Deep Throat, Shallow Mind

Having just come home from a visit to Holland, I can report that the sidewalks of Amsterdam are no longer as heavily boobytrapped with dog shit as they used to be. Hooray for progress.

But there were disappointments too. The two broadsheet papers I bought last Saturday (NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant, both of which I used to write for before I moved to America in 1991) seemed to delight in a new priggishness, if the opening essays in their multi-page opinion sections were any guide.

NRC Handelsblad, known as a bastion of classic European-style liberalism, carried a lengthy piece — co-penned by a top government bureaucrat — that was essentially a diatribe against consumer choice. Admittedly, the title provided ample warning of what lay ahead: "Mandatory Freedom Is a Problem Rather Than a Solution — You Should Be Able To Choose Against Choice." Ay caramba.

There is too much freedom in our markets, the authors sought to convince me, and it's the wrong kind of freedom at that — because it's a lot of work to be an informed consumer (cue sad violin music). That Western consumers are at liberty to choose everything from ice cream flavors to healthcare providers is a violation of equality and solidarity, the intrepid essayists charged. Choosing is neither "fun" nor "ideal," and choice is something "no citizen ever asked for."

Riiiight. Best to abdicate choice and personal initiative, sink back into your welfare-state apathy, and let the government determine everything for you, of course.

My thus-induced exasperation got a lot worse when I read the considerably more sour-pussed, left-leaning de Volkskrant — in particular, a 2,000-word plea to criminalize not just the manufacture, but the possession of "violent" porn. The fingerwagger in question is an unknown (to me) journalist and book author called Ralf Bodelier. As it turned out, he's very good at committing, in rapid succession, every howler and fallacy imaginable. (Unfortunately, the piece is only available in Dutch, and is tucked away behind a pay wall to boot, but I'll do my best to give you the gist of it here.)

For instance, would you like to venture a guess what, to Bodelier, constitutes violent porn?

The movie Deep Throat. No kidding.

He writes:

Only viewers who completely ignore their own capacity to judge can believe that Linda Lovelace voluntarily swallowed the doctor's immense penis all the way up to his balls.

Really? For starters, I don't recall "doctor" Harry Reems' member being supersized, so perhaps Bodelier's observation says more about his own johnson than about Reems's. This is not meant in a gratuitously mean-spirited way. I'm just pointing out that Bodelier repeatedly makes the classic nanny mistake of believing that his own convictions and experiences are the norm, some kind of universal yardstick. This is also evident in the fact that Bodelier apparently sees deep fellatio as an inherently violent act on the recipient's part — which must mean that he's never been on the receiving end of a consensual blowjob that involved deep-throating. Hardly the kind of guy you want judging the appropriateness of other people's sexual proclivities.

One of the few laugh-out-loud-funny passages in Bodelier's piece — no less mirthful for being unintentional — comes when he goes surfing for violent porn, and finds out which horrid things various porn sites specialize in. The flavors he finds, and is shocked by, include 'rape,' 'humiliated,' 'gangbang,' and — ready for this? — 'doggystyle.' Isn't it precious? For Ralf Bodelier, it seems, sex is at its finest when the two participants each insist on nothing but the missionary position.

But he isn't just out of touch — he's also dishonest. Anyone enterprising enough to spend ten minutes on a Deep Throat refresher course, courtesy of Google, will know that the truth about Linda Lovelace is not as starkly one-dimensional as Bodelier will have you believe. It's true that Lovelace, after first embracing the porn industry and cashing in on her post-Deep Throat celebrity, did an about-face, indicting porn makers as exploitative and coercive. But then, when that narrative had run its course, she changed her mind again, and willingly posed for a softcore porn magazine called Leg Show. Somehow, Bodelier forgets to mention that.

More importantly: by most credible accounts, it wasn't the porn industry that maltreated Lovelace. That dubious credit belongs to her then-husband and manager, a first-class prick by the name of Chuck Traynor. Mark Kermode, a British Channel Four journalist who has long been fascinated by the famous porn movie and its star, resulting in a 2002 documentary called The Real Linda Lovelace, writes:

Linda Lovelace's story is not a paradigm of the porn industry, it is a lesson in the appalling reality of spousal abuse which continues to this day. It is the plight of battered wives, rather than the morality of the porn industry, to which those concerned by Linda's story should turn their attention.

