No Taboo is Safe – Mary Harrington

This is coming late—it was my daughter’s birthday last weekend, and I’ve been sick ever since. But if I’m honest, it also took a while to process this news story and find a way to respond that wasn’t just rage or crying. Because sometimes a case comes along that is so profoundly, unfathomably bad that it’s hard to even know how to write about it: and the crimes of Dominique Pélicot, 71, currently on trial in France, fall into this category.

In a case that has shocked the public in France and beyond, he has admitted repeatedly drugged his wife of 50 years, Gisèle Pélicot, while men he recruited from a porn website raped her. While others abused his unconscious wife, Pélicot allegedly watched and filmed. There are no words to describe the depth of the monstrosity required to pull off a calculated betrayal of intimacy on this scale. I can only hope that justice is done in the trial and that the victim and her children can find some closure in the process.

I want to emphasize here the extent to which the atrocities themselves are connected to and symbolic of the core business of the porn industry: monetizing taboos.

While pornographic art of course predates the sexual revolution, its large-scale form is a direct byproduct of that revolution. Central to this, as I have often noted in these pages, was the technological de-risking of real-life sexual intimacy through contraception. While the sex industry, again, predates the pill, it was only with the advent of reasonably reliable contraception that it was possible to imagine that who you have sex with, when and how, is a purely private matter. And as night follows day, the privatization of sex produced libertarian defenses of the buying and selling of sex, including the production of porn.

Did the overall benefits of the sexual revolution outweigh the downsides of a booming sex industry? Reasonable people can disagree. But no matter where you stand, it’s no coincidence that it took barely a decade after the legalization of the pill in the 1960s for the porn industry to explode to a size that provoked feminist protest—and, eventually, libertarian feminist support. The feminist “sex wars” of the era are complex and deserve a post or three of their own, but at their core they revolved around a conflict between those who felt that women’s interests were best served by a defense of sexual freedom, including the making or consumption of porn, and those who argued that porn was structurally misogynistic and both perpetrated and legitimized violence against women. Ultimately, the libertarians won.

But the radical feminists were onto something. Because the central mechanism of porn is the violation of taboos. The most obvious of these is the viewing of people having sex at all: even today, in our now very sexually liberal culture, everyone understands that it is forbidden to copulate in public. Porn makes money by breaking this basic rule. omertà, in a dynamic in which the thrill of seeing forbidden things is at least as much a part of the stimulus as the stimulating effect of watching or imagining the acts themselves. This in turn paradoxically works with the ongoing impetus behind the sexual revolution: the liberation of sexual expression and desire from social constraints. For, now that sex is decoupled from procreation, there is no theoretical reason, except perhaps the power of habit, to impose any normative limits on sexual expression. Since sex is a private matter, you should, in this view, be able to do literally anything you want, our post-revolutionary consensus holds, provided it is safe, healthy, and consensual.

Part

But the problem with this is that for many people – especially paraphiliacs – the thrill of eroticism lies in the forbidden nature of desire. Logically, as desire becomes more normalized, it becomes increasingly difficult to find something taboo enough to give you the creeps. And this is being accelerated enormously by the smartphone revolution.

A while ago I argued in the WSJ that the compromises implied in the libertarian victory in the Sex Wars were probably acceptable to most people within the particular media environment of the 1980s. Here, it was relatively easy to control access to banned material: specialty stores, top magazines, and so on. So while it was clear that some exploitation was taking place, it was on a small enough scale to be, in some ways, acceptable. But smartphones have radically changed that calculus by making pornographic material much more readily available. As a result, the taboo-violating mechanism of porn has been amplified beyond recognition and spread beyond anything that the sex libertarians of the 1980s could have imagined.

Research suggests that the behavioral conditioning achieved through the cycle of pornographic stimulus and orgasmic dopamine rush is similar to drug addiction. Some research, in turn, suggests that heavy porn users become desensitized over time, leading to a search for increasingly extreme content in order to replicate the same “high.” Meanwhile, the technology itself drives the production of extreme or grotesque material, through a competitive attention economy that rewards clickbait. These neurological, technological, and commercial incentives drive sexual desensitization and abuse on multiple axes: 90% of online porn contains verbal, physical, and sexual violence against women.

And as if it weren’t bad enough that we have to normalize violence against women on this scale, the deeper impact also becomes clear: the fact that this is not a state, but a vector with force and direction. Taboo breaking is a process: once enough people have been conditioned to eroticize taboo breaking, they will begin to run through and gradually exhaust the stimuli that even the “permitted” taboos can provide, which are seen as edgy rather than outright illegal. And we are running out of “legitimate” taboos (like hitting, choking, or urinating on women) and hearing a steady, insistent tapping on the foundational taboo of the sexual revolution: consent itself. In particular, clear violations of “consent” such as attacks on animals, children, or clearly unwilling or unconscious victims.

Leave a Reply

Dominique Pélicot was one of them. He met the men who abused his wife on a chat forum called “A son insu” (without their knowledge), on a now-closed website that also hosted pornographic material. The website specifically focused on sexually violating the unknowing: non-consensual by definition. He was initially caught by police using a camera to look up an unsuspecting woman’s skirt, and when they searched his computer, the decade of abuse against his wife was discovered. The common theme in both types of violation was that the victim remained unaware. A similar drive to find new taboos to violate underlies the case, which is currently the subject of an ongoing lawsuit against Pornhub, of a 12-year-old boy who was drugged and raped, with videos of his abuse then published and monetized on Pornhub. As with Gisèle Pélicot, the violation of consent is the point.

The central claim of the sexual revolution is that we can make sex “safe” and therefore not impose restrictions on its details, except for individual consent, which is sacrosanct. But those who pretend that we can protect ourselves from sexual misconduct simply by emphasizing consent in this way are woefully naive at best. For the driving force of the porn industry that also launched the revolution is to cash in on the exposure of taboos: a direction of travel that always ends in violence, violation, and cruelty.