culture critique – GV Loewen

An Ethicist Looks at Youth Pornography

An Ethicist Looks at Youth Pornography (a self-inflicted study)

“I thought I’d become entranced with myself. I got into it because I wanted to have fun and it’s my body, right? But instead of it being ‘hey, look at me’, it quickly became ‘hey, look at all the people looking at me.’ It was all about the numbers.” (19-year-old female university student).

“My only regret is that I started too young. I was twelve. I wouldn’t recommend it before say, 16, as my body is now no different than it was at 16. But at 12 I was so taken with myself and that I was in control, you know? And all these thousands of people following me. But ten years later, I look at those people and say, ‘Uh, excuse me? You’re following a naked 12-year-old. There’s something seriously wrong here.” (22-year-old female university graduate).

“Girls who are on the net want to be on the net. It’s that simple. Many do, most don’t. It’s like anything else you do, from vaping to playing volleyball. Most don’t, but some do, who cares? And yeah, you’re told about risks, but how many suicides have there actually been? I’ve read of three in the backstory news over the past twenty years. Three! Out of tens of thousands of girls per month, who knows, maybe way more. You’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning, speaking of risks.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).

Introduction:

When I consulted as an expert for the senate committee tasked with setting new government policy preventing access to violent pornography by minors, I was struck by the assumptions everyone in the conversation made about the topic itself. Eventually, Bill S-210, (age verification for online porn sites), was adopted by said body on April 18, 2023. Its coverage had, perhaps inevitably, generalized itself from restricting access to ‘violent’ pornography to all online pornographic sites. In good faith, I did not suspect the bill’s sponsors of any prior intent to widen the scope of the bill, and indeed, given that one could neither properly define ‘violence’ in sexual portrayals with any efficacy, and that even if one could, such (per)versions of intimacy would be mixed in with all other possible versions, given the scope of the sites in question themselves, any bill seeking to restrict access thereto for minors would, in the end, have to inure blanket coverage. I supported the bill as is, in practice.

But the process left many unanswered questions. Why did minors seek out pornography, even participate directly in making it? Why did adults seek to limit such access, even ban it outright? The usual arguments hailing from developmental psychology were, to a philosopher’s mind, verging on the vacuous. Psychology itself is the source of our knowledge of children’s sexuality. Children are sexual beings. The question must rather run along the lines of the sexualization of children for adults. And this is not a question for psychology at all, but instead, one for ethics. As the American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia using phrases such as ‘a prurient interest in children under 12’, by its own discursive and policy standards, the banning of youth access to pornography must, in turn, be argued as well along lines other than those from psychology. The argument I put forward to the committee is that, under Canadian law, persons under the age of 18 cannot have sex for money. This was the only point of consistency wherein an outright ban of access for those between ages 12 and 17 would make any ethical sense. Since pornography as an industry is not truly about sex but rather money, minors should not be able to participate in it.

But what of pornography itself? Between parent-pandering politicians, schools concerned about lawsuits, psychologists and counselors drumming up business for themselves, and NPO’s fulminating the latest moral panics, it was clear that neither clarity nor objectivity was to be found in the public sphere regarding issues surrounding youth and shared sexuality. In order to discover the reality of such a conflicted and ideologically laden scene, it was equally clear that one had to properly study it oneself. And for better or worse, I did.

The Study:

For the past three years I employed a battery of mixed qualitative methods, including unobtrusive, indirect participation, and interview as well as dialogue. Participants were solicited from their on-line profiles found either on porn servers or from my own academic networks, and the therapists were recruited from the Psychology Today listings. I was up-front uncomfortable about asking actual minors about their intimate doings and so I did not attempt to do so. This is a weakness in the study, as I had only past and indirect access to youth participation in pornography, through the voices of those who were youth in that past but had in the interim, before the study commenced, become legal adults. The epigraphs above are examples of hundreds of like interview out-takes. Some of the methods involved deception, including posing as a female youth online to attract groomers in hopes of disclosing the process by which illicit pornographers recruit their victims, and posing as a patient with a pornography addiction in order to access psychotherapists’ on-the-ground practices and methods of combatting this medically real health issue. As a veteran member of 4 university research ethics boards and a co-founder of two, I was well aware of both the pitfalls of engaging in deliberate deception during research as well as the ‘dangers to self’ involved in certain kinds of human subjects ethnography. Indeed, as an ethicist, it was often my role on such bodies to look for possible risks to researchers and over the years, I found many. This specific study presented a number of risks, since I was interacting virtually with both criminals and at-risk young adults. Perhaps ironically, perhaps fittingly, the vehicle of digital media lessened those risks for my vocation just as the informants claimed it did for theirs.

Such a study would not have passed any ethics board I sat on – not on my watch, at least – but since I am long outside of the institutional circle, itself mostly concerned with litigation against it and less so about the truth of things, as an independent scholar I remained uniquely qualified to engage in this kind of research, having both twenty years of social science fieldwork behind me, much of it in arenas of social deviance and other marginal communities such as UFO cults, American Civil War reenactors, and artists. I had as well authored the first detailed scientific study of a specific genre of sexuality, the BDSM theatre, which appeared variously in peer reviewed journals as well as in my monographs of 2006 and 2011B. Even so, this recent study was different than any other I have completed in a number of important ways: 1. I no longer was capable, nor felt it necessary, to include amongst the methods those of direct participation. 2. The atmosphere surrounding the topic at hand was muddied beyond any possible clarity by moralizing, anxiety, and fashionable politics, as well as a vague fear of technology in general; and 3. Given 2, it is unlikely anyone will pay the least bit of attention to the nonetheless interesting results thereof.

