pornography, in creativity and mediocrity

If Bush’s win was a night of hot sex, Moore’s failure was the cumshot.

This line from a political post invited my mind to wander to a subject very close to my own heart

: pornography. Let me begin by giving those words a considered, really really objective response:

Oh, ugh!, do I hate the barbaric 'obligatory cum shot' convention and the whole mediocre formulae. Yicky, yicky, yick!

OK, done with that; now for some serious deep thoughts about porn.

I wonder how many people who consider pornography degraded as such realize the way the the industry regulation works. Basically, if you do exactly what everyone else has done before, you are realistically safe from prosecution... but the moment you do something that stands out as original, you can be clobbered for offending community standards anywhere in the country. The result is the equivalent of a book publishing industry where you can get jailed for doing anything but changing the names and faces of the characters... that is why porn is usually aesthetically valueless, not because one cannot put creativity and passion into the presentation of sexual ecstasy. The same thing is true of all form of the sex industry; escort ads turn many rational people off because of their tacky, sexist, stereotyped ad nauseums... what most rational people do not realize is that the escorts behind those ads are in many cases extremely creative individuals who pay the minimum of lip service (ahem) to conventions; they take pains to keep their advertisement stereotyped, because anything that stands out or affronts the unwritten status quo in such pages is a magnetic attractor for the VCs.

Not that most porn directors (and many escorts) deserve better... they are exactly the kind of creatures who thrive under such controls... and when they do challenge the law, it's not to break the artistic boundaries, but to break into some more extreme version of the same tired script, which if established can yield a whole new mine of mediocrity. The result is that the porn industry is filled with tired stereotypes and thirty years out of date sexism. The only exceptions, aside from a few classics, are pro-sex feminist pornographers who somehow are getting a hearing despite the fact that most stores won't carry them. They, I mean specifically people such as Veronica Hart, Candida Royalle, and Violet Blue, should be heroes to those concerned with individualism... those in fairness the Eris Society did generously invite Mme. Royalle to speak at their last gathering.

Pornography was once indistinguishable from and continuous with art; I remember reading a reference to an ancient temple of Aphrodite where the statuary had to be cleaned off in the morning because one of the male worshippers had embraced her very passionately in the dead of night. These are the same statues proudly displayed in the art museums of the world, neatly locked away from the arousing purposes they were meant to have, did have, and do have... one of the crimes of our modern art education is the systematic conditioning of young students to safely, asexual, 'good student' attitudes to their art history books. This totally missed the point of art and is fully as destructive of aesthetic as well as sexual education, both of which are devastations that should each be taken seriously.

We need to recreate the ancient erotic arts, with the full benefits of modern technology under a liberal polity. Even today, Japanese hentai anime only the most accessible form of a culture decades- at least- ahead of America in the expression of the erotic imagination... largely, because modernity hit Japan while it was still a largely Pagan, instead of Christian society. Those who wish to think of a libertarian future should consider the massive social changes that would result from the freedom of open sexuality... and regard this not with nervousness, but as a challenge for the creativity of the human spirit to express itself after centuries of Tsarist tar paper. This is a challenge to the sexually uncomfortable; it is an equal challenge to those comfortable with today's mediocre conception of sexuality.

my regards,

Pyrophora Cypriana ))(*)((
"not all those who wander are lost"

Post 1

Thursday, November 4, 2004 - 11:23pm

Fascinating post, Jeanine. I am inclined to accept your statement that "Basically, if you do exactly what everyone else has done before, you are realistically safe from prosecution... but the moment you do something that stands out as original, you can be clobbered for offending community standards anywhere in the country."

I have seen only two pornographic films, but I understand they were representative of the genre, and I have wondered why someone did not do the obvious: Unite passionate love with passionate sex in movies that would be enormously moving and enormously sexual. There would be lines around the block to see such movies.

But I assume, from your statement, that they would "offend community standards." I remember the outcries against "Last Tango in Paris," which is the closest I've ever seen to what I'm suggesting.

Barbara

Post 2

Friday, November 5, 2004 - 12:43pm

Basically, if you do exactly what everyone else has done before, you are realistically safe from prosecution... but the moment you do something that stands out as original, you can be clobbered for offending community standards anywhere in the country.

