I am many things: a woman, an academic, a feminist, married, raising two girls, and I’m pro-porn. I’m also an expert in queer history, and write about men’s desire and sexual practices. How bizarre? No, actually, how utterly and completely normal.

I’ve been following this debate about pornography with relish. It proves a point I strive to make again and again in my undergraduate classes and in my own work. No matter what side we find ourselves on, when it comes to pornography, we just can’t help but talk about it. And by talking, debating, (and oftentimes disagreeing) we prove that porn provides a unique window into our most intimate thoughts and actions, our cultural beliefs, and even high politics.

In fact, historians of sexuality will tell you that throughout time, erotica and pornography played a vital role in how people understood core aspects of themselves. Must this be a bad thing, lead to sinister outcomes, threaten the very stability of all we hold dear?

The obvious answer is no. Let’s not fall in to what experts call a “moral panic”—a heightened state of response dictated by emotion over evidence. Of course, it’s difficult not to see the mercury rise when discussing pornography. It’s highly fraught terrain. Some might say a minefield, with deeply entrenched positions on both sides of the debate.

My position is this: before we rush to judgment over “men’s true nature” and “women’s inherent opposition,” let’s spell a few things out for discussion’s sake. First thing: we are not the first to debate the merits, impact, and utility of pornography. Anyone who has viewed the frescos of Pompeii knows what I mean here. What differs is that we are quick to see explicit sexual imagery as a sign of sign of something not quite right, something dangerous and in need of control.

If Michel Foucault is to be believed—the French philosopher whose writing helped birth the history of sexuality as a field—other cultures saw erotica as opening up much-needed discussion about mutuality—one’s likes and dislikes in the bedroom—and desire. Images provoked erotic play and negotiation, allowing, in an ideal sense, for an ethical and complimentary exploration of sexual wants and needs. Explicit images provided truths about our sexual selves.

Sometime in the 19th century this changed. Suddenly, explicit images became evidence of the contagion within. Instead of promoting healthy discussion and debate, pornography was evidence of a tortured soul, painfully out of step with the newly important place of the middle-class family and the masculinities and femininities that buttressed it. Science and medicine—newly professionalized—schooled men in ways to channel and repress their desire as self-mastery became an emblem of responsible manhood. Women were alternatively regarded as frigid, uninterested, or over-sexed, requiring the discipline of marriage and motherhood to overcome their extreme emotions.

Isn’t it funny to see some of these ideas still in effect today? Of course, the playing field is much different in the Internet age, after the Sexual Revolution, with new forms of marriage increasingly the norm.

But what would happen if we were to take up this issue of the merits of pornography as an entry in to an open engagement with the nature of desire?

Admittedly, we don’t even really know the scope of that with which we are dealing. The Newsweek article that Hugo Schwyzer cites in his recent article in here (“Are Most Men Like This?”) casts a pretty wide net in seeking to get at the truth about men’s motives for purchasing sex. There are also significant differences between accessing pornography on the computer at work and paying for a sexual encounter in a club, on the street, or abroad. Was the person underage? Were they suitably compensated for their sex work? Are there mandatory health checks on the work site? I won’t deal with these otherwise important questions here.

I am interested in the sense of panic surrounding allegations that “husbands and boyfriends, brothers and fathers, bosses and teachers, coaches and co-workers” are furtively consuming porn, and that this is having none other than a negative impact on otherwise healthy, happy relationships. Leaving the sex worker issue aside, since it really deserves analysis on its own terms, what is at stake here, really? Are all men secretly “doing it” (and women, by extension, not)? Must its impact necessarily be negative?

While for most of the day, I do occupy a place high up the ivory tower, my research into real world consumption of pornography—queer erotic photography specifically—might yield some interesting food for thought.