A Summary of the Responses:

All vectors requiring the suite of methods outlined above were ongoing simultaneously. It invoked, in the traditionalist view, a sense of that old-world ethnographic immersion, with the major exception that I had no novel ‘natural language’ to learn, as one would do, with pith helmet atop head and notebook in hand, ‘among the natives’. Nevertheless, I found the denizens of the pornographic scene to indeed be restless in their own, sometimes fetching, manner:

“I was like, ‘Okay, I know I’m hot’. All my friends adored me. I wanted to pay for my own college. So, I get on there and I’ve got thousands, then tens of thousands of views and so on. I felt like I was the hottest thing out there. It was very empowering. But then I checked out the competition and it was like, ‘Okay, yeah, she’s kinda hot too’, and ‘oh, uh, okay, she’s hot’, and ‘Hmm, damn, she really is hot!’ and on and on, right? And then the whole thing became kind of a spiteful, vindictive battle of who could generate the most followers and you know these were all the same people following everyone, because young guys, and huh, I guess old guys too, can’t just look at one pretty girl.” (19-year-old female university student).

The motivation for intimate expression and display was in some majority income related, especially for youth but also for young adults:

“My parents couldn’t afford college. I was the first person in my family to ever go, and the only reason I went was because I did my own internet porn. It was by far the easiest way to make money. No managers bitching you out, no guys harassing you at the workplace, no minimum wage and then getting home and taking three showers and still the fast-food grease smell is on you. Its shit, utter shit, anywhere else teens work, right? So as soon as I actually was a teenager, I got on there. I’d seen my older sister work fast-food and it killed her. Not me.” (21-year-old female college graduate).

The sense that making pornography, even illicitly, was a superior form of both self-expression and of employment, was a major theme in interview:

“Don’t talk to me about morality. Is it a ‘good’ thing to put on a micro-skirt and sashay your way around a restaurant, smiling and flirting and flaring your skirts and bending over surreptitiously just to generate bigger tips? Is that ‘moral’ behavior? No, you wanna look, you’re gonna pay. And the only way a young person can balance those books is by doing porn. I can’t say I love it, but its way better than anything else out there. So, save me the lecture on responsibility. I fucking told my mom to shut it, I’ve paid for college through it, and what do you know? She did.” (25-year-old female graduate student).

I was unable to access more than a handful of young males who were willing to speak of their online activities, legal or no, but those that did manifested an apparently sincere understanding for their female counterparts:

“I don’t know if you ever worked a shit-job in your life, no offense. But people don’t know just how badly girls are treated out there. Guys like me, almost all guys, think girls are just objects for their amusement and desire. I got so turned off by that. And then one day my girlfriend told me she was doing porn, take it or leave it. Well, if her, why not me? It only seemed fair, you dig? But only when I got into it did I gain empathy for women. There was no danger for me at least. I read that the audience for young guys is either gay men or middle-aged women! Makes me laugh because I’m not gay and I was a teenager at the time. Like, hey, my mom and her friends think I’m the shit! It was a huge joke, but the money was better than anything I could have made short of becoming an actual sex worker. But then I’d have to have actual sex with my ‘mom’, so, uh, no way!” (21-year-old male university student).

As in most professions, amateur pornography favors men, in this case mainly because the vast majority of workers are female, even though the audience for pornography of all genres is evenly split between the dominant genders. Even so, doing pornography was still found to be alienating for some in this study:

“With all the tech toys out there, I learned quickly that I could have much more intense pleasure than any man would be capable of giving me. Overnight, it was like, ‘well, who needs men?’. And many women I know feel that way. Like, in general. Virtual solo sex for money. Sounds perfect, you know? No obligations to anyone, no health risks like STDs, no chance of rape or whatever. And cost-free admiration. Who cares what they’re doing, right? Some people I know get off on others getting off on them. I guess they could be called exhibitionists. But all these labels do is make things clinical. It’s irrelevant. The only thing that matters in the end is the money, on the one side, and the lack of real community on the other.” (27-year-old female white-collar worker).

The anomie, or subjective alienation, expressed by some in interview was, however, not a universal sensitivity. Feelings of loneliness and usury developed only over time, and were associated strongly with older participants. Those younger adults who had been manufacturing and distributing illegal pornography for some years as youths shrugged off suggestions of any potential Weltschmerz in waiting:

“Do you really think I’m going to be doing this at age thirty? One, no one would watch. Two, I should have two degrees by then and some normal job. I might even be married, who knows? That’s the whole thing about people who worry about teens and sex. They don’t understand that it’s just a phase of life, like anything else. Old people don’t have sex, or not much of it. Young people do. It’s that simple. Do you jack yourself off and record it? ‘Hey girls, the famous philosopher is fucking himself on-line! A can’t miss, that one.’ No offense, no really, but you get it right? I mean, I appreciate you doing a study like this because like, no one knows what this shit is really about.” (19-year-old female high school graduate).

