Sometimes you read something so breathtaking in its wrongness that you’re reduced to incoherent spluttering. The Atlantic Magazine has been on quite a roll in producing that reaction in reasonable folks, with Lori Gottlieb’s dreadful “case for settling for Mr. Good Enough” (I responded here); Sandra Tsing Loh’s myopic assertion that since her marriage failed, no one else should bother (my response here); Hanna Rosin’s perverse misreading of the evidence to suggest that feminism is destroying men (my response here). But they’ve topped themselves with Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s dismal offering Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women.

It’s work-safe to read, but if you’re drinking a beverage, you may spray it over your keyboard in exasperation. Vargas-Cooper, like the proverbial blind squirrel finding the occasional nut, gets a few things right — and almost everything else wrong. And she’s “wrongest” in her hopelessly antiquated interpretation of male sexuality. She begins with this entirely undocumented assertion: porn doesn’t plant (ideas) in men’s minds; instead, porn puts the power of a mass medium behind ancient male desires… Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Says who? Men have always wanted to ejaculate on the faces of their female partners? Really? Show me one shred of evidence, Natasha. She’s got it completely back-to-front. Porn creates at least as it much as it reflects. The great lie is always that we’re too smart — or too hard-wired — to be influenced by culture. Were that true, none of us would be susceptible to advertising. (Most of us think everyone else is susceptible to its charms, but we are immune. That’s the kind of unjustified self-overestimation that advertisers love, because it gives us all a false sense of agency.)

It gets worse:

Yes, (sex) is a natural, human function, and one from which both partners can derive enormous pleasure, but it is also one largely driven by brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges.

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.

Never mind that even Freud recognized how much of our sexuality was malleable, and conditioned by culture. Vargas-Cooper makes the same mistake that Robert Jensen, a writer I respect but with whom I disagree, made with his memorable aphorism that “porn tells lies about women, but tells the truth about men.” Much of pornography marketed to men (but by no means all) is aggressive and hostile towards women; humiliation of a woman and male arousal are linked (as in the tremendous popularity of the sex-by-deception genre). But that doesn’t mean porn tells an essential truth about men. It tells us what they’ve been conditioned to want. Men in the Seventies expected their porn stars to be richly endowed with pubic hair; by the 2000s, they expected to see perfectly waxed genitalia. So which is the “truth” about men? That they want hair on women or not? Did some great shift happen in men’s essential nature between 1980 and 2010 that radically transformed their tastes? Or were those tastes shifted by cultural forces? Common sense and the evidence at hand suggests that porn creates and shapes desires rather than merely depicting what men have always wanted.

As a man, I was taught to connect sex and aggression. I was taught that my pleasure needed to be connected to my capacity to remain in control, and that to remain in control, I needed to dominate. I was taught that by boys on the playground, I was taught that in literature, I was taught that in the first porn I saw more than three decades ago. I’ve often quoted Timothy Beneke’s remark that there is no phrase in English that allows one to connect male lust and humanity. From the time we’re small boys, we’re taught to dissociate ourselves from our sensitive side, from our emotional side, from anything that seems feminine. When we cry, we’re mocked as “girls” or called “faggots”. When we’re older, and we talk about being in love with our girlfriends, we’re told we’re “pussy-whipped.” The message is clear: a real man demonstrates his masculinity by doing what he can to drive a wedge between sexuality and empathy. Vargas-Cooper might agree. But where she falls down is in her claim that this violence is encoded in our maleness, written so deep that culture and civilization can only momentarily obscure the lurking misogyny. We may dress as sheep, but we are all destined to be wolves, or so she claims; women had better be prepared to be eaten, and not in the good way. Continue reading →