TAO + PORN

I googled this unlikely combination and found a wealth of valuable thinking.  Of course, I’m more a Taoist than I am Christian anyway, unless you mean expertise in Taoist writings.  I just mean I depend on “felt” concepts as much as books/authorities.  The head of the google list (after the paid entry) was  http://thetaobums.com/  where there are ongoing discussions.  Almost everyone posting is male.  Interestingly, one of the most vivid voices is a handsome man from Portugal, a most “macho” country.  I would not have expected a Taoist there. 

In ten minutes of cruising these are the issues relevant to thinking about porn that I found:

addiction

separation from other human beings

feeling bad about oneself

bad practices in the industry (victimization of the actors)

cultural pressure to feel badly about it

being out of control of oneself

bad karma

illusion

prevents satisfaction of the “real” hunger -- it’s a diversion, a symptom, a means

being controlled by underlying biology (esp. male/female)

The goal of Taoism, as I understand it, is both freedom and harmony.  “We” (Americans) tend to find these two mutually exclusive, to assume that freedom must amount to fighting our way out of confining circumstances, like being born, and that this struggle means foregoing safety because growth comes from risk rather than harmony.

There is nothing I saw in the Taoist discussion about “writing about illegal sexual activity” because the guide is not in written law.  Rather the guide is within the “felt” world of the person and its effect on that person’s behavior.  This is not about police coming to knock on your door and impound all your copies of Playboy or Playgirl.  This is about waking up in the morning feeling “icky” (their word), regretful, and sore.  It’s about being out of control, avoiding reality by settling for illusion.  

If one is happily perusing photos or videos or whatever even though they might shock your neighbors, then there’s just nothing wrong with it.  If one is creating it without damage to oneself or others, then it’s simply another art form.

These Taoist discussers do understand that porn is an aid to wanking.   It IS arousing.  That’s the POINT.   But what’s wrong with being aroused?  It’s the behavior that results that counts.  Maybe a guy is a sperm donor in a small closet, trying to get his wife pregnant in vitro, or maybe he’s a donor for commercial purposes.  In this use porn is more often images than words.  Top of the google list I got (you might not get the same list since it’s controlled by algorithms) was a Chinese company marketing a detector of image porn for the purpose of censoring.  The opium of the masses.  Male, anyway.   First: porn, second: control.

The omissions in this discussion are obvious: women and children.  Pornography, when it is illegal and based on illegal activity, includes the categories of women and children only as objects and victims -- not buyers and users.  Their experiences and opinions are ruled out. There’s porn for women (euphemized as romance) but few write about the eroticism of children, which can be extinguished and distorted by using them for the pleasure of adults, esp. when there is physical control and, inexcusably, pain and fear -- big oppressing little.  

The advantage of pornography as image or writing is that it eliminates the element of disease.  Disease makes the passive person powerful in a covert way.  The spirochetes and viruses that thrive in the sensitive tissues of a human being don’t care about motive or gender or strength or privilege.  All it takes is contact in order have revenge.  STD’s can be passive, undetectable, and a time-bomb.  But they add risk and some who pursue violent or commercial sexual contact find that an advantage, an added element.  The false friend of sexwork is the fatalistic conviction that one’s life is short -- that it doesn’t matter what one does.  Flirting with danger, adrenaline-surfing, is part of the deal. 

Danger is in opposition to porn, which is valuable because it is “safe.”   But a secondary thrill would come from secrecy, the feeling of privileged access.  No “skin in the game” if it’s a quiet exchange of money for paper stimulation, little risk of detection by disapproving significant others, like wives or parents.  No passing on diseases to them.  Displacement to writing, video, photos, the telephone, thus is safer but less stimulating unless -- like any addiction -- there begins to be escalation.  More outrageous, more secret, more strange tales -- like ordinary media stories -- are pursued because they keep the customer present and paying.  Part of that will be customers who try to make the illusion become reality by finding the person portrayed or writing -- even though they might not be living anymore.  Of course, some people might welcome hookups, either commercial or not.

The Tao attitude would be that porn is not essentially morally wrong, but that it can interfere with the reality of being in the world, of recognizing one’s relationship to all other existence.  It can prevent constructive intimacy with other people.  The judging of porn would require personal internal “felt” results within the terms of one’s own life -- not the scrutiny of laws that are written and rewritten to fit a whole category of people, and that require constant rewriting.  “Law & Order SVU” provides a steady stream of case studies in which written laws may or may not provide justice.  It’s harder to find dramatized narrative exploration of Taoist points of view outside of the therapeutic and self-improvement websites.  They tend to become exercises in the supernatural, like mind-readers or angels who intervene.  And then there are the bodice-rippers, hardly realistic.

Taoists have no difficulty understanding that sex is only part of life as a whole, even that humans are only part of this planet as a whole.  This reduces the need for porn, allows people to take delight in many things -- including each other -- without oppressions and exploitations.  The attitudes and structures of the rule-defined, power-based world allow the compartmenting of porn by stigmatizing and criminalizing.  Then it doubles back to justify confinement, punishment, exclusion and and even torture that increases the level of suffering in the world.  It supports rather than interdicting addictions like drugs or alcohol.  It ghettoizes polyamorous, same-sex relationships, and supports strange practices like body surgery, either on genitals or faces, or fetish objects.

Worse than that, so long as we obsess about porn with the idea of suppressing or eliminating it, the economic and political forces that push people into desperate actions in order to survive never get addressed.  That preoccupation is as much of an addiction as the porn itself.  Of course, smart porn purveyors know that if it becomes legal and accepted, the money will go out of it.  One of the uses of religion is to generate the kind of stigma that produces profit.

Interestingly, the generation born since maybe 1990 has already made a cultural shift towards Tao thinking.  There are some people who suggest that Jesus himself was an instinctive Taoist or Zen person whose ideas were captured by the Roman Empire and exploited into an instrument of control.  The impulses of Tao came back into the US through Transcendentalist and later “Aquarian” surges of thought.  They are always there, organic and immanental rather than dependent on “otherworldly” or supernatural sources as captured by institutions.  The Pope must always be on guard against the planet.