At my Social Science Section of Northern California meeting yesterday, there was a brief discussion of pornography, and like a lot of what anthroposophists casually discuss, there was more heat than light.  Similar to weakly thought out views of the Internet, the discussion of pornography was basically superficial.

Dear Friends,

At my Social Science Section of Northern California meeting yesterday, there was a brief discussion of pornography, and like a lot of what anthroposophists casually discuss, there was more heat than light.  Similar to weakly thought out views of the Internet, the discussion of pornography was basically superficial.  It reflected, in a way, a recent spate of articles in the more popular press, arguing many sides of the same question.  Having spent some time actually "thinking" about this phenomena of social life, I will offer below a few observations and conclusions.

The first thing that PoF students will find agreeable, is that many of the views people have are quite justified given the outlook or point of view in which they were born.  Each seeming side of what are called "the issues" has valid and important things to say.  At the same time, a thinking trained in goetheanism can perhaps add something to what is already being said.

Consider the "explosion" of pornography on the Internet.  It is huge, with pornography being perhaps the biggest money maker of all the commerce there.  Accurate figures are hard to find, and those who have an itch to scratch frequently use information whose main virture is how much it supports their point of view.

Without doubt what is called the "sex industry" (by some) exploits its "workers".  A great deal of content now comes from Eastern Europe and Asia, where such problems are more acute.  At the same time, "workers" in almost all industries are everywhere exploited world-wide, so this phenoman is more universal than peculiar to pornography.  It is also clear that pornography wouldn't exist if it didn't find a market.  We can't really understand what is going on without recognizing that there is a purchaser of pornography.  The exploiters of sex workers wouldn't do it if they weren't making money.

We also have to distinguish to a degree what is call erotica from pornography.  Suzy Bright defines erotica as an encounter (mostly mental) with the forbidden.  What is forbidden, by the way, is quite cultural in the rules being "violated", so that erotica in Asia is something quite different from erotica in the USA.  Many today (to turn the tables in another direction) cry out against the restraints on female dress by Muslim cultures.  They seem to argue that it is a woman's right to show a lot of thigh, belly and cleavage, at the same time wearing clothes so tight that little (if anything) is left to the imagination.  In my previous journal entries I mostly referred to this in the sense of "Fallen Eros".  We have lost touch with the underlying spiritual realities behind sexual "attraction".

There are also kinds of "pornography" (of children for example) that are criminal.  If we sum this up a bit (that is make a first stage picture), we might do this:

erotica - ordinary pornography - criminal pornography

The purchaser of each of these forms of material has a different inner relationship to what is being purchased.  We have now to take a brief look at the purchaser's psychology, for it is this "market" that drives the providers to provide.

Now lest someone think I am working out of some ivory tower here, the reader of this post should realize that during the 1970's, while needing work, I was employed on the periphery of the pornography industry in San Francisco.  I worked for the notorious Mitchell Brothers (who gave us "Behind the Green Door", the first porn film to make over a million dollars).  I managed movie theaters for them, and was occasionally at their offices where I met many "sex workers".  I also, when writing my book "the Way of the Fool", where I undertook a deep contemplation of Eros, I spent a lot of time examining Internet porn, both samplying the effects upon my own consciousness as well as trying to understand what might be learned by thinking about the phenomena in the sense of the different kinds of content offered.  I'll get to details (none x-rated, sorry) below.

I suppose this needs to be said right at the start.  Most pornography is for men.  Most men masturbate to this pornography.  Like any human activity, it can be abused and some even get addicted.  We did spend a lot of time during the so-called "sexual revolution" taking the view that masturbation was "natural", so we shouldn't be surprised if (in the USA in particular) erotica and ordinary pornography are a bit confused.  Erotica is often written (Anais Nin, for example on the art side of erotica, Suzy Bright and her friends more in the middle in between art-like erotica and ordinary pornography).  Most Internet pornography is visual (appealing to the senses rather than the mind, as is the case for written erotica).

It might be difficult to classify ordinary sense oriented pornography if it were not for the fact that the producers, knowing their customers, already do this for us in how they "organize" the various websites.  LIke almost everything else that is appearing during this time of the Fall of Western Civilization, excesses appear.  Some critics have focused on these excesses, and while their particular biases weaken their arguments, they do point to something that has to be noticed: A lot of pornography takes the shape such that the man is visualized as dominant over the woman, with the woman submissive, passive and slavish to the point of doing whatever the man wants.  Sexual crimes (rape and so forth), for those who study that phenomena, are often more about power than about sex.   These various facts can give us another picture:

communion with or dominion over  (in the idea of communion with I am refering to those erotic and sensual encounters in the real world where both participants are equal and their love making mutual).  In pornography, there is no partner, the partner is imagined, and we have to be careful with assuming what is the nature of the imagination of the partner during masturbation.  Certain kinds of pornography leave little question here, in that obviously what is imagined has a great deal of dominance in it, sometimes even to the point of imagining criminal abuse.

When we add to our considerations the fact of the role of the imagination we encounter a whole other dimension, for we have gotten deeper into the psychology of the purchaser (the end user of pornography - which mainly means the sexual psychology of men).  We should also notice that the simulation of men through advertising, and other "accepted" visual media (magazines and films) has become more and more explicitly pornographic (soft porn) since the sexual revolution, such that as Fallen Eros has increased during the Fall of Western Civilization, a kind of pre-condition in the stimulation of the imaginative psychology of men accompanied these changes.  Into this kind of sexually stimulated and unsatisfied inner (soul) life of men has poured Internet pornography.

