Neither weep nor laugh, but understand – Spinoza

As if one could discuss pornography, even now, without mentioning Andrea Dworkin. The conventional gesture is one of dismissal and disavowal: whatever we are going to say about porn, it will not be what Dworkin said! But it turns out that what we above all do not want to say – for example, that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, and that pornography is the cause of rape and should therefore be forbidden – is not exactly what Dworkin said. There is something suspicious about this situation: what is it about what Dworkin said that we so want to be rid of, but can’t even reproduce accurately when we claim to be refuting it? What was the schibboleth that she pronounced, and we cannot?

For Dworkin, porn was to be understood primarily as an ideological apparatus, a closed system in which men chose and women were forced to live: a perfect circle, like the dialectic of consumption and production: at once incitement to act and justification after the fact. The “porn wars” that overtook second-wave feminism were a distraction, and absorbed too much of Dworkin’s polemical energy, the true object of which was not the silly and banal posturings of “pro-sex” feminists but the frantic nihilism subtending the model of sexual agency in which they wanted to stake a claim. Dworkin’s was a deep and macabre pessimism of the intellect, illuminated at every turn by flashes of grim humour; she had enemies everywhere, but few who were equal to her question.

Coming across this excerpt from Robert Hughes’ memoir in the middle of re-reading Dworkin’s novel Ice and Fire, I was struck by the similarities between the bohemian inferno traversed by Dworkin’s punch-drunk, self-immolating narrator and the milieu inhabited by Hughes and his first wife, Danne. There is the same wolfishness, the same habit of referring to putative sexual partners as “fucks”; the same metaphorical slippage from the prick to the needle:

She does it away from me: with other lovers: now and then: glassy-eyed and elayed: not aloof but ecstatic: sated: when no one could even see, from day to day, that she had been hungry.

Or I couldn’t see.

Or she wasn’t: the needle just gutted her with pleasure: so afterward, in retrospect, one inferred that there had been a lack, a need, before the needle: but in fact she had been complete before and now was simply drenched in something extra: something excquisite, heavy and thick like some distilled perfume, sweet to the point of sickness, a nauseating sweetness: something transporting and divine: something that translated into eyelids weighed down and swollen, lids puffed up, the cracks in them spreading down, the body suddenly soft and pliant, ready to curl, to billow, to fold: a fragile body, delicate bones suddenly soft, eyes hiding behind lush eyelids: the hard tension of her hips dissolved, finally. The way other women look when they’ve been fucked hard and long, coming and coming, is how she looked: the way other women look fucked out, creamy and swollen, is how she looked. The needle gave her that, finally: dissolved.

Ice and Fire (London: Fontana 1987), pp. 46-47.

The immediate object of Dworkin’s polemics on pornography and intercourse is, necessarily, the hippy glorification of free love and of pornography as the articulation of a wholly novel erotic freedom. In the hippy fantasy of sexual freedom, pornography stands for frankness versus hypocrisy, explicitness versus repression; the pornographer appears as swashbuckling auteur and champion of free speech. Fucking and shooting up are alike posited as paths to transcendence, but the experience sought is in fact one of narcissism without limit, a perpetual immurement in the ineluctably thermodynamic One God Universe of the cosmic self.

Pornography specifically presents a world of unhampered access to perpetually willing and compliant sexual objects, a world in which there is no such word as “no”. In this world, domination achieves its objective but loses its rationale: what is the use of power without resistance? Behind the ever-depreciating erotic valuation of the image, libidinal vacancy: what is the point of desiring someone who cannot fail to desire me back (or whose desire, or lack of it, is as simply besides the point as mine is)?

For Dworkin, pornography was a cover story for domination, a fable in the service of male power, but it was also decipherable as a record of nihilism, the board books of a centuries-old scam: “if the first one is a fake, you can’t underwrite a shithouse”. She chose to call what happens to women (and even men) in pornography “dehumanisation”, but we should not therefore define pornography as the pollution or degradation of a vital human essence by some exterior, death-dealing agency; rather, we should understand pornography as anthropomorphising, as positing an anthropology – an image of human animals doing what is only human – from which the ability to bear the inhuman has been excised. “Of course,” Dworkin wrote, “no biological determinist has yet found the bug, fish, fowl, or even baboon who had managed to write Middlemarch. Humans create culture; even women create culture”. Is an “erotic fiction” possible in which managing to write Middlemarch would not be unthinkable?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.