Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature

by Susan Griffin

A profound analysis of how pornography impacts on the relationship between men and women. Maintaining that sado-masochism has become endemic to our society, Griffin considers pornography as a crucial expression of modern culture and surveys the plots and images of pornographic books, movies, and magazines. "A serious effort to apply feminist insights to sexual psychology."--Ellis Willis, New York Times Book Review

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Psychology, Womens, Politics, Pornography

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Susan Griffin is an award winning poet, writer, essayist and playwright who has written nineteen books, including A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Named by Utne reader as one of the top hundred visionaries of the new millenium, she is the recipient of an Emmy for her play Voices, an NEA grant and a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. Her latest work, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, on being an American Citizen has been called "fresh, probing" and "incisive" by Booklist.

Reviews

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Griffin should be a household name because of her sheer brilliance, complex and holistic analysis, and poetic writing style that still conveys solid information.

This is a must for everyone to understand our patriarchal culture.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has dated less well than Susan Griffin's most visionary books (in my mind): A Chorus of Stones, Woman and Nature, and The Eros of Everyday Life. Pornography and Silence is a brilliant investigation into the dead end of masculine longing and inability that gives rise to the fetishization of objectified, disconnected sexual experience, and makes it possible to experience images of women's degradation and exploitation as pleasurable. The trouble is that it's entirely a product of the second-wave feminist campaign against pornography, and fully underwrites the equation of pornography with those documents of alienation and abuse. The grayer areas, many of which have come into existence since that time, do not appear here, and so this wonderful book has lost a great deal of its relevance, since it serves a hard-line anti-erotica position that few people I know would endorse today.

There are important questions in those gray areas that would be very well served by Griffin's sensitive, meticulous investigation, such as what is an appropriate relationship to the many varieties of sex work in a world in which we all have to submit to exploitation in some form in order to be allowed to live, and most of the work available can be a whole lot less empowering and pays a whole lot worse if one can get it at all (70% of transgender women of color are officially unemployed in San Francisco and can be refused work without reason). But that's not the book she wrote, in the time she wrote it, and I don't think the lack makes it less brilliant.

[Stephy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed the way I look at the world back in 1982 I wanted to read it again. That part of me who was offended then has become insufferably tolerant again of the fact that men denigrate women on a daily basis. If we believe in the ideas presented in this book, we cannot allow pornography to flourish as it does in the United States of America! Stories of computers which bog down and crash completely because businessmen are seen as funny, not shameful. Where have we gone wrong as a society? Why do we still tolerate this exploitation of women? And what can we do to set change in motion once again. Or are we stuck in endless empty,helpless ongoing morass of Porn forever?

[Fishface · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this one over and over. Full of thought-provoking reframings of the role of pornography in our society.

[Mary Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for a Psychology of Sexuality course and found it an amazing look at the way culture perverts itself to be a destructor of nature and life itself.

[Beky-Mae · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a encyclopedia of amazing artists and writers of whom I had to look up and am now enjoying their works such as Marquis De Sade, Kate Chopin and Franz Marc so I thank this book for that. The first 70 pages were also very enjoyable to read however it's to feministic for me personally, I understand this book revolves around that on purpose but at the end it feels the author is running out of points and has to keep using to death the same words, references and ideas . It was a bore to read by about 2/3 the way through in my opinion .

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing book exploring the split between culture and nature (often depicted as wimmin) and how pornography perpetuates this split at the exspense of women and people's ability to be whole beings. I would call this book essential reading.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cornerstone feminist theory
Surprisingly accessible and ultimately empowering

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a considered and detailed feminist takedown of pornography. Focus is made on European and modern writings with some special emphasis on Histoire d'O Story of O. Some that don't get reviled are Song of Solomon and The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.

Some say pornography, and I suppose violent imagery in games and films, cannot influence viewers. An interesting point made by this author is that that contradicts corporate money spent on advertising. This also is refuted by the interest and controversy around subliminal advertising. Also recounted is successful self-improvement techniques involving creative visualization.

If the social scientist who found no correlation between violence and pornography believes his studies to have proved that pornography does not cause violence, then we must wonder why he does not begin to examine pornography as a strange and extraordinary exception to all other imagery. For in this case, if he has discovered a form of culture which does not affect behavior, he ought to study this form to discover what is exceptional in it, and what it might tell us about the mind.

