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.

On the Ubiquity of Child Pornography

On the Ubiquity of Child Pornography (a Christmas Day gift for a ‘naughty’ society)

            In the burlesque of passion, ‘naughty’ is nice. In the grotesque of desire, ‘naughty’ is simply nasty. If pornography is more deeply and precisely defined as the narrowing of one’s humanity through objectification, suppression and the sabotage of agency, child pornography appears ubiquitous in our society. Its sexual aspect is but one instance of the confluence of these three forces, and in no way should an ethical understanding of pornography be limited to an examination of what is in fact a mere skewed symptom. For sexuality in itself is an essential part of the human experience, and from a very early age, as Freud and many others have correctly demonstrated. By reducing our inhumanity as directed upon others to what is indeed an authenticity of being only compounds the evil, which is itself in turn sourced in ressentiment. It is inevitable that an adult will feel a compulsion to absorb the wider childhood of which he was himself robbed when a child; whether this theft is repeated against his own children or those utterly unknown to him. This repetition of a criminal act may be witnessed in a myriad of examples hailing from a variety of sectors in today’s society, and specifically in its institutional cultures, wherein objectification, suppression and the denial of human agency and will occurs together and in a calculated manner.

            Private schools emblazon public transit with rows of smiling uniformed girls, well-behaved and no doubt well-disciplined and yet apparently so happy to be forced into the same clothing and the same personality as their desk-bound neighbors who, before being crammed into such places by parents eager to both dispense with their care and ensure that their wealth stay in strictly monitored courtship circles, were complete strangers to them. No matter, as all will shortly become the same thing, and this thinghood is of the utmost: not a person, but a set of objectified roles; dutiful child, chaste daughter, model student, submissive spouse et al. That the ‘schoolgirl’ is an altogether perennially popular staple of the porn industry tells all: it has borrowed from the stilted life of the child the sexualized thinghood already utterly present within its pleats and tights. Just as art mimics the very highest of and in life itself, so does porn mimic the very lowest.

            Such schools spend much space on their respective websites outlining with a salacious delicacy their uniforms, including ‘modesty shorts’ for girls. At once this official apparel, from which there may be no deviation whatsoever pending punishment – much anticipated by the adults involved, and the very reason why uniform codes are so picayune in the first place – suppresses any hint of natural sexuality by objectifying youthful charm in a lockstep repetition, not unlike ballet or team sports, two other parental favorites, in which youth appear as part nymph part storm-trooper. Such schools rely on supportive and presumably equally neo-fascist families for ‘discipline’, also reiterative, and in even more authoritarian circles, often still of the physical variety. And yet the malingering presence of corporal punishment in some political regions is completely consistent with other aspects of the suppression and objectification of the child, for it is nothing other than surrogate sex.

            The child and the youth become the institutional playthings of adults, chaste yet charming chattel, objects and not persons. Their human rights are denied them, their own nascent wills crushed, their narrowed paths set before them and predefined as the same road to ressentiment. In this dynamic, the relations of an alienated subsistence are reproduced. The child will become the avid consumer, the beleaguered producer, entertained by a sullen mean-spiritedness. They will watch television ads wherein even a teenager’s first kiss is denied by mocking parents, and these latter will chuckle to themselves and glance over with menace at their own adolescent children. We’re not selling you a vehicle, but rather a warning. Those who script such ad campaigns are pornographers, the companies which contract them porn merchants. Buy their products and support child pornography, but that is what you desire above all else. For the truncated adulthood of our mass culture only moves us when we can enact violence, either symbolic or physical or both, upon others. Children are the safest mark, for other adults will generally fight back or have friends who will fight for them. But the uniformed disciplined loveless child is the perfect daughter, the perfect son. And to have one or the other makes you the perfect parent.

            We can also rely upon far more than the schools and the laws to support our perfection. All that is sold to children fosters within them an auto-pornography. Shop anywhere, and though you may be of any age group, you are forced to listen to the voices of insipidly ten-year-old sounding pop stars who, in highly sexualized whispers or ululations, sing of youthful desire alone. This the basest most perverse version of any possible Reich, for at least the Nazis had good taste in music. In all else regarding our children, we mirror many of their own desires. The Orwellian character of general child pornography is certainly also indisputable. The children’s athletic apparel designed to provide a source of endless voyeurism for audiences; the television ratings for the competitions that reveal much or most of young women always the most popular attractions. Those few with acrobatic skills and perfect hebephilic figures have graduated from the sexual school uniform to that of theatrical sporting performances, in the process having also been unsurprisingly regressed from a mere pupil to a circus animal.

