IS "CALL THE MIDWIFE" PORNOGRAPHY?

This is a doll.

Pornography as defined by our current American culture must struggle with its assumptions of what the taboos are.  As it turns out, you can get as nude as you want, so long as you wear a condom.  The sub-groups, sometimes covert, have been captured by youngsters, so that once-shocking just-out-of-combat S/M has devolved into trendy corsets, pinching and poking, plus a little bondage with clothesline or a pony crop.  At least that’s what it appears to me, but what do I know?  I’m outside all this, which to many people makes my opinions totally useless.

But it also frees me from assumptions and lets me be provocative.  So I will take advantage of that to claim that “Call the Midwife” is pornographic.  This opinion won’t damage their fans — it will attract more.  People are tired of conventional porn or they wouldn’t be watching those “Shades of Gray” and perverse murder series.  In fact, our whole Western society is having to radically reframe our understanding of the ideas clustered around coitus and flesh.  

We now know which molecules cause arousal, what the tissue consequences are, where the germ cells must go and what they do when they get there.  Maybe a few laggards still haven’t figured out that a vagina is internal, a vulva is external, and a clitoris is much more than the little tender button.  The interactions of drugs are known and not nearly so magical as was hoped, not even Viagra.  It’s the social and emotional elements that make intercourse magical, and these are the elements that also create and feed the stories on “Call the Midwife.”

Childbirth, which is the obvious continuation and consequence of the sex act, was once a matter of life and death.  Because of that it was surrounded with as much fantasy as the idea of a Muslim warrior being greeted in Paradise by all those virgins.  They were sentimental assurances to keep people doing what their culture wanted them to do.  Sentimental meaning knee-jerk conventions about what a mother might feel about giving birth and the consequences of an infant in the household, even one that has enough wealth and skill to sustain a new human being.  (Sometimes I’m tempted to write a satire about the Ayatollah trying to manage his young, obstreperous and flighty horde of virgins who want things, but aren’t sure what they are.  They brandish catalogs.)

“Call the Midwife” lifts up the act of childbirth to the level we normally expect of filmed “love-making.”  That is, the red-faced rictus grimaces are extreme versions of someone having an orgasm, complete with gripping the pillows and making rhythmic sounds.  Instead of one partner present, there are one or two nurse/nuns investigating the perineum which is never shown, which is also a convention in some porn.  (There’s no breast-feeding in this show, though women claim it may be the most truly erotic act of their lives.)  There is an almost jealous concern that a male not be present, unless he is a doctor.  Doctors have the ultimate privilege, the total access of lovers and husbands, in spite of never having babies if they are male.  The more money, the more access; the more access, the more money.

As though I were male, I’ve not given birth nor have I observed a birth, except animal birth.  Even that is impressive.  The whole idea of one animal coming out of the guts of another is shocking, a sci-fi seeming event that needs the mythic meaning element, the ritualistic understanding of “boil water,” the proper presentation, the moment before the infant begins to breath on its own.  (“Call the Midwife” never strikes a baby to make it cry.  They rub the back and use a rubber tube to clear the airways.)

On this show few mothers die, all babies are “beautiful,” and Christian ideas dominate because, after all, the nurses are either nuns or living with nuns.  During my chaplaincy in preparation for ministry, I was discouraged from visiting the infant ICU because I was Unitarian and therefore didn’t talk about God’s plans for babies.  Faulty or incomplete babies were there: babies with guts outside their bodies or their backs incomplete so that their spines were exposed.  Some of them were so premature as to teeter on the edge of survival and no one knew whether they would ever be complete.

One woman gave birth to a seemingly complete baby that was faulty inside and died.  It was because of her drinking and she knew it, but no one discussed that.  Instead the whole focus was baptizing the baby so it could go into Heaven.  But Catholic dogma at the time — and all chaplains were obliged to observe the dogma of the faith of the patient — forbade the baptizing of a dead baby.  It would go to Limbo.  The priest reasserted this.  The woman was very poor and often had to depend on the charity of her church, so she didn’t want to be defiant.  But she INSISTED that the baby be baptized.  

Someone in her family brought an elegant white christening gown.  The head nurse on that ward was Catholic and the church rules allow any believing Catholic to administer sacraments in the absence of a priest.  So one night she quietly baptized the baby, saying she could not leave a child on the stairs waiting for the Golden Gates to admit it to Heaven.  

Everything was fine then, except that they were all mad at me, holding me responsible.  I was safe to blame.  The exception was the mother, who took me into her confidence.  In her culture, the tradition was to give money to a new mother and her visitors had been doing exactly that.  She showed me the little hoard of bills in her pillowcase with great satisfaction.  Then I understood.  

“Call the Midwife” is not so direct about the religious rules of childbirth.  The nuns are Anglican, a more elastic system developed within English life.  Screenwriters are the “theologians” and they choose their dogmas carefully.  We see no love-making.  A few Golden Rules contain the hatred and destruction.  The nuns still sing praise.  Immigrants are treated gingerly.

The actor who plays the doctor and the doll who plays a baby.