Very often, during any research process, participants themselves suggest promising lines of querying. So, I began to ask that seemingly simple question, and the responses were intriguingly critical:

“What is this all about? Well, for me, it’s about control. My parents tell me what do to 24/7 and after a certain age it’s like, ‘Well, go fuck yourselves’. Hah, and then, its well, I can fuck myself but in a good way, unlike what others try and do to me. Okay, so now I’m in college but I still live at home. There’s nothing illegal like them hitting me, but there are still rules. The economy forces young people to stay young for far too long. I get that. I can’t afford anything by myself. Even if and when I get a degree, is that really going to set me free? Making porn is an insurance policy; that’s what it’s all about.” (18-year-old female university student).

With more veteran producers, a semblance of a politics emerges:

“Okay, good question, if vague. For me, it’s about exercising some sort of agency in a world that cares nothing for me. What are my skills? I have a great body and lots of energy. Fine, what else? Do I sell my body and my face for next to nothing waiting tables, or do I sell it on-line for decent wages? You tell me. You didn’t have to make that choice, no offense. But anyone who moralizes at me and anyone else who hates what I do needs to look in the mirror. Are they jealous of my youth? Are they the same people who leer at my peers who do wait tables? Yeah, I’ve ‘converted’ a few of my friends. They’ve seen the light, hah! No more butt-pinches and slaps at the fast-food joint, no more stares and comments at the sit-down restaurant. You get the picture. Long live the internet!” (23-year-old female sex worker).

In spite of the consistent if not constant caveats generated by government agencies and NPOs alike regarding the risks to youth who involve themselves in pornography, whether as viewers or actual producers, when asked about such risks and their attendant campaigns, respondents were universally critical:

“The only time I was stalked was when I worked fast food. You get all kinds in places like that, and all the wrong kinds, whether its people with disabilities, criminals, unhappy husbands, INCELs, you name it. And you know, like, right away, ‘this guy is dangerous’. On-line there’s no contact. If there is any danger to it, well, two can play that game, right? You expose me I expose you. The police can track your IP and the rest of it. Don’t insult me or play with me on-line. You have no idea where I live or even who I am. Those few girls who were threatened with exposure, maybe one or two killed themselves, well, how did that even happen, right? I have no fear of ruined reputation because there’s a million girls out there who look basically just like me. Do I live in Lithuania? No, but she might. And when I was still in high school it was like, ‘okay, make my day asshole’.” (20-year-old female university student).

Not all research participants were as confident, nay, yet belligerent, as were some, but even the more cautious ones sneered at the nay-sayers:

“You have to be smart with it. Of course you do. I would not tell a young girl to try this. I started when I was 15 and I learned quickly what not to do. Never invite anyone into a chat. Never focus on one consumer at the expense of others. Never say you’re single. Never offend anyone, like by saying anything about their own sexual prowess or ego. Obviously, never mention where you live or what school you go to or your real name, I mean, a ten-year-old knows that part of it, not that she should be doing what I do, but really. The biggest thing is that you’re being paid to be someone’s fantasy object, and as long as it stays at that level, there’s no risk. Like, none at all.” (19-year-old sex female sex worker).

I asked producers what was going through their minds during actual performances, and correspondingly, reported further on, I asked therapists what transpired mentally during their respective interactions with those who did, or had, performed:

“When you’re live it’s all about the act. You’re getting pleasure and so are they. Nothing else should intrude upon this ‘duet’, if you will. It’s a total fantasy only in the sense that I would never be together for real with anyone who views me, and they know that. But they can dream, and when they do, I’m there for them, almost equally for real. The thing that pisses me off is now the 3D AI ‘girls’ are stealing my views and you know it’s not other teenagers making those. It’s some loser who has tech gear and skill and he’s making money from some of the same people I used to make money from. Pretty soon all the moralizers can just go home, with that going on. Who knows, maybe some of those religious fanatics are actually making the AI shit, trying to put real girls out of business!” (22-year-old college graduate).

I had not thought of that possibility, as ludicrous as it may sound on the face of it. Whoever is generating artificial sex objects however, is panning for the same guttural gold as are real persons; that much was clear. Another common response:

“Okay, so it’s a business like any other. There’s you and there’s the competition. So, you innovate, just like any good entrepreneur. As far as the AI stuff goes, well, I have a video where I slash myself on the back of my arm and it bleeds a little, no biggie. And I say, ‘No fucking sex doll or AI mock can do that, boys.’ And some people are turned on by that, and word gets around, right? I got good responses from that one, a lot of views. People said they really appreciate me ‘being real’, and that I’m ‘not a coward’. And though I’m not quite real in one sense, I do have guts. It takes guts to make porn, which is something the haters like to forget. You try it.” (20-year-old female university student).

The therapists and counselors involved in the study were not of one mind in their responses to being shown patterned interview out-takes with young adults. Many were shy of making any final judgment at all, which was consistent with their professional duty to act as resources rather than evaluators. The following was commonplace, whether I myself was feigning illness or no:

“We should never moralize about sex. It doesn’t help at all. Especially for young women, I feel they are driven to place themselves at risk because they are looking for some reassurance. Not only that they are beautiful, because they know that it’s no great turn of trick to be beautiful at their age, but much more so, a kind of validation that they have some social worth, that they have a place in society more generally. What kind of place is, of course, another matter entirely.” (middle-aged female psychotherapist).

