Just What is It That Makes Porn So Stupid?

Okay, I'll confess that I grew up on porn, specifically of the softcore variety. I fiddled with knobs in order to get the Playboy channel, and sat patiently through uninspired, chopped-up hardcore movies, waiting for the one scene that would stir up the feelings that a precocious child is doomed to struggle to understand, at least in a prudish society. The few boring shots that could be used were always looped three times, so I knew I was doomed to talk back to the screen until I was handed a shred of passion to work with. You may have guessed that I developed a very critical perspective on porn.

I had access to the excellent UVA library a few years ago (a long story involving an ex wife; forget it), and me being me, I read anything I could about sexuality. I got very used to hearing about Foucault in the first few pages. It was particularly interesting to read that, because pornography is a business, it tries to appeal to as many customers as possible, so it tends to include as much as possible. Apparently, I was not the only one who felt that the pornographic experience is primarily one of patient watching and boredom, hoping that my number will be drawn in the demographic lottery once more. But that's not my complaint.

When I feel that my life desperately needs an infusion of humanity, I sometimes do a Google image search for some naughty topic or other. I like to create the illusion that some dark and forbidden corner of the human psyche has not yet been commercialized. I mean, consider: the past demand for "news" on Michael Jackson's case even intensified the commercialization of illegal desires. Television was trying to compete with the relative freedom of the internet. Try as you may, those frightening freaks are still exchanging pictures somewhere, thereby justifying a lot of superfluous and expensive FBI jobs. Pandering to the worry inherent in modern life also serves to increase government power. Sometimes, the evening news suggests "your children are at risk" in every other story, gaining the government's imprimatur. And family values seemed so good. C'mon, I like social stability as much as anyone who has to deal with daily experience.

Invariably, I find that whatever I've been looking for has been mixed up with pseudo-lesbians, dildos, and other nonsense that I see no need for at all. What a great, steaming load of idiotic, commercialized crap. The subject has been made very visible, to be Foucauldian about it. It sucks, to be very Beavis and Butthead about it.

Men whose desires have been invested in breast implants have sold their deepest parts for a few quick thrills.

My life has involved a quest from sex as ideal to sex as a very intense reality. Frankly, it's better to experience the burst of passion first-hand than to try to impose ideals on reality. The second option is just like using a woman as a souped-up right hand. I'm well past the epiphany stage, and so perversity is a useful tool.

My point is that many men never get to that stage. They'd rather accept the capitalist product, a safe and emasculating replacement. President TR was the poster child for such wretchedness. Capitalism, after all, substitutes the relationship of people to things for the relationship of people to people. Men's desires have been sold to the plastic surgeons who mutilate women's bodies to create the illusion that breasts don't hang. They do hang, and it's impossibly sexy. Nothing could be hotter than a non-objectified woman, than her personality over her body. As Thomas Kuhn would possibly have us understand, though, a lot of people's careers depend on our never realizing that.

Viva la Revolucion!