The Porning of America (Beacon Press, 272 pages, $24.95), by professors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott, sounds like it could be a Michael Medved book, but the authors’ stated goal is an even-handed assessment of porn’s porting into mainstream culture and, according to them, “how porn has shaped us, how it has affected how we see ourselves and one another.”
Let’s read “even-handed” as “bipolar.” When the authors stick to the subject, their insight is impressive, as when they trace the history of the porn industry. On the one side, the Hefner-ian derived middle-class porn that portrays at least a surface of female enjoyment of sex and, on the other, the torture and debasement imagery that grew from the déclassé “love-camp atrocities” of men’s adventure mags of the 1960s. While Sarracino and Scott give 10-foot-pole-credit to contemporary practitioners of the former, it’s the misogynistic latter, they argue, that has set the tone for today’s pornscape just by sheer ubiquity on the internet.

That is true, but by spending a Meese Report–like number of pages on the most extreme porn then ultimately agreeing that violent sexual imagery does not increase real world violence (and in fact, does just the opposite), the authors leave us wondering what exactly their goal is beyond instilling the same shock they decry. Compare the above conclusion against their conflation of Abu Ghraib and the micro genre of torture-horror films, only a few pages away: “A culture that takes so much pleasure in images of sexual violence and murder … is a culture that has lost its sense of strength and is searching desperately to recover its former authority.” To be fair, qualifying every argument to the point of nullity is a common enough problem with academics.

Their examples of the language of porn being part of common speech are equally inconsistent and range from the undeniable, like Clinique’s notorious “facial” ad, to the far-fetched. Seeing elements of prostitute-chic in the Bratz dolls is the kind of religious-right, paranoid reading that academics aren’t immune to when it serves their purpose. As well, in assaying contemporary sexual mores of high school and college students, the authors hilariously rely on Tom Wolfe not once, but — for fuck’s sake — twice. 

The greatest strain Sarracino and Scott put on credulousness is when they try to push their curious verb “porning” outside the realm of the social. Time is wasted pondering the effect of porn on political discourse, i.e., that porn’s high-contrast extremity-as-entertainment has influenced the Coulter/Limbaugh/Franken axis of punditry. Not only does that imply political discourse in America once had dignity, it’s also just wrong. Circular logic is too damn sloppy for a couple of guys with pedigrees.

Late in their study, the authors predict that porn, especially with the rise of feminist and truly amateur examples, will become a completely acceptable part of sexual life, culture-wide.

That’s noble, and fun to think about, but by failing to look porn in the eyes and confront what it really means to record ourselves or watch others in the most charged and vulnerable states that we’ll ever attain, the authors have missed out on a truly literary query. Instead, they flip-flop back and reiterate hoary arguments about celebrity culture, reality TV and the blurring of the personal and public cribbed from a 10-year-old copy of Harper’s at the back of a dentist’s magazine rack.

Is it possible to have your porn and watch it too? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. 

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