The most shocking story might be about biology gone berzerk, partly because it is addled by technology: the story abut the thalidomide baby, which was made vividly horrifying by a babydoll of exquisite accuracy, even capable of movement.  I couldn’t help thinking of sex dolls.  Evidently there is a minor industry creating artist’s dolls which evolved out of artists using high technology of materials and molds to make super-realistic replicas of people, but perhaps out-of-scale so that an infant could fill a whole room.  Or maybe the artist makes only a head but as big as a room.

Giant head by ?

These are challenges meant to jog us out of assumptions and to think more deeply about what matters, what is possible, what consequences might come about from what seems delightful and private.  Granted, “Call the Midwife” is sort of gender-assigned porn, because they are female flights of fantasy about something males may impose arbitrarily, a way of softening something that carries pain, blood, and change.  Should it be stigmatized?  Should it be included in junior high sex education classes?

EAST SLOPE INDIGNATION

Looking at magazine-type websites is something I do when the rest of my day’s writing is finished and ready to post that night at bedtime.  Sometimes I reply to Aeon which has Aussie roots but lives in the vicinity of the Templeton leafy world in England.  Recently they published an article about land ownership by a young Montana woman.  I was offended.  The problem with this upper-class, educated set of people is that are always unknowingly offensive when they venture out of their own circle.  (The same goes for me.)  What they see from their perimeter is all mapped monoliths but the world is made of sand, and geology is crucially various.

The writer, who is living in Missoula — the humanities university which has now become fodder for a Krakauer exposé — made a pitch for common ownership of land.  She lives in the Flathead Valley across the Rockies from me but her family once homesteaded in Geraldine on the High Line which means a lot to her, a point of pride that dates back to 1900.  My location and emotional attachment are on the East Slope of the Rockies, an ecotone that underlies the Blackfeet Reservation.  (In Canada the Blackfoot Reserve; to the Siksika the remnant of a great gyring culture that circled  the prairie behind the buffalo.)

I told her — intemperately because I’m not a temperate woman when it comes to my heartlands — that the next person who said the mountains were “beautiful” and paired that with “hardship” was gonna get socked.  I called them “echo words”.  Hallmarkian exhalations of the tour leader pointing out features.  If some Blackfeet crusader goes on about saving the Badger-Two Medicine or Sid Gustafson, in his new book called simply “Swift Dam”, were to talk about the sacred land, I would agree but step away from the agonizing over Euro-abuse.  (Headquarters in Missoula.)

My view is geological and cosmological.  Tectonic, volcanic, sedimentary, and apparent only over the aeons.  (Ironic.)  When I drove back from the laundromat in Cut Bank the other day, there was just enough snow left to limn the huge ledges created when uplifting the continental crust from the cellar of the world.  That is, the buckling collision of two tectonic plates, one under the Pacific and one under what used to be a great sea from here to the midwest, which is what deposited the zillions of minutias that created the broken layers.  This uplifting is technically called “exhumation” but the editor where I sent a query said that was too grim.  After all, the mountains are beautiful.  She took the word out, shuddering.  It just means lifting humus, earth.  Echo: human, humility.

These Rockies are the third cordillera to rumple up out of the continent and they say that the underlying pressure, unbelievably deep, creates a kind of ringing that some people or some instruments can feel.  From the side they look like a silhouette, just the top edge making a line.  From an airplane they look like an unmade bed, rumple after rumple.  Peter Matthiessen advised me at a writers’ workshop sponsored by Missoula professors that I should not use small domestic words and images for phenomena so grand and overwhelming.  (I had said buffalo have purple mouths like chow dogs.)  I do it anyway.  Matthiessen is dead — he was old-school, wonderfully so, but still from my father’s generation that so venerated explorers, even if they risked being cannibalized.  Buddha and atahuasca were his edge.  They’re not mine, but I respect them because they are cosmic.

Bob Marshall Wilderness from the air

The land on the east slope is tilted up (or down from an eastern perspective) so that when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago, the melt water all ran out through the Mississippi drainage, creating a doomed port for New Orleans where the Euros landed their sea-going ships and boarded flat bottom boats that could steam upstream to Fort Benton, the farthest north they could go because of the great ledge of limestone left by the ancient sea.  It was far enough north to get them into Blackfeet country.

Fort Benton was where the first Indian agency was located.  That was where the first governor disappeared overboard, drunk again.  That is still where there are public monumental bronzes by Bob Scriver and the replicated fort houses a gallery of his Blackfeet bronzes.  This is where the roots of the Baker Massacre took hold in the family feud of Malcolm Clarke, an intemperate man who married a Blackfeet woman, whose even more intemperate renegade relatives murdered him.  The Clarke children feature large in the politics of the Blackfeet ever since.  Particularly the fact that the cavalry sent to punish the bad guys ended up exterminating an innocent peaceful band instead.

Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea

You can't see baby Pomp from this angle.

