Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and Linda Williams Chloë Taylor,

18. Elena - February 25, 2010 [Edit]

This whole article on pornography is relevant to the study of sexual attitudes in the Fellowship of Friends Cult. Many points expressed here reaffirm statements I made on the connection between the fantasy of sex and the inability to be present to sex in fascist characters. Allow me to give “my” definition of Fascist as I’ve used all along in my attacks against Fellowship members and exfellowship members: it is the inability to perceive the human in the subject one is dealing with.

I should define “human” for me: it is the possibility of acknowledging the person in the “reality” one is dealing with

I should define “reality” : the sum total of factors conditioning the event

This I imagine will need redefining again but serves an initial stage

Chloë Taylor 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 18-44, September 2009

ARTICLE

Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and
Linda Williams
Chloë Taylor, University of Alberta

ABSTRACT: In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states in
passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and
psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse
implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of
film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and
attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and
pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences in terms of
the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the
question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional
discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is
the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities
within a disciplinary system of power.

Keywords: Foucault, Linda Williams, pornography, prostitution

In 1977, Michel Foucault was asked by a government commission how he would like
to see the laws concerning sexual crimes reformed in France. In his response he
made no mention of prostitution and stated briefly that he was opposed to all
legislation restricting sexually explicit materials. Prostitution and pornography
appear to have been easy cases for Foucault, while he went on to say that there were
only two kinds of sex acts that troubled him with respect to legislation – rape and
sex with minors – and it is these issues that he contemplated in some detail.1 Lest we

1
Foucault describes this phone call in ‚Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison,‛ where he goes
on to discuss rape with his interlocutors. Soon after, in ‚Sexual Morality and the Law,‛
he addresses the issue of sex with minors. See Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Michel
Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York
and London: Routledge: 1988) 178-210 and 271-285. For critical responses to Foucault’s
comments on rape and sex with children, see Linda Alcoff, ‚Dangerous Pleasures:
Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia,‛ in Susan J. Hekman (ed.), Feminist Interpretations
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
19

think that sex work was entirely unproblematic for Foucault, however, in The History
of Sexuality prostitution and pornography are mentioned along with the disciplinary
professions of medicine and psychiatry as having ‚tapped into both this analytic
multiplication of pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it.‛2
Prostitution and pornography are suggested by Foucault to be involved in the
workings of disciplinary power as it constructs and controls sexuality, and in this
sense would be problematic indeed, even if it would make no more sense to resort to
legislation in the cases of pornography and prostitution than it would in the cases of
other disciplinary practices such as psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Since law
functions on a model of repressive, sovereign or juridical power, it is not very
effective, and may even be counter-productive, to resort to law in order to resist
what are in fact disciplinary phenomena.

This paper has two objectives, one negative and one positive. First, I wish to critique
Film Studies scholar Linda Williams’ highly influential study of pornography, Hard
Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, which draws on Foucault at length.
Williams’ 1989 work was groundbreaking in that it was the first study of porno-
graphy that declined to engage in the censorship debate. Rather than questioning
whether we should be for or against pornography, Williams approaches porno-
graphy like any other film genre, discussing it seriously in terms of influences and
techniques. Williams considers pornography to be a ‚body genre‛ of film much like
other low-brow genres such as melodrama and horror, which also work to elicit
physiological responses in the viewer. Importantly for the current paper, it is one of
Williams’ central theses in her book to take up Foucault’s association of
pornography with the disciplinary sciences of medicine and psychiatry in order to
argue that pornography is a confessional science and participates in the will to know
about sex. Moreover, Williams understands Foucault’s situating of pornography
within his discussion of the perverse implantation to mean that pornography results
in a positive proliferation of fluid sexualities within individual lives. Williams’ use
of Foucault has gone unquestioned in Film and Porn Studies and has been cited and

of Michel Foucault (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1996), 99-135; Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993); Ann J. Cahill, ‚Foucault, Rape, and the Construction of the
Feminine Body,‛ Hypatia, 15, vol., no. 1, (Winter 2000); Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001); Laura Hengehold, ‚An Immodest
Proposal: Foucault, Hysterization, and the ‘Second Rape,’‛ in Hypatia, (Summer 1994): 88-
107; Monique Plaza, ‚Our Damages and Their Compensation,‛ Feminist Issues, 1 (3),
([1978], 1981): 5-35; Chloë Taylor, ‚Foucault, Feminism and Sex Crimes,‛ in Hypatia, vol.
24, no. 4, (Fall 2009); Winifred Woodhull, ‚Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape,‛
in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (ed.), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance,
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 167-176.
2
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 48.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
20
employed authoritatively by numerous other scholars; however, I shall contest both
Williams’ reading of Foucault and of pornography.

My second and more positive objective in this paper is to offer a new interpretation
of Foucault’s reference to pornography (and, to a lesser extent, prostitution – which
Williams sets aside) in The History of Sexuality. This interpretation is more consistent
than Williams’ not only with Foucault’s arguments in The History of Sexuality, but
more importantly, with the manner in which pornography and prostitution actually
function. First, I argue that in so far as pornography and prostitution involve
expertise, they are closer to the ars erotica than to the sexual sciences. Second, I argue
that the mechanism by which pornography and prostitution participate in the
perverse implantation is not confession but consumption. Consequently, contra
Williams, we must attend to the consumers rather than to what takes place on set or
on screen to see how pornography serves its disciplinary function. Finally, I argue
that although the perverse implantation deployed by pornography may result in a
proliferation of sexualities at a society-wide level, on an individual level it is
constraining rather than liberating, contributing – along with the sexual sciences of
medicine and psychiatry – to the fixing of each of us into frozen rather than fluid
sexual identities.

Scientia Sexualis or Ars Erotica?
Other than his references to specific literary works such as My Secret Life and the
writings of Sade, Foucault only considers pornography once in the History of
Sexuality, and what he says is all-too-brief and has been influentially misinterpreted
by Williams. In the chapter entitled ‚The Perverse Implantation,‛ Foucault writes:

And accompanying this encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified,
became stuck to an age, a place, a type of practice. A proliferation of sexualities
through the extension of power; an optimization of the power to which each of
these local sexualities gave a surface of intervention; this concatenation,
particularly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and relayed by the
countless economic interests which, with the help of medicine, psychiatry,
prostitution, and pornography, have tapped into both this analytic multiplication of
pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it. Pleasure and power
do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and
reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and
devices of excitation and incitement.3

This citation is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it helps to explain
Foucault’s opposition to any censorship of sexually explicit materials. Foucault’s
main objective in this reference to prostitution and pornography is not so much to

3
Ibid., 48 (my italics).
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
21

say anything about the sex industry per se, but to reject the strategy of repressing sex
in order to control it more generally, whether this repression occurs through
legislation or medicine. According to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power as
productive, the workings of power and the very idea of repression are constitutive
rather than extinguishers of desire.4 As Foucault argues throughout the first volume
of the History of Sexuality, when we try to control desire by repressing it we in fact
produce it, and, as this passage makes clear, Foucault thinks that this is just as true
with respect to the sex industry as to the medical treatment of perversions.

