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The Aesthetics of Degradation
Pornography keeps getting more extreme. Manufacturers, defenders and consumers of porn rely on a mix of wilful ignorance and bad faith to avoid serious discussion. When we do talk about violence against women in the porn world, the debate all too often becomes technical, complicated by legalities and outrage.
But what are the moral and psychological consequences of the mercantilization of abuse?
In this studied and ruthless examination of the place of pornography in contemporary life, translator and critic Adrian Nathan West treads dangerous literary and social ground, transcending cliches about free expression and the demands of the market to look at the moral discomfort of violent pornography from the perspective of the viewer.
Collapsing distinctions between novel, memoir, and essay, this book will not make for light reading. But at its core is an extraordinarily brave and honest concern for the women and men who have been hurt in the name of sexual gratification.
But what are the moral and psychological consequences of the mercantilization of abuse?
In this studied and ruthless examination of the place of pornography in contemporary life, translator and critic Adrian Nathan West treads dangerous literary and social ground, transcending cliches about free expression and the demands of the market to look at the moral discomfort of violent pornography from the perspective of the viewer.
Collapsing distinctions between novel, memoir, and essay, this book will not make for light reading. But at its core is an extraordinarily brave and honest concern for the women and men who have been hurt in the name of sexual gratification.
128 pages, Paperback
First published June 14, 2016
About the author
Adrian Nathan West
48 books39 followersAdrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation as well as the translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature. He lives between Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.
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November 1, 2018West makes a fatal error that colors this entire book from the offset: he assumes that pornographic works are unmediated recordings of actual events. He proceeds to undertake a “shock-and-awe” analysis of contemporary extreme pornography that highlights the most shocking examples and makes them paradigmatic of the medium as a whole; coupled with his assumption that porn reflects real events, this makes for an emotionally and viscerally tiring read, even if its page count barely reaches triple digits. This exhaustion seems to be part of West’s strategy here: he tries to position himself as a “white knight” who hopes to gain credibility in feminist circles by railing against these extreme abuses of the porn industry, abuses that cannot be defended if the defender wants to retain any shred of human dignity. His a priori assumption of the reality of pornographic media is the cornerstone of his argument. Take it away—by, for example, realizing that porn is inherently artificial and mediated through layers of language, fantasy, digitalization, video production, editing, direction, and acting—and everything falls apart; his argument looks more like a vain attempt to look like a feminist without contributing anything substantial to actual feminist discourse. One bright spot is when he attributes the apparent abuse in pornographic media to the cultural logic of late capitalism, but he remains content to argue against this symptom rather than against the disease that causes it. After all, it’s much more difficult to argue against an entire all-encompassing ideology than against a cherry-picked straw man of shocking titles and descriptions. The book isn’t bad—there are many interesting insights scattered throughout drawn from Lacan, Kojève, and Bataille—but its core argument doesn’t stand up to even basic scrutiny. Also: there is no index, which makes this book’s use as an academic reference a huge pain. I read the entire book while in line at the DMV; I’m still not sure which experience was more frustrating.
January 14, 2022
“The Aesthetics of Degradation” is a broad indictment of both pornography and our so-called liberal democratic society in which is thrives. It’s a tough read, not only for the robust philosophical arguments and arcane vocabulary used therein, but also for very explicit examples of the degradation the title refers to. This is not “vanilla porn” nor erotica by any stretch of the imagination, and some may take issue with using such extreme examples to indict the whole industry; “all porn isn’t like this.” Actually, it is. The whole industry has been deliberately saturated to some degree, by West’s account, with acts depicting the sexual exploitation and degradation of female “actors.” His premise is to examine the motivation for this degradation which in part lies with a warped idea of freedom and responsibility. Pornographers prey upon the vulnerabilities and desires of real women and consumers and pro-porn apologists use faulty logic to justify it all. He argues from a place of deep compassion and sympathy for the young women within this industry, and aims biting criticism towards the producers and consumers of pornography. He imagines having a conversation with one notorious porn star and the futile attempt to draw a cohesive picture of her. She is the sweet girl next door who’s done a 100+ gang bang, among other things. How are both of those realities possible in the same person? He doesn’t provide a direct answer, but offers a psychological examination of conscious, beginning with himself. Do we really even know ourselves, let alone someone else? Since West tactfully eschews any religious arguments, his work is all the harder and bleak in outlook. The book ends, in fact, with him contemplating how since there is “no moral distance” between himself and a rapist-murderer, he might as well jump off a bridge. Of course he doesn’t, and in fact has a real desire to live a moral life outside any formal religious dogma, and describes how the stain of pornography on our society makes that moral life more difficult for everyone. He does, however, make some interesting connections with porn and that society, including religion itself. He says that both (bad) religion and porn are similar in that they both “use condemnation as a precursor to violence.”
That is but one of many zinger connections and rejoiners to common defenses of pornograpgrahy, too many to list. Serial killers and pornographers sharing similiar goals, subjecting women to unimaginable abuse with the goal of “carrying out my fantasies…with a living human doll,” and seeking to “evict a woman from her body” mirrored the desire of pornographers to supposedly help liberate women to fulfill their (the women’s) fantasies. Porn as a market strategy, to create a demand where none existed, then never to satisfy it. Catherine MacKinnon describes porn as a “set of instructions for the abuse of women.” Porn as a deflection of moral scrutiny under the guide of “freedom of expression,” and what we really mean by being “free” is that “we don’t care to be bothered with the antecedents of that person’s plight, particularly those aspects of it in which we might play a part.” Andrea Dworkin’s quote “The Left can’t have its whores and politics” comes to mind here. Consent forms “less a statement of willingness than an impunity for abuse.” Sexuality not as a source of freedom, but comparisons in terms of number of partners, acts engaged in as if it were a sport. He defines pornographer’s “reason for being is to extract obedience from women for financial gain.” Porn as “grooming” on a global scale; repeated exposure to lurid scenes prepares millions of men to attempt the same with their partners or worse, their victims. Billie Eilish’s recent personal revelations a case in point.