Both the social scientist and the pornographer collaborate on the assumption that pornographic imagery does in fact affect behavior. Millions of dollars are spent on research, which not only documents but discovers techniques by which an association between sexual desire and any activity encourages behavior. This research is financed by an advertising industry which used pornographic photographs of women and sublimi- nally embedded images of penises and breasts in the belief that showing these images in proximity to a given product, a kind of Scotch, or a brand of cigarettes, will cause the viewer to buy these products. Here research suggests that the pornographic image has such a powerful effect on behavior that it is worth millions of dollars a year. See Wilson Bryan Key, Media Sexploitation (New York, 1977) and Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1957).

I like the idea of science emerging from a cultural matrix.

As Ruth Hubbard has written of Darwin's thought: "There is no such thing as objective, value-free science. An era's science is part of its politics, economics and sociology: it is generated by them and in turn helps to generate them." In short, science is not fact: it is culture; and so science's definition of instinct can perhaps tell us more about culture's will and belief than about the natural limits of our behavior, more about our minds than about nature.

And indeed, a large body of scientific data exists to disprove the ideas of Freud and Lorenz and Stekel and Hobbes and Spencer regarding human nature. In his massive study of both instinct and our culture's biased view of nature, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm writes: "The anthropological data have demonstrated that the instinctivistic interpretation of human destructiveness is not tenable. While we find in all cultures that men defend themselves. destructiveness and cruelty are so minimal in so many that these great differences could not be explained if we were dealing with an 'innate passion.'

The author connects the pornographer to the chauvinist to the bigot to Hitler.

There are two kinds of delusion which it is possible for the civilized mind to embrace. The first delusion is a private one. The mind possessed by such a delusion is often perceived as mad. Certainly as strange. For the private delusion sets the one who believes in it apart from the rest of humanity. But exactly the opposite is true of the second delusion. This is the mass delusion: it consists of a shared set of beliefs which are untrue and which distort reality. A whole nation, for example, decides to believe that "the Jew" is evil. This type of delusion brings the man or woman who believes in it into a common circle of humanity. And because the mass delusion is a shared delusion, the mind which shares it is perceived as normal, while the same society perceives as mad the mind which sees reality.

Pornography is a mass delusion and so is racism. In certain periods of history, both of these mass delusions have been accepted as sane views of the world, by whole societies or certain sectors of society. The pornographic ideology, for instance, is perceived as a reasonable world view by parts of American and European societies today. And various forms of racism have been the official ideologies of societies, political parties, and even governments. Most notably, we remember the official racism of the Third Reich.

...

We know that the sufferings women experience in a pornographic culture are different in kind and quality from the sufferings of black people in a racist society, or of Jewish people under anti-Semitism. (And we know that the hatred of homosexuality has again another effect on the lives of women and men outside of the traditional sexual roles.*) But if we look closely at the portrait which the racist draws of a man or a woman of color, or that the anti-Semite draws of the Jew, or that the pornographer draws of a woman, we begin to see that these fantasized figures resemble one another. For they are the creations of one mind. This is the chauvinist mind, a mind which projects all it fears in itself onto another: a mind which defines itself by what it hates.

...

Hannah Arendt has observed precisely this pattern in Nazi propaganda. She tells us that the announcements of the Third Reich consistently contradicted themselves. Even within the same statement, contradictory assertions were to be found. Moreover, continually, with almost no attempt to conceal the divergence between fact and statement, the pronouncements of the Third Reich contradicted what the German people could see with their own eyes. But here we are at the heart of both the experience and the raison d'être of Nazi propaganda. Like pornography, the medium of propaganda itself speaks, gives us a message, and this message is that the knowledge of culture and of authority is to be trusted over direct sensual knowledge. "The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses," Hannah Arendt writes; the masses "do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience, they do not trust their own eyes and ears but only their imaginations."

...

In every detail, the concentration camp resembled an enacted porno- graphic fantasy. Even the hardware of sadomasochism was present. Men and women were chained and shackled; and the SS officer, who wore high leather boots, carried a whip. And just as in a pornographic fantasy, the Jew was beaten. He was "disciplined." A man who at- tempted to escape, for example, was "beaten to a pulp." And then he was made to stand for hours in this beaten state under a hot sun or in rain before being lashed again or "thrown into a dungeon for further torture, or hanged before the assembled camp."

