Literate Perversions

It’s a Thin Line Between Art and Sex

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Cherry Torn pours drinks on the Upper Floor at Saturday’s “Thin Line Between Art and Sex” event.

In my unfortunately abortive attempt recently to promote non-crappy porn, one of the positive obstacles that I ran into in trying to get enough articles up was the fact that I suddenly realized that there was actually a surplus of stuff to write about. What I said about there being an excess of crap still stands; whenever you wander into the world of smut, be sure to bring a snorkel so you breathe under all the shit.

But nevertheless, things are a lot better than they used to be; in addition to being ass-deep in personal tsuris, one thing that stalled me was that I just couldn’t decide who to write with. There’s good reason to be optimistic about where we’ll be with our porn in twenty years. [Read more…]

My Pro-Porn Week, Pt. 2: Kink.com

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Logo for Kink.comSo, on Monday I announced that as my way of commemorating Morality in Media’s White Ribbon Against Pornography Week, I would write a post every day this week about my favorite porn, stuff that in one way or another I think is hot and makes the world a better place.

Obviously, I’ve already blown that somewhat ambitious schedule by failing to get an entry in yesterday or Tuesday. My apologies about that; it’s less because I’m flaky than because I’m undergoing a lot of tsuris right now, which includes a girlfriend in the hospital while she gets turned into a cyborg by the doctors. (Long story.)

But anyway, I’m going to keep plugging away at this and get these entries in as best I can. Today, my choice of prime porn: Kink.com. [Read more…]

Pushing Porn During Anti-Porn Week

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Were it not for the efforts of Joe.My.God., I would be blissfully unaware of the fact that according to the group Morality in Media, the week October 31 – November 7 (which is in fact, eight days, more than a week) is White Ribbon Against Pornography Week, in which Good Americans are supposed to devote themselves to combating “the floodtide of pornography pouring into our nation’s communities, homes, and children’s minds.”

Thanks a lot, Joe. [Read more…]

Chutzpah!

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The classic example of chutzpah, the Yiddish word for brazen gall, is that of a man who, after being convicted for killing both his parents, throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan. Everyone in every culture in the world has experienced chutzpah, but to my knowledge, only Yiddish nails it so precisely. The beauty of so many Yiddish words is that you don’t have to actually know what they mean to understand them completely when used. Yiddish is one of the most emotionally onomatopoetic languages ever invented.

Another example of chutzpah that rivals even the archetypal parricide is that of the Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn who’ve recently gotten into a snit because “scantily clad” women ride their bicycles on the bike routes along the bike paths on the streets running through the South Williamsburg area:  [Read more…]

"The Price of Pleasure"

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A new anti-porn documentary, The Price of Pleasure, has just been released and is being promoted via a few small showings across the country. There’s been some buzz on this one for a while; Chyng Sun, the director, has written about the work in progress in left-wing outlets such as Counterpunch for several years, and I’ve seen allusions to it by both Robert Jensen and Gail Dines. For those of you who have either seen or heard about Noam Chomsky’s recent anti-porn statements, that video apparently comes from this scene.

As iamcuriousblue points out, there seems to be a huge divide in how the film is presented in its press package and the tone set by the trailer and clips on the website. The press synopsis explicitly makes the film out to be one that looks at porn through a filter of calm, unbiased rationality:

Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations. At the same time, the film examines the unprecedented role that commercial pornography now occupies in U.S. popular culture. Going beyond the debate of liberal versus conservative so common in the culture, The Price of Pleasure provides a holistic understanding of pornography as it debunks common myths about the genre. [Read more…]

Review: “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity” by Robert Jensen

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The following review was originally posted at Sex in the Public Square, the web community that I co-founded with Elizabeth Wood.

Getting Off:Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity Pornography and the End of Masculinity
Robert Jensen • South End Press
185 pages • $12.00

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfaction with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

It’s this last point where the differences between Jensen and I become too obvious to ignore; yes, I can go on for hours and hours about what irredeemable psychic flotsam the great mass of porn is, and could probably fill several volumes thicker than Jensen’s on the mediocrity, body fascism, poor production values, labor abuses and sexism that dominate mainstream porn. These are all things that people of good conscience should find troubling about porn as it exists today. And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.

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Doin’ It With the Dinos

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Every so often, after 13+ years spent browsing all the finest obscene materials that the Internet can deliver, from ASCII pr0n to Usenet stories to downloading full feature films via the wonder of torrents, I get jaded. Or maybe arrogant would be a better word for it.  In short, I start to think that I’ve seen it all.

Fortunately for my sense of humility, it’s at times like this that karma comes along and hits me with something like this.  Of all the things that I’ve masturbated to (and they have been varied and plentiful), I can safely say that a woman doing three pterodactyls never once crossed my mind.

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More Lost Girls

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Dorothy caught in the tornado of her own ecstasy.

Dorothy caught in the tornado of her own ecstasy.

As if just being Susie Bright didn’t make her cool enough,everyone’s favorite sexpert has an interview with one of my other literary heroes, Alan Moore, about The Lost Girls, which I blogged about before.  Susie gets to have all the fun. Dammit.  She’s also put together a Flickr gallery of Melinda Gebbie’s work.  I’ve never seen Gebbie’s stuff before, but the excerpts from The Lost Girls are breathtaking examples of erotic art.  The problem with trying to portray eroticism is that you’re trying to capture an incomprehensible mix of contradictions; our society is big on the idea that mind and body are two entirely different things; the body is just a meat vehicle for the mind, which is the real “you.”  Sex gives the lie to that.  Men’s tendency to name their cocks and call them the “little head” is a good example of how divorced our sense of self is from our physical being.  Gebbie’s art — for instance, her depiction of Dorothy captured in a swirling orgasmic “tornado” that turns her sense of reality upside down — is sensual, colorful, and shows how sex merges the fantastic and the real, and how inseperable it makes your body and mind.

This is going to be a hell of a book.  I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

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The Lost Girls

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Swamp ThingLike a lot of comics fans my age, I had my view of what comic books could and should be completely changed when AlanWatchmen: the opening page of issue 1, as we watch Rorschach walk through the blood of the Comedian. Moore took over Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1984.  Moore took a character that was at that time a bad joke, in a book that was slated for cancellation, and recreated it from the ground up, resulting in one of the most critically-acclaimed titles of the time.  Moore’s Swamp Thing stories are still damn good, but they’re dwarfed by the body of work he’s done since, such as Watchmen, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention V For Vendetta, which had been published in incomplete form in England before DC hired Moore for Swamp Thing, and should be considered one of the classics of modern anti-authoritarian literature.

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