Smut
Several of my favorite bloggers, coming from completely different perspectives, have been talking about porn.
Figleaf, not for the first time, tries to provoke discussion on what sort of porn people want instead of what’s out there.
Most of the other sex-bloggers talking about porn this week seem to be women. Nearly all porn, even that made by women, is made for men, and as such it often fails to appeal to intelligent women. Seems to me there are two ways to deal with that: give up, or develop a clear way to describe what should be done instead. As a former HP technical manager used to say “Investment follows the clearest specification of success.” Which is an extremely oblique way of saying tell someone what you want and a better way to do it and they’ll be way more willing to produce it for you.
Now, I’m probably not the best person to answer this question, because, a) I have seen no X-rated movies whatsoever and only a few porn still photos, and, b) I have a moral reservation about paying someone else (including paying by proxy) to have sex, which means I’d be bound not to watch X-rated movies even if people started producing the sort of movies I’d actually find erotic (which I gather, from everyone’s description of what’s in porn, isn’t the case now). Still, I’ll take a moment to say why porn as it stands doesn’t seem all that enticing, and why it doesn’t seem likely that it will be commercially viable to produce enticing-to-Lynn porn.
Now, there are several ways in which sex can be combined with art (using “art” fairly loosely here, since some of the combinations are a bit weak on artistic value): movies, still photos, words (fiction, poetry, song lyrics, whatever), or other forms of art like paintings and sculpture. But the term “porn” seems generally to be used for the photos and the movies.
Photos: Right away, you run into a problem coming up with something sexy to me, because I am just not that visually oriented in my sexuality. Sure, visual cues make a difference, but visual cues alone are never enough to attract me. I’ve never been sexually attracted to anyone on first sight (first conversation, yes). The only times I’ve ever actually been turned on by a still photo are when it’s of someone I actually know, like my husband.
The second problem is the photos: the porn photos that I’ve actually seen are basically goodlooking bodies posed in a way that draws the eye to the genitals or breasts. This is not sexy. It conveys, well, genitals. It doesn’t convey passion. Even when there’s more than one person in the photo, the focus is still genitals. As, for example, in one photo I once saw, where a woman was leaning in to an erect penis, preparing to lick it like an ice cream cone. OK, cute, funny, I guess, if you like that kind of thing. But I can’t imagine getting turned on by that photo. Neither it, nor any other photo I’ve seen, really conveyed passion to me. Maybe a photo, without any words to go with it, just can’t. There’s nothing in there of:
At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet,
And a freight train running through the middle of my head,
For you, to cool my desire.
Oh, I’m on fire.
Movies: I haven’t seen any X-rated ones, and they don’t sound all that sexy, even as described by the people who like them.
Christopher, for example, in Cardboard Characters and Cookie Cutter Canoodling, discusses (as an out gay Christian man) his problems with gay porn, and critiques another man’s article:
I love the fact that everyone is sexually available. No matter what he looks like or what his occupation is, any character that shows up in pornography — whether poolboy or postman or airline pilot — will end up sucking or getting sucked, fucking or getting fucked. That’s automatically attractive to me. I have little patience with the hard-to-get.
That’s the rub for me. I am not sexually available to everyone. Nor do I want to be. And I would worry for anyone who is. Again, how does this lead us to reality? Away from reality? Who has time or energy? Where is the imagination or possibility of relationship if every man drops trou first thing? Goes for sex acts without getting a name? I guess Mr. Shewey would have little patience with me!
Exactly! Everyone being immediately available to everyone sounds, to me, about as unsexy as you can get. Even the most bland and cookie cutter romance gets it better than that; the point of the fantasy isn’t for everyone to be available to everyone, but for the particular object of fantasy to be available to the right person. And sometimes being able to walk away from the not-so-right person before finding the right one is just as much a part of a proper romance fantasy as the happy resolution.
And then there’s what I actually do find sexy, in regular movies. There are the obvious suspects: seduction scenes like the chess scene in the 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair or the food scene in Tom Jones. One could, I suppose, work that kind of thing into a movie that then goes on to show explicit sex. Maybe someone has. But mostly it’s a scene that plays out something building between two characters throughout the movie: the dancing in the barn scene in Witness, or the scene in Howards End where Helena Bonham Carter drifts off in the boat with the cad, or the scene in Ridicule where Ponceludon’s hand is creeping up Mathilde’s knee. And it wouldn’t be the same if you just plopped a man on the screen with his hand creeping up a woman’s knee in the same way, because part of it is the build up to it, the way they connect over their shared interest in science, the fact that I’m intrigued by Mathilde and her research into diving bells, and all the looks that have passed between them before that point.
