A speech to the Sydney Writers Festival
May 25th 2003
Clive Hamilton1
In Growth Fetish I argue that it has become apparent that the liberation movements of
the sixties and seventies – the sexual revolution, the counter-culture, the women’s
movement and the civil rights movement – have had some unforeseen and regrettable
consequences. Contrary to the dreams of the young people of that era, the liberation
movements did not create a society of free individuals in which each of us, released
from the shackles of social conservatism, could find our true selves. While the goals
were noble, the effect has been to open up to the marketers areas of social life from
which the forces of commerce had previously been excluded. In a strong sense, the
liberation movements of that era did the ground work for the neoliberal economic
revolution of the eighties and nineties.
It seems to me that the libertarian-left continues to invest so much in the freedoms
won in the sixties and seventies that it has lost its capacity for discernment, an ability
to recognise the social limits of individual freedoms. The ideas of the libertarian-left
have become a reactionary force, for they have substituted an uncritical defence of the
freedoms won in an earlier era for a real politics of social change.
I’d like to develop this argument with respect to the perennial question of sex, and in
particular the commodification of sexuality and what I call the pornographication of
everyday life. This is a fitting topic for this Writers Festival not least because one of
the overseas literary stars is Catherine Millet, author of the best-selling memoir The
Sexual Life of Catherine M.. Millet’s memoir is one of a number of recent literary
works that, one way or another, tell us a great deal about the bleakness of life in post-modern consumer capitalism and the political impotence of the libertarian left.
I wrote Growth Fetish to understand one monolithic fact. I call it the great
contradiction of modern life, and it is this. Decades of sustained economic growth
have meant that most people in the West live lives of abundance. This abundance has
occurred at a time when the social constraints of class, gender and race have in large
measure been swept away. We are richer and freer than humans have ever been, but –
and here is the contradiction – we are no happier. For decades we have been promised
that economic growth and the lifting of oppressive laws and institutions would take
away the sources of our discontent. But it hasn’t happened. What is going on? I want
to venture an answer to this by way of an examination of the commodification of sex,
and will include a commentary on the reaction to a report my Institute recently
published on the question of youth and pornography.
As criticism of the libertarian-left has come almost exclusively from moral
conservatives, it will help if I establish my bona fides as a card-carrying member of
the protest generation. Like many others of my age group I participated in the
liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I marched against the Vietnam War
and was arrested for obstructing traffic. I camped outside the South African Embassy
in the dead of a Canberra winter to protest against the Springbok rugby tour. I was
manhandled by police when I linked arms with others to form a human barricade
around the first Aboriginal tent embassy.
From my mid-teens I was convinced that the lifting of the suffocating constraints on
sexual expression would be a source of liberation. We railed against ‘Victorian
morality’ and were attracted to free love (most of us preferred the idea to the
practice). When the headmaster of my school gathered the sixth form into the school
hall and told us we should confine our selves to ‘waist-up relationships’ I made him
squirm by asking defiantly: “What can a 60-year old man tell 17-year olds about
sex?” With others I rejoiced at the liberalisation of censorship laws that allowed
anyone to read Portnoy’s Complaint, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Schoolkids Oz . I
even took my clothes off at Jim Cairns’ Down to Earth hippie festival at Bredbo in
1974, but that’s an episode I would prefer to forget.
Like young people everywhere I thought we were freeing ourselves from the shackles
of oppressive convention and sexual hang-ups. We thought we were creating a new
society and we knew our opponents were being defeated. The conservative
establishment lost cause after cause and could no longer sustain the institutions of
Victorian morality, women’s oppression, racism and the unbearable constraints of
social convention. But while the battle against social conservatism was being fought
and won, the real enemy was getting on with business and savouring the new
commercial opportunities that the radicals were opening up.
But I am jumping ahead of myself, so let me go back a little.
Oppression and liberation
The liberation movements were a natural evolution as they expressed no more than
the democratic impulse that had driven the history of the West for the previous three
or four centuries. From this viewpoint, the late 20
th
century moral decline bemoaned
by the conservatives is no more than a period of transition, in which the traditional
expectations and roles that defined industrial capitalism are disintegrating and
something new is emerging. The rejection of traditional standards, expectations and
stereotypes represented by the various trends and movements dating from the 1960s –
the sexual revolution, the counter-culture that led to experiments like Nimbin, and the
women’s movement – was a manifestation of the longing for self-determination.