West questions the assumption that people can never do anything against their will. In fact, poor and vulnerable people “view their dignity, sanity, and physical integrity as resources to be drawn upon, that any harm that should occur in those areas will redound (rebound) to a non-essential part of themselves.” If you’ve ever asked, “how could these women choose to let this happen to themselves?” it is precisely because their concept of ‘self’ differs from our own, and even our own self concept isn’t as crystal clear as we would like to think. We engage in self deception all the time, West maintains. Unless we suffer from a terrible calamity or depression, the autobiographical stories we tell about ourselves are always one of improvement, even if they are not accurate. Why would porn stars be any different? Rape victims who blame themselves have better outcomes than those who do not. By putting the onus of responsibility on themselves, they replace feelings of helplessness with an illusion of control. Women who view porn as “empowering” are a case in point. Subjected to abuse, they deceive themselves with this illusion. The psychology of trauma can induce victims to paradoxically seek to live out that trauma again in order to gain a sense of calm. Studies have shown trauma produces an analgesic effect on the brain, a calming effect to help them survive the abuse. Later, they seek out that calming effect through a re-exposure to the stress. Abuse victims in fact require a higher level of stimulation than non-traumatized people to activate mood-regulating brain chemicals. They feel apprehension, emptiness, and boredom when they are not involved in activities which mimic the trauma. They can never get on with their lives, they are so consumed by their trauma. In one sense they are “free” to act, but they are a slave to the trauma. West acknowledges that not all porn stars are abuse victims, but it is true that victims will seek out the kind of abuse porn dishes out. Are we okay with that a society? West asks.
West makes a distinction between real eroticism, which can take on a wide variety of forms, requiring real bodies, real absorption, a “doing with,” not a “doing to,” and the faux eroticms evoked in hard core porn. Under capitalism, eroticism has little or nothing to do with the actual sex scenes depicted in most mainstream hard core films. Hard core porn is “the infiltration of market psychology into the erotic realm,” and a confluence of “radical individualism” and the “destabilizations of the interpersonal foundations of the sense of self” and is “less a sexual pathology per se than urges to exact ever-more-definitive proofs of possession.” He also goes into detail as to why a certain sex act, very popular in all porn, is inherently degrading, bringing up topics as disparate as his own personal aversions, Roman history, and the Spanish Civil War. He goes on to describe porn as catering to two different “markets;” men who want to see women degrading themselves and men who want to see women coerced into acts of degradation. In either case, the women degrade themselves in front of the camera for the pleasure of hetero men. As women improve their economic, political, and social standing, West argues, some of these men feel threatened and find their recourse in “hostile sexual correctives” depicted in these scenes.
If the “narrator” is understood to be West himself, we discover West grew up poor with a mother who loved him but a father who did not. We learn about his first exposure to porn and its effects on him, which is likely how many young boys and men are introduced to it; curiosity born from boredom or allure, then excitement, which morphs finally to confusion then despair. The story which struck me hardest was about a green coat he received at Christmas from a second hand store he picked out for himself. He didn’t realize the sun had faded it to yellow in parts until he’d brought it to school. A pretty girl in her nice new Christmas sweater asked him about the coat and he snapped at her, partly out of shame but also to push her away in an act of “self-defeat.” He was poor and she was not, and he would never fit in with her crowd. West brings up these stories to mirror that which many porn actresses experience. Unable to find fulfillment in traditional means, either because of their backgrounds, class, or floundering career prospects, actresses turn to porn as a radical departure to find fulfillment. Just as West rejected the friendly overtures of the rich pretty girl, so do porn stars who don’t really see themselves as equal to others, and do things which are not in their best interests, pushing away people who would otherwise help them. West’s autobiographical stories (which, in a sense, are ironic because West believes the whole autobiographical enterprise as more or less self-deception) are touching because they help humanize the stories of actual porn stars he discusses. He tries to make the connection that these young women could have been you or me, that many were attracted to the money and status, and did the best they could with the limited options offered to them.
Porn star Oriana Small tells herself that it’s just acting, it’s not real life in order to assuage the guilt and shame she feels in her new career. West points out how this rationalization fits into a broader degradation of our society, where the common good gives way to more economically or socially expedient ends, justifying statements like “our first commitment is to our shareholders” and use of torture to justify disobeying authority, like in the case of George Floyd and countless others. Politicians preach “traditional values” on one hand, but their self-serving actions subvert these very values. Higher social classes predict unethical behavior, according to a research paper West cites, but it is only the poorer classes who pay the price. Why not the same in pornography? The porn stars depicted are not entering the business from a place of power and prestige, but rather striving for them by any means necessary.
In the last chapter, the narrator takes a literal 30,000 foot view on a trans-Atlantic flight from having witnessed a pornographic “art” exhibit in Spain. If there are any glimpses of a possible solution to the otherwise bleak framing of our society and its treatment of women in this book, it’s his assertion that freedom cannot be divorced from responsibility, and that we cannot ignore the moral tension that exists between contemplation and action. He gives some examples in the scenes which conclude the book. He questions whether to board the plane in the first place, having a fear of flying. He encounters a young woman on the plane he considers seducing for a fleeting moment. When back in the States, a group of young Asian girls trigger the aforementioned thoughts of becoming a rapist-murderer, like the Vietnam vets before him. In these instances, he chooses responsibility over freedom; just because he can do it doesn’t mean he should. How many pornographers can say the same thing? Without a religious framework, West is perplexed why it should be this way, but I think his courage to do the right thing anyway could be inspiring for the rest of us who say we are. Perhaps West didn’t want to end his essay on a positive note, falling for the wishful thinking he decries as false. I don’t think he’s completely hopeless, but the bar is pretty low; he didn’t jump off the bridge after all. Between the two extremes of becoming a rapist-murderer and self-negation West places himself, which is a pretty harsh framing of one’s life. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. One of the best, if not the best book I have ever read as an adult is The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps a better way to frame the problem and the solution is through the words of the Alyosha: “I am responsible for everyone and everything and I more than anyone else.” This statement needs a lot of unpacking but suffice it to say he says this in humility and love. He identifies with both the sinner and saint and doesn’t hold himself higher or lower than either. This, of course, is not an attitude universally shared among the religious; all too often they reject the sinner and pay faux homage to the saints, while not realizing they themselves are the sinner! The sooner we can take responsibility for our freedom, the sooner we can put an end for the need of others to degrade themselves to survive, whether on the set of a pornographic film or a meat processing plant. In a world which is increasingly less democratic and where accountability and wealth are inversely proportional, living lives rooted in love, respect, simplicity and promoting the common good can help turn things around.
That is but one of many zinger connections and rejoiners to common defenses of pornograpgrahy, too many to list. Serial killers and pornographers sharing similiar goals, subjecting women to unimaginable abuse with the goal of “carrying out my fantasies…with a living human doll,” and seeking to “evict a woman from her body” mirrored the desire of pornographers to supposedly help liberate women to fulfill their (the women’s) fantasies. Porn as a market strategy, to create a demand where none existed, then never to satisfy it. Catherine MacKinnon describes porn as a “set of instructions for the abuse of women.” Porn as a deflection of moral scrutiny under the guide of “freedom of expression,” and what we really mean by being “free” is that “we don’t care to be bothered with the antecedents of that person’s plight, particularly those aspects of it in which we might play a part.” Andrea Dworkin’s quote “The Left can’t have its whores and politics” comes to mind here. Consent forms “less a statement of willingness than an impunity for abuse.” Sexuality not as a source of freedom, but comparisons in terms of number of partners, acts engaged in as if it were a sport. He defines pornographer’s “reason for being is to extract obedience from women for financial gain.” Porn as “grooming” on a global scale; repeated exposure to lurid scenes prepares millions of men to attempt the same with their partners or worse, their victims. Billie Eilish’s recent personal revelations a case in point.
West questions the assumption that people can never do anything against their will. In fact, poor and vulnerable people “view their dignity, sanity, and physical integrity as resources to be drawn upon, that any harm that should occur in those areas will redound (rebound) to a non-essential part of themselves.” If you’ve ever asked, “how could these women choose to let this happen to themselves?” it is precisely because their concept of ‘self’ differs from our own, and even our own self concept isn’t as crystal clear as we would like to think. We engage in self deception all the time, West maintains. Unless we suffer from a terrible calamity or depression, the autobiographical stories we tell about ourselves are always one of improvement, even if they are not accurate. Why would porn stars be any different? Rape victims who blame themselves have better outcomes than those who do not. By putting the onus of responsibility on themselves, they replace feelings of helplessness with an illusion of control. Women who view porn as “empowering” are a case in point. Subjected to abuse, they deceive themselves with this illusion. The psychology of trauma can induce victims to paradoxically seek to live out that trauma again in order to gain a sense of calm. Studies have shown trauma produces an analgesic effect on the brain, a calming effect to help them survive the abuse. Later, they seek out that calming effect through a re-exposure to the stress. Abuse victims in fact require a higher level of stimulation than non-traumatized people to activate mood-regulating brain chemicals. They feel apprehension, emptiness, and boredom when they are not involved in activities which mimic the trauma. They can never get on with their lives, they are so consumed by their trauma. In one sense they are “free” to act, but they are a slave to the trauma. West acknowledges that not all porn stars are abuse victims, but it is true that victims will seek out the kind of abuse porn dishes out. Are we okay with that a society? West asks.
West makes a distinction between real eroticism, which can take on a wide variety of forms, requiring real bodies, real absorption, a “doing with,” not a “doing to,” and the faux eroticms evoked in hard core porn. Under capitalism, eroticism has little or nothing to do with the actual sex scenes depicted in most mainstream hard core films. Hard core porn is “the infiltration of market psychology into the erotic realm,” and a confluence of “radical individualism” and the “destabilizations of the interpersonal foundations of the sense of self” and is “less a sexual pathology per se than urges to exact ever-more-definitive proofs of possession.” He also goes into detail as to why a certain sex act, very popular in all porn, is inherently degrading, bringing up topics as disparate as his own personal aversions, Roman history, and the Spanish Civil War. He goes on to describe porn as catering to two different “markets;” men who want to see women degrading themselves and men who want to see women coerced into acts of degradation. In either case, the women degrade themselves in front of the camera for the pleasure of hetero men. As women improve their economic, political, and social standing, West argues, some of these men feel threatened and find their recourse in “hostile sexual correctives” depicted in these scenes.
