Over the last two decades, pornography has become not only one of the most spectacularly profitable industries in the West but also, in its own way, the most innovative, with the development of more and more individualized technologies of sexual stimulation and simulation. At the same time, it has been the focus of ever fiercer debates: political, ethical and judicial. Despite the media's expanding sexual obsessions, pornography remains largely a matter of public shame, while being privately consumed by millions of citizens, now female as well as male. It is a unique phenomenon of our time, and one whose real significance is still little understood. In this remarkable study Bernard Arcand approaches pornography as an anthropologist, in an attempt to explain precisely why it exists in these forms at the moment, and with what consequences. To do so, he has assembled data on the state of the industry and its technology, on its history, and on the polemics it has engendered, especially, but not exclusively, among feminists. The result is probably the most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published. But Arcand's main concern in The Jaguar and the Anteater is to elucidate the ways in which pornography is a mirror of our modernity - how we get the porn we deserve and need. Drawing on the work of social theorists such as Lasch, Sennet, Baudrillard and Lipovetsky, he examines the consumption of pornography and its wider significance in terms of privatization, specialization, isolation and extremism. And, while stressing the peculiar originality of contemporary porn, he uses anthropological material, particularly from South American tribal societies, to suggest that the phenomenon is also a new and uncertain response to a series of elementary questions concerning modesty and desire, masturbation and inhibition, death and illusions of eternal youth.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This elegantly written, dispassionate study broadens the debate on pornography through its anthropological, historical and cross-cultural perspectives. Surveying research worldwide, Arcand, a French-Canadian anthropologist, reports that no conclusive links exist between viewing pornography and criminal sexual behavior. Nevertheless, he finds that much pornography promotes an infantile, dehumanizing model of sexuality. Arcand surveys South American native myths portraying a contest between the jaguar (symbol of sex and reproduction as an escape from death) and the anteater, an asocial creature without much appetite. The Sherente tribe of Brazil embrace the jaguar, but modern pornography, declares Arcand, sides with the anteater in promoting cozy isolation and escape from traditional social constraints. One section contrasts medieval India's open embrace of human sexuality, as exemplified by erotic temple sculptures, with modern Western prudery. Arcand also distills much information on pornography's embattled history, marketing and consumption.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
An anthropological overview of the many political, moral, and social debates concerning pornography. The upshot seems to be that although there is much disagreement over what does and does not constitute pornography, as well as over its positive or negative effects, humans have an overwhelming interest in actual pornography, and nearly as strong an interest in it as a subject of discourse. Especially instructive are Arcand's accounts of the many political wrangles over pornography, from the debate in feminist circles to the many commissions created to study and report on it. The sidelights are often illuminating, too. Members of the Meese Commission, who had to see many porno films before writing their 1985 report on pornography, found themselves jostling one another in their eagerness to "get a better view." Brian McCombie
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excellent cultural commentary,
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This review is from: The Jaguar and the Anteater: Pornography Degree Zero (Hardcover)
This is a thorough and often illuminating analysis of the increasing prevalence of pornography in modern culture. Arcand was a professor for many years and clearly knows how to communicate, pulling out many examples from anthropological records when they serve to highlight a point. His deepest insight, for which the title is a metaphor, is that late 20th/early 21st century Western culture increasingly allows instinctual lust rather than the socially-constructed rules of modesty to control sexual decisions--and this is occurring precisely in the same way that 19th-century Western culture allowed instinctual greed to control economic decision-making.
Arcand sees pornography and masturbation, being minimal sorts of sexuality, as encouraging a kind of inactive solitude within participants. He is by no means advocating censorship of any kind, but rather indirectly voices his admiration for the annual festival of the Xerente tribe in Brazil, which chooses a more spontaneous, more social lifestyle over the protection and control that minimal living brings.
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