Democracy, combined with the arrival of widespread material abundance in the West,
has for the first time provided the opportunity for the mass of ordinary people to
pursue self-realisation. The political demand for democracy of earlier generations has
become a personal demand for freedom to find one’s own path, to ‘write one’s own
biography’. The constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression
based on gender and race is no longer tenable, and the daily struggle for survival has
for most people disappeared. All across the industrialised world bewildered people
have been asking, ‘What do we do now?’ Or, as the ethicist Peter Singer has put it,
‘How should I live?’. For if the life-determining constraints of class, gender and race
have by and large fallen away, and the threat of poverty has for most been dissolved
by decades of economic growth, the ordinary individual has, for the first time in
history, a true choice.
The democratic impulse – which to date has taken the form of collective struggles to
be free of autocrats and various forms of social oppression – has morphed into
something else, a search for authentic identity, for self-actualisation, for the
achievement of true individuality. Some have gone straight to the known sources in
various spiritual traditions or, more often, the superficial versions of them in various
New Age guises. But most have ended up seeking a proxy identity in the form of
commodity consumption, consumer capitalism’s answer to meaninglessness.
Others have looked for the answer in drugs. People continue to pursue more wealth
and consume at ever-higher levels because they do not know how better to answer the
question ‘What do I do now?’. The agents of the marketing society have seized on the
primal search for authentic identity to sell more gym shoes, cars, mobile phones and
home furnishings.
And what happens at the level of the individual translates into society’s preoccupation
with economic growth, an autistic behavioural pattern of obsessive acquisitiveness
devoid of emotional connection with other humans, a pattern reinforced daily by the
platitudes of the commentators and the politicians. But this state of affairs can be
sustained for only so long. Despite its extraordinary success over the last four or five
decades, we are beginning to see that the marketing project must ultimately fail: in the
last instance, a pair of designer jeans cannot satisfy the deeper urge to make sense of a
life.
In the marketing society, power and oppression are no longer concerned
predominantly with the domination of one group by another but are bound up with
what people do to themselves. For most citizens, the fruits of growth have provided
the means to seize emancipation, yet few have availed themselves of the opportunity,
except to abandon themselves to a life of serial gratification. As I will explain, this
irony is perhaps most stark in the success of the women’s movement, where progress
towards liberation was diverted into equality in work and consumption.
While power, oppression and resistance were in an earlier era played out in the arena
of production, now they are played out in the arena of consumption and the wider
polity. Industrial struggles still occur, but they are rarely life-or-death struggles. To be
sure, certain groups in society are disparaged and victimised – the homeless, the long-term unemployed, people with disabilities, indigenous people – but the system has no
structural interest in this sort of oppression, except perhaps a fiscal one.
For most workers, the modern economy and labour market provide some degree of
autonomy that makes them much less subject to the dictates of the boss than they
were in the past. This is more the case for some types of workers than for others, and
it holds even in the face of attempts to remove protections in labour laws. In the West
wage slavery belongs to another era. But if oppression is the opposite of liberation,
and liberation means a life in which each person can live out their full potential and
achieve true autonomy, we remain oppressed.
Such a view is, of course, alien to the enlightened advocate of neoliberalism – after
all, haven’t modern social movements swept away all the oppressions of the past? The
sexual revolution freed us from our Victorian inhibitions; the women’s movement
freed women from role stereotyping; gay liberation allowed free expression of sexual
preference; and the civil rights movement eliminated institutionalised racism.
Conservatives fulminated and progressive people celebrated.
Liberating capitalism
But despite the gains, the social movements of the post-war period have for the most
part represented no threat to consumer capitalism. Indeed, the counter-culture, the
civil rights movement and the women’s movement have served to reinvigorate it.
Post-war rebellions against oppression have worked in the interests of consumer
capitalism because they have swept away long-standing cultural and religious barriers
to the most insidious form of oppression. This is the oppression implicit in
sublimation of the self in pursuit of wealth, fame and social success, a form of
oppression that is readily embraced. As I argue at length in Growth Fetish , liberation
is denied those who invest their lives in external reward.