If the “narrator” is understood to be West himself, we discover West grew up poor with a mother who loved him but a father who did not. We learn about his first exposure to porn and its effects on him, which is likely how many young boys and men are introduced to it; curiosity born from boredom or allure, then excitement, which morphs finally to confusion then despair. The story which struck me hardest was about a green coat he received at Christmas from a second hand store he picked out for himself. He didn’t realize the sun had faded it to yellow in parts until he’d brought it to school. A pretty girl in her nice new Christmas sweater asked him about the coat and he snapped at her, partly out of shame but also to push her away in an act of “self-defeat.” He was poor and she was not, and he would never fit in with her crowd. West brings up these stories to mirror that which many porn actresses experience. Unable to find fulfillment in traditional means, either because of their backgrounds, class, or floundering career prospects, actresses turn to porn as a radical departure to find fulfillment. Just as West rejected the friendly overtures of the rich pretty girl, so do porn stars who don’t really see themselves as equal to others, and do things which are not in their best interests, pushing away people who would otherwise help them. West’s autobiographical stories (which, in a sense, are ironic because West believes the whole autobiographical enterprise as more or less self-deception) are touching because they help humanize the stories of actual porn stars he discusses. He tries to make the connection that these young women could have been you or me, that many were attracted to the money and status, and did the best they could with the limited options offered to them.
Porn star Oriana Small tells herself that it’s just acting, it’s not real life in order to assuage the guilt and shame she feels in her new career. West points out how this rationalization fits into a broader degradation of our society, where the common good gives way to more economically or socially expedient ends, justifying statements like “our first commitment is to our shareholders” and use of torture to justify disobeying authority, like in the case of George Floyd and countless others. Politicians preach “traditional values” on one hand, but their self-serving actions subvert these very values. Higher social classes predict unethical behavior, according to a research paper West cites, but it is only the poorer classes who pay the price. Why not the same in pornography? The porn stars depicted are not entering the business from a place of power and prestige, but rather striving for them by any means necessary.
In the last chapter, the narrator takes a literal 30,000 foot view on a trans-Atlantic flight from having witnessed a pornographic “art” exhibit in Spain. If there are any glimpses of a possible solution to the otherwise bleak framing of our society and its treatment of women in this book, it’s his assertion that freedom cannot be divorced from responsibility, and that we cannot ignore the moral tension that exists between contemplation and action. He gives some examples in the scenes which conclude the book. He questions whether to board the plane in the first place, having a fear of flying. He encounters a young woman on the plane he considers seducing for a fleeting moment. When back in the States, a group of young Asian girls trigger the aforementioned thoughts of becoming a rapist-murderer, like the Vietnam vets before him. In these instances, he chooses responsibility over freedom; just because he can do it doesn’t mean he should. How many pornographers can say the same thing? Without a religious framework, West is perplexed why it should be this way, but I think his courage to do the right thing anyway could be inspiring for the rest of us who say we are. Perhaps West didn’t want to end his essay on a positive note, falling for the wishful thinking he decries as false. I don’t think he’s completely hopeless, but the bar is pretty low; he didn’t jump off the bridge after all. Between the two extremes of becoming a rapist-murderer and self-negation West places himself, which is a pretty harsh framing of one’s life. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. One of the best, if not the best book I have ever read as an adult is The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps a better way to frame the problem and the solution is through the words of the Alyosha: “I am responsible for everyone and everything and I more than anyone else.” This statement needs a lot of unpacking but suffice it to say he says this in humility and love. He identifies with both the sinner and saint and doesn’t hold himself higher or lower than either. This, of course, is not an attitude universally shared among the religious; all too often they reject the sinner and pay faux homage to the saints, while not realizing they themselves are the sinner! The sooner we can take responsibility for our freedom, the sooner we can put an end for the need of others to degrade themselves to survive, whether on the set of a pornographic film or a meat processing plant. In a world which is increasingly less democratic and where accountability and wealth are inversely proportional, living lives rooted in love, respect, simplicity and promoting the common good can help turn things around.
March 11, 2018
Eight quotes from this brave work, part frustrating Bernhardian novel, part philosophical essay, part feminist near-manifesto. Blurbed by Edmund White who blurbs all the right books.
1. It is troubling that the emphasis on extreme humiliation in so much contemporary heterosexual pornography has coincided with the rise of organized misogynists who fault women in general for their own professional and personal frustrations.
2. The lack of a comprehensive philosophy of stupidity points to a moral failing in our culture.
3. The right to sexual liberty, as a social concern, vastly eclipses the right to food or shelter.
4. The pornographer's reason for being is the exaction of obeisance from women for financial gain.
5. What is middlebrow but a lowbrow with pretensions of grandeur, who hopes by his impostures to accede to a forgery of greatness?
6. I can never pay attention to prepared remarks, I prefer the awry clarity of spontaneously uttered words, their involuntary self-evidence, to the occlusiveness of eloquence, just as I prefer minor literature to major.
7. We do not know what perdures in the self and what is semelfactive, nor what is incidental or essential. We do not know what marks are left by the things we no longer remember, or when a memory persists in concealment and when it is gone forever.
