Eric Raymond is a tit man.
Tuesday June 18, 2002
Oh, I’ve been putting this one off. I mean, I first read it a couple of days after it was first posted, since I’m not a regular reader of Raymond’s blog; but Lisala pointed me to it, Vinnie mentioned it in correspondence, the irreplaceable Daze Reader logged it, it hit the lower levels of Daypop—an A-list blog entry, it was. Still—in the soundbite-eat-soundbite world of blogging, you can easily get this idea there’s a use-by stamp on every blog entry—get your licks in now, people, or it’s so yesterday. (For God’s sake, he’s already posted the follow-up entry!) —Of course, one of the beauties of the web is that, barring link rot intentional or otherwise, whatever you put up there is going to stick around for a long, long time. And soundbites, of course, are precisely the sort of crappy journalism we bloggers are supposed to be reacting against, with our elevator pitches for our network of backscratching links to links about links. (I think I read that in Wired. Or maybe it was the New York Times.) And anyway, I’m off in my own little backwater, here. Who cares how out of date I am? (Certainly not me.)
So it wasn’t that.
And yes, maybe some of the inertia that’s laden me lately what with one thing and another has had something to do with not sitting down and doing the grunt work necessary to put together a cogent and entertaining (if, as ever, long-winded) response.
But that’s not all of it.
I mean, Eric Raymond’s a smart guy. I do not doubt his intelligence; I do not doubt his enthusiasm; I do not doubt his basic decency. He’s said some smart stuff that’s made me think, that’s affected my politics, that I’ve recommended to others, here, read this, it’s good. (Mostly what I’m talking about is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” but that’s one helluva mouthful, so.) But when you set aside software and hacking and privacy concerns and the consequences of intellectual property, you then have to pick over rants about arming all passengers on airplanes and how “pederasty has never been a marked or unusual behavior among homosexuals.” One is left with the impression of an intelligent, enthusiastic, basically decent but almost touchingly naïve man rushing headlong down the most jack-assed of rabbit holes with the supreme confidence of logic gone horribly wrong; in short: a moron.
(Watch yourself! I speak advisedly, judiciously, carefully, and furthermore, I’m citing Jacopo Belbo’s taxonomy from Foucault’s Pendulum, in which a moron is described as “the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark.” What else can you say about someone who misses the shockingly dangerous syllogistic error in the statement, “To the extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze”? Which pretty much waterlines a hulk already listing hard over from unsupportable generalizations, stone cold bias masquerading as objectivism, and outright fallacies presented as truth.) (Of course, full disclosure demands I point out I’m a fool by said taxonomy: “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses.” See? I wanted to talk about Eric Raymond’s idea of bad porn, and look where the hell I’ve ended up.)
So.
Eric Raymond’s idea of bad porn.
The basic problem with this essay—which has been lauded by most who’ve linked it as cogent, well-written, thought-provoking, and which for God’s sake you should go read if you haven’t already before you get too much farther in what I’ve got to say about it—is that it starts with the premise, “I’ve found by experience that most of the vast amounts of pornography available on the Internet leave me feeling more repelled than aroused,” then goes on to query, “How could these pictures arouse anyone who was actually paying attention to them?” and from this concludes, “I am forced to the unhappy conclusion that plausibility is exactly what most porn consumers don’t want. That somehow they feel better when their fantasies are safely distant from reality. All the possible reasons I can imagine for this are very sad.” —He starts with a specific statement concerning his specific tastes: “I don’t like a lot of porn out there today,” and from this QEDs a startling generalization: “There is something very wrong with porn today.” (If you will permit me to paraphrase impishly.)
It might prove useful to trace his steps and see how he ended up down this particular rabbit hole.
The essay’s linch-pin is the experiment Raymond conducts, of which he himself says: “Now, this was hardly a controlled experiment. And it’s just me.” (One might go on to point out that randomly sampling the freebie pages linked off Persian Kitty is hardly a comprehensive survey of the freebie porn galleries out there for the browsing—much, much less what Raymond goes on to pretend it to be: an in any way useful representation of the porn that is subscribed to or purchased, as opposed to randomly browsed, but I get ahead of myself.) —Having randomly sampled “pictures of single unclad women,” (“to control some obvious variables”), Raymond then used “my own hypothalamus as a calibration instrument” to sort the images on a four-point scale.
So far, so good. We’ve basically got a rather entertaining method of documenting one person’s tastes in porn. Some samples from each category, with notes as to how and why each image triggered whichever reaction it triggered, and we’d have had a well-thought-out and cogent little essay.