*LOL* Oh yes... How well I know this fact... How well I know it. *LOL*

What's even funnier, is you folks acknowledging the ironic truth in this statement, and then trying to assemble a mob armed with torches and pitchforks to chase me to the castle doors at night, in the rain... All for merely speaking out loud what no one wants to admit they also think. *LOL*

Post 3

Sunday, November 7, 2004 - 5:30am

Jeanine, Barbara,

I very much agree that there ought to be movies that "unite passionate love with passionate sex". Personally I find the comparatively tame sex scenes between two characters who are obviously very much in love (or at least share a mutual admiration) that appear in somewhat more "mainstream" movies far more erotic than hardcore pornography that divorces sex from any kind of emotional context.

MH

Post 4

Sunday, November 7, 2004 - 8:57am

As an artist who recognises that the naked is the natural, and that humans by nature are very sexual beings, I fully agree with contention of the ordinary being able to get by, while the inovating get chased with pitchforks, so to speak..... porn is merely the term used by religionists to demonize the human sexuality - and if there is to be a refutation of sexuality-as-evil, then it has to be attacked NOT thru the 'freedom of speech', but thru the 'separation of church/state' aspect of the 1st amendment, pointing out that the 'community standards' are violations of that and as such thenselves unconstitutional.....

Post 5

Sunday, November 7, 2004 - 11:26am

To all here-

I greatly appreciate your words; I am very pleased to see Objectivists willing to see in sexual art something of value, worth defending; thank you.

Mme. Branden
and Msr. Humphreys-

While I would love to see the kind of cinema of sexual love you describe, I do hesitate at what I believe to be an irrational horizontal reification in our culture's view of sex; we are usually asked to divide sex between the 'casual', minimal of emotion, and the romantic, which is contains serious emotion exclusively in the context of sexual friendship (I affirm Chris Sciabarra's contention that Rand's refusal to define romance in this sense evasive). In my view, there are problems with our culture's wisdom, both in the implied theory of emotion, which assumes that emotions string their value an epistemological direct object in the most narrow sense, and in the assumption the only seriously sexualizable value is friendship; whereas in my view, art, intellect, competition, social relation and many other values of spiritual significance and great emotion are also sexualizable; in fact, a great deal of Pagan and Renaissance art, and art in general, simply does not make sense outside this context. I make a note about this because just as strongly as I would call for admiration for high sexual passion, I contest a teleology of the heights of sexuality that implies love (i.e., sexual friendship) is its only experience. It is my view that sexuality is a mode of experience that can be invested in all aspects and manners of life (I follow Nietzsche's philosophy and Pagan tradition and practice), and that our restrictions of meaningful sexuality to romantic relationships is a trailing aura of the Church's restriction of moral sexuality to procreative relationships. Mind you, I have the very highest regard for romantic love, and I am not desiring to level it, but to raise other heights to their properly equal level. But I also have the highest regard for other erotic pursuits that are not identical with romantic love; my own vocation is one example.

I would like to take the time to cite specific examples in modern pro-sex feminist pornography, because the cinema you do not see does exist in marginalized forms. but at the moment I have other affairs. I do hope to get back to this.

regards,

Jeanine Ring ))(*)((
stand forth!

Post 6

Sunday, November 7, 2004 - 6:44pm

So, do people here think the pornography/art dichotomy is a false one?

I personally define pornography as any images, sounds or words which are specifically designed to be a masturbation or sexual stimulant. A typical XXX smut film easilly fits the criteria of this definition, but what is to be said of an exquisitely painted nude figure, such as those that Michael Newberry creates for example? It seems to me that artist intent is key here.

(Edited by Pete on 11/07, 6:50pm)

Post 7

Sunday, November 7, 2004 - 10:25pm

Jeanine, I've read your post twice, but I have to say I simply don't understand the point you wish to make. Would you try again -- and present it more simply?

Barbara

Post 8

Monday, November 8, 2004 - 5:22am

I have another view. There is much greater tension between a couple on screen who make love with their eyes and body language, and hidden meaning in words. Maybe Ive seen too much, but I find myself bored by so called sex scenes in soft or hard porn.

Whereas, in a movie such as Casablanca where Ingrid Bergman with glistening eyes, tells Bogart (I dont have the exact quote but its something like this): "Kiss me, kiss me as if its the last time". Of course we find out three seconds later that it *is* the last time. Or the sex scenes in The Piano, like the one where the Harvey Keitel character finds a hole in Holly Hunters stocking and touches her skin through the hole.

Ok I'm off to take a shower.

John
(Edited by John Newnham on 11/08, 5:31am)

Post 9

Monday, November 8, 2004 - 9:05am

Msr. Newnham-

I don't dispute your own sexual desires; these things are inextricably individual.  Yet if you mean your view to be a general truth of aesthetics, I would argue this is the eternal false dichotomy; the bodyless depth of straight cinema or the depthless bodies of pornography.

A rational erotic cinema would not shy from a full pallete of modes and degrees of sexual explicitness and would have both serious narrative structure and sexual entertainment value. Just as we've learned to see spectacle as the death of culture, and self-interest as the death of principle, and capitalism as the death of authenticity, so we have learned to see the sexually explicit and the seriously romantic as incompatible. But why not both, integrating two aspects of excellence? There is no reason one cannot portray such tension as you describe as part of a narrative which also a times explodes to absolute sexuality; one must be careful in imagination to disregard the associations and material of a limited, stagnant present and keep a chaste disregard for what merely is. And look to the past;here are Hellenic and Hellenistic statues more sexually explicit than anything on the XXX shelf and far more powerful in eros taken seriously. Most do not experience such statues this way, but such is the entire purpose of 'great culture' training- to learn the crimestop of viewing the David and not seeing a god in sexual glory. I myself would likely get thrown out of the Louvre considering what experiences I would exhibit around classical reliefs and statuary (except that in Europe, here a superior culture, they might understand such things):

What I want to see is a sculpted twin statue of lovers locked in full sexual embrace, larger than life in the style of the Pieta, elevated above the viewer's head to that one is forced to look up and see sexuality naked in full sunlight, and painted as the Greek statues were in their own time (I would suggest a vivid but nonnaturalistic pastel colour precisely to offset our automatic reactions to bare skin tones in existant pornography). When someone has the courage to do that, there will never again be honest voices raised too loudly against 'smut*'.  There will only be an outcry against the inferior rubbish we have today, and the unconcealed hatred of the Christian, the bourgeois, and the patriarch. That would be the day when the liberation of Sexuality herself would begin anew.

It makes me almost want to learn sculpture... but I'd never have the patience. There need to be dedicated, erotic neo-Romantics in all of the arts again.

regards! {and I admit, I do like the word "smut" (|||shiver|||)}

Jeanine Ring   ))(*)((   - "not all those who wander are lost"

(Edited by Jeanine Ring on 11/08, 12:34pm)

Post 10

Monday, November 8, 2004 - 10:23am

John: "I find myself bored by so called sex scenes in soft or hard porn."

I agree, but I think it's because they are so much alike that we feel we've seen them a hundred times before -- and we have. It is rare to non-existent for a sex scene to show any imagination, any first hand concept of the potential beauty of the sexual act.

Barbara

Post 11

Monday, November 8, 2004 - 12:00pm

Barbara, yes! The *potential* beauty which coming out of anticipation, longing and imagination, makes the act so much more. In some rare and well crafted cases, the final act itself does not even have to be seen. I remember one scene in a recent movie where the characters, married to other people and not wishing to leave propriety behind, never touched, but caressed each other with their eyes and body language.

John

Post 12

Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - 6:57pm

Hey Barbara,

What is your opinion of the treatment of the sex scenes in the Passion of Ayn Rand film?

Post 13

Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - 8:31pm

Msr. Newnham-

Forgive me if I misinterpret her, but I think Mme. Branden is saying that the portrayal of sexual love in explicitness is potentially beautiful; I do not think she is saying that it is the potential, ie., anticipation of sexual love as opposed to explicitness which is the particular beautiful aspect.

