In the last couple of days two news headlines have caught my attention:
1) “Robots Could Be Future Playmates for Kids”
2) “How Many Facebook Friends Do You Have? Study Links Narcissism and Facebook Activity”
I mentioned the Narcissism – Facebook connection in my August 25th, 2011, post entitled Does Chronic Internet Use Mimic Insecure Attachment? Bowlby’s Theory Gives Us a Possible Answer. In this series of posts I’ll take another look at these troubling trends: 1) Facebook use encourages narcissistic states, and, 2) we are increasingly turning to robot caregivers as our current nurture drought sets in and deepens. Taken as a whole I will argue that these trends map out the progression from two-dimensional forms of pornography to 3D versions. Put on your 3D glasses and lets get going.
As a part of my graduate studies in counseling psychology back in the 1990s I wrote a paper and presented on the topic of pornography consumption. Back then I decided that the “featured act” of my presentation would be a 20/20 segment entitled Sex With the Unreal Woman. This segment originally aired on January 29th, 1993, and was delivered by ABC news reporter Lynn Sherr (the segment was produced by Kate Wenner Eisner). This segment featured a group of men studying at Duke who had organized a weekly evening discussion group (comprised of both male and female college students) centered on how pornography consumption had adversely affected their attempts to form stable and committed intimate (e.g., secure attachment) relationships. The announcer for the segment tells us that pornography consumption “sets up generations of young men for ‘Sex With the Unreal Woman’” (quoting from a copy of the transcript obtained through Journal Graphics). The announcer continues by cautioning viewers: “Tonight, 20/20‘s most provocative report yet—true confessions from men [concerning pornography consumption].”
I saw this segment when it originally aired and, yes, it was open, frank, provocative, emotionally gut-wrenching, and pulled no punches. For my graduate school presentation I ordered a copy of the segment from ABC News and showed it to my class for educational purposes. I thought the segment would help illustrate some of the points I wished to make during my presentation. At the very least the 20/20 segment would show that the topic of pornography consumption was a topic now being covered by popular news media. However, my presentation took an unexpected turn that surprised me. My “opening act” (if you will) ended up in many ways eclipsing my featured 20/20 act. What was my opening act? It was a brief discussion of a book I found during the literature search I conducted for my paper: Judith Reisman’s 1991 book entitled “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball—Its Tragic Effects on Women, Children & the Family. The only way I can think of to compare and contrast the 20/20 segment and Dr. Reisman’s book is to use an image drawn from the movie The Wizard of Oz: The 20/20 message is like the image of the Wizard floating in smoke and fire whereas the message that Dr. Reisman delivers is like the man behind the curtain pulling all of the various levers. I guess my audience (counseling psychology students mostly) was familiar with the Wizard; they wanted to hear about the mysterious man behind the curtain. Very briefly, here’s how Dr. Reisman describes the man behind the curtain of pornography consumption.
As the title to her book implies, Dr. Reisman argues that soft pornograhy—so called men’s girlie magazines—causes more social harm than does hard pornography. On first blush this seems counterintuitive. Dr. Reisman goes further and, back in the early 1990s, argues that the images of soft pornography “have filtered into advertisements, TV, film, art, music, novels and sex education in school” (quoting her book). Note that back in the early 1990s the Internet had not hit the popular scene. (As an aside, recently New Mexico was at the center of a controversy centered on whether images contained in sex education materials had crossed the line into the realm of pornography.) Dr. Reisman’s message that, if we know what we are looking for, we can find pornography contained in everyday images, stayed with me. As a result, back in the early 2000s the FHL Foundation made a grant in support of Dr. Jane Caputi’s efforts to produce a DVD entitled The Pornography of Everyday Life (this is a link to a description of Dr. Caputi’s DVD over at Berkeley Media). Dr. Caputi’s DVD looks at the very real possibility that many of the images contained in the so-called mainstream media are constructed using the same processes and purposes as can be found in the world of backroom pornography. In essence, many mainstream images fall on a continuum that includes the images that are found in backroom pornography.