This is not just a matter of personal choice: capitalism conspires to ensure that
external rewards will triumph over the urge to liberation. In a famous passage on the
conquering power of capitalism, Marx declared:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real
conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx’s declaration was in some respects premature, since preindustrial social
conventions and conservative attitudes continued to impose constraints on the full
manifestation of market capitalism for a century after publication of The Communist
Manifesto. It is now becoming clear that the sixties generation tilled the ground for
the neoliberal reforms and ‘turbo-capitalism’ of the 1980s and 1990s.
Railing against the conventions of their parents, the counter-culture tore down the
social structures of conservatism that, for all their stultifying oppressiveness, held the
market in check. The demands for freedom in private life, for freedom from the fetters
of career and family, and for freedom of sexual expression were noble in themselves,
but it is now evident that demolition of the customary social structures did not create a
society of free individuals. Instead, it created an opportunity for the marketers to
substitute material consumption and manufactured lifestyles for the influences of
social tradition.
In the face of revolutionary changes in social attitudes in the West, consumer
capitalism has remained unruffled. Indeed, each new social revolution has provided
an opportunity for the system to rejuvenate itself. Both the counter-culture and
environmentalism contained within them seeds of revolt, but they were effortlessly
co-opted, so that now those who are inclined can simply buy an alternative lifestyle,
whether it be the image of urban escapee to be had from a 4WD, the rugged nature
lover to be acquired at Kathmandu or the badass ghetto youth conferred by being seen
to listen to hip-hop.
The women’s movement attacked the social and family conventions that kept women
in the kitchen. The family built around the male breadwinner undoubtedly denied
women the opportunity to spread their wings, but it also conditioned the labour
market to operate on the assumption that workers had family responsibilities. Men
formed trade unions to fight for limits on working hours, security of employment, and
carefully regulated pay structures. When workers demanded a ‘living wage’ that could
sustain a married man and his wife and children, the moral argument had wide appeal.
This world of security in which people knew their roles as well as their social
responsibilities has gone. The counter-culture took the hatchet to it long before the
ideologues of the free market decided that we could all be richer if the labour market were deregulated. The counter-culture had its wish. Gone are the stuffy constraints of
career expectations, nine-to-five regimentation and the life mapped out by the
corporation’s hierarchy. Now workers are free-floating commodities in the labour
market, often employed casually or on contract, the only consideration being their
measurable contribution to the firm’s productivity.
So Margaret Thatcher should be thankful to beat poet Alan Ginsberg and LSD guru
Timothy Leary. The counter-culture tuned in, turned on and dropped out, but only
long enough to sweep aside the social conventions that had provided moral constraint
on the urgings of consumer capitalism.
It is fitting that Germaine Greer – the original voice of anarcho-feminism – should
now shatter the dream of liberal feminism in her book The Whole Woman.2 For all the
advances in education and employment and for all the dramatic changes in attitudes,
women have now become paid-up members of the market system. They have
achieved equality so that they can feel alienated and exploited in the way men do.
They sought liberation but settled for equality. Women, she argues, can never be
liberated until men are too, and neither can be free when they are active and willing
participants in consumer culture.
In the 1950s middle-class respectability may have been oppressive but it carried with
it a certain deference. Women are the subject of far more sexual objectification now
than they were in the 1950s, although men have become more adept at concealing it.
And even the need to conceal has been discarded by the crass exploitation of ‘girl
power’. Why should a young man pretend that he doesn’t lust after the young woman
who has just burned him off at the traffic lights, when nubile popstars thrust their
groins at the camera and declare ‘more power to us’?
As happened with the counter-culture of the 1960s, mainstream feminism has been
co-opted. Greer observes, ‘What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation
was fading out with the word’. The liberation of women from oppression was
understood by the early feminists as freedom, not only from oppressive male
structures, but also from internalisation of self-hatred and self-denigration. Algerian
anti-colonialist author Franz Fanon and South African black consciousness activist Steve Biko understood that oppression runs deep: while discriminatory laws can be
changed, the internalisation of oppression is far more insidious. Colonialism was
threatened by liberation struggles, patriarchy by feminism, and segregation by the
civil rights movement. But what sort of people would be left by liberation?