As for myself, I think anticipation has its beauties, but so does explication. I think the dichotomization of explicitness and sensuality is precisely the same mistake as arguing that "deep" art stays away from action, spectacle, etc. The same impulse which holds that Star Wars or Raiders od the Lost Ark or Peter Jackson's version of Lord of the Rings must be aesthetically flawed because there is action, suspense, star destroyers and scimitar flourishes and flaming balrogs, argues that the proper presentation of sexuality is restrained as such. It is a version of the art/entertainment dichotomy, and the claim that art is really better entertainment than entertainment fails both intellectual honesty and the box office. I would say what is more true is that, as Rand implied, the great Romantic works of art contain all of the aspects of a thriller combined with the complex care and seriousness of the 'deep' novelist. It is the same in sex as in the element of spectacle in theatre. A rational artist will make use of every degree of sexual explicitness when called for; that degree depends upon the medium and the meaning of a particular work of art. When the particular nature of the artistic work is sexual, explicitness should not only be acceptable but often encouraged; for some artists, this is their particular passion and style.

It is not civilization, but barbarism, to want to paint fig leaves and cloths over the sexual bodies of lovers and gods in Renassaince paintings. The same is true of modern sexual art forms, including cinema. The fact that modern cinema, i,e., 'pornography', in a Puritanical culture, mostly does portray sex in the images of what Christians and the bourgeois mind believes it to be is an argument for a nobler spectacle of human sexuality, not to fear such spectacles.

This is what sexual art should be about, and if we do not see this as sexual, then our age has given us sadly discoloured eyes. Why should we fear to create such images and name them honestly sexual, as both the Church and the lords of the Renassaince knew them well to be? Why should we fear to go further and paint her joined with Ares in sexual ecstacy, perhaps as lovers caught in Haephestus' net as Homer describes her, with all the sight of a Botticelli? And why should our paintbrush not be the videocamera- or the live stage?

My regards,

Jeanine Shiris Ring ))(*)(( - "not all those who wander are lost"

Post 14

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 1:40am

To John Newnham,
I couldn't agree with you more John. The most beautiful expression of love expressed sexually in a movie that I have ever seen was in "Summer of '42". Although it was clear they were making love, the act was not made explicit- to do so would have ruined the whole point of the movie.
The point being missed here is that sex is an intensely private act, because when we make love to a lover, we are expressing our own value of ourselves first and foremost, and the value of the loved one within that. But those emotions - which are the most private and sacred of emotions- cannot be portrayed by just visualising the act itself, because all the viewer can see is the act, not the expression of value. The expression of value can only be conveyed by facial expression, eyes and body language, and to a certain extent the accompanying music.
The only time I have seen anything close to explicit (I don't watch pornography, so I am going on mainstream theatre here) I have felt the acute embarrassment of feeling like a voyeur, like those people who have surburban "swinging sex, couple swapping" nights, watching each other. It's pretty sick.
Cheers, Cass

Post 15

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 5:35am

Cass, hello. I agree with you. The focus in porn movies from soft to hard to *underground* is utilitarian. There is a clear goal, which is to cause a physical response on the part of the viewer.

In any genre, when the goal becomes more, is where potential for greatness comes in. When the goal is not *just* physical titilation or arousal, but an emotional, and/or intellectual response, then it becomes interesting. My preference these days is to look for the nuance. That is what I remember.

John
(Edited by John Newnham on 11/11, 5:46am)

Post 16

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 5:40am

Jeanine:"Forgive me if I misinterpret her, but I think Mme. Branden is saying that the portrayal of sexual love in explicitness is potentially beautiful; I do not think she is saying that it is the potential, ie., anticipation of sexual love as opposed to explicitness which is the particular beautiful aspect."

You are right Jeanine. I did misinterprett Barbara. I wasn't only trying to explore a dichotomy between explicitness and implicitness. Partly I am expressing a personal artistic preference. And partly I am expressing a desire to see better cinema.

John

(Edited by John Newnham on 11/11, 5:43am)

Post 17

Friday, November 12, 2004 - 9:37am

(Edited by Barbara Branden on 11/12, 9:49am)

Post 18

Friday, November 12, 2004 - 9:47am

Pete: "What is your opinion of the treatment of the sex scenes in the Passion of Ayn Rand film?"

I disliked the scenes between the Caroline and Nathaniel characters. They were "cookie cutter scenes" -- that is, we've seen them so many times in so many other movies that they have lost all meaning; and they add nothing to the story or the characterizations. The scenes between the Ayn and Nathaniel characters were much better, much more imaginative; and they did significantly add to the characterizations.

Barbara

Post 19

Friday, November 12, 2004 - 10:00am