8. It is almost worse, pissing on the side of her head rather than directly in her face. If the man pissed in her face, we could pretend she was a fetishist, and consider urolagnia a 'lifestyle choice' of the kind owed deference in liberal societies; but the derision exemplified in pissing on the side of someone's head is no longer even sexual.
1. It is troubling that the emphasis on extreme humiliation in so much contemporary heterosexual pornography has coincided with the rise of organized misogynists who fault women in general for their own professional and personal frustrations.
2. The lack of a comprehensive philosophy of stupidity points to a moral failing in our culture.
3. The right to sexual liberty, as a social concern, vastly eclipses the right to food or shelter.
4. The pornographer's reason for being is the exaction of obeisance from women for financial gain.
5. What is middlebrow but a lowbrow with pretensions of grandeur, who hopes by his impostures to accede to a forgery of greatness?
6. I can never pay attention to prepared remarks, I prefer the awry clarity of spontaneously uttered words, their involuntary self-evidence, to the occlusiveness of eloquence, just as I prefer minor literature to major.
7. We do not know what perdures in the self and what is semelfactive, nor what is incidental or essential. We do not know what marks are left by the things we no longer remember, or when a memory persists in concealment and when it is gone forever.
8. It is almost worse, pissing on the side of her head rather than directly in her face. If the man pissed in her face, we could pretend she was a fetishist, and consider urolagnia a 'lifestyle choice' of the kind owed deference in liberal societies; but the derision exemplified in pissing on the side of someone's head is no longer even sexual.
September 25, 2024
Back in the 1980s, a radical feminist extremist and gender separatist named Andrea Dworkin gained notoriety as a prominent anti-pornography activist. Her writings analyzed pornography, a lot of which was literary in the form of the written word, and her interpretations were full of fallacies of composition, appeal to emotion arguments, ad hominem attacks on men as a collective whole, massive cherry picking, conspiracy theories, misattributions, and an extremist hyperbolic tone that made her difficult to take seriously as the social critic she claimed to be. She argued that male sexuality is inherently violent, that the male orgasm is a form of violence, that pornography was invented to oppress women, and that female porn performers are bigger victims than people who died in the Holocaust because, according to her, Holocaust victims didn’t have to be photographed playing with their genitals before being killed. All of these brilliant ideas can be found in her hate-filled rant Pornography: Men Possessing Women. And while that information can easily be found, if anyone can find empirical evidence that death camps for porn stars are real, than I will concede that argument to the she-demon Ms. Dworkin. Even worse, she used her phallic symbol of a bullhorn to protest horror movies and collaborated with the conservative Christian right wing of the Reagan administration calling for a ban on all pornography. But if there was an ounce of truth in anything Andrea Dworkin said, it was that some people get sexual thrills out of seeing women being tortured and humiliated.
There is a cautionary tale here. Andrea Dworkin took her views to such an extreme that she looked like a loudmouthed buffoon. Having such a prominent voice in the feminist movement possibly set the cause back by at least a decade. By turning the volume up to maximum on her anti-pornography crusade, she wasted a lot of people’s time that could have been used to address more prominent issues affecting gender politics. And by setting the impossible task of banning pornography, she almost guaranteed that the sex industry would continue to grow and flourish. The lesson to be learned for activists of all kinds is that taking the wrong approach to your issue can kill your credibility when a more modest approach can yield more results and possibly even keep your pet issues alive in public discourse.
As time has gone on, the availability of pornography has become more widespread, more mainstream, and in some cases more degrading and extreme. Adrian Nathan West addresses this phenomenon of extreme pornography in his short book The Aesthetics of Degradation. While he didn’t make the same exact mistakes that Andrea Dworkin made, he does wind up in a similar space by constructing an ineffective argument.
This extended essay starts off describing some porn the author has watched. I’ll spare you the stomach-churning details here but I will say that what he describes is gross. For some reason, West feels compelled to explain why it is disgusting and degrading as if the audience couldn’t figure that out for themselves. But in case you couldn’t, he offers a semi-Freudian interpretation of why anal sex makes him feel sick. Then he goes online and finds an interview with a female performer in which she brags about her ability to do extreme sex acts while being filmed. What was he expecting? Besides he doesn’t consider the possibility that what she said in the interview could be part of a marketing strategy. He also doesn’t consider the possibility that her interview could have been written by someone in a porn studio’s advertising department. Porn is a business after all. Is this even important? Well maybe because I feel like West missed some opportunities to further examine his subject matter and the strange space that pornography occupies in the way that it combines performance and authenticity presented through the filters of editing and marketing.
But in any case, this leads the author to ask the ever mystifying question of: why some women choose to do this. He finds his answer in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ll give West some credit here. He makes a key idea, common to both philosophers, comprehensible which isn’t easy considering the arcane style of writing they both have. West explains that chronological time is the basis for building an individual’s identity since memory is a building block we use to make us into ourselves. Chronological memory is a resource we use to navigate our way through life. In the case of female porn stars, this personal chronology has been disrupted at some point, through trauma like neglect or abuse, that compromises their ability to make effective decisions. This appears to make sense, but my objection to this claim is epistemic, He writes as if this claim is absolutely true and yet I don’t see how he can claim it as such without accessing the subjectivity of a representative sample of all female porn stars. It’s an easy over-generalization. It certainly is plausible, but without enough data I can’t accept it as anything other than speculation. I’m also wary of his concept of decision making; just because a woman doesn’t make the choice he thinks she should make, it doesn’t mean that she made a wrong choice or even an ineffective choice. West never takes the broader picture into consideration here.
