Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste and

the Problem of the Middlebrow

Mark Jancovich, University of Nottingham, UK

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pornography was generally positioned as an object of
criticism by feminism. A great deal of feminist work was devoted to analysing it as an almost
pure expression of patriarchal ideology and power. Although these assumptions were never
fully accepted, even within feminism, they did none the less have an almost taken-for-granted
status, which meant that those who called for a more complex understanding of this area were
largely marginalised. Whether drawing on classic works of popular feminism (see, for
example, Dworkin, 1979; Lederer, 1980; Griffin, 1981) or on the more theoretical critiques of
"woman as image" (see for example, Mulvey 1975; Pollock, 1977; Kappeler, 1986), this
work assumed that pornography addressed male sexuality and was generally based on a
violent subjugation of female sexuality and subjectivity.

While there is not room in this article for a full review of either feminism or its engagement
with pornography, the criticisms of pornography discussed above have never gone
uncontested, and even within feminism many have been at pains to point out the dangers that
are inherent in this work (see for example, Willis, 1989; Merck, 1987; Rodgerson and
Wilson, 1991). For example, they have stressed that these criticisms of pornography tend to
present it as the cause, rather than an effect, of sexual inequality (Rodgerson and Wilson,
1991). They have also taken issue with the assumption, in many criticism of pornography,
that women who enjoy pornography or even penetrative sex are necessarily complicit in their
own subjugation (Segal, 1994). As Willis has pointed out, for example, this kind of work not
only ends up reproducing very familiar conservative notions of female sexuality, but also
essentialises them in the process (Willis, 1989).

As Linda Williams has pointed out, criticisms of pornography (feminist criticisms included)
frequently involve an implicit or even explicit distinction between pornography as the
product of some perverse sexuality or sexualities, and a normative sexuality to which it is
opposed (Williams, 1993a). It reproduces the notion that there can ever be a healthy, natural
and authentic sexuality that exists outside of social power relations. As Williams puts it: "If
phallic sexuality is contaminated by power, this tactic seems to say, if it is essentially violent
and perverse, then female sexuality shall be defined as its opposite: as non-violent and not-
perverse - a pure and natural pleasure uncontaminated by power." (Williams, 1990: 20)

However, the problem here is not just one of essentialism, but rather that this essentialism is
actually normative; that it acts to marginalise and subjugate those women whose sexuality
does not conform to this supposedly "natural" female sexuality (Willis, 1989). It has therefore
produced a feminism that has led many women either to feel guilt about their sexualities or to
reject feminism as "not for the likes of us" (Segal, 1994)

Others have also pointed out that this critique of pornography often reproduces very familiar
cultural distinctions (Nead, 1992). Indeed, in his study of taste, Bourdieu argues that the
aesthetic disposition is precisely based on an ability to perceive objects "as if the emphasis on
form could only be achieved by a neutralization of any kind of affective or ethical interest in
the object of representation" (Bourdieu, 1984: 44). Aesthetics is therefore founded on its
disinterestedness in the object of representation, whereas pornography is specifically defined
by its interest in that object and in its function as a means of exciting sexual arousal.
However, as Bourdieu suggests, distinctions between art and pornography are not defined by
the contents of these categories but, on the contrary, on the ways in which particular texts are
consumed.

The meaning of any text is not eternally inscribed within its form but changes, as it is
positioned or repositioned in different categories, as they are consumed according to different
competences and dispositions. A picture may be read "aesthetically" in terms of its form, or
"pornographically" as a depiction of a naked body that excites desire in the viewer. But such
readings are not simply individual choices. On the contrary, as Bourdieu argues, they
correspond to specific taste formations that are, in turn, tied to the situation of specific social
classes.

Debates over pornography therefore need to be understood not simply as political struggles
over gender relations, but also as political struggles between these different taste formations.
Critiques of pornography are often the product of one class's visceral intolerance to the sexual
taste of another class. As Laura Kipnis has pointed out, the moral outrage at pornographic
forms can often be seen as "the desire to distance [oneself] from and if possible banish from
existence the cause of [one's] distress - the sexual expression of people unlike [oneself]"
(Kipnis, 1992: 377).