There is actually a burgeoning discussion in academic circles about the merits of pornography as a teaching tool. Porn studies (“the porn curriculum” according to a March 26, 2006 Time report) hasn’t yet swept college campuses, but it is an eligible field of study at many universities in Canada and the United States, where Laura Kipnis (of Northwestern) and Linda Williams (Berkeley) were among the first to apply a feminist analysis to it in the early 1990s. This alternative approach came of age in the context of the Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin debate that pornography was at least partially to blame for sexual assault, since it dehumanized women in to objects of male sexual desire.

Kipnis and Williams, and pro-sex academic feminists like them, argue that pornography is a source like many others that yields insight in to a range of social issues, attitudes, and concerns, from poverty and class stratification to the media construction of taste. Asked whether it is prudent to show such explicit material to university students, Williams thinks it is instructive to probe, analyze, and test one’s limits. “Showing a film … allows them to react and then to take a step back and analyze their reaction with the critical tools you give them” (Time, March 26, 2006).

Sure, there’s a difference between viewing pornography in a controlled environment versus stealing a glance in one’s office cubicle. And Kipnis and Williams do not represent the only academic view on porn’s impact on today’s society. In Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Beacon Press, 2010) Gail Dines (Wheelock College, Boston) argues passionately that the images we confront online today are anything but “playful images that feed our sexual imaginations but materials products that depict a type of sex that is formulaic, generic, and plasticized.” (Gail Dines, “Adventures in Pornland” HuffPost Books, July 6, 2010). Having interviewed hundreds of college-age students, she argues that the porn industry has managed to color and shape “identities, sexualities, and ideas about intimacy, relationships, and connection.”

I don’t disagree that much of what is found online is repetitive and trite. And I too believe that the industry would benefit from more feminist film-making along the lines of work by feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino, who lets actors choose their own partners, showcases women’s pleasure, and ensures an equitable and safe work environment on set and on screen (http://www.puckerup.com/).

What I do disagree with is the lumping together of all forms of pornography, and, more importantly, the as-yet-unproven assumption that the outcome of viewing porn can only be dangerous, violent, and bad.

The truth is, we have entire bodies of work still trying to reconcile the impact of what we view on what we do. And we know even less in social-historical terms about the role of fantasy on our own developing sense of pleasure and identity. While we can’t know for certain the precise impact of pornography on day-to-day relationships, we can surmise a few things drawing on the literature in gay, lesbian, and queer studies, where much more research has been done.

In GLBTQ studies, there are fewer taboos surrounding the place of pornography in shaping people’s desires. To the contrary, erotic photography, stories, and pornography represent a form of resistance to the status quo, and were often places of refuge and community in a hostile and homophobic age.

In my work on men and masculinity, I’ve found that homoerotic images bought and sold in the mail order trade were central avenues for questioning men to have their desires affirmed, molded, and shaped. Pornography bestowed a sense of belonging and refuge, and educated men about a form of desire that still could not speak its name in public.

Of course, all is not sunshine and roses even among queers. The spread and proliferation of pornographic images since the 1970s has been linked to greater body dissatisfaction in the GLBTQ community as the hairless, youthful ideal took hold in advertising campaigns and mainstream porn. But all is not lost; researchers in Germany are undertaking research to see how people are responding to these new beauty norms. Alongside youthful body ideals there is a huge and growing network of amateur pornographers, taking film, video, and snapshots of themselves to document their own body beautiful and resist the dominant gaze.

For better or worse, the erotic arts are a source into our selves, giving us a clearer picture of what makes us tick, what we like and dislike, tolerate and abhor. Still, the question remains: can pornography take us to a more ethical, equitable place of intimacy, bonding, pleasure, and exchange? I think the dirtiest little secret of all is, it could.

Jennifer Evans is associate professor of German History at Carleton University, where she is also a contributor to the Sexuality Studies programme. Her book Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2011. She is currently writing about queer erotic photography. Follower her on Twitter @JenniferVEvans.

Republished with permission from the Good Men Project.

Photo credit nathangibbs/Flickr