A lot of the rest of the book is a mishmash of odds and ends, abruptly switching from one subject to another without any clear transitions. West alternates between descriptions of pornography that get more violent and disgusting as the essay progresses, testimony from female porn stars, philosophical musing, and commentary from the serial killer Ed Kemper who describes his feelings of lust and violence toward his victims. The Ed Kemper quotes are problematic since, not only are they non sequiturs, but it amounts to a false analogy considering West doesn’t include any quotes from male porn stars or directors who express the same sentiments. This is a dirty rhetorical trick because we are supposed to associate the feelings of a serial killer with pornographers and porn consumers without any clear connection between them. As far as I know, there haven’t been any male members of the porn community who have been serial killers and actually the number of them who have murdered people has been too small to be statistically significant. A guilt by association argument is especially bad when there is no grounds for association to begin with. As for porn consumers, articles on the Psychology Today website show only a weak correlation between pornography consumption and acts of violence. An article I found on NPR stated that violent pornography is somewhat popular with women consumers, particularly if they are suffering from PTSD. So again, I don’t feel that West has taken the full range of possibilities into consideration when writing this essay. Even worse, his style of writing is disorganized and disorienting. I can’t tell if this is meant to be some kind of deliberate postmodern derailment or if it’s just bad writing, but it doesn’t work for me.
Then the author goes from bad to worse. He goes from vilifying pornographers for using money to exploit women of lower financial status to vilifying them for exploiting stupid women. He really does classify female porn performers as literally stupid after comparing them to retarded people. He really does use the word retarded too. His argument is that retarded people need to be protected from predatory and exploitative adults and stupid people are only one step above retarded people in intelligence levels. Therefore stupid people need to be protected from those who exploit them too. Stupid people are incapable of making effective choices for themselves and therefore end up allowing pornographers to make choices for them. The solution to this problem is for intelligent people with good intentions to make choices for stupid people so they don’t get exploited. I’ll concede that some female porn stars probably are stupid, but when your defense of them involves their humiliation and degradation with terms like “retarded” and “stupid”, I think you might want to re-evaluate how you go about approaching this problem and what your true intentions really are. Spitting on the people you claim to be defending is kind of a low blow.
The remainder of the book involves the author hanging out with a Catalan performance artists who reenacts scenarios from violent pornographic films as an art project. This guy doesn’t get around to saying much and most of these passages serve no useful purpose in the essay. But what he does do is make an argument of determinism to say that female porn stars do degrading porn because they have no choice; they are only responding to stimuli in the environment and this is a symptom of capitalism. He doesn’t explain this concept beyond merely making the claim. But anyhow, I suppose that means that people producing violent porn also have no choice other than to obey capitalist stimuli and porn consumers have no choice either. I guess nobody anywhere, no matter what they do or who they are, have any choice other than to obey whatever environmental stimuli come into their empirical range and goddamnit if we just got rid of the capitalist system than that could never happen again. Yeah right.
In the end, I wondered why West bothered to write this essay. He doesn’t actually argue for or against anything. What is he trying to prove? That violent, degrading, disgusting pornography is...violent, degrading, and disgusting? Why not argue that the sun is hot or that ice is cold? He makes no demands on the reader or society either. He proposes no solution to what he describes as media created with the intent to humiliate and degrade women. He sounds to me like a guy who spent a lot of time watching this crap until it made him sick to his stomach and he wrote this as therapy, complete with some philosophical concepts and postmodernist name dropping to make it look academically legitimate. (See what Alan Sokal and Noam Chomsky say about that in their criticisms of postmodernist pseudo-intellectualism) I might actually be inclined to agree with West if I could actually pinpoint what it is he is arguing for. He presents no thesis to defend, just a collage of information all related to one subject.
As for extreme pornography, here is what I think is going on. Being the kind of business it is, it is going to attract some unsavory people. Some men want to abuse and humiliate women so they get into the pornography business. With enough money to produce films and hire lawyers, they get female performers to sign legal contracts and forms of consent, some of which are vaguely worded and don’t specifically say what the performers will do. Since the films are made as works of art produced for commercial purposes, these abusers have found a loophole in the First Amendment and their films are protected as freedom of speech.
Pornography involving the use of minors is illegal, as it should be, because the need to protect children overrides the luxuries of the First Amendment. In most cases I am opposed to censorship and pornography won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be banned. Andrea Dworkin went on a fool’s errand when she tried to have pornography censored. Besides, most pornography is neither violent nor extreme. If you can’t see a difference between depictions of consensual vanilla sex and the things described by West, you might be a bit of an extremist yourself. But I do think more regulation is necessary. People involved in the production of pornography should be held to the same OSHA standards as people working in factories or any other occupation. If sex workers are truly workers, they have the same rights to health and safety standards as anybody else. Part of that means drawing a strict line of demarcation between “consent” and “informed consent” because the two are not the same. Porn producers need to be held legally responsible to prove that their performers know what they are getting into and they need to prove that consent is no given under coercion, intimidation, manipulation, or any other form of duress.
In the end, I might be inclined to agree that the kinds of violent pornography described by Adrian Nathan West is disgusting and is a sign that we live in a sick society. The problem with The Aesthetics of Degradation is that his writing is so poorly executed, depending on appeals to emotion, disorganized writing, and failing to make a definite point about anything, that I don’t feel he sufficiently made his case, whatever that was meant to be. It’s hard to agree with somebody when you aren’t sure as to what you are agreeing on. He makes the Andrea Dworkin mistake of over-emphasizing his case to the point where it becomes trivialized and rendered ineffective. I can’t say this book is of much use unless you just want to read about something that disgusts you. If you are that kind of masochist then there are better places to get what you want.
There is a cautionary tale here. Andrea Dworkin took her views to such an extreme that she looked like a loudmouthed buffoon. Having such a prominent voice in the feminist movement possibly set the cause back by at least a decade. By turning the volume up to maximum on her anti-pornography crusade, she wasted a lot of people’s time that could have been used to address more prominent issues affecting gender politics. And by setting the impossible task of banning pornography, she almost guaranteed that the sex industry would continue to grow and flourish. The lesson to be learned for activists of all kinds is that taking the wrong approach to your issue can kill your credibility when a more modest approach can yield more results and possibly even keep your pet issues alive in public discourse.
As time has gone on, the availability of pornography has become more widespread, more mainstream, and in some cases more degrading and extreme. Adrian Nathan West addresses this phenomenon of extreme pornography in his short book The Aesthetics of Degradation. While he didn’t make the same exact mistakes that Andrea Dworkin made, he does wind up in a similar space by constructing an ineffective argument.
This extended essay starts off describing some porn the author has watched. I’ll spare you the stomach-churning details here but I will say that what he describes is gross. For some reason, West feels compelled to explain why it is disgusting and degrading as if the audience couldn’t figure that out for themselves. But in case you couldn’t, he offers a semi-Freudian interpretation of why anal sex makes him feel sick. Then he goes online and finds an interview with a female performer in which she brags about her ability to do extreme sex acts while being filmed. What was he expecting? Besides he doesn’t consider the possibility that what she said in the interview could be part of a marketing strategy. He also doesn’t consider the possibility that her interview could have been written by someone in a porn studio’s advertising department. Porn is a business after all. Is this even important? Well maybe because I feel like West missed some opportunities to further examine his subject matter and the strange space that pornography occupies in the way that it combines performance and authenticity presented through the filters of editing and marketing.
But in any case, this leads the author to ask the ever mystifying question of: why some women choose to do this. He finds his answer in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ll give West some credit here. He makes a key idea, common to both philosophers, comprehensible which isn’t easy considering the arcane style of writing they both have. West explains that chronological time is the basis for building an individual’s identity since memory is a building block we use to make us into ourselves. Chronological memory is a resource we use to navigate our way through life. In the case of female porn stars, this personal chronology has been disrupted at some point, through trauma like neglect or abuse, that compromises their ability to make effective decisions. This appears to make sense, but my objection to this claim is epistemic, He writes as if this claim is absolutely true and yet I don’t see how he can claim it as such without accessing the subjectivity of a representative sample of all female porn stars. It’s an easy over-generalization. It certainly is plausible, but without enough data I can’t accept it as anything other than speculation. I’m also wary of his concept of decision making; just because a woman doesn’t make the choice he thinks she should make, it doesn’t mean that she made a wrong choice or even an ineffective choice. West never takes the broader picture into consideration here.
A lot of the rest of the book is a mishmash of odds and ends, abruptly switching from one subject to another without any clear transitions. West alternates between descriptions of pornography that get more violent and disgusting as the essay progresses, testimony from female porn stars, philosophical musing, and commentary from the serial killer Ed Kemper who describes his feelings of lust and violence toward his victims. The Ed Kemper quotes are problematic since, not only are they non sequiturs, but it amounts to a false analogy considering West doesn’t include any quotes from male porn stars or directors who express the same sentiments. This is a dirty rhetorical trick because we are supposed to associate the feelings of a serial killer with pornographers and porn consumers without any clear connection between them. As far as I know, there haven’t been any male members of the porn community who have been serial killers and actually the number of them who have murdered people has been too small to be statistically significant. A guilt by association argument is especially bad when there is no grounds for association to begin with. As for porn consumers, articles on the Psychology Today website show only a weak correlation between pornography consumption and acts of violence. An article I found on NPR stated that violent pornography is somewhat popular with women consumers, particularly if they are suffering from PTSD. So again, I don’t feel that West has taken the full range of possibilities into consideration when writing this essay. Even worse, his style of writing is disorganized and disorienting. I can’t tell if this is meant to be some kind of deliberate postmodern derailment or if it’s just bad writing, but it doesn’t work for me.
Then the author goes from bad to worse. He goes from vilifying pornographers for using money to exploit women of lower financial status to vilifying them for exploiting stupid women. He really does classify female porn performers as literally stupid after comparing them to retarded people. He really does use the word retarded too. His argument is that retarded people need to be protected from predatory and exploitative adults and stupid people are only one step above retarded people in intelligence levels. Therefore stupid people need to be protected from those who exploit them too. Stupid people are incapable of making effective choices for themselves and therefore end up allowing pornographers to make choices for them. The solution to this problem is for intelligent people with good intentions to make choices for stupid people so they don’t get exploited. I’ll concede that some female porn stars probably are stupid, but when your defense of them involves their humiliation and degradation with terms like “retarded” and “stupid”, I think you might want to re-evaluate how you go about approaching this problem and what your true intentions really are. Spitting on the people you claim to be defending is kind of a low blow.