Dr. Caputi argues that it’s not so much where the images are found, but what intentions or purposes are involved. As examples, infantilizing women or “adultifying” children are two processes that often link together the mainstream and the backroom. At the risk of being a broken record, it was the father of attachment theory, John Bowlby, who pointed out that such processes as adultifying children or infantilizing adults were royal highways toward insecure attachment relationships. Unreal women (or unreal children—think Toddlers & Tiaras) answer the question asked by insecure attachment: how do I make a connection AND at the same time avoid the risk that true face-to-face intimacy inevitably brings? In my opinion, pornography researchers such as Drs. Reisman and Caputi try to get us to see that one of the strong purposes behind any form of pornography—everyday, soft, or hard—is to create a state of emotional insecurity. Once pornography sets up this emotional insecurity, pornographers can point to any form of relief they wish. The same is true of advertising and propaganda (for more on this theme see Jacques Ellul’s 1973 book entitled Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes). Yes, advertising, pornography, and propaganda all fall on the same continuum. So, lets take a deeper look at the “processes and purposes” of the pornography continuum (for lack of a better term) as revealed by Dr. Reisman’s work. In essence, lets meet the man behind the curtain.
Dr. Reisman argues that when we think of pornography consumption, we tend to think of the isolated man (typically) consuming (e.g., in a pornographic relationship with) the image of an objectified woman. Dr. Reisman warns us that if we keep that image in our minds—the image of the Wizard—we will not recognize the man behind the curtain, the real relationship. Focusing in on the man behind the curtain, Dr. Reisman asks us to see the man consuming pornography not as an isolated individual but, in fact, as a member of a very large community—the community of all other men also consuming that very same image. Dr. Reisman argues that the good, even sexual feeling that the man feels does not, in fact, come from consuming the image of the objectified woman; instead it largely comes from the unconscious knowing that the man is in a homoerotic relationship with all the other men consuming the very same image and, possibly, at the very same time. According to Dr. Reisman, the nature of this homoerotic relationship goes even further. Ultimately, the man consuming pornography is having a very intimate relationship with the mind of the pornographer, again, typically a man. It goes even further still. What binds (“attaches” if you will) together the consuming man and the producing pornographer is the technological continuum—the lighting, the makeup, the background context, the obsessive attention to detail and placement, the staging, the photography, the distillation (100s of images are taken to create just one), the developing (this is the early 1990s before digital photography), the layout, the format, the printing, the marketing, the distribution, etc.—that in essence places the pornography in the hands of the man. When it comes to pornography, 1960s media critic Marshall McLuhan’s trenchant observation that the “medium is the message” certainly applies. For more on the technological continuum, see Jacques Ellul’s 1954 book entitled The Technological Society, or even Neil Postman’s 1993 book entitled Technopoly—The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
So, whereas the Wizard is the traditional image of an isolated man consuming the image of an objectified woman (typically), the man behind the curtain is the concealed, even unconscious image of a very sociable man in communion with a multitude of other men, all of whom are bound to the mind of the pornographer through some form of technological continuum. When it comes to pornography, I would suggest that the image of the fembot could be looked at as the alter ego of the man behind the curtain. The fembot image—part robot, part hyper-sexualized woman—was introduced to the masses via the movie Metropolis back in the late 1920s as more and more men formed bonds with each other within factory walls. The image of the fembot tries to draw attention to the following connection: the homoerotic experience of consuming pornography goes hand-in-hand with the homoerotic experience of men producing goods in a factory. The common thread in both worlds: the technological continuum conveyor belt endlessly delivering products to be consumed. Whereas the technological continuum is explicit in the world of the factory, it is implicit in the world of pornography.
Recall that back on September 28th, 2011, I wrote a blog post entitled Has the “Fembot” Transmorgrified Into the “Kidbot”? In this post I make the following statement:
In the same way the Fembot represents a complex blend or overlap combining together the industrialization of men’s psyches with what that process does to their sexual behavioral system, the Kidbot represents a similar blend combining together the industrialization (e.g., the conveyor belt assembly) of kid’s psyches and what such an assembly process does to the caregiving behavioral system (of both kids and parents alike).