            Children are mocked in entertainment scripts intended for adults, while youths are often violently suppressed and yet objectified, seen as a threat to society but at the same time as being the original source of desire, resented mightily and yet relentlessly pursued, just as we orient ourselves to our own lost youth. And it matters not whether the scriptwriters are simply good old Nazi or fashionable Feminazi; compare ‘Bosch’ with ‘Scott and Bailey’, for instance. In both, teens are berated, threatened with violence, cast as the source of social problems or the bane of parental existences. And these are but two of the more egregious offerings out of hundreds and in all genres. And by contrast, scripts directed at youth themselves are in their vast majority pure fantasy, stating to young people that in order for them to have an agency at all, they must dwell alone in the worldcraft of our adult imagination, formulaic and utterly reactionary as it is. The creators of such fantasies are child pornographers, the young actors sex industry starlets, and the parents who approve of their viewing do so with the low cunning of a holocaust architect. Objectification, suppression, denial of agency: the trinity for the mass murder of all that children authentically embody.

            Children who play with one another unencumbered by social role device, who create their own worldcraft bereft of the constant and ubiquitous harping of corporate CGI campaigns, and youths who love one another far outside of parental control and oversight, and who explore their shared world wide-eyed with one another far beyond the panting grunt of the molester’s narrow gaze, these are the experiences authentic to the young human being and which we, as those older and supposedly so much wiser, need to nurture in every child. One stares round in vain for such contexts wherein this utmost task is even attempted, let alone accomplished. And if the apparently enchanted premodernity hung its collective hat upon revelation, we today, disenchanted and modern are compelled to consider revolution as the advent of human freedom. But in murdering our young, we avoid the confrontation with our own culture’s self-imposed slavery. We prefer pornography to authenticity, child porn to mature intimacy. In that, we impale ourselves. But to suffer this same fate upon a child is to move from simple ethical error to evil, as patent and as vacant as are our own embittered hearts.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor if the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

An Artless Society

An Artless Society (the neo-Christian Reich)

            The Third Reich took great pride in its artistic vision. Even the death camps were seen to serve an aesthetic function; the ‘beautification of the world through violence’, as a well-known documentary puts it. And while the Reich narrowed the definition of what could constitute art by rejecting modernism in all its forms, it did preserve one of two basic elements of what art, in its essence, accomplishes; it presents for us an ideal. This ideal is at once one of form and one of content. The form is irreal in that not only does it not exist in reality – it is both an amalgam of historical types and cultural desires – it also exists beyond the real in the presence of an archetype. The content precedence given over to the plastic arts in the Reich spoke to its executives’ penchant for realizing the ‘new man’, a eugenics-inspired pastiche of Victorian cultural levels theory and organismic evolution. Between Spencer, the oft-misrecognized ‘social Darwinist’ and Tylor, the major anthropologist of non-relativistic cultural studies, the stage was set for an anthropometry of art.

            And yet while the National Socialists armed their artists with not only state funding but also a retrogressive vision of the essence of humankind – in it, it was the anatomy of sculpture that was most fascinating; during Hitler’s ‘Dyskabolos’ address he intones with all due caution that we today could not think to consider ourselves a successful race unless and until we achieve or even surpass the form represented in Greek classical art – that favored the physical ‘look’ as an expression of an inner health, we today have taken both their conceptions of health and esthetics as at least commercial ideals for all to strive towards. The ‘mongrel man’ remains with us in the guises of obesity, addiction, laziness, to name a few. And though we are certainly correct to disarm the edge of this once visionary sword while preserving the reach of its therapeutic blade, I wonder if the two can be so easily separated in practice.

            The Nazis understood half of the presence of art in society, the half that validated their own sensibilities. But by far the majority of us today share those same ideals, and this is evidenced by our reaction to any type of art that challenges them, not to mention any other challenge emanating from other cultural spheres, including that of science. Durkheim shrugged off this kind of resistance to science, just as every authentic artist does for art. But the rest of us cannot afford such blitheness. Not the least while there is a powerful political movement afoot whose sole goal is to return to Eden, the ultimate result of a logic that seeks to beautify through violence. And through their critique of other cultural forms, including art, they have a most willing audience in those of us who would never turn their way through religious suasion alone.