However, while recent work has begun to challenge the assumptions about pornography that
dominated the feminist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, much of this work
continues to operate around a series of cultural distinctions that are highly problematic. The
following article will therefore concentrate on those writers who have tried to defend, and
even champion certain types of pornography, and it will argue that they do so through a
concentration of "trangressive" pornographies, a strategy that has a very specific class
politics. In other words, it will argue that this strategy actually works to reproduce cultural
distinctions through an Othering of lower middle class taste. In contrast, the article will then
move on to try to re-evaluate the sexual tastes of this class and the power relations within
which it operates.

Aesthetics, Transgression and Pornography

As a result, even when pornography is not the Other of legitimate culture, cultural
distinctions are usually clearly in evidence. For example, Sontag's formative essay, "The
Pornographic Imagination", is less a defence of pornography itself, than of the right of "pure
taste" to appropriate whatever materials that its deems necessary for the production of "art".
As Sontag puts it, "art (and art-making) is a form of consciousness; the materials of art are
the variety of forms of consciousness. By no aesthetic principle can this notion of the
materials of art be construed as excluding even the extreme forms of consciousness that
transcend social personality and psychological individuality" (Sontag, 1969; 44), the very
qualities which she identifies as central to those forms of pornography which she champions.

Thus, she assumes that there is a general "consensus" on "the diagnosis of pornography" (38),
of which she considers herself to be a part, that defines it as the product of "a deplorable
arrest in normal adult sexual development" (37) and one that "can be a crutch for the
psychologically deformed and a brutalization of the morally innocent." (71) For this reason,
she condemns as "depressing the fact that a whole library of pornographic reading materials
has been made, at least within the last few years, so easily available in paperback form to the
very young" (71). However, she does distance herself from those who seek to repress and
censor these materials, but only to the extent that she argues that their "apprehension is
justified but may not be in scale" (71). For Sontag, what is really at stake is not pornography
but its "uses". As she puts it:

There's a sense in which all knowledge is dangerous, the reason being that not
everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps
most people don't need a "wider scale of experience." It may be that, without
subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and
consciousness is destructive for most people … Except perhaps in a small
circle of writer-intellectuals in France, pornography is an inglorious and
mostly despised department of the imagination. Its mean status is the very
anti-thesis of the considerable spiritual prestige enjoyed by many items which
are far more noxious. (71-2)

For Sontag, it is specific modes of consumption that are the problem, not pornography itself.
To those with a pure gaze, pornography can be rewarding and significant, and to these
people, she argues, "the question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the
pornography." (Paul Goodman, quoted in Sontag, 1969: 72)

Sontag's article is therefore an outright critique of those who are unable to read aesthetically
or through the pure gaze, and she starts out from a critique of the social sciences:

From the standpoint of social and psychological phenomena, all pornographic

texts have the same status; they are documents. But from the standpoint of art,
some of these texts may well become something else. (36)

From this standpoint, they may be art. The problem with the social sciences is therefore their
inability to distinguish between texts aesthetically, and this is because they apply the wrong
criteria to the judgement of texts. Unlike the pure gaze of critics such as Sontag, they make
pornography the "locus of moral concern" (38) and are unable to see that, as Bourdieu has
argued, the pure gaze depends on the "neutralization of any kind of … ethical interest"
(Bourdieu, 1984: 44). As Sontag puts it, "the 'human scale' or humanistic standard proper to
ordinary life and conduct seems misplaced when applied to art." (Sontag, 1969: 44-5)

If Sontag does defend certain forms of pornography, these are therefore defined in opposition
to "ordinary" pornography and identified with an avant-garde literary tradition. These forms
qualify as art specifically because they move beyond mere pleasure and into jouissance. They
reject the banalities of the beautiful in favour of the terrors of the sublime. Instead of the
comforting pleasures of "ordinary" pornography, Sontag champions the unsettling powers of
the obscene, which moves beyond eros and into death:

One reason that Histoire de l'Oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong
and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any
other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't
sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either
 overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and
sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, "the obscene," do. It's toward the
gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every
truly obscene quest tends. (60)

The pornography which Sontag celebrates is a pornography of transgression in which that

which is "transgressed" is the "ordinary" moral and emotional universe. While most "people
try to outwit their own feelings" and "to be receptive to pleasure but [to] keep 'horror' at a
distance", Bataille is praised for seeing this strategy as both "foolish" and limiting (61).