Second, while in this passage and elsewhere Foucault does not elaborate on the
relation between the sex industry and the sexual sciences, it is curious that he would
string together the apparently incongruous bedmates of medicine and psychiatry
with prostitution and pornography. Each of these practices is suggested to be
working towards similar ends within a disciplinary system of power: Foucault
suggests that pornography and prostitution, like the sexual sciences, are involved in
a ‚proliferation of sexualities,‛ which proliferation, for Foucault, is in turn caught up
with ‚the perverse implantation,‛ as the chapter in which this citation occurs
explains. Unfortunately, whereas in the case of medicine and psychiatry Foucault
describes the precise mechanism through which this proliferation and implantation
of sexualities occurs – confession – he does not give us a similar account of the
manners in which prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities. In response to
this passage, Williams has deduced that pornography simply is a sexual science for
Foucault, and thus employs the same technology of deployment as the ‚other‛ sexual
sciences. Setting the issue of prostitution aside – and even replacing the word
‚prostitution‛ with ‚law‛ in her reference to this passage5 – Williams has argued that
pornography is a confessional practice. As I shall argue below, however, and as is
suggested by Williams’ own need to switch the word ‚prostitution‛ for the more
obviously confessional practice of ‚law‛ in her manipulation of Foucault’s phrase,
this is far from clear. In fact, to make sense of this citation, we need to understand
how both pornography and prostitution function to deploy sexualities in a manner
that is analogous (but not necessarily identical) to the workings of the sexual
sciences.

In the History of Sexuality and in related works from this time, Foucault argues for
the disentanglement of sex from truth and identity. He famously concludes this
work by proposing that ‚The rallying point for the counterattack against the
deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.‛6

4
Ibid., 158.
5
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‚Frenzy of the Visible‛ (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1989), 35.
6
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
22
Rather than trying to find out what we already or truly are through introspections
into our sex(uality) and desires, we should work on what we might become, what
new pleasures and capacities of the body we might discover. In this initial volume,
Foucault explores the possibility of mastering the body and its pleasures in terms of
the Eastern ars erotica.7 A few years later, he would describe this discussion of the ars
erotica as ‚one of the numerous points where I was wrong in that book,‛ not because
what he said there was false, but because he ‚should have opposed our science of
sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture. The Greeks and Romans did not
have any ars erotica to be compared with the Chinese ars erotica *<+ They had a
techne tou biou [care of the self] in which the economy of pleasure played a very large
role.‛8 Foucault now contrasts the sexual sciences not to Eastern erotic arts, but to
Greek and Roman practices of self-care, and provides a schematic account of the
different approaches to sexuality in each of these cultures – the East, the ancient
West, and the Christian and modern West:

If by sexual behavior, we understand the three poles – acts, pleasure, and desire
– we have the Greek ‚formula‛ *<+ In this Greek formula what is underscored
is ‚act,‛ with pleasure and desire as subsidiary: acte – plaisir – (désir). *<+

The Chinese ‚formula‛ would be plaisir – désir – (acte). Acts are put aside
because you have to restrain acts in order to get the maximum duration and
intensity of pleasure.

The Christian ‚formula‛ puts an accent on desire and tries to eradicate it. Acts
have to become something neutral; you have to act only to produce children, or
to fulfill your conjugal duty. And pleasure is both practically and theoretically
excluded: (désir) – acte – (plaisir). Desire is practically excluded – you have to
eradicate your desire – but theoretically very important.

And I could say that the modern ‚formula‛ is desire, which is theoretically
underlined and practically accepted, since you have to liberate your own desire.
Acts are not very important, and pleasure – nobody knows what it is!9

The Eastern ars erotica, or the ‚Chinese ‘formula’,‛ assumes pleasure and the
techniques of mastering the pleasure-capacities of the body to be an area of
knowledge external to the self that a subject can acquire through corporeal practice
under the tutelage of a master. Ancient practices of self-care were concerned with an

7
Ibid., 57-71.
8
Michel Foucault, ‚On the Genealogy of Ethics,‛ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 234-235.
9
Ibid., 242-243.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
23

agent’s ability to control his sexual acts or indulgences in pleasure and took little
interest in desire. As Foucault writes:

For the Greeks, when a philosopher was in love with a boy, but did not touch
him, his behavior was valued. The problem was, does he touch the boy or not.
That’s the ethical substance: the act linked with pleasure and desire. For
Augustine it’s very clear that when he remembers his relationship to his young
friend when he was eighteen years old, what bothers him is what exactly was the
kind of desire he had for him. So, you see that the ethical substance has
changed.10

The shift that happened between the Ancient Greeks and Augustine, a shift in
emphasis from acts to desires, is still with us today. While desire remains the aspect
of sex which we stress, it has now become positive rather than negative: whereas
Augustine worried about the nature of his desire in order to better annihilate it, we
now seek to identify our desires in order to affirm and inhabit our authentic
sexualities, and we take desire, rather than acts or pleasures, to be the key to
unlocking the secrets of our souls.

Granted this unprecedented importance, Foucault suggests that desire has
succeeded in eclipsing sexual acts almost entirely. With the scientia sexualis there is
no need to act at all in order to have and to discover our sexualities, we just need to
think about our personal desires and the types of selves that these constitute. For
the scientia sexualis, sexual truth is already in the psyche, if we only introspect on our
feelings, fantasies, dreams, childhood traumas, repressions and inhibitions. Sexual
truth is psychologized, or is specific to each individual and need not be acted upon,
in contrast to the ars erotica, for which the truths of sexual pleasure are mysteries into
which one must be initiated, which must be practiced, and which have nothing to do
with the individual practitioner or her psychic states.

Both the scientia sexualis and the ars erotica have their ‚sexual experts.‛ For the
scientia sexualis, these are scientists who may or may not have much sexual
experience or much embodied knowledge of pleasure but who are medically-trained
decipherers of desire, interpreters of sexual confessions, taxonomers of perversions
or psychosexual types. The sexual experts of the ars erotica, on the other hand, are
trained in the mastery of non-individuated bodies and pleasures.11 Studying the ars

10
Ibid., 238.
11
Bodies may be individuated in the ars erotica into a few physiological types: for instance,
in the Kama Sutra, male bodies come in hare, bull, and horse types, and women come in
deer, mare, and elephant types, according to the size of their genitals. Bodies also come
with different degrees of passion – deemed small, middling, or extreme – and the Kama
Sutra urges lovers to find partners who correspond to themselves in genital size and force
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
24
erotica would consequently be a deindividualizing practice. Unlike patients and
practitioners of the scientia sexualis, an initiate of the ars erotica would not be
concerned with understanding her own individual sexuality, or the various
individual sexualities (perversions, etc.) of others, but in understanding the
pleasures of bodies per se. While corporeal pleasure is important to the ars erotica,
the Western obsession with sexual identity has no more place in these Eastern
practices than it did in the self-mastering techniques of the ancient Greeks.

In Hard Core, as noted, Williams identifies pornography with the scientia sexualis that
Foucault discusses in the History of Sexuality. Williams’ initial argument for the
pornography/sexual science identification involves showing that pornography and
two modern scientific developments – photography and psychoanalysis – came of
age together, and share a history that has not been disentangled since. As Williams
documents, the scientific inventions of photography were quickly employed to
produce pornography, while sexual scientists such as Charcot took quasi-
pornographic photographs with titles such as ‚Ècstase.‛ Science, psychiatry,
psychoanalysis, and pornography thus have an interactive history, and this history
is one of the grounds for Williams’ blurring of the notions of pornography and
sexual science. The use and making of pornographic images in the history of the
sciences of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is not enough to establish pornography as
a sexual science, however, or even to say that it is like a science. Charcot touched
many things, and early scientist-photographers worked in many genres, but not all
of these became science.

