Shifting Positions: Humanist Perspectives on Porn

Prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, pornographic material was kept private amid a culture that labeled it too risqué for the public eye. With the mass production of magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, porn’s increasing visibility elicited outrage from the more conservative members of society. Twenty years later, pornography became a full-blown civil rights issue.

The 1980s gave rise to some of the most vitriolic critiques that had ever been aimed at the subject. While moral objections to pornography were nothing new, it was only starting in the ’80s that many outraged feminists and humanists willingly teamed up with the religious right to oppose what both considered a truly sick and disturbing trend in adult entertainment.

Not surprisingly, the creation of this unlikely coalition put the allied humanists in a very awkward position. How could they, as strong proponents of social equality and sexual freedom, ever justify siding with the kinds of people who took their philosophy from an overtly misogynistic and homophobic text? It was a controversial move that provoked much debate within the humanist community.

For one, humanists were typically pornography’s sympathizers and not its assailants. Unlike the members of the so-called moral majority, who objected to porn mainly because it showed people fornicating in a slew of “unacceptable” ways, humanists found nothing inherently obscene about the graphic depiction of sex. They certainly weren’t appalled by the act itself—provided that it was consensual—and couldn’t point to any reason why sexually explicit material deserved to be labeled, automatically, as indecent. Moreover, many humanists believed that pornographers, like anyone else, deserved the right to freely express whatever they wished, regardless of how uncomfortable it made people feel.

On the other hand, some porn appeared much too appalling to tolerate on the basis of free speech. The ’80s snuff films in particular seemed to defiantly overstep the boundaries of what ought to be marketed as sexy. From an ethical standpoint, what these movies glorified—the raping and killing of women—was absolutely disgusting to anyone who believed that human life deserved to be treated with respect and dignity. Unfortunately, the rise of these films was just one of several new manifestations of moral decay. Another was the questionable content of popular men’s magazines; the June 1978 cover of Hustler, for example, featured a crude clip-art collage of a woman being fed face-first into a meat grinder. The violence and misogyny present in such images led some feminists to believe pornography was something that deserved to be banned, quickly and permanently.

However, not all humanists agreed with them. While none condoned the sexual violence expressed in certain types of pornography, some were more hesitant about placing their trust in legislation to bring about its end. The outspoken sexologist Sol Gordon, as an adamant opponent of censorship, pointed out that a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and effects on attitudes might be shown, but that no one could show such a relationship between exposure and behavior. “Anything we ban,” he added, “we make readily available…haven’t we learned the lesson?” Besides, he argued, the legal restrictions the feminists were proposing could easily be twisted and used against them—it could be their writings on sex and their beloved pro-feminist erotica that the obscenity censors would target first. (Consequently, he turned out to be right; immediately following a 1992 Canadian court ruling declaring pornography an obscenity subject to government regulation, two LGBT bookstores were raided, and their “offensive” lesbian erotica was seized.)

By 1985 the conflict over pornography was nearing its climax. Although humanists generally agreed that something had to be done to fix the social ills porn promoted, they nonetheless couldn’t reach a consensus on what exactly this was. With neither the anti-porn feminists nor the civil libertarians backing down from their respectively entrenched positions, the American Humanist Association held a panel discussion (subsequently published in the Humanist) at their annual conference in 1985 in hopes that a healthy debate would lead to a compromise. But to the dismay of the strongly anti-porn humanists, a definitive answer never emerged. Instead, the issue continued to remain at an impasse, epitomized in panel host Cleo Kocol’s statement that “neither the Feminist Caucus nor the American Humanist Association has an official opinion [concerning pornography].”