As a result, Sontag does not see this form of pornography as involving a "neutralization of
any kind of affective … interest" (Bourdieu, 1984: 44), and denies that "the purported aim or
effect, whether it is intentional or not, of such books to excite the reader sexually [is] a
defect." (Sontag, 1969: 47) However, not only is this sexual excitement distinguished from
the mundane excitements of "common" rather than transgressive sexualities, but she also
points out that "sexual arousal doesn't appear to be the sole function" of these works (40).
The language of this pornography does not play a "debased, merely instrumental role" (39) of
provoking desire, but uses desire to disorientate and unsettle the reader (47). Even the
supposedly "unrealistic", "artificial" and "conventional" nature of pornography is, in these
texts, seen to have aesthetic effects: it draws attention to the literary form and makes "the
reader think of, mainly, other pornographic books rather than sex unmediated" (49).

In a similar way, even though recent work has begun to challenge the assumptions about
pornography held by certain sections of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s - in
which pornography was simply a monolithic form of male domination - much of this recent
work still continues to employ cultural distinctions that need to be questioned. If much
contemporary writing does not accept the simple claim that "pornography is violence against
women", or that if "porn is the theory [then] rape is the practice", it is still the case that much
of this work is organised around a defence of "transgressive" forms of pornography in ways
that depend upon a highly problematic construction of, and opposition to, "ordinary"
pornography.

For example, while Linda Williams' study of hard core pornography does not privilege a
literary high cultural pornography in the way that Sontag does, as Jennifer Wicke contends:

The problem is not that Williams or others have hopes for a utopian
overcoming of politically rigid gender identities, but that the hope rests on a
fairly hidden assumption that mass culture is a degraded form within which
embryonic avant-garde progressive texts are struggling to get out. (Wicke,
1993: 177)

In Williams' account, sadomasochistic pornography is privileged because its performative

and theatrical qualities can be made compatible with contemporary avant-garde theories and
art-practices.

A similar strategy is evident in the numerous articles on Annie Sprinkle, whose performances
are seen as questioning the political implications of "drawing a firm line between obscene
pornography on the one hand and legitimate art on the other." (Williams, 1993b: 177)
However, while Sprinkle's performances supposedly question, challenge or "deconstruct" this
distinction between art and pornography, this act of questioning, challenging or
"deconstructing" still assumes, and indeed requires, a stable pornographic Other against
which to define its transgressiveness as an act.

For example, Williams makes an implicit distinction between Sprinkle's "one woman show
entitled Post-Porn Porn Modernist, [in which] she performs a parodic show-and-tell of her
life as a sexual performer" and "the live sex shows" in which she had performed previously
(Williams, 1993b: 176). Implicitly, one is parodic and not a sex show, while the other is a sex
show and not parodic. This distinction is emphasised still further through the suggestion that
the "one woman show" was genuinely challenging and transgressive, whereas the other was
not, a feature which is supposedly evidenced by the claim that

In 1990, while she was giving this performance in Cleveland, the municipal
vice squad forced her to omit the speculum component of her act. It is a
fascinating comment on American culture that when Annie Sprinkle
performed live sex shows in the same city she was never visited by the vice
squad. (Williams, 1993b: 176)

The pornographic performance is conventional, if marginalized, but the performance art is

supposed to be really threatening to American culture. This is not to imply that legal action is
irrelevant, but simply that live sex shows are not immune to legal action, and that the
conditions that provoke legal action - or might account for its absence - are far more complex
than Williams' rhetoric implies.