More significantly, Williams argues that photography and its immediate production
of pornography are situated in the particularly modern and Western ‚will to know‛
about sex, which volonté de savoir is also what motivates the sexual sciences.
Foucault’s argument is that we, as a society, want to know about sex, since we have
come to think that sex is the key to understanding who we are, the means to
realizing both our truth and our happiness. It is in this context that we participate in
the studies of the sexual sciences, undergo analysis and self-analysis, and consume
the books, magazines, and television shows that feature sexological knowledge. In
this context, pornography is interpreted by Williams – and by authors who cite
Williams’ study such as Chris Straayer, Julie Lavigne and Gertrud Koch – as catering
to this same will to know the truth about sex. Like sexual scientists in their
interrogations, Williams thinks that we consume pornography out of the desire to
hear ‚sex speak‛ or to witness sexual confessions.

of passion. These basic differences in scale are, however, quite different from, and far
less individualizing than, the psychosexual taxonomies of the sexual sciences.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
25

While Williams shows that the sexual and photographic sciences produced
pornographic images, Koch shows a reverse movement, pointing to cases in which
pornographers made overtures to the sexual sciences. She points out that certain
pornographic films ‛declared their intention to offer practical advice for living, to be
purveyors of knowledge. Examples of these are the Oswald Kolle series, or Helga.
The classification of formal knowledge by category still attaches to an unending
series of ‘Film Reports,’ often presenting sexual behaviour according to various
occupations.‛12 Koch goes on to note that certain ‚early porn films displayed a
lexicographic tendency,‛ and quotes two descriptions from a 1956 essay by Curt
Moreck:

A special flavour is given to obscene films through the scrupulously realistic
presentation of every imaginable perversion. Although life itself very often
offers the connoisseur a view of simple vice, the chance to enjoy real perversity
as a spectator is much rarer; in this case, film tries to fill the void. There are some
films in this genre which seem to have been staged directly from Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis, as a manual of abnormal sexual operations for civilized
man.

All the vices of man flickered by on the screen. Every one of the hundred and
fifty ways from the old Treatise on the Hundred and Fifty Ways of Loving was
demonstrated, with occasional interruptions for lesbian, pederast, and
masturbation jokes. All that was harmless. Sadists and masochists waved their
instruments, sodomy was practiced, coprophagous acts were on display.13

Cases such as Moreck describes indicate that pornography might offer itself as the
sort of material which the sexual sciences study. Indeed, Krafft-Ebing used the
pornographic texts of Sade and Sacher-Masoch to identify the characteristics of
sadism and masochism. Some pornographic films could function like the texts of
Sade and Sacher-Masoch as other illustrations of perversions which the sexual
scientists might analyze. As Foucault notes, the anonymous author of My Secret Life
described the value of his writings as a quasi-scientific contribution to human
knowledge of sexuality.14 In instances such as these – voluntarily in the cases of My
Secret Life and the films that Moreck describes, and involuntarily in the cases of Sade
and Sacher-Masoch – pornography serves as material for the sexual scientists’
studies of perversion. In the case of My Secret Life, because it is the author himself
who offers his experiences to the scientists, and because the text is written in an
autobiographical mode, pornography works as the kind of confession which sexual
scientists elicit from their patients. In the other cases, the data is more dubious and

12
Gertrud Koch, ‚The Body’s Shadow Realm,‛ in Pamela Church Gibson (ed.), More Dirty
Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (London: The British Film Institute, 2004), 155.
13
Cited in Koch, 155.
14
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 22.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
26
involuntarily provided, and Sacher-Masoch was appalled to find a sexual perversion
named after himself in the Psychopathia Sexualis on the basis of his literary works.

Although this shows that some pornographers have justified the existence of their
work by claiming to contribute to scientific knowledge, and a few have done so in an
autobiographical or confessional mode, it is surely the case that most pornography is
not autobiographical and is not offered up as quasi-scientific information about
human sexuality, but as fiction and fantasy. Significantly, while anti-pornography
feminists have regularly claimed that pornography reflects and reinscribes (a
misogynist) reality, the pornography industry and its defenders persistently argue
that their opponents are failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Pornography, they argue, is not truth but fantasy, and the people who consume it
realize this. The value of pornography to society is defended as art and imagination,
and not as science, knowledge, or truth.

While Koch’s study, like Foucault’s discussion of My Secret Life, is interesting in that
it shows that some works of pornography have engaged with and even hoped to
contribute to or collaborate with the sexual sciences, this is not a feature of most
pornography, either in the nineteenth century or today. It is in fact highly
questionable whether pornography arises primarily out of a ‚will to know‛ about
sex at all. For one thing, mass-produced and circulated pornography pre-existed the
volonté de savoir that Foucault describes. While Williams begins her study of the
history of pornography with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century,
thus making it contemporary with Charcot, she might have begun with the
invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century instead. Like the invention of
the camera, the invention of the printing press quickly gave rise to the mass
production and circulation of pornographic works, such as Guilio Romano’s 1520
series, I modi, and this well before the age of the ‚will to know‛ about sex that
Foucault describes.15 It is thus quite possible for a society to make, distribute, and
consume pornography on a large scale with non-epistemological motivations and
prior to the existence of the sexual sciences, and this leads me to doubt that the
primary impulse behind the production and consumption of pornography is any
more part of a volonté de savoir today than it was in the 1520s.

Of course, pornography might function very differently today than it did in the
Renaissance, and yet even in this age of the will to know about sex, it is far from
clear that it is in the spirit of knowledge that pornography is either made or
consumed. Do people consume pornography to learn about sexual pleasure or to

15
Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999)

Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
27

have it? Is pornography primarily about satisfying curiosity or desire? Is porno-
graphy an epistemological endeavor or a masturbatory aid? Are these necessarily
inter-related? Epistemological pursuits may certainly be prurient, and Foucault
himself characterizes fin-de-siècle medicine as ‚a pornography of the morbid,‛16 but
does all sexual pleasure today seek the truth of sex? Williams seems to think that it
does, for she even includes peep shows under the umbrella of the ‚scientific will-to-
knowledge.‛17

I have no doubt that people look at pornography with some intellectual curiosity
and that it can play an educative role, for better or for worse, but I am not sure that
this educative role is the primary motivation or function of pornography, its
explanation or raison d’être. According to one poll, eight-six percent of respondants
think that pornography is educational, and Pamela Paul writes that young men in
particular may use pornography ‚to figure out what women want and expect from
sex. In fact, studies show that men learn from and emulate what they see in
pornography.‛18 I shall argue below that mainstream heterosexual pornography
does not so much educate men in women’s desires as construct a fantasy for men
according to which women’s desires and pleasures correspond to their own.
Something similar might be said about prostitution, which is also often used for
male sexual initiation and education, but which in fact probably teaches men very
little about women’s actual pleasures or desires. Here, however, I want to argue that
in so far as advocates say that pornography (or prostitution) is educational, they
mean that it teaches sexual skills or techniques, not truths about the psychosexualities
and desires of the individuals on-screen or employed. This, for Foucault, would
situate pornography (and prostitution) closer to the ars erotica than the scientia
sexualis. To recall, the sexual experts of the ars erotica are trained in practices that
bring about pleasure and have mastered an art of manipulating bodies, while the
sexual experts of the scientia sexualis are trained in diagnosing psychological
perversions and interpreting desires. If porn stars (and prostitutes) are ‚sexual
experts‛ of a sort, capable of contributing to the sexual education of consumers, it is
in the manner of the ars erotica and not of the sexual sciences.

Let it be granted, then, that pornography can serve a pedagogical function, as is so
frequently claimed. It is nevertheless not clear that this situates pornography on the
side of the sexual sciences, and moreover it is not clear that this is very often the
main purpose in consuming pornography, or that it is a consumer’s primary

16
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 54.
17
Williams, 51.
18
Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our
Families (New York: Times Books, 2005), 18.

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
28
motivation or merely a side-effect. Since pornography tends to be repetitious, it also
seems unlikely that viewers continue to watch pornography for its educational
function. After a short time, one has likely learned what pornography has to teach,
but many go on watching pornography for other reasons, which reasons were
probably the main motivation in the first place.

