It’s a Porn World After All

To some, Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog is itself pornographic. The novel is a calculated howl, and its narrative strategies — various parallel forays into the vast dark cave of what its author elsewhere dubs “the near-infinite chaos of human desire” — are a challenge to follow. But Amis’s point is as clear as his methods are murky. Men, the novel suggests, have enormous trouble maintaining sexual balance in their heads and hearts, and the mainstreaming of porn is proving a disaster for this uneasy equilibrium, making “yellow dogs” out of many males and victims out of many women and children.

Mercifully, it is still men’s thoughts, more than their actions, which stumble about in the cave. A father who has suffered a “de-enlightenment” due to a violent assault starts to fantasize about his daughters. (“They’re mine, and I can’t protect them. So why not rend them? Why not rape them?”) A scurrilous journalist wonders about his failures at relationships. (“Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography — with its infinities, its immortalities — Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them.”) Imagine what would happen, Yellow Dog contends, if such thoughts were let loose as actual acts committed upon actual people. “We get over it,” a porn actress says of the abuse she suffered in childhood. “No you don’t,” she is corrected. “No we don’t,” she concedes. “Obviously.”

There is no end to the obvious damage on parade in extreme pornography, should one wish to acknowledge it. Nor is that extremity difficult to find, thanks largely to the Internet. But even if one grants that a pornographic sensibility has gained a degree of mainstream acceptance in society, is there actual evidence of a slippery slope of collective harm? When the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of legalizing sex clubs in December, it declared that there was no sign that “the sexual conduct at issue harmed individuals or society.” Dissenters to the ruling, including the editorial writers of the Globe and Mail, argued back that the courts should be used to discourage activities that “offend community standards.” The paper also decided that waiting until there is a clear indication that indecency is sliding into depravity is waiting, in effect, until it is too late. But a consensus about “community standards” may no longer be available. Sex remains a moral issue for most adults, but not in the way it once was. The movement has been away from the morality of sex itself — no pre-marital sex, the proscription of homosexuality — to the issue of harm: people shouldn’t be getting off on the acts of those who are themselves traumatized and are being traumatized by what they are doing. Maybe terms like “obscene” and “pornographic” have lost their nuance. Words such as “dangerous” and “humanly disastrous” might be more to the point.

In an essay about the porn industry in California, Martin Amis wrote that “porno is littered — porno is heaped—with the deaths of feelings.” To be more specific, in its exploitation of personal tragedy and naivete, its misrepresentation of human erotica, especially among newly sexualized youths, who may never recover from being consumers of its distortions, in its indifference to consequence, to the causality of action and effect, both on screen and in real life, extreme pornography may be stalking one emotion more than any other. That would be the shared feelings we have for fellow humans, along with the inclination to recognize kindred suffering and even lend aid. Porn may yet be the death of empathy.