For those interested in Goetheanism, what this discussion has tried to do is to not let us abstract Internet pornography out of its "context".  Any phenomena abstracted out of its context can rarely be understood.

Let us now assume that a certain degree of sanity exists in men's sexual psychology, and that masturbation is "natural" in a sense (the driver according to some is the physiology of the testicles, which need to be discharged periodically otherwise a medical/psychological dysfunction can arise - witness the strange consequences of celibacy that often occurs among monks and priests).

From here we can ask the question: Is there anything about Internet pornography that can teach us truths about men's sexual psychology?  We are stepping past the aberations (those phenomena at the extremes of the "bell curve" so to speak), and looking at the ordinary impulse to be stimultated sexually to orgasm through pornography (something commonly used in cases of medical efforts to deal with difficulties in marriages arising from an inability of the partners to conceive).  Above we noted that the produces helped us understand something by the fact that they "organized" their websites along certain well understood "interests". (breasts, lingerie and so forth).

Since the producers have to provide a product that satisfies, even more significant is the postures the sex workers are encouraged to take.  There are quite common "themes", whether we go back into the former black and white erotic visual arts of photography, to the more modern (and excessively explicit) visual themes of today. Clearly it should be recognized that what was originally outrageous when Playboy magazine was first being published in 1955 is not the same as the films and other media offered today.  This "degeneration" of a kind of visual art in the representation of the female form has accompanied a kind of cultural-wide desensitization of both our senses and of the imagination.  One can tear one's hair out here, or one can seek greater objectivity and understanding of the "process", if we are to find a way to healthy and renewed: UnFallen Eros.

In my book "the Way of the Fool" I concluded that what was being offered in various media to men for the stimulation of their sexual apetites involved a "displacement" of something otherwise healthy.  Overstimulated by their culture, and underloved by life (the I in our time is frequently forced to stand on its own) we can find in not only pornography, but also in sexual chat rooms, prostitution and strip joints, a response to something men might well want in a partner who was willing to understand them as a sexual person.

Let me say this once more.  Cultural phenomena as regards human sexuality are not only a mirror of unhealthy impulses, but of healthy ones as well.  A dear friend of  mine (a woman and a native American) once said that women should be "whorish" in bed.  That if they took a selfless attitude toward their "man", they would recognize that a man's sexual apetites are part of his being, and necessary and natural (otherwise no babies, no bodies in which to incarnate in, no stream of physical inheritance etc.). 

If we make a list of general themes in pornography and other sexually explicit media, what can we find that might be representative of natural and healthy sexual hungers in men, that a women might find useful to want to selflessly satisfy in a partner?  Oddly enough, as noted in my previous discussion of Eros (part II), if we think about the five sense we find all that we need to discover.

Men, who according to Steiner are more "incarnate" - more earthly - than women, live more strongly in their senses in a kind of less sensitive way than women.  So visual pornography primarily seeks to satisfy the need to "see" - the sense of vision.  This dominance of the sense of vision is also an aspect of modern life in general that as deeper significance but that is another theme altogether.  Women often dress provacatively, and men enjoy not only the form of dress, but also the act of dressing and undressing (thus "strip" clubs).  Pornography is full of this kind of imagery - women in various stages of dress and undress.

The sense of touch is covered in the emergence of "lap dancing" which actually was begun by the Mitchell Brothers (in the USA in any event).  Smell is there as well.  Visual pornography offers neither of these other two senses, so perhaps this explains why it tries to move in the direction of an excess of the explicitly visual themes.  Film pornography gives us sound, so the sense of hearing is found there, as well as in Internet chat rooms (that are sound oriented, not just typed).  Typed stimulation is often pornography seeking the erotic, as is some of the speech that can be found in film.

Men tend to like earthly speech and the use of terms with a more (coarse according to some) explicit nature.  I'll leave the actual wording to the readers imagination. So we have the sense of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and the last, taste, which while it cannot be satisfied by visual pornography, is frequently explicitly depicted in visual pornography. In film the whole is often woven into a playlet.  Various kinds of themes are offered, from situations where the man is more passive, to situations where the sex is more mutual (and oddly enough occasionally loving) to that where dominance (and unrecognized anger) is present.

One of the more unusual pornographic films made in the 1970's was made by a woman.  She interviewed a very large group of men and women who were not sex workers, but which she developed a feeling for, and then paired into five pairs.  She created a situation where the room used was covered by two cameras, left running on their own (no crew was present).  Candle light and wine was provided, and each couple did not meet each other until they walked into the room.  They understood that each was commited to making love to the other, but everything else was left to them to define.  It was unusually erotic, in large part because the encounter was quite real.  This was a time of casual sex in any event, but the awkwardness was natural, as was the discovery of each others passions and desires.

In any event, my studies led me to realizing that Internet pornography, and other existing explicitly sexual media, could (if we got our antipathies and sympathies out of the way) reveal something about the natural hungers of men toward women that very much needs to become part of the necessary dialogs by which we can in the future give birth to UnFallen (or the Redemption of) Eros. 

Yes, there are excesses everywhere (in everything - witness the number of things that are now thought of as addictions.  At the same time, once we enter into excesses we have to go deeper into the problems of the threefold double-complex, for pornography and these kinds of problems are not really causally related.  The object of an addiction is not necessarily the cause of the addiction, but these problems are for another time.  Removing the stimulation to addiction, (witness the failure to stop alcoholism by making alcohol illegal, a problem now socially destructive when applied to drugs) does not solve the problem.  In a similar vein, the difficult issues with respect to Internet pornography require a much deeper understanding if our object is a healthy social life built out of healthy individuals.

joel