Setting these questions aside, even if we were to accept Williams’ assumption that
pornography arises and is consumed out of a will to know about sex, it is important
to note that not everything that engages in this volonté de savoir becomes a sexual
science. Foucault himself observes that the desire to confess and to hear confessed
the truths of sex quickly expanded beyond the scientific realm, and finds expression
today in our intimate conversations with family members, friends, and lovers and in
‚‘scandalous’ literature.‛19 Indeed, the confessional impulse does not merely
characterize our speaking about sex, for Foucault, but modern subjectivity more
generally, or the wide-spread trend toward psychologization. For instance, Foucault
discuss the manners in which criminal law became psychiatrized and involves
confessional practices in the modern era, even in cases which have nothing to do
with sexuality.20 For Foucault, this does not transform law, ‚scandalous literature,‛
or pillow talk into science, although it indicates that they interact with the human
sciences in interesting and problematic ways.

“Confessional Frenzy”?
Williams, however, argues that pornography in general (and not only in a few
autobiographical instances) is a sexual science, and that it functions in our society as
the sort of confession which the sexual sciences elicit and which Foucault examined.
According to Williams, pornography is consumed as a confessional genre, and as a
confessional source of truthful information about female pleasure in particular. She
writes that pornography has ‚the goal of making visible the involuntary confession
of bodily pleasure.‛21 In this way ‚We begin to see *<+ how this sexual science gives
form to the ‘truths’ that are confessed.‛22 In particular, ‚Hard core desires assurance
that it is witnessing not the voluntary performance of feminine pleasure, but its
involuntary confession.‛23 Pornography, according to Williams, is not just

19
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 21.
20
Michel Foucault, ‚Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison,‛ and ‚The Dangerous Individual,‛ in
Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and
Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 178-210 and 125-151.
21
Williams, 50.
22
Ibid., 48.
23
Ibid.,, 50.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
29

confessional but a ‚confessional frenzy,‛24 and ‚proceeds by soliciting further
confessions of the hidden secrets of female pleasure.‛25

Although the last formulation, with its language of soliciting rather than staging
‚confessions‛ from porn stars, obscures the point, the more sophisticated version of
Williams’ argument is not that the porn stars are actually confessing, but that
pornography aims to produce the illusion of confession, and that pornographic films
are consumed as confessions. Referring to Diderot’s tale of the speaking sex, as
discussed by Foucault, Williams writes that ‚Motion pictures *pornography+ take
over from the magic of Mongogul’s silver ring to offer the illusion of a more truthful,
hard-core confession.‛26 Williams thus realizes that it is in fact male directors
catering to male viewers who have been doing most of the ‚speaking‛ in
pornography, so that if male viewers think that they are ‚hearing‛ confessions of
female pleasure ‚spoken‛ through close-ups of female genitals engaged in real sex,
this involves mostly male pornographers ventriloquizing their voices into the vulvas
of their female stars. However, Williams asserts that this is equally true of the
‚other‛ sexual sciences:

Freud’s theory of the fetish develops out of a particular way of seeing women as
‘lacking’ that cinema participates in as well. Neither institution actually reflects
the confessional truths they purport to record; rather, they produce these truths
in their new forms of power and pleasure.27

In other words, Freud and Charcot do not give us the unadulterated confessions of
their female patients any more than the pornographers do, and yet what they said,
like the images that the pornographers produce, is productive of truth. Doctors and
pornographers, according to Williams, both give us confessions of female pleasure
as seen through the lens of male interpretation and desire in manners that do not so
much reflect as construct the truth of female sexuality. In one example, Williams
describes staged photographs of a faked hysterical attack by the photographer
Muybridge as other ‚‘confessions’ of a female body.‛28 Even pornographic literature
written by male writers is interpreted by Williams as ‚confessions‛ of female
pleasure:

there is not much difference between literary confessions (written by men but
often focused on women) of female pleasure *<+ and the more direct and
graphic confession of pleasure by women’s bodies in hard core. Both are

24
Ibid., 122.
25
Ibid., 53.
26
Ibid., 32.
27
Ibid., 46.
28
Ibid., 47-48.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
30
examples of men speaking about women’s sex to other men; both want to know
more about the pleasures of women *<+.29

Williams suggests that if Fanny Hill, written by John Cleland, is read as a confession
of female pleasure, then so can pornography be – but does anyone read Fanny Hill
this way?

In any case, porn stars, especially female porn stars, like the model who faked a
hysterical fit for Muybridge, or the ‚hysterics‛ who performed for Charcot, are thus
not really confessing, for Williams, but she claims that they are viewed as confessing,
especially during their ‚involuntary convulsions‛ or orgasms, authentic or
otherwise, and that their performances function as confessions in the production of
knowledge about sex. According to Williams, it is because we watch pornography
to see confessions that the orgasm must be as visible as possible, as evidenced by the
de rigueur ‚money shot‛ in the case of male porn stars. For Williams, it is a major
problem for the pornography industry that women do not (usually) produce
similarly visible ‚confessions,‛ when ‚involuntary confessions of pleasure‛ –
especially female pleasure – is what hard core is all about.

Many objections can be raised here. To begin with a relatively small one, it is not
clear why Williams consistently associates pornographic orgasms with
involuntariness. In the case of ‚money shots,‛ which Williams repeatedly calls
‚involuntary confessions of pleasure,‛ Williams herself tells us that male porn stars
are paid extra for these scenes, and thus certainly intend them. It is also not clear
that confessions in general should be characterized as ‚involuntary.‛ While Foucault
stresses that confessions are authenticated by the inhibitions that they overcome, this
does not make them involuntary but rather feats of voluntary effort. In a legal
context, an involuntary statement does not qualify as a confession at all. In
literature, texts written in the third person and texts in which the first person
narrator’s name does not correspond with the author’s name (for instance, Fanny
Hill does not correspond with John Cleland) are also not considered confessional.30
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes confession as ‚a ritual of discourse
where the subject who speaks corresponds with the subject of the statement,‛31
which cannot be said for any of the cases which Williams is calling ‚confession.‛

Our everyday as well as Foucault’s use of the term ‚confession‛ refers to a truthful
statement made by one person to another about herself, whether this statement

29
Ibid., 55-56.
30
Philippe Lejeune, ‚Le pacte autobiographique,‛ in Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte Autobio-
graphique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 13-46.
31
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 61.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
31

refers to something she has done, felt, or had done to her. Not every statement we
make about ourselves is considered to be a confession, however: calling a statement
a confession implies that it speaks of something that is shameful, difficult to say, or
revelatory of who the speaker is. According to Foucault, confession is a discursive
act that individuates us, and it is one of the privileged forms of truth-telling and self-
constitution in our culture. In ‚Subjectivity and Truth‛ Foucault defines confession
as: ‚To declare aloud and intelligibly the truth of oneself.‛32 In The History of
Sexuality, confession is ‚a ritual which unfolds in a relation of power, since one
doesn’t confess without the presence, at least the virtual presence, of a partner who
is not simply an interlocutor but the agency that requires the confession, imposes it,
weighs it, and intervenes to judge, punish, pardon, console, reconcile.‛33 For
Foucault, confession is also ‚a ritual where truth is authenticated by the obstacles
and resistances that it has had to lift in order to be formulated,‛ or one that is always
told with difficulty and shame. Finally, it is a discursive act in which ‚articulation
alone, independently of its external consequences, produces, in the person who
articulates it, intrinsic modifications: it makes him innocent, it redeems him, purifies
him, promises him salvation.‛34 In a later essay, ‚Christianity and Confession,‛
Foucault furthermore makes clear that confession must be verbal and not merely
performative. To make this point, he recounts a story from Cassian in which a monk
who stole a loaf of bread each day experiences repentance during a sermon, and
therefore performatively reveals to those congregated the loaf of bread hidden under
his robes, and then confesses verbally to having stolen and eaten a loaf each day.
Only when he makes a verbal confession does ‚a light *seem+ to tear itself away
from his body and cross the room, spreading a disgusting smell of sulphur.‛35 Satan
and his temptations were not dislodged from the monk at the moment that he felt
contrition, nor at the moment that he displayed the stolen loaf to his fellows and
thus theatrically exposed his guilt. Only when he confessed his wrongdoing in
words was the Devil forced from his body. Foucault uses this story to argue that
confession is discursive rather than performative, unlike earlier, pre-confessional
forms of Christian penance.