A male professional counterpart added what turned out to be as well a well-travelled road:

“I’ve worked as a counselor for only two decades, so while I’m still young, I have increasing difficulty identifying with youth. You told me you had the same issue as a professor, when you were still teaching. It makes me raise my eyebrows, when a teenager tells me she’s making porn, but I don’t judge. That only makes what might be a bad situation worse. Instead, I ask such a person, ‘what’s in it for you?’. I get very similar responses as you have shown me from your study. The sum of such responses is, I dare say, quite convincing.” (middle-aged male psychologist).

Professional psychologists and counselors varied only upon their methods of guiding minors or others, and in turn, based this variance on whether or not the client in question actually wanted to get out of the business or did not. No clinician or counselor with whom I spoke, either as a health research colleague or as a ‘patient’, said that they had ever recommended to a porn producer that they stop, let alone suggesting that they were necessarily placing themselves at risk, contrasting mightily with the journalistic, political, and other grassroots voices regarding the topics at hand:

“I don’t want to ever say to a young person involved in porn that, ‘there’s no risks’, but we have to look at the stats. We know that 95% of violence and abuse against minors happens in the home and from family members or friends thereof. 95% of the other 5% happens in the schools or in other like contexts, as in, where there may be coaches, music teachers, ballet instructors, and the like. We know this, and we have known this for some time. But it is only very recently that stories of such abuse are appearing, and some very high-profile ones, like the Olympic gymnasts and what-have-you. And yet parents blithely drop their kids off at ballet or whatever, and those same kids, when older, with their same trained and disciplined figures, may be making porn, because they know they have the right type of looks for it. And only then do parents hit the roof. So, there’s a problem with the whole discourse surrounding risk in our society, and I for one am glad you’re doing this expository study on one of the core arenas of these misconceptions.” (middle-aged female clinician).

I have argued elsewhere that most organized activities for youth in our culture serve multiple, often conflicting purposes. Henry Giroux is the most sophisticated name in this part of critical discourse, but alas, I could not access him to comment upon this study. Yet psychologists themselves appeared aware that there was a studied hypocrisy afoot when it came to comparing activities such as sports and the arts with pornography. I then, in turn, threw that out in the direction of the pornographers themselves:

“Hah! Well, that really makes me laugh. I was in ballet for years. That’s exactly how I got this body and the confidence to strut my butt, right? But dance is like all the rest of it for us girls. The adults bark at you, touch you when and where they should not under the guise of ‘positioning’, some parents even still spank their kids if they’re younger. The dance teachers don’t dare but they tell on you, right? I got it up until I was 12. Now I spank myself for money and I’m in complete control of it, which I never was as a little kid. So yup, hypocrisy? That’s basically any older adult’s middle name as far as I’m concerned.” (19-year-old female university student).

There were many respondents who also did not see any serious difference between doing sports or dance and doing porn, given the apparel and physiognomic feats required for many athletic and performing arts venues:

“Yeah, well, the thing of it is, what I wear online and what I wore in dance or when I was in track at school; not much difference. And I’m still doing crazy things with my body either way, so no real difference there either. And the people who showed up to watch me play volleyball in high school weren’t all there to watch the game, if you know what I mean. Same with track, same with dance. The bottom line, excuse the expression, is that people want to look at young girls, the less clothes the better, and so we’ve got all kinds of ways people can do just that. And my parents never batted an eye at it. So, it’s all porn, at the end of the day. All of it.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).

When I asked how making porn itself, illicitly or no, compared with just viewing it, after explaining that I was consulting for the Senate committee, a number of responses shared the following themes:

“The viewers are losers, at least in one sense. But I’ve read other studies of porn usage. On the one hand, you have the stereotype, the INCEL guy who could never get a date, or that’s how those people think of themselves, anyways. I’ve always found that there’s someone for everyone out there, sad but true. But on the other, you have some married guy with a professional job and an attractive wife but they now have kids and he’s not getting enough. Women too, of course. So that audience isn’t losers at all, and so I have to perform with both in mind. But as far as the difference between making and just viewing it, producers have the bods and the guts, the consumers are just anyone, and they might be cowards too but I don’t really judge or care about that.” (23-year-old female sex worker).

The other category of respondent were the groomers, but since they were, by their own tacit admittance, criminals, and their process of recruiting for underage sex labor was shot through with both a cloying extortion and hortatory clichés that I felt even an eight-year-old would not fall for – though apparently, I remain naïve about such entrapment – I do not consider any of it worthy of reproduction here. Rather, I end the results section with a typical summary of responses of amateur and unaffiliated professional producers when asked to characterize the essence of the falderal surrounding their chosen workplace and their activities within:

“It’s not for everyone. But what is? Don’t tell me I can’t do it because you don’t like it. Or you pretend you don’t. Too fucking bad. Look, I’m 18. Everywhere I go people stare at me. Do I get paid for any of that? Do I get a guy, young or old, come up to me and give me a hundred bucks and say ‘Sorry, miss, I was leering at you. I know this doesn’t make up for it, but take it anyways and just know I’d never do anything more than just look’. Never. Never in a million years would that ever happen on the street. But hey, I discovered a wondrous land where it does happen! And in that land, that’s all guys do, is ‘just look’. You hear people yelling ‘keep it real’. No, reality is what sucks. Virtual reality is a godsend. I’ll be making porn until no one is willing to pay me for it. And every critic can just suck on that. Full stop.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).

