… a literal translation into English of the Chinese/Korean communist pejorative zǒu gǒu 走狗, meaning lackey or lapdog, an unprincipled person who helps or flatters other, more powerful and often evil people. It is derived from the eagerness with which a dog will respond when called by its owner, even for mere scraps.
Capitalists are not often the root cause of social change. They just aren’t the geniuses capitalist ideology would have us believe they are. More often, they take note of social trends and find ways to latch onto and misdirect social change to their own benefit. Hugh Hefner was a shrewd capitalist. He saw the push coming from women for greater sexual freedom and autonomy, and he also rightly detected (probably because he was afflicted with it) the 1960s trend toward the idea that the only means to expressing one’s “true self” was through consumption. What looks like an ingenious anti-feminist usurpation of women’s liberation ideology in Playboy is really nothing more than Hefner’s realization that the women’s liberation movement had pushed sexuality into the public eye to the extent that he could now sell sex to men along with watches, colognes, and esoteric cigarette brands.
At the moment at which women seemed on the brink of overthrowing patriarchy, Hefner succeeded in turning women into yet another object for men to consume in the pursuit of projecting a fashionable lifestyle and thus — probably accidentally — in driving a wedge between those who could see what was happening and those who didn’t want to that has yet to be dislodged. The story from that point on is a familiar one that leads to the present, when anyone with internet access can find hundreds of pages of rape porn with very little effort.
The cultural journey from half-naked women frolicking in fields to readily-available gang rape porn illustrates a few of the fallacies and problems in capitalist ideology, especially as deployed by defenders of the porn industry. Pornographers claim, as does everyone else who makes a profit selling anything, that they are just meeting a demand (though pornographers doth-protest-a-little-too-much to a greater extent than those who sell products that can’t be shown to be direct causes of rape and human trafficking). Most readers of Playboy in 1969 would likely have been disturbed by the content of a modern mainstream porn clip. For that matter, most viewers of hardcore porn from the early 1990s would be at least mildly alarmed by what is readily available on the internet today. But once something becomes a legitimate target for commodification, all bets are off. Marketers left meeting demand behind nearly a century ago (see the BBC series The Century of the Self) for the more fertile ground of creating it themselves by means of hiring psychological experts to tell them how to manipulate people into believing that they truly needed what was being offered to them for sale. The porn industry is a leader in the psychological manipulation of its customers and makes use of expert advice on addiction psychology and neurological science in order to ensure its continued profits. Scores of studies have shown that long-term porn users find themselves compulsively viewing material that would have upset them had they viewed it months or years earlier, but pornographers disingenuously claim that they are just making what the people want. Horseshit. Some weirdo in Belarus might have decided one day that his ultimate dream was to see a woman get fucked by a dog, but it took the porn industry to create a situation in which every dude over the age of fifteen has seen a video of a woman getting fucked by a dog at least ten times.
Profit is the supreme end of capitalist ideology, and that renders capitalist ideology amoral. There is no realm of human existence that capitalist ideology cannot be applied to, which is one of the soundest arguments against capitalism. That is, if one realizes that there are certain aspects of human existence the application of capitalist ideology to which is immoral. War, health, and sex are the examples that spring to mind first. Capitalist ideology holds that profit is always good, even if extracting a profit from something adulterates or destroys it. The extraction of profit from commodified sexuality has reached a point at which it threatens to destroy sexuality even for those who do not consume its commodified form. (To give one relevant example, extracting profit from commodified sexuality routinely destroys the bodies and minds of those being commodified in the commercial rape industry.*) Pornographers, despite their patently absurd claims to the contrary, do not want you to have a healthy sex life. If you had a healthy sex life, their product would become irrelevant. When porn producers read studies of erectile dysfunction in men under twenty, they rejoice, because it means that they have scored a customer for life who cannot get his sexual needs met without creating demand in an industry that reflects and exacerbates societal misogyny and takes that misogyny out on real women’s bodies. When porn producers read articles about young women who believe that if they don’t embrace their own degradation and physical and emotional discomfort they will be as good as invisible, they shit their pants with glee at the thought of their labor costs decreasing as more and more women flood into the pool of willing performers.
Porn producers are capitalists. They justify commodifying and debasing sexuality to the brink of its destruction on the basis of the capitalist ideology that underlies the entire global power structure. They don’t do it to help the state or the managerial class to control citizens and employees, they do it to make money for themselves. The fact that half of the population is so obsessed with porn that they don’t have any spare time to spend on thinking about the ethical problems inherent in capitalist ideology is nothing but a by-product bonus that the porn industry happens to accidentally contribute to the global capitalist order. Beer companies don’t set out to keep the population mired in drunkenness, hangovers, depression, and alcohol-fueled family dysfunction to prevent them from reaching an emotional and intellectual position from which to confront capitalist ideology, they do so to ensure their own continued profits. That their interests dovetail with those of the managerial class and the world’s governments is a happy coincidence born of the ideology that drives them all. Therein lies the key: within the capitalist world system, everyone in a position of power, whether governmental or financial (the difference between which being diminished to a terminal extent at this point), approaches the task of making decisions from an ideologically capitalistic position. Government officials, when asked to decide whether to regulate the porn industry, don’t opt not to because they believe that the porn industry will keep the population docile by sapping all of its “essence,” they opt not to because they are products of the capitalist world system, the linchpin of which is a capitalist ideology that has assured them since birth that profit is always good.
It is truly bizarre to witness purportedly anti-capitalist or leftist men performing Libertarian mental gymnastics to defend their porn use when it is evident that the porn industry is one of the best examples the radical left could point to as an illustration of the flaws inherent in capitalist theory and practice. But even those who aren’t all that interested in political or economic theory ought to be aware that they’re being manipulated to their own detriment and understand the difference between their own interests and those of corporations for whom nothing matters save profit.
Men should stop using porn because the porn industry rapes, traffics, and kills women. Men should stop using porn because men who use porn make shitty lovers, terrible partners, and are an embarrassment to humanity. Men should stop using porn because men’s porn use makes women’s lives nearly unbearable. Clearly, none of that seems to matter to most men, so how about men stop using porn because it’s bad for men? The porn industry, in seeking to enrich itself, is turning men into sexually dysfunctional robots with no capacity for emotional bonding through the act of sex.
Men, please, have a word with yourselves. The porn industry does not give one fuck about you, and in fact they think you’re just as stupid as they do the women they abuse in the making of their product. They sit around in boardrooms laughing at the thought of you sitting up in your room at four in the morning with your dick in your hand jacking off to images of a bunch of other guys’ dicks doing something to a female human being who is at best incidental. They joke about turning you all gay by directing your sexuality away from women and molding it around other men’s behavior and genitalia. They know their product makes you feel guilty, empty, disgusting, and lonely. But they also know that they can only continue to exist to the extent that you allow them to control and damage your sexuality. Please, for our sake and your own, quit being such a bunch of fucking dupes.
* For those of you new to the site, I call the porn industry the “commercial rape industry” because the women in porn are paid for consent they would not otherwise furnish. If someone has to be paid to consent to something, they have not actually consented to it but have rather agreed not to make their non-consent an issue in exchange for money.
Word to Your Mother