The white cliffs along the Missouri, a tributary of the Mississippi, are limestone, just like the White Cliffs of Dover.  Tour guides on float trips point them out and they provoke the imaginations of Euros who see castles and cities.  I don’t know what the Blackfeet saw.  They didn’t care much for boats.  Nor did they long to climb mountains except to go to a high place for a dream induced by thirst and staring at the sun.  (Don’t do that — you’ll go blind.)

The east slope is harsh in intervals because the Rockies make warm winds (catabatic) that come sweeping along, creating fifty degree temperature sheers.  They have a definite edge.  I recall stepping out of the van in Babb and feeling warm on one leg, cold on the other.  It strips the snow down to grass, but not so far east as Geraldine, I think. Geraldine crushes homesteads because of lack of water — not low temps and wind.

Geraldine, MT

One morning you look at the mountains and see a second range of piled up clouds that rise up in a “storm shelf,” hanging there while dropping water on the Flathead Valley.  Overhead there is a great blue arc of sky where the high altitude wind pushed back the clouds — it’s called a Chinook arch.  Sometimes a contrail from a Malmstrom cargo plane has passed across in a straight line.  Depending on where the sun is, it may glow like neon, or just be chalk.

My friend Barrus has a problem with Aeon’s treatment of pornography.  His relationship with the human body is far deeper and more multiple than that of most of us.  It comes from experience, not just humping customers or setting their responses on fire by depicting forbidden acts.  He’s done those things, but far more of his life has been washing autistic children and teens who have dirtied themselves with excrement or vomit, treating the terrible afflictions of those who have no immune defense because of HIV, calming the drug-deranged, and clasping hard against his own chest the bodies of boys threatening suicide.  What taught him was the great plague of AIDS in SF where lovers eased each other through death, a tribe of Charons who knew about flesh.

To him pornography is not just a literary money-making project — though that as well — but a glimpse of the abyss inside every human aware of living on this fractally broken and potentially erupting world.  How can we kiss each other when the whales are dying stuffed with our plastic?  How can we say the mountains are “beautiful” and “harsh” when at their foot people are suffering “pornographically” because of sanctions and limitations and stigmas that come from the rest of us?  All these mixed with fantasies of intimacy, specialness.  It’s a very real question.  One might say “religious.”

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.

JESUS & PORNOGRAPHY

Since the issue of sex comes up so much and since the internet has changed the terms of pornography so much (so much more available, so much more vivid, exotic and scary) I thought I’d put in 1,000 word’s-worth.  In some ways I don’t believe in pornography.  In other ways, I see it everywhere.

www.apologetics.com has the motto “Challenging believers to think and thinkers to believe.”  Apologetics are a sub-category of theological thought that tries to reframe the previously writing-prescribed church theology when it no longer fits the reality of the present.  For instance,  this quote is from http://www.apologetics.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=67643

“The literal definition of “pornography,” comes from the combined meaning of the two components, pornea which means “forbidden sexual behavior,” (Biblically verifiable) and grapho which means “to write.”

So “pornography” is, literally, writings about forbidden sexual behavior. By extension it includes photographs and movies about forbidden sexual behavior. Let us be sure we understand: it is not “writing about sex” that is illicit; it is writing about “forbidden sex,” that is wrong. The Scriptures use the word "pornea" to define illegal sexual activity.”

This reflection on “pornography” uses this definition as a starting point.  There are two categories (porn + graph) at issue here.  I’ll take the last one first, though I’m a little distracted by the idea of “graphoporn.”  Isn’t there a kind of pornography of writing itself, elevating a common act like writing into something glamorous and privileged, which is the strategy of commercial sex porn?  Or otherwise illegal to publish, like government secrets?  At the heart is money, right?  Well -- we’re quickly taking the money out of writing so it’s less pornie all the time.

I googled “sex and Jesus” which brought up all sorts of things, including the apologetics site above and one I quote below:  http://www.religioustolerance.org/sex_jesu.htm#  

“Jesus is recorded as having made only four direct comments that might be interpreted as relating to sexual behavior.

Matthew 5:31-32 states:
“It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." (KJV)  

Matthew 19:9 states similarly:

"And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery."  (KJV)

Here, Jesus prohibits divorce, except in a case of sexual misconduct -- "porneia" in the original Greek. Various versions of the Bible have translated "porneia" as adultery, fornication, unchastity, unfaithfulness or marital unfaithfulness. Jesus here deviated from Jewish law, which said that a man could freely divorce his wife.

Mark 10:11-12 states:

"...Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

Luke 16:18 states:

"Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery."

These gospel writers record Jesus as having taken a different stance on divorce. He said that it is unacceptable for any reason at all. 

These statements are about legal matters, normally the business of Caesar rather than the church, though today’s church in the Christian tradition claims parallel jurisdiction and “Caesar” permits it.  Let the church scribes keep the records and the responsibility for propriety.  Usually, Jesus doesn’t interfere, although later when he says his followers should “forsake all others” he defies the claims of church, state and family.  When he protects prostitutes, he acts on principle rather than laws.  He does NOT define them as porniea.  (Some would claim that prostitution protects marriage.)  He always seeks to protect the poor, the outcast, and the diseased, conditions which press people into sexwork.  There is enough evidence in the “gospels” that were not accepted by the church patriarchs (the Apocrypha) to persuade some people that Jesus had a male lover.  It is OTHER parts of the Bible that are quoted to condemn same-sex relationships and then only males.