The Analytic Upshot:

In every field study I have conducted as principal investigator, I have found that the commonplace sociological rubric regarding people defending their own values is true to life. The sentiments expressed by sex workers, of whatever age or style of performance, was no different. Even if their community is disparate, partly fictional, and connected only loosely, they still felt that they were a part of something greater than themselves as individuals. Many saw themselves as rebels with a noble cause, even as social critics. Policies which censored them or targeted them in other ways were disdained and mocked, the apparent hypocrisies of their political and parental vendors exposed. I was myself asked, on some occasions, about my role in such censorship, and I explained that, as an ethicist, I would like to see some formal accountability within the organizations benefitting from uploading their materials and profiting from them, as often as not without the original creator’s knowledge. But even this was a hedge, and I knew it. Better to state that the distinction between a shared everyday reality which is always public and must place the whole of itself before any specific part thereof, and the semi-private reality of the internet and like venues, needs to be preserved insofar as the former does not find itself too engrossed in the latter. For cultures too can become addicted.

The most important points raised by respondents in an ethical sense were those directed against the idea that pornography was somehow qualitatively different than other activities youth partook in, and that the conception and definition of risk within its scope was severely overblown. For myself, and from an analytic standpoint alone, there may be a sense that if young people in any society become too taken with themselves in one relatively narrow way – the perfect physical and sexual specimen – then their once-respective identities would be as narrowed. As an ethicist, I think this is the greatest danger at the level of personhood. At the level of character, I feel that there is a danger of a craven cowardice in virtual sexuality, precisely due to there not being a real other with whom one must confront, conflict with, reassure and rapproche, and most of all, try to love. Given that almost all respondents themselves appeared to understand these dual dangers when questioned about them, and put their lack of interest in their ethical themes down to simply not being part of the phase of life we generally refer to as youth – thereby implying that when they were more mature, such themes would then take on more weight in their lives – I could not in turn simply dismiss such a reply. We do not yet have the longitudinal data to document either way this implied transition.

In light and in lieu of this present absence, I will end this summary with a final quotation to these regards:

“No one does this forever. I’m certainly not planning on it. In ten years, I’ll be married and probably have at least one kid. I’ll look like everyone else you see; that is, not great! My husband will want to fuck me at his discretion, my kids will want me to feed them, drive them somewhere, help them with their homework, all that. Right now, ‘all that’ feels like a kind of death. So, what’s so wrong with living a little before you start to die?” (19-year-old female university student).

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Fifty Films

Fifty Films: a Covid-19 project

My wife, having more or less grown up without film, suggested that we watch a fair sample of films ‘everyone’ has seen but she had not. Only fifty, you say? Well, there are other things to do after all. I’m neither a film historian nor a film buff, so for what it’s worth…

Canonical:

All the President’s Men (1976): Not unlike a Ken Burns epic where there is much early detail and then it leaves you hanging at the end, Redford and Hoffman break the story of the decade and then exit stage left. Still a good lesson in power corrupts given our Trumpist times.

Rear Window (1954): Irascible James Stewart and the perennially perfect Grace Kelly almost let their imaginations run away with them. In spite of her timeless beauty, it is Kelly’s gaminesque exploits that win the day, lightly echoing the period’s male desire for the feminine to become oddly masculine.

Dirty Harry (1971): Cop flick on overdrive features the debut of Harry Callahan, master of cinema epigram. Now did Eastwood make six films in this character, or only five? Guess punk, do you feel lucky? To have seen them all, yes, I do.

Vertigo (1958): Dolly zooms aside, don’t cast your lead and then later complain that he’s ‘too old’ for the part to be believable. What about driving down the wrong side of the highway, or that a national historic site is open at all hours, including its bell tower? The movie’s plot mimics its action. Just climb up and fall off.

Citizen Kane (1941): For six decades the ‘best film ever made’ maintains its relevance by capturing the character of the most dangerous type of modern person; the one who cannot love. Still a far better film than ‘Vertigo’, which for some reason has recently assumed pride of place on the A list, it was itself never the best – ‘The Battleship Potemkin’, ‘Metropolis’, ‘Modern Times’, ‘The Seventh Seal’ and ‘2001’ all come readily to my mind as better films. Nevertheless, the film remains a great work of art if only because the truth upon which it was based is yet more terrifying.

North by Northwest (1959): In what must have been a very mature thriller for the time, Grant morphs from self-interested ‘Madman’ into espionage agent as if he were born to do so. Aside from the ludicrous ten second denouement, this is still a solid film with many famous sequences and a clever plot.

Easy Rider (1969): Disturbing piece of ethnohistory is shot alternatively as docudrama and experimental. Its theme – our persistent and perennial refusal to even attempt to understand one another – is regrettably still current.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956): Coming at the height of the Suez crisis, this still eminently watchable thriller exhibits the excellent chemistry of Day and Stewart, who appear to have equal agency and wit. Hitchcock’s women were always active and represented a slightly different ideal to the prevailing winds.

Network (1976): Still a reasonable, and very prescient, satire of commodity media. Pythonesque influences abound here a few years after that show went off the air.

On the Waterfront (1954): Early Brando as a naive but gutsy longshoreman is a solid film for its time, though you can hardly hear it through the blaring Bernstein score. Almost as if Lenny went to Kazan and said, ‘shoot me some background footage for my new incidental music’.

