empowered? or just willing...

"Be a man."
...
"I choose to renounce being a man. I choose to struggle to be a human being."

Those are the first and last lines of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen. I listened to him on CBC the other morning.

He's not saying much that's new - feminists first began condemning pornography in the 60s and 70s. But then feminism went into retreat and, as Jensen puts it, pornography went mainstream and the mainstream got pornographic. But Jensen possesses two unique perspectives in the discussion about pornography. One, he is a man. Two, he is now. How often does someone seriously, smartly and publicly decried our sexed-out culture anymore?

According to Jensen, masculinity is a straightjacket that suffocates men. It creates a toxic masculinity that kills the culture around it and destroys the human being within. Men are divorced from their feelings, divorced from their bodies, divorced from each other. Pornography, the complete disembodied "masturbation facilitator", is the logical result.

He talks about our rape culture. Evident in everything from the lax penal system for rapists, to the proliferation of pedophilia, to the pornographic billboard ads for body spray on the highway. He says that while porn had a quaint purience about it in the past, today it is all about "body punishing sex" and humiliating fetishes. Women, thinking they were empowering themselves by taking it on (let's hear it for Madonna and Christina), instead just send the message that they are willing participants in their own degradation.

Men are fascinating creatures. Reading Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man was a window into a lonely world. One of the things she saw was how men police each other. They watch each other for signs of weakness, misteps that take them dangerously close to effeminateness and a loss of their dominant power. They pull each other back. Or they club each other on the head with disgust.

A friend of mine went to Alberta for a few weeks, taking the bus all the way there and back. Aside from that idiotic and exhausting gesture, he also grew a beard. When asked why, he said, "I don't want to get bothered or beaten up." By who, I asked him, thinking how, uh, sweet he was to have these paranoiac fantasies about women. By other men, he said, what do you think.

This guy, let's call him James cause that's what his name is, is not aggressive and not belligerent. Nor is he small or effeminate. He's just a quiet guy who felt that getting on a bus for 3 days and going to Alberta required some masculine reinforcement. He needed to get back to being a maaaaan. Cause if he didn't some guy was going to show him. Up close and personal like.

Honestly, I didn't know men were scared of other men. I really didn't. But I should have known. I've been in groups of guys and seen how they egg each other on. Saw how if one says tits the next says pussy and the next says bitch. They outdo each other, prove to each other they are big and hard and can do it oh yeah. I assumed they were just doing it for the women. Scaring us, impressing us, taking up space, putting us in our place. But no, they are doing it for each other. Taking the piss out of each other. They are scared of each other.

What does all that have to do with porn? Well, aside from the fact that I am rambling, it has everything to do with porn. Because men make porn and consume it and foist it on the people and culture around them. And just as men like to think of themselves as impermeable and sealed - fortress man! - they create a monoculture of men and masculinity. The male-dominated society does not like to let in women, now does it. No girls allowed.

But cultures of exaggerated masculinity - hello Middle East, good afternoon Bush Administration - signal their own violent destruction. With a dearth of independent women in power, in positions of influence, in popular culture, the society spirals out of control. Becomes a patriarchal parody of itself.

A pornographic culture is a very sick culture. It is our culture.