by Helen Walsh
Canongate, 2004
296 pp., $14 (US)
Yellow Dog
Knopf Canada, 2003
340 pp., $36
In 2003, porn actor Ron Jeremy set out on a tour of American college campuses. At every stop the veteran of more than 1,800 hard-core films was greeted by fans, many of them teenagers. Few who clamoured to see Jeremy had likely rented his 1988 movie 21 Hump Street or 1996’s Another White Trash Whore. They probably knew him instead through the reality-TV show The Surreal Life and documentary film Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, as well as his cameos in Hollywood films like The Rules of Attraction and Boogie Nights. At the University of Alabama Jeremy participated in one of a series of debates with the Canadian writer and anti-porn activist Susan G. Cole. As reported in Pamela Paul’s Pornified, students in attendance, some wearing “I love porn” T-shirts, cheered Jeremy’s boasts about the benefits of pornography and “having a party” while booing Cole for her objections. “What’s your fucking problem?” one young scholar asked Cole during the question period.
Pornography, it is worth remembering, peeled off its brown-paper wrapping only quite recently. The way it struts through popular culture these days, waving various small flags of faux liberation and a much larger banner bearing a simple dollar sign, you might think it had gone mainstream back in the 1960s, along with the pill. In fact, the porn parade down the boulevards of North American life is about a decade old, and many middle-aged watchers, unschooled in sex.com or Britney Spears, still may not be sure what those raunchy floats and teenaged pole dancers represent. Younger observers, having grown up inside the Internet, and anyone attempting to raise children in the early twenty-first century know all too well.
The clever industry fluttering of those lesser flags — pornography as sexual liberation, as third-wave feminist assertion, as freedom-of-expression battleground — in the faces of concern seemed to temporarily stifle criticism. But today, for a pioneering group of commentators and novelists, the wish is to remark not on the spectrum of porn that reflects a liberated relationship with sex, but those activities that are symptomatic of a distorted and even abusive vision of human sexuality. Distinguishing the exhibitionist tendencies of giggly college girls from, say, dubiously consensual incest web-sites out of eastern Europe ought to be easy enough. But extreme porn, especially the degraded forms that flourish in cyberspace, invites both conflations and a tendency to moralize.
Moral objections, however, more than legal or aesthetic ones, may be the most instinctive response to what Martin Amis calls “the obscenification of everyday life.” Harm, observers assert, is being done here. Harm to those watching extreme porn and harm to those being watched. Harm as well to community standards, especially those concerning young people, who still deserve our protection and guidance. Finally, harm is being done to all our fragile sexual selves, which may be incapable of withstanding the relentless assaults of a multi-billion dollar industry whose principal effect is to make a mess of our relationships.
Ariel Levy began noticing the change several years ago. The author of Female Chauvinist Pigs would switch on her television to find “strippers in pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm.” Viewing the film Charlie’s Angels, a hit in the summer of 2000, she would contrast the assertions of its stars that they were presenting strong women with the visual evidence of the actresses dressing on screen in “alternating soft-porn styles.” On the newsstands were fresh examples of the “porny new genre” dubbed the “lad magazine.” Publications such as Maxim, FHM, and Stuff fixated on “greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.”
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