Obviously this is pointless, given that no one is reading this Infinite Thought, and no one can read the other, but oh well:
K-Punk is free teaching!
' June 20, 2007
Calling South London massive
I'm teaching a five-day Critical Thinking course at Orpington next week. If anyone has the time available and wants to acquire some Cold Rationalist intellectual weaponry, then please come along. Email me at k_punk99[at]hotmail.com for details. It's free, and you can see me in action, if that's of interest. If you want a recommendation on my teaching, a student said yesterday, 'Mark, you shouldn't give up teaching, because if you do lots of people will miss out.' Which was one of the nicest things that has ever been said to me.'
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Monday, 18 June 2007
Ah, yes, new home, no authority, no responsibility! Ignore the old posts I put up here, I'll probably write something half-amusing, half-annoying tomorrow, as per usual.
Heh heh heh.
Heh heh heh.
Saturday, 16 June 2007
vintage porn and the money shot
[This piece forms part of a symposium attended, hopefully, by some or all of the following: bacteriagrl (bacterial porn), k-punk (let me be your fantasy), owen (I still dream of orgonon), different maps (fucking in rhythm and harmony, part I; empire state, part II; we want discipline, part III, sex of the real (Heidegger mix), part IV), poetix (not safe for work, dickweed). If anyone would like to contribute to this symposium on any pornography-related topic, please feel free, or bound, as you prefer. No biscuits were shared during the making of these posts.
UPDATE: The Impostume rises to the challenge! Plus, sent by a kind reader, the introduction to Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir, can be found here
UPDATE II: Carceraglio also contributes with Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it., with added link to sexpol film in the making
UPDATE III: Martin from Byndthmpld contributes with porn post 1, porn post 2
UPDATE IV: Tom at Bad Zero with a seriously good porn post]
‘It is not a woman in the nude that is indecent, but a woman whose skirts are tucked up that is. Adorn the Medici Venus with rose-coloured garters and tightly pulled white stockings, and you will strongly feel the difference between decent and indecent.’ – Diderot, 1767.
Feeling the frisson of difference between the decent and the indecent is no longer the dialectic of visual titillation. The sheer hard work of contemporary porn informs you that, without delusion, sex is just like everything else – grinding, relentless, boring (albeit multiply boring). The pneumatic Calvinism of rubberised piston porn-duty, the grim orgasm of unsmiling physical moil. As if the abject fallenness of humanity, its total depravity, has been fused with the work that may be the only faint method of glimpsing the sovereign God’s decision...From erection to election... Annabel Chong’s 251 men in ten hours, refusing payment from the massive video sales (or letting the matter slide, which is the same thing) – on man 161, what kind of God wouldn’t have allowed a brief splinter of heavenly light to filter down onto the back of her ravaged, kneeling, broken body?
But sex-as-work is the lesser partner in the invention of porn-capitalism. Where does it all end up, after all but in the money shot. The trajectory of the money shot is the history not only of filmed pornography (a contradiction in terms given the 'graphy' of the original medium – the 'writing of/about prostitutes' in the name of a social materialism that sought to bring down the church alongside its concomitant bourgeois hypocrisy), but also the sheer explosive pointlessness of capital itself, abasing itself in a repeated act of onanism that blinds and silences the other in a gobbet of slightly-disappointing sexual-Tippex.
One of the most interesting things about so-called 'vintage erotica', those short mostly French and German films made 1910-1950, for all its indifference to the well-timed cut, its wasteful expenditure in the pursuit of female pleasure, and so on is the presence of the ‘money shot’ (of course, this term too is now beyond sweet – we mean cum shot surely). I was initially surprised – the money shot seems like it should have been a recent invention, but there it is, all over the 1920s, as if the logic of the tension between make-believe and authenticity has already been encoded for the big porn other. Incidentally, if you can get hold the stuff, vintage erotica tends to be exempt from classification, as if no one now could come to black-and-white fucking, particularly all that hair and excess (read normal) flab. But isn't this true?
