Porn

Porn looms large in the public superego. Every now and then someone turns around and reminds us “oh yes, and this porn. It’s not on!” Well it is on, and it’s on everywhere. In this week’s Sunday Times David Baddiel wrote an article ‘Too much free porn is a big concern – for pornographers’. Shortly afterwards Jaqui Smith’s husband was forced to apologise publicly, not for looking like a cross between George Galloway and David Brent, but for having his way with two pay-per-view channels at the taxpayer’s expense. I remember my philosophy tutor at University writing a paper about whether pornography could be art (he concluded that it couldn’t, but gave no thought – if I remember correctly – to the question of whether art could be pornography). Beyond that, there’s no end of sociologists, psychoanalysts and journalists telling us that pornography is seriously bad for us. To live in an online world of hairless men, breasts the size of small clouds and ponies who fancy women is to decide to take the blue pill – to agree to live in a fantasy land, the Zizekian Desert of the Real, with reality proper disappearing into the distance like an anal bead down a MILF’s shitter.

In the same way that computer games supposedly make kids impervious to the stark brutality of violence, overexposure to pornos apparently leaves adolescents and adults unable to form meaningful relationships. The fact that no teenager ever marched into a school with a raging boner and shagged thirteen pupils and two teachers before sucking himself off is irrelevant. Porn works in more subtle ways than that. Porn gives us…a dodgy idea about what sex and the world is all about. God forbid.

I, frankly, disagree. I think porn is a perfect example of what the world is all about. You know that age old joke (still appearing in stale American coming-of-age comedies) about how ‘wrestling isn’t real’. (Invariably some pimpled anemiac leaps up to defend the obese-erotic charade, having his naivety remorselessly shat upon by both his tormentor and the audience in process). This joke relies on one overarching presupposition: that everybody in the audience already knows wrestling ain’t real.

When the pretty brunette waitress smiles and takes your order in a restaurant, returns half way through the meal to ask how it’s going and then thanks you at the end for visiting the place, do you really think she fancies you? Do you actually tell the truth when your elderly neighbour asks how you are (or when anybody asks how you are, for that matter), or how school is going, or how the family is? Of course you don’t. Our world, the very fabric of our most intimate interactions, is comprised of an endless series of meta-fictions and cultural narratives that we have ourselves assembled. We suspend our disbelief because otherwise we’re in the Matrix. And everyone knows, deep down, that the Matrix is shit. It’s virginal, it’s intact, it won’t do anal.

‘But, but…’ I hear you. ‘Porn stops people forming proper relationships and gives them the wrong idea about what good sex is like’. Not for men it doesn’t. Fuck. Porn gives men a great idea about what good sex is like. The real point is - what is anybody – anybody – suggesting as an alternative type of education. Sex education in schools is determined to leave the urethra fundamentally uninteresting, identical in diagrammatic form to the magma vents on photocopied geography handouts. I suspect the same person is commissioned to draw the pictures in all secondary school textbooks. His name is Ernie and he likes pterodactyls best. Where’s the boisterous sperm, the wanton egg? With no other education to go by, and nobody making any attempt to provide any, porn is as good a guide to exciting, fun, humorous bedroom antics as you’re likely to find. What would you rather, boys and girls, to fuck like porn-stars or fuