Pornography, Censorship, and the Cult of the Wild West

...Youth (the most beautiful word in the language, as Henry James once wrote in his notebooks) is easily assimilated to Emerson's Party of Hope...

...Those writers—Grace Paley and Susan Sontag among them—who petitioned the Manhattan District Attorney to ban the movie Snuff (in which a woman is portrayed as being hacked to death), on the grounds that it was an incitement to sexual violence against women, were refusing to fall into this trap...

...One might say, then, that the pornographer faces a dilemma: He can only defeat the censor at his own expense and so in the long run has no alternative to keeping him in business...

...nevertheless, his right to publish and profit from pornography is thought to have affinities with the right to keep and bear arms, so that our political and social well-being is widely, if often rather nervously, believed to be as dependent on mayhem as on degradation...

...Victor Baras 1945-1977 We are saddened by the death, on November 13, of our valued friend and contributor, Professor Victor Baras...

...At the latter level, as countless Westerns have indicated, we have not only remained ambivalent about the value of civilization but enthralled with the evasions of adult responsibility as cowboys and rustlers cooperate symbiotically to keep their zestful play going...

...Gray's Lovers and Tyrants as pornography—as assaults on that enemy of all frontiers, the censor...

...This being the case, it is not hard to understand why so many writer-intellectuals have sprung to the defense of Larry Flynt, even though, as one of his defenders, New York Times cultural editor John Leonard, conceded, Flynt' s Hustler magazine is "offensive to women and other human beings" and Flynt himself is "a kind of toad in the erotic garden...

...One result is the frequency with which in Western fiction and movies it is the women who struggle to establish those prime institutions of civilization, schools and churches, while their men either drag their feet or get caught up exuberantly in those violent frontier games beside which church and school-building are at best dull pastimes...

...God knows, this is a familiar enough consequence when human beings do what they are so naturally disposed to do—overburden their symbols...

...One can, perhaps, agree with Ms...

...Romance is only another name for idealism," wrote Zane Grey, quite apparently with his own Western heroes in mind...

...Willis, in her Rolling Stone column, reminds us of the extent to which the cult of pornography is bound up with an obsolescent but not dead bohemian tradition of revolt—a tradition that takes us back at least to that great moralist (as Simone de Beauvoir has called him), the Marquis de Sade...

...This policy of containment has connections with the old-fashioned sense of the gentleman, and it has not been without its social utility, being, among other things, responsible for the role-playing that has so often saved us from the excesses of our virtues—if not from eruptions of our latent barbarism...

...Nevertheless, this convention, tending as it does to bracket females with adolescent males and therefore to downgrade civilization, can also be exploited for male self-deception and evasion...

...In his "Adulthood in American Literature," however, Professor Lynn is concerned less with the thematic glorification of literal adolescents than with the extent to which 19th and 20th-century fiction appeals to young readers because of the childishness of the adults in it...

...Or as Frank Norris once put it, our true Western hero, "the Hector of our ignored Iliad," was a law-maker, not a law-breaker, a hard drinker, or a cheater at cards, not a trigger-happy barbarian, but a man who loved his horse, his friend, and little children and "was always ready to side with the weak against the strong, with the poor against the rich...

...If women can be induced to acquiesce in his adolescent state, the male is less likely to feel guilty as he enjoys the camaraderie of the saloon and the sports of the frontier...

...Youth can always strike out for the territory and so elude the long arm of the censorious establishment of elders—the Party of Memory which is anxious to make the present and future conform to the familiar past...

...Evasion itself, interpreted as a stubborn and courageous refusal to submit to the emasculation of civilization, is then the hidden theme of the romance...

...Influenced as we have been in recent years by the 1 efforts of the human potential movement to redefine self-centeredness as a virtue, any view of American literature that suggests, as Lynn's does, that narcissism in American males has been too routinely defined as a praiseworthy passion for autonomous life is bound now to seem extreme, even perverse...

...Such idealizations have more cultural value, particularly in curbing the human race's high potential for barbarous regression, than we are willing to allow nowadays...

...But one can also say, perhaps with even better reason, that the dislike of censorship—whether directed against pornography or any other promise of release from moral stricture —has been a conventional expression of a male need to escape from the combined threat of women and civilization...

...Hence, they are widely read and admired as true frontierswomen, and one is tempted to say that their progenitors are those hard-riding, hard-swearing, gun-slinging heroines—Hurricane Nell, Phantom Moll, Wild Edna, Calamity Jane—who enlivened the Beattie dime novels in the last half of the nineteenth century...