So, if I imagine a film explicit enough to be classed as porn, that I’d actually find sexy, it would be, oh, maybe a Merchant and Ivory style film where you actually followed the characters all the way into bed, or a more explicit version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not so much porn-with-plot as plot and characterization with brief interludes of porn. And no one would want to pay to produce it.
The X-rated versoin of The Unbearable Lightness of Being would still need to shell out money for the script, director, and actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Then it would need to shell out for body doubles for the sex scenes, since the regular actors usually either wouldn’t want to do them, or wouldn’t match the get-it-up-in-an-instant standards that I gather porn is used to. And it would lose movie theater venues due to the X rating, lose some of its non-porn audience (like me, actually, if I know anyone had to have actual sex for money for the film to be made) due to the explicitness, and some of its porn audience because it spent so much time in non-sex scenes. I can’t imagine anyone in the movie industry wanting to take the financial risk – well, OK, that’s an overstatement, since I gather there’s a few movies like Henry and June. But I can’t imagine it happening on a significant scale. It’s just more profitable for the industry to put plot and characterization in completely different movies from the ones that are sexually explicit. Industrial porn (as figleaf calls it) will never be my friend. figleaf suggests an alternative of small scale boutique porn; I don’t have anything to suggest there, though, not if we’re talking movies.
What I do like, in the way of art that involves sex, is this:
- Those delicate Japanese paintings of couples in the act, in some nature setting.
- The small bronze satyr I saw in the museum in Athens, Greece.
- Songs, poetry, certain passages in books – words, so long as they have passion or humor – but not the sort of words that emphasize sex-as-degradation or tie it with violence.
Which takes me to Christopher’s other post, the one where he wonders
… where does enjoyment cross the line, become lust? I don’t know, and I think it probably varies from man to man, woman to woman. What are the visual limits for a gay man like myself in a committed relationship? And perhaps most importantly, a gay Christian man? Certainly, pornography is off limits. But what is pornography? Auden defined pornography as “There’s only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ”Did you get an erection?” If the answer is ”Yes” from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.†But I’m not so sure about Auden’s test. It seems to dichotomous. Erections can lead us to remember G-d. To appreciate the wonder of our humanity and our ultimate Good Pleasure.
It’s something I wonder about, myself. One route is simply to reject obvious porn. Then my life is easy – I don’t have any reason to believe I’d even like what’s generally called porn, so I automatically get the merit of avoiding it, right? And there’s no shortage of Christian men who can’t say that. It feels a little cheap to pick the one traditional sin that I don’t have any desire to do, and talk about how bad it is (especially when it’s not affecting me directly). Sort of like what many straight Christians (including some of those porn-tempted men) do to gay people. It’s not as if my sexuality is free of any twists and temptations, just because I don’t happen to exactly share theirs.
On the other side, I’ve encountered some people with a very expansive definition of porn. Dry Planned Parenthood brochures about condoms are porn. Andrew Greeley novels are porn. You should never watch any movie that you can’t also show to small children. Amanda of Pandagon has even been called a pornographer for her posts about sex (and these are decidedly un-arousal-inducing opinion pieces, about as likely to bring you to orgasm as a Maggie Gallagher editorial, though from the other end of the spectrum in what they advocate).
Somewhere in there, there’s a middle line. I tend to think it’s probably best reached by asking yourself the right questions – though I’m not altogether sure how best to frame those questions.
June 30th, 2005 at 5:22 am
This is an interesting post – very much like Christopher’s own post.
I am a visual person, so some pornography does appeal to me. OTH, I much prefer a relationship being displayed rather than “raw” sex, which is a bore, for the most part.
There is a fine line between honest desire and appreciation for physical beauty and lust. When did David sin? When he kept watching Bathsheeba or when he sent her husband to the front lines to die so that David could have her?
My other issue is how exploited individuals are who perform in such films. There are many stories of how ex-porn stars wind up drug addicted, ill, and/or dead.
I’ve thought about posting on porno, too, but haven’t gotten around to it. It would take some time and thought to write, which I don’t have much of right now.
Thanks for the thoughts, however.
June 30th, 2005 at 6:16 am
One truly sexy scene I vividly recall is in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Moliere: he walks into his (much older) future mistress’s room where she is sitting up in bed and slips a hand inside her chemise. That’s it, and both of them are wearing 17th cent bedclothes, ie more than most 20th cent people would wear to a funeral. But it is so hot, because you know there has been sexual tension between them, and that they will have a long-term, complicated liaison.
