Jeffrey Hart
REFLECTIONS ON PORNOGRAPHY
The subject of pornography has come in for a good deal of
attention lately, and for a variety of reasons . There is more of this
kind of product visible in the marketplace than heretofore, and, in
fact, it is a major industry. Many people object to it from different
perspectives, and, indeed, they mean different things by the term.
Pornography has become for some a political issue, and for others a
moral and even a religious one. On pornography, the Moral Majority
and Gloria Steinem agree, for once. The whole issue goes far beyond
the rather narrow definitions established in current case law, in which
the courts have defined the pornographic as: 1) appealing entirely to
"prurient" interest; 2) focusing on the representation of human gen–
italia; and 3) having no redeeming social or scientific value. Those
definitions, when we come to actual works of representation, are dif–
ficult to apply .
In
any event, the concerns ofJerry Falwell or Gloria
Steinem are entirely different.
.
My own effort here will be one of clarification, both intellectual
and semantic. My interest in this subject was awakened several
years ago when I moderated a debate on it between D . Keith Mano ,
the novelist, and Ernest van den Haag, the social philosopher. I
have since read a great deal of the literature on the subject. I offer
these reflections tentatively, but also ou t of a sense that all of the
discussion I have read has been in various ways inadequate.
In
a recently collected essay, for example, Gloria Steinem
characterizes as pornographic any work in which a woman is ex–
hibited as an unwilling victim . One understands her political im–
pulse here. But , after all, people - men, women, children - are
sometimes victims. The disposition of power in a given relationship
is not always equal. Such a situation ought to be available to
representation. Steinem would be the most restrictive critic of
Othello
since Thomas Rhymer.
In
her recent book
Pornography and Silence,
Susan Griffin writes
from what could fairly be called a feminist perspective, and she - a
writer of genuine poetic power - has marvelous things to say about
this subject. Her central thesis or insight is a useful one, though not
in the way she handles it . Griffin argues that the spread of por–
nography is not the result of the so-called "sexual revolution," and is
by no means a celebration of eros.
It
is, in fact, the opposite , the
