I Like the Erotic and the Porn: Looking Back at Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”

The pornographic, then, “…is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes “sensation without feeling.” Furthermore, Lorde believes the pornographic degrades the erotic:

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power. As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

Lorde’s definition of the erotic affirm a woman’s way of knowing via feelings and living fully in and with those feeling to inform everything she does, be it working for reproductive justice, making jewelry, creating a blog, or sexing it up with herself and/or others.  Just do conscientiously and fully, whatever it may be.

However, Lorde defines eroticism and pornography so broadly that they almost threaten to desexualize what both words mean. For Lorde, “There is a difference between painting a black fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” Pornography, on the other hand–”[w]hen we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse”–can define the US War against Iraq and the exploitation of undocumented workers as farmhands as well as the adult film industry.

I can see one reason why Lorde would want to expand both definitions: a basis for political action. So, a person who sees, for example, the US War in Iraq and the plight of im/migrant farm workers the same as the adult-film industry–as forms of human exploitation and destruction, of using without the consent of the used–then a person making such connections would be hopefully willing to fight to end all three or ally with folks fighting to end them.

Lorde steeps her approach to using the erotic in the “personal is political” thinking, a cornerstone of Second Wave feminism. As guest conributor and regular commenter atlasien wrote to me: “[Her] strategy of developing ‘the erotic’ sounds very helpful to many people. It could be unhelpful to others. If someone internalizes it to the degree where they judge themselves at every point—‘is what I’m feeling erotic or pornographic?’–it could also produce feelings of crippling inadequacy.”

Lorde’s definitions, however, as my collaborator Fiqah would said, don’t make me wet. Though fighting to end US involvement in Iraq and the undocumented agricultural workers’ continued exploitation may make me feel great–the biochemicals of shouting at a rally, the jump-up-and-down joy of hearing that a petition campaign led to raised wages–it doesn’t make me orgasm or even get aroused. Both porn (I personally connote it as the visual representation of sex acts, usually in the form of video or film) and its literary counterpart, erotica, does turn me on–and sometimes I want the sensation without the feeling. Lorde sees all pornography exclusively in terms of getting fucked over; the porn and erotica that I enjoy is about fucking with consent.

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