To summarize Foucault’s understanding of this crucial Western practice of truth-
telling, confession is interpersonal, discursive, autobiographical, difficult or
shameful, and subject-forming. This said, can pornography be described as

32
Michel Foucault, ‚Subjectivity and Truth,‛ in The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e), (1997), 173.
33
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 61.
34
Ibid., 62.
35
Michel Foucault, ‚Christianity and Confession,‛ in The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e), (1997), 222-223.

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
32
confessional according to Foucault’s analysis of confession? Contra Williams, I
would argue that it cannot for the following reasons. First, the relation between
actors and viewers in pornography is not an interpersonal one, and the acts involved
are theatrical performances rather than discursive acts. Moreover, although this
point requires more explanation, it does not seem to me that the actors are
overcoming inhibitions in order to confess/perform pleasures which are subject-
forming, constitutive of their identities, or individuating. Performing in a
pornographic film, like engaging in prostitution, may be taken as constitutive of
psychosexual subjectivity in the modern West in that it is assumed to damage the
sex worker’s authentic sexuality.36 In this case, however, her authentic sexuality is
not what gets performed in either the brothel or the set, but is what gets obscured in
this process. According to this negative view of pornography, what we see in a
pornographic film is not an expression of the porn star’s sexuality, but a possibly
permanent and damaging obscuration of it.

Another way that pornographic performances may be constitutive of sexual identity
in the eyes of viewers and for the stars themselves is insofar as such performances
constitute her according to the identity of ‚sex worker‛ or ‚whore,‛ regardless of the
nature of the particular sex acts in which she is engaged; in other words, performing
as a dominatrix in a pornographic film does not constitute the actress as a
dominatrix in her own eyes or those of her viewers, but it may constitute her as a sex
worker or a whore, with all the stigmatization that this entails in a society such as
ours. Men interviewed in Pornified note that they would not date or marry the
actresses who arouse them, precisely because of the type of woman that performing
in pornographic films makes them. Performing in pornographic films functions to
constitute actors as porn stars/whores for their viewers and probably for themselves,
whatever (possibly more positive) meaning this has for them, but it does not
constitute them as, say, lesbians if they engage in lesbian sex scenes, or
sadomasochists if they perform in s/m scenes, for the precise reason that they engage
in these acts as theatrical performances and they are consumed as such. Williams is not
arguing that the porn stars are seen as confessing to being porn stars, however, but
that they are seen as confessing to pleasure, to truths about female sexuality, or to
their own feminine pleasure in particular acts, which does not seem to be the case.

Most importantly, it seems to me that no one considers the majority of pornographic
films to be confessions for the very simple reason that they are fictional and not
autobiographies or documentaries. Pornography does not declare itself to be a
truth-telling genre, but fantasy catering to the desires of its viewers (not its actors),

36
This view is widespread, but see, for instance, Igor Primoratz, ‚What’s Wrong with
Prostitution?‛ in Alan Soble (ed.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings (Lanham,
Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 455.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
33

whereas, as Philippe Lejeune has argued, confessional texts are to be understood as
quasi-legalistic and particularly authentic cases of truth-telling or self-revelation.37
Peter Brooks, in his study of confession, notes that ‚Western literature has made the
confessional mode a crucial kind of self-expression that is supposed to bear a special
stamp of sincerity and authenticity and to bear special witness to the truth of the
individual personality.‛38 We do not consider a pornographic sex scene to be
particularly sincere, or to be any more confessional than a Hollywood sex scene,
even though, unlike in Hollywood films, porn stars are having real sex, as
demonstrated by the all important ‚meat shots‛ and ‚money shots‛ that characterize
hard-core. Although the act or sex is real, it is not true: porn stars are not telling the
truth of their sex or their desire. We see acts and maybe pleasures in porn, but we do
not know (and, as I shall argue below, I do not think that we care) if we are seeing
desire. In this sense, again, pornography seems closer to the ars erotica than to the
scientia sexualis.

Throughout Hard Core, Williams fails to distinguish between reality and truth, or real
sex and the truth of an individual’s sexuality, and between acts and pleasure on the one
hand, and sexuality and desire on the other. For Foucault, however, these are crucial
distinctions, indicative of the epistemic transition to modernity, or the shift in
importance from act to actor, deed to desire.39 An individual may be considered a
pedophile even if he has never acted on his desires, but only demonstrated them
through certain fantasies, consuming certain literature or websites, just as a person
may consider herself to be bisexual even if she has only had heterosexual sex, on the
basis of her longings. We evidently think that the sexual acts we perform in reality
may have little to do with the truth of our sex. For this reason, as Foucault makes
clear in The History of Sexuality, sexual confessions (and even legal or criminal
confessions) may or may not be about what a person really does, but they are always

37
Lejeune, 13-46.
38
Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press, 2000), 18.
39
Foucault stresses this shift towards psychologization in many contexts. As seen above,
he contrasts the Eastern interest in bodies and pleasures to the Western focus on
sexuality and desire. In later works, Foucault contrasted ancient Greek and Roman
practices of self-mastery focusing on acts to the modern fixation on desires. For Foucault,
it is a peculiarity of the modern West that truth does not lie in what we have done but in
what we feel. Foucault notes a similar manifestation of this shift in interest from deed to
desire, act to actor, with respect to law: while in the past judges were only concerned
with crimes – or with establishing what had happened, who did it, and what punishment
corresponded – today they are at least as concerned with criminals, or with the psyches,
motivations, intentions, childhood histories, regrets, and likelihood of recidivism.
Foucault makes this point frequently, for instance in ‚Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison,‛
‚The Dangerous Individual,‛ and Discipline and Punish, among other places.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
34
and more importantly concerned with what he or she wants to do. This is why
confessions are importantly discursive rather than theatrical. While Williams thinks
that pornography is confessional precisely because it uses bright lights and close-up
camera shots, or is a ‚frenzy of the visible,‛ confessions are in fact about the
invisible, what cannot be seen and must therefore be said – or whispered. Contra
Williams, the invisibility of the female orgasm in fact poses no problem at all for a
confessional discourse, even if it poses a problem for pornography.

In the case of hard-core, we know that the actors are having real sex, and even that
the male actors are having real orgasms or some degree of real pleasure, even if they
need to take Viagra to achieve it. However, we have no idea how they feel about it,
what their intentions and motivations are, what histories led up to their being where
they are, or if either the male or the female actors are expressing the truth of their
desires. What Williams does not see in her repeated references to these so-called
‚involuntary confessions of pleasure‛ is that, confessionally-speaking, pleasure is
not nearly as important as desire, and meat shots and money shots do not tell us
about desire – or, in a point to which I shall return below, at least not about the
desires of the actors.