Gender equality has meant, above all, unfettered opportunity for women to create
themselves in the images invented for them by the marketers. Whether a woman is a
dutiful housewife or a kick-arse careerist is a matter of indifference to the marketers,
as long as she continues to spend. There is no difference between an advertising
campaign that appeals to the image of the nurturing, caring mother and one that
targets the power-dressed professional; indeed, the cleverer campaigns manage to
combine both. Each is just a demographic; the only difference is that the independent
professional believes she is more in control of her life when she is deciding what to
buy. Greer has a cruel term for it – lifestyle feminism’:
. . . the kind of feminism that sees getting membership of the MCC or the
Garrick Club as a triumph is lifestyle feminism that gives tacit support to a
system that oppresses women worldwide. A ‘new feminism’ that celebrates the
right … to be pretty in an array of floaty dresses and little suits put together for
starvation wages by adolescent girls in Asian sweat-shops is no feminism at all.
Equality is good for the market. It has meant a growing and better qualified
workforce; it has destroyed old-fashioned ideas that employers need to pay enough to
support a family; it has helped turn nurturing households into nodes of consumption;
it has hastened the development of lifestyle thinking; and it has exposed a much larger
proportion of the population to the direct influence of the advertisers. In addition to
Alan Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Mrs Thatcher has much to thank liberal feminism
for.
The pornography debate
In recent times some niggling doubts about where this has all led have become
crystallised in my mind as a result of a report my Institute published in March on the
question of youth exposure to pornography.
The report revealed that teenagers in
Australia have extensive exposure to both X-rated videos and sex sites on the internet.
We emphasized that the extraordinary proliferation of sex sites on the internet means
that it is no longer feasible to hang on to the comforting belief that pornography for
kids is not much more than boys sneaking a look at Dad’s Playboy centrefold.
Our report was especially focussed on what we called ‘violent and extreme’
pornography on the internet, especially those practices that would never be permissible on an X-rated video. We concluded that much more effective measures
are needed to restrict access to violent and extreme pornography on the internet.
However, while we have criticisms of the representation of sex in X-rated videos, we
did not believe that any changes are needed in their regulation.
Our report included a content analysis of X-rated videos and internet sex sites
drawing on a range of other studies and our own research. In summary, pornography’s
characteristic codes of representation reflect its appeal to a male heterosexual
audience. The camera is positioned to facilitate maximum visibility of the female
body and genitals. Men’s bodies are not presented, scrutinised or routinely objectified
in the same way, except of course in gay male pornography. Pornographic imagery
focuses relentlessly on acts of penetration and on vaginal and anal intercourse and
fellatio. Male-centered constructions of sex are also visible in the contrasting
treatment of cunnilingus and fellatio in adult videos: scenes of the former are short
and show unresponsive men, while scenes of fellatio are prolonged and show women
who appear highly sexually aroused.
Two sexual practices – extravaginal ejaculation and anal intercourse – have become
staples in heterosexual pornography. It is standard practice in heterosexual
pornography for the male partner to withdraw from intercourse or fellatio before
orgasm to ejaculate on to the body or face of his female partner. Images of male
ejaculation are commonly described as ‘cumshots’, while the sub-genre ‘facials’
refers to images of men ejaculating on to women’s faces and women’s faces covered
in semen. Male-female anal intercourse is a second, almost mandatory, inclusion in
pornographic depictions of heterosexual sex.
You don’t have to watch much mass-marketed heterosexual pornography to realise
the accuracy of the observation of US pornography researchers Jensen and Dines:
sex is divorced from intimacy, loving affection, and human connection; all
women are constantly available for sex and have insatiable sexual appetites;
and all women are sexually satisfied by whatever the men in the film do.4
This description of video porn fits precisely the accounts of her sexual encounters
described by Catherine Millet in her memoir. Millet provides graphic accounts of
dozens of sexual liaisons, especially orgies in which she is penetrated in every orifice
by long queues of men, in apartments, parks and cars. The anonymity and
arbitrariness of sexual partners (she concedes she cannot remember most of them and
did not even see many) celebrates sex as an activity devoid of personal contact, and
she writes of herself as if she were always available and virtually insatiable, exactly as
women are portrayed in porn videos. It is not the copiousness or explicitness of the
sex in the memoir that makes it pornographic but the studied absence of intimacy and
affection in the sex that fills the pages. She dares us to judge her and, fearful of
mockery, few have taken up the challenge.
Perhaps the emblematic statement in Millet’s memoir is this one: “Fucking is an
antidote to boredom. I find it easier to give my body than my heart.” While one can
easily interpret Millet’s extraordinary sexual abandon as the result her own
upbringing and character, the success of the book tells us something profound about
the nature of sexual relations under late consumer capitalism.
As I watch Catherine Millet at this Writers’ Festival I wonder whether I am seeing a
real human being or only the shadow of one. In her Sexual History she has so
completely exposed all that is intimate and personal about herself that there seems to
be nothing left. For there is a sense in which our private selves are inextricably
entwined with our sexual intimacy, and Millet has given it all away – or rather, she
has sold it in exchange for celebrity and money. But in the hollowing out of herself
Millet has done a service; she has shown us the desperate emptiness that, taken to the
extreme, the objectification of sex and sexuality leaves in its wake. That, I think, is
the legacy of the sexual revolution.
If Millet’s book were presented as nothing more than an unusually explicit erotic tale
then I would have no argument with it. That, after all, is why it has sold so well,
although I am sure many readers, like me, soon became bored with it. But Millet and
her publishers have sold it to us as a powerful text of social critique.
Millet set out to subvert convention. Yet writing explicitly about sex is no longer a
revolutionary act; erotic imagery is ubiquitous and no boundary remains untraversed.
So what is Millet subverting, other than love and intimacy themselves? Strong
relationships may be thought of as those in which each party gives the other
unbounded freedom but neither wants to exploit it. Millet’s libertarianism is still stuck
in the adolescent phase in which the freedoms have been won but the maturity not to
exploit them has yet to develop.
The claimed literary value of Millet’s memoir has rescued it from being shelved in the
pornography section of the bookshops. But the nakedness of her exposure is at the
memoir’s core. It’s not art, it’s suicide. The mood that swirls like a mist around her
life history is one of ineffable sadness, and this is the sadness that engulfs us when we
reflect on the failure of the liberation movements to usher in a new world.
The publisher describes Catherine Millet’s Sexual Life as “a manifesto of our times −
when the sexual equality of women is a reality and where love and sex have gone
their own separate ways”. Is this not precisely what men, in their raw state, have
always wanted, to divorce copulation from intimacy? Is not every counsellor’s room
the witness to an endless stream of torn relationships in which she wants more
intimacy and he wants more penetration? In the world of Catherine Millet women
have entered the universe of sex constructed by men − primordial, unsocialised men
driven by their ids, in which all finer feelings are drowned in a sea of testosterone.
This is the new ‘democracy of pleasure’, in the words of Ovidie, the French porn star
and author who describes herself as a feminist, artist and philosopher.5 Ovidie starred
in the mainstream film The Pornographer of which one critic said that ‘no film in the
history of cinema had portrayed oral sex with such a superb sense of existential weariness and melancholy’.6 The subtext of all porn is boredom, the mechanisation of
sex stripped of its excitement and mystery, reduced to that which one person does to
another (or more precisely, what men do to women). Sex in porn is not the
exploration of one with another but an act of relief, like defecation (indeed, on some
internet sites the two are combined).
Perhaps we could accept it if this attitude were confined to porn videos and sex sites
on the net. But depersonalised, indiscriminate sex has crept into the cultural
mainstream so that the symbols, styles and even personnel of the pornographic genre
are cropping up in television, newspapers and film. Porn stars run for parliament with
the aim of asserting porn’s acceptance and we treat it as a light-hearted relief from the
usual dull political fare. (Was anyone’ like me, surprised to discover that Jamie
Parker, the Greens candidate for a Sydney electorate, was responsible in his other job
in a marketing company for a huge billboard showing a man and a women having sex
to advertise Horny Goat Weed, a natural aphrodisiac?) Even Telstra bought into a
company making porn videos, a move which led one ethical investment fund to
dispose of its Telstra shares.
Along with Millet’s memoir and Ovidie’s book, the novels of Michel Houellebecq are
a basic ingredient of the turmoil of sexual politics that has gripped France and is
rippling across other Western cultures. Both Atomised and Platform have been called
pornographic. There is plenty of sex, with one reviewer describing them as ‘wilfully
obscene’. Platform is described quaintly by another as ‘filthy’. But unlike Millet’s
memoir, the eroticism is there for a purpose.
For Houellebecq’s characters the sex is an antidote to the meaninglessness of modern
life but the novels are also a meditation on that meaninglessness. They are a subtle
journey into the vain quest for happiness in a post-scarcity world in which the
promises of plenty, and the freedoms won in the sixties and seventies, have left a new
barrenness. If all has failed us and there is nothing left to believe in, then why not
fuck till we drop? Whereas Millet puts her orifices on display, Houellebecq shows us
his doubts. While Millet is still playing out the fantasies of sexual freedom,
Houellebecq is warning us of its perils. ‘The sexual revolution was to destroy the last
unit separating the individual from the market.’7
The ‘sexual communism’ promoted by left-libertarians and the porn industry is of
course strongly in the interests of the market. This is true in the obvious sense that
pornography is one of the world’s biggest industries. It is estimated that hardcore porn
in the form of videos, the internet, live sex shows and cable television now generates
revenues of $10 billion per annum, as much as Hollywood’s US film takings.8 But
more insidiously, the values and lifestyles promoted by Millet and the left-libertarian
defenders of porn are precisely those of the market. Discernment and restraint are
antithetical to consumerism. Depersonalised sex and the spread of the pornographic
style are intensely self-centred, just as the market desires. They express and celebrate
an understanding of happiness that seeks instantaneous emotional and physical highs
– whether obtained through drugs, spectacles, food, gambling or sex – where each of
these is a commodity. Twentieth-century consumer capitalism has seen a progressive
substitution of activities and desires that result in immediate gratification in place of
the more challenging and fulfilling demands of trying to live a worthwhile life.
There is nothing wrong with indulging in sex, drugs, food and spectacles, except
when they become the markers by which people chart a course through life. There is a
trade-off that must be made between a life devoted to short-term gratification and one
aimed at attaining deeper goals of self-realisation. After all, isn’t making that
transition what growing up is about? Yet instant gratification is the sort of happiness
that the market wants because this is the only sort of happiness that markets can
provide.
Perhaps there is a place for purely objectified sex, divorced from human passions
other than lust, but when this view of sexual relationships pervades social
understanding and the intimate behaviour of generations of men and women then we
have lost something fundamental to our humanity.
Freud used to complain that his American acolytes had interpreted his
psychotherapeutic ideas as a technique for making people happy. Steeped in the
European philosophical tradition, Freud believed this to be a trivialisation of a
movement whose purpose was to understand the meaning of what people do and the
nature of the human condition. The purpose of life is not to be happy; it is to
understand ourselves and become reconciled with that knowledge. While
Houellebecq’s novels are an exploration of the deeper questions of the human
condition, Millet’s unexamined sexual abandon is wholly consistent with how US
corporations have defined the pursuit of happiness. The same can be said of the
libertarian defenders of porn in Australia.
Defending porn
The reaction to The Australia Institute’s report on youth and pornography reflected all
of the immaturity of left-libertarianism. While the subject matter of the report is of
course highly emotive, the issues were dealt with in a scholarly way and the authors −
Dr Michael Flood and myself − have strong credentials for liberal-mindedness. The
principal author, Michael Flood, has for some years taught gender studies at the ANU
and has long experience as a sex educator in schools. While I don’t have the track
record of work in this area, I certainly did not come to the task as a stuffed shirt. (I
have the dubious distinction of being the first Australian to say ‘fuck’ on national
television.)
But we quickly discovered that there is an unholy alliance working against any
consideration of the dangers of porn and, by implication, any extension of restrictions
on it. The alliance includes the adult video industry, the internet industry and a small
but highly vocal group of libertarians and academic sexologists. The latter group are
of most interest. These left-libertarians still see porn as a political statement, a symbol
of the freedoms won in the sixties and later of the ‘right’ of women to engage in any
form of sexual expression. Porn is just one manifestation of the democracy of sexual
expression and the more outrageous the sexual act the stronger the political statement.
