently drives people to need mediated images of sexuality? I mean, what’s going on? And that’s a fundamental question I think we should be asking of this culture. Now, my own view is that there’s not a single answer to the question of the appropriateness of what we’ll call erotica.

I find that in my own life, I don’t feel compelled to use it, I don’t see a need for it, and the reason is I think for me, at least, there is something about the nature of intimacy and sexuality that doesn’t translate to media when it’s represented in graphic, sexually explicit fashion. There’s something lost. There’s something about the nature of the experience that’s lost, and I choose not to do that. That’s my choice based on self-reflection, and a lot of thought about this. I don’t expect that everybody’s going to come to the same choice, but I think it’s a relevant question everybody should ask.

So if you ask me: Would I rather have people watching hardcore, graphic pornography in which women are routinely the subjects of cruelty and degradation, or graphic, sexually explicit material where there’s some level of mutuality, and an underlying egalitarian dynamic, yes, I would rather the latter.

But I think the question to ask before that, is, “Why do people feel a need for this kind of material?”

Now, that’s not to say that any depiction of sexuality is somehow inherently problematic. I would say that as long as people have a creative capacity, that is, as long as human beings have been able to represent the world in what we basically call art, there’s probably been art about human sexuality for the simple reason that much of our sexuality is mystery to us.

I mean, we understand the biology and the mechanics of it, but sexual drive and all those sorts of things are kind of mysterious, we don’t really understand it very well. That’s why there’s a lot of art about sex. Because we use art, we use our creative capacities, to explore those things we can no longer understand, that are bumped into the limits of traditional, rational, logical thought.

So when you explore something and you’ve reached the limits of how you can understand it through a more traditional, rational process, we often explore it through art, through our creative capacities. I would say that’s why there’s so much art about sex and so much art about God, because God is another concept that’s fundamentally a mystery to us. So we use art to explore those things and I think that’s healthy, I think that’s a part of the human condition.

But there’s a difference between that exploration and what I call contemporary pornography. I don’t think the goal of contemporary pornography is to explore. In fact, I think it has exactly the opposite effect. I’ve made this point often when people say pornography opens up their sexual imaginations.

My argument is it does exactly the opposite: it closes it down, because it channels one’s sexual imagination into a very formatted and I think, quite rigid conception of sex. Especially that kind of pornography rooted in male dominance. So, in the book I wrote, I write about this—that pornography doesn’t open doors, it closes doors; it’s like literally being in kind of a prison of the imagination.

And those are the things I think we have to talk about, rather than trying to create simple categories of: porn : bad, erotica : good, the using of erotica as being beyond questioning. The whole point of this is to open up conversation, not shut it down, and I think that the porn/erotica distinction too often actually shuts down difficult conversations.

Lili: Well, what about people who say, “If you’ve looked online recently, you’d see there’s ninety million videos depicting every single sexual variation possible and left on my own, my imagination wouldn’t likely conjure this up. So in and of itself, porn is expanding my sexual imagination, not contracting it.”

Bob: The problem with that is that it treats sex like a mechanical act. The hardest sexuality is not tricks, from my point of view. It’s intimacy. I’ve even described sexuality as kind of a form of communication. It’s a way we communicate with another person, it’s a way we communicate with ourselves. If one thinks about the sexual experience as among the most meaningful in one’s life, it’s usually because you go beyond some connection to a person, it deepens your connection to a person.

And I don’t think that has anything to do with the mechanics of sex. I think that has to do with vulnerability and how open one is.

So the fact that you can look online and see sexual positions you might not have thought of, is to me, irrelevant and of no particular great benefit.

People have the creative capacity to engage in sexuality that meets their needs. We have that; we don’t need recipe books for that, self-help books or videos for that. Human beings have always had that capacity.

That ability to connect and deepen our experience with another person can be undermined by all sorts of things…like patriarchy, like individual psychopathology, or any number of things.

But the answer, to me, isn’t to create more movies or write more books about the mechanics of this.

The key, to me, is about returning to an understanding that sexuality is fundamentally about human communication and opening up people’s ability to communicate. And, in my experience, listening to literally, at this point, hundreds and hundreds of people talk about the effects of pornography in their lives, the overwhelming majority of those people, when they self-reflect, recognize that pornography has not enhanced their relationships with other people, but in fact, created impediments to those relationships.

And that’s what I think, in the end, is the thing we should keep talking about: What is the real effect in people’s lives of this kind of thing and how it’s used?

And the effects are variable. I always remind people there’s a lot of individual variations. You cannot say anything about all human beings but what you can do is look for trends and patterns. And the patterns, I think, about the use of pornography are quite clear at this point. I think they do create more impediments than they seem to remove impediments to that kind of intimacy, vulnerability and communication that to me, is at the core of sex.

Lili: I’m also troubled by what I see as a real voyeurism in our culture, this entitlement to appropriate for ourselves imagery of sex for our “enjoyment.”

And I always ask the question, “Well, just because we can, should we?”

Often, the answers I’m met with are more accusation than anything else: “You’re being conservative.”

That unwillingness to probe into the nature of our behaviors, and attack instead, is deeply troubling to me.

Bob: I’ve said, partly in jest, is that the problem in this culture is that we’re over-mediated, over-marketed, and over-medicated. That is, in a consumer society, there’s a real sense when I say we’re over-medicated, that if there is some discomfort in your life, there must be a product to deal with it, that you can buy a solution to whatever it is that’s making you uncomfortable.

We’re over-marketed in the sense that the whole system is set up to sell us these things.

And we’re over-mediated in the sense that so much of our experience comes through screens, that we take that mediation to be the way we learn about the world.

You put all that together, and you get the phenomenon you’re talking about. The assumption that mediated sexuality, even mediated sexuality of our own lives, like a video camera trained on us, is somehow always positive.

And I think that one of the reasons that idea, which seems so foreign to me, is so widely accepted in the culture is precisely because of the culture: that culture of mediation, that culture of consumerism, that culture of medication, that culture that says, “If you can do it, you should do it.”

And of course, no society can survive that. That’s an ethic of destruction, an ethic of no-limits.

And no human community, no biological community can survive with a sense of no limits. And I think that’s at the core of this.

What are the limits on human communities, on human individuals…? Because there are limits.

Lili: Right. And we clearly see the effects of that no-limits approach in the destruction we’ve wreaked on our environment, plundering the earth’s resources, polluting our lands, what, in effect, I’d call the dominator model run amok.

I work in the field of compulsive sexual behavior, specifically porn and sex addiction as it affects partners. And in this field, you’re trained to look for cues that signal addictive behavior. And denial is the predominant signifier there.

What I’m about to say may be construed as alarmist by some people, but when I see the vast wreckage created by sexuality that’s turned compulsive (and the evidence for this is undeniable now) I am alarmed that when we point it out, when we mention the consequences of that behavior piling up like so many cars in a bad car accident, and we’re met by just more denial, it’s hard not to believe we’ve become a nation of addicts stuck in deep denial.

Certainly we know about compulsive eating, gaming and shopping but more and more, sex is joining those ranks. And yet no one likes to talk about it, because it’s supposed to be “private” and as such, it stays vastly underreported. Our country’s dirty little secret.

So when you try to have a conversation about this, it most often deconstructs into black and white categories with little to no room for nuance.

Yet, the divorce statistics show that compulsive online sexual activity by one partner is the reason stated in the majority of divorce cases every year…that’s alarming! And this is coming from matrimonial lawyers.

When you have an over-$750 million dollar a year industry that sells and services internet monitoring and filtering software, 750 million dollars every year, and mind you, roughly HALF of that is installed by the person with the compulsion—not the spouse, and not the concerned parent…that speaks volumes about the way we’re using sex compulsively now, and that’s alarming.

