On the Paradoxes of Researching Those Things: The Writer on Porn, Between Research Objectivity and ‘Coming Out’
On the Paradoxes of Researching Those Things: The Writer on Porn, Between Research Objectivity and ‘Coming Out’

Summary/Abstract: Among the research subjects in socio-humanistic sciences, the sex-related themes are posing the biggest challenges. And pornography is even more so, an issue whose consumption cannot be dissociated, in the minds of others, from the researcher or theoretic writer’s persona. The paradox lies in the fact that the research is conducted/or the paper, or book, written on the use (consumption) of something, and the researcher cannot be suspected of not having used it; yet, this very use is supposedly private, intimate, and, hence, indicible, un-exposable in public (Brewis, 2003). As its exposure constitutes a sort of self-denouncement, in order to correct the impression and restore the trust of the public invested in the author who was already ‚tainted’ by the supposition that himself/herself a pornography consumer, some discursive strategies (among which, self-censorship) have been developed – some of them underlying the whole of their work, from the paper/books structure to the writing. An issue Jensen associated with this face-saving conduct when writing about porn with a schizoid practice common to Western disciplines such as philosophy, that of distinguishing between body and mind – and using the latter when studying and researching. So that researchers come apart from their initial impetus of writing about something and, detaching from the emotions associated with this consumption, let their bodies out. Few are the books or papers written on these difficulties of writing about pornography; yet, there are some authors (Brian McNair, Patrick Baudry) who dedicated, in their books, chapters or subchapters to the issue. Robert Jensen writes a whole chapter, in Critical Readings: Media and Gender (Carter, 2004), on the peculiar situation of being a normal men (thus, subjected to the reaction pornography suscitates) and writing on this subject. And they are not the only ones: there are, in the literature, some extensions of this issue – articles on how it is to teach GLBT and ‚come out’ in class (as being, yourself, part of the minority you teach about, in class). Our paper intends to be a short breviary of the difficulties of writing about pornography, challenges situated at the crossroads of ethics (telling the truth, researching for the truth, not lying about one’s perspective or identity), the one’s own uncertainties, the face-saving (normal) behavior and, even, self-censorship.

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