Of course, the adult industry laps up this adolescent form of liberation politics and
maintains, in the face of scepticism, that women are keen consumers of porn too, and
would be freed to enjoy it as much as men if only the remnants of social conservatism
where blown away. In Australia, academics such as Catherine Lumby and Kath
Albury are doing the blowing.
The first to attack our report was Kath Albury, a media academic at the University of
Sydney, who was disturbed at “the veiled condemnation of non-heterosexual activities
and the lack of respect for young adults’ sexuality”.9 In fact the report went out of its
way to acknowledge the important role of sexual imagery for the development of
young people’s sexuality, especially young gay people. Albury’s defence of
pornography is to acknowledge reluctantly that there may be grounds for discomfort
with some forms of porn, but then in a trice to slide away from it and refuse to address
it head on. In their writing about porn, Albury and other post-moderns adopt a
particular pose: sex is playful, women are ‘girls’ and judgements are for those with
hang-ups. Sex takes all forms and no-one has the right to judge one form as more
worthy than another; everyone has their own tastes in sex just as they do in clothes, so
lighten up.
But for all of the post-modern irony and determination to ‘transgress’ remaining
norms, Albury declines to engage with the single burning question: Does she or does
she not believe that it is OK for a 14-year old to look at images of a woman being
raped, a man penetrating a cow and a woman defecating into the mouth of another?
For these are the images that are easy for the curious teenager to find on the internet.
And to argue that sexual preferences are changing so that acts that were beyond the
pale 20 years ago are now accepted, is just a debating trick. Is she saying that one day
anything we can now imagine will be acceptable, and those who hesitate only hold
back progress? Does that go for …. (name your favourite internet perversion).
Albury’s co-worker, Catherine Lumby, also leapt into print using the same technique
of wry light-heartedness, the purpose of which is to say: ‘Look I’m cool about sex and
anyone who raises concerns about porn should just lighten up and get with the times’.
Unlike Albury who claimed she was not shocked by our report, Lumby wrote in The
Bulletin that she was shocked at our claims that images of rape and bestiality are
common on the net. One has to ask how an academic who researches porn can be so
naïve, but this is where the libertarians’ practiced denial kicks in. Like other ultra-libertarians, Lumby is so enamoured with the liberating possibilities of porn that she
refuses to recognise its dark side. Thus Lumby can argue that we made “an unsubstantiated leap between what you can find on the internet if you actively go
looking for things like bestiality, and what teenagers actively enjoy looking at”.10
This is an astonishing statement. Does she believe that teenagers will only look at
what they ‘enjoy’ looking at? The rosy view of porn cannot admit that some young
people, like adults, experience intense and confusing emotions around sex and go
searching for things they know are taboo and may disgust and disturb them. Teenage
curiosity is enough to ensure that. We don’t enjoy looking at gory car crashes but we
can’t help ourselves as we drive past. Some people go out of their way to witness
blood and guts. And what do we do with the boys who simply ‘enjoy’ looking at
bestiality and rape sites? Do we respect their right to their own forms of sexual
expression? Are we not concerned if some boys view rape and bestiality as a simple
pleasure?
