In his work Thinking about pornography (PUF, 2003), the philosopher Ruwen Ogien (1947-2017) refutes the arguments of pornophobes, whether they call themselves conservatives or progressives. While some see pornography as a threat to the family unit and the traditional values it embodies, others criticize the degradation of human relationships it generates. His objections are based on a minimum ethic, one of the principles of which is that of not harming others.
According to Ogien, the production or consumption of pornographic images should be considered harmless, provided that it does not harm anyone. To discuss this, he carefully examines the views of groups of individuals opposing pornography on the basis of a substantive conception of the sexual good that is supposedly inherent in human nature. However, this conception rejects the right of adults to decide what they do with their own lives.
As an essay in applied ethics, Thinking about pornography interferes in a debate that is still ongoing between those who, in the name of human dignity, wish to repress pornography and those who, while acknowledging its existence, militate for tolerance as to the desires and tastes of each in respect rules consistent with minimalist ethics.
Four years later, Ogien publishes The freedom to offend. Sex, art and morals (La Musardine, 2007) and attacks, this time, censorship in the field of artistic expression. He defends the freedom to offend, that of exhibiting works that may shock as long as it does not cause harm to anyone. Admittedly, visual works of art that display images deemed obscene can be deemed to be in bad taste and cause repulsion, but should they be banned for all that?
To protect themselves from the indignation of a certain public, museums or any other cultural establishment set up signage mentioning that works can rush the sensitivity of certain people. This was the case for the exhibition Evergon. intimate theater, presented recently at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, while a space reserved for works of a sexual nature was offered to an informed public. In these conditions where no one is forced to see these works, Ogien pleads for an acceptance of the representation of sexuality in public places.
It must be said, however, that with the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of screens, the freedom to offend is deployed in a completely different field. So-called pornographic images can easily circulate, and I’m not talking here about sex industry websites that offer their products in the name of entertainment culture. On social networks, the censorship of images that too often confuse nudity, eroticism and pornography is mainly carried out by algorithms that somehow moderate the content disseminated.
In this issue’s dossier, on the association between the visual arts and pornography, Jessica Ragazzini’s text recalls the debate surrounding the images of works of art that have been blocked by Facebook. His article analyzes above all the strategies developed by certain museums to counter this abusive censorship. Still related to pornography, the other titles focus more on the creation of works or performative actions that explore the world of pornography in different ways.
This artistic incursion may upset some readers, but it contributes to a not insignificant reality of attitudes of artists who, for several years, have been exploring another pornography — alternative, gay, lesbian, trans, queer, feminist — who, in no doubt, transforms the edges of conventional pornography.
So-called commercial pornography develops in the lap of a capitalist economy that is mainly part of a history of heteronormative sexuality. Its market aims to produce images of non-simulated sexual acts that can excite and stimulate male sexual pleasure. It is to counter this phallocentric vision that the texts in this dossier are part of a movement called “postpornography”. THE ” post porn identifies itself with a panoply of minority practices allowing people to assume their gendered body outside the diktats of industry.
Co-director of this file, Julie Lavigne, art historian and professor in the Department of Sexology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, offers a retrospective of artistic practices that she calls “autopornography”. Like several other contributions to this issue, his text analyzes the claims of artists whose critical approach underlines the importance of asserting a perfectly autonomous sexual dimension, which highlights other representations of sexuality within a self-creating subjectivity.
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