The trouble is if there is the kind of lead-in, tension, interesting, engaging characters, as you imagine, and then they show actual (simulated) sex, it’s kind of embarassing. Most people probably don’t want to watch their friends doing it, kwim? It’s TMI.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:00 am
Lynn, if you’ve seen very little porn, it does indeed seem foolish to comment about what existing porn is really like. And if there were porn exactly fitting your tastes, how would you know it exists?
June 30th, 2005 at 9:05 am
[...] ;s long and thoughtful post responding to a pro-porn article he read. Lynn responded to it here, and there are a lot of issues one could pick up about it. But in particular, I was struck by the bit w [...]
June 30th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
This is probably out of left field (& maybe off topic, anyway no pink showing here).
No visuals but this got me thinking about erotic _music_ and _prose_. For the most erotic _music_ if not the most erotic _art_ in western civilization (pace Rodin) my vote would be Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde love music from acts 2 & 3. (Yas yas Wagner was among his other faults an unreconstituted egomaniac & second only to Martin Luther in his anti-semitism; none of which has anything to do with the incredible _yearning_, the desperate _seeking_ which always, until the very end, eludes, in the music).
In the words dept., here’s a snippet from one of my favorite authors/wise women Ursula K. LeGuin that really hit me in a quiet way (the two protagonists are both young females):
How Sutty Met Pao
[The scene is one of celebration following the removal from power of a repressive, theocratic world government.]
… It had always been the faithful who gathered in large crowds, shouted praises, sang songs, celebrated, marched here and marched there, while the unbelievers lay low and talked soft. But the rain let up, and people brought guitars and sitars and saxophones out into the streets and squares and began playing music and dancing. The sun came out, low and gold under big clouds, and they went on dancing the joyous dances of unbelief. In McKenzie square there was a girl leading a round dance, black heavy glossy hair, ivory skin, Sino-Canadian, laughing, a noisy laughing girl, too loud, brassy, self-confident, but Sutty joined her round dance because the people in it were having such a good time and the boy playing the concertina made such terrific music. She and the black-haired girl came face to face in some figure of the dance they had just invented. They took each other’s hands. One laughed, and the other laughed. They never let go of each other’s hands all night.
(From “The Telling”)
June 30th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Oh, Jean, that sounds like a cool scene. It’s funny, when I think about it, most of the scenes I find sexiest actually are in movies where everyone’s wearing more clothes (even in those scenes) than we would to a funeral. Yeah, I know what you mean about TMI. Another problem is I have a harder time sympathizing with the relationship if the sex scenes squick me out than if the characters have any other sort of preference that I wouldn’t. This was a problem for me in The English Patient (something about the way he and his mistress came together *really* didn’t do it for me), even though I liked the movie in other respects (and loved everything to do with the nurse’s relationship with the guy who looks for mines). Maybe I’m really better off with the actual (simulated) sex being left to my fertile imagination, to fill in or not as I choose. I do know that I am *not* watching the new Thomas Crown Affair after hearing that it has no chess seduction scene, and instead has run-of-the-mill simulated movie sex. On the other hand, following the characters at least some of the way into the bedroom works for me when what’s shown reveals something about them and their relationship, as in the awkward wedding night scene in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Joe, a friend of mine from my previous meeting once suggested to me, in connection with the lusting in your heart passage in Matthew, that maybe it was best to see that passage not in terms of feeling desire but in terms of an attitude of entitlement. And, thinking about it, I think that fits both my experience and the stuff about not coveting in the Ten Commandments (after all, coveting isn’t so much liking what your neighbor has as feeling entitled to it). So, I’d say David sinned at the point where he concluded he was entitled to Bathsheba, and everything else followed from that. And, yeah, the exploitation issue is a concern.
mythago, that depends. I’d be foolish to tell you I know better than you what’s in porn, since you’ve seen more of it than I. And I think it would be silly of me to lead an anti-porn crusade – unless it’s to support workers complaining of actual exploitive work practices – since I don’t think people should crusade against what they’ve never really wanted to do (well, not counting the stuff I’ve never really wanted to do that actually harms me when other people do it). But, I’ve seen some photos, and read and heard from a spectrum of sources – ads, anti-porn feminists and Christians, porn friendly sex-positive feminists and other porn liberals, and ordinary men and women talking about what they like and dislike in porn, and none of them described a product I’d actually like. At best, I hear about things that make me chuckle (like the “Bend Over Boyfriend” video Susie Bright has praised) rather than wince (like the stuff people choose to promote in comment spam). So, it doesn’t seem to me foolish at all to conclude that there’s not much sense looking there for a product that I’d like, that the industry’s market incentives probably aren’t favorable to Lynn-friendly stuff, and that I’m not really interested in trying to encourage Lynn-friendly explicit photos and videos. Are there really lots of porn videos which spend *most* of their time building plot and setting up tension rather than showing sex acts, and where dialog is one of the best parts of the movie?