The money shot has always been about different kinds of 'money', however. Etymologically, it’s not clear whether the mainstream 'money shot' (literally, the most expensive scene in the film – the climax, indeed) got transplanted to early porn or vice versa: the money shot these days is just as likely to be the hero's virile escape from a terrorist-induced explosion as a guy trying his best to 'put out'. But the porn meaning is complex: is it the point at which the guy completes his 'product' and thus makes the thing he gets paid for, in a base capitalist form? But where, then, is the alienation here? (And we should bear in mind that porn is one of the only industries in which men usually get paid less than women). Or is it, instead, the point at which the audience 'get their money’s worth?' in the sense that what has been delivered to them has finally, irrevocably been proved to be 'real': 'oh my God, honey, they really did it!'... La passion du réel indeed, for politics as for porn...Or is porn simply operative as a basic animal stimulant, in which the 'act' is a reminder of basic physical capacity? Or that one 'identifies' in one way or another with the bloke or the gal, or the bloke/bloke, or the girl/girl....or do people actually get off on the idea of being filmed, such that porn is the paranoic desire for representation made manifest ('make love to the camera')....and that wanking to porn is like being faintly smiled at by the big other.
This passion for authenticity, which unsurprisingly works even better as the only-ever-hinted-at 'real' sex-scene of the mainstream film, is curious: is it not enough that we see and hear ‘pleasure’ on the face of the participants? Of course not – just like any other woman, the porn actress could be faking it. But there is no way of measuring her pleasure, of course, even though vintage porn does its best to assure us that female jouissance has its own place. 'I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra (en plus)'.
But the money shot has moved again - from mainstream cinema, to porn, to TV – in this latter context it is used to describe the key scene in a reality show that provides a kind of low-level climax for the programme to hook the trailer on: a clip of a contestant breaking down and crying during his or her post-elimination, or falling, or screaming. Even money can sometimes get cheaper...
But the internal logic of the purely pornographic money shot has shifted; travelling upwards, spreading inexorably from the blank expanse of the woman’s body just above her sex or the small of her back, to the face. There is nothing more 'now' than the sight of a yelping woman with semen all over her face. Or a silent one in which the tears mingle with the visual debasement in a process of physical absurdity that somehow captures the horror of the entire universe. Or, then again, one that sells you mobile phones...with free video-messaging...
The Bunuelian specificity of cum-shots. It is not enough to splatter willy-nilly ('It’s raining cum and these sluts use their faces as umbrellas'), but in keeping with the varieties of linguistic invention inherent to porn, indeed the very desire for the image to keep up with language, there has to be an ever-increasingly specific remit internal to porn classification itself - not just 'facials', but 'eye-shots', 'ear-shots', 'mouth-shots'. God, I hate it when they come in their mouths, for fuck's sake, that's such a turn-off. I only like eyes...
 |  |
But what of the female voice in all this? American bukkake seems to add in the more traditional porn shouting and begging of the woman as a prelude to her vocal or visual occlusion, whilst the 'original' Japanese version seems to fetishise context and clothing and, above all, the silence of the woman, as if to say this is about what it looks like, not what it sounds like, obviously.
The American model certainly buys into a more banal logic: The simultaneous importance of the female voice ‘oh yeah, come on, do it, fuck me’ at the same time as the desire to shut her up. The reflex to close your eyes when something gets close to them, however, is much less conscious, and surely closer to the truth of facials (tossing yourself off into the face of a kneeling woman), insofar as such gestures can have a truth. It's certainly fair to say that Lacan's claim in Seminar XX that 'no relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings' is nowhere better borne out than the silencing of the woman with cum (and what are we to make of the sub-genre of bukkake, in which two women take it in turns to swap cum mouth to mouth until such point as it eventually dissipates, made invisible in the passage to the impossibility of communication?). Or is this instead a battle over the very substance of language, an aggressive response to the non-relation that characterises all human interaction?