But. Raymond goes on to round two:
After the first grading pass, I re-sorted the images in an attempt to compensate for the presence of particular physical features that I know are powerful sexual releasers for me (red hair is an example). I did this because, to the extent possible, I wanted to try to separate my autonomic arousal reaction to the images from my esthetic and psychological reaction. So I downgraded images in which the women had obvious, powerful releaser traits for me.
Slam on the brakes, Mabel.
To pretend one is capable of separating one’s “autonomic arousal reaction” from one’s “esthetic and psychological reaction” is, at best, shameless hubris. At the very least, one should seek another pair of eyes in looking over one’s sorting job, or in the course of sorting out all the women with red hair, one might well miss the fact that the “excellent” shots one has objectively selected are overwhelmingly of women presenting their (yes, impressive) tits to the camera with a winningly winsome smile—a startlingly narrow subset of randomly sampled, single unclad women, that, if truly not due to autonomic arousal reaction, says some telling things about esthetics and psychology. (Oh, please. I’m not making fun of Raymond for being a tit man. I’m just as amused as anyone ever is at fish who can’t see the water in which they swim. —Even as I continue trying to sound the depths of the water around me; I know it’s here, somewhere…)
Why on earth would one want to separate one’s autonomic arousal reactions from one’s æsthetic and psychological responses? “Good” porn—by which (I suppose I should define my terms) I mean art that plays skillfully upon the sexual desires of its audience—is practically defined by how well it deals with autonomic responses: summoning them forth, playing on them ironically, working in spite of repulsing them, calling forth through art or accident the responses of people whose desires are decidedly not those of the creator or performer. To say nothing of how well it deals with the æsthetics and psychology underlying (and slathered over) these responses, and the reasons why these responses should have come about—and the ways these responses defy reason.
But: and more to the point: if one is going to separate out autonomic arousal reactions, one might want to look to such prominent, reasonably generalized secondary sexual characteristics as, well, tits, and not separate out “red hair,” which is a far more specific trigger, and thus much more necessarily a function of æsthetics and psychology…
So we’ve got a misstep, though far from a crippling one; it’s a tricky misstep, all too common to folks who suppose desire is something easily broken up into objectively verifiable, easily quantified granules—rather than terrifically subjective, complexly interacting feedback loops. The Engineer’s Fault, as opposed to the Bricoleur’s. But the essay isn’t crippled yet. So long as the specific isn’t confused with the general, we’re okay.
Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Raymond sets out to do.
Having come up with this randomized assortment of “good porn,” Raymond then tries to puzzle out why so much porn out there isn’t good. But—despite disavowals of puritanism and moral objections—the meaning of “good” has shifted alarmingly, from “pictures of single unclad women randomly selected from Persian Kitty which I like” to:
Good porn, by contrast, conveys a sense of plausibility. You believe the women in it exist. You can imagine meeting them. You can imagine liking one of them, having her like you, and the two of you sliding off somewhere for a mutually happy fuck. Being aroused by such a picture makes emotional sense; you don’t have to either fight or ignore any sense that the subject is an inaccessible fantasy.
What, then, of someone who likes snuff porn? Who likes incest porn? Who likes amputee porn? Who likes the idea of sex on a beach even though they’d never move out of Montana? Who likes rape fantasies? (Either way.) Who likes homoeroticism in the opposite sex? Who likes porn that features high-heeled shoes and pearl necklaces and teased blond hair and DD tits—or tool belts, or showers (golden or Roman), or a glass-bottomed boat, or the charcoal smears on the cheeks of football players, or jockstraps, or black men in jockstraps, or burqas, or this celebrity or that, or the Czech model over yonder, or priests—
Or is none of that “good”? —Well, perhaps not to Raymond. But the rest of us?
Raymond is right to note that porn consists of various interlocking codes of fetishes—the creator’s own, those perceived in the audience(s) to which the creator wishes to pander—but he’s wrong to assume he can somehow unpack some objective ur-porn, some “good” porn, by dismissing those of his fetishes he is aware of; he is further wrong to assume that this ur-porn is somehow a universal standard against which all porn, and all reactions to porn, can (or must) be measured. The ur-porn he’s derived is still very much defined by his fetishes—which are precisely those things that help drive and determine and are themselves defined by our psychological, our æsthetic, our autonomic responses to porn—and it is thus individual, unique, specific; worthy of discussion and exploration and elaboration, yes, of course, but ill-fitting when applied as an ideal to anyone but himself.