Apocalypse Now (1979): New extended version to 3.5 hours has some interesting additional scenes that would have been good in the original cut. Still one of the best films ever made, in my opinion, but the so-called director’s cut is far too lengthy. Even Joseph Conrad would have fallen asleep.

Gandhi (1983): I may be becoming cynical in my old age but this epic left me cool. Amazing film as films go but repetitive and preachy as go narratives. Kingsley himself very convincing, Gandhi not so much.

The French Connection: (1971): Hackman and Steiger engage in one long chase video which includes the famous Harold Lloyd inspired car and train sequence – though Lloyd never actually crashed a vehicle in his chase scenes, just himself. A passable crime thriller supposedly true to actual case.

Remains of the Day (1993): Genius atmosphere but regrettable characters. Hopkins is brilliant as a complete loser and Thompson is basically the female version. A solid contemporary tragedy that just manages to avoid nostalgia.

Five Easy Pieces (1970): Early Nicholson verges on film noir, then in its third and final(?) phase. A slightly interesting character study that must have been a fair sample of such doings during the generational upheaval of the era. Otherwise: huh?

The Mission (1983): Still in my personal top 10, and me not of a religious suasion. Irons is exact in his portrayal of a living ethic and De Niro grasps this only to let it fall from his grip right at the end. Another true account, apparently, and certainly believable. Fantastic film and the winner of the Palme D’Or amongst many others.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Intriguing plot makes this archetypical courtroom drama fairly watchable and current in spite of its length and some dated and sexist dialogue. The fact that over six decades later women are still cast as willing actors of their own demise in many assault cases raises questions about the legal system and society more generally, which this film adeptly initiates given its time period. The snappy Ellington soundtrack and the moment where Stewart and Ellington share a piano also lend interest.

The Exorcist (1973): Almost coherent thriller spawned a new genre that has itself become so tired that the original views brilliantly, with Blair’s command performance well worth the Golden Globe and a should-have-been Oscar. Penderecki’s score adds to the surreal quality of the sequences while we are left to ponder the mortal weaknesses that mark our own very human descents.

The Seventh Seal (1957): One of the great works of art of the post-war period, Bergmann’s solemn meditation on the meaning of life in the face of death yet resonates underneath the shill of the mundane. The Knight’s inordinate pride provides Death with the latter’s in; the former sharing his chess tactic with an apparent monk. That one moment, seemingly too obvious for a film of this depth, reminds us that human genius contains its own tragic character flaw.

Sudden Impact (1980): This is the film with the single most famous line in cinematic history, besting the nostalgic turning away of ‘Play it again, Sam’, the fatalistic resentment of ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’, and even the ominous deadpan of ‘Open the pod bay doors, Hal’. It’s not as profoundly pointed as ‘Deserves got nothing to do with it’ but it’s simplicity sums the entire human endeavor; its resistance, its refusal, its dare: it is what existence utters to history, it is what thought utters to the tradition. So go ahead…

Non-canonical:

Goodfellas (1990): Scorsese’s personalist take on the gangster film brings a fresh view to the sub-genre, with Liotta narrating his biography; a guy who wanted to be something he could not, due to ethnicity and scruple. Another apparently true story and a decent film.

The Matrix (1999): Although it could be generously interpreted as self-satire, this abysmally cartoonish rescript of ‘Metropolis’ has one good thing about it: it makes Fritz Lang look all the more the genius he actually was.

A Walk in the Woods (2015): Gentle journey narrative places aging Redford and Nolte in the position of asking two questions each of us must come to ask: what is the meaning of a life well lived, and have I myself done as much? Since these are both existential and ethical questions, the principles serve as characters in the finest of Greek tradition.

Magnum Force (1973): The second of the Harry Callahan quintet takes its cue from Bond-style action and conspiracy but fashions it into a more realistic and serious ‘Star Chamber’ style plot. Eastwood plays his signature role ‘knowing well enough its limitations’ to make it both believable and entertaining.

Tie me up, Tie me down! (1989): Bathos and pathos meet head on in this Spanish tragi-comedy. Why do I wonder if the theater of mental illness and that of the pornography industry are more closely related than meets the eye? A very good film but one leaving one counting one’s blessings.

The Enforcer (1976): The third ‘Dirty Harry’ film is well known to be the weakest of the five but even here interesting themes such as the novel experience of women in the work force and doing dangerous work to boot are explored, with Tyne Daly, the put-upon greenhorn partner of Callahan, making her case for the later ‘Cagney and Lacey’ TV series.

The Pelican Brief (1993): In this barely passable political-legal conspiracy drama – melodrama? – the subtext seems to be as much about Julia Roberts’ ever-changing hair styles as anything to do with the now – but at least not then – tired opposition between environment and resource extraction. The film owes much to Hitchcock’s similarly gender-paired thrillers but this is not always a good thing. Instead of a ludicrous ten second denouement this one is ten minutes long.

The Man who Loved Women (1977): Truffaut’s good-natured yet poignant tribute to a now rather unfashionable sense of romance is both amusing and all too close to the truth of things. The ‘hero’ is very much a man I recognize, and this makes him more than himself, as it were, even if in the end he is immolated upon his own passions. Sound familiar?

The Dead Pool (1988): By now an expected formula, the last of the Callahan set yet entertains on the once. Eastwood himself stated afterwards that given his age there would be no more as the risk of self-parody was just evident even in this film. Still, a ‘swell’ series of almost archetypical character.

