Changing stakes: Pornography, privacy, and the perils of democracy

Abstract

As the millenium closes and a new one opens, the question of the changing boundaries between privacy and public morality has become an area of intense controversy. My purpose in what follows is to explore briefly the ways in which certain twentieth-century arguments about sexuality and pornography looks to the French Enlightenment for explanation and support, and how the different attitudes toward these issues in France and America focus on the relationship between freedom and equality. I am interested in the ways biopolitics, as a touchstone for expressing social and political malaise, can be argued as either liberating or harmful. My hypothesis is that the focus on sexual scandal, as it is transmitted through the media, both translates and fosters the uncertainty surrounding ethics in the sociopolitical sphere, in particular, the connection between the personal and the political for women as well as for men has been caught between an increasingly invaded private realm and a contested public morality. This has led to a mythification of national differences that stymies rather than furthers discussion among public intellectuals on the question of individual and social responsibility and on the kinds of interpretation necessary to meet the demand of the future