            Instead of proselytizing superstition, the advance guard of the neo-Christian alliance attacks aspects of culture that on the face of it, many of us would instantly agree need to be curtailed or even vanquished. Criminality, pornography, drugs, come to mind. But, as riders to these widely agreed upon human failings, the Neo-Christian will smuggle in assaults on art via pornography, addiction as an illness via drugs, poverty and class struggle via criminality. Indeed, one may well suspect that the criticism of ‘non-partisan’ social problems is seen only as a vehicle for this critic to undermine essential aspects not only of a democracy, but of the ethical society itself.

            We are receptive to these more calculated attacks because its seems, once again, on the face of it, that the rationality guiding them should be acceptable to any sane human being. We know that obesity, addiction, or the anti-social or misogynistic aspects of the sex industry are not ideals, either cultural or moral. We tolerate them without full acceptance because they express the wider marginalia of a free society. In attacking them directly, we must redefine what we understand by human freedom, trending it away from its shadowy verges which, when enacted, are always tantamount to the nth degree of having the freedom to immolate oneself upon one’s own desires. We children of the Enlightenment, our parents equally Rousseau and De Sade, embrace the joy of ecstasy with the sorrow of nothingness. Ours is a Dionysian existence made into a commodity fetish.

            To all of this the Christian would cringe with a genuine sorrow, and in this we ourselves can agree to a point. But the neo-Christian rejects this fuller human freedom by editing, moralizing, censoring, erasing. His is the faux sadness of pity, for in vice he does not see the underside of virtue but rather the leverage to promote his own wider vice. ‘If this is humanistic freedom’, he exclaims, ‘better then to be a slave!’. In their slavishness, the place of art is reduced to decoration, for while a fascist welcomes the art of the past, and particularly the forms which evolved within his own cultural antecedents, and while he also understands that art presents an ideal form for humanity to strive towards, the neo-fascist does neither. The new fascism of today, neo-Christian and neo-conservative, has no conception of art whatsoever. The nude is pornographic, just as is nakedness immoral. Puritanical in its genesis, not unique to America but having its hearthstone there, neo-fascism deliberately mistakes prudishness for prudence, neurosis for mere caution. Its desired Reich is yet lower than that previous, shockingly, given what we know. It is lower and less noble because it does not even have the half-understanding of art that the Nazis did. What it presents to the rest of us is a vision of an artless society.

            From this observation we are but one step from as well suggesting that such a society would also have no culture. The anthropological definition, in its origins begrudging and still heavily hierarchized, attains through its Boasian relativism only the sense that humanity expresses its shared essence in a multiplicity of manners and mannerisms alike. The liberating quality of cultural relativism was almost immediately used by the Reich to justify its criminal practices – ‘this is our culture after all, and no two may be judged by one another or even directly compared’ – and thus this logical entailment of relativism is now used to justify unfreedom, often chanting the shallow terms ‘morality’, ‘principle’, ‘standard’. Either way, the individual, conscious of her own potential freedom and yet also self-conscious about expressing it, is left unsupported. On the one side, relativism defeats itself by extending its logic to the death camps, and on the other, it opens itself to external defeat by declaring that its enemies also have the absolute right to their own druthers. The throw-away line ‘well, its all relative’, today represents a fatal error, not in morality per se, but rather in existential authenticity.

            The only way to resist and overcome neo-fascism is through a step-by-step advance through the dueling Herculean pillars of ideal form and adorational desire. Though it may be ironic that the purveyors of the Third Reich would view those of the Fourth as themselves a mongrel ‘race’, it is through this very viewpoint, itself fraught with risk, that we can best defeat the artless society. Once again, this is the case precisely due to the fact that the majority of us understand art the way the Nazis themselves did. This is certainly an indictment upon us – our half-hearted conception of art represents in us a genuine decadence rather than a mere desireful lust which is expressed in the pressing presence of pornography, for instance – but it is the half-step away from neo-fascism that is nevertheless necessary to avoid a sterner collective fate. The fullest comprehending of the presence of art in society is too much of a threat to that very fabric to be taken in a single step. For art does not alone represent an ideal, but rather speaks into being the oversoul of our shared humanity and thus puts the lie to any sensibility that we can remain aloof to our equally shared existential condition. The ‘scandal of art’, as Ricoeur states, balances and confronts the ‘scandal of the false consciousness’. In doing so, it oft comes across as itself not mere scandal but rather as a palpable evil. But to recognize the authentic evil in the aesthetic object would be to but give away another weapon to the neo-fascist, and one that the rest of us, in our headlong flight from our own feared freedom, would be only too willing to wield.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in aesthetics, ethics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

