Heretics' almanac: If porn is heaven, what his hell?

In Norway, where pornography is illegal, Deep Throat is considered a piece of film history, so every once in a while someone wants to show it - for academic interest only, of course. The premise is that you can watch porn as long as it doesn't arouse anything but intellectual curiousity.

Laura Kipnis also has something to say about Deep Throat, now that it's being re-released along with a documentary. Her punchline:

Deep Throat tells a labyrinthic story about sexual pleasure—a labyrinth that is the female inheritance—then magically fixes it. In its coded, sometimes ludicrous, frequently offensive way, pornography does tell certain unpalatable truths, then offers an antidote to them—one that millions can't seem to live without these days.

Is this a terrible thing? According to anti-porn forces, yes. But if reality can't compete with porn, isn't it reality that should be doing the apologizing?

Along with my favorite line:

The usual impediments to acquiring sex don't exist in pornutopia: Forget social convention, sexual repression, your partner's personality foibles. Porn is a world where personality simply doesn't matter: what a refreshing vacation from the daily reality of coupledom in which one partner's personality tics and the other's inability to deal with them is surely the leading cause of couple dissolution, not to mention the sexual anesthesia (or antipathy) that generally precedes it.

(I can only hope that pornutopia makes it on the shortlist of the American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2005.)

It is interesting that very few people will openly approve of pornography. The right is against it because they're against sex; and the left is against it because they think it objectifies women and victimizes (only the female?) actors. The centrist position is that well, it is of course offensive, and especially to women, and who would watch the filth anyway, but there is this matter of free speech and the slippery slope, and we're leaving it to the courts anyway.

I'll openly admit to being one of the fuddy-duds who would rather not consume porno. I once interviewed Seth Warshawski about internet porn, and he offered me a "sample," and I nervously turned him down, much to the amusement of my female colleague.

But it seems to me that the opposition to porn is based on the premise that it isn't right to make people do deeply personal or deeply disgusting things for money. We're upset that producers, directors, and everyone else creates an environment that gives participants no choice but to go along with what they want.

So, what about Fear Factor, where people are reduced to wrecks after being closed up in confined spaces with snakes, spiders, etc., eating revolting and raw body parts from various animals, being submerged in cold water, etc., etc.? Isn't that just as predatory as pornography is? Both depict fantasies that people have, but pornutopia is heaven, and Fear Factor is hell.

And so it appears that hell is fit for primetime TV; but heaven can get nowhere near it.

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