Sex and the National Media
Mainstream journalists in Canada rarely discuss sexuality in their columns. No Canadian mainstream newspaper has a reporter on the sexuality beat; but they do have scribes covering every other niche subject: from cars to tech to fashion.
So it was refreshing to see National Post columnist and op-ed editor Jonathan Kay dip his toes in the sexual sea with his feature on porn and its “philosopher king” the veteran porn performer Ron Jeremy.
Sadly, his piece is powerful testimony to the need for specialists in this area. His attempt at a sexual feature is full of the journalistic defects that modern writers usually take great pains to avoid. Much of this can be attributed to his lack of professional experience in the sexual field.
If you want to understand what the sex-positive movement is up against in trying to change unhealthy attitudes toward sex, Kay’s column is illustrative.
Consider first Kay’s statements about porn: “Even if you overlook all of the sad and awful things we know about the way porn is made [which he never specifies] the act of consuming it is inherently degrading.” (emphasis added).
Such breathtaking reductionism! A vast and complex media genre, consumed in many different contexts and with many different emotional, physical and relational outcomes is said to provoke a single universal response: “degradation”.
Nobody familiar with the modern sexually explicit media industry would so generalize.
While 25 years ago sexual media indeed had a very narrow scope, mostly seedy and unaesthetic, today the industry is extraordinarily diverse. It includes aesthetically beautiful cinematography produced by women and for women. It includes material designed not only to arouse but also to educate and liberate.
There are indeed types of porn that portray degrading scenes and aim to elicit feelings of degradation in those watching it. Kay would be on safe ground labeling this material as “degrading”. But to take the next step and lump all porn in that category is empirically false.
Such journalism is irresponsible.
Is the explanation that Kay is just ignorant of the array of modern porn? Probably not. We should presume that a responsible journalist with a senior position in a national daily newspaper would research the industry he is writing about before publishing his piece.
So probably Kay indeed knows that porn is no longer all the ugly stuff so common a generation ago. And yet he still concludes the entire genre is “inherently degrading”.
Maybe he means that he feels degraded watching any type of porn.
Some people do indeed react that way to all types of sexual media. Due to powerful aversions developed during their youth some unfortunate souls learn to associate any media-driven sexual arousal as sinful, wrong, immoral and above all emotionally uncomfortable. They react to images of sex like most people react to images of vomit.
It is all experienced as degrading to them. The same way you do not distinguish between tasteful images of vomit and disgusting images of vomit, folks averse to sexual media don’t distinguish between types of sexual media.
So Kay’s over generalizing may just be an inarticulate way of expressing his own aversions. But that is not acceptable journalism either.
He trips up again discussing Ron Jeremy’s autobiographical account of having sex with a woman while her husband watched. Jeremy describes the great pleasure the couple experiences. Hogwash, claims Kay. Without any evidence he dismisses Jeremy’s report as a “preposterous porn-land fairy tale”.
Kay has obviously never been to a swingers club. Behavior that occurs every night all over North America, he claims does not exist.
On no other subject but sex would senior editors allow this sort of uninformed writing. His piece is littered with many more examples of the same irresponsibility.
Kay is a fine journalist and a highly educated man with multiple degrees from prestigious universities. What explains his lapses here?
Journalists mess up in this area mainly because sexuality is not a subject they (or most other people) have studied at school, read about much in the media, even discoursed at length about with their friends. The absence of intelligent social and personal discourse about sex inhibits clear thinking on the subject.
If no mainstream journalists regularly wrote about federal politics, television, or interest rates, if these subjects were rarely discussed on talk shows, or in university classes or at the pub, then the journalist who wrote a piece about federal politics, television and interest rates might well commit similar errors.
The phenomenon of simple minded sexual discourse by highly intelligent professionals appeared most vividly half a century ago in the written decisions of judges grappling for the first time with sexual issues in constitutional cases.
Lawyers and judges pride themselves in the precision and clarity of their words. Read a classic judgment on mortgages or maritime law, and you will see meticulous attention to distinctions, subtleties and nuances.
Yet when the same judges began to grapple with sexual controversies, their words suddenly failed them. This is best characterized by the famous statement of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who admitted he could not intelligibly define pornography, “but I know it when I see it.”
Kay’s writing shows the same inability. His normally skilled writing descends into meaning-impaired generalizations.
Fortunately, as our culture gets more comfortable with sexual discourse, our thinking and writing about it will become more clear and nuanced. That positive process is already evident in modern constitutional decisions about sexual media; which are now far more clear and reasoned than a half century ago.
But as Kay shows, journalists are behind judges in this area.