Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary

The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography

Natalie Purcell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136274466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

No cultural product reveals our collective fascination with sexual violence more candidly than popular heterosexual pornographies. They showcase scenes of intense sexual aggression and cruelty that are gendered in repetitive, patterned configurations—configurations that are designed to arouse. Purcell uses comparative critical analyses of popular pornographic movies to explore common fantasies of sexual violence and how they have changed over the past forty years. Adopting a thick descriptive approach, she moves beyond the mere observation and recording of instances of sexism and violence, elucidating the changing aesthetics, themes, and conventions of depicted sexual aggression and showing how they have emerged in specific socio-historical contexts. Purcell also draws from a range of industry publications and fan forums to examine the fabric and function of misogyny and violence in viewers' fantasies and everyday lives. By documenting how popular pornographies have changed over time, this study sheds new light the evolving desires and anxieties of the genre's growing U.S. audience.

1 “Just Fantasy”

Rethinking the Pornographic, the Fantastic, and the Real

QUICK TO DISMISS

At a moment when hardcore pornography is commonplace, accessible, and not terribly controversial, it's easy to dismiss debates about pornography as a stale preoccupation of the uptight and the insecure. Not surprisingly, many left-leaning social commentators do precisely this, treating pornography less like a political matter and more like a trivial cultural product that doesn't warrant serious refl ection. Sex-advice columnist Dan Savage (2003), responding to a heterosexual woman concerned about her partner's porn use, advises her to “get over it”: “The handful of men who claim they don't look at porn are liars or castrates. Tearful discussions about your insecurities or your feminist principles will not stop a man from looking at porn…. I'm sorry if you think that's insensitive—no, wait: I'm not sorry.” Savage can summarily and unapologetically dismiss his reader's concern because of the widespread conviction that pornography doesn't really matter in our lives and relationships. To him, worries about porn are almost always paranoid because porn lacks any power and significance beyond its role as an occasional masturbatory aid. In practice, Savage's advice constitutes another confident claim that pornography is just fantasy.

In the Introduction, I tried to trouble this claim by gesturing toward the multiple things pornography is and does. But, even if we were justified in assuming that pornography is only fantasy, would it follow that fantasy is just a fl eeting preoccupation of the individual mind—a trifl e without personal or social consequence? Might there be some power and significance inhering in pornographic fantasy itself? This chapter is an invitation to carefully consider what our fantasies are and how they matter in our lives.

THE LIFE OF FANTASY

Instead of asking, “What is fantasy?” we can start by asking “What does fantasizing feel like?” or “What do I do when I fantasize?” Fantasy is perhaps better conceived as a verb than a noun—as an ongoing process, rather than a psychic object (Arlow 1969; Fisher 1988). Fantasizing is a kind of “doing” that may not feel like a “doing” at all. When we fantasize, we see and hear, but not with our eyes or ears. When we fantasize, our nerves tingle and our muscles respond, but neither our nerves nor our muscles, it seems, created our fantasy. When we fantasize, we experience a cascade of images, sounds, and sensations, but we don't always feel like we're actively thinking, assembling, cogitating. When we fantasize, we are swept away in an unfolding narrative, but we don't always feel like we're thinking up a narrative; we may feel like the narrative is “thinking” us.

Our fantasy may please us, disgust us, or do both at once. It may seem close to our lived “reality”—a memory of something that happened, a blueprint for something that could happen, a revised rerun or pre-run that we can master triumphantly. Or it may seem worlds away from who we are and what we would contemplate doing—provoking shame, shock, moral outrage, fear, or perhaps silent longing. There are fantasies that seem to come from nowhere and return to nowhere, never to arise again. And there are fantasies that return, over and over, sometimes slightly reformulated—fantasies that we have had for as long as we can remember. Some have a meaning and purpose in our lives that we understand; others remain mysterious, indecipherable to us.

In fantasizing, the “I” who thinks, who cogitates and formulates, often gives up a little control. Sometimes that's a scary feeling, but sometimes it's blissful. Fantasizing can feel a lot like indulging, but it might also bring us to an unfamiliar and uncomfortable place. Fantasizing is often charged with feelings of desire, delight, anger, fear, excitement—sometimes distinguishable, sometimes mixed and muddled. When we fantasize, our emotions might be singular, vivid, and sustained throughout the fantasy, or they might move with the narrative, slowly shifting or abruptly fl ashing from one sentiment to another. These feelings can be so many and so much that we may not be sure they all belong to us: They belong to the scene, the milieu, the story or portrait itself. Where the “I” fits in that scene, we may feel certain or utterly unsure. Sometimes, we think the “I” is not there at all.

