Digital and physical space are not identical

Signifying Nothing: Think before you watch: considering racist depictions in porn

If you think Americans are no longer racist, you must have never watched porn. Even the most mainstream, “vanilla” porn sites are full of racist representations. A search on Pornhub.com (in the name of investigative journalism, of course) yields the following video titles: “Interracial cuckold slave is humiliated and dominated,” “Dirty Latina whore swallows cum after hot anal sex,” “Asian housewife serves her two guests,” “Mocha.”
Feminists often discuss how pornography implicates gender. This is important, but prejudice in porn goes beyond gender. Porn produces pleasure by capitalizing on all kinds of power relationships: gender, age, class, occupation and race. Despite priding itself on filling every niche of desire, most porn reenacts racist tropes that build and represent a racist mentality. Black men threaten white men by having sex with white women. Asian women are docile and subservient. Latina women are fierce and exotic. Black women are “ebony.”
Porn is obscene—a word derived from the Latin “obscaena,” meaning offstage. Literally, it is a network of media that exists underground, outside of more publicly-acknowledged media outlets. And yet the Internet has made it easier than ever for us to access pornography. If you want, you can watch porn in a car, in a bathroom stall or during class. Such ubiquity deserves serious attention.
When some adolescents spend hours every day consuming porn, what are they learning about the world? As backstage media, porn masquerades as a glimpse into adult reality. Of course, the bodies are exaggerated, the plots contrived, and the acting often banal. But the irony is that, by fulfilling consumer desires, porn plays out racial tensions that exist in our collective mind. And racist images shape how media consumers see the world. I’m sure you’ve heard young men claim “I’m just not into black girls,” or “I have an Asian fetish.” Porn trains an entire generation of people to associate sex with race, to objectify and compartmentalize their sexual partners.
A few semesters ago, Professor Peter Coviello (who is unfortunately no longer at Bowdoin) gave a talk where he argued that feminists shouldn’t see porn as a problem to be solved, but as a positive space where people can acknowledge their desires. But should porn recognize and satisfy all desires equally? Porn is regulated enough to keep images of children out of the pornographic mainstream. Children cannot consent to depicting their own naked bodies. But what about race? Do we not care if black men consent to be depicted as savages, Asian women as slaves and Latina women as whores?
The racist depictions in porn suggest a world where the white man is a viewer whose desires must be fulfilled at just about any cost. For pornography, people aren’t people as much as they are symbols. In “The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,” Angela Carter says that, “Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements.” Porn is form. Carter suggests that a “moral pornographer” could combat the injustices of porn by using pornographic forms to empower degraded people. But would the process of empowerment and humanization be truly pornographic? Should morality ever be obscene?
I’m not telling you to stop watching porn. Puritanical censorship and regulation is exactly what allows pornography to get away with rampant prejudice. By labeling sexual content as “obscene,” mainstream media can claim their moral superiority, while engendering a space that permits the reenactment of all kinds of injustice. Sex is not bad, and pictures of sex are not bad. But a mindless pursuit of pleasure will only perpetuate longstanding relationships of power.

Signifying Nothing: On intuition and the limits of structured thinking

There are three main arguments in favor of veganism. The first, and (to my mind) most logical, concerns the environment. Seeing the film “Cowspiracy” on campus this weekend reminded me of the devastating effects of animal agriculture, and reignited my enthusiasm and personal commitment to resisting environmentally destructive habits. Without going into too much detail, producing one pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water, compared to 304 gallons for a pound of almonds (which are often demonized for their water consumption), and 34 gallons for a pound of broccoli.
“Cowspiracy” convincingly argued that raising cattle for beef is clearing rainforests, wasting water and producing reckless amounts of methane. However, the movie didn’t limit itself to beef production, but aimed to criticize all animal agriculture. To do this, the film had to appeal to vegan argument number two: the appeal to animal sentience. Philosopher Peter Singer has famously argued that we should not eat animals because, as far as we can reasonably tell, animals can feel pain, and we should not cause unnecessary pain. This argument has stuck with me ever since we debated animal consumption in “Moral Problems” my first year at Bowdoin. With the language of “speciesism” (privileging the pleasure of humans over the life of animals) I could finally justify something I’d felt for a long time—that eating animals made me feel mean, icky and kind of uncomfortable. As a kid, I would refuse to eat any meat that had bones in it, choosing chicken nuggets and hot dogs over drumsticks and fish. Eating around bones reminded me that my food had once been a living, feeling animal.
“Cowspiracy” really tries to make its viewers feel icky. In a pivotal moment in the film, the documentarian visits a backyard duck farm and closely watches a man kill a duck. It was gross. However, this scene didn’t really have anything to do with large-scale agribusiness and environmental degradation, the main topics of the film.
“Cowspiracy” also features a scene that appeals strongly to the third argument: health veganism. The filmmaker in “Cowspiracy” interviews a tan, leathery and lean older doctor who talks about how he and his patients have enjoyed exceptional health by following a vegan diet. The funniest part of the film is when this doctor is joking about the cognitive dissonance required for people to consume dairy, which he terms “baby calf fluid.” For this doctor, eating animal products just didn’t make sense for living a healthy lifestyle. There are many arguments for and against health veganism. The China Study is a good place to start, and the internet has no shortage of opinions.
But this article isn’t really about veganism as much as it is about arguments. After spending an hour accusing large-scale cattle farms of destroying the environment, why does “Cowspiracy” show a man beheading a duck? For a while, I’ve been caught up with the various debates over veganism. For some, abstaining from animal products is about helping themselves. For others, it’s about helping animals. Others care most about the environmental degradation of the planet.
Why do we decide to do what we do? How do we make the decisions that shape our identities? Liberal academia supposes that we can rationalize the world by breaking it down, pulling it apart and dividing knowledge into disciplines. Secularism provides no language to earnestly engage with generalities. The world speaks to us, all the time, but the death of God makes it just about impossible to think about things in their entirety.
Academic disciplines impose borders on knowledge. Borders, being functions of power, keep some people comfortable at the expense of others. In his inaugural address, Clayton Rose warned of “the threat to free and robust intellectual discourse” of those who privilege comfort over academic engagement. It seemed to me that President Rose was implicitly attacking the “trigger warnings” without using that phrase directly. While I don’t intend to put words in President Rose’s mouth, he didn’t specify where this threat came from, or how it manifests itself. However, by speaking vaguely, President Rose set limits on his discussion which allowed his listeners to remain comfortable, while positioning himself as the authoritative voice on academic discourse.
I have never heard of a conversation truly being shut down by trigger warnings. Rather, students use these warnings to explore their own boundaries, understand how a conversation makes them feel and convey their discomfort to others. It’s ironic that, after they were criticized for preventing conversations, trigger warnings became a hot-button, widely discussed issue.
The discourse on discourse also reveals an implicit boundary between academic conversations and material action. President Rose’s speech suggests that it’s fine to be “unsafe” and take risks in the classroom. However, a common argument against divesting Bowdoin’s endowment from fossil fuel companies is that we’d be risking our endowment for a symbolic action that we can’t be sure will work. The dualistic approach to material and symbolism is deeply ingrained in secular thinking. Yet, we don’t make decisions in pure rationality. Intuition exists, and beliefs guide even our most mundane actions. What is lost when we break down beliefs into separate parts? As the recent Intersections Teach-In showed us, people can understand and respond to a real and urgent problem by transcending disciplinary boundaries.
And yet we can and should not rely merely on intuition. Many of our instincts are racist, sexist, homophobic or simply selfish. But perhaps, within the limitations of academic disciplines and modes of thinking, we don’t give enough credit to instinct. We already synthesize information with intuition all the time. Sometimes it helps to follow your gut.