Bob: Well let me talk a bit about the concept of addiction. For a long time, many of us who identify as feminists/anti-pornography activists, critics of the porn industry from a feminist point of view, many of us resisted the notion of addiction, and porn addiction.

Because we feared that it may have some meaning as metaphor, but in a culture like this, when you label something an addiction, it tends to get medicalized and dealt with through medical solutions.

And we didn’t want the underlying feminist critique about gender and power to be lost. And so for a long time I resisted the notion of pornography use as being addicting, in the sense that we would use that term for tobacco/nicotine or alcohol and drugs.

But two things have changed my view on that. One is, as you point out, the experiences of people who, whether it’s an addiction or not, are certainly engaged in addictive-like behavior patterns. That evidence is mounting, especially since the advent of the internet where access to pornography was easier, cheaper and more private than ever.

So, as you point out, if you talk to divorce lawyers and therapists, the rise of people acknowledging this, not just women talking to male partners with this problem, but men themselves acknowledging these addictive-like patterns, I think it’s clear that we’re seeing, what at least in common parlance, we can talk about as addiction. That is, it certainly produces behaviors that are similar to what we talk about as addiction in these other areas.

The other thing is the neuroscience research available now is changing and there are, with the advent of FMRI machines and very sophisticated neuroscience, there’s more evidence in fact, that in the brain itself, the responses to not only pornography but also gambling and other kinds of extreme behaviors that produce behaviors like that, does look a lot like addiction when we look at the brain scans on it.

Now, I’m not a neuroscientist so I don’t pretend to evaluate the science and I tend to be rather cautious; I don’t like to overdrive the evidence but at this point I’d say there’s no question that the lived experience of people, the trends we see people reporting about their experience, and the neuroscience makes it clear that we should consider pornography use as, if not addicting in the traditional sense that we would use that term, certainly something like that.

The habitual use of pornography, the difficulty of men who acknowledge they would like to stop using it, the patterns of denial you’re talking about and the effects on intimate relationships—I think all that’s pretty clear at this point. The evidence is piled up now for the past couple of decades certainly.

And the cultural denial, not just the individual denial—but the culture’s unwillingness to think about this, I used to say, “It’s just another sign of a culture in collapse”. There are a lot of signs of this culture in collapse right now—that fundamental human virtues that are necessary to sustain decent human relationships in community are being corroded.

And I think they’re being corroded by lots of things: by consumer capitalism, by patriarchy, all sorts of things, but that’s where we sit. There’s nothing alarmist about pointing to the evidence, there’s nothing alarmist about researching science and asking questions and coming to these conclusions.

Lili: So give us a couple of worst case/best case scenarios that you could imagine, if nothing else changes, nothing intervenes to change the trajectory we’re on. When young men prefer online sex to real life relationships because online is so much easier, and when the porn industry targets more and more females so that now the addiction rate amongst porn-using females is 17% and climbing steadily the past few years, what do you foresee possibly happening here?

Bob: Well, one clear consequence of this is that when in secular societies, especially within feminism, there’s no consistent critical examination of this, the only place where people are critiquing it, then, in a way that’s consistent, is in conservative and typically religious contexts.

So if the dominant secular culture can’t cope with the problems we’re discussing, I think it will simply drive more people, both men and women, to conservative and religious responses.

So they want to deal with it, but the dominant culture gives them no tools.

Well, if you go to right-wing religion, it does give you tools. Now, I think they’re the wrong tools; I don’t think they understand the nature of the issue and therefore I think their response is inadequate. But it is a response. So I think that’s one ironic consequence of it.

For people in secular circles, especially the secular, liberal or feminist circles to continue to celebrate pornography, refuse to look at the issues we’re talking about, it’s going to drive more people into the arms of right-wing religion where at least there’s an answer of some sort.