...Writers as different as Lionel Trilling, Phillip Rahv, Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and R.W.B...

...The romance of pornography is, like the romance of the Wild West, bound up with the thrills of transgression which the censor obligingly helps to make possible by keeping the right amount of pressure on its devotees...

...Willis' view they were, no doubt, being seduced by the dialectic of the short run, but what common sense reason could they have had not to believe that left to its own logic the Wild West of the pornographer would only become wilder...

...There is then a historic appropriateness in the fact that so many men read Ms...

...For one thing, there is the matter of story necessity: The young have (or at least it is easy for adults to believe that they have) the kind of physical and passional vigor, the rebelliousness, curiosity, openness to experience, and mobility that get them into the right kind of trouble...

...On one level, to call a pornographic film or shop "adult" is to play a game with established convention or law, in which it is imagined that the law is frustrated because it can see no ready way to violate the terms of play: Either it must be a spoilsport or risk making a fool of itself...

...3 / JANUARY 1978 John P. Sisk Pornography, Censorship, and the Cult of the Wild West The legend of the Western hero glorifies an evasion of adult responsibilities that is still compelling to American males...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...

...Thus the primitivist Boone is "a fugitive from civilization who could not endure the encroachment of settlements upon his beloved wilderness," and felt cramped if there was another human being within a hundred miles of him...

...But in their far more popular version, Smith points out, such figures find the agricultural hinterland as confining as the civilized Eastern seaboard...

...At the same time, the possibilities for evasion become and remain analogous to pornography, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that much of the resistance to censorship of pornography is at bottom a fear that what is at stake is one of the few remaining frontiers of male evasion...

...One might say, too, that one of the best ways to defeat the pornographer would be to let him have absolutely unrestricted access to his pleasures, in which case he would soon enough find ways to invent or invite back the opposition without which, by lacking structure, pleasure would become boredom...

...This being so, the closing of the frontier in 1890, which might have been interpreted as a signal to concentrate all efforts on the building of civilization, could only have been a traumatic event that aroused ambivalent feelings in many American males...

...No doubt, their pleasure in such fictions is often laced with uneasiness as they apprehend a usurpation of their own frontier privileges...

...the women managing their appliance-free sod house and log cabin households, rearing the children, and performing numerous chores now generally thought of as male...

...Irving, Poe, Melville, Twain, Howells, James, and Stephen Crane all display that "psychic immaturity that inspired so many childish themes" no less than Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr...

...Indeed, the legend of the Western hero, especially in his role as cowboy, lends itself to a glorification of the evasion of adult responsibilities that is still compelling to American males...

...it is a tragedy, if not a disaster...

...One might even imagine a condition of liberation in which pornographers, yearning nostalgically for a lost golden age of furtive pleasure, would come to place the same value on clandestinely obtained filthy pictures that neo-Nazi cultists place on their swastikas and assorted leather goods...

...The Editors The American Spectator January 1978 7...

...If the censor refuses to stand fast, if he evades his responsibility within the structure of the romance, the protagonist is in danger -of appearing evasive rather than virtuous, even to himself...

...In Ms...

...Indeed, the romance of pornography is a way of refusing to come to grips with the issue of pornography and censorship except in a form that conveniently rules out many of its most bedeviling real-life complexities—including the complexity that it is all too easy to confuse genuine threats to the First Amendment with Hustler-like attacks on human society and the debasement of human beings...

...This is why no amouht of realistic detail can keep most Western movies from being romances in which is rehearsed one of the more subversive assumptions of romance: that civilization is not an assignment but the boundary beyond which the playground begins...

...Of course, the heroes in Westerns are not generally the ones who consort with the available prostitutes...

...Some of this cooperativeness is apparent on the level of story (and a The American Spectator January 1978 5 capacity for cooperation between the sexes is itself an important identifier of adulthood...

...He cleaned up the wild and woolly West so that it was a fit subject for family audiences...

...Given the power of this romance, it is no wonder that people, among them women who are so conspicuously its victims, at once abhor pornography and see no alternative to defending it from legal attack lest there result a domino-like collapse of all freedoms, a closing off forever of all possible frontiers...

...There are a number of reasons for this accent on juvenility...

...Twain's Huck Finn, Hemingway's Nick Adams, and Salinger's Holden Caulfield are not only satisfactorily trouble-prone, but the trouble they get into makes for handy symbolic repetitions of the national experience: open-ended adolescent America putting behind it the history-shackled adulthood of Europe...