Transgression and its Distinctions

However, rather than simply challenging cultural hierarchies, as these accounts suggest,
"transgression" is a strategy for producing distinctions and conferring authority. As Bourdieu
puts it,

the easiest, and so the most frequent and most spectacular way to "shock
(epater) the bourgeois" by proving the extent of one's power to confer
aesthetic status is to transgress ever more radically the ethical censorships (e.g.
in matters of sex) which the other classes accept even within the area which
the dominant disposition defines as aesthetic. (Bourdieu, 1984: 47)

However, the term "bourgeois" needs some unpacking here, as it refers not to the class in its
totality but rather positions within that group. After all, the transgressive artists and their
audiences are themselves primarily bourgeois in composition (see Appendix One).

For this reason, Bourdieu makes a distinction between the dominant and the dominated
sections of the bourgeoisie, or rather between the economic bourgeoisie and the cultural
bourgeoisie; and as his study reveals, there is an inverse relationship within the bourgeoisie
as a class, between the possession of economic capital on the one hand and cultural capital on
the other (260). Those richest in economic capital tend to be poorest in cultural capital and
vice versa. When the cultural bourgeoisie therefore set out to "shock (epater) the bourgeois",
they are often implicitly attacking those sections of the bourgeoisie by which they feel
dominated. At times, these shocks, attacks and criticisms are directed at those sections that
have most power economically, but more often than not the enemy is identified as the lower
middle class or petite bourgeois, i.e., those sections who are low in cultural capital but also
subordinate economically. This group is therefore doubly damned and hence highly
vulnerable to attack.

While the lower middle class or petite bourgeois has traditionally had to work hard to
distinguish itself from the working class by emphasising its respectability, it is precisely this
aspect at which the aesthetics of transgression is targeted. As Bourdieu argues, the
"commitment to symbolic transgression, which is often combined with political neutrality or
revolutionary aestheticism, is the almost perfect antithesis of petite-bourgeois moralism or
what Sartre used to call the revolutionary's 'seriousness'" (48). Indeed, aesthetic hostility to
the petite bourgeoisie is so great that one frequently finds a privileging of popular taste over
that of the middlebrow.

This preference for the popular rather than the middlebrow is partly a result of the fact that
"aesthetic choices are in fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of groups closest
in social space, with whom competition is most direct and most immediate" (60). However, it
is also due to the fact that the middlebrow threatens the authority of the cultured elite more
directly than the popular, which is therefore easier to patronise, in both sense of the term. As
Bourdieu puts it, the cultural bourgeoisie "prefers naivety to 'pretentiousness'. The essential
merit of the 'common people' is that they have none of the pretensions to art (or power) which
inspire the ambitions of the 'petite bourgeois'." (62) In short, popular taste knows its place,
whereas the middlebrow does not.

As a result, as Leon Hunt has argued, "it is the 'middlebrow' - arguably always the real set of
easy pleasures, in Bourdieu's terms - which has been recast as the low and indefensible"
(Hunt, 1998: 160). The term "recast" implies that this is a relatively recent development, but
it can in fact be traced back well into the nineteenth century, and is clearly relevant to
Flaubert's presentation of the Bovarys and their milieu.

In debates over pornography, this privileging of the popular over the middlebrow can clearly
be seen in Kipnis' account of Hustler magazine. In this discussion, she juxtaposes the image
of Robin Morgan in the anti-pornography documentary, Not a Love Story, with a letter
published in Hustler. This juxtaposition is claimed to "offer a route towards a consideration
of the relation between discourses on sexuality and the social division of labor, between
sexual representation and class." (Kipnis, 1992: 373. See also Kipnis 1993 and 1996)

Kipnis' point is not only that "feminism, a discourse whose object is the organisation of
gendered oppression, may in fact not be the most appropriate or adequate discourse to
address sexuality," (374) but also that sexuality is, at least in part, organised in relation to
class, a category "which has been routinely undertheorized and undetermined within the anti-
porn movement in favour of a totalizing theory of misogyny." (374) As a result, as she
argues, it is important to remember that "not all women do experience male pornography in
the same way" (380), and this is not just as a result of "false consciousness" on their part.
This concern with the class dimension of sexuality leads her to privilege Hustler over Morgan
to the extent that she argues: "Like Morgan's radical feminism, [Hustler] offers an explicitly
political and counter-hegemonic analysis of power and the body; unlike Morgan it is also
explicit about its own class location." (373) Kipnis even goes as far as to claim that, as a
result, anti-porn feminism is founded upon "a theory and politics of the body on the wrong
side of struggles against bourgeois hegemony, and ultimately complicit in its enforcement."
(374)
For Kipnis, Hustler's explicit class position offers a "low theory" of sexuality, but it is one
that she defines as radical precisely through its opposition to the "petite-bourgeois moralism
or … revolutionary's 'seriousness'" (Bourdieu, 1984: 48) displayed by radical feminists such
as Morgan on the one hand, and the "airbrushed" and "sanitised" pornography of Playboy on
the other. As Kipnis puts it:

The Hustler body is an unromanticized body no vaselined lenses or soft focus;

this is neither the airbrushed top-heavy fantasy body of Playboy, nor the ersatz
opulence, the lingeried and sensitive crotch shots of Penthouse, transforming
female genitals into objet d'art. It's a body, not a surface or suntan: insistently
material, defiantly vulgar, corporeal. In fact, the Hustler body is often a
gaseous, fluid-emitting, embarrassing body, one continually defying the
strictures of bourgeois manners and mores and instead governed by its lower
intestinal tract a body threatening to erupt at any moment. Hustler's favorite
joke is someone accidentally defecating in a church. (Kipnis, 1992: 374)

In this way, Kipnis presents the grotesque body of Hustler as a refusal and transgression of
the classical bourgeois body of Playboy and Penthouse. However, by lumping these two
publications together, she therefore ignores the significant differences between them. Rather
than a simple opposition between two poles of a binary opposition, these three publications
have all been very concerned to distinguish themselves from one another.

Once again, however, the definition of the term "bourgeois" is ambiguous. While Kipnis does
refer to Bakhtin and others who associated the classical body with the "formation and
consolidation of bourgeois subjectivity and bourgeois political hegemony" in the early
modern period (377), there is little sense of how matters might have changed by the latter half
of the twentieth century. The bourgeoisie is largely defined by, and criticised for, its cultural
attitudes rather than the methods by which it economically exploits other classes. There is
little acknowledgement that having attained political hegemony, the bourgeoisie as a class is
under less pressure to protect and privilege the classical body.

Indeed, the celebration of the grotesque body has become an integral aspect of bourgeois
aesthetics from modernism onwards and, as has been argued, the target of such transgressive
aesthetics is the petite-bourgeois. It is this class who are predominantly associated with the
classical body and its obsession with respectability and hygiene, and this is because it is the
class who are condemned to repeat the strategies of "formation and consolidation" which
were practised by the bourgeoisie in the early modern period. As Bourdieu puts it,

Having succeeded in escaping from the proletariat, their past, and aspiring to
enter the bourgeoisie, its future, in order to achieve the accumulation
necessary for this rise they must somewhere find the resources to make up for
the absence of capital … The rising petite bourgeoisie endlessly remakes the
history of the origins of capitalism; and to do so, like the Puritans, it can only
count on its asceticism. (Bourdieu, 1984: 333)

As a result, Kipnis privileges Hustler specifically because it can be made to conform to an

avant-garde aesthetic, and present a challenge to petite bourgeois taste.

Like sadomasochistic porn and the performances of Annie Sprinkle, Hustler is presented as a
"deconstructive" form of porn that is defined against the Other of "ordinary" pornography.
For example, as Kipnis argues: "again a case where Hustler seems to be deconstructing the
codes of the men's magazine: where Playboy creates a fetish of the breast, and whose raison
d'etre is, in fact, very much the cultural obsession with them, Hustler perversely points out
that they are, after all, materially, merely tissue another limb." (Kipnis, 1992: 379) In the end,
Kipnis' account repeats the familiar distinction between mainstream culture and its radical
Others that can be traced back to the mass culture critics of the 1950s and beyond.

Re-examining the Middlebrow

In these accounts, the mainstream is defined against an authentic folk culture on the one hand
and a radical avant-garde on the other. However, as Sarah Thornton has shown, while this
construction of the middlebrow is necessary in order to provide a sense of cultural authority
and can be identified in a whole series of aesthetic theories which "uncritically replay these
beliefs" (Thornton, 1995: 96), this position of opposition to, or difference from, the
"mainstream" eventually proves entirely contradictory. As she argues, "inconsistent fantasies
of the mainstream are rampant" in cultural theory, and this is why critics can either "find
pockets of symbolic resistance wherever they look" (93) or see everything as having already
been incorporated into the mainstream.