Aggression is certainly the key to contemporary porn: the unthinkable would be the sweet smile, a pure form of affection that believes in nothing - not work, not competitition, but only in a momentary secret complicity with the other. But of course, it is much easier, the signs are clearer if sex is reduced to a form of literally hard labour - the scandal of Grand Theft Auto is not the psychotic murder of random other figures, but the idea that you could also have sex with your girlfriend. But think of the children...!.
 |  |
This is hurting me more than it is hurting you... No one comes with a smile on their face anymore, all is pain. Contemporary sex as a recapitulation of the shame and wretchedness of Eve's expulsion. Knowledge is not power, it is misery.
I blame the fifties. With the introduction of sex toys (the vibrator, but also the radio, the telephone, the television), porn becomes radically miserable. Women sit alone in houses filled with consumer goods, popping out only to purchase the biggest vibrator they can find. Occasionally they might flick through a book, or more likely, a magazine, but it never distracts them for long. Unlike the comedic role-play of twenties and thirties porn, or the frenetic war-apocalypse porn of the 1940s, Fifties European porn looks like a cross between a Godard film in which women hang around looking a bit bored (most of them, surely) and a rape fantasy.
Utter ennui amidst the products.
Idly flicking through random literature and photos.
What are we to do with all these objects?
In a final, psychotic twist, one of the short 1950s films involves a bored housewife inviting over the sex-shop owner who has just sold her a vibrator. Once at her place, she spikes his aperitif and orally rapes him with the same dildo while he sits unconscious in her chair. Clearly she can't splatter his face, even if she would like to, but the scene is filled with menace. I believe that the future of the money shot will involve the impossibility of male ejaculation, which is still too human, too teleological. Impotent men will toss themselves off in vain while a pretty young girl gazes up at them as if at the cosmos itself. There will be no mediation.
[This is a piece by me published a little while ago in the New Humanist (which explains the title and general, erm, thrust of the piece). It's a bit like the porn piece I wrote a while back, but rather more straightforward. This lends it a somewhat naive air, and it is being published here because Daniel, having read it in print, wants to give it a bit of a kicking on his blog. In the spirit of no-holds-barred-egalitarian-yet-harsh-verbal-scrapping, which we all love a lot, I am publishing it here so that he can link to it even as he mauls it like a pitbull in a sack of kittens. Most of the pictures are from The Good Old Naughty Days].
What would humanist pornography look like? Chances are that even the most adamant defender of the charms of adult material would struggle to find much evidence of compassion or affection in today’s relentlessly lurid output. Contemporary pornography informs us of one thing above all else: sex is a type of work, just like any other. What matters most is quantity – the bigger the better. It is not for nothing that one of the most successful sex videos of all time, starring Annabel Chong, features 251 sex acts performed with approximately 70 men during a ten hour period. Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality.
The pornography industry itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren't looking for anything as recherché as sweetness or wit.
On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.
But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn't always function and purr like a well-oiled machine? The early origins of cinematic pornography tell a very different story about the representation of sex, one that suggests a way both out of the rubberised inhumanity of today's hardcore obsession but also out of the claim that pornography is inherently exploitative. What if porn stopped being such a brute and actually started to deal with the question of pleasure?
A recent collection of silent pornographic films mostly made in France between 1905 and 1930 and collected by French director Michael Reilhac as The Good Old Naughty Days, astonishes and appeals for several reasons. The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn't just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for 'dessert'. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the 'peeping tom' motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.
Due to the lack of money available, many of the vintage porn films were made using the costumes and sets of mainstream films, forming a kind of counter-history of cinema within cinema. The attitude towards sex in these early pornographic efforts is closer to the mordant humour of a Samuel Beckett than the action-film over-kill of Suck It Dry 3 and its ilk. As the narrator of Malone Dies recounts: 'And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of sombre gratification.' Try asking for that sort of porn from your local sex shop.
