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While the majority of discourses around child sexual abuse would suggest that nations revile the very possibility of sexual abuse against children, the truth is that child porno- graphy has a significant market that is beyond the regulators in a multi-billion dollar web industry, connecting paedophiles for the sexual trade and exchange of children, as well as enabling them to produce and distribute new child pornography. Thus, the idea that pornography is detached from the body to codify sexuality for abstracted individual pleasure is only partially true. At one level, there is a certain degree of ambivalence within pornography that promises sexual pleasure which is beyond reach and has the potential to frustrate as much as fulfil. Where frustration reaches its climax, it may manifest in fetishistic representation that refuels the desire for more pornography, the effects of which are seldom dealt with in anthropological analysis.

Individualism has become the marker of much pornographic as well as S/M activity, but this was not always the case. Until the late 1700s, sexual images were intimately entwined with speech and debate in social life. A focus on the erotic impact of these images did not gain momentum until the 1800s. Sex then took on a force of its own,

separating arousal from social value in a way that generated new discourses of obscenity and which led to the term pornography being coined in the 1860s. Obscenity referred to the power of corruption and depravation and therefore included a wide range of materials judged under the Obscene Publications Act (1857). Some of these works were anthropological, such as Ellis and Symonds’ (1897) Sexual Inversion. The erotic power of pornography was viewed as something that needed to be closeted away from the masses but which in turn positioned dis courses of obscenity as central to the freedom of speech (see Sigel 2002).

Anthropology has been seen as complicit with pornography in other ways, with parallels drawn between power relations in ethnographic practices and pornography (Hansen et al. 1991); in the rise of a commercial licence for erotic works in art and literature and sexually explicit anthropological accounts (Schick 1999: 78); and in the comparison between classic ethnographic film and illicit heterosexual pornography (see Nichols 1995). In the nineteenth century, anthropologists, along with lawyers and writers, were among the avid devourers of domination and submission as well as erotic anthropology that were on offer in the Victorian Cannibal Club.3 _{They viewed their}

activities as an elite educational private practice, savouring a taste for racial and sexual difference that brought together science, anthropology and pornography in the search for hard erotic data (see Sigel 2002). These libidinal expressions have taken on differ- ent historical guises within the anthropological profession. Don Kulick (2006: 934) has called for a serious critique of what he calls the ‘libidinal structure’ in order to under- stand how anthropologists have derived a masochistic pleasure out of analyzing the powerless.

The rise in media technologies and unlimited access to Internet porn means that now ‘the sexual culture of pornography is a formula for sexual self-abuse’ (Sanday 2007: 213). For example, one of Sanday’s (2007: 214) informants, John, testified to his addiction on a ‘Quitting Pornography’ webpage:

My addiction was growing so fast I could hardly keep up with it . . . It kept getting sicker all the time. I need more books, more degrading sex, more abusive sex. Pornography showed me new ways of abuse and self-abuse.

The implications of this testimony are that pornography is a destructive influence be- yond an agent’s control. Rather than pornography serving sexual pleasure, erotic ism has its own sadistic agency that can debilitate and victimize the viewer by virtue of their inability to choose to do otherwise.

Despite John’s realization of his entrapment, not all analysts agree that self-harm, whether through pornography or other kinds of bodily modification or mutilation, is degenerative. Armando Favazza (1987: xi–xix) has posited that certain kinds of self- mutilation in general and sexual mutilation in particular can be forms of healing for mentally ill patients, in the same way that ritual mutilation may serve as a therapeutic resource for groups such as those who practise subincision or for Fakirs who practise tattooing in order to transcend the pain they inflict upon themselves.

The relationship between sexual pleasure and pain is a subtle one, either inflicted sadistically upon another person or masochistically upon oneself. Havelock Ellis (1921) argued that the distinction between the two was blurred as they comple mented one another, and that the intention of either form of sexual pain was not for abuse. By contrast, Krafft-Ebing (1965: 86) invented the term masochism, view ing it as ‘a peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life’ in which a person is ‘un conditionally sub ject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by the person as by a master, humiliated and abused’. Freud (1938: 570) also sug gested that masochism was an extension of sadism as the two forms appeared in the same person. The terms maso- chism and sadomasochism derive from the names of two writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Count Donatien-Alphonese-François de Sade (1740–1814), whose books describe outrageous forms of mutilation which some analysts regard as improbable, and Count Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95), whose most famous work, Venus in Furs (1870), concerns ‘a nobleman who enjoyed being ordered about and whipped by an icy woman in furs’ (Kulick 2006: 935). In reality, he asked his wife to beat him with cat-o’-nine-tails studded with nails, as well as seeking out other women to dominate him (Weinberg 2009).

Sadomasochism has been analyzed in recent times by sociologists, social psych o- logists and others in terms of ‘pornonormativity’, i.e. sexual scripts derived from images and narratives of porn (Bell 2006; see also Langdridge 2006; Plummer 1995 on sexual scripts); the politics of sexual citizenship (Binnie 1994); psycho-medical constructions (Taylor and Ussher 2001); and sadomasochism as a ‘valid sexual culture’ (Wilkinson 2009: 192). Culturally produced meanings have expanded over psychoanalytic inter- pretations (see Weinberg 2005). As research into sadomasochism has grown, it has been found that men tend to engage in more hypermasculine behaviours while women take on positions of humiliation (Weinberg 2005: 22). Sample studies in America show that more educated and single women tend to be involved in S/M activities, a minority of whom have a preference for playing a dominant role (Levitt et al. 1994: 472), and that the varieties of sexual practices are not randomly chosen but constitute a ‘script’ of ‘structured patterns’ (Santtila et al. 2002) in which fantasy plays a significant part in the arousal expectations for those in dominant positions but not for those being dominated (Donnelly and Frazer 1998). It has been argued that ‘kinky’ practices should be viewed as extensions of vanilla (natural) sex in a pluralistic sexuality that adds pleasure, parody and play, whilst making power inequalities in marriage visible and challenging structures of intimacy (Langdridge and Butt 2004: 43).