Cultural Studies: Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture Posted on Monday, 04 February 2008 @ 00:00:00 by tim milfull
http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php? name=News&file=article&sid=2409 Reviewed by Tim Roberts Pornography has never been more accessible or more widely used than it is today. This truism forms the basis of Pornification: Sex and Sexualtiy in Media Culture, the latest multi-author study on the impact of the genre, an overview that offers some vital insights into the extent of the genre’s media penetration, if you’ll excuse the term. The book’s cover features a naked male torso, cropped just high enough to avoid being relegated to the naughty section of the bookshop. This is a good thing, as the authors’ attitude to sex is extremely frank, and the book resists the twin evils of salaciousness and sanctimony. Paasonen and Saarenmaa’s essay The Golden Age of Porn seeks to deflate the myths surrounding 1970s-era pornography: that it was artistic, high-quality and non-exploitative, only to be cheapened by the arrival of videotape and low budgets in the 1980s: “Porn historiography characterizes the 1970s as an era of sexual, and even artistic, exploration unhinged by AIDS, and of adult film-making undisturbed by video technology or the economical desires of the porn industry” (27). They take Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights to task for perpetuating this stereotype, and conclude that “films produced since the 1990s are selective in their aesthetic remembrance. While faithfully replicating the hairstyles and sideburns of the bygone decade, they do not do so with the hairy backs, armpits and crotches which abound in the productions of the 1970s. Their tragic stories mainly involve tanned and well-groomed people” (28). They also disprove the economic argument, noting that “Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door are often celebrated as the most profitable films ever made in respect to their production costs” (29). One of the most interesting studies is the analysis of the effects of porn on the comments displayed on the Cosmopolitan website. The authors argue that the ‘liberated’ image peddled by the magazine is not unambiguously positive, as “while Playboy celebrated its version of ‘natural’ male sexual drive complemented by innocent girls next door happy and willing to please men, Cosmopolitan stressed the role of female sexual knowledge in keeping a man” (74). These two aims, of course, can be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. More disturbingly, a number of the website’s visitors seem to have a superficial approach to sex, which the authors suggest has been largely informed by pornography. “The ideal relationship is constructed as sexually active: failure, reluctance, impotence or the lack of sex do not usually amount as topics. Sex talk on the site is characterized by an emphasis on the technical” (78), a focus that ignores the emotional bond. The wide-ranging collection of analyses includes music videos, with a perceptive reading of how cars often act as surrogates for the absent men in music videos. In one example, “the fourth character, the Hummer, is not simply a fetish object but is coded as male” (121). The authors’ exploration of pornography’s role in exploiting minority groups, including gays and black people, is handled without the hysterical tone that overruns so much of the gender studies industry. Arguing that “pornography is written into the code of gay men’s everyday lives”, Sharif Mowlabocus brings to light the techniques used by the porn industry to cultivate gay men as a market. The UK website Gaydar, while not a porn site, still has commercial designs on its gay clientele: “if the primary purpose of Gaydar is to bring gay men together, the secondary purpose is to transform them into an identifiable demographic” (65). The ease with which adopting a porn-based aesthetic makes individuals more susceptible to being targeted by commercial companies is an excellent point. I particularly enjoyed Pin-Ups, Retro-Chic & the Consumption of Irony for its deflation of the duplicitous attitude of ‘hipsters’ towards the porn aesthetic: “It is the hipster’s camp sensibility and ironic pose that makes consuming pin-ups OK: the logic is that yes, I know it is sexist and because I know, I can enjoy these representations guilt-free” (55). Buried racism in porn is dealt with as well, and the authors of Interracial Desire & Black Women in Video Porn note that the genre “allows white men to never explicitly disclose their desires to consume or participate in interracial sex between whites and blacks”, doing this by stereotyping black women as “manipulative and lazy” (42). Similarly, Bisexuality in Porn Magazines explores the fact that “The bisexuality of men, in particular, crossing as it does the sacred border of hetero- and homosexuality, is depicted as embarrassing, revolting or humorous”. The book makes an excellent case that porn’s frequent use of negative racial and sexual stereotypes should be thoroughly confronted and criticised. Pornification has some depressing things to say about porn’s ability to invisibly infiltrate and alter social structures, making its way into everyday language and behaviour. As such, it is a worthwhile contribution to understanding the multi-faceted representation of sex in present society. Pornification: Sex and Sexualtiy in Media Culture (2007) edited by Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, & Laura Saarenmaa Berg (distributed in Australia by Footprint Books) ISBN: 9781845207045 204pp AUD$57.95 _______________________________________________ Netporn Mailing List [email protected] list: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/netporn-l_listcultures.org links: http://del.icio.us/netporn