As a result, there are a number of problems with accepting this opposition between the
mainstream and the "alternative", particularly as it applies to pornography. For a start, such
oppositions work not only to produce a difference between the two categories, but also in the
process, to repress differences and struggles within these categories. For example, Playboy is
not only subject to attack from the "low" and "avant-garde" but also from the radical right,
and it remains a highly contested object of political debate within what is often presented as
an entirely homogeneous and undifferentiated mainstream. Furthermore, since its beginnings,
Playboy has clearly articulated its own critique of a "sexual" mainstream and its conformity,
and has self-consciously defined itself as a sexually dissident publication. As a result, it is
necessary to question whether the mainstream can ever be thought as a stable entity, or
whether it is instead simply a mobile construct that is continually defined and redefined
through the struggles for distinction between different social groups.

Furthermore, constructions of the mainstream tend to present it as an entirely passive object

which is only ever associated with conservatism, and hence as a place where nothing
interesting ever happens. This position also suggests a sense of over-familiarity in which the
mainstream is supposedly not worthy of examination because it is presumed to be all too well
known and obvious. In debates over pornography, as we have seen, interest is almost always
in the "transgressive" because mainstream pornography is assumed to be an essentially
known entity which does not change. In contrast, however, it could well be argued that the
supposed subject of that mainstream - the white, middle-class, heterosexual male - may be far
more complex and contradictory than is often acknowledged. Rather than a stable,
unchanging, homogeneous and known entity, this category itself may act to repress and
contain the heterogeneity and contradictions involved within it. In other words, accounts of
this figure rarely bother to subject this category to detailed analysis, but merely rely on, and
reproduce, taken for granted assumptions instead.

If the cultural bourgeoisie's distaste for the middlebrow is founded on the threat that it poses
to their cultural authority, this threat is entirely unintentional. Rather than an intentional
challenge, the petite bourgeoisie become a threat precisely because of their reverence for
legitimate culture, not their hostility to it. Aspiring to enter the bourgeoisie proper, they
display an admiration for legitimate culture that is founded on their sense of exclusion from
it. If they threaten to blur distinctions between high and low culture and so undermine the
authority of the cultural bourgeoisie, it is because they are too eager to become a part of
legitimate culture, a culture to which they are alien (Bourdieu, 1984: 321) As Bourdieu puts
it, "this petite bourgeoisie of consumers [is one] which means to acquire on credit, i.e., before
its due time, the attributes of the legitimate life-style" (365).

The petite bourgeoisie, then, is a class whose intermediate status - it is neither proletariat nor
bourgeois but somewhere in the middle - means that its identity is entirely formed through its
negation. As a result, it is a class filled with self-loathing and self-denial in so far as it desires
to be other than it is. It distinguishes itself from the working class but is not yet what it
aspires to be - i.e. bourgeois. It is therefore engaged in what Bourdieu calls, "a sort of dream
of social flying, a desperate attempt to defy the gravity of the social field." (370) To put it
another way, it is a class which displays a desperate resistance to being classified or classed.

Living in a constant fear of being judged, it therefore develops what Mike Featherstone has
called "a learning mode to life" in which the petite bourgeois individual "is consciously
educating himself in the field of taste, style, life-style." (Featherstone, 1991a: 91) The petite
bourgeois individual is in a perpetual state of anxiety. They long to "like what it is better to
like" and try to acquire the ability to do so: to learn what it is right to like and how to
appreciate it. However, they are also terrified by the possibility of being caught out, of
showing that they are "not what it is right to be" because they do not know what is right to
like or else lack the proper means of appreciating it (see Brunsdon, 1997).

It is this situation which accounts for the oft-cited shift from character to personality, or what
David Riesman referred to as the move from the inner-directed individual to the outer-
directed individual (Riesman, 1961). For the petite bourgeois identity becomes a matter of
performance. As Bourdieu claims, the petite bourgeois "reduces social being to perceived
being, to seeming" (Bourdieu, 1984: 483).