The remainder of the book involves the author hanging out with a Catalan performance artists who reenacts scenarios from violent pornographic films as an art project. This guy doesn’t get around to saying much and most of these passages serve no useful purpose in the essay. But what he does do is make an argument of determinism to say that female porn stars do degrading porn because they have no choice; they are only responding to stimuli in the environment and this is a symptom of capitalism. He doesn’t explain this concept beyond merely making the claim. But anyhow, I suppose that means that people producing violent porn also have no choice other than to obey capitalist stimuli and porn consumers have no choice either. I guess nobody anywhere, no matter what they do or who they are, have any choice other than to obey whatever environmental stimuli come into their empirical range and goddamnit if we just got rid of the capitalist system than that could never happen again. Yeah right.
In the end, I wondered why West bothered to write this essay. He doesn’t actually argue for or against anything. What is he trying to prove? That violent, degrading, disgusting pornography is...violent, degrading, and disgusting? Why not argue that the sun is hot or that ice is cold? He makes no demands on the reader or society either. He proposes no solution to what he describes as media created with the intent to humiliate and degrade women. He sounds to me like a guy who spent a lot of time watching this crap until it made him sick to his stomach and he wrote this as therapy, complete with some philosophical concepts and postmodernist name dropping to make it look academically legitimate. (See what Alan Sokal and Noam Chomsky say about that in their criticisms of postmodernist pseudo-intellectualism) I might actually be inclined to agree with West if I could actually pinpoint what it is he is arguing for. He presents no thesis to defend, just a collage of information all related to one subject.
As for extreme pornography, here is what I think is going on. Being the kind of business it is, it is going to attract some unsavory people. Some men want to abuse and humiliate women so they get into the pornography business. With enough money to produce films and hire lawyers, they get female performers to sign legal contracts and forms of consent, some of which are vaguely worded and don’t specifically say what the performers will do. Since the films are made as works of art produced for commercial purposes, these abusers have found a loophole in the First Amendment and their films are protected as freedom of speech.
Pornography involving the use of minors is illegal, as it should be, because the need to protect children overrides the luxuries of the First Amendment. In most cases I am opposed to censorship and pornography won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be banned. Andrea Dworkin went on a fool’s errand when she tried to have pornography censored. Besides, most pornography is neither violent nor extreme. If you can’t see a difference between depictions of consensual vanilla sex and the things described by West, you might be a bit of an extremist yourself. But I do think more regulation is necessary. People involved in the production of pornography should be held to the same OSHA standards as people working in factories or any other occupation. If sex workers are truly workers, they have the same rights to health and safety standards as anybody else. Part of that means drawing a strict line of demarcation between “consent” and “informed consent” because the two are not the same. Porn producers need to be held legally responsible to prove that their performers know what they are getting into and they need to prove that consent is no given under coercion, intimidation, manipulation, or any other form of duress.
In the end, I might be inclined to agree that the kinds of violent pornography described by Adrian Nathan West is disgusting and is a sign that we live in a sick society. The problem with The Aesthetics of Degradation is that his writing is so poorly executed, depending on appeals to emotion, disorganized writing, and failing to make a definite point about anything, that I don’t feel he sufficiently made his case, whatever that was meant to be. It’s hard to agree with somebody when you aren’t sure as to what you are agreeing on. He makes the Andrea Dworkin mistake of over-emphasizing his case to the point where it becomes trivialized and rendered ineffective. I can’t say this book is of much use unless you just want to read about something that disgusts you. If you are that kind of masochist then there are better places to get what you want.
March 3, 2022
A discourse mainly focused on hardcore porn contained within the form of a novel. It is OK, I guess I'd enjoyed it more if the discussions were to go a bit more into the details and the underlying economies of the industry.
October 22, 2018
An interesting read.
September 3, 2016
I received this book in exchange for an honest review.
This book made many interesting points about the underlying effects and meanings of hardcore pornography and the same for why it exists.
Two things though: 1) maybe I wasn't smart enough for this book, but I couldn't go through a sentence on about 1/3 of the pages where I knew the meaning of every word. This made parts of the book kinda hard to get through. And 2) who's "the narrator" who does all the things in this social essay about porn? Is it the author? I was never quite sure.
Overall, the author had a lot of good thoughts and points. :)
This book made many interesting points about the underlying effects and meanings of hardcore pornography and the same for why it exists.
Two things though: 1) maybe I wasn't smart enough for this book, but I couldn't go through a sentence on about 1/3 of the pages where I knew the meaning of every word. This made parts of the book kinda hard to get through. And 2) who's "the narrator" who does all the things in this social essay about porn? Is it the author? I was never quite sure.
Overall, the author had a lot of good thoughts and points. :)
September 16, 2016
Honestly, I was hoping for something a little less serious and a little more naughty. But, as the title suggests, the topic was handled in a heavy way. I feel like I labored over the book, it was not easy and I don't know exactly what I did gain from it. I will say it was my error in requesting a copy and had I read the (also) heavy description, I may have realized it wasn't for me. But since it was a giveaway, I did want to get to the end. If you are interested in the topic - not of porn but of the degradation of it - it's probably a fine book.
August 16, 2016
I won a copy of this book.
This was an interesting read. It's thick, while only being slightly over 100 pages, with information and musings on the porn industry. The book talks themes of freedom, free will, and violence in the porn industry.
This was an interesting read. It's thick, while only being slightly over 100 pages, with information and musings on the porn industry. The book talks themes of freedom, free will, and violence in the porn industry.
Read
December 16, 2016read the bibliography and stopped after 20 or so pages of the content due to the relentless graphic descriptiveness, one could argue about the merits of such descriptiveness, but apart from that the book is - i think - probably asking/discussing the right questions...
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