130
STEVEN MARCUS
We need not pause
to
discuss the degree of truth or falsehood in
these assertions. What is of more immediate concern
is
that these
assertions indicate a system of beliefs. These beliefs are in the first
place associated with class: the "majority of women" evidently fails to
include
~'low
and vulgar women"- this final ascription might possibly
include all working class females. These beliefs express yet again the
notion that sex
is
a curse and a torture, and that the only hope of
salvation for man lies in marriage to a woman who has no sexual
desires and who
will
therefore make no sexual demands on her
husband. At this point we can observe how sexual responsibility
is
being projected onto the role of woman; she
is
being required to
save man from himself; and conversely
if
she is by sOme accident
endowed with a strongly responsive nature, she will become the
agent of her husband's ruin. In either event she is being regarded as
essentially a function of masculine needs, whatever the direction in
which those needs may run. That these needs are in substance
contradictory, that sexuality is a regular hell, and that general im–
potence is a universal fear, not to say a universal condition, of middle
class men is the burden which Acton's book communicates.
We see then how nearly related is the world which Acton creates
and the world envisaged by pornography. At all points they touch
either by analogy or oy analogy through opposition, and sometimes
by both at once. In both there is a similar split or divided conscious–
ness; both are dominated by the logic of fantasy and association
rather than by the logic of events or of consecutive thought. Both
are also worlds without psychology; they are worlds of organs and
physiology in which everything is convertible into matter. That
is
to
say both represent a primitive form of materialism. In pornography,
this
fantasy purports to be subversive and liberating. In Acton's work
it represents itself as grimly scientific and ineluctably tragic. What
is
of largest interest, however, is that at this moment in history a
human science- the investigation of sexuality-had attained ap–
proximately the same stage of intellectual development as porno–
graphy itself. Perhaps it might be more precise to say that it rested
or remained fixed at that stage, and it is to the happenings of that
enduringly arrested world that we must now begin to turn.
