Ethics of Extreme Porn: Are some kinds of sex intrinsically degrading, even if they’re consensual?”
In the back of the book “Consensual Violence: Sex, sports and the politics of injury” by Jill D. Weinberg I found an online newspaper resource called The Atlantic and their published article “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults? A defense of consent as a lodestar of sexual morality.” The article discusses the ethos of consent in the practice of sexual bondage and discipline. The author seems to support the act of consent even in morally debasing acts of sexual pleasure. But what many people may not realize that what plays into these consensual depraved sexual acts is almost always a person’s personal history with abuse, and it most certainly plays into acts that are not consensual like rape and sexual assault. What is acted out in the bedroom in sex-play has been shaped by our early childhood experiences with the primal scene and one’s creative primal scene phantasies in response to a traumatic event. Conor Friedersdorf suggests reading the n + 1 magazines article “What Do You Desire?” which recounts a woman’s experience when a group of San Franciscans crowded into a basement to watch and participate as a diminutive female porn actress who has consented very specifically to being bound with rope, gagged, slapped, mildly electrocuted, and sexually penetrated in almost every way. Although this woman was a paid actress in a porn shoot, many who practice BDSM are victims of sexual and physical abuse. In the mindset of sexual freedom the article touts “You can have whatever you desire, even if you choose hell, then we will call it good, because it is “freely chosen,” and brings you pleasure.” The result is the result of chaos and nihilism and when the only way to transcendence is believed to be through the indulgence of one’s sexual desires freely. In a world of human beings whose history details for us period irruptions of violence and excessive abuses of humanity, one must marvel that history’s most free, wealthy people “use their liberty to degrade each other and to choose to be degraded.” Consent isn’t enough to guarantee that sexual behavior is moral. Yet we live in a world that evaluates a person behavior by looking at their accumulated wealth, their credit score, their bank accounts, how timely they pay their bills and taxes, along with security background checks, and none of those things provide any indication that the person actually possesses an ounce of morality. In an excerpt from Weinberg’s book she writes:
“A second example reveals that courts set up a comparison between BDSM and sports to routinely vitiate a person's consent on the basis of incapacity. In People v. Samuels (1967), the defendant filmed and starred in a pornographic movie where he unclothed, gagged, whipped, and lashed another man with a riding crop. During the trial, the defendant testified that the man fully consented to starring in and participating in the activities featured on the film. Although the prosecution never located the other man to testify, the court dismissed the possibility that the victim had the capacity to consent to this behavior: “It is a matter of common knowledge that a normal person in full possession of his or her mental faculties does not freely and seriously consent to the use upon his or her self of force likely to produce great bodily harm. Those persons that do freely consent to such force and bodily injury no doubt require the enforcement of the very [criminal] laws that were enacted to protect them and other humans.” Ultimately, the court concluded that “consent of the victim is not generally a defense to assault or battery, except in a situation involving ordinary physical contact or blows incident to sports such as football, boxing or wrestling (Weinberg, 2016, p. 10).”
Primal scene phantasies already have encoded in them the actions that make up the male-sexual and female-sexual stereotypes. Actions emanating out of this scene of early childhood may go on to provide the child sexual pleasure in actions that dehumanize and debase other objects. We see the primal scene played out in acts of war. It is a theatre stage set in the interest of “a theatre of cruelty” where power is derived from the belief that mastery is synonymous with dominance and that weakness is synonymous with submission and the female fate is beneath the power dominant phallic aggression, regardless of biological gender. It further complicates and exploits the gender politic by placing “submissives” in subservient positions and denying them power. It is a theatre stage not set inequality, but rather a representation of a disproportionate power dynamic. With regard to the law, the making of consent is not unfettered but not vested with one source; it is a dialectic between ordinary people and the law, the social reality that orders relationships within a prescribed legal category. The law is not so much concerned with a person freely given consent, as much as it is with the social and moral value of the activity to which she is consenting. The courts find the violence employed in acts of BDSM a vitiation of what the meaning of love is supposed to inscribe. That is, the violence of BDSM is seen as a depraved and corrupt invalidation of what love is supposed to entail. It is for this reason, even when consent is freely given, it will not be recognized by the courts.
I find it interesting that “mild electrocution” was used in the making of the pornography film against the diminutive female porn star and this makes me wonder about BDSM, in the theatre of cruelty, and the use of electromagnetic frequency stimulation on the bodies of targeted individuals suffering from electronic assaults.
The question remains. “Are some kinds of sex degrading or immoral even if they’re consensual?” What do you think?
Sources:
Friedersdorf, Conor. (2013). “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults? A defense of consent as a lodestar of sexual morality. The Atlantic. Published online May 16, 2013. Retrieved online February 7, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/the-ethics-of-extreme-porn-is-some-sex-wrong-even-among-consenting-adults/275898/
Witt, Emily. (2013) “What Do You Desire?” n + 1 Magazine. Issue 16: Double Bind. Published Spring 2013. Retrieved online February 7, 2021. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-16/essays/what-do-you-desire/