  

It seems clear that “porniea” is a legal category relating to the state of marriage, which controls economics, lines of inheritance (the importance of a woman being inseminated by only one man so that his bloodline is continued), and -- in cultures that see wives as belongings -- property.  Fertile sex-acts outside marriage mess up inheritance, though many narrative plots (including the Old Testament) rely on regularizing what are technically bastards.  Any force that shakes up the legal status quo can be heretical and pornographic in its writing, even feminism.  (I’m not talking about same sex acts, but rather about stepping outside marriage.)

The biggest “porniea” now (and I think Pope Francis I would agree with this) is not prostitution but the challenge to ideas of conception and family patterns.  In vitro conception; multiple mothers; DNA proof of fatherhood; single or multiple or same sex families based on nurturing instead of biology or legal status; the definition of when a fetus becomes a person -- all these and more have challenged everything previously assumed.  Our understanding of homosexuality, gender identification, maturation, brain function and so on have also challenged the legal definition of marriage, which in view of the multiple religions in the United States, is less and less related to church views because of the problem of determining WHICH church.

Since the biological understanding and management of sex is so radically changed since two millennia ago, then we must go to Jesus’ principles of behavior rather than legal definitions, which is the brilliant shift Jesus made anyway.  This is why it’s so hard for the Supreme Court to define what pornography is -- it’s hard to define marriage.  It has become a category based on cultural proprieties instead of principle.  Common law marriage is literally common behavior.

What would I see as an alternative?   First, I would move the definition of “marriage” out of the legal realm and into the biological/psychological context since that is the origin of the confusion.  That’s what’s changed so drastically.  I would define “marriage” as something more like “bonding”, a state of commitment that doesn’t depend on gender, age, nationality, skin color, or even species -- though that last is taking it a bit too far unless you’re talking about swans.  Still, some people bond with dogs or horses.  It is a brain phenomenon that supports mutual protection and shared goals.  Excellent for the raising of families, but not necessarily even physical in the sense of coition.  I would reduce the legalities of marriage to the status of contracts, “pre-nups” about things like money management, residence and process of termination.   Enforce THAT and really do it. How then does one detect “bonds of marriage”?  Behavior -- what is loving and nurturing indicates a bond.  This is like the common law definition of marriage.

Jesus was addressing divorce, but I don’t know of any biological/psychological research that defines an end to bonding, which can persist even after death.  (There is a lot of work done on grief and trauma, which might be helpful.)  Clearly Jesus objects to anything that disrupts a bonded marriage, no doubt including economics.  He does not say whether lust interferes with or supports emotional pair-bonds.  He doesn’t address sex as a bodily act one way or another.  Nor does he talk about children.  If we’re talking about writing that challenges pair-bonds, one has to admit that Jesus himself recommends leaving one’s family and marriage partner -- Jesus as pornographer.  The pornography of the Gospels.

The main strategy of Christian theology is to separate human conventional phenomena from “higher” mystical participation in another world, a “felt” connection beyond any earthly terms.  One marries God.  (Of course, the Church claims IT is the bride, which is a kind of pornography because it reduces mysticism to a set of written bureaucratic rules.)  If one is in a predominantly Christian culture and committed to it, then this discussion and the other websites that relate to it (just google “Jesus + sex”) will be meaningful and possibly help to guide behavior without hurting other people or oneself.

  

So now I’m going to google “Tao + Pornography” and see what I find.  

ALL THE VARIOUS PORNS

Among my bookmarked pages is one called “bookshelf porn.” (bookshelfporn.com) It’s all photos but none of the shelves are naked. I don’t dare look for long or I get feverish.

Word roots: “porne” comes from Greek for prostitute and graphic comes from “graphein” to write. Pornography is a concept that baffles even the Supreme Court. Clearly it is supposed to be about pleasure. (How is being a prostitute a pleasure?) Clearly something is supposed to be TOO pleasant, so much so that it has to be controlled by stigma, the imposition of social taboo and scorn. (People here sneer at my books. “Get a life,” they say.) Money is involved -- money paid for something that one ordinarily thinks of as a gift (intimate expression of love) or an assault (unwanted forceful penetration). (“You gotta lotta bucks in these books.”) So, a monetary transaction that is pleasant on one side and profitable on the other. Well, heck, that’s life, isn’t it? So much so that we can talk about “food porn” or “fashion porn” -- almost anything that seems a little too pleasant and a little too expensive, offending two Puritan taboos at once.

What was up with those guys anyway? Did life have to be one long hairshirt? Isn’t that “prudery porn”? “Asceticism porn”? That stuff can get to be pretty expensive, especially emotionally. If porn is just skimming the top off of the real full-scale experience, like eating the frosting off a cupcake, then I can imagine the thrill of sitting on the Seat of Scorn. (It’s in Psalm One -- I looked it up.) But is that the full-scale experience of denying, constricting, censoring? (I’m starting to sound like a character out of “Homicide.” Oh, hey. Maybe the full version of scorn is murder. I’m onto something.)

