Last month I noticed how much I talk about pornography when a friend complained about the monochromatic tone of my conversations: “Not everything is about sex”, she said.
And she was right. Not everything is about sex. But everything is about porn.
Sex as power, as a space for dominance and social interaction, as an economic trading mode, does not exist in the love making format; it comes raw, violent, basal, instinctive, anonymous, and primary as a biological need. It takes places not in the Victorian bedroom we still reproduce in our bourgeois households, but out on the streets, where it can be noticed and acknowledged, accepted or repudiated. From the latest Nic Minaj video to Cronenberg’s (failed) attempt to portray female hysteria, through the endless flirt between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: it is all about PORN, not about sex. Sex is what happens when nobody is looking: porn is its embodied version into something that exists to be noticed, this way positioning participants in a given social economic loci by subjecting them to classification by observance. Sex is to be whispered about, barely noticed, while porn is this oversized, grotesque body singing loud from TV screens in the broadcasting of cooking shows, soccer games, dance theater: it is all in the body, the human form, the assemble of limbs and muscles and skin, and it is all about pleasuring the taste buds, the eyes, the ears. Pornography is not about sex: sex is about pornography.
The private history of the subject has long become focus of the academic world, inasmuch as it is the primary configuration, the archetype of every process of come-to-being. The limits between the public and private, which appear to be the founding structure of our society, is being now constantly questioned by the use of social medias and the internet: no longer I am able to "be" without "being seen". And, aware of that, one can choose which façade to display: never, or quite rarely, there is a window that allows a peek into their fondness for pornography. While that eroticism is moderately accepted, pornography is dealt with as if deriving from twisted, darkened sexualities which are to be hidden – all this while the world wide web, the same frame which in current society locates the self, continuously bombards users with pornography in its most varied forms.
And while I was thinking about this, it dawned on me that the porn industry might be the most inclusive, most open, and most accepting of all industries, since it allows all sort of minorities to establish in a niche created specifically for them. While that some may argue that there is a ranking system, a price tag which differs to the products of each niche – as in this performer versus that performer, or this category over that one – it is society and consumers, not the porn industry, who ranks them. By allowing all forms of fetish to be equally represented, for example, pornography would be able to bridge private and public on a non-judgmental way, wasn’t for its consumers denying its consumption. The irony is amusing.
It is in the tension between what is done (inside) and what is spoken (outside) that a solution for the demystification of porn lies. As Michel de Certeau poses, “Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name." Let ‘s make it named: porn.
- Published February 5, 2012