Unfortunately that answer is to reinscribe patriarchy, to return to quote unquote “traditional family values” where you see patriarchy playing out not in the way that men buy and sell women’s bodies but the way men must take their role as the head of the family in a traditional, heterosexual family values, etcetera, well, that’s one thing that’s going to happen.

The other thing that’s going to happen is that in some sense we can only assume the problems are going to get worse. The inability to not only take seriously the problems but understand the underlying systems from which those problems arise guarantees that, in the absence of some intervention, that it’ll just continue. And here, I don’t know how to predict.

Because the last 20 years, the period of time in which I’ve been studying the pornography industry, the industry has pushed the boundaries of what can be represented in graphic and sexually explicit fashion in ways that I don’t think anybody could have predicted 20 years ago. The extreme nature of some of the acts in pornography, the intensity of the cruelty and degradation to women, the racism of it, I mean all of it kind of defies the imagination.

And that’s not just my estimation. When I’ve interviewed pornography producers and directors, I often ask them, “What do you think is coming next? What are the trends?”

And they kind of shrug. Some of them have told me, “I’ve shot, I’ve filmed, I’ve photographed everything I know how to do.”

I’ve had male producers and directors tell me, “We’ve done everything to the female body we know how to do.”

Lili: Oh my God, I suddenly feel sick.

Bob: Well, it’s a very disturbing reality. But it is reality. And so, if the fundamental charge of pornography, the sexual charge, the excitement, comes from presenting women as objectified bodies for male sexual pleasure in a patriarchal context where male domination and female subordination is at the core of that sexual excitement, then in a society like this, premised on mass mediation, premised on the expansion of profit in capitalism, the industry is going to continue to push for ever more extreme ways to try to provide that sexual excitement.

And where does that end? I don’t know where it ends.

Is there a limit? Well, I don’t know how to predict. The industry’s already gone way beyond what I think most people would have predicted in the past.

Lili: Well, as one example, we can look at Japan to see what’s happened there: the creation of video games where the player gets to virtually rape three generations of women: the very young daughter, the mother, the grandmother…

Bob: But I don’t think it’s specific to any one country. I think the porn industry is now global. There are specific styles of pornography that have come out of specific countries, including Japan, but they’re all similar in that they root the sexual excitement in male domination and female subordination. And that’s really the way to understand pornography in contemporary culture.

So yeah, there’s some pretty unbelievable things that come out of Japan, and there’s a lot of unbelievable stuff that comes out of the San Fernando Valley in California. There’s unbelievable stuff that comes out of Europe. We live in a world where women are bought and sold for male sexual pleasure on a daily basis. In some places it can be on the street, where you can buy and sell not only adult women but girls…and boys.

It happens through mediation in a more advanced industrial culture, it happens in all sorts of ways and it’s all part of this fundamental definition of women as being less than fully human.

And fulfilling one of their primary roles in the world as providing sexual pleasure for men. And that’s the core of patriarchy, and pornography is part of that.

Lili: What would one say about all these women pornographers now making porn? Because any talk about the patriarchy would then tend to fall on deaf ears.

Bob: But there’s nothing new about that. In complex systems of oppression, the trend in which members of oppressed groups might make their own particular bargain with the system, that goes on all the time.

Let’s take it out of the sexual context. Go to the third world where European and North American Imperialism has imposed economic systems on third world people that enrich the first world and enmiserate the third world. Well, in those societies there’s some portion of the third world society that makes it’s deal with the Imperialist society and is rewarded for that.

So you go to Latin America, in the worst of American domination, and there was a class of people who cut deals with American business and American government to get their share of the gain. Meanwhile the vast majority of the population suffered. It happens, and it’s complex and one has to look at people’s motivations and the systems within which people make those choices. The fact that women participate in what I would call patriarchal institutions is neither new nor surprising…it’s in the nature of oppression.

Lili: What I love so much about your work is the way in which you chronicle your own journey, and describe your own deconstruction of the concept of masculinity, what it stands for, and then eventually move more towards realizing that you would rather identify as human than as masculine.