One should not imagine, though, that all that vintage porn presents is the odd dirty kiss or flash of thigh. In fact, some of the footage of The Good Old Naughty Days is so explicit that it received a R18 rating (a classification for films deemed even more explicit than those that would usually fall under the 18 category). Usually such films are consigned to the DVD racks of sex shop, rather than screened in cinemas. The Good Old Naughty Days was briefly released, however, as it was deemed to be 'of historical interest'. The implication perhaps being that no one these days could find black-and-white footage of sex arousing.
What shocks the contemporary audience more than any of the specific acts on display, however, is the fact that the participants genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves, and that they might even be quite keen on sleeping with each other. Furthermore, for all the shouting and screaming of contemporary porn, it's rare to see a woman smile, or laugh: vintage pornography abounds in sweet expressions and moments of shared affection. The polymorphous perversity of the actors reminds us that sex can be both witty, but also that it's not a competition – many of the short films from the early twentieth century involve the inability of men to achieve erection and the increasingly comical attempts of their remarkably understanding lovers to try to amend the situation. The humanist promise of early cinema seems to have been betrayed by a combination of artificial and destructive antagonisms between men and women and unnecessary anxieties about 'performance' and desirability.
But perhaps we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in re-establishing the link between wit and sex. The Burlesque revival of the past few years, which combines elaborate costumes, glamour, slapstick, strip-tease and a heavy dose of comedy, reveals a modern desire for subtle titillation. Mainstream cinema too seems to be blurring the boundaries between pornography and more conventional depictions of romance. Recent films that have included scenes of 'authentic' intercourse include Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs and Lars von Trier’s The Idiots. Whilst unsimulated sex in otherwise non-pornographic films doesn’t always make for a necessarily interesting cinematic experience, as the almost universally bad reviews for Winterbottom's effort indicate, nevertheless their existence speaks of a desire to refuse to hand sex over to pornography. Perhaps the most successful of these films is the recent Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell, which features a surprising amount of unsimulated gay and straight sex, often framed in a highly amusing way. One interesting outcome of this rare approach to sex is actually how incidental it becomes to the main story, despite, or perhaps even because it is made so central. It is as if when we start to that admit that sex can be funny, as well as meaningful, that it can take its rightful role as one of the many aspects of human behaviour that relate to all the others. One of the single most depressing things about most mainstream porn is the idea that sex is something to be treated outside of other human relations.
Others argue, less pessimistically, that there are flashes of hope to be found in today's pornography. Clarissa Smith, author of a forthcoming book, One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn, argues that to see all contemporary pornographic output and the response to it as mechanical, repetitive and thematically limited is to neglect the different roles it can play in people’s lives: 'critics often accuse porn of being just the same thing over and over again but that tells us so little about the ways in which porn fits into people's lives and this is really because as well as thinking that the content is all the same, those critics also see use as being one-dimensional, for example, limited to masturbation.' She also draws an important distinction between access to pornography in the UK and the US, involving certain restrictions in the UK porn market which gives it a different, potentially more interesting, cultural status: 'The main difference lies in the protection of porn as free speech in the US, we have no such protection here so sexually explicit materials are always potentially subject to regulation. Until recently it was difficult to find a legally available magazine featuring explicit shots of penetration in the UK.' This has lead to a specifically British feel to porn. Clarissa Smith again: 'I think there are elements of UK publications/films which sell themselves on their Britishness - Readers Wives would be an example of this and the work of director Anna Span (Britain's leading female porn director) where a more realist aesthetic is at work in their imagery.'