Part of the problem with porn is knowing where to locate the source. Is it in society, who seems to believe they have the right to draw the line, maybe by confining all the merriment to Merrymount? (Historical reference. Look it up.) Or is it in the consumer, who doesn’t want all the fuss and bother of having to develop full-scale relationships in order to have sex ? (Why is it always about sex? Why isn’t it about money? Or politics?) Or is it in the producer, who has a shrewd idea of what to “make” that will sell?

Of course, once the commerce angle gets into it, there is the question of high-end porn versus low-end porn, which immediately means that there are class issues in this business, just like every business. Aesthetics may be one dimension -- how skillful and beautiful the porn is. How much power can entitle the consumer to do the most extreme thing that is even more stigmatized, like the eroticism of killing small animals or even human beings -- the “kill thrill.” (Maybe only governments are entitled to that.) Isn’t that young man just arrested for killing homeless men (his own father is homeless) indulging in “murder porn”? Homeless men is pretty low-end. What about the guy just arrested for killing society girls in Caribbean resorts? Is that high end?

The environmental listservs to which I subscribe have just begun to consider “enviro porn.” The class issue pertains here, too, because some people can afford to visit exotic spots, but I responded to the idea right away because tourists of all incomes come here, spot a snow-capped mountain, and sigh, “Oh, how beautiful!” They are conditioned by National Geographic in much the same way as naive men are conditioned by Playboy. (Sex is blonde sixteen-year-old girls on the pill.)

Personally, I’m susceptible to “shelter porn”, not so much the log/plateglass/corten-steel ridged-roof, stone mansions of rich people in Montana, but more the country cottage that’s a little rough, a little unexpected. Maybe a converted old railroad station. Not that I could or would BUY something, but that I like the pretty pictures -- isn’t that the same as porn? There’s a wide streak of Puritanism in the environmental movement, too, and they would insist on the ecological soundness of every aspect. Is it possible to have porn without Puritans? Is every context veined with sin and virtue? Isn’t there any just plain vanilla innocent life?

Alongside -- or maybe interwoven -- the continuum of money and class is the continuum of drugs and criminalization. It’s not a neat inclined plane but a twisted synergy of teasing, addiction, enslavement, that comes as much from the assumptions and practices of those who criminalize (using a Puritan entitlement) and stigmatize the most vulnerable on that continuum they can find (those who need the drugs because of their wretched lives) -- and dine out with the sleek beneficiaries of the criminalizations. (politicians, CEO’s, police commissioners) Then comes disease and the medicalization of sin, which provides even more stigma plus greater exclusion and blame. (“You aren’t taking your meds, are you?”) And that leads into more blame for poverty because every profit of some individuals has to go for meds that are sold at a huge markup by pharm corporations. (Since corporations have been ruled to be persons, they can be murderers, too.)

Writers have to take some responsibility for this. They love the plot elements of all-of-the-above for their own pornographic versions of real life. Even the writers who hope to be true and revolutionary end up repeating the same old stereotypes because if they really knew through their own experience, they would not be in a position to write. Nor am I. Everything is second-hand. If you’re talking about sex and drugs.

But I’m talking about life. Sex and drugs are not separate categories of being. Our ordinary days, our little management habits in the worlds of food, clothing, and transportation, are also tracking along the same paths. My bookshelves may be as pornographic as any. A carpenter once expressed horror that they are so poorly made. (Knocked together boards that I carried around for decades.) Someone else noted how dangerous they are, since they’re just piled up there, not attached to the wall. In fact, they have a tendency to bow out at the sides. I keep a long clamp on one so it won’t separate enough to dump the shelves of books. Very low-end this is. (The clamp makes a good radio antenna, too.)

I have books that would shock some people, though would have to be people who read since not many of them have pictures. A few expensive ones. Drugs, they are. Don’t get me started on the kind of work I’ve had to do to survive in this world and that have pressed me into rebellion. It wasn’t sexy. But I had my pleasures.

Pornography/prostitution are metonymes, the kind of metaphor that uses the part for the whole (like "skirt" to mean woman). Reading about it, paying for bits about it, instead of IT. I do know a thing or two about the continuums of religious porn. If you extend one of those lines out far enough it will reach around the planet back to the beginning, like the equator. After church one Sunday a nerdy guy came into my office and said, “A minister is meant to attend to my needs. I need sex. Therefore, you should go to bed with me.”

I stood up. I was a foot taller than he was. I said, “Well, as a minister I’m pretty low rent, but I charge a helluva lot more to be the Temple Whore.” He left. I had a lot of bookshelves in that office. I built them myself.

