Archive for the 'Porn and Masculinity Series' Category

Beyond heat and pleasure to joy and light: the third post on Robert Jensen, porn, and sexual ethics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 5, 2007
in Books, Porn and Masculinity Series, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 17 Comments

This is part three of my series responding to Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Part One is here, Part Two is here.

At the end of this short, powerful book, Jensen muses about sexual ethics. I was struck by what he has to say about heat, light, and pleasure:

Another common way people talk about sex, especially in the past decade, is in terms of heat: She’s hot, he’s a hottie; we had hot sex. In the world of hot, it’s natural to focus on friction, which is what produces heat. Sex becomes bump-and-grind,; the friction produces the heat, and the heat makes the sex good.

But we should take note of a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding; we say that such an engagement produces “more heat than light.”… So what if our sexual activity — our embodied connections –could be less about heat and more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if such touch were about finding a way to create light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better? If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path.

I read that and leaped to my feet, crying “Yes!” At its best, I am convinced sex not only brings pleasure but helps to transform the people who are participating in it. I am a better teacher, better friend, and better mentor because of the light that my wife and I reveal when we have sex with each other. After three divorces and countless short-term relationships, I understand what Jensen is talking about here, because my wife and I are living it out. Make no mistake, I don’t think marriage is the only arena in which this kind of light can be created. But a relationship in which one or both parties is expending sexual energy on pornography and fantasy is one in which there is very little chance of light indeed.
Continue reading ‘Beyond heat and pleasure to joy and light: the third post on Robert Jensen, porn, and sexual ethics’

Shame and self-hatred, guilt and self-esteem: part two of the series on Robert Jensen, porn, and masculinity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 3, 2007
in Books, Men and Masculinity, Porn, Porn and Masculinity Series and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 34 Comments

This is part two of a three-part response to Robert Jensens’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Part One appeared last Friday, I’m aimin’ to have Part Three up on Wednesday of this week.

Courtney Martin wrote last week that Jensen’s prose “reeks of self-hate and desperation.” Blogger “Sweating Through Fog” writes that “Jensen uses porn to indulge his hatred for masculinity.” In this second part of the series, I’d like to take up this issue of male self-loathing (or, to put it another way, the loathing of one’s own maleness.) Far from hating himself, or men, Jensen is calling men to love themselves, their fellow men, and women enough to transform. His argument hinges on understanding the distinction between shame and guilt, a distinction that may have eluded some of those who read (or have decided to condemn without reading) the book.

The charge of “self-loathing” is one of three classic slurs used against feminist men. Any man who is committed to feminism publicly will regularly encounter at least one (and likely more) of the following stereotypes:

1. All feminist men are gay, and thus not “real men”.

2. All feminist men are “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, using an outer veneer of egalitarianism in order to get women into bed.

3. All feminist men are filled with self-loathing; secretly believing that women are the superior sex, they project their own self-hatred onto other men.

From the time I began studying feminism and doing pro-feminist men’s work, I ran into all three of these charges on a regular basis. The men’s rights advocates (MRAs) who periodically comment here tend to use all three, with a few not-very-bright ones insisting that all three are true simultaneously. So when Robert Jensen makes a compelling, at times radical case against pornography — accompanied by a searing and entirely accurate indictment of contemporary American masculinity — it’s little wonder that even well-meaning folks bring out the “he must really hate himself, or at least hate his maleness” card. Continue reading ‘Shame and self-hatred, guilt and self-esteem: part two of the series on Robert Jensen, porn, and masculinity’

Part one of a series on “Getting Off”: masculinity, pornography, and the truth of what we don’t want to face

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 30, 2007
in Men and Masculinity, Porn, Porn and Masculinity Series, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 47 Comments

This will be the first (long) part of a three-part post. Parts two and three to come next week.

I started reading Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity over the Thanksgiving holiday, and finished the relatively short book earlier this week. As I said in my post immediately below this one, it has had a deep and profound impact upon me.

In this first post, I’ll look at the case Jensen makes against porn, particularly the arguments he marshalls against the idea that porn isn’t a “big deal” and that “normal people” can use it without negative consequences for themselves, their relationships, and society as a whole. In the second post, I’ll respond to the charge against Jensen — reiterated by Courtney Martin – that his prose “reeks of self-hate.” Self-loathing is a common slur tossed at pro-feminist men, and deserves a response all of its own. In the third post, I’ll look at Jensen’s proposals about masculinity and sexuality, particularly his remarkable suggestion that we ground our sexual ethics not merely in pleasure, but in joy and in light.

Robert Jensen is one of a small group (others include Jackson Katz, Michael Flood, and Michael Kimmel) who are the dedicated public faces of the pro-feminist men’s movement. Jensen, a professor of journalism at Texas, wrote the marvelous Heart of Whiteness, about which I also ought to blog someday. Getting Off sees Jensen take an enormously brave step. Balancing thoughtful analysis with deep candor, he makes the most powerful case against pornography that I’ve read since the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, a book now more than 25 years old. And yes, Getting Off is dedicated to (among others) Dworkin herself.

Jensen starts by reminding us of what we already know: we live in a porn-saturated culture. Technological innovation has made the furtive peeps at father’s Playboy an unknown experience for most young people today. Jensen, born in 1958, describes his own adolescent fascination with pornographic magazines and the lengths to which he and his buddies would go to acquire porn. My own experience with porn was similar; I “discovered” it in 1979, when I was twelve. The porn that so indelibly marked (and marred) my nascent sexuality came in print with magazines like “Club International” and “Penthouse.” What’s available today online –even for free — is infinitely more vivid, infinitely more hardcore, and infinitely more interactive than it was in my youth or in Jensen’s.

We know all this of course. What we don’t know — or, as Jensen points out, what we don’t want to know — is how truly ugly pornography is. For a host of reasons ranging from denial to civil libertarianism to sheer horny curiosity, a great many voices across the spectrum are unwilling to name porn as one of the most corrosive influences on our culture and on our humanity. Continue reading ‘Part one of a series on “Getting Off”: masculinity, pornography, and the truth of what we don’t want to face’