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rights revert to author.
Bound and Gagged in America
A book review
by Guillermo Bosch
Bound and Gagged (Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in
America)
by Laura Kipnis
Grove Press, New York, 226 pages
With a title like Bound and Gagged, one might assume this is a book of Dominant/Submissive erotic photography. It's not. Bound and Gagged is far more subversive, dangerous and frightening: The author, Laura Kipnis, not only argues that pornography is simply another, perfectly acceptable cultural genre, but also that pornography reveals far more about our society's underlying prejudices, assumptions, stereotypes and fantasies than other more "acceptable" genres. Furthermore, Ms. Kipnis makes her arguments so intelligently, clearly and logically that even the most regressive cultural conservative would be hard pressed to answer her probing questions and non-defensive assertions.
Kipnis gains strength from her willingness to defend difficult terrain. She does not equivocate: "Who's to say whether performing sexual labor is a worse or more dehumanizing job than manual labor or service-industry labor or working on an assembly line or waitressing, other than the person doing it?....women are capable of making informed decisions about how to conduct their lives, Élabor under capitalism, is, by its very nature, exploited." Or, "Although the fact [backed up by Justice Department figures] is that children are at far greater risk of abuse, violence and murder by their own parent than anyone else, cultural panic about child safety attaches far [more] disproportionately to the monster figure of the pedophile stranger-abductor." When I tried out such concepts on Southern California friends and neighbors, I did not receive a sympathetic hearing. Sign of the times?
The fact remains, however, that Kipnis' "truths" and well-thought-out hypothesis are disturbing for the same reasons some find pornography disturbing. Both force us to confront our own most intimate, and often scary, thoughts about what is (Freud or no Freud) our most basic instinct, our sexuality, and our desires, personal and societal, which we prefer to hide behind elaborately constructed fantasies about milk carton children, monsters on the Internet and perverts loose on our streets. The point here is not denial, not a refusal to admit that missing and abused children, monsters on the Internet and perverts exist, but the totally obvious and documentable fact that they actually exist in such small numbers that our hysterical reactions cannot possibly be justified as thoughtful caution. I mean really, how does "child pornographers on the World Wide Web" become a seriously debated issue in the Congress and national election campaigns? Something else is going on.
If I fault Bound and Gagged for anything, it is that Kipnis chooses to make her points by illustrating five specific "cases:" The US vs. Daniel Thomas DePew (entrapment and vicious prosecution for fantasies rather than acts); transvestite pornography; fat porn; Hustler magazine; and a catch-all chapter on the positions of Allan Bloom, Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. At times, (I hesitate to say this because I really do want readers to try this book) the attention to details (DePew, for example, runs to over 60 pages) and to fairly arcane debates within the academic and feminist community, can be (oh no!) boring. But please don't let that stop you. If you're a book-reading adult who occasionally feels under siege by the current wave of anti-porn, anti-sex, anti-eroticism, anti-60s propaganda and need a good friend to shore you up during these difficult times, Laura Kipnis' Bound and Gagged will not disappoint.
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