However, despite these features the petite bourgeois is itself a divided class. The old or
declining petite bourgeoisie is largely made up of "craftsmen and small shopkeepers" while
the new petite bourgeoisie "comes into its own in all the occupations involving presentation
and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so
forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services." (359) The difference
between the old and the new petite bourgeoisie is therefore immense, despite the fact that it
emerges from a similar position of anxiety. The old petite bourgeoisie tried to avoid being
judged through a tactic of respectability and restraint through which they hoped to pass
unnoticed, but the new petite bourgeoisie, on the other hand, tries to avoid judgment by
rejecting the values of the old petite bourgeoisie. In an attempt to avoid being identified as
petite bourgeois, it rejects the ethic of respectability and restraint and defines this ethic as
"outmoded" and "fuddy-duddy". In its place, it therefore adopts an ethic of fun, which is
defined as "modern" and sophisticated in opposition to the tastes of the old petite bourgeoisie.

It is this tactic which accounts for the "calculated hedonism" which Featherstone identifies
with contemporary consumer culture (Featherstone, 1991b: 171), and it is a feature which
clearly registers the anxious relationship of the new petite bourgeoisie to their bodies. If the
new petite bourgeoisie rejects the restraint of the old petite bourgeoisie, this is not to say that
it gives in to wild abandon. On the contrary, it simultaneously tries to liberate and educate the
body. On the one hand, as Bourdieu argues, "it treats the body as the psychoanalyst treats the
soul, bending its ear to 'listen' to a body which has to be 'unknotted', liberated or, more
simply, rediscovered and accepted ('feeling at home')." (Bourdieu, 1984: 368) On the other,
however, this relation to the body "is inseparable from an exaltation of self, but a self which
truly fulfils itself ('growth', 'awareness', 'responsiveness') only when 'relating' to others"
(368). As a result, the body is therefore also "treated as a sign" rather than through the
classical bourgeois conception of the body as an "instrument" or property, a relation which,
as Bourdieu notes, creates a whole new "politics of the 'alienated body'." (368) It is this new
petite bourgeoisie, then, that is the class most directly related to the rise of the therapeutic
society with its "corps of professionals" who claim "a monopoly of the legitimate definition
of legitimate pedagogic and sexual competence." (369)

Thus, when John D'Emilo and Estelle Freedman claim that "sexual liberalism spoke most
directly to the middle class", it was not simply because, as they claim, it was this class
"whose incomes, socialisation, and style of living made possible the intense focus on the
privatized couple in the companionate ideal." (D'Emilo and Freedman, 1988: 273) Instead it
was due to the intense importance which sexuality acquired for the new petite bourgeoisie as
a result of their anxious relationship to their bodies. Indeed it is worth noting the centrality of
the concern with sexuality to the extraordinary commercial success of best-selling life-style
guides such as Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care (1946) and Alfred Kinsey's Sexual
Behaviour in the Human Male (1948. See Appendix Two).

Furthermore, it was often precisely in the field of sexuality that the new petite bourgeoisie not
only distinguished itself from the old, but also actually succeeded in pathologizing them. As
Bourdieu puts it,

Invoking the prestige of the false science of sexual behaviour to naturalise a conception and
an experience of "sexuality" - a very recent historical invention which depends on social
conditions of possibility that are very unequally distributed - it consigns to the pathology of
"sexual poverty", i.e., to the attentions of the psychoanalyst and sexologist, sole arbiters of
legitimate sexual competence, all those whom the old morality would have consigned to the
inferno of "natural" sexuality. These "barbarians" who have not caught up with the "sexual
revolution" are once again the victims of a universalization of the definition of competence
not accompanied by a universalization of the conditions of acquisition. (367-8)

The new petite bourgeoisie displays its distinction from the old through its "liberated"
sexuality, but it is a "liberation" that is only ever achieved through education, discipline and
intense self-surveillance. The "liberation" of the body from its "repression" is therefore
experienced simultaneously as the rediscovery of a natural self and as the enactment of a
carefully controlled performance. It is both a liberation from alienation and a whole new
mode of alienation.

