Pornography as the next Tobacco
As a former student of Philosophy, I found this summary on the NYtimes website interesting reading over breakfast. While pornography and tobacco aren’t really breakfast table conversation material, the comparison between the two struck me. Mary Eberstadt, of the Hoover Institution, compares the two in a fascinating piece about what she calls “reversal in moralizing”.
But the article got me thinking in a larger sense about photography, film and pop culture. Eberstadt states that pornography is as ubiquitous and unremarkable in public as tobacco once was. And while she’s really talking about Internet pornography, artists like Jock Sturges have even been accused of being mere pornographers. While Sturges is a whole new can of worms, it’s obvious that porn is so prevalent I’d say that it’s even become a pastiche of sorts. Consider the “foodporn” work of Jing Quek or some of the work of Terry Richardson both of which have adapted the style (and in Terry’s case, often times the subject matter) of pornography into their work.
According to Eberstadt, it is quite possible that one day we’d find that pornography would slowly be marginalized and pushed to the fringe in much the same way that smoking has after the Surgeon General’s 1964 “Report on Smoking and Health”. For that to happen, Eberstadt says, the “consensus about the harmlessness of Internet pornography” would have to erode.
As an undergraduate, I studied with professor Rae Langton (now of MIT) at the University of Edinburgh, who has written a very powerful book about how pornography not only subordinates, but silences women. The work is based in part on the theories of John Langshaw Austin, who theorized that speech is more than just an utterance of words; speech is a type of action. I was so drawn to this unique approach that I wrote my thesis on the subject.
If Langton’s work has set the stage and provided the philosophical pretext for an argument that could erode the consensus of pornography’s harmlessness, then is it conceivable that one day pornography would recede back to the fringe? Does it follow that porn-as-art-as-pop-culture would then also disappear from the mainstream? Given its prevalence, it’s hard to imagine, but certainly not altogether impossible.
Hmmm. Thinking about this. More later.