On his radio talk show, “Philosophy Now,” Ken Taylor, professor and chair of the department of Philosophy at Stanford University, discussed his opinions regarding the distinction between eroticism in art and pornography: “The erotic is really cool and really important, and people are always afraid of it, and I fear that lots of reactions that call that stuff pornography are reacting out of fear of the power of the erotic.”
One of his interviewees, Scarlet Harlot, an activist for sex-worker rights and a director, producer, and editor of both erotica and pornography, agreed: “In an anti-porn perspective, [there is] a condemnation of a huge part of society that is basically trying to communicate about sex. My own work in porn has been toward developing positive sexual imagery to keep our sexuality healthy, to allow us to express our diverse sexualities, that’s very important to me. Most of us call ourselves pornographers just so that we don’t divide ourselves, so we don’t have the ‘good’ people producing erotica and the ‘bad’ people producing pornography. That distinction inherently condemns us. We’re reclaiming ‘bad,’ so we’re pornographers.”
Both speakers made the point that an erotic identity is an essential component of people’s sense of themselves in the world, while co-host John Perry, a Henry Waldgrave Stuart professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, suggested, “If we [can] take pornography as part of nature, and can say, ‘Maybe you enjoy this fantasy, but there is a distinction between that [fantasy] and real life,’ much of the fear of pornography which many people experience could be removed altogether.”
When I interviewed Peter Acworth, founder of Kink.com, at his offices in the old Armory of San Francisco, he agreed that there is a distinction between art and porn. “Our stuff is blatantly porn, but some of our scenes include ropework which takes an hour to apply and it’s got this beautiful, elaborate, crisscross ropework over the body, which many would argue is art. I think our material contains elements of both. It’s different in the eyes of who’s viewing it. People like us, who view a lot of porn, will look at our porn and see this beautiful ropework and think that it’s art, whereas somebody who is coming from the outside, and sees the nudity aspect of it, sees that it is porn.”
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