The Jaguar and the Anteater: Pornography and the Modern World

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The problem with pornography, Bernard Arcand declares, is that it
quickly becomes boring. The reader might be forgiven, then, for
approaching this 250-page anthropological study of pornography with a
degree of caution. The wariness is unwarranted. Arcand writes with
authority and wit. He can alternate statements like “the consumption
of pornography stimulates the thalamus and the hypothalamus, which in
turn produces a modification of the endocrinal system,” with “if
children spent their pocket money on pornography, the first consequence
would be an improvement in their dental hygiene.”

Arcand provides both a historical overview and a cross-cultural
examination of pornography. The only thing that becomes clear in
defining pornography is that pornography refuses empirical definition.

Each new wave of technology provides an unforeseen outlet for
pornography. As the invention of the telephone quickly gave rise to the
nuisance obscene phone call, the computer modem has become a springboard
for both sexual gratification and personal outrage. The home VCR is
threatening to make porno magazines obsolete. What does society make of
a computer chip that creates an image of a person who never existed
performing an act that is physically impossible?

Arcand ends his work with an examination of a ritual performed by a
South American tribe (who have never seen a French postcard or snuff
film). The tribe’s ritual—an annual celebration of the anteater and
the jaguar—Arcand believes, is a fundamental statement about humanity
and pornography.

This is not a book that provides hard data and easy answers for those
who are looking to gather ammunition for a moral crusade against either
pornography or censorship. It is, however, a highly readable and
intelligent discussion of a subject usually avoided by most societies
most of the time.