How does your garden grow? Robert Jensen talks of pornography's role in pop culture -

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

To see Robert Jensen standing behind the wooden podium at the front of Ilsley Public Library's basement meeting room, no one would have guessed that this slight, bespectacled and amiable man, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism, would condemn the direction of today's society and paint a picture of the end of the world.

But on Feb. 28. as the 15 or so audience members gasped in shock or nodded in righteous agreement, Jensen graphically described the state of pornography and used it as a measure of our society's ills. He began very simply.

"Pornography is what the end of the world looks like," Jensen said. "If you look at pornography honestly, what you will see is a vision of a set of values, values rooted in hierarchical systems around gender, around race and around an economic system that I think are fundamentally unjust and unsustainable. If you look at especially the direction pornography is going and is likely to continue, what you see is a very disturbing picture about what the end of these systems looks like. And it ain't pretty."

The Addison County Coalition against Domestic and Sexual Violence organized Jensen's talk, titled "The Pornification of Pop Culture," and most of the audience members were women from domestic violence and child abuse prevention programs. Jensen's approach to pornography elicited many nods and knowing looks in these women as he stressed again and again his fundamental theory of pornography: the eroticized subordination and domination of women. He supported this theory with an explicit depiction of the evolution of the sexual script in pornographic films - these films, generally of heterosexual intercourse produced for a target audience of primarily heterosexual white men, are what Jensen meant when he referred to pornography.

When pornographic films first became social
ly acceptable in the '50s and '60s, they featured primarily vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman. By the '80s and early '90s, anal sex was a wildly popular feature, and in today's pornography Jensen cited acts known as double penetration, gagging and a-- to mouth as common elements.

Why the change in the sexual script? Jensen said an executive in the porn industry explained it to him the best when asked about the move to anal sex in the '80s.

"Anal sex is not part of the regular sexual preference of most straight women," Jensen said. "[The porn executive] said, 'Men know this.' He said, 'When men get pissed off at women, they think to themselves, 'Boy, I'd like to f--- you in the a--' as payback. But most men are not in situations where they can do it, so they like to watch it done to women on the screen.'"

The brutality reflected in this response is the same motivation Jensen pointed to behind the more recent pornographic evolutions.

He placed his theory in line with femininist critiques of pornography - that pornography itself is not a bad thing, but that the way in which it is made and the attitude it reflects towards women are horribly damaging to both women and society.

"We could have had pornographic scripts that were focused on egalitarian sexuality with mutual pleasure, with lots of foreplay and expressions of intimacy and caring," Jensen said. "It didn't happen."

Melissa Deas of the Domestic Abuse Education Program, which works with men who commit acts of violence towards women or children, raised the issue of porn's psychological effects on men.

"Men objectify themselves as well as they objectify women," Deas said. "We need to go deeper into that and think about teaching men to view themselves as sacred and their sexuality as sacred and precious."

Jensen acknowledged this idea, but not to the extent Deas wanted. She called for social reform at the ground level in teaching men that their bodies are sacred life-givers just as women are taught that their bodies are sacred vessels for life.

But Jensen only went as far as recognizing the objectification of men.

"[Men] are trained to take all of the complexity that comes with being human and reduce it to this task of obtaining sexual pleasure," Jensen said. "In a patriarchal society, that's how sex is most commonly defined for men."

According to Jensen, in pornography, everybody loses their humanity, but the consequences remain considerably more dire for women than for men.

To illustrate his argument, he referred to noted writer Margaret Atwood's famous description of fear between the sexes. When Atwood asked a group of men why they were afraid of women, they said they were afraid to be laughed at. When Atwood asked a group of women why they were afraid of men, they said they were afraid to be killed.

Jensen's argument is that pornography increasingly propagates both of these fears, and it does so ever more effectively as it infiltrates pop culture in more seemingly inocuous realms.

"You can see the paradox I'm raising," Jensen said. "In a civilized society, how is it that you can have a mass media that becomes more and more accepted at the same time it is becoming more and more cruel and degrading to women and more and more overtly racist?"

At the culmination of his talk, Jensen summed up his characterization of pornography as industrially produced and marketed upon the subjugation of women in a sexual way.

He answered his own question using his earlier proposal of pornography as a depiction of the end of the world.

"Pornography calls into question the assumption that we are a civilized society, that in fact the systems out of which our society is built are truly civilized," Jensen said. "If you have an unleashed patriarchy, an unleashed white supremacy and an unleashed, predatory corporate capitalism, [pornography] is the image of the world that they produce [...] an image in which the most important feature is that there is no empathy possible."

Jensen's portrayal of contemporary society is not optimistic But despite his forecast of doom and gloom he remained inspired and he hoped to spur his audience to action rather than depress them.

"If the world were a bad place just because people were bastards, you couldn't fight that," Jensen said.

"Human beings are what they are. If you can see that human nature is channeled through institutions and systems, then you can say, 'Well, I can fight that,' and so it creates the possibility of action.

"For me, that action doesn't have to come with guarantees of short-term results to be meaningful."