In Defense of Pornography as a Theater of Human Freedom

Senator aims to curb ‘violent’ porn, pitches mandatory age verification for online sites | CBC News

In Defence of Pornography as a Theatre of Human Freedom

            In the Mad-TV satire ‘What Men Want’, a woman steps into the original Mel Gibson role as the gender-reversed script ambles along its expected course, this time with the woman being able to hear the men’s innermost thoughts in her own head. The answer is simple, and in one scene, where the narrator says farewell to her dying grandfather, she intones: ‘I’ll miss you grandpa’. He replies, ‘I’ll miss you too, sweetie – (then silently) But not as much as I’ll miss porn!’. For men in particular this could be interpreted as a ‘me too’ moment, but however that may be, I will argue in the following why society as a whole might well miss pornography and erotica more than we may at first imagine.

            My experience with pornography-erotica, call it what you will, tells me I am consuming an aspect of base culture. As theatre, mostly plotless and with acting culled from an underground high school yearbook activity, it receives a solid ‘D’ rating. As sex itself, it is dull, stereotyped, unimaginative and attempts to win one over – whatever that may entail – with grandstanding (mostly) youth showing off. It is no surprise that, as with athletics, anything that so intensely involves the body as a physical vehicle should be the basic preserve of youth. And sadly, in our society, this is mostly what youth have to offer; their pristine and charming physiques. Pornography is in all aspects juvenile, from its representations of youth by those far older to its motives. It is at source about money and not about sex, so it is also essentially dishonest. Given this, why defend it at all?

            Though it cannot be defended as an aesthetic object, I suggest that it must be defended as an ethical one. At first, this seems a contradiction. While art is likely the highest expression of human freedom, attaining a status that transcends even history by communicating perennial truths of the human condition to and from diverse periods and variations thereof, the portrayal of sexuality alone speaks at best only of desire and passion. What is missing in pornography is the Gestalt of humanity; its passions, some certainly present, but also its compassions, which are wholly absent; its desires yes, but also alongside, its anxieties. It is therefore also not an ethical ‘object’. But what pornography does contain is a potent ethical objection to the self-imposed limitations we humans have a tendency to exert upon ourselves and others. Working from the simple premise that if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out – turn off the e-device but only for thine own self – any ethical objection to that which serves to place social norms and institutional orders into perspective must be applied first to one’s own self-understanding. As soon as it attempts to dictate what others shalt or shalt not do it strays over the line of ethics and into the space of fascism. And this is precisely the line that any call for the policing of the viewing of pornography based on age-related limits is doing.

            Creeping fascism always plays the same tired game, and it is astonishing that, given recent history, we are still attracted to it. ‘I’m not trying to shut the porn industry down, I’m only trying to protect our children.’ In Canada, anyone twelve years old and above is legally entitled to have actual sex. There are a few reasonable age restrictions between twelve to fifteen, but the principal is clear. Youth (12-17) is its own category under Canadian law, as distinct from children (2-11). The fact that youth are no longer subject to being forced into surrogate sex with adults through corporal punishment underscores this separation. France remains a rare European country that has not banned this practice, so is it surprising that it is one country cited in the above article that seeks to ban viewing of sexual material by minors? For the French, apparently, youth are to remain sexual objects in the service of adults and can have little or no sexual agency of their own. Canadians are better than that, and by ‘better’, I mean, more ethical. The call to criminalize youth sexuality is both a regression and an expression of adult ressentiment specifically against the hard fact of the loss of our own youth and the future of humanity more generally. But by calling attention to the nostalgic and altogether deliberately naïve idea that young people are somehow not sexual beings and need to be ‘protected’ from sexuality until they are eighteen, the fascist attempts to take on the guise of guardian angel. ‘Save the children!’ He cries, from themselves, from evil adults, from evil itself!

            Anyone who agrees with this kind of suggestion is committing the ethical error of projecting one’s own vain desires onto young persons. Pornography too exhibits these desires – ‘discipline’ sites are the most obvious expression thereof; why else would we be attracted to the idea that youthful looking actors should portray the very minors we are supposedly seeking to protect? Why would such roles always be those that require such discipline: physical, sexual, and political? – and in so doing it provides young people with an important insight: we adults want to harm you because you represent all that we have lost, including beauty, guilelessness, openness, and spirit. We might even hate you, but alas, direct hate crime is already illegal in Canada and thus we must express our dark passions in another way: limit your freedom, your sexual liberation, your mischievous fun. Portray you as disobedient pests who, if you can no longer be beaten in reality, at least you can be allegorized as being beaten in virtuality. Just so, to suppress your knowledge of how we actually think of you is one of the core reasons for banning youth access to pornography.