Kermode also paraphrases Eric Danville, the writer of the book The Complete Linda Lovelace, as saying

[I]t was the fame which Deep Throat bestowed upon Linda which ultimately saved her from Chuck's fists because, on a purely practical level "he couldn't be bringing out a bruised piece of property." [emphasis mine] 

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure that the porn industry has no shortage of deeply unpleasant, sleazy people. Then again, the same was true for Enron, Adelphia, BCCI, Arthur Anderson, and so on. At all those companies, fucking people over (unlike the sex acts seen in 99-point-something percent of porn flicks) involved unwitting and unwilling participants who, rather than collecting a pretty good paycheck for services performed, were unceremoniously swindled out of their own dough.

Bodelier does not believe that virtually all porn scenes are consensual. His article is full of accusatory but maddeningly imprecise words concerning the damage that the porn industry supposedly inflicts on its actresses. He alleges that "many" of the starlets become actual slaves ("completely lose their freedom"), without a sliver of evidence to back up the claim. Bodelier repeats the charge until he's blue in the face, relying each time on little weasel words like "many" and "often" and "usually" to make his dubious point.

The only time he gets more or less specific is when he quotes a United Nations report which estimates that worldwide, roughly four million women are forced into sexual slavery every year. That number may or may not be accurate. People who seek to draw attention to the plight of enslaved sex workers have been known to exaggerate their stories (perhaps with the best of intentions). A good case in point is journalist/novelist/screenwriter Peter Landesman, who penned a January 2004 feature story for the New York Times Magazine about sexual slavery. America's best press critic, Slate's Jack Shafer, characterized the piece thusly:

[A] breathless hodgepodge of anecdotes, bait-and-switches, non sequiturs, pseudonymous testimonials, and over-the-top hysteria. ... Supporting evidence is vague. Where it is not vague, it is anecdotal. Where it is anecdotal, it is often anonymous, too. And where it is not anecdotal or vague it is suspicious and slippery.

Shafer might as well have been writing about Bodelier's heartfelt if factually flawed advocacy piece.

Even if the UN estimate is accurate, it is hardly relevant to the porn topic. As Bodelier half-admits, those sex slaves end up in brothels and maybe in peepshows. As there is a serious crime involved here, the victims are typically not paraded in front of cameras for all the world to see.

Another piece of sophistry Bodelier commits is a an uncritical reference to the killer of U.K. teacher Jane Longhurst, Graham Coutts, who is said to have been under the influence of violent porn. There is, however, no causal link between porn consumption and actual violence, as I've argued here.

There's more. Take Bodelier's assertion that a few men in a little town in Holland were recently found to have had "advanced plans" to make a snuff movie. But of course. The desperation with which anti-porn crusaders clearly wish that snuff movies actually existed is something to behold, isn't it? Well, sorry, ladies and pantywaists, no dice. To the best of the experts' knowledge, and no matter how much it displeases Gloria Steinem, no real snuff movie — in which a victim is murdered on camera for the sexual gratification of viewers — has ever been made.

Poor Ralf Bodelier. Denied his chance to wax wrathfully about snuff-film horrors, he must resort to pure fantasy. Immediately following a paragraph about the "planned" Dutch snuff movie, he writes:

More than three decades after Deep Throat, this looks like the daily practice of too much Internet porn. While Norman Mailer and Xaviera Hollander describe the emergence of porn as the dawn of sexual freedom, that rise led to an absolute lack of freedom for hundreds of thousands of women. [emphasis mine] 

So he's alleging — proof be damned — that "hundreds of thousands of women" have been enslaved by porn-making evildoers, who've turned filming the killing of their victims into a "daily practice." Um, could we have some hard numbers and cold facts, please? Or even just one or two examples of those murders being commited on movie sets daily?