...Jong's How To Save Your Own Life and Ms...

...For the real dirty secret about pornography is that it is connatural to adolescence: to that capacity of boys to be as entranced with fantasies of sex—utterly divorced from adult heterosexual realities and responsibilities—as they are entranced with their passionate reenactments of the Wild West itself Similarly, the old convention that the adult male does not tell dirty stories in the presence of women is in one respect a recognition that the amenities of civilization are especially dependent on feminine virtue, and that when men and women are together these amenities must be honored and protected by civilities of language...

...One of the refinements of the game, at least traditionally, has been the agreement among the players that the pornographic and obscene ought to be kept away from adolescent males, and females of all ages—with the exception, of course, of those honorary citizens of the adult male world, the prostitutes...

...As Henry Nash Smith has indicated in Native Land, there are versions of Western heroes like Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill that glorify them as champions of social progress, selflessly concerned, as Smith says of Boone, "with scattering knowledge through the heathen wilds, and mending the state of universal man...

...No doubt the Western story has made a major contribution to a myth that dies hard with the American male: that the best of all sex is sex with a prostitute—not least because, thanks to her indiscriminate and uninhibited sexuality, she can be imagined as dwelling close to elemental and vitalizing forces, whereas sex with a wife is spoiled by cultural conditioning...

...For Professor Lynn, Rip Van Winkle and Thoreau are typical...

...They are too busy functioning as prologues to that version of Lindbergh's great trans-Atlantic flight that emphasizes its frontier achievement as man alone...

...If such untamed superstars rescue damsels in distress it is hardly preliminary to the act of joining with them as adult males in order to domesticate the wilderness...

...Thoreau at Walden Pond, "seeking an alternative to the quietly desperate world of work and marriage," writes a book every episode of which "reveals an astonishing immaturity...

...Toad he may be...

...In the mythical world of the Western the classic place of evasion is the saloon, that frontier club where gambler, cowpoke, gunman, rustler, and wild mountain man come together in those violent sports that are often less the by-products of the act of trying to tame the wilderness than its justifications...

...11, NO...

...Nevertheless, this policy also serves the cause of male evasion and self-deception by making it possible to believe that to indulge a psychic immaturity in sexual matters is a sign of adulthood...

...Unfortunately, it is abundantly evident in the classic Western movie that the idealizations of Western romance are largely an overlay, and that what they really glorify is the hero's reluctance to come to man's estate and to accept the responsibilities of adult sexuality...

...The success of any society depends on its capacity to distinguish between those idealizations without which it cannot sustain its values and those that are simply sentimental evasions of its responsibilities...

...On the level of lived historical fact, of course, the pioneering effort was often enough an effort of cooperating adults: the men clearing and planting the land, getting in the crops, fighting off Indians and rustlers...

...Nevertheless, it is worth noting how much truth there was in this view—at least on the level of legend, fiction, and drama—as the nation moved westward after the retreating frontier...

...Thus for him, like the "other escape artists of his time, life is an endless series of get-aways...

...To head off rustlers at the pass may be to accept one's adult responsibilities to civilization no less than to cooperate in the building of a school...

...Lewis have observed this American trait with varying degrees of critical severity...

...The saloon as playground is not complete without its playgirl: the prostitute who, if gunplay is not an adequate sublimation, becomes the prime means for the evasion of adult male sexuality with all its domestic and cultural concomitants...

...Until fairly recent times most Westerns had to be classified as romances in the conventional sense of the term: man-meets-and-wins-woman stories thatended, once the obstacles to amorous union had been overcome, at the foot of the altar—and so promised that the man was on the verge of assuming adult responsibilities, with whatever fond backward glances at his abandoned playground...

...One must, as noted, concede that behind the fiction is often enough the historical fact of a necessary division of labor in frontier life, where men and women are put to the test together under conditions in which our own sexual pieties and anxieties are not especially relevant...

...Easygoing Rip, whose entire life had been an evasion of responsibilities, escapes into his 20-year sleep, leaving his wife "who symbolized the hateful responsibilities of work and marriage" to contend with the consequences of his incompetence...

...For early cynics, this fact was symbolized in the typical Tom Mix silent movie by the arrangement of the final scene, in which the head of Mix's horse, Tony, was interposed between the handsome and smiling faces of the lovers...