Whereas the fembot image blends together male industrial bonding with a reduction in male sexuality, the kidbot image blends together female industrial bonding with a reduction in female caregiving. Even though the fembot and kidbot images play on the sexual behavioral system and caregiving behavioral system respectively, they both share the same processes and purposes—to reduce an overall behavioral system that holds attachment, caregiving, and sexuality (e.g., the Grand Bowlbian Attachment Environment as I call it) to its constituent parts. Any “bot” image really is about making a part the whole. Here’s a quick example that might help to make this point.
During my graduate school presentation mentioned above, I told my audience that most teen magazines contain pornographic images. I went further. I told them that most teen magazines are targeted at children as young as eight years old. (By the time they hit adolescence, most teens have already outgrown teen magazines.) I asked my audience to do me a big favor: “Outside of the fact that adults very rarely appear in any of the images in teen magazines, look at these images and ask yourself ‘How much time, effort, energy, and cost did it take for the image I am looking at to end up here in this magazine?’” The answer on all accounts is simply “huge!” Then I asked my audience to ask themselves one final question: “Why is this huge effort—huge time, huge effort, huge energy, huge cost—being directed at my eight-year-old child? I’ll give you a simple answer that would take many posts to explain: eight year olds (mostly young girls) are being manufactured using a highly sophisticated technological continuum. The sad part, most adults (especially parents) are unaware that this manufacturing process is taking place, usually right under their noses. For more on this theme, see Jean Kilbourne’s 1999 book entitled Deadly Persuasion—Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising.
So, with respect to the Wizard, the conscious, conventional idea surrounding pornography consumption is that this process is about some form of unique heterosexual pleasure. However, Dr. Reisman tries to convince us that pornography consumption is about an unconscious, largely hidden “man behind the curtain” process of male communion led by a central pornographer that, by its very nature, is mostly about homoeroticism. I would argue that it was this “behind the scenes process” that inspired Susan Griffin to write her classic 1981 book entitled Pornography and Silence—Culture’s Revenge Against Nature wherein Griffin argues that the massification processes of organized religion (i.e., the Mass) centrally drive pornography. I agree with Griffin but I would argue that any massification process could drive pornography, not just a religious one. This leads me to one of my central tenets concerning pornography—some type of massification process must be present in order for pornography to take form. Here’s a corollary: where there’s massification smoke, you’ll probably find pornography fire. As examples, advertising, education, politics, militarism, propaganda, technology, religion, bureaucracy, etc., are all forms of massification. Where we see or experience these massification processes, we should also be able to see or experience pornography, or at least the processes, purposes, and intentions of pornography. This may be hard for one to wrap his or head around but I would argue that the buzz of pornography isn’t so much about the image being consumed as it is about the unconscious knowing that the pornography consumer is caught up in a massification process right along with all the other pornography consumers.
So, I know what you’re thinking: why the post title “Sociable Robots: 3D Pornography?” I’ll answer that question in part II of this blog series. In the mean time, if any of the above has piqued your interest, feel free to leave a comment. What’s your reaction to Dr. Reisman’s idea that, for men, consuming pornography is part of a homoerotic process. To pique your interest in part II of this blog series, I would suggest that male-dominated online gaming MUDs (multiuser domains) such as World of Warcraft, are 3D versions of the homoerotic processes that Dr. Reisman describes. Or what about the idea that most (if not all) teen magazines contain pornographic images that are often targeted at eight-year-olds? Any thoughts there? Or is good old Rick just floating in so much smoke and fire. OK, one last question to ponder: Is it possible that young kids being fed a steady diet of pornographic images via teen magazines (for tens of years now) has laid the groundwork for young kids eagerly embracing sociable robots?
Postscript—the Foundation had a strong interest in and funded media literacy projects back in the early 2000s. A lot of the above information comes from our experiences funding media literacy.
