Since the explosion of growth caused by its arrival on the Internet, pornography has also become a super-giga-business: in 2020, the revenues of the industry were estimated at 60 billion worldwide. These figures whisper to us that porn is now a common culture, whether we like it or not.
A Freudian sees penises (almost) everywhere. The structuralist Emmanuel Désveaux, he discovers a pubis in the veil which covers the head of the Virgin Mary of the Pietà of the XVe century adorning the cathedral of Aosta, Italy. Mamma mia!
After emphasizing in his last book that the mother of Christ spreads her legs to support the body of her son, the anthropologist continues his iconographic description. “However, one also notices there, in the veil which covers the head of the Virgin, a strange fold of the fabric, with the pronounced winding of the level of the middle of the forehead, he writes. The element clashes at first glance, because it defies the rules of drapery. If it does not correspond to any realistic requirement, it does on the other hand very clearly suggest the image of a clitoris transforming the veiled face into a vulva. »
The audacious interpretation appears in Sexuality, societies, nativities, recently published by Les Classiques de Champ Vallon. “It’s a fairly ambitious book, which starts from the observation that anthropology has overlooked sexuality,” explains Professor Désveaux, met during a recent visit to Montreal, in an interview. “Anthropology talks about marriage or kinship, but not sexuality. So I started from the base by asking myself what the sexual relationship means in itself. There is of course a universality of the sexual relationship, but not of its meaning. »
Mr. Désveaux is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A specialist in the first peoples of the Americas, he carried out the observation field for his doctorate in an Ojibwe community in northern Ontario. He helped design and launch the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. He even directed the thesis of Quebecer André Tessier on masculinity in hockey.
Why pornography?
He therefore occupied his last years with a vast anthropological investigation around sexuality which ended up addressing the subject of pornography and its origins. The simple and complex question organizing this work amounts to asking why pornography appeared in the West. The market for sex industry products is globalizing, like so many others, XXX is spreading through the WWW, but the fact remains that it is this corner of the world that has spawned and made exploitation prosper sex for itself (and for profit).
So why ? For what Playboy, Deepthroat or isn’t Pornhub Chinese, Peruvian or Gabonese? A Marxist would probably attempt an answer evoking capital, this social link inserted everywhere to replace them all. The sexual relationship becomes a commodity like any other.
The fundamentally different answer provided by the anthropologist Emmanuel Désveaux involves a very long analytical detour to understand the ways of considering sexuality in different human societies. They are reduced to a few types: Australian, American, European and Asian.
In the Far East, carnal love is seen as a sacred relationship. The Native Americans of the Americas link sexuality and reproduction without conceiving of biological heredity, unlike the Europeans. Among Australian Aborigines, the sexual relationship and conception are dissociated. Mr. Désveaux hypothesizes that since this continent is not home to large mammals, it does not allow this link to be observed through breeding (as in Europe).
This way of thinking stems from a basic idea of wild thought, by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, wanting humans to draw inspiration from nature to understand themselves. “Among other peoples, there is a continuity in the sequence of the carnal act until birth,” says the professor. Sexuality for Europeans can be separated for pleasure in itself. What gives a non-procreative sexuality. This leads to an instrumentalization of the female body. The woman becomes either a source of pleasure or a source of children. »
mom or whore
In other words, other human societies establish a sequential continuity between the carnal act and procreation while Westerners exploit the sequence (and the female body) to the point of saying that it is possible to have sexual intercourse only for pleasure, up to conceiving and exploiting a non-procreative sexuality. This particularity can be observed since Greco-Roman Antiquity.
“Some Greek representations of sexuality explicitly reproduce pornographic-type sexual acts that are absolutely unrelated to procreation,” notes Mr. Désveaux. I wanted to show that pornography is the culmination of this dissociation, that, from the start, it is already there, with this split Western conception of women, either generating pleasure or generating children. »
The intellectual exploration of this intuition takes various paths. Here, to offer a history of Western attempts to understand the mechanisms of reproduction. There, to analyze the “imperative of restraint” in the search for pleasure added by Christianity (after Stoicism, as Michel Foucault has shown in his own History of sexuality) to the fundamental binary device.
“Dechristianization had a radical effect by laying bare this opposition between the mother and the whore to leave, in fine, the pornographic actress on the one hand and, on the other hand, the claim to be able to be a mother without sexual relations, like the Virgin Mary, says the professor, admitting that his reading may seem paradoxical and provocative. Our world will accentuate this paradoxical tension between hypersexuality and motherhood without sexuality. »
He also points out that medically assisted procreation (MAP) has become commonplace at the same time that pornography has become the most frequented spectacle on the Internet. “The legalization of assisted reproduction and theempire of pornography do not signal a moment when the West would have allowed itself to be overwhelmed by technology, but on the contrary, when it helped to shed a light, more vivid than ever, on what sexual relations are in their eyes. and procreation”, he underlines in the book Sexuality, societies, nativities from the first page.