Significantly for Williams’ argument, I also do not think that most consumers of
pornography are concerned about the authenticity (or truthfulness) of the actor’s
pleasures and desires, and this again indicates that they do not consume porn as a
confessional genre or out of a ‚will to know‛ about the sex(uality) of those on-
screen. One indication of this is that although there is a widespread belief that many
actresses in pornographic films are sexually exploited and abused, this does not
seem to change the experience of viewers, indicating that they are not interested in
what the porn star’s true desires, pleasures, or psychic states are, as long as she
performs well and the sex is real.40

40
In At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1998), Jane Juffer discusses the case of one porn film in which the porn stars
are supposedly performing their own desires. The marketing gimmick for this work is
that it is allegedly undirected, and so provides viewers with a rare opportunity to see
porn stars expressing their true sexualities and pursuing their actual fantasies. Juffer
writes:

In Venom, a popular selection produced by Vidco Home Video, ten porn
stars perform a vast number of sex acts in what is billed as an expression of
their authentic and outrageous sexualities. Says producer Henri Pachard
before the MTV-style video begins, ‘You’re going to see something
different – exhibitionists given the freedom to expose nasty sexual urges
that will amaze a viewer. This extremely personal approach causes the
performers to become very vulnerable< They’re not fucking for you.
Taylor: Pornographic Confessions
35

My experience of watching porn with men who are frequent consumers has
indicated that they notice – and are not favorably impressed – when a porn actress
diverges from the standard porn script, for instance by looking directly into the
camera rather than at her partner(s) in the scene. Of course, the direct gaze of the
porn star may be experienced as a challenge to the voyeuristic pleasure of the
viewer, or as a reminder of the presence of a cameraman at whom she really looks,
but when my viewing companions have said ‚she isn’t supposed to look at the
camera‛ at moments such as these, or when they even more frequently comment on
whether the actress is doing a ‚good job‛ or a ‚bad job,‛ this has made me realize
that they do not want an authentic performance or a genuine encounter with the
actress, that they do not want windows into her soul or her sexuality, but a well-
performed adherence to a standard pornographic script. If the direct gaze is any
indication of what she is really thinking, they do not ‚will to know‛ this truth.

Finally, as seen above, Williams does not just argue that consumers watch porn out
of a ‚will to know‛ about pleasure (rather than, more obviously, to have pleasure),
but out of a will to know about female pleasure in particular. Williams convincingly
demonstrates that in contrast to the stag films that preceded it, mainstream hardcore
pornography makes some efforts to problematize and represent female pleasure.
Indeed, men interviewed in Pornified stress that they enjoy pornography because the
women are more enthusiastic and pleased by sex than women are in real life. As
Pamela Paul writes, ‚Of all the requirements for enjoyable pornography, men most
commonly cite the appearance of a woman’s reciprocal pleasure as key.‛41 As
‚Ethan‛ says, for instance: ‚Women in porn tend to act like sex is earth-shattering

They’re not fucking for me. They’re fucking for themselves.’ We’re thus
positioned before the video begins to view pornography as something
performers do for their own pleasures; they are at heart exhibitionists, not
victims, as governmental discourse would have it. Furthermore, you, the
viewer, are the invader on what is essentially a private act; says Pachard,
‘If you begin to feel that you’re invading their privacy, you are.’ Pachard
appeals to the illicit thrill of voyeurism and yet legitimates pornography as
a private, fully consensual act. (Juffer, 60)

We may be skeptical, as Juffer seems to be, about whether even this video shows the
authentic sexuality of the porn stars, or that many viewers accept this. Importantly,
however, it is presented by the producer himself as ‚something different,‛ indicating that
in other porn the actors are not expressing their true sexualities or pursuing their real
fantasies, or are not fucking for themselves but for the director and the viewer. By
presenting this particular video as confessional, there is an acknowledgement that
normally what porn actors are doing is not confessional, or is not a performance of their
own personal fantasies, but those of the intended viewers.
41
Paul, 45.
Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44
36
even though in reality, sex isn’t like that all the time. Unfortunately<‛42 This
citation shows that consumers of pornography do not think that pornography
represents reality, even if this fantasy may come to construct their desires and even
their expectations in ‚real life.‛ It also shows that many consumers of pornography
want to see female pleasure represented (even if they know it is faked), and the
pornography industry caters to this desire. Unlike sexual scientists such as Kinsey,
however, the mainstream heterosexual pornography industry that Williams is
discussing did not solicit confessions from women about their pleasures and then go
about trying to capture true or even real female pleasure based on this information.
It did not direct male porn stars to perform the acts that real women (or the female
porn stars themselves) say they like in lieu of the usual anal penetration, fellatio, and
money shots, for instance, which is what we might have expected had Williams’
thesis been true, or had pornography really been participating in the will to know
and to tell the truth about female pleasure. Instead, the acts represented in
mainstream heterosexual pornographic films did not change very much – there is
still a great deal of fellatio, in some numbers this is just about all there is, and very
often it occurs as the climactic scene, compared to far less frequent and shorter
(‚foreplay‛) scenes of cunnilingus (and this usually only in films marketed as
‚couples’ porn‛), while the ‚money shot‛ remains a near-constant. The male
orgasm and not the female orgasm is the conclusion to almost all pornographic
numbers (even in ‚couples’ porn‛), even if now the female stars seem to enjoy
receiving the product of the male orgasm as much as the male stars enjoy producing
it.

As Julie Lavigne has argued, this is equally true of amateur pornography, which,
today, we might have expected to be the confessional sub-category of porn if ever
there was one.43 In fact, as Lavigne points out, amateur pornography for the most
part emulates the professional mainstream. This suggests that amateur
pornographers with their home videos are not interested in revealing the truths of
their individual sexualities any more than their professional counterparts, but are
instead engaged in performing according to the standards, norms, and expectations
established by the professional pornography into which they are thoroughly
assimilated – as, perhaps, most of us now are. Pornographers, then, whether
professional or amateur, have gone on representing the same things as always, but
now they bother to insist that these acts give women pleasure too. If pornography
produced primarily for men is interested in representing female pleasure, it is not the

42
Ibid., 14.
43
Julie Lavigne, ‚Érotisme féministe en art ou métapornographie. Le sexe selon Carolee
Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, et Natacha Merritt,‛ Symposium: Canadian Journal of
Continental Philosophy, 11 (2), (Fall 2007), 364.

Taylor: Pornographic Confessions

37

truth or even the reality of female pleasure that it is after, but rather the fantasy

according to which female pleasure results from the same acts that give men

pleasure.  

The paradigmatic example of this point is of course Deep Throat, in which a woman’s

clitoris is located at the bottom of her throat such that she can only attain orgasm by

fellating men.  The film is ostensibly about a woman’s quest for sexual pleasure, and

yet, as a result of an anatomical peculiarity that no viewer takes as ‚scientific fact‛ or

as a ‚true confession‛ on the part of Linda Lovelace, that female pleasure

corresponds to male pleasure in being fellated.  In films like Deep Throat this is a silly

and self-conscious fiction, while the ‚sexual scientist‛ in the film appears as a

buffoon, and yet Williams reads the film and the role of the sexual scientist within

the film to be an instance of pornography as sexual science in pursuit of truthful

knowledge of female pleasure via confession.44 

 

Along these lines, Williams interprets the pornographic representation of rape, in

which the victim eventually ‚confesses‛ to pleasure ‚despite herself‛ (or appears to

enjoy the rape), as arising from the greater confessional value of an involuntary

admission of pleasure.  However, as Williams herself writes, scenes such as these

‚vindicate *the male viewer’s+ desire to believe that what he enjoys, she enjoys,‛45

much like the plot of Deep Throat.  The fantasy world of much pornography

produced for men is one in which women enjoy doing or having done to them what

gives men pleasure.  Such a fantasy is surely soothing in an era when women are

demanding their own pleasure (which may not necessarily correspond with what

brings men pleasure), and are judging men on their performance with the option of

shopping around for better lovers should men fail to perform.46 

As seen, Williams uses Foucault’s account of Diderot’s tale, ‚The Indiscreet Jewels,‛

to describe pornography; however, if mainstream hard-core pornography gets the

female genitals to speak, as Williams herself realizes, it is only to have them say

what men want to hear.  Most mainstream pornography, unlike some sexual

scientists and unlike the prince in Diderot’s story, does not express a genuine

interest in what the female genitals would have to say.  Proof that the pornography

industry as well as viewers are aware of the fact that pornography is catering to the

desires of viewers, rather than revealing the desires of actors, is that when the

pornography industry began to target a female audience (or heterosexual couples),

                                                

44

  Williams, 112-113.

45

  Ibid., 164-165.