Marnie (1964): Sean Connery (still alive at 89), fresh off the first three ‘Bond’ films in succession, is still not famous enough to displace friend-of-lions activist ‘Tippi’ Hedren (still alive at 90) in the credits of this quite serious piece about child abuse and murder. One of Hitchcock’s last films has strong dialogue and is generally intriguing. It must have been tough on the audiences of the day, but at least the adorable Diane Baker (still alive at 82) really was adorable.

The Hit (1984): The absurdity of life gets in the way of the calculatedness of death. Like watching the Godfather vacationing in Fawlty Towers, Peter Prince’s writerly precision is far sharper than any would-be assassin’s eye.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999): A fluffy piece of inconsequential nonsense, much like the Kidman character herself. I rarely find a need to quote a popular culture critic, but Edelstein’s comments at the time nailed it: “Who are these people played by Cruise and Kidman, who act as if no one has ever made a pass at them and are so deeply traumatized by their newfound knowledge of sexual fantasies—the kind that mainstream culture absorbed at least half a century ago?” At least, given the film is based on a 1926 Freud-inspired novella. The only mystery herein is why Kubrick apparently imagined this was his greatest film. But ask me if I’m going to obsess over that mystery.

Meet Joe Black (1998): Ever-eloquent Anthony Hopkins cannot carry this twice-too-lengthy piece of sentimental nonsense. If you want an authentic understanding of how love can overcome death in life, listen to Mahler 2. Please.

Independence Day (1996): About as gripping as a popcorn epic can be, we are meant to be inspired by a global community that unites in the face of the end of everything. However unrealistic this may be, it is an ideal that is not only worth pursuing, but, specific to our own times, must be achieved.

American Gangster (2007): Another supposedly true story that explores the link between the Viet Nam war and a new generation of drug culture and use in the USA, as well as exposing the largest single police corruption case in US history. Gritty and yet strangely sentimental, the account was apparently so heavily fictionalized that in this specific case Ridley Scott may mean close to didley squat.

Monster’s Ball (2001): This was a surprisingly good film about persons who manage to survive the worst and find a new life outside everything they thought they knew. Not ‘heartwarming’ in the Hallmark Card sense of the term but still a relief vis-a-vis the human spirit.

The King of Hearts (1966): Excellent satire of social organization in all its absurd glory. The question of what constitutes insanity is thoroughly explored and sent up in this unassuming little gem from France. Features a youthful Genevieve Bujold.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1977): And speaking above of ‘huh?’, here Nicholson is a much more well-adjusted persona who plays Abel to his brother’s Cain. Perhaps this is the more subjectivist version of ‘The Big Chill’ of the following year, but a pretty sad affair all round.

Boost (recent): Quebec film about the immigration story is quite good, though inevitably tragic. The sequence in which Canadian identity is defined from the outside in is alone worth the price of admission.

Antigone (recent): Another Quebec hit retells the archetypical conflict between public and private morality, centered once again in the state versus the family. Definitely for young persons, it was still a good take on the narrative, though less convincing for older viewers given Antigone’s own tragic flaw.

Will you ever forgive me? (2001): Sordid but true story of a has-been writer who fakes famous writer’s letters etc. and then gets caught. Not worth making a film about but still entertaining.

The Game (2012): Mike Douglas ends his once endless streak of never being in a mediocre film.

High Plains Drifter (1973): Shot on the abandoned Salton Sea in California, this is an early Eastwood directed film. A decent idea for a western and of course Clint is always appealing as the justice-seeker who has at his disposal unlimited means to find it. Reminds me of some of my saga’s characters.

Amelie (2001): This film became such a cult hit that it almost seems cliché on second viewing. There is something so very Gallic about the whole thing that is both charming but also frustrating. Love may indeed be innocent in general, but surely not of itself.

The Day After (1983): The most horrifying fictional film I have ever seen, and thus the most important. Though we are in fashionably collective denial about the greatest threat to the future, nevertheless that same old threat remains. Watch this film, just don’t watch it alone.

Documentaries:

The 24 Hour War (2017): The epic sports car and specifically Grand Lemans battle between Ford and Ferrari in the 1960s is eloquently explored in this fascinating set of interviews, archival footage and contemporary retrospective. Ferrari took the first half of the decade, Ford the second. Either way, a great watch.

All or Nothing at All (1997): My wife and I became instant fans of Frank Sinatra after viewing this poignant and powerful four hour affair. A heroic tale tinged with bitterness presented the man himself as both a larger than life character and one who nonetheless could not master that very life he came to represent.

Williams (2018): Wincingly intimate portrait of one of F1’s most famous racing families, living through both complete success and utter misery. Documentaries like this one almost make me able to forgive the BBC for cancelling ‘11^th Hour’.

American Factory (2017): Top notch organizational ethnography about a Chinese reboot of rust belt infrastructure shows the conflict between two systems of labor and production. Practicing Buddhist billionaire Cao’s self-doubts regarding his actions ruining the world appear genuine, and thus one wonders if anyone in either Beijing or DC is listening.

The Road I’m On (2019): Oddly, this was probably the most disturbing film of the fifty on this list. Garth Brooks has apparently become some all-too-certain ‘family values’ propagandist due to his consuming guilt about missing part of his children’s childhood. I didn’t think I could so intensely dislike a celebrity, let alone the seemingly benign, or at least inoffensive and inconsequential Brooks, but after three hours it wasn’t a problem to shoot out the dance.