The difficulty we may experience in locating the self—the ego—in our fantasies would not surprise Freud. For Freud, fantasies, like dreams, are where what is conscious to us and what remains unconscious intermingle most vividly. Too frightful for direct display, our repressed and disavowed thoughts, feelings, and memories appear to us disguised in dreams and fantasies. The specters of the unconscious mind are like neglected, feral beasts of the psyche that occasionally demand to be fed. When we try to find them, we can glimpse only the fl ash of a tail or the blur of a moving body; they hide behind the fence, in the bushes, in the dark basement. They rarely come when we call them, but they appear unexpectedly—perhaps only for an instant and only on their terms. Once they're gone, we aren't sure they were there at all, but we recognize the traces they leave behind—the bits of hair and feces, the scent of urine, fading footprints in the mud. These traces tell us that the beasts of the night could reappear on another day, still elusive and still demanding their food.

Dreams and fantasies—our close encounters with the feral beasts of the unconscious mind—can be intensely exciting, often sexually charged. The untamed beasts often embody desires so powerful and overwhelming we can scarcely admit that they are ours at all. But the beasts are us—at least in some sense. They do not represent the things we mean when we say “me” or “I”; they are not the stuff of the ego but rather the stuff that's been cast away in order to make the ego what it is. They don't disappear in the making of the self. They haunt the ego through phenomena like fantasies and dreams. Our fantasies are processed and coded images, narratives, and imagined or remembered scenarios that the ego can more safely manage and perhaps even accept as its own.

Where do the beasts of the unconscious come from, and how do they make their way into our fantasies? Across many theoretical perspectives, there is a shared sense that “memory traces” related to difficult, unprocessed childhood experiences populate the unconscious mind (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968:17). Infants and young children confront an oftenfrightening world, encountering desires they don't know how to express, feelings they don't know how to regulate, events they cannot control, and scenes they can't make sense of. Caretakers help children to navigate this rough terrain, but no matter how good a job they do, every child will experience some unbearable feelings, some traumas. Often, these have to do with scary experiences or sexual desires—with wants, wishes, questions, beliefs, or actions that cannot be verbalized for fear of their consequences or because they bring too much shame and confusion. Depending on the resources a child has to draw on, on the dynamics of the child-caregiver relationship, and on many other factors, different experiences can feel overwhelming and unmanageable. Fantasies arise from an amalgamation of our lingering fears and traumas, of our feelings in response to them, and of the impressions and beliefs we use to make sense of and defuse them (cf. Rangell 1988; Stoller 1979). This amalgamation becomes recognizable as fantasy only when its components are psychically processed and narrativized, coded and condensed in often-opaque symbols (Stoller 1979).

While trauma figures large in the development of fantasies, fantasizing itself can be a healthy, adaptive phenomenon. Often, fantasizing is a learned strategy that works to mitigate trauma. Fantasies can function like scripts that help children to make sense of and exert some control over their experiences. We can draw on our fantasies (automatically, deliberately, or unaware) to facilitate our daily functioning or to escape from life's trials and tribulations. Fantasies can be stories we tell ourselves or scenes that we conjure to get through life and manage our relationships. According to Peter Dally²⁴ (1975:3), fantasies gradually “evolve in the child's inner world, through his experiences, particularly the way his needs are met and the way he reacts to his frustrations, anger and anxieties, and the nature of his relationships with people close to him.” In the course of everyday life, a child's feelings will give rise to different understandings or accounts of what is happening, different eff orts at processing and managing life experiences and the emotions associated with them. As Julia Segal (1985:27) has explained, a child's tacit ways of perceiving, experiencing, and understanding the world do not go away as the child gets older and acquires more rational hypotheses and more conscious feelings about life, self, others, and the world. Our earliest impressions live on as fantasies that shape our developing perceptions, emotions, and ideas in ways we aren't often aware of. Thus, there is a certain consistency in our reactions to phenomena that remind us, consciously or not, of earlier experiences. Our largely unconscious fantasy world ensures that how we interpret and cope with new experiences will have everything to do with what came before and how we learned to understand and grapple with it.