Signifying Nothing

Digital and physical space are not identical

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jesse Ortiz

Columnist

October 13, 2015

Printers never cooperate. More often than not, at least one of the printers in Smith is flashing red, signaling its disobedience. I know a thing or two about printers. As the 2013-2014 Reed House Printer Coordinator, I was paid $43.75 per week to stock our house printer with paper and ignore the disgruntled emails from housemates trying to print late at night. Basically, it was a good gig.

As Printer Coordinator, I learned to be patient with machines. To work effectively with printers, you have to be calm and understanding, but firm—a printer whisperer. Because printers are in a precarious position. These machines bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. They are portals that translate data into images and text—things you can carry around that are disconnected from digital networks. The portals to the portable.

Printers shouldn’t really do what they do. They connect two disparate worlds, like a shaky wooden bridge in a B-level adventure film. And like those swinging bridges, they always fall apart, only for the hero (in this case, your valiant Printer Coordinator) to scramble up the bridge and preserve life and limb.

As the sphincter of digital space, printers make us uneasy. I’ve often gone to great lengths to avoid printing, to retain the data within the system. Think about Track Changes on Microsoft Word. The neat formalization of digital annotation allows us to avoid marking up our precious documents with our imperfect physical hands.

The frustration of printing reminds us that digital and physical space are not identical. There does not exist a function mapping every point in the physical world to a point in digital space. For now, the two worlds are only connected through us—the consumers—and excretory printers.

So far in this article, I’ve been riffing on a silly conceit. But while thinking about printers as the broken connection between two disparate worlds, I recalled an online experience that really affected me. On July 8, 2015, I (@sgnfyngnthng) tweeted a screenshot of a Facebook module, which said, “CREATE NEW GROUP/The easiest way to share photos and share things with your parents” and juxtaposed my profile picture with that of my two parents.

My parents have been split up for as long as I’ve used Facebook. Since my parents’ marital status has not always been the easiest part of my life, I wasn’t enthused with Facebook’s suggestion. But, as we know, Facebook has little room for unpleasantness. Facebook structures your news feed to reveal content that you don’t want to see, to keep you in a feedback loop of positivity that advertisers can exploit.

By suggesting that I start a group with my divorced parents, Facebook shows its own hand. This glitch in the matrix reveals that there is a matrix. Digital representations are not natural, but rather carefully constructed. While doing Spanish homework last week, I stumbled upon the word “matriz,” which means both matrix and womb. The English word “matrix” comes from the Latin “mater,” meaning mother. The digital matrix may be the mother, womb, outline of our online experience, but as users we are responsible for input.

Although there’s only so much we can do within a social network, recent history has shown how certain platforms lend themselves to “IRL” disruption. Twitter’s structure permits #blacklivesmatter and other activist movements to take hold. In contrast, Facebook’s system of groups can only permit the most self-referential aesthetic, producing communities that amuse themselves but fail to penetrate the mainstream. By imitating real-life interaction but minimizing user vulnerability, Tinder has shifted online dating away from its association with eHarmony tackiness, and made itself a fixture among young people looking to meet.

Form is intrinsically limited, defined by its boundaries. The structure of social media is no exception. Social networking often tries to model our lives. Though no models are perfect, some models are useful. In their imperfection, models are constantly susceptible to revision. Social media will duplicate life when the Smith Union printers work smoothly forever.

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