Murray S. Davis - Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology
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This unique study of sexuality and society offers a provocative reframing of the subjectincluding what the author calls a periodic table of perversions.
In Smut, Murray S. Davis investigates sex in a way that differs from nearly all previous books on the subject. Discarding the simplistic theory of sex as a natural instinct, he sets out to develop new explanations for its universal appeal. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comediansand exploring everything from theology to pornographyDavis recaptures sex for the social sciences.
First, Davis examines the difference between sexual arousal and ordinary experience, arguing that arousal alters a persons experience of the world. Positing an erotic reality distinct from everyday life, he demonstrates how different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in each realm. Davis then asks why some people find this alternation between realities dirty, and offers a periodic table of perversions that summarizes the social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world.
Finally, Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the pornographic, which portrays individual, social relations, and social organizations being disrupted by sex; and the naturalistic, which conceives of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have battled for control over Western society, and, in his conclusion, Davis offers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.
In Smut, Murray S. Davis investigates sex in a way that differs from nearly all previous books on the subject. Discarding the simplistic theory of sex as a natural instinct, he sets out to develop new explanations for its universal appeal. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comediansand exploring everything from theology to pornographyDavis recaptures sex for the social sciences.
First, Davis examines the difference between sexual arousal and ordinary experience, arguing that arousal alters a persons experience of the world. Positing an erotic reality distinct from everyday life, he demonstrates how different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in each realm. Davis then asks why some people find this alternation between realities dirty, and offers a periodic table of perversions that summarizes the social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world.
Finally, Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the pornographic, which portrays individual, social relations, and social organizations being disrupted by sex; and the naturalistic, which conceives of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have battled for control over Western society, and, in his conclusion, Davis offers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.
Murray S. Davis: author's other books
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Murray S. Davis
Fred Davis
Leanne Davis [Davis
Leanne Davis [Davis
Leanne Davis [Davis
Leanne Davis [Davis
Leanne Davis [Davis
Dan Davis [Davis
L G Davis [Davis
Michael J. Bader
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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
1983 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1983
Paperback edition 1985 Printed in the United States of America
94 93 92 91 6 5 4
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Davis, Murray S., 1940
Smut : erotic reality/obscene ideology.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Sex. 2. Sexual deviation 3. Pornography. I. Title.
HQ21.D32 1983 306.7 82-16061
ISBN 0-226-13791-0 (cloth)
0-226-13792-9 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-226-16246-1 (ebook)
SMUT
Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology
Murray S. Davis
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Chicago and London
For C. S., my tenth Muse
Gloucester. The trick of that voice I do well remember.
Ist not the King?
Lear. Ay, every inch a king!
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that mans life. What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery! No:
The wren goes tot, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucesters bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got tween the lawful sheets.
Tot, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers.
Behold yon simpring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasures name,
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes tot
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends;
Theres hell, theres darkness, theres the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie!
King Lear, 4.6.10831
Approaches and Acknowledgments
I have tried to lay out in this book everything modern science does not know about sex. That is, I have tried to display here all the aspects of sex ignored by positivist science in the narrow sense. My goal is to present the nonscientificthough not unscientifictradition of sexual knowledge in coherent form by synthesizing the personal, literary, philosophical, and theological perceptions that constitute this antipositivist position. I am not saying the scientific approach to sex should be rejected; I am saying it should be broadened. For I believe sex can be studied thoroughly and meaningfully only by including components that have been neglected in what passes today for a science of sex.
As I organized the materials that helped me reconceptualize sex in this way, it occurred to me that I was unintentionally following the phenomenological reductionthe method of intentionally doubting the received wisdom about a topic on deeper and deeper levels. In retrospect, I came to see that the earliest materials I could make sense of concerned not sex itself but its interpretation. These I brought together in what is now part two. Other materials indicated that sex was capable of more than one interpretation. These other interpretations of sex and their interplay comprise what is now part three. Only after I had cleared away these interpretations of sex could I see that my remaining materials concerned the pure experience of sex. These I organized in what is now part one. Finally, I arranged the parts into their present sequence because I felt the reader would find it clearer to transverse my reconceptualization of sex in the logical order of its development rather than in the phenomenological order of its discovery.
The complexity of my topic, my resources, and my approach obliged me to go through many drafts to produce this book. Several readers of these earlier versions helped to lead me out of the conceptual mazes in which I often got lost when my arguments had reached what seemed dead ends. In particular, I wish to thank Bennett Berger and Aaron Cicourel, of the University of California, San Diego, and Gary Marx, of MIT, for their detailed comments. Elizabeth Vodola, of the University of California, Berkeley, has my appreciation for editing my sometimes circumlocutory prose in these early drafts. Once again I am indebted to Donald Levine, of the University of Chicago, for bringing my manuscript to publishers attention. I am also grateful to the entire sociology department of the University of California, San Diego, for its sustained support during the many years it took me to bring my project to fruition.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Catherine Schmidt, for sharing her numerous insights into my topic, and especially for her amused forbearance whenever I made notes on unseemly matters at untimely times.
Introduction
For many years I have been puzzled by two questions: Why does a person want to have sex with others? And why do other people attempt to stop him or her from doing so? I first tried to find answers for these questions in the enormous literature on these topics already available.
One large group of books revealed the way we should have sex, either morally (spontaneously, lovingly, etc.) or technically (rhythmically, imaginatively, etc.). But their cognitive value seemed to me to lie less in what they claimed to demonstrate about sex than in what they inadvertently disclosed about a society that reduces every problematic activity to a homily or a diagram.
A second large group of books revealed the way we do have sex, describing the wide variations in sexual behaviors in different societies and subgroups of our society as well as in different stages of social history and individual development. But many of these books were merely anecdotal, displaying the diversity of sexual activities in the same way some early naturalists displayed butterflies and other species: merely as a haphazard collection with little attempt to integrate them into a more general system. Too often the surface variety of sexual relations has discouraged any attempt to search for their underlying unity.
The relatively few books that did postulate a principle for sex usually fell back on the instinct theory. They treated sex as a natural instinct in the organism which manifests itself in various ways under various conditions. Sigmund Freud, the main proponent of this doctrine, believed the sexual instinct to be an irrational force, which periodically manifests itself to consciousness in the form of a swelling tension which strives for its own negation (see especially Freud 1961). He ingeniously describes what occurs when the sexual instinct, madly and blindly seeking the satisfaction of extinction, smashes into the obstacles society places in its path; for only after colliding with social restrictions do its trajectories become apparent in dreams, neuroses, slips of tongue, jokes, and so on, just as the tracks of certain subatomic particles become visible only after colliding with the water droplets of a cloud chamber. But on the precollision nature of sex Freud had much less to say.
There are several problems in conceiving of sex as a natural instinct. First, whoever refers to something as natural or instinctual implies he has explained it fully and need say no more. But these rhetorical terms of conceptual closure inhibit further exploration of often the most crucial topics. Although powerful theories (like Newtons and Darwins) have been spun around a key element called natural (e.g., gravity) or instinctual (e.g., self-preservation), they all contain this conceptual weakness at their core.
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