A Caution Concerning Gender

A Caution Concerning Gender:

The question ‘why do we need men?’ has likely at least been framed on the lips of every Western woman post-war. Today, more globally, it has become a question that can at last be asked by all. Barring the advent of a human parthenogenesis, the basic function of men, reduced to their physical substrate by one sense of such a question, would be to help continue the species. But downloadable consciousness of the type Raymond Kurzweil is predicting would obviate even that biological fallback. We might not need men at all, which would certainly suit the tastes of E. Jean Carroll, for one. Just so, we wouldn’t need women either.

Though journeying with a dog named after a man – this namesake was also a plausible child molester – Carroll travelled the United States in as precise avoidance of everything ‘men’ as she possibly could. And though we are not made aware if she drove on this or that street named after men, she did manage to shop only at stores that were either neutral – were they yet owned by men? – and visited only towns named after women or bearing women’s names, etc. This seemed a cunning enough stunt, and those words are used advisedly, that she must needs write a book about it, itself bearing the title of a close version of the question in question.

Here instead is a slightly immodest proposal: get rid of gender entirely. I am a person and a human being far before I am a man, white, middle-aged, heterosexual. But such ‘persons’ as I also am are themselves a category, and one fashionably much disdained. Yet I too have been solicited, assaulted, and stigmatized by women seeking to impose a toll upon my imagined sexuality or libidinal availability in order that I might further my career. That I have refused all such approaches, sometimes deftly, sometimes not so much, marks me as indeed less of a man, because a ‘real man’ would have simply either shouldered these opportunities as ‘notches on one’s belt’, so to speak, or fully taken advantage of them. What must I have been thinking?

I could simply say ‘#somethinguncouthmetoo’ and leave it at that, but my social role and the ethical dignity that both comes from it and is necessary to it does not allow me such a pat and narrow response. Instead, it would be more constructive to flesh out the viable and ethical critique of masculinity that is part – but only part – of the wider culture critique in which all of us must engage. ‘Toxic masculinity’ actually hurts men more than it does women. Women, of late, have been able to walk away from it, though not entirely and not without some consequence. But men cannot do so. It is a manifest danger, not only to the continuation of the species but to the Earth and its wider nature, to the future, to ethics, and to the nascent trust necessary for the extant genders to get along with one another as human individuals. Masculinity might itself be defined as wholly toxic if one generalized the archaic conceptions of loyalty, honour, dignity, rationality, and socialized for a more even distribution of lesser things such as the ability to read maps and not get lost in the woods. Femininity too has a compendium of aspects which are better left behind and thus there must also be present a ‘toxic femininity’ – though one never seems to hear of it – that also should be expunged from social and cultural relations.

And E. Jean Carroll and other writers in that vein are part of that other set of toxins. With a seething irony, these women ally themselves with the worst of their ’gender’ as they become most like ‘we’ men. She suggests war would end if men as we know them today were gone, masculinity overcome. Margaret Thatcher was a woman after all. Greed? Imelda Marcos. Torture and abuse? The members of the SS auxiliary units and the guards of the women’s camps. Domestic violence against children? Check out all the internet threads advocating use of physical assault against children under the guise of ‘discipline’, populated in the main by mothers. And so on. The problem in fact is not men, but the power relations of present-day genders and families and politics themselves.

In defining ourselves apart from our persons, in joining up with a category, we lose a vitally important aspect of our humanity; our self-understanding. We imagine we act ‘because’ we are a man, or Caucasian, or part of this or that demographic, and these ‘structural life variables’, as social scientists refer to them, are not simply to be denied. They do have a powerful influence over us. Indeed, it is these that need be overcome on the way to mature being. The person, as individual; self-responsible, attending to the call of conscience, being-ahead-of-itself in that it is future-oriented and is concerned about the world as it is and given its present, as it might become, this is a person who bears no allegiance to gender of any kind. The fact that one of Canada’s major chartered banks has no less than nine categories under gender should tell us that the move toward the dissemination and dissolution of the binary model of gender relations is entirely missing the point. Institutional acceptance is never reflective of revolutionary change, rather quite the opposite. What it tells us is that gender, however it is defined or redefined, does not matter.

In one sense, this is a good thing, as we are well past the point of needing to adhere to archaic social norms and esthetic forms. Even so, we must be cautious regarding our replacement values. Choosing an alternative gender does not exempt one from confronting the human condition, most especially, one’s own. The premise of vanquishing the dominant gendered definitions and their inherent toxins holds within it no promise of overcoming what are human frailties through and through. Yes, there is more than one ‘human nature’, and I would be the last to subscribe to the unthinking and wholly irresponsible response that the ‘person in the street’ oft gives to the challenges of our time. But no, it is not men per se who are the source of this patent unthought. Rather it is simple ignorance on the part of some persons, simple dishonesty from others, and a rather less simple calculation on the part of those with the most to lose if we actually did overcome such things.

To begin to do so is to ask the question with the greater critical and reflective leverage: ‘why do we need gender?’ Its interrogative is fully portable to ethnicity, class, nation, creed, poverty and war, amongst others. Given that we have already asked that same question about God, long ago, one would think we would have the simple and unassuming courage to ask it of ourselves.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty-five books in ethics, aesthetics, social theory, social psychology and religion, as well as metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.