As a result, underlying the new petite bourgeoisie is a fundamental irony: in their attempt to
avoid being judged and classified, they try to present themselves as unclassifiable and "yet all
their practices … speak of classification", if only in "the mode of denial" (370). To put it
another way, the desperate refusal of classification that distinguishes this class results in an
identity that is defined purely through the negation of other identities and positions. The new
petite bourgeoisie is not only driven to life-style guides and self-help books, but to a whole
series of political movements and practices which are defined as alternative or oppositional:
hence the tendency for them to be associated with movements such as alternative medicines
and political positions referred to as, for example, anti-nuclear, anti-racist or non-sexist.
Conclusion

In this situation, then, sexual behavior became overtly politicized because it so clearly
distinguished the attitudes of the new petite bourgeoisie from those of the old and, in the
process, so did pornography. The study of pornography therefore requires us to acknowledge
that sexual tastes are not just gendered but also classed and that, as Bourdieu argues in
relation to the aesthetic disposition more generally, sexual tastes are not only amongst the
most "classifying" of social differences, but also have "the privilege of appearing the most
natural" (56).

However, it also requires us to acknowledge that the struggles over sexual tastes are far more
complex than the current debates often suggest. It is not just the anti-pornographers who
cannot tolerate the tastes of others, as I have demonstrated through a discussion of the
cultural politics of the aesthetics of transgression. While this article is in no sense a defense
of the anti-pornographers of either the left or the right (whatever those terms mean in this
context), it is none the less a reminder of the extent to which the anti-anti-pornography
position can, in certain incarnations, be seen as "a claim to legitimate superiority over those
who …remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies" (56). In other words, we must
be careful not to ignore the social and cultural conditions that not only provoke the anti-
pornographers but also enable a sense of distance and distinction from them.

Appendices

Appendix One: References to Bourdieu in other national contexts are usually greeted with the
question of whether his findings are applicable outside France where his study was
conducted. However, while Bourdieu himself acknowledges that France "has no counterpart
elsewhere, at least for the arrogance of its cultural judgements" (Bourdieu 1984: xi), this is
not to claim that other nations such as the United States and Britain do not share similar
distinctions between high and low culture. On the contrary, as the discussion of Sontag makes
clear, the distinction between the pure gaze and popular taste is clearly present within
American intellectual life. This is further illustrated by Lawrence Levine's Highbrow,
Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Levine, 1988), which provides
a brilliant historical account of the social production of these cultural distinctions within late
nineteenth century America. Indeed, Levine's notion of the "sacralization of culture" is
remarkably close to Bourdieu's notion of the pure gaze.

This is not to deny the national or historical specificity of these distinctions, or of the class
relations that underpin and structure them. Indeed, while Bourdieu suggests that the new
bourgeoisie and new petite bourgeois become a significant force within French cultural life in
the 1960s, I have argued elsewhere that they became a significant force within America at
least a decade earlier, when they became one of the central objects of social and cultural
debate, and were know variously as the New Class or "the postwar managerial class" (see
Jancovich, 2000 and Ehrenreich, 1989).

Appendix Two: Of course, Kinsey's report was not intended as a life-style guide, but its
immense commercial success and influence was due to the fact that it was appropriated in
this way. In other words, Kinsey's study was taken as a critique of existing sexual mores, and
as evidence of their repressiveness. Nor was this entirely surprising. As Paul Robinson has
pointed out, Kinsey clearly presented himself as a scientist in the Enlightenment mould,
whose job it was to distinguish a rational basis for human behaviour from the dangers of
superstition, and hence presented the book as a full-blown critique of existing sexual norms
(1976). It is true that this critique was often misunderstood: Kinsey valued function rather
than style in sex and saw the upper classes' aestheticisation of sex as mere "dillydallying", a
distraction from the "real business at hand" or as the product of sexual "superstition" (See
Packard, 1959: 296). None the less, Kinsey's account of the discrepancy between social
norms and sexual behaviour was seen as a critique of the first and hence as a justification of,
or even incitement to, sexual experimentation.

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