Fantasies can also work like scripts or scenarios of vindication in the aftermath of painful experiences (Biven 1997; Dally 1975; Kahr 2008; Stoller 1979). Feelings of powerlessness and bodily shame are especially important in the development of omnipotent control fantasies and sadistic or masochistic fantasies (Almond 1997; Kahr 2008). In one of the most extensive international studies of sexual fantasizing, Brett Kahr (2008) found that early childhood experiences of bodily shame and abuse were closely correlated with adult fantasies of infl icting and/or receiving humiliating and degrading treatment. Often, reports of sexual trauma in youth translated with eerie precision into the core sexual fantasy scenarios reported by Kahr's patients. Substitutions and symbols abound in fantasies, so their links to traumatic events are often difficult to untangle. But those links can become clearer and more apparent during psychotherapy. Kahr concludes that sexual fantasizing is a vehicle through which trauma lives on and is processed in our lives.

For most people, sexual fantasizing is only one manifestation of the “continuous stream of fantasy thinking” that is intrinsic to mental life and “exerts an unending infl uence on how reality is perceived and responded to” (Arlow 1969:29). Fantasizing, whatever forms it takes, can be an adaptive coping mechanism or it can be a maladaptive defense strategy that signals a retreat from real relationships and responsibilities. Often, it's a little of both. Analysts tend to agree that extreme frequent or compulsive fantasies and extremely masochistic or sadistic fantasies will not arise among happy children who have their needs met; only intense and ongoing frustration prompts the elaboration of an all-encompassing fantasy life (Dally 1975).

Given the links between fantasy and personal history, it is not surprising that an individual's fantasies are often recurring, repetitive, or very similar in content over the years. Ethel Person (1995) explains that many fantasies, especially sexual ones, have core content that doesn't seem to shift much in the course of a lifetime. Although the incidentals may change, the “basic theme” tends to persist: “All through life we replay and revise a core group of fantasies, each organized around one of a relatively small number of infantile and childhood wishes” (Person 1995:73). Yet fantasies are also responsive to daily reality and shift in accord with our perceptions and needs, “evolving over time in response to changing circumstances in the external world” (Person 1995:69). Eric Klinger (1971:354) found that “[u]nsettling events—moments of intense joy, anguish, conflict, or loss… seem to influence the thematic content of subsequent fantasy.” Many stimuli, like verbal suggestions, can shape what, when, and how we fantasize (Klinger 1971).

Scholars of fantasy agree that it serves a “psychological or emotional purpose” in our lives (Person 1995:32). Indeed, fantasies can play many roles—they can help us get through the day, plan for the future, feel better about ourselves, escape boredom, achieve arousal and pleasure, forget our responsibilities, set aside the needs of others or the demands of life, experience imagined revenge, conjure a sense of power or control, and imagine utopian or dystopian futures. Ethel Person (1995:38) believes that our practices of fantasizing “coalesce ultimately around wish-fulfillment, emotional regulation, assurance of safety, containment of unpleasant emotions, working through of trauma, crystallization of perception, or aspirations for the future. The goal of fantasy is to achieve an overall change in state—a change in how one feels.”

Person's conceptualization of fantasy has its roots in Freud's thought. Freud believed that every fantasy contains a partly present, but partly hidden wish—something at the tip of our awareness but with roots in the unconscious. This wish relates to some object or experience that we don't or can't have—like forbidden sex, the love of another person, revenge, or power. The “reality principle” declares that the desired experience or scenario is out of reach—either because it is unavailable or because to attain it would entail moral, emotional, or physical costs that are too high (for the individual or for society). Fantasizing, for Freud, is a way to vicariously attain otherwise unattainable pleasures. Usually, to have the forbidden, proscribed, or simply absent experience would be very gratifying to the ego—so much so that just fantasizing about it can be pleasurable in itself. The desired experience is something we want, even if admitting our need for it and understanding where that need comes from are more than the ego can bear. An iceberg is a common metaphor for dreams and fantasies: We see the tip that juts out from the sea, but the rest—the bulk—remains hidden below, out of sight and out of mind.