SEXUAL "GAME" -- how times change

http://www.youtube.com/user/kanyewestvevo?blend=2amp;ob=4#p/u/0/L7_jYl8A73g

The music video above shows a pop singer, a black man, picking up on the “black swan” trope in a very stylish way.  He’s formally dressed, standing up from an elegant dinner party where his partner was evidently an extravagantly costumed black woman, to go to a white piano where he plinks out a call to a bevy of black cygnets.  The song is evidently a warning to them.  I know next to nothing about pop music or Kanye West etc.  so I can’t tell you more than that.  It appears to me that this vid is about urban surface wealth, ego, and what is being called “game” as in the sex games between men and women now that marriage and stigma are out of the way.  

In fact, it’s a sort of illustration of the recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Hard Core.”   http:://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/   Natasha Vargas-Cooper gives us the feminist “facts” about sex with only personal boundaries, and the tough reality that men want only sex and are willing to be aggressive.  In fact, to her this is the essence of maleness, which she approaches through porn, marked as the worst stuff anyone can find on the Internet.  Pretty bad.  Her marker is penetration of a woman’s anus by two men at once.  (It always strikes me that such acts approach anatomical unlikelihood, but what do I know?)  Her bottom line is not that, but the cruelty, banality, and hopelessness of the search for intimacy through sex.  Except that she blames it on the narcissisism of men like the one Kanye is depicting or like the choreographer in “Black Swan.”

Anyway, here’s where I throw in my quick switch.  Last night I watched “Mrs. Henderson Presents” which is about the famous Windmill Theatre in London that featured nude tableaus, which were ruled works of art so long as nobody moved, and which became a symbol of cutting edge defiance in the face of vulnerability during WWII.  This covertly fascinated my father, so there were find-able accounts in our house when I was very young.  It was part of my father’s romance with nudity and innocent sex.  He would have loved this movie.  I did.

The girls were desperate for jobs, barely surviving the Big Depression, and they were nice girls, many from the countryside.  In fact, the DVD extras included a party for those women, now quite old but just as elegant as they ever were and totally unrepentant.  They spoke about how carefully protected they were.   Mrs. Henderson (who died in 1944) is portrayed by Judi Dench whose specialty is a kind of wise-child willingness to be open-eyed.  There is a sub-plot in which one of the girls is not participating in the culture-wide romance bonanza of WWII because she falls deeply in love with men she is fond of and the breakup is far too painful.   Mrs. Henderson tricks her into a relationship with a sweet young man who gets the girl pregnant, then goes back to his previous sweetheart.  She is killed by a bomb, which solves that plot dilemma.

But the REAL dilemma of love at the core of the tale is not even physical, not young, beautiful, nude or even caressing.  It is the meeting of more than minds -- shared enterprise?  World-view?  Soul-mates?  Oh, that’s going too far.  Mrs. Henderson is in love with her impresario, who “stirs her heart” as her wise friend notes, but circumstances like his pre-existing marriage, the class divisions, and even -- to some extent -- her totally committed marriage until the death of her husband, keep them from having anything but a business and friendship relationship.  It’s the TENSION of the yearning against the impossibility and the resulting driving of human emotion to the level of universals beyond social rules that makes this so intensely moving.  

It’s “game,” right enough, but at a far higher level than banging.  Hot, young, fast, and soon-over seems to be today’s style, including some kind of violence, but in the end it's about money.  This is media promotion for sales purposes.   In this context money is not in the Jane Austen bourgeois sense of comfortably stable income, but in the ostentatious nouveau riche sense of no limits -- especially on taste.  The ethic is “Wild Palms,” that deeply silly psuedo-tech series I just watched.  No woman too skinny, no house too vast.  (I DID like the clothes.)  And the ultimate greed is immortality as much as immorality.

That’s fine and maybe it fun to watch sitting here in this little village while the temp sinks below zero, but these are not quite what one had in mind for the behavior one’s own children -- which is, of course, why they’re so attracted to it.  

I do see the kind of greedhead narcissism and wretched excess that Natasha Vargas-Cooper rightly labels pornographic.  A formal Blackfeet Tribal Council member stopped through yesterday and we talked about the just-now-daylighting of sexual abuse of reservation tribal women.  (Again.  It’s something that cycles.  I mean, the abuse is constant -- the media attention cycles.)  He said that in the year he was on the council there were between two and three hundred cases of identified but unaddressed sexual abuse of women out of the population of 8,000 or so.  Probably there were twice as many unreported incidents, muddled up with drunkenness, incest and fatal accidents.

Even the Supreme Court agrees that pornography varies widely from place to place and time to time.  Restrictions are not quite like those on alcohol -- totally banning alcohol is hopeless but alcohol stays the same.  Porn changes all the time, more like designer drugs.  What ends up suppressed is not the porn itself but the stigma, taboo, and black-out over understanding the dynamics of “game.”  Not least among problems is the gap between generations.  Consider Mrs. Henderson counseling the girls in the dressing room by telling stories of her years in India.  

But how can there be anything other than a terrible chasm between the experience of women who would have been disgraced by sex out of wedlock and their choice among the possible mortality of childbirth, the impoverishment of raising children alone, lethal back-alley abortion, and avoiding sex altogether --  and the easy-going “let’s-start-with-sex” attitude of youngsters since the Pill.