...Put in these terms, it is easy to see that the formulation of youth and adulthood in America can result in melodramatic entrapment: the youth aspiring not to become father to the man but to fight off John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...Hence the strategy of applying the term "adult" to the materials and the special enclaves of commerce that serve pornographic interests...

...This is the tradition of transgression in which so many literary intellectuals have for nearly two centuries now been enthusiastically enrolled...

...Trapped in the enemy's camp, then, they find it all too easy to read novelists like Erica Jong, Joyce Haber, Lisa Alther, and Francine du Plessix Gray as propagandists for a new order, however much these writers may object to such oversimplifications of their work...

...Like Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumpo, the classic American writers with few exceptions evade "the painful problem of being old in a young country" and "deny the realities of adulthood"—especially the realities of family and community life...

...the man lest he lose all his clarity, vigor, and virtue...

...If a frontier is the best of all playgrounds—a place where it is possible to evade responsibilities with a clear conscience—then the closing of it can only be a threat analogous to censorship...

...But all this is the dialectic of the long run, considered in the abstract and supported perhaps by a faith that—short of the point at which we run out of oil, food, drinkable water, and breathable air—some Hegelian synthesis will occur...

...The significant thing, however, is the context in which one puts the act, the theme one asks it to serve, as it passes from history into myth...

...while Carson, having begun his life as a pure and noble pioneer of empire, is soon transmogrified into a rip-roaring, freedom-loving mountain man, as ill at ease with the amenities of civilization as Thoreau was...

...Nor should this fact be put down lightly...

...Willis that women have good reason to protect from the lusts of the censor the pornography and obscenity that threaten them...

...But in a deeper sense it is to play a game with oneself—a game in which an essentially boyish compulsion is disguised as a genuinely adult preoccupation: a true frontier encounter in which only two-gun cowpokes and tough mountain men can survive...

...At the same time, men never quite forget that the lure of pornography is rooted in that "forfeit Paradise" of pre-puberty sexual fantasy, and ought therefore to be put aside as one puts 6 The American Spectator January 1978 aside those games of childhood that cannot serve some serious adult purpose...

...Unfortunately, we live in the short run and must contend with a complexity of competing, interrelated, and mutually exacerbating dialectics...

...In so far as one is a captive of this melodrama it is not simply hard to become adult...

...but none of them has come down quite so hard on it as Kenneth S. Lynn in the Fall 1976 Daedalus...

...Similarly, the primitivist version of Daniel Boone or Kit Carson needs an urbanized Eastern seaboard that will stand fast in its assumed civilized decadence...

...Pornography—one of the cheapest and least risky ways of indulging what Professor Lynn calls "psychic immaturity"—is, in fact, a spectator version of playing cowboys and rustlers on the sexual frontier...

...One thinks of the sensitive and embattled adolescents in the fiction of Twain, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, Fitzgerald, John Knowles, and the early Capote...

...Pornography makes strange bedfellows...

...Pornography is but a spectator version of playing cowboys and rustlers on the sexual frontier, and the resistance to censorship is in fact a fear of the combined threat of women and civilization...

...Ellen Willis, for instance (see her column in the March 24, 1977 Rolling Stone), is appalled on the one hand by the proliferation of pornography with its degrading images of women, and dismayed on the other hand by those feminists who cannot see that to appeal to the censor, even where the most obnoxious pornography is concerned, is a disservice to the cause of women...

...Menaced by censorship, it becomes the subject of an idealizing and distorting romance in which the protagonist who has assimilated to himself the whole cause of freedom needs an antagonist who has assimilated all the forces of repression...

...One may even suspect that the American male's dislike of censorship conceals a conviction that pornography makes possible a true frontier experience, the closing off of which can only result in impoverishment of spirit...

...It is clear enough that American literature—to say nothing of popular myth and legend—has had a long love affair with males whose pre-adult status has generally been identified in such honorific terms as to cast adulthood itself in a villainous role...

...The cowboy hero in the classic Western (Tom Mix, William S. Hart, Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson) had a purity of heart and a capacity to idealize—especially women —that suggests the medieval knight...

...However, as Henry Nash Smith points out, not only were theseladies frequently disguised as men but they were largely male creations to begin with, so that they turn out to be simply refinements in the male's evasive frontier pleasures...

...In these circumstances it is absurd to let the romance of pornography become a semantic trap for the terms of the debate...

...The irony is the extent to which women, having been induced to accept the male playboy's definition of liberated adulthood, now find it hard to oppose the obscenity and pornography that continue to threaten them even in their new "male" condition...