46

  See, for instance, Anne Koedt’s article, ‚The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.‛ in The CWLU

Herstory Website Archive (1970), for a classic feminist challenge to phallic sexuality and

intercourse which is contemporary with Deep Throat (1972).  

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44

 38

the films it made were somewhat different.  If pornographers really believed that

women have the same desires and pleasures as men, the idea of making

heterosexual couples’ porn different from men’s porn would not have occurred.

 

Williams acknowledges that in most hard-core ‚confessions of pleasure‛ it is the

men who have done the talking and what we see is merely the ‚illusion‛ of a female

confession.  But is it even that?  On what understanding of ‚confession‛ does

Williams make these arguments?  As seen, it is not Foucault’s understanding of

confession, although it is Foucault’s account of confession on which she is ostensibly

drawing, and it is not that of literary and legal theorists of confession either, and it is

not even our ‚everyday‛ understanding of the term.  Contra Williams, mainstream

pornography is not The Vagina Monologues, and most men do not watch

pornography primarily to know about women’s truths or women’s pleasure or

men’s pleasure either, but to have their own pleasures.  The medium of this pleasure

is understood by consumers to be fantasy rather than quasi-scientific non-fiction or

confessional autobiography, and their objective is orgasmic rather than

epistemological, self- rather than other-oriented.

 

The Perverse Implantation and the Proliferation of Sexualities

Until now I have argued that pornography is not confessional, by which I have

meant that the sexual performances that we see in pornographic films are almost

never marketed as or understood as revelations of the sexual truths of the actors, or

as sexual truths at all.  Now, however, I want to argue that there is a quasi-

confessional aspect to pornographic practices, but that it does not occur on the side

of what is produced by the pornography industry or what we see on the screen, as

Williams argues, but on the side of the viewer.  If anyone does anything like confess

in the realm of pornography, it is not the actors but the consumers.  In fact, this is

what should have followed from Williams’ comparison of pornography to the sexual

sciences.  After all, what the sexual sciences do is not to provide us with sexual

confessions but to elicit them from us.  By her own logic, then, if pornography were

like the sexual sciences, it would not give us confessions but would extract them from

us.  As seen above, confessions, for Foucault, are individuating and subject-forming,

and are more about desires than acts or pleasures.  While I do not think that

pornographic films are individuating, revelatory, or constructive of the sexuality of

the actors, other than in so far as they constitute them as sex workers, and while I do

not think that they are consumed as revelations of the true desires of the actors

either, I will now suggest that they are revelatory and constitutive of the desires and

sexuality of those who consume them.  

I have said above that the educative role of pornography, such as it is, is closer to

that of the ars erotica than the sexual sciences, because porn stars, as ‚sexual experts,‛

Taylor: Pornographic Confessions

39

teach viewers (especially younger viewers) techniques in the mastery of bodies and

pleasures – even if, in fact, and due to the constraints of their profession rather than

to personal failings, they are often bad experts or provide a bad education, as I have

also argued.  This is to be contrasted with the kind of knowledge provided by the

sexual sciences, which consists of individuating, confessional truths about the

confessant’s sexuality or desires.  I now want to argue that there is a manner in

which pornography educates us about individuated sexualities and desires in a

manner comparable to the scientia sexualis after all; however, the sexualities or

desires in question are not on the screen, nor are they related to ‚female pleasure‛ in

general, as Williams argues.  The desires and sexuality in question are those of the

consumer, whether male or female.  The pornography that viewers choose to watch,

and the acts and actors that arouse them, reveal to viewers their desires and thus

contribute to the identification and constitution of their sexualities.  I am suggesting

that something comparable to confession is found in pornography, but that it is

found in the experience of consumption.  This consumption, like confession,

participates in the perverse implantation and the proliferation of sexualities.

Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality that far from there having been a

repression of sexuality and perversions in the modern West, there has been a

proliferation of sexualities and an implantation of perversions.  Indeed, it is precisely

those practices and discourses that were aimed at repressing perverse sexualities –

those of the sexual sciences in particular – which led to this proliferation and

implantation.  In order to control perverse sexualities, modern Western societies

believed that they had to first understand them, and thus set out to discover,

categorize, and study individual sexual perversions.  Ironically, the consequence of

these activities was not a reduction of perversions but their explosive deployment. 

Studying sexual perversions meant studying the people who engaged in perverse

acts and identifying these individuals according to their desires.  In the process,

according to Foucault, sexual identities were not so much revealed as discursively

produced.  This was an unanticipated but not entirely negative effect of the sexual

sciences.  Only by being identified by their so-called perversion, and by taking on

this identity for themselves in the process, could sexual sub-cultures be established,

giving their own meanings to the sexual identities according to which they had been

categorized.  Despite this result, Foucault is troubled that we are now each fixed to a

specific sexuality and that this sexuality is taken as our identity, supposedly

structuring everything that we do.  For Foucault, discovering one’s sexuality is not

liberating: on the contrary, there is a lack of sexual freedom once a particular

sexuality is implanted as who we are.  

Importantly, Foucault’s claim is not that sexualities or perversions proliferate within

an individual’s life, such that we as individuals now enjoy multiple and fluid

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44

 40

sexualities.  On the contrary, Foucault’s argument is that while sexualities proliferate

at a society-wide level, each of us is tied down to a single sexuality.  This means that

there are now more options with respect to the sexual identities that we take on, but

each of us tends to be reduced to just one of these options.  Moreover, most

sexualities are understood as ‚abnormalities‛ situated in relation to and with respect

to their divergence from the norm: this norm is monogamous, heterosexual,

romantic, and vanilla.  Some of these divergences, such as male heterosexual

promiscuity, may be more tolerated than others, such as pedophilia, however all are

situated with respect to a norm that they thereby affirm.  For Foucault, by

identifying with any sexuality, whether the norm or any one of its variations, we

reinscribe that norm.47  This – and not straightforward homogenization – is how

normalization works.

I stress these last points because Williams has misunderstood what Foucault means

by the perverse implantation.  For Williams, because the modern era is implanted

and proliferating with perversions and sexualities (partly through the deployment of

pornography), each of us inhabits multiple perversions or sexualities:

 

there can no longer be any such thing as fixed sexuality – male, female, or

otherwise – *<+ now there are proliferating sexualities.  For, if the ‘implantation

of perversions’ is, as Foucault says, an instrument and an effect of power, then as

discourses of sexuality name, identify, and ultimately produce a bewildering

array of pleasures and perversions, the very multiplicity of these pleasures and

perversions inevitably works against the older idea of a single norm – an

economy of the one – against which all else is measured.48 

As a result, according to Williams, modern sexual identity has become multiple and

fluid, undermining the notion that there is a single sexuality determined by a phallic

‚one‛ or norm.  For Williams, the perverse implantation is to be understood as a

positive Irigaray-esque disestablishment of sexual normalization, and she urges that

we embrace ‚the liberatory potential contained in the very idea of an ‘implantation

of perversions.’‛49  The perverse implantation is positive for Williams, results in

fluid sexualities, and opposes normalization, whereas for Foucault it is largely

negative, results in fixed sexualities, and imposes a norm through the very

implantation of abnormalities.  While Williams states that the perverse implantation

produces new pleasures and opposes the fixing of sexual identity, Foucault is clear

that it does the very opposite of this, stating, on the same page where he mentions

pornography and prostitution, that ‚the West has not been capable of inventing any

                                                

47

  Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization 

(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).

48

  Williams, 114-115.

49

  Ibid., 118.

Taylor: Pornographic Confessions

41

new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices.  But it has

defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures.  The frozen countenance of

the perversions is a fixture of this game.‛50  What the perverse implantation does,

through the workings of the sex industry as well as the sexual sciences, is to ‚fix‛ or

‚freeze‛ the face of our sexualities, circumscribing the kinds of pleasure that each of

us can have by tying us down to specific sexual identities as taxonomized by the

sexual sciences.

