• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1073 0

glossy spreads in Playboy and smutty films sold in seedy shops. It is corporate and easily available. Its products today focus less on sex between a man and a woman and increasingly on groups of men beating off on a woman’s face or tearing her anus open with their penises. Porn has evolved to its logical conclusion. It first turned women into sexual commodities and then killed women as human beings. And it has won the culture war. Pornography and the commercial mainstream have fused. The publicity photo for the porn production company Wicked could be lifted from a Victoria’s Secret catalog. The lacy brassieres and thongs, candelabras, stilettos, windswept hair, strings of pearls, and arched backs are staples of mass culture. The wars fought by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem to free women from sexual tyranny have been defeated by a cultural embrace—by both men and women—of bondage and objectification. Stripping, promiscuity, S&M, exhibitionism, and porn are mainstream chic.

“Why do deep down within we’d all like to be porn stars at one point in our life or another?” asks Faye Wattleton in complete earnestness on the HBO special Thinking XXX. She is the president of the Center for the Advancement of Women.

Sexual callousness and emancipation have become synonymous. Fashion takes its cue from porn. Music videos feature porn stars and pantomime porn scenes. Commercials and advertisements milk porn for shock value. The grainy sex tapes of vacuous celebrities from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton enhance their allure as porn icons. Madonna has built her public persona, and her dance routines and videos, around the sexual boundaries obliterated by porn. Rap stars like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Yella produce porn. Howard Stern interviews porn stars. Fitness clubs offer pole-dancing and strip classes. Porn star Jenna Jameson’s memoir was published by HarperCollins and was a New York Times best-seller for six weeks. The E! True Hollywood Story episode of her life remains the highest-rated single episode of that show. Reality television shows like The Girls Next Door and Rock of Love feature a male celebrity who has multiple female partners competing for his affections. The Girls Next Door, which stars the octogenarian Hugh Hefner and girlfriends young enough to be his granddaughters, is spiced up with undertones of incest and pedophilia. HBO celebrates and glamorizes porn, prostitution, and strippers with specials and shows like Thinking XXX, Katie Morgan’s Sex Tips, Cathouse, and G-String Divas. The language, abuse, and moral bankruptcy of porn shape and mold popular culture. And there is a direct line from the heartlessness and usury of the culture of porn to the hookup parties on college campuses, in which young men and women get hammered, have sex, and do not speak to each other again.

Women, porn asserts, whether they know it or not, are objects. They are whores. These whores deserve to be dominated and abused. And once men have had their way with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It is the belief that “because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have a right to use this force and control.” It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts in Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.

III

The Illusion of Wisdom

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

—SINCLAIR LEWIS

THE MULTIPLE FAILURES that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional