The purpose of pornography

One might take the article as more evidence that sex has lost all meaning, becoming divorced not only from procreation but from any relationship. Yet the article also suggests that in a certain sense sex has gained greater meaning than ever.

It is first worth noting that pornography has become important for both men and women. The market among women for porn is said to be increasing, a claim the Fifty Shades phenomenon would seem to confirm. This does not mean its effects are equally distributed. For two years as a graduate student, I cycled almost every day through the docks in Aberdeen on my way to school. I thus had plenty of opportunities to observe at close range the human faces of those allegedly empowered by prostitution. I am no aficionado of postmodern feminist theory, but the women selling themselves on the street for their next heroin fix did not look to me to be particularly powerful.

Why does porn have such allure? After all, it would seem to bring in its wake some brutal and unattainable demands which guarantee dissatisfaction and ultimate despair. A porn-saturated culture places pressure on women both to cling desperately to the vestiges of youth and, as Landesman suggests, to become more compliant to the selfish sexual demands of men. Ironically, it also places impossible demands on men: the need to spill vast silos of seed with the limitless abandon of an eighteen-year-old becomes a key measure of life itself. Regardless of one’s moral commitments, the physical work rate alone would seem to be off-putting. Yet still the cruel culture of pornography draws us ever onward.