Porn Is Necrophilia
Why does so much pornography look like it was shot in the examination room of an alien mothership?
Anaesthetic fluorescent. Cream walls. Glass and leather. All the cheer of the room where you sit before your solicitor tells you some very bad news.
The women: practically flayed, already down for it, cycling through the routine with automatic, professional care.
Under surveillance of the porn consumer, the body plays to the rules of a certain gaze. In super-realistic clarity, nothing goes undisplayed.
The woman’s body is a kind of information. More pixels means more data. The logic of high-definition is that if you can see more then you can, well, see more.
Over-lit porn presents sex without ambiguity, or discomfort, or not knowing; without the tease, without the tipping points at which waves stop, and gather, and suddenly cascade in a new direction. Under bleaching luminosity there are no pockets for threats to hide, no traps sprung, no surprises along the way.
The erotic, as experiencing in real life, is complex, but one of its motors is the closing of distance. The invite, the dissolving of protocol.
Porn bounds over and erases that distance; delivers us to the destination immediately, safely. Hyper-descriptive titles and thumbnail previews promise that nothing will happen that we’re not expecting.
The pleasure, and work, of moving through space (aka intimacy) is erased.
It is my experience that despite their well-documented obsession with sex, young men (porn’s primary audience) are also sort of terrified of it, because young men are sort of terrified of showing themselves.
Pornhub is not bad because it’s sex, it’s bad because it’s not sex.
If, here, we consider sex to be not just a choreography, but also a feeling, an atmosphere, a tethering of the otherwise disparate.
Tangent: In the 16th Century, the Church split. Animating the conflict was a disagreement over how signs work: did a stained glass window or a crucifix refer outwards, to the divine, or did it just represent itself? What, exactly, were the faithful actually worshipping?
Catholics were accused of prioritising the body over the spirit; the material over the spiritual. They worshipped “idols”. Dead things. London’s Protestants went to see plays where male characters made out with poisoned skulls.
I was going to use this as a metaphor but then I remembered “skull-fucking” is an actual term.
Without blood or heart, the ride is polite necrophilia.
There is the thing, and there is the image of the thing, and fanatics kept freaking out because they couldn’t figure out how to separate the two.
Hot Jane Doe lies on a steel table.
Handheld hovers.
Dissection begins.
NB: this is about a specific popular porn aesthetic/ethic. Obviously there are erotic film-makers who prioritise atmosphere, feeling and context. They are heroes.