Because fantasies blend conscious and unconscious wishes, Freud didn't speak of “conscious fantasies” and “unconscious fantasies” as if they were separate things (cf. Laplanche and Pontalis 1968). There are, however, certain aspects of our fantasies that we have access to and certain aspects that we don't. There may be some fantasies that we are mostly unaware of because they refl ect wishes that are too frightening or too threatening to acknowledge at all: “Much of fantasy remains buried in the unconscious. We know it is there because we see its traces in our daydreams, our night dreams, our symptoms, and our neuroses. But we are unable to invoke the underlying fantasy itself—the ‘ur’ fantasy” (Person 1995:19). The fact of differential access to (and awareness of) our fantasies has led some scholars to draw a conceptual distinction between what is conscious—often labeled “fantasy” proper—and what is unconscious—labeled “phantasy” (e.g., Cartwright 2002:49). The scenes that run across our minds are our “fantasies,” but much of their meaning lies in the realm of “phantasy.” Many “phantasies”—buried narratives, unacknowledged impressions, stories we tell ourselves without knowing we do so—rarely manifest as “fantasy” proper.²⁵

Whether conscious or not, fantasizing remains closely linked to desire. Some psychoanalysts, such as Laplanche and Pontalis (1968), believe that the very essence of desire lies in fantasy. In an essay exploring the origins of sexual desire, Laplanche and Pontalis argued that fantasy and desire are coproduced in a cauldron of infantile distress: Infants do not always have the comfort they need or want; in particular, an infant may want the mother or breast when she/it are not present. But the infant experiences something more than basic need; s/he desires not just the breast itself, but rather the total gratifying experience associated with its presence. In practice, the absence of longed-for comfort generates a kind of psychic “representation”—a fantasy—in its place. This fantasy does not simply represent the lost object; it is instead a whole psychic scenario—a full, imagined scene that can generate some pleasure and comfort even in the absence of the object itself. The fantasy does not give the infant the same experience as he or she has when the lost object is actually present (e.g., when the breast is available); fantasy has a psychic life and a satisfying power of its own. Thus, desire calls for a whole fantasized experience, not just a real-world “thing” that fulfills a need. For Laplanche and Pontalis (1968), fantasy exists only because there is “a mythical moment of disjunction between the pacification of need… and the fulfillment of desire” (24). Fantasy arises in the gap between “real experience and its hallucinatory revival” (15).

Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek (1997) shares Laplanche and Pontalis's perspective on the importance of fantasy in the genesis of desire. For him, fantasy is not simply a refl ection or realization of existing desires; fantasy helps to create desire and shows us how and what to desire: “[F]antasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire’'” (1997:7). Zizek believes that fantasy “provides a ‘schema’ according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire, filling in empty places opened up by the formal symbolic structure” of the fantasy (7). In other words, for something or someone to arouse us, it needs to occupy a place in our already-present and highly structured fantasy scenarios. Zizek's theory finds support in the widely documented centrality of fantasy to sexual arousal—even during actual sex with another person (Bader 2002; Crepault and Couture 1980; Leitenberg and Henning 1995; Rangell 1988; Wilson 1978). Explaining the important function of fantasy in desire, Zizek (1997) writes: “[F]antasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me” (7; italics in original).

It is crucial to remember that, within this schema, fantasy isn't just a psychic representation of a desired object. Fantasy is the setting of a mental scene in which desire and its fulfillment are possible (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968). Fantasy is the construction of a psychic milieu in which the subject is experientially present or invested. If the wish fulfilled by fantasy were just a wish for an absent thing or person, then the fantasy alone wouldn't be gratifying. Fantasy, after all, doesn't make what is physically absent present; instead, it allows us to experience a mental scenario that is often gratifying in itself.

It follows that fantasy doesn't always translate into a desire to have some particular “thing” or to do some particular “thing” outside of the realm of fantasy. For instance, if a certain sex scene crosses our mind again and again, we may or may not be sure who we are within that fantasy (or if we're in the fantasized sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Just Fantasy”: Rethinking the Pornographic, the Fantastic, and the Real
• 2 Golden-Age Assaults: Heat and Hostility in 1970s Pornography
• 3 Romance and Rebellion: The Two Faces of 1980s Pornography
• 4 Expressive Bodies, Intense Encounters: Realism in 1990s Pornography
• 5 Banal Brutality: In Search of Extremes in 2000s Pornography
• 6 Sex, Gender, and Power: Aesthetics of Arousal in Contemporary Pornography
• 7 Body and Soul: Pleasure, Pain, and Self-Revelation in Today's Hardcore
• Afterword: Pornography, Feminism, and Tomorrow's Sexual Politics
• Appendix A: List of Pornographic Films Viewed for This Project
• Appendix B: Methodology and Methodological Limitations
• Appendix C: Defining Violence (or Not)
• Appendix D: A Closer Look at 1990s Pornography
• Appendix E: Distinguishing Sadism and BDSM
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index