Despite the diversity of humanist viewpoints being offered at this time, there was at least one point on which all were in agreement, namely, that porn both perpetuated and reflected a culture of filth and malaise, that it was, ultimately, a symptom of a sick society. This quintessentially negative stance had, for humanists, been in vogue ever since Sarah J. McCarthy’s 1980 exegesis, “Pornography, Rape, and the Cult of Macho,” painted pornography as sexual propaganda transforming unspeakable violence against women into something socially permissible. Even so, her article was met with less than resounding acclaim when it was published in the Humanist. The comments of at least one dissatisfied subscriber were published in the following issue’s Readers Forum:

McCarthy’s article substituted assertion for evidence, was confused in aim, and overly dependent on speculation…[I]n all likelihood, the extravagant nonsense that is seen in ‘pornography’ is but another manifestation of the same underlying psychosocial dynamics that have produced ever more bizarre expressions of political and religious beliefs and a host of aberrant lifestyles in contemporary society.

Indeed, this reader’s reaction wasn’t surprising, because he was echoing the convictions of an earlier era when humanists were more concerned about the damage being done by a domineering society than with pornography’s alleged harms. Not only was pornography generally tamer and undoubtedly less violent back in the 1960s, the type of criticism it provoked was far removed from feminist complaints that it subjugated women—the greater concern at that time was that it might turn people on to “deviant” and “antisocial” sexual practices including auto-eroticism, sadomasochism, and homosexuality. Thus, rather than condemning it, sociologist and proto-gay rights activist Edward Sagarin had praised porn, “the socially disapproved appeal to the libido,” for its ability to stimulate controversy along with sexual appetites. He believed that both were healthy in a society that had only recently begun to break free from a stifling culture of repression. As he indicated in his 1969 article, “An Essay on Obscenity and Pornography: Pardon Me Sir, But Your Asterisk is Missing” (the first ever about the subject to be published in the Humanist):

Pornography…acts as a force demanding greater self-reflection from within society, creating a counter-culture to the staid, puritanical, and taken-for-granted world. It is a call for sexual re-evaluation, and that means it is a force against stagnation and conservatism.

Fast-forward back to the deadlock surrounding the ’80s, and it’s obvious that the humanists themselves were also in need of some revolutionary thinking. A much-needed revitalization of humanist thought on pornography arrived in the ’90s, courtesy of the third-wave feminists. They were quick to dismiss the one-dimensional view of the institution of pornography, in which men pulled all the strings and women were relegated to the role of helpless victim. As third-waver Kimberly Klinger explained in a 2003 edition of the Humanist, pornography isn’t just “degrading sexual imagery made by men, for men.” Women, she argued, also have the right to “enjoy sexual images without violence or negativity.”

In light of these shifting perspectives, one of the main proposals made by humanists was to decriminalize the sex industry. During this time it was recognized that women didn’t always become porn stars out of resigned desperation; interviews with female adult entertainers and prostitutes revealed that some found their line of work legitimate, enjoyable, and even empowering. But this did not automatically persuade all humanists that the danger had been eradicated from the sex industry. In 1995 and later in 2003 Alice Leuchtag put forth valid counter-arguments that sex trafficking, sex tourism, and other forms of sexual slavery were serious human rights violations that warranted legal action. Her well-researched pieces on both porn and prostitution caused humanists to think twice before advocating the complete decriminalization of sex work. A more moderate approach calling for its “destigmatization” is what is more widely accepted today.

Forty years have passed since the first Humanist article on pornography surfaced, and the topic continues to remain relevant as the sex industry continues to evolve. Thanks to the Internet, porn has taken on new forms and generated even more controversy. In June the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICCAN) green-lighted the development of the long-debated .xxx domain, designed specifically to house on-line adult entertainment. Christian groups oppose the .xxx domain for fear it will legitimize pornography, while porn sites oppose because they say it will open them up to government censorship. (In all likelihood they’re more worried about lost revenue from the so-called accidental search discovery they enjoy on .com sites.) As the debate unfolds, the same questions that have dogged humanists for decades—how should we interpret pornography? What is the humanist stance?—will again resurface and some will reluctantly find themselves, as they were in the ’80s, on the same side as religious conservatives. As always they are questions humanists must answer for themselves.

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