Lumby compares abhorrent material on the internet with “some pretty horrible stuff
written about women on the backs of toilet doors”. We collectively condemn ‘horrible
stuff’ written about women on toilet doors and take steps to remove it, so how its
existence can be used as a reason to do nothing about the more disturbing aspects of
porn is a mystery, especially when the emotional impact of graphic images of rape,
for example, on the internet is much greater than any words on a toilet door.11
When the problem has to be admitted, Lumby and fellow libertarians refuse to
acknowledge it as a social issue and put the responsibility onto parents. The answer is
an embarrassing conversations with our kids. For Lumby, parents, like porn itself, are
treated as an abstraction. Parents are wise and loving and awkward around sex. Oh to
be the proverbial fly on the wall when Catherine Lumby has to explain to her 12-year
old the picture that has just popped up on her computer screen: “Well, dear, when a
woman and a dog love each other very, very much …”
Albury and Lumby, along with Brisbane academic Alan McKee, frequently base their
credentials to comment on their participation in a major study of pornography that
they are undertaking with the support of an ARC grant. Yet they resolutely refuse to
consider the potential harms of internet porn. The tone of their commentaries is
precisely that used by the adult video industry – porn is for consenting adults at play,
porn is what the adventurous use when they want to spice up their sex lives. It can be
that; but it can be much more as well. You can see why any discussion of depictions
of sexualised violence or extreme fetishes is avoided or deflected. It is too threatening
to their worldview to look at these things in the face. A common attitude to porn is not
the only thing shared by these academics and the adult video industry. In a recent
issue of Eros , the glossy magazine of the adult industry, their ARC project is
described glowingly and Eros encourages its members to give the researchers every
support.
Similar observations might be made about the ABC’s Media Watch program fronted
by vocal ultra-libertarian David Marr. Marr seems to have been outraged at the
prominence given in the Sydney Morning Herald to our report on youth and
pornography and, by way of a series of phone calls and emails between myself and his
researcher, sought to find some media malpractice in the report or the reporting of it.
None could be found, but that did not prevent Marr making a series of innuendos
designed to suggest that our report and the Herald’s story had some hidden
conservative motive. As a long-time fan of Media Watch, this for me was a great
disappointment.
The ultra-libertarians, including Millet, Lumby, Albury and Marr, are so determined
to defend their sexual liberty that they have abandoned their critical faculties. The
defense of pornography and the commodification of sex that goes with it is driven by
an atavistic desire to hang on to freedoms won long ago and nowhere under serious
threat. This form of libertarianism is not embedded in any politics or social analysis.
The emotion underpinning it is the same one that underpins neoliberal economics. It is
a declaration of individualism in which the purpose of life is to maximise the number
and intensity of pleasurable episodes. Just as neoliberal economists find it hard to
concede that there may be ‘externalities’ associated with their economic rationalist
policies, ultra-libertarians resist any suggestion that there may be social damage
arising from unfettered access to any sort of sexual practice or sexual image, even for
children.
In a sense, Growth Fetish is a book about the morality of the market. Neoliberal
economics is justified by the idea of consumer sovereignty – the belief that only
consumers are in a position to decide what is in their own best interests. For the
libertarians, sexual morality can similarly be reduced to a simple rule of consent. Just
as we need to built a new sexual ethics, in Growth Fetish I argue that only in a post-growth society can we resolve the burning question of our age: ‘How can the longing
for self-determination be brought into harmony with the equally important longing for
shared community?’ 12
One thing is for sure: the answer to this question cannot be
found in the shopping malls and it cannot be found in indiscriminate sex.
References
1 Executive Director, The Australia Institute. Tel: 02 6249 6221.
2 Although similar critiques of liberal feminism had been made by other feminists.
3 Michael Flood and Clive Hamilton, Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects, Discussion Paper Number 52, The Australia Institute, 2003
4 Jensen, R. and Dines, G. 1998, The content of mass-marketed pornography. In Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, and Ann Russo. (eds). Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (pp. 65- 100). New York: Routledge, p. 72
5 Andrew Hussey, ‘The democracy of the sex shop’, AFR 27 September 2002 (originally published in New Statesman).
6 As reported by Andrew Hussey, ‘Liberte, fraternite, pornographie’, The Weekend Australian February 22-23 2003. (Check original)
7 Atomised, p. 136
8 Guardian Weekly, May 8-14 2003, p. 14
9 Kath Albury, ‘Curious teenagers need to be informed about sex, not controlled’, Sydney Morning Herald, March 4, 2003.
10The Bulletin, March 18 2003
11The queen of this libertarian foolishness is The Australian’s resident wit Emma Tom, whose
relentless post-modern irony only displays a complete disconnection with the real world. She
complains that she never receives any unsolicited porn and believes that getting hold of ‘anything more
than standard newsagency tits’n’arse requires going right out of your way’. For her internet porn is
about ‘massive hooters’. Very droll
12Posed by Ulrich Beck, Democracy Without Enemies, Polity Press, Cambridge 1998, p. 7