We might like to think that the British attitude towards sex and its cinematic portrayal has often been tempered with humour, from the sex-farce films of the 1970s (the Confession of series) to the little 'thought of the day' speech-bubble of the Sun’s Page 3 girl. But for all this, it remains difficult to find material that balances amusement with excitement. Hardest of all, perhaps, is the notoriously problematic depiction of female pleasure. As Clarissa Smith puts it, 'part of our understanding of the notorious difficulty of female pleasure revolves around the authenticity of the performance - is she really enjoying this?' In effect, she argues, it might be easier to conjure up female pleasure via the written word (which, incidentally, touches on the original meaning of 'pornography', as 'the writing of prostitutes'). She continues 'I think you can communicate the emotional heat of sexual pleasure and that's why porn stories work. Its also possible to show women orgasming on film but whether or not it’s believed is another matter ... This question brings up what is pleasure?' Whilst this last question might be extremely difficult or even impossible to answer, Smith points to the paucity of any real discussion of the subject at the heart of mainstream pornography. Furthermore, she asks, 'can we depict male pleasure? Yes, the money shot, but is that all pleasure is?' It is hard not to conclude that mainstream porn tends to give both men and women a raw deal. We may, Smith argues, need to ditch films for literature. Smith claims that lesbian erotica is often prefaced by a discussion of the ways in which women's sexuality has been silenced and rendered secondary to male sexuality in such a way that the writing and reading of lesbian porn has a certain status as an antidote to that: 'Thus reading porn can be justified as a political statement or as part of the project of the self-seeking knowledge about one's own sexual preferences.'
Jane Czyzselska, editor of DIVA and lesbian love columnist for thelondonpaper, agrees that it is hard to imagine how female pleasure might be depicted outside of the centuries-old male perspective on desire: 'there are codes we learn about desire from very early on in our lives and as we grow from little girls to mature women in a still largely patriarchal culture, what we can ascribe to female expressions of desire becomes less and less clear.' A humanist pornography sets itself a difficult task if it attempts to capture both male and female pleasure in an affectionate and honest way; an even harder one if it treats sex as part of a more convincing narrative, rather than the outcome of a deliberately limited set-up (oh my washing machine has broken! Best call that sexy plumber!). Nevertheless, by looking back to the origins of pornography in The Good Old Naughty Days and other collections, we can start to imagine anew what a genuinely funny, sweet and exciting pornography would look like: less howling, more giggling.
What would humanist pornography look like? Chances are that even the most adamant defender of the charms of adult material would struggle to find much evidence of compassion or affection in today’s relentlessly lurid output. Contemporary pornography informs us of one thing above all else: sex is a type of work, just like any other. What matters most is quantity – the bigger the better. It is not for nothing that one of the most successful sex videos of all time, starring Annabel Chong, features 251 sex acts performed with approximately 70 men during a ten hour period. Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality.
The pornography industry itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren't looking for anything as recherché as sweetness or wit.
On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.
But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn't always function and purr like a well-oiled machine? The early origins of cinematic pornography tell a very different story about the representation of sex, one that suggests a way both out of the rubberised inhumanity of today's hardcore obsession but also out of the claim that pornography is inherently exploitative. What if porn stopped being such a brute and actually started to deal with the question of pleasure?
A recent collection of silent pornographic films mostly made in France between 1905 and 1930 and collected by French director Michael Reilhac as The Good Old Naughty Days, astonishes and appeals for several reasons. The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn't just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for 'dessert'. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the 'peeping tom' motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.
Due to the lack of money available, many of the vintage porn films were made using the costumes and sets of mainstream films, forming a kind of counter-history of cinema within cinema. The attitude towards sex in these early pornographic efforts is closer to the mordant humour of a Samuel Beckett than the action-film over-kill of Suck It Dry 3 and its ilk. As the narrator of Malone Dies recounts: 'And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of sombre gratification.' Try asking for that sort of porn from your local sex shop.
One should not imagine, though, that all that vintage porn presents is the odd dirty kiss or flash of thigh. In fact, some of the footage of The Good Old Naughty Days is so explicit that it received a R18 rating (a classification for films deemed even more explicit than those that would usually fall under the 18 category). Usually such films are consigned to the DVD racks of sex shop, rather than screened in cinemas. The Good Old Naughty Days was briefly released, however, as it was deemed to be 'of historical interest'. The implication perhaps being that no one these days could find black-and-white footage of sex arousing.