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

She describes well the mind-set that seeks to posess the objective body protrail and capture identification with vulnerability present from childhood without being vulnerable and can never find it. Silence about the human experience of vulnerability drives the engine of pronography for women as well as men.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't onboard with this book at first

This book is hard to describe. I grumbled a lot at first while reading it. It was too poetic, there weren't enough citations for the ideas presented, it reminded me too much of my own high school IB essays, it doesn't hold up/sounds like it was written longer ago than it was, doesn't hold enough space for non-binary and trans people, etc. I read the first half slowly, grudgingly, over four months. I would have given it 2 stars at that time.

But roundabout halfway, things shifted for me. Maybe it was that I sat with the concepts for so long while going about my daily life in this country that made it easier to accept some of what the author is putting forth. That the things I observe and experience routinely fit in with what she theorizes.

The second half of the book resonates deeply with me, and it's something I have already shared with and recommended to women in my life. I expect to periodically review my highlights in the future, and potentially re-read it. I would give this part five stars.

Combined rating of 3.5 stars easily rounding to 4.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t think i can fully put into words how much this book has affected me. the way Susan Griffin writes of oppression through pornography is so deeply visceral. she viewed misogyny, racism and anti-semitism through this lens of a pornographic mind in such a way that has just blown me away. i will definitely be reading more of her work.

[Maria Theodora Dobre · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The man who stares at a photograph of a nude woman is a voyeur. He can look freely and turn away when he wishes. He can run his hands over the two-dimensional surface, but he will not be touched. He can know the body of a woman, and yet encounter a knowledge which will not change him. We read that the sight of a woman contains “the image of everything which rises up from the depths.” But the voyeur, when he sees a photograph of a woman’s body, keeps these depths at a distance. An invisible line separates him from the image he perceives. He will not be overwhelmed by the presence of her flesh. He need not encounter the knowledge of his own body. He can hide from the deepness of his own soul."

''Yet the pornographic mind, like the doctrinal mind, denies the knowledge of its own body. By the mechanism of projection, this mind succeeds in detaching itself from its own bestiality. In this mind, the bestiality of a man’s nature is expressed in a woman’s body."

"Indeed, the pornographic mind attempts to solve the problems of the psyche precisely by creating a world of illusion. And therefore, if this mind wanted to believe women docile, it would need to represent women as docile and as objects. Why, then, must this mind show us over and over again the act of domination and subordination, which suggests to us that women are not, in fact, objects by nature, but instead must be made so obsessively, redundantly? Because indeed, the women in pornography are not “other” than the pornographer himself. They are symbols for the denied parts of himself. And in this sense it is quite literally true that they are his possession and that they exist to serve him and give him pleasure. But now we also know why a creature who is owned and who is not supposed to have a will of her own must be mastered. For in fact, she is will. She is a desire to be. She is a part of the pornographer’s mind and body which he has denied to himself, but yet, even so, would come to consciousness, expression, and life. So the pornographer, despite his conscious intention to make a woman an object, would give the woman he creates a will because she is a mirror of himself. And then in fantasy he would master that will. He is in a terrible conflict. He would let his body speak; he would let the knowledge of the body in himself live; and yet this is also precisely the knowledge of which he is terrified. And so he tries to resolve this conflict by depicting the body without a spirit. He tries to separate culture from nature. He would have what is natural in him be mute. But what is natural speaks in him. Therefore, he gives “woman” a voice in pornography, but he gives her this voice only in order to silence her."

"And now the breasts take on a double significance. For at the same time they represent power, they also represent vulnerability. They are sensitive. They feel. They are defenseless. They manifest sexual desire. Their nipples harden. And the flesh around them is soft, yielding; to touch them is to evoke at once tenderness and need."

"Pornography expresses an almost morbid fear of female speech."

"Perhaps here is the clue to why daughters, who face the same human condition, and must have the same desire to master nature, move toward self-punishment and self-diminishment rather than to dominance and sadism. For the daughter is taught by culture to identify the “dark” and the “inaccessible” within herself. She herself is culture’s lost self; she is the power that is both denied and feared; hers is the nature which must inevitably imperil not only those around her, but even herself. Just as culture teaches its sons to take revenge against nature in the body of a woman, so does culture give this same lesson to a woman, only it is her own body she must hate and fear."