To put it more bluntly: sex ain’t porn, and porn ain’t sex. Most people do not turn to porn as a substitute for sex; this is a myth. (Porn can be used as a mere trigger to provide sexual release when sex itself isn’t available; yes. This is the most colorless and mechanical of porn’s many and varied uses.) Porn is a fiction, a fantasy, is art; people turn to it for a heightened sense of reality, a distillation of a flavor teased out of a more mundane, quotidian experience—for far more than just a picture that makes “emotional sense.” Porn is frequently more effective because it is mannered, distanced, inaccessible; something dangerously unstable made that much safer to approach. We are all of us capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality; for every frat boy who dreams of picking up two girls to recreate that threesome from a Hustler video, there’s a dozen men and women who look at pictures of things they’d never dream of doing in real life, or having done, who read stories or think thoughts of things impossible to achieve in real life (due to reasons moral, practical, or æsthetic)—and all for far more reasons than just to pump some blood into spongy tissues and get those juices flowing. —For many, then, porn that is “plausible,” “believable,” that is easily translated into an experience we could have here and now, that is “accessible,” is, well, dull. Unexciting. Not arousing.
Bad, really. —Æsthetically, I hasten to add. Not morally.
Because that’s the most disappointing thing about Raymond’s essay: he confuses the specific with the general, the æsthetic with the moral, a random sampling from a limited assortment of freebie galleries for the breadth of available porn, and all of it to end up in a dreadfully familiar, unnecessarily moralistic, surprisingly anti-porn place for such an avowedly porn-friendly libertarian. —Because so much porn out there is bad, the overall audience must want bad porn. Because the overall audience wants bad porn, this says bad things about the reasons why they want bad porn. How sad and full of shame, the fate of the average consumer of porn…
We’ve already dealt with the problems in Raymond’s assumptions of what is good, and bad, and the conclusions he draws therefrom; we should also look, though, at his assumptions about art, market forces, the porn market in specific, and maybe thereby get some better idea as to why so much porn out there is bad. (Because, you know, it is. A lot of it. Æsthetically, most of it sucks. Gay or straight or lesbian or trannie or fetishized up the wazoo; breathless erotica or camped to the nines raunchy burlesque, words or pictures [still or moving]: most of it is crap.) —Don’t worry, though; this should be pretty quick.
His assumption that because so much porn is bad, therefore the market must want bad porn, is simplistic. It assumes that a comparable amount of effort, of resources—time, skill, artistry, luck, perseverence—must go into the crafting of a good piece as a bad. The average pornographer must be capable of making a rational choice between a good piece, or a bad piece, and choosing to make a bad piece due to market demand. The truth, of course, is that crafting a “good” piece of porn (by whatever standard) is as slippery and mysterious and capricious and downright hard as crafting a “good” piece of any other sort of art; crafting a bad piece of porn is as easy as swiping a handful of jpegs and some HTML. Five bucks for a domain name and you’re in business, bucko.
More to the point: assuming that the freebie attention-grabbing galleries on a links page—available on a whim, for free—have any connection with the porn one must expend some money or effort in acquiring (assuming, however well-received, that Persian Kitty is somehow an equivalent in intent to, say, Michelle7 or Three Pillows or Suicide Girls) is, well, a mistake. Yes, most of them are ads for pay galleries—but to judge their success by their rate of proliferation in a market whose basic production costs are rock bottom dirt cheap is to mistake the rabbit’s survival strategy of having lots and lots and lots of baby rabbits for some sort of economic superiority. —And to assume that people are clicking on these “bad” galleries and downloading these “bad” images solely in search of images that arouse is to forget the simple motivators of camp and curiosity and the freakshow humor we all of us all too often attach to sex and porn (it’s another of those defensive mechanisms: “My God! Would you look at that!”)—all too easily indulged when the galleries are free.
No, in an industry which is notoriously hard to get a bead on, where coherent, trustworthy data on audience trends and tastes and demographics aren’t just thin on the ground, they’re non-existent—well, this sort of broad overview is worse than useless; it merely reinforces whatever prejudices we may already have in place. —And anyway, the question itself that starts Raymond’s essay is maybe the wrong one to be asking: it shouldn’t be, “Why is so much porn out there bad,” but “What turns people on, and why?” That’s a much more rewarding question, and leads you to much more interesting places, places you didn’t expect to end up, places much more likely to spawn cogent, thought-provoking, entertaining essays that start to give us precisely that bead we lack.
I mean, “Why is porn bad?” Shit. Ockham’s Razor—especially to a hacker and an engineer who’s a science fiction fan—ought to suggest a much more likely answer...