What shocks the contemporary audience more than any of the specific acts on display, however, is the fact that the participants genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves, and that they might even be quite keen on sleeping with each other. Furthermore, for all the shouting and screaming of contemporary porn, it's rare to see a woman smile, or laugh: vintage pornography abounds in sweet expressions and moments of shared affection. The polymorphous perversity of the actors reminds us that sex can be both witty, but also that it's not a competition – many of the short films from the early twentieth century involve the inability of men to achieve erection and the increasingly comical attempts of their remarkably understanding lovers to try to amend the situation. The humanist promise of early cinema seems to have been betrayed by a combination of artificial and destructive antagonisms between men and women and unnecessary anxieties about 'performance' and desirability.
But perhaps we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in re-establishing the link between wit and sex. The Burlesque revival of the past few years, which combines elaborate costumes, glamour, slapstick, strip-tease and a heavy dose of comedy, reveals a modern desire for subtle titillation. Mainstream cinema too seems to be blurring the boundaries between pornography and more conventional depictions of romance. Recent films that have included scenes of 'authentic' intercourse include Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs and Lars von Trier’s The Idiots. Whilst unsimulated sex in otherwise non-pornographic films doesn’t always make for a necessarily interesting cinematic experience, as the almost universally bad reviews for Winterbottom's effort indicate, nevertheless their existence speaks of a desire to refuse to hand sex over to pornography. Perhaps the most successful of these films is the recent Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell, which features a surprising amount of unsimulated gay and straight sex, often framed in a highly amusing way. One interesting outcome of this rare approach to sex is actually how incidental it becomes to the main story, despite, or perhaps even because it is made so central. It is as if when we start to that admit that sex can be funny, as well as meaningful, that it can take its rightful role as one of the many aspects of human behaviour that relate to all the others. One of the single most depressing things about most mainstream porn is the idea that sex is something to be treated outside of other human relations.
Others argue, less pessimistically, that there are flashes of hope to be found in today's pornography. Clarissa Smith, author of a forthcoming book, One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn, argues that to see all contemporary pornographic output and the response to it as mechanical, repetitive and thematically limited is to neglect the different roles it can play in people’s lives: 'critics often accuse porn of being just the same thing over and over again but that tells us so little about the ways in which porn fits into people's lives and this is really because as well as thinking that the content is all the same, those critics also see use as being one-dimensional, for example, limited to masturbation.' She also draws an important distinction between access to pornography in the UK and the US, involving certain restrictions in the UK porn market which gives it a different, potentially more interesting, cultural status: 'The main difference lies in the protection of porn as free speech in the US, we have no such protection here so sexually explicit materials are always potentially subject to regulation. Until recently it was difficult to find a legally available magazine featuring explicit shots of penetration in the UK.' This has lead to a specifically British feel to porn. Clarissa Smith again: 'I think there are elements of UK publications/films which sell themselves on their Britishness - Readers Wives would be an example of this and the work of director Anna Span (Britain's leading female porn director) where a more realist aesthetic is at work in their imagery.'
We might like to think that the British attitude towards sex and its cinematic portrayal has often been tempered with humour, from the sex-farce films of the 1970s (the Confession of series) to the little 'thought of the day' speech-bubble of the Sun’s Page 3 girl. But for all this, it remains difficult to find material that balances amusement with excitement. Hardest of all, perhaps, is the notoriously problematic depiction of female pleasure. As Clarissa Smith puts it, 'part of our understanding of the notorious difficulty of female pleasure revolves around the authenticity of the performance - is she really enjoying this?' In effect, she argues, it might be easier to conjure up female pleasure via the written word (which, incidentally, touches on the original meaning of 'pornography', as 'the writing of prostitutes'). She continues 'I think you can communicate the emotional heat of sexual pleasure and that's why porn stories work. Its also possible to show women orgasming on film but whether or not it’s believed is another matter ... This question brings up what is pleasure?' Whilst this last question might be extremely difficult or even impossible to answer, Smith points to the paucity of any real discussion of the subject at the heart of mainstream pornography. Furthermore, she asks, 'can we depict male pleasure? Yes, the money shot, but is that all pleasure is?' It is hard not to conclude that mainstream porn tends to give both men and women a raw deal. We may, Smith argues, need to ditch films for literature. Smith claims that lesbian erotica is often prefaced by a discussion of the ways in which women's sexuality has been silenced and rendered secondary to male sexuality in such a way that the writing and reading of lesbian porn has a certain status as an antidote to that: 'Thus reading porn can be justified as a political statement or as part of the project of the self-seeking knowledge about one's own sexual preferences.'