"Rose of the eye of the hand of the mouth. The scent of the rose. The enrapturing scent. (The rose of the nose. The rose only the nose knows.) The soft rose. The rose of our thoughts, crossed with our ways: the rose of the war of roses, of revenge; the rose of celestial perfection or of earthly passion or of both, as in the rose of martrydom, the rose of voluptuousness, the heart center rose, the labyrinthine rose, the rose of the union of opposites, the tree of life of feminine deities of Venus of resurrection, as in the rose of the beloved. Or the blood-red rose. Which shall it be? And how shall we name the rose? O wide rose consummation open, quiver pause perfection And close achievement: this rose. This actual rose. The rose blooming in the early fall. In the warm days of early fall. With still a few more buds unopened. The rose as yet to come. Petals soft like the skin of the body and hidden, the green sheath pulled back to reveal: the new bloom. The astonishing beauty. The color which stuns the eyes (but not only the eyes, also the heart, the breath) dark pink at the edge, infinitely by slow degrees shading into lightness and then into brilliance into yellow; petals curled, petals embracing, rounding one another, cherishing a mouth, a blessing at the center: a flutter, a swooning motion, where the secret opens. And the fullest bloom: uncurling blown, seeded, the loose rose, the laughing rose, the spent rose, the heedless, reckless rose, the shining rose. And then the old rose. Petals brown, shrinking, dry and dying, shedding to the ground, petals the color of soil, invisible, doing their dark work. Rose of the eye of the hand of the mouth. How shall we name thee, rose. By the song like a rose on our lips, rose, who is in us, wondrous, large rose, as large as we can imagine, rose who is in us, rose that we are, partly open, blooming, bloomed."

"For pornography is the form of resistance which the ego takes when it confronts the possibility of its own death."

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MORE “PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITIQUE OF PORNOGRAPHY AND ITS EFFECTS

Susan Griffin (born 1943) is an eco-feminist author, who has written books such as 'Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World,' 'A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War,' 'Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen,' 'The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society,' 'What Her Body Thought,' 'Rape: The Power of Consciousness', etc.

She wrote in the Prologue to this 1981 book, “One is used to thinking of pornography as part of a larger movement toward sexual liberation. In the idea of the pornographic image we imagine a revolution against silence. We imagine that eros will be set free first in the mind and then in the body by this revelation of a secret part of the human soul… And yet… we must now make a distinction between the libertine’s idea of liberty, ‘to do as one likes,’ and a vision of human ‘liberation.’… if we are to move toward human liberation, we must begin to see that pornography and the small idea of ‘liberty’ are opposed to that liberation.” (Pg. 1)

She states, “The pornographer begins by reprimanding the virgin for her prudery. In his mind, he even makes her into the church inquisitor… He vents a rage against her because she has rejected him… the virgin is punished by carnality. Coitus itself becomes the vehicle of the pornographer’s rage… its essential element is not the pleasure that the rapist obtains from coitus itself… rather… the satisfaction he receives is from humiliating the virgin… For shame is the essential element in the pornographic transformation of a virgin into a whore.” (Pg. 21-22)

She points out, “real women’s bodies are often cut, molded, and reshaped so that, like the bodies of wooden or plastic dolls, they will please men. A woman’s hair is dyed… Our faces are lifted… Our breasts are augmented or reduced… we are made to appear like the cultural image of women. Yet… this is something futile in all these efforts… For the fantasy is by nature a replacement. It is a symbol itself of an unrealized wish and a denied fear.” (Pg. 45) Later, she says, “For while beauty evokes feeling, ugliness numbs us. The pornographer’s art is meant to dull our feelings, and his own.” (Pg. 84) She also notes, “What the pornographer calls catharsis is not at all a catharsis. Rather, it is an attempt to defend a belief in illusion. The pornographer’s argument is really his illness arguing for its own continued existence.” (Pg. 98)

She suggests, “indeed, no study has ever PROVED or ever claimed to prove that pornographic images do not cause violent events… we discover that numerous studies and experiments have been conducted by social scientists in order to discover whether or not a correlation exists between a pornographic image and a violent event. To say that no such correlation can be found to exist does not prove that this correlation does exist.” (Pg. 103) She adds, “If the social scientist who found no correlation between violence and pornography believes his studies have proved that pornography does not cause violence… if he has discovered a form of culture which does not affect behavior, he ought to study this form to discover what is exceptional in it, and what it might tell us about the mind.” (Pg. 105)