And not to pick nits, but nowhere does Bodelier make the slightest attempt to come up with a definition of "violent" porn. Considering that he deems Deep Throat vile and impermissible — and that he'd like to put you behind bars if you watch it — I'm not hopeful about where he draws the line. Still, it's a question that begs for an answer. As I wrote a couple of months ago, when the British proposal to punish possession of violent porn was introduced:

[W]ho gets to decide what goes too far, and how to define big amorphous words like "violent" and "abusive"? Are the Brits going to have a censorship committee that will earnestly discuss if a facial cumshot is allowable or abusive? And if the verdict comes down that that's permitted, how about a bukkake gangbang? Or how about a golden-shower scene — is that potentially abusive enough that it could land you in the pokey for a few years? Will the committee bravely tackle the possible violence in everything from fisting photos to extreme-bondage tapes?

So how about it, Bodelier?

Oh: For those interested in the Linda Lovelace saga, her quite lovely, no-spin obituary — penned by Joe Bob Briggs — is here.

Comments

[Phil]

Good to have you back, Rogier.

It seems to me that most of these anti-porn people are just grossed out by porn in general. It's another case of, "I don't like it, so it must be bad"-ism, which is sadly becoming as much of a problem over there as it is in the US.

[Windypundit]

If he thinks deep throating is violence against women, don't you wonder what the hell he'd make of all the sword swallowing in gay porn? (I remember hearing about some female anti-porn crusader telling a crowd how deep-throating wasn't possible unless force was involved, only to be corrected by several gay men in the audience. Bet she didn't see that coming.)

Also, I doubt he ever actually contacted any adult film makers and asked them about their recruiting practices. They just take out ads and start hiring applicants. The famous adult film-makers don't even need the ads.

[J9]

As a female who knows other females, I've always been frustrated by the ommission of something in these debates:

Some women like porn. Some women even like violent porn. Some women even (horror!) like rape-fantasy porn. I know some of these women. They're all intelligent, generally well-balanced, earn at least 5 figures a year (or are married to men to earn enough to support them and their kids), and none of them actually wants violence to happen to them or any other women. To my knowledge, none has been sexually assaulted in a serious way (being groped by a drunk guy in a bar doesn't count here).

So are me and my friends all just sick? Or do we deserve as much a say in the debate as the "femininists"?

[GreginOz]

J9-yes, you are a dead-set sicko! Didn't you hear Barbara Bush's "Just say NO" campaign? 'S funny that these wowsers would think that the Brady Bunch is pornographic yet it is invariably these du-oh gooders (sic)that get caught with the buttplug and the 12 year old. Also of fascination is that the USA is one of the biggest producers and consumers of porn yet sits on a moral high horse. I think there must be an axiom about this: The Law of Porn. 'those most oppossed to porn have a gimp in their closet'? Regards. PS just thought of a great snuff movie title.........
Soddom Death!

[J9]

I heard her campaign - and believe me, I will never do drugs or have sex with Barbara Bush.

J9

[K.L.]

Sources suspect.
Snuff film never made?
The article that you use to refute a very credible assertion is dated and delves not at all into current sex-slavery/sex-work realties (ie., eastern Europe, Turkey, modern brothels in the EU, etc)
Take care von Bakel, you're beginning to sound as naive as Bodelier.

[Rogier]

For the record, the article I cited is from October 2006. After 16 months, it is badly outdated, you say? Then out with it, please, K.L. -- credible recent (or even old) reports of actual snuff films having been found, confiscated, confirmed, and (preferably) the perps having been found guilty and convicted.

If the genre existed, at least some of these crimes would come to light, and we'd be reading about such sensational murder cases in every newspaper in the world.

Remember, according to Bodelier, snuff movies are a "daily practice" in the porn industry. That means there must be thousands upon thousands of them. People like he and you appear to take that as a fact, based on ... what, exactly? I merely would like to see credible proof -- and *I'm* the naive one?

For the record, I believe there ARE psychopaths out there who take pleasure in torturing their prey and recording their own handiwork on video. They get a nice six-figure salary and a generous pension from this country's taxpayers. You can read about them here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-12-06-cia-tapes-terror_N.htm