Two major caveats, though: First, I’m not saying that *no* photos or videos exist *anywhere* that someone might class as porn, and that I might like. I’ve liked some Mapplethorpe photos in an artistic sense, though I’ve never seen one I actually found *erotic*; I suppose he might have stuff that I’d enjoy (but not likely stuff I’d have any inclination to masturbate to) and that some people would class as porn. And I mentioned Henry and June as an NC-17 movie that I suppose I might like if I ever saw it. Second, and more important, I’m using the definition where porn means videos and photos, and all the written stuff gets classed instead as erotica. And, as I said, I’m not a terribly visual person in my sexual response. I know you’ve said elsewhere that you find the distinction between porn and erotica artificial – and to some extent I agree. So if you want to define writing as also being porn, I’ll allow that that definition would require a major revision of my claim that there’s not likely to be much Lynn-enticing porn out there. Writing’s a more promising venue for combining sex with complex relationships, too; there’s not so much of a market incentive to put your emphasis on delivering particular kinds of sex. Joel likes Anais Nin; would you class her as porn? She’s long been on my list of people to read someday.
To Francis: Words and music have always been the way to my heart. And Ursula LeGuin is one of my favorite writers – cool passage. I haven’t heard the Wagner piece, but it sounds interesting, too.
July 1st, 2005 at 8:24 am
…that comes to mind is the issue of feeling turned on by things you don’t actually like much, which can happen. I think there’s research showing that isn’t unusual for women, and it has happened to me. Kind of the way I intensely dislike the horror genre as a rule, but coming across a bit of it can weird me out – I may feel it’s fake and stupid, but it sets my own imagination down that path.
I think a lot of people would class the stuff Anne Rice wrote under pseudonyms as porn, not erotica, or some of it as each. And I have read some really bad sex in books that weren’t supposed to be either, but bestselling beach reading (Harold Robbins). Stuff that is not only not a turn on, but makes you hate the whole idea of sex and never want to have it!
I haven’t seen the movies you mention, just read the books, and don’t recall finding them especially erotic. The English Patient is so interior I had trouble with the idea of it as a movie at all. I wasn’t crazy about the Kundera. Btw, Jessie also likes Anais Nin, or read a lot of her at one point. I’m trying to think what I have found erotic in movies, and all that comes to mind is that there was something in A Room with a View, that I can’t quite remember, but again, a relatively small gesture. Oh – the movie Heat and Dust.
July 1st, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Lynn,
Like Joe, I’m a highly visual person, but most actual pornography that I have seen is relationship-void, and after about ten minutes, enough is enough really. My imagination can come up with far more sexy scenes, so why bother.
I agree with you and mythago that the line between porn and erotica is at best blurry. Writen relationships and erotic scenes are themselves capable of taking my breath away, among other things. Auden’s poetry to his lover or a scene from Front Runner or Anne Rice, even a carlos williams description of plums has sex appeal.
I agree with you that stimulation and desire do not equal lust; an Orthodox priest friend of mine once counseled that lust is about owning the other for one’s own purposes–coveting as you put it. That’s why I found Auden’s definition less than complete because it equates erection-inducement/desire with porn, bifurcating eros and agape unnecessarily, in my opinion.
And there really is nothing sexier than sitting in bed at the end of the day, as my partner undresses himself after a long day at work. No movie or photo can take the place of such a scene.
July 1st, 2005 at 9:15 pm
not really pertaining to this post but, what does the title of this blog mean? i was never any good in latin…
July 1st, 2005 at 9:39 pm
It means “Please don’t irritate the lions.” I came into the blogosphere through Catholic blogs (reading to see how people were responding to the sexual abuse scandals, when they started getting big a few years ago). So a lot of the blogs I read had Latin names, and I decided to pick myself a Latin name from “Latin for the Illiterati” and came up with this phrase.
I suspect The English Patient is very free in its adaption of the novel, because it’s not that interior a movie. Also not, overall, an especially erotic movie, but it does have a little simulated sex.