 

But how do pornography and prostitution implant perversions and contribute to the

proliferation of sexualities? Not by being confessional, as Williams has claimed in the

case of pornography, while setting aside the question of prostitution.  Rather, I am

claiming that the implantation, fixation, or freezing of sexual perversions and

identities occurs in pornography and prostitution through the subject-forming

practice of consumption.  Consumers interviewed in Pornified indicate that porn

consumption exposed them to a range of sexualities and allowed them to figure out

what they were ‚into.‛  As one 20-year-old, male university student puts it: ‚I was

able to learn what ‘my type’ is by looking around online – thin women with C- or D-

sized breasts and long dark hair.  Porn gave me a sense of what’s out there and

exposed me to the kind of stuff I enjoy in real life.‛51  In this way, pornography

educates viewers in the proliferation of sexualities from which they can choose, but

then they do choose (or ‚discover‛) their sexuality according to an analysis of their

desires, as demonstrated by their consumption of pornography.  Pornography thus

allows viewers to realize a sexuality or taxonomical sexual type, providing them

with the opportunity to identify with one of many kinds of sexuality.  Each man

interviewed in Pornified quickly states what his type of pornography is, and often

what his type of porn star is.  Now he knows the sites that specialize in the things he

likes.  Every time he types in what he wants to see in his search engine, he self-

consciously reaffirms and reinscribes his sexual type.  It therefore seems that

pornography allows consumers to experiment with different kinds of pleasures that

might not otherwise have been available to them and thus allows for a proliferation

of sexualities; however, pornographic consumption also contributes to an identi-

fication with one kind of sexuality.  Consumption, like confession, is thus productive

of ontologies, or is one of the many ways in which we identify who we are.

Other pornography-consumers say that they only ever consumed a particular type

of pornography because of the sexuality with which they already identified or

wished to identify by the time they had access to pornography.  One man with

whom I spoke consumes pornography on a daily basis and told me that he has only

ever watched heterosexual mainstream pornography.  He too states that he has a

                                                 

50

  Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 48.

51

  Paul, 16.

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44

 42

‚type‛: heterosexual pornography featuring women with large, natural breasts. 

From the start, he was wary of looking at any other kinds of pornography for fear of

being influenced by them.  If anything ‚abnormal‛ comes onto the screen when he is

consuming pornography – such as a transsexual, or male homosexual activity – he

immediately closes the window and searches for something else, not so much

because the image turns him off but because he does not want to be turned on by it. 

This consumer does not want to explore alternative sexualities or to identify with

anything other than ‚normal‛ and ‚straight,‛ and thus vigilantly avoids non-

‚normal‛ pornography sites.  This man’s exclusive consumption of heterosexual

mainstream porn is informed by his identification with and desire for normalcy.  At

the same time, his preference for straight porn probably does more than simply

reflect his sexual identity, but shores up and reinscribes it.  The act of shutting the

window when anything ‚abnormal‛ comes on screen surely reaffirms his sense of

himself as ‚normal‛ and ‚straight‛ every time.  Likewise, a person with ‚abnormal‛

desires who consumes non-mainstream pornography engages in an activity which

causes him to self-consciously identify with what he himself will understand as an

‚abnormal‛ sexuality.

Arguably, when sexual initiation and exploration occurs in a more reciprocal and

less consumerist context, or in the physical presence of other human beings whose

services one has not purchased, the individual is more likely to respond to the

desires and limitations placed on him by the other person(s) in the sexual relation. 

There are thus limits to what he can experience, or on the kind of sexual

consumption he can identify with through his practice, but also, in a non-

consumerist sexual encounter, there are other people’s desires to respond to which

may go beyond what the individual thought to be his own desires, but in response

to which he may experience new pleasures.  In contrast, pornography – like

prostitution – allows the consumer to stipulate, dictate or select exactly what he

wants every time, and this facilitates falling into a specific typology.  As in the

prostitute-client encounter, there can always be surprises in what happens in a

pornographic film, but then one can quickly shut the window, stop or fast-forward

the DVD, and choose something else.  The fact that the options are almost unlimited

with pornography – especially with internet pornography – and that this is a

consumerist rather than a reciprocal sexual activity, in which the object of sexual

desire is merely a means to one’s (orgasmic) ends, means both that the individual

has more options and that he can have exactly the option he wants every time and

nothing but that option if he so chooses.  Although the sex industry opens up many

new possibilities, it may ultimately and paradoxically curtail the potential for

surprise, novelty, and sexual exploration, thus limiting rather than setting free. 

According to Paul’s study and my own discussions with consumers of porn, men

who have consumed pornography over a period of years can no longer fantasize

Taylor: Pornographic Confessions

43

without it, and nor can they be aroused without pornography or real-life sexual

performances which emulate pornography.  Sociologist Michael Kimmel has found

that ‚male sexual fantasies have become increasingly shaped by the standards of

porn.‛52  I would argue that this is increasingly true of female sexual fantasies as

well, or at least of female sexual behavior as it strives to fulfill the new norms of

male desire. This indicates pornography’s power to shape our sexual imaginations

in ways that constrain rather than open up to new possibilities.  

As Foucault has shown in the case of confession, we may engage in an activity, such

as the consumption of pornography, in the belief that we are liberating our sexuality,

when in fact we are limiting that sexuality, binding it to just one form of sex-desire. 

In this sense, although in a very different manner, consuming pornography, like

hiring prostitutes, really is comparable to what the sexual sciences do according to

Foucault’s reading, or is part of the ‚perverse implantation.‛  In so far as

pornography may also be seen as an erotic art in its offering of technical sexual

expertise, it is perhaps an art which we do better to eschew in its current mainstream

forms, whether professional or amateur, since the education it provides is phallo-

centric, masculinist, and normalizing.  Returning to Foucault’s statement, cited

above, that he should have contrasted the sexual sciences not with Eastern ars erotica

but with ancient Greek technologies of self-care, I would suggest that what we need

to do is to explore sexual technologies that function as cares of the self, or,

alternatively, as ars erotica which conjoin with techne tou biou rather than with the

scientia sexualis.  Although this is a subject that I must develop further elsewhere, I

suspect that certain alternative pornographies already function in such a way. What

I have argued is thus not an absolute critique of all pornography or of all uses of

pornography, but rather only of mainstream porn and of the specific ways in which

it tends to be used not for the exploration of bodies and pleasures but for

‚discovering‛ and satisfying supposedly pre-given sex-desire.

Conclusions 

This paper has argued that it is because the mechanism of consumption works in a

manner similar to confession – and not because pornography is a confessional

discourse or a sexual science as Williams has claimed – that Foucault listed

pornography and prostitution along with medicine and psychiatry in his discussion

of the perverse implantation in The History of Sexuality.  Whereas Williams has to

replace the word ‚prostitution‛ with the word ‚law‛ in her reference to this passage

in order to support her view of pornography as confessional, my account of

consumption requires no such manipulation and can explain why Foucault includes

prostitution in his list of normalizing sexual practices.  Similarly, whereas Williams

needs to strain the definition of confession in order to see pornography as a

                                                

52

  Ibid., 27.

Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 18-44

 44

confessional practice, my focus on consumption more easily makes sense of how

both pornography and prostitution work.  Understood as practices of consumption

rather than confession, pornography and prostitution, like psychiatry and medicine,

are part of the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation: they are, in

their current mainstream forms and uses, normalizing rather than liberating sexual

practices.  In the last part of this paper I have indicated how these processes of

normalization, proliferation, and implantation might take place in the cases of

pornography and prostitution.  Finally, I have indicated that pornography need not

function in this normalizing way, and that non-mainstream or alternative forms and

uses of pornography may already function more positively as techne tou biou or as

non-normalizing ars erotica.