So, I’d like to ask you about masculinity, then. There appears to be a strong drive to define what it is today.

How important do you think that is, to define masculinity?

Bob: I approach it in what I think is a very simple and sensible fashion. We are a sexually dimorphic species: there are male and female humans. Our reproduction is based on that. The result is that we will always have these categories of men and women, of masculine and feminine. They’re not going to go away because the species is based on sexual differentiation. So, I have no problem recognizing there are male bodies and female bodies, and also a small percentage of the human population born, what I call, “intersexed.”

The problem I have with the obsession with masculinity is about how that plays out within patriarchy. In patriarchy, there is a continued session with establishing a definition of masculinity that keeps men on top. Now, people will argue about what that definition should be. But much of the attempts even to redefine masculinity away from a traditional conception of masculinity based on domination, conquest and control—even a lot of the attempts to reformulate masculinity end up reinscribing that notion of domination, conquest, and control.

And so my argument is, that as a corrective to that, we need to stop obsessing about masculinity and, obviously, that would include implications for femininity, as well.

Lili: Of course.

Bob: But stop obsessing about what it means to be a man, and reformulate the question as: What does it mean to be a human? so that men can start to think about these questions outside of patriarchal demands that even in subtle ways, remain on top. And that’s, I think, the real challenge.

Once we’ve taken care of patriarchy and once male domination as a political reality is over, then I don’t mind talking about what is it to be male, and female, and what might masculinity and femininity really mean. But we’re not anywhere near that point yet.

And so, rather than try to constantly ask: how can we reconceptualize masculinity?, I think the greater challenge and the more productive challenge for men is, How to break free of our obsession with masculinity? and start asking: How can we more fully live out our humanity?

Lili: What about all the men’s groups now, whether male rights, or male empowerment groups?

How do you see that trend in the context we’re speaking of now?

Bob: I’ve spoken to some of them….I don’t participate in men’s groups, because I think, even when well-intentioned, most men’s groups end up playing out patriarchal games.

My formative political experience was in a feminist movement, in a feminist organization that was woman-run, based on the insights of women around patriarchy. That did everything I needed, for me.

It helped explain my own tension with masculinity, it gave me a vehicle for trying to change the world, and it gave me the tools I needed to engage in critical self-reflection. I didn’t need a men’s group; I’ve never understood the need for men’s groups.

I think men can more productively self-reflect about this, both individually and collectively, within the context of the feminist movement, rather than within the context of a men’s movement. And women are eager to have men engage in that, so there’s no shortage of ways to do it. And there’s nothing impeding men from doing that, from trying to understand themselves within a feminine context.

My argument is that is the only context men are going to break free of the ways in which patriarchy creates very toxic conceptions of masculinity. If we want to actually slip the trap of patriarchy ourselves, it’s going to be, from my point of view, through feminism, not through men’s groups.

Lili: So you wouldn’t identify yourself, then, as a humanist rather than a feminist? Is calling yourself a feminist primarily coming out of an allegiance to the movement which gave you your roots?

Bob: Yes! Just as in the same way that as a white person, I came to understand racial injustice and oppression, not by some vague humanism, but by the work of black and brown critics of white supremacy. In other words, when you have a system of oppression in place, you understand it not by trying to transcend the oppression in some mythical, magical fashion and pretend you can rise above it.

You deal with it by confronting it, and there are movements that have historically helped people do that. Radical anti-capitalists, labor movements have helped us engage in critiquing the inequality in capitalism. Feminism has helped us do that in gender. Various kinds of critical race groups have done that around white supremacy. That’s the vehicle, not some ideal, mythical humanism.

I don’t have any problem with the term “humanism” as some sort of assertion of an ideal that transcends differences, to try and understand our common humanity. But we do that through politics, and that politics needs a theory, and it needs an analysis and it needs an understanding of history. And that’s what feminism does for me in this particular context.