So, Robert Jensen has a new book out, called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. If you’ve been paying attention to this sort of thing, you already know my feelings about Mr. Jensen. But now, with the release of his book, plenty of people who call themselves progressive or liberal are falling all over themselves to praise him. And it makes me sick.
I don’t know if I want to read the book or not. On the one hand, I feel like I should, because of the “understand your enemies” thing (which is why I suffered through Female Chauvinist Pigs and Pornified), and also because I think if you talk about a book without having read it, you’re talking out of your ass (this was one of my main gripes about the Full Frontal Feminism fallout).
On the other hand, I don’t know how much head-desking I can take. I’ve read enough of his articles to know what Jensen’s M.O. is. And would a fisking of his book really accomplish anything? If it would, then I might be convinced to read it. But also, Chris Hall has already posted an excellent, thorough review at Sex In the Public Square. Here are a few key excerpts:
I can go on for hours and hours about what irredeemable psychic flotsam the great mass of porn is, and could probably fill several volumes thicker than Jensen’s on the mediocrity, body fascism, poor production values, labor abuses and sexism that dominate mainstream porn. These are all things that people of good conscience should find troubling about porn as it exists today. And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.
[...]
By using this thin sliver of pornography to talk about the whole, Robert Jensen has eliminated alternative genders and sexualities entirely. He doesn’t have to wonder what it means to have a transgendered man like Buck Angel making a good living billing himself as a “man with a pussy.” Dykes who make porn for other women, like the Cyber-Dyke network, are not even acknowledged. There is not even a whisper of the thousands of web pages and videos and magazines that focus on women dominating men, or cock-and-ball torture, or any other of a million practices. These sexualities do not even exist in Robert Jensen’s cosmology; he has written them out of existence as neatly as a respectable family who resolutely doesn’t speak the name of the cousin living as a “confirmed bachelor.” But all of these identities and practices come with legal and social consequences. To simply discard so many lives in a book that claims to honestly explore the nature of desire in our society is not only intellectually dishonest, but hateful.
[...]
Robert Jensen’s passion is reserved for visualizing women’s sexual pain. Never once does he turn that passion the other direction to look at the possibilities for women’s sexual pleasure. There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked. And that’s why, regardless of my doubts about mainstream porn, I can never, never imagine aligning myself with Jensen and his ilk. Because at the heart of his arguments, I see the same misogynist bullshit that I want to excise from pornography.
[...]
One of the things that keeps misogyny a thriving monster in our society is sexual shame and guilt. Violence against women and gays comes not from people who are comfortable being open about their desires, but by those who feel that their desires are somehow wrong. People have a limited capacity for accusing themselves. There are only so many times that a man will look at women and feel guilty about his lust before those thoughts whip around like a serpent devouring its tail. Then, the problem isn’t him. It’s that bitch in the short skirt, the whore who’s tempting him and who deserves whatever she gets. And then, we know the rest of the story. We’ve heard it too many times to forget. November 19 was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and December 17 will be 5th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers precisely because we know how the story of people driven by sexual self-hatred turned inside-out ends.
So what do you think? Should I bother reading this book and posting a review?
READ ME: Disclaimer
8 Responses to "Should I subject myself to this?"
If I’m gonna read it, which you know I will, you better LOL.
I was (how twisted is this) thinking about Bob while doing a porn scene on saturday. Not the whole time, mind you, my brain was otherwise occupied for the most part, but when it came time to do the DV scene (which was my choice, I had put it into the agenda) and we get to it, and one of the dudes was in total and utter pain, I mean, he had a grimace on his face like someone had slammed his balls in a car door. Me, I was fine. I asked him if he wanted to stop, switch positions, or whatever else, and his comment was he was getting paid to do this act, he would be fine. Yadda yadda. Well, he lived. Dignity in tact and everything, but the man was hurting. And I wondered what Bob would make of that….of this poor porn dude doing an act that he found physically painful because an evol female pornographer was paying him to do it….
you know, that alone might require a post…
Yes, indeed I think it might!
And you know I’ll end up reading the book. I’ll have to dip my eyes in bleach afterward, but I’ll do it. Maybe I have some masochistic tendencies after all.
I welcome any criticism of the sex trade as long as its about the imbalanced power dynamics, not the morality of sexual desire. As an on-again-off-again sex worker myself I’m pretty conflicted about my own role in perpetuating these imbalances, this “pleasure men get from women’s pain.”
Well, Amber…I don’t know if I could stand reading through one chapter — heaven forbid, a whole book - of Bob’s turgid prose before getting some urges to throw stuff around and break things. But then again, I’ve read enough of Bob’s previous work to stoke the flames of rage enough.
But, since I do believe in knowing the enemy and all that jazz, do whatever you need to. Just have plenty of Visine and a retch bucket on stand-by….and a copy of sex-pos books as an antidote.
Anthony
Amber, there is good masochism, and there is bad masochism. Good masochism is having some nice but wicked person run needles through your nipples or other sensitive body part; bad masochism is reading overwrought tripe like Robert Jensen without having to. I fear that I shall never recover from the experience. If you’ve ever read Lovecraft, I feel like one of those poor souls who, having read the Necromonicon, promptly go mad.
But that being said, I think that it was necessary and, in a way, valuable. I’ve never gotten used to people with progressive, feminist intentions endorsing this kind of snake oil, and it breaks my heart to see high praise for this book coming from Alternet and Feministe, both of which have been extremely valuable sources of news and ideas for me. My review got to be over 3k words, much longer than most of the articles on our site, but I feel like I left so much uncommented on. For instance, there’s a clear undercurrent of emotional masochism in how Jensen describes his own sexuality, for instance in how he acknowledges having engaged in “rape-like behavior.” He doesn’t go into detail, but I really wonder what “rape-like behavior” is, and how broadly it’s defined.
He also uses questionable research (i.e., Melissa Farley) in ways that are at best suspect: in discussing the psychological toll of pornography upon women who act in it, he cites one of Farley’s studies which, using a sample of 130 street prostitutes in San Francisco, purports to document an abnormally high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. The study does not give statistics for the general population in the areas studied, and Jensen doesn’t acknowledge any difference between the situation of a street prostitute in San Francisco and a porn star in the San Fernando Valley.
If I could talk to Bob Jensen face-to-face, the one question I’d really like to ask him is, “What makes you hard?” That might sound like an obnoxious question at first, but I would really mean it seriously. He, like every other anti-porn activist, is willing to describe grotesque scenarios of women being abused and raped in luscious, intimate detail. If he can’t talk about pleasure as openly, it says something really hateful about him.
I know. I was joking around!
I agree w/ you re: the question to ask Jensen. I bet he’d get all huffy and offended though.
And… Feministe is plugging the book? Oh no. That really makes me sad. :(
Once again, Chris: excellent review.
Bob Jensen was one of my professors in college. He’s a fine journalism professor, which is why I was sad when I found out he had something in common with Phil Burress.
Leave a comment