It’s strange but true that the boys of Cinematheque who have survived through paid sex put a high value on tenderness and protection -- MORE than a hard core feminist writing for a high end mag in the US.

THE MEMBRANES: An attempt to redefine pornography

It’s very hard to think about pornography, not least because no two communities define it the same way.  We remember, not too long ago, when it was ankles that were shocking.  But arts for grownups in dignified places show people having sex and that’s not supposed to be pornography.   The definition depends very much on time and place and other circumstances.  Where is the moral center?  It must be in the human being.  Pets walk around with their apertures in plain sight and no one is aroused -- not even them, unless they’re in season or are poodles.

I propose this little conceit, this little idea that I have.  It’s about membranes, but membranes of consciousness, of identity.  Membranes are thin pliable wraparound tissues that surround and protect but also join one organ to another.  There’s one around the brain, one around the heart, one around the liver, one around the growing baby before it is born.  When you cut open an animal -- yes, I have, because of hunting and being married to a taxidermist -- the space inside is orderly and silvery with these membranes. The key pattern here is the membrane around the growing baby, the one that is full of “water” -- the amniotic fluid because that membrane is called the amnion -- which must be torn open either in the process of birth or immediately afterwards or the baby will not be able to breathe.  The protection will become a suffocation.

The membrane of innocence is what protects the baby from the knowledge that it could be neglected at birth, left cold and unwrapped, maybe dropped or starved.  The baby doesn’t know this.  WE know this.  Tearing open this membrane of trusting care means death and we know it.  This is when a baby can be touched all over, MUST be cleaned, fed, dressed, wrapped, and -- hopefully -- soothed, stimulated, stroked, massaged without fear of sexuality.  The pornography of the infant is neglect unto death.   The infant is powerless.

Next is the membrane of emotion, when the child begins to be an interactor, wants to attract attention, smile into a face, and take care of others,  And yet the child is also playing with separation, feeling for the limits of bad behavior, throwing things on the floor, going too far, ripping clothes off.  So the parent preserves safety by interceding tactfully, making a buffer here, removing a sharp object there, and when the child has had enough exploration, becoming a soft warm harbor for sleep and song.  Now the membrane can be ripped open by the pornographies of rage, stony indifference, capricious limits, excesses of excitement or devouring.  Need one say that adult rape of either boy or girl is a rending, a destroying?  And yet if the membrane is too thick, too opaque for the child to break through, he may never have access to the feelings of others, may never energize his own creativity and freedom.

The membrane of eroticism is where things begin to be tricky.  Now the excitement and sensation escape from the flesh and move to the page, the silver screen, the flirtations of others, and all the other poetries that are not about muscles or blood flow, but rather about the interior of the brain.  When the metaphors take hold, the displacements and replacements and the place itself become significant and potent, maybe too much so.  The mind makes connections that are hard or even impossible to break, that come to visit, whirling through dreams and seizing the mouth, sucking at the eyes, boring into the ears.  Obsession.  Even this might not be a pornography unless there is formlessness, no way to make sense, no way to make a clearing in which to rest without killing the eroticism that is so much of the joy in life, the beauty and the dearness.  So again it is a question of tearing away the membrane and accepting the risk that is part of exploration always.

The membrane of generosity can be torn away early in our society.  Pay to play, bub.  One way or another.  But relationship is based on generosity and sexual generosity more than most other gives and takes.  The question is not so much equality -- not keeping score -- but a kind of dance of coming.

Four membranes:  Innocence,  then emotion, then eroticism, and finally generosity.

Now I’ve got a kind of hierarchy or levels going.  So I could say that a definition of pornography that is based on damage to the individual -- rather than the enforcement of community norms -- means anything that does damage at any of those levels.

If it destroys innocence wrongly, then it is porn.  If it overwhelms emotional readiness, then it’s porn.  If it is carelessly erotic, creating obsessions and displacements, then it’s porn.  If it is either stinginess or just wild dumping with no shape, then it’s porn.  What is porn has nothing to do with age or gender and not really much to do with the community, the culture.  This version is an attempt (a beginning) to define it in terms of the individual.  One person’s porn isn’t for someone else.  Might not even be erotic or edgy.  Might be laughable.

The fourth membrane is the strongest:  the membrane of our finitude, normally only pushed away or torn away by advanced age, mortal illness or battlefields.  The porn of loss is always punishing, a denial, an attempt to profit from fear.  Whether death is final, we just don’t know, but it is in two parts: the ends of things we know, one way or another, including other people, and our own end which we might see in spite of that protective membrane which we might in fact tear down or make into a rope.  All things end.  But there is this other conviction:  all ends are simply transformations.  We picture them as grisly, terrifying, but that’s only the rending of the membrane.  We’re back to the first membrane that protects the infant from knowing about the possibility of death, but now we know it in a different way.  We’ve already been transformed a million times.  What’s one time more?

In the end the pornography is sentimentality, denial, the diminishing of the life, the interruption of the necessary grieving.  Finitude teaches us that things should run their course, that we should live with joy in the moment.  That’s all I know so far.