She notes, “the ordinary woman can choose to project her hatred of her own false self upon the ‘sex symbol.’ It is always easier for a woman within pornographic culture to take out her rage over her silence and her powerlessness on another woman than on that culture itself. Therefore, certain ordinary women come to hate the women who are culture’s sex symbols.” (Pg. 207)

She states, “nowhere can [Marilyn Monroe] find any feminine protest against this pornographic imagery… any attempt which a woman makes to protest this falsity is described by the pornographic culture as prudery… they have no way to say that such behavior is dangerous to a woman’s body and soul.” (Pg. 213)

She concludes, “We never lose the soul. But we do lose knowledge of the soul: we cease to know ourselves, we become ignorant, and we cease to know others. Others cease to know us. We begin to believe the world is soulless, and our belief makes this true. For knowledge is a part of the soul. And because the world is a resonant place, none of us escape grieving over the loss of another’s soul… Yet to exclude another being from this resonance is an ignorant act, committed by a creature who has lost the ability to see another being, who has lost part of himself.” (Pg. 263)

This book will be of great interest to those studying pornography and its implications.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

In some ways, this book is a little dated. But then I think about the AppleTv show Disclaimer. Don't get me wrong, I love AppleTV. Foundation is one of the best series out there at the moment. But Disclaimer, well.

On paper, Disclaimer should work. Based on a book, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline among others. Great director. And yet it doesn't. The series is supposedly about the revenge that Kevin Kline's character, whatshisface, takes on Blanchett's character because his dead wife wrote a novel that says that Blanchett is responsible for debauching their son and letting him die because when she saw him drowning in the ocean (along with a bunch of other people) she didn't shout look, he's drowning. The show is about how you shouldn't trust narrative and is too Meta narrative for it's own good. Any viewer will quickly pick up on the fact that the hyper sexually active boy in the first ten minutes or so who flashes his girlfriend's underwear to everyone at a train station, is not the sexually inexperienced innocent that has the affair with Blanchett's character, Catherine. That boy is an image of the son in the mother's book. There is also the question of how much we should trust the narrator who speaks.

The problem is that the series wants to be meta, and possibly make a comment on how we judge women without hearing their side, by doing exactly that and at the same time, making use of the old adage that sex sells. I haven't read the book, and I doubt that the affair has seen though the eyes of the mother is what happened. I have my theory and if I am correct, boy this series messed up. The series has spent 4 of the five episodes sexualizing young Catherine. The sex series are graphic (I wouldn't watch them with parents) and yet, highlight the sexual beauty of Lelia George who plays young Catherine. Basically because the view of the novel of the mother is being used, the show can capitalize off of an attractive woman in risque sexual encounters and in various states of undress, but also then claim (or try to claim) that it is really about how we view people and how women can be maligned easily by false stories.

Which would be a good point if you didn't have four episodes focusing on the hot sex and half, or totally naked, blonde.

In other words, sexualization of women still happens. But you knew that. Griffin narrows it far more, focusing on the harm that porn (and much filmed sex scenes harken to it. Look at how the rape scene in non-Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is filmed). Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the book is the look at Monroe. But she also works the use of ancient literature - Pysche, which makes for an interesting comparison to porn.

There are times in the book when she takes a bit too long to get to the point, and times when she gets a bit too repetitive. Yet it does contain some good refutation of "go porn" points.

[Δκнғ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Griffin is certified #nofap.

Masturbation is fascistic: that's fact.

Edging is fascist as well but it has that ugly aestheticality to it.

Fascism without masturbation is that fascism without aesthetic.

Kendrick Lamar also called out Drake as a child trafficking pedophile, so that also counts toward this book.

[Christine Andersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The information, opinions and arguments this book offers is worth 5 stars ⭐️ It was a “heavy” and slow read though. Very poetic and philosophical! I would highly recommend. Sadly even though this book is nearly 50 years old, the issues of pornography has only gotten worse since then.

[Ketab Dozd · Rating 5 out of 5]

نمیتونم بگم با همه عقاید گریفین تو این کتاب موافق بودم ولی کتاب واقعا خوبی بود. گریفین تو این کتاب نه پورنوگرافی بلکه فرهنگ پورنوگرافیک رو به درستی هدف گرفته. قطعا ارزش خوندن داره.

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