Jane Czyzselska, editor of DIVA and lesbian love columnist for thelondonpaper, agrees that it is hard to imagine how female pleasure might be depicted outside of the centuries-old male perspective on desire: 'there are codes we learn about desire from very early on in our lives and as we grow from little girls to mature women in a still largely patriarchal culture, what we can ascribe to female expressions of desire becomes less and less clear.' A humanist pornography sets itself a difficult task if it attempts to capture both male and female pleasure in an affectionate and honest way; an even harder one if it treats sex as part of a more convincing narrative, rather than the outcome of a deliberately limited set-up (oh my washing machine has broken! Best call that sexy plumber!). Nevertheless, by looking back to the origins of pornography in The Good Old Naughty Days and other collections, we can start to imagine anew what a genuinely funny, sweet and exciting pornography would look like: less howling, more giggling.
Saturday, 9 June 2007
juche comes to wiltshire
After nuclear bunkers in Corsham, now we have Chippenham inviting North Korea to come and stay during the Olympics.
Pyongyang (population 3 million)
· Legendarily inaccessible, the North Korean capital has direct flights to and from Beijing and occasionally Russia
· Foreigners are not generally allowed to use public transport and face restrictions on interaction with the local population
· 50,000 members of the ruling elite live in a luxury compound in central Pyongyang while most of the city's population relies on food aid. In winter the temperature routinely falls to -13C
· Attractions include the Juche Tap, a tower lit at night which is the only constant source of light in the city
Chippenham (population 40,000)
· Sited on the river Avon, the market town was the site of a royal residence during the Middle Ages and appears in Domesday Book as a crown manor
· It is 4 miles south of the M4, giving easy access to Bristol, Swindon, south Wales and London. Once known as Little Bath because honey-coloured stone was used for its public buildings
· Lacock Abbey, close by, became Hogwarts school in the first two Harry Potter films. The town holds an annual festival in honour of rock 'n' roll singer Eddie Cochran, who died in 1960 after a car crash in Chippenham.
[I've actually been to the Eddie Cochran festival, as my brother's band played there one year. It's a very odd and macabre affair, though contains some nice quiffs].
Pyongyang (population 3 million)
· Legendarily inaccessible, the North Korean capital has direct flights to and from Beijing and occasionally Russia
· Foreigners are not generally allowed to use public transport and face restrictions on interaction with the local population
· 50,000 members of the ruling elite live in a luxury compound in central Pyongyang while most of the city's population relies on food aid. In winter the temperature routinely falls to -13C
· Attractions include the Juche Tap, a tower lit at night which is the only constant source of light in the city
Chippenham (population 40,000)
· Sited on the river Avon, the market town was the site of a royal residence during the Middle Ages and appears in Domesday Book as a crown manor
· It is 4 miles south of the M4, giving easy access to Bristol, Swindon, south Wales and London. Once known as Little Bath because honey-coloured stone was used for its public buildings
· Lacock Abbey, close by, became Hogwarts school in the first two Harry Potter films. The town holds an annual festival in honour of rock 'n' roll singer Eddie Cochran, who died in 1960 after a car crash in Chippenham.
[I've actually been to the Eddie Cochran festival, as my brother's band played there one year. It's a very odd and macabre affair, though contains some nice quiffs].
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