            All fascists fear exposure of their true desires. These include ultimate control and the possession of a singular authority. They too know God is dead, but unlike more modest persons, they’re quite willing to fill in with the hope of making it a permanent situation. Hence the real ‘creeps’ in our society are not so much the relatively rare on-line child ‘groomers’ or molesters but rather the much less rare closet fascist who shows us just enough flesh so that we are distracted from noting the bones in behind him. He always begins with seemingly the most reasonable premise and this ‘foot in the door’ technique is also dishonest: ‘our children are vulnerable’ (And why so? Because we tend to control and baby them beyond their years lived). He uses seemingly reasonable analogies which turn out to be spurious: ‘films have limited access’ (In public only. Anyone can view an R-rated film without the fear of invasive criminalization in private and internet viewing is always already in private). He leaves out his true demands: ‘I’m only talking violent porn, here’ (in age-restricting porn sites you lose access to all porn, not just the minor percentage of it that might qualify as ‘violent’). He represents himself as reasonable: ‘I know this is a delicate topic’ (So was the so-called Jewish Question). The limits which are in place walk the actually delicate line between impinging upon hard-won and truly fragile democratic freedoms and the advice of child development experts and discourses: here’s some warnings and judge accordingly; some children might be disturbed by this or that material, others not, or yet some parents themselves might be warned off. Indeed, if I were to support age-restrictions on sexual material I would place them between the ages of 12 and 40. Anyone under or over those ages would not be permitted to view it. On the one hand because, according to the American Psychiatric Association, childhood ends at age 12 in important and specifically sexual ways – their definition of pedophilia, for instance, runs as ‘having a prurient interest in children under twelve’ – and on the other, mature adults need to focus on saving the planet and its life, including one another. Enough distraction, enough fantasy. Pornography is an education, of sorts, and it is at best trite to state that reality and fantasy are seldom the same thing. The world is in the shape it is in not because youth cannot distinguish between the two of them. Ask yourself why it took a sixteen year old with a disability to call our wider attention to the climate crisis? Ask your very much adult stockbroker, financier, captain of industry, or wonder of wonders, politician, why it wasn’t they who provided such an alert, amongst others. And then we can ask why yet other adults willingly take on the role of domineering Lydias – a role that is, with ironic relish, only barely admissible within the fantasy of discipline-oriented pornography – intent on correcting our bad habits without respect to our freedoms. An educative pornography might well include titles such as the all too obvious ‘Handmaid’s Tail’ by Marguerite Göttwood, in which such self-proclaimed defenders of ‘morality’ can bare yet more of their sorry selves.

            If one wanted to construct a genuine ethical argument against the decoys of contemporary social life, pornography included, I would be the first to entertain it. It would first have to outline the activities sanctioned by society that distract us from both the existential profundity of human life as well as the future of our collective existence. These are: organized sports (ironically a ‘must’ for youth, supposedly), all non-critical entertainment fictions and video games (Atwood not included), erotica/pornography, holidays both consumer and religious – and, speaking of reality and fantasy, is it really the case that we can distinguish such days? – conspiracy ‘theories’ of all kinds, obsessions with speculative, if, in principle interesting, topics such as extraterrestrial intelligence and ‘paranormal’ events, and the like. At the top of such a list of unethical attempts to divert our attention from serious global conditions would be our neurotic compulsion to rationalize our resentment of youth.

            If made, such an argument would be valid across the ethical board. But the message we send to both present-day youth and future society alike is that we, bereft of both conscience and foresight, have instead opted to suppress the curiosity, the spirit, the very existential verve of young people who, robbed of their nascent capacity to think for themselves through schools, media, and portions of the legal apparatus perhaps to be extended, will be unable to avoid the very fate we have already set out for them. This satisfies us as well, for it will not be we ourselves who have to live in the denuded future of a well-raped Earth. Youth will pay simply for being young.

            The call to limit youthful experience of the world in any way, no matter how juvenile the material or knowledge, only adds to the sense that we have given up on an ethical human future. Shutting it down ahead of time, exerting a pre-emptive strike against the coming freedom of world youth, is the evil privilege of adulthood. And adults are, in fact, old enough to know that we either use it or lose it. We betray our truer selves as maliciously resentful oversized children in its use.

            Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.