WHAT ARE WE BANNING TO KEEP FROM KNOWING?

Today’s “books” are so different from what we used to call “books” that it’s hard to understand what “banning” them means. How does one burn an electronic book? How can it be suppressed at all? How can issues like pornography be pursued when books are no longer local, which is the locus of most obscenity laws for the simple reason that it’s different in different places? How can issues like political points of view be controlled when there are so many points and networks of transmission that efforts at interdiction simply call attention to what is supposed to be suppressed?

The change in the nature of “books” has been accompanied by such a radical change in the marketing of writing (what we used to call “publishing”) that content -- which is supposed to be what is banned -- is almost irrelevant. In some cases the banning has moved to the new focus of many censorship efforts: the author. Why ban books when one can ban authors? The most radical and effective way to silence dissent is to kill the speaker. Fatwa. One needn’t even pretend to read the books if the argument is that the author is just too wretched, heretical and obscene to be tolerated.

“Quills,” the movie based on the Marquis de Sade, vividly and wittily illustrates this phenomenon pitting content -- irrepressible and commercially profitable because so many people are avid to read it -- against that which certain interests are desperate to erase, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with the official reasons, more to do with elections and laws. It was not that de Sade was writing about sex in a offensive way -- it was that he accused those in control of idiocy and corruption. (At that point everyone was a little distracted by mass beheading. Why resent the upper classes when you can kill them all?)

It’s been fascinating to watch the Native American writers who were untouchable in the years when they were politically correct (and there was profit to be made from them) now being accused of obscenity a page at a time. When books were printed and bound volumes, they were condemned in those units. Now that people read excerpts and chapters, it is specific scenes, some only a page or two long, that are the cause of rejecting the whole book. James Welch Jr.’s book, “Fools Crow,” a conventional morality tale, is attacked on the basis of one dramatic set of paragraphs lining out the major illustration of the anti-hero’s immorality: he hides in a lodge where young women suffering from smallpox are sequestered, slides under their buffalo hides, and takes advantage of their naked and helpless state. Sherman Alexie, once an enthusiastic condemner of whites in feathers who write about Native Americans, claiming they were “stealing his heritage,” is now banned for writing about masturbation in YA books.

When I was teaching, there was a story going around -- evidently true -- about a school principal confronted with the sorts of issues in the paragraph above. Almost daily a parent would march in and attack some book in the school library. So this conscientious principal would promise to review the book, get it from the library and put it in his closet to wait until he had time to read it. When he moved on in a few years, some hapless person opened the closet door and was buried in the avalanche of books. This will not be a problem with ebooks: just hit delete. But why not censor at the point of objection? If one is offended, don’t read it. Of course, a lot of people are offended by the difficulty of mathematics and a certain part of education is learning things one doesn’t want to know.

Popular opinion suggests that dirty books sell better, but those who are experienced (I’m not, but I know people who are) suggest that this isn’t true. For one thing many consumers have gone to the image -- not sepia postcards of sinister men wearing nothing but socks with garters and doing things that experimenting children might think of, but videos that mix violence with graphic closeups. Tim Barrus suggests that today’s publishers are neither subtle nor leisurely enough to indulge in the irony of hoping books will be banned for the sake of publicity. Ray Stark, who with his wife wrote a witty pseudo-memoir of a porn queen, confided that they made only enough money for a nice vacation and it was such hard work that they really needed one. The real action now is not in suppression but in disclosure: government intrigues, corporate malfeasance, secret war negotiations and revisions. We’ve always known there was something going on. Leaks are the new pornography.

In a world where Wikipedia will tell you all the things that we used to try to look up in the dictionary (with very little luck), and supply graphic full-color illustrations of genitalia, death and money are still mysterious. In the end “banned books” have been crowded aside by TMI. The sweet-faced girl whose mother didn’t want her to read “Fools Crow” is fond of obscene ghetto-blaster music.

So what can “Banned Book Week” possibly be about now? The same things that most human strategies are about: class, prestige, control -- all more closely related to money than to sex. Our problem now is not how to get past guardians of decency at major publishing houses. Our problem is how to find the things worth reading, writing that tell the truth even if it has to be framed as a fantasy or a lie to protect the author. Printed books were a three-handed game: author, reader and intermediary supplier of capital to pay for printing and distributing the actual object. Then the poker game became crowded: critic, official regulator (especially at the international border since obscenity is local), marketing specialist, and corporate investor. Now the table is overturned and we’re back to only TWO intact players: author and reader, though some of us play solitaire.

Now it’s needle in the haystack. The new currency is time. The aggregator and the curator -- those who survey and sift -- are more important than ever but there's no money in it. The author writes in images and sound as much as print. No one can tell whether readers are lumping or splitting -- are they now content to read what the trendy media suggests, quite aside from issues of obscenity? Or are they putting up their own pickets in order to avoid what upsets them or seems dangerous? Are they reading to escape reality or to discover reality? What are we banning to keep from knowing?