by Неизвестный
it is necessary that a man is vigilant about his appetites, as the majority of men err on the side of excessiveness, especially when it comes to the genitals and the stomach, not to mention money, power, and fame. Excess and deficiency are both blameworthy in regards to chastity. . . . The desire for sexual intercourse is natural in order that the species is compelled to procreate and to ensure the survival of the species. Hence it is sought after for two reasons—to have children and to remain chaste in the marital bond—and not simply for pastime and pleasure. And when one does seek enjoyment and sensual pleasure from the act, it is in order to ensure the maintenance of mutual love and affection to keep the bond of marriage strong through sexual pleasure.16
Al-Ghazali goes on to explain that the inculcation of modesty is essential to a chaste society. Modesty is not the same as an excessive shyness or prudery that prevents people from fully participating in life; rather, it is a sense of shame in relation to blameworthy traits that are rationally discernable and not simply societal norms that pass themselves off as universal morality. Modesty concerning sexual matters is deeply natural to the human being, but it can be stripped off a person, and films and visual media are unprecedented means to that end.
The universal idea that sexuality is something best performed in the dark or behind closed doors is not limited to prudish Puritans or priggish busybodies who, like “Old lady judges watch people in pairs / Limited in sex they dare / To push fake morals, insult and stare,”17 but is assumed by decent people who recognize the threat that a sexualized culture presents to both children and people committed to marriage. The notion that viewing people in heightened states of pleasure is natural is a view pushed by pornographers and their victims. In reality, it is quite alien to most people around the world—the reason that, until recently, it was limited to the dark recesses of the peep show or the windowless sex shops found in the sleaziest parts of a city. “Voyeurism” is a pejorative word in English, and yet pornography is essentially just that.
THE SELF AT PEACE
It is now worth examining a mystical perspective that celebrates the third and final stage of a human’s spiritual development, designated in the Qur’an as the self at peace. This is also Kierkegaard’s third and most celestial life, the religious life.
Both Christianity and Islam share the concept of the Beatific Vision: “Blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Maintaining the heart’s purity is a particular focus of the Abrahamic faiths. The Qur’an says, “On the Day of Judgment, nothing will avail a person, neither wealth nor children, only a pure heart” (26: 88-89). Purity of heart is a birthright. The innocence of children is celebrated everywhere and that is precisely why, of all the heinous and dark crimes of men, none elicits more revulsion than pedophilia, which defiles a child’s innocence. We know that children must lose their sexual innocence eventually, but every decent parent’s desire is that it takes place in adulthood with mutual love and respect.
Lust is a manifestation of the Eros impulse that Sigmund Freud rightly identified as the great force of life that opposes our death instinct. When channeled into the pure love of another, it becomes life-affirming, enabling us to experience that person at the deepest and most intimate level with absolute presence in the moment.
It is in the present that we can love and experience the divine in that love. The purity of that love is sustained by presence and destroyed by desiring something else at the time, whether it be another lover or simply the onanistic self-pleasure provided by an objectified human. Simone Weil wrote:
Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire? The beloved being is then naked and real, not veiled by an imaginary future. . . . Thus in love there is chastity or lack of chastity according to whether the desire is or is not directed towards the future.18
CHASTITY OF THE EYES
According to Islamic and Christian tradition, the single most corrupting inroad into the heart is through the “concupiscence of the eye.” Not for nothing does the Holy Scripture name it among the three powers which constitute the world that “lieth in the power of evil” (1 John 2, 16; 5, 19). It reaches the extremes of its destructive power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness. The destructiveness of this disorder lies in the fact that it stifles man’s primitive power of perceiving reality; it makes man incapable not only of coming to himself but also of reaching reality and truth.
If such an illusory world threatens to overgrow and smother the world of real things, then to restrain the natural wish to see takes on the character of a measure of self-protection and self-defense.19 The Arabic word for “eye” is “‘ayn,” which also means “wellspring” and “essence.” The word for pupil is “insaan,” which also means “human being.” Hence, the eye is reflective of the essence of the human being, and its center is the pupil, created to witness the beauty of this world and gaze upon the beatific vision of the next. We are creatures designed to witness and reflect. The pupil constricts with worldly light and dilates in darkness and when stimulated by pleasure.
We live in a visual culture; never before has humanity been so threatened by the devastating effects of concupiscence of the eyes. It is an appetite that desires not to perceive, but simply to be excited. “What this seeing strives for is not to attain knowledge and to become cognizant of the truth, but for possibilities of relinquishing oneself to the world,” writes Martin Heidegger in Being and Time.
Chastity of the eyes is the single most difficult form. Far easier is it for a man to abstain from an illicit physical encounter with a woman than to raise his gaze from her exposed cleavage. Yet according to the teaching of the Prophets, this too is adultery of the heart; its perniciousness is perhaps of a lesser degree, but its effects on the soul are, over time, potentially devastating. Add to natural desire the artificial exposure to images of naked forms on the computer and pictures of semi-clad men and women that bombard us from billboards and magazine covers on checkout-line shelves. Such stimuli are so overwhelming that our culture’s capacity to continue to generate real meaning is threatened.
Society’s eyes are under assault, and that means our hearts are as well. The Qur’an advises men and women to lower their gaze when exposed to the opposite sex and attraction is felt: “Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity; that is purer for their hearts, and God is aware of what they do. And say to the believing women that they too should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what ordinarily appears” (24:30). Imam al-Ghazali says that lust20
is nothing but a wellspring of excessive sexual desire, and is the disease of an empty and unconcerned heart. One should be on one’s guard against its preliminaries by abstaining from repeated glances and thoughts. Otherwise it will take firm hold of one and be difficult to shake off.21
The “repeated glances” al-Ghazali speaks of were in eleventh-century Iraq, a society extremely conservative in dress and behavior. The current crisis of image overload far more easily corrodes the spiritual potential of a person. Any serious attempts at meditation, prayer, or even leisurely reading are affected by the images that have been allowed into the heart through the inroad of the eyes.
WOMAN THE APOTHEOSIS
In Islamic tradition, women have always been associated with the divine. Women are an apotheosis of divine mercy in the world, particularly embodied in the mother. The Prophet Muhammad said, “No one degrades women except vile and contemptible men.” Rumi says in his Mathnawi: “God has made [woman] attractive, so how can men escape from her? . . . The Prophet, to whose speech the whole world was enslaved, used to say, ‘Speak to me, oh ‘Aishah!’ ” The Prophet said that “women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of heart, but ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by the ferocity of animals. They have no kindne
ss, gentleness, or love, since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes, anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is the Creator—you could say she is not created.”22
The thirteenth-century Spanish scholar, philosopher, and mystic Ibn Arabi considered the most perfect contemplation of the divine in the world to be women. He writes of women as “the Universal Nature is to God in which He revealed the forms of the Cosmos by directing toward it the divine will and command, which, at the level of elemental forms, is symbolized by copulation.” He continues:
Whoever loves a woman in this way loves with divine love, while he whose love for them is limited to natural lust lacks all true knowledge of that desire. For such a one she is mere form, devoid of spirit, and even though that form is indeed imbued with spirit, it is absent for one who approaches his wife or some other woman solely to have his pleasure with her, without realizing whose the pleasure really is. Thus he does not know himself truly, just as a stranger is not known until he reveals his identity. As they say: They are right in supposing that I am in love, only they know not with whom I am in love. Such a man is really in love with pleasure itself and, in consequence, loves its repository in women, the real truth and meaning of the act being lost on him. If he knew the truth, he would know whom it is he is enjoying and who it is who is the enjoyer; then would he be perfected.23
In our Western tradition, William Blake wonderfully expresses a glimpse of this same meaning: “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God/The lust of the goat is the bounty of God/The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God/The nakedness of woman is the work of God.” Chastity and purity always have been the great virtues that come naturally to women but that men must learn. The Qur’an uses Mary, the mother of Christ, as the great paragon of chastity and purity of the heart and describes her as an ideal. “And God has made an example for those who believe of Mary who guarded her chastity, so We breathed some of Our spirit into her, and she confirmed the pronouncements and the scriptures of her Lord, and she was among the devout” (66: 11-12).
It is from women then, that men learn chastity and purity, which in turn protect the sacred nature of women, alluded to in the Arabic word for woman, hurmah, which means “what is sacred.” Now, the failure of men in imitating women in their natural virtue has resulted in women rejecting the double standard and imitating men in their natural vice. The spiritual power of women is great, but so too is the power of their physical attraction to men. It is this power that causes vile men to want to dominate women, and virtuous men to honor and protect them.
But that physical power of the female form over men is a sensory power that veils men from her metaphysical meaning. Her sensual form prevents the man lost in carnality from knowing her spiritual reality, that she is the source of mercy in the world. The Arabic and Hebrew word for womb (rahm) is derived from the word for mercy (rahma) and an expression of the creative power of God in man. In degrading woman, we degrade the highest qualities of our human nature; in elevating her, we elevate our highest nature. When her natural virtues—compassion, kindness, caring, selflessness, and love—predominate in men, men are able to overcome their natural vices and realize their full humanity. When, however, those virtues are absent, men descend to the lowest of the low and are worse than beasts.
In unveiling the outward beauty of a woman, we become veiled from her inward beauty. As a poet from the distant past wrote: “I said to my rose-cheeked lovely, ‘O you with bud-like mouth, Why keep hiding your face, like flirting girls?’ She laughed and said, ‘Unlike the beauties of your world, In the veil I’m seen, but without it I’m hidden.’ ”
PART THREE:
DILEMMAS OF LAW AND POLICY
FREEDOM, VIRTUE, AND THE POLITICS OF REGULATING PORNOGRAPHY
James R. Stoner, Jr.
The politics of regulating pornography in the United States is, like so much else in America, complicated by our constitutionalism. Ours is not a parliamentary democracy where a policy decided upon by the cabinet is made into law, though even that would be complicated to analyze, involving a fluid mix of ideas, interests, politics, and personalities in the formation of the policy, however straightforward its enactment. All of these elements are at play in the American context, too, of course, but the constitutional structure of our institutions and the judicial enforcement of constitutional rights add other dimensions.
In the first place, federalism means that policies that touch upon both state and national interests involve governmental institutions at both levels, often in interlocking ways. The regulation of pornography originally fell within what was known as the police power of the states—that is, the general power of government to regulate society to secure health, safety, and morals, with education sometimes also mentioned—and thus involved the federal government only indirectly, through its power to regulate commerce or to deliver the mail.
But in the second place, since the middle of the twentieth century, the freedom of speech and press clauses of the First Amendment have been interpreted to protect communication that the law once suppressed as obscene or pornographic, so that, thanks to the doctrine of “incorporation” which applies the First Amendment to the states, the federal courts have become in many instances the final arbiters of what is and what is not allowed in the control of pornography throughout the land. As scholars increasingly agree, the role of courts in establishing constitutional limits should be analyzed as involving not their review of abstract doctrine but what is now called constitutional politics.1 Any account of policymaking in an area that in some way touches constitutional issues has to include the courts as players, but also recognize that, though they often hold the trump, they do not hold all the cards.
In this overview of the politics of pornography and its regulation, I will begin by discussing American policy over the course of the last century and a half, as well as the technological developments that have made pornography a moving target and its regulation a repeated challenge, adding a quick review of First Amendment constitutional law. Then I will outline the various ideas and interests that have influenced the development of pornography regulation in recent years. Next I will turn to examine an innovative but ultimately unsuccessful attempt in the 1980s to develop a new rationale in favor of regulation, a new mode of regulating, and a new coalition of support, drawing on Donald Downs’ study, The New Politics of Pornography.2 In conclusion I will consider what lessons might be learned from this experience for the issue of regulating pornography in the age of the internet and in light of advanced scientific understanding of pornography’s social costs.
REGULATION OF PORNOGRAPHY
The term “pornography” in English has been dated only to the mid-nineteenth century, when it seems to have been borrowed from the French or coined from the ancient Greek, meaning, literally, “writing (or drawing) about prostitutes.”3 “Obscenity” is an older English word, taken from the Latin, where it meant more or less the same as it did for us, at least before the federal courts seized the word: “offensive, foul, loathsome, disgusting.”4
Known in the West from the ancient world through the poetry of Ovid and Juvenal among others, as well as access to some ancient Eastern texts, and rediscovered in pictorial form with the excavation of Pompeii, the artistic depiction of human sexuality seems to have been a preserve of the upper classes, controlled, if at all, by Church scrutiny or social disapproval but not subject to temporal law, or at any rate to recorded legal action. The first common law prosecution for obscenity in England appears in the early eighteenth century, and only in 1857 in Lord Campbell’s Act (the Obscene Publications Act), did Parliament give magistrates statutory authority to destroy obscenity in print.5
Though in the states distribution of obscene materials was contrary to common law and sometimes to statutes since Colonial times, the first federal prohibition came in the Tariff Act of 1842, which forbad importation of “all indecent and obscen
e prints, paintings, lithographs, engravings, and transparencies.” This was broadened in 1856 to include the new technology of photography. As a result of an apparent growth in domestic traffic to meet the demand of the troops in the Civil War and at the request of the Post Office, in 1865 Congress made it a misdemeanor to “knowingly” mail any “publication of a vulgar and indecent character.”
Eight years later, at the instigation of Civil War veteran and recent founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, Congress extended the prohibition to include mailing information about abortion and artificial birth control (activities which were illegal in the states), punished receiving obscene mail as well as sending it, multiplied the maximum fine by a factor of ten to $5,000, added the possibility of imprisonment, allowed penalties to be doubled for repeat offenders, and strengthened the enforcement powers of federal judges. A petition effort to repeal the statute a few years later was rebuffed, and by the 1880s Comstock himself had been appointed special agent in charge of its enforcement by the Postmaster General, though for most of his career he was paid by his Society, itself funded by leading businessmen in New York.6
If passage of the Comstock Act can be seen as the result of the rise of the technology of mass printing and efficient dissemination, subsequent legislation responded to new technologies in turn. Motion pictures brought forth numerous state boards responsible for film censorship, whose authority was upheld by the US Supreme Court against a First Amendment challenge in 1915.7 The movie industry successfully headed off an outcry for federal regulation in 1922 by hiring Postmaster General William Harrison Hays as their public relations agent. He oversaw the development of a system of self-enforced standards, codified in 1934 and applied to almost every movie distributed in the United States for over twenty years, that renounced nudity and the favorable depiction of immorality in American-made films. The system was gradually eroded in the 1950s and the 1960s and replaced by the current rating system, still a self-imposed industry standard rather than a government regulation or law.8