July 2nd, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Hi Lynne,
I thoroughly appreciate that some people don’t respond to visual representations of sex, and I particularly appreciate your candor for acknowledging both your disinterest *and* the dilemma that would be involved in claiming virtue for avoiding something you find uninteresting anyway.
The question of *whether* pornography should be made is still up in the air, but the question that it can be made was settled between five and ten thousand years ago. Even if one can suppose it shouldn’t exist at all, it does, and therefore it’s reasonable to try and distinguish that which is at least *less* objectionable and (as when one distributes condoms to single people even though one might prefer that they remain chaste) it’s worth encouraging the development into further and ideally less or non-exploitive varieties.
One of the reasons I’ve been trying to steer clear of the “art” question, as well as trying to claim that “good” porn is “erotica” while bad porn is just, well, porn, is the way the lines go haywire as soon as you look at them too closely. For myself I tend to place porn and erotic on separate continuums — one between art and erotica, and another between pornography and advertising. I’ll have to discuss why I make that separation another day and focus, for now, only on pornography.
I agree to a certain extent that paying someone to have sex is weird. However I also think it’s equally weird to pay anyone to do any form of body work including the practice of medicine, nursing, as well as massage, kissing booths, ballroom dance lessons, and of course prostitution. Not necessarily *bad* but certainly weird. (I should add I’m not crazy about paid public speakers, athletes, or performance either.) I resolve this by accepting instead that it’s ok to pay people to do things they’d be just as willing to do for free either because it pleases them to do so outright or else as a favor to another.
As luck would have it, my preferences in pornography make that perfectly acceptable. I’m not at all attracted to the extreme or degrading forms of sexual activity commonly portrayed in industrial pornography.
But I do like pornography. Sight is a sense, and vision is a sensual experience. Looking at other people who don’t mind being looked at, doing things they’re not coerced into doing, or experiencing things they enjoy, is visually, and thus sensually pleasurable for me. However if I’m to enjoy it I have a personal responsibility to see that it’s made as well as possible where “well” includes consciousness of the actors’ physical, psychological, medical, and economic well being.
However even if I didn’t partake of pornography I feel I’d still have a responsibility to see to those things as, for instance, I feel about prostitution. (That’s an activity I have no interest in, no personal experience of, and only limited social contact with but that I nevertheless feel very strongly needs something more coherent than a “just say no” policy.)
Therefore while I agree that your lack of interest and experience, combined with your moral reservations, makes you less than the perfect candidate to make recommendations, I hope you’ll encourage others to see if there’s anything that could be done to make the experience of pornography more wholesome for it’s subjects, producers, distributors, and consumers.
—
By the way, as far as movies go, consider The Age of Innocence with Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeifer. The representation of a social structure of near-fetishistic sexual repression which couldn’t be considered even remotely healthy has its own pornographic undertones. (For instance the story wouldn’t have been written, nor the movie made, but for the sexual tension and frustration of the protagonists. In other words the sex, or frustrated lack thereof, is entirely gratuitous and the entire story neither educates nor elevates but only stimulates us. We can leave that for another day as well.)
—
Update: you said “I’m using the definition where porn means videos and photos, and all the written stuff gets classed instead as erotica.” The etymology of “pornography” derives from, approximately, “harlots” and “writing about” so both technically and in practice written stuff is expressly porn and visual stuff only by inheritance. I’ll also note that more than one critic of even feminist anti-porn definitions carefully, and perhaps conveniently, distinguish between the two. I should add that the idea that “men like naked photos, women like bodice-ripper novels” appears to be as artificial a construction as the idea that all lesbians either are, or are attracted to, “bull dykes” or that all fetishists like to wear rubber — although of course one can find instances that match any
Figleaf
p.s. I thought I’d posted this comment as soon as I saw your post but I was mistaken. Sorry for the delay. Only the last paragraph is new. The rest appears as I originally wrote it.
July 23rd, 2005 at 9:53 pm
figleaf makes a good point about the “erotica” distinction. Personally, I think the real distinction is the old joke about conjugation. (I read erotica; you read sexually-explicit material; she reads porn.)
I don’t know if there is lots of stuff that would appeal to you; there is almost certainly some, unless you’re claiming to be the one market niche porn HASN’T exploited.
I know there’s a video called Justine which, IIRC, Good Vibes carries, which has plot and shows characters with genuine affection for each other. I don’t watch much visual porn, because it’s mostly heterosexual couples, and that just doesn’t interest me.