Girls (Scream) Aloud: Hypersadism, Obscenity and Sexuality

The UK’s obscenity law is a history of attempted prosecutions that have failed or been reversed. The latest such attempt has just been dismissed from court – it was the attempt to prosecute a man for putting online a story (titled ‘Girls (Scream) Aloud’) about the erotic kidnap, rape, torture, mutilation, and murder of the five members of ‘Girls Aloud’.

The coverage has been varied – the commonest line has been that the story is very offensive and very unpleasant, and the author ‘sick’, but that nevertheless – perhaps, and this is the question posed – does even a sick man have the right to publish obscene and terrible material? I had various thoughts reading this story, and so I felt that I should perhaps write a post about this kind of sexuality – what I’ll call hyper-sadism, the erotic fascination with, not just inflicting pain or exerting control, but with mutilation and murder.

Benefits, Compensation, and Sado-altruism

Debates over benefits often illustrate the hegemony of capitalist ideas. The entire debate happens within the bounds of a class-based viewpoint.

Typically the debate is between those who say that “we” (who’s ‘we’, paleface?) have a duty of benevolence to those who are “unable to provide for themselves”, out of our charity and kindness, as a mark of our ‘civilised’ society, and those who disagree, or feel that although, yes, we should show such kindness, the poor – especially those who have the temerity to not even seek work (i.e. who usurp the right of idleness that belongs only to those with sufficient wealth) – really ought to be properly grateful, and if they don’t show appropriately industrious gratitude, it’s foolish of “us” to keep providing for them.

This whole debate takes place in a fantasy land. Let’s take the phrase “unable”. These people need “our” help because they are “unable to provide for themselves”. And people shouldn’t give birth to children who they are “unable to look after”. What does this mean?

Cruelty, Callousness, Sadism, and Science

We think we have a clear distinction between cruelty and callousness. The cruel person inflicts pain and is pleased to do so, derives a sense of satisfaction from its infliction. The callous person inflicts pain simply because some other reason makes it expedient, and is indifferent to the pain per se. (The nice person inflicts pain regretfully and does everything they can to avoid doing so, of course).

For example, someone might have to operate on someone without anaesthetic (let us say, there is none available, or the risk of death is too great). A mild operation, not too much pain, but enough that the patient would very much prefer anaesthetic. We might intuitively say that the surgeon who takes satisfaction in the infliction of that pain is cruel (perhaps sadistic might be a more appropriately psychological word? no offence to BDSM tops) while the ‘businesslike’ surgeon who simply gets on with the operation is merely callous (the nice surgeon would, we imagine, do something to minimise the pain or prepare the victim for it?).

So these two alternatives – cruelty and callousness – seem very different: one is defined by a certain affect, the other by a lack of affect. But it seems to me they may often be very similar. I say this because it seems that very often people draw satisfaction precisely from their ‘callousness’, their indifference to pain.

I Don’t Really Know What I Think About Pornography

This is a confession. Pornography as an issue confuses me. I’ve been trying over the last few days to write a post on it, after being involved in a public debate over Hustler. But I keep losing track of my point.

One of the things I am sure of is that there’s a problem, that misogyny and objectification are prevalent and arguably becoming ever more prevalent. But to what extent, and in what ways, does misogyny in porn relate to wider social problems? As cause or effect? The empirical evidence is confused and contradictory – but what sorts of effects should we be looking at? Extreme sexual violence, low-level sexual violence, discrimination, or something else?

Similarly, I’m fairly confident that it makes sense and is useful to challenge and draw attention to the misogyny that’s widespread in a lot of porn (not to mention racism), such as that with which Hustler drips. But beyond that, questions of what to do about it confuse me. Is a legal ban really the right sort of measure? Would it do more harm than good? How can the ‘right’ subset of pornography be defined and picked out, without targetting things that don’t need it and leaving legitimate targets untouched?

I’ve been reading various views on the matter from different camps of feminist, but they leave me still roughly in the middle. Anti-porn radfems are persuasive, pro-porn sex-positives are persuasive, so, blah.

So this post doesn’t have a point or an answer. What it does have is some rather disjointed reflections.

Does Universal Power-Hunger Make Hierarchy Rational?

It’s sometimes said that people have an innate love of aggression and power and dominance and all those things that anarchists are against. It is then sometimes suggested that anarchism doesn’t ‘recognise’ this fact and that, on the contrary, only hierarchical societies do justice to ‘human nature’.

Now there’s two ways to take this. It might mean that people are unchangeably irrational in  this – that they will, in overwhelming numbers, strive for whatever offers them the momentary promise or prospect of satisfying it, whatever the cost. Or it might simply mean that the desire is there and is strong.

I won’t here give an answer to the first. If humans are so foolish that they can’t seek their own good, then that is indeed a good route towards authoritarian thinking. But I happen to have a certain optimism that people are rational enough, ultimately, that they can recognise what causes them suffering and work against it.

The second, though, I will try to tackle: the idea that, independently of rationality, people innately and always love power. I would suggest that if this is true (which it may be) the case for anarchism is not one whit diminished. That is because if one accepts the arguments that non-hierarchical societies are good, then those arguments will imply, fairly unchanged, that non-hierarchical societies are the most rational type of society for a power-hungry species.

Radical Feminism and Sado-altruism

Over recent weeks there has been a major dust-up in a large region of what has been called “the feminist blogosphere”. The focus  has been the topic of BDSM; the locus has been Rage Against the Man-Chine.com. The battle-lines have been broadly between those who, to identify the whole side with their stupidest position, think that if someone agrees to something, whatever that thing is, their choice should be respected and no further analysis attempted, because “feminism is all about choice” – and on the other side, those who, to again identify the whole side with their stupidest position, think that because an oppressive society can condition people to accept their own oppression, sexual spanking is no different from domestic violence, and sadists should be locked up.

More broadly the debate is over the status and possibility of consent within an oppressive system, but in this post I want to focus on a particular phrase:

“I’ve got no desire for dominance.“