There’s a general agreement — is there not? — to avoid talking about pornography. You just don’t hear people mentioning it in polite society. It is treated as if it just doesn’t exist. Occasionally someone will break the sacred rule not to mention it, but what they have to say is often too particular to be of any general interest. Porn is boring, unless you’re using it for the reason it was made, in which case it can be very exciting.
I remember reading that some miscellaneous mammals had been shown their equivalent to pornography and had, given the choice, preferred to miss out on food than the sex on television. Human beings aren’t quite that bad, but you have to wonder about the effect that all this stimulation of our deepest pleasure centres must have. Perhaps we aren’t even close to satisfying the abysmal depths of our sexual potential.
Sometimes I wonder what people think about when they watch pornography. It is something that interests me quite a lot because it seems to me that porn taps directly into the unconscious. With porn we can surprise ourselves.
The things you like are always odd but oddly conventional. I wonder what it was like in the olden days before we had access to porn? What did people masturbate to? Did people make love more? We should employ more sexologists to tel us how people lived in the past. It might make us feel better about how we ourselves live. If we could latch onto something ‘natural’ we’d be able to gauge how close or far away we were from such a state.
Is the word ‘natural’ still problematic. Growing up in the pomo 90s it seemed that every word we took for granted was problematic. The effects of deconstruction was to reduce the amount that people could say by focusing on the vocabulary that they used. To satisfy this urge toward linguistic self-reflection, people used to concentrate on the exceptional cases. A discourse on nature would address the writings of a Victorian bigot who believed that thrashing wives was ‘natural’. Things like that.
Of course, at the time — and even now — it felt ever so clever. We were so knowing, so superior to those unreflective idiots in the past. But it was a hollow victory. We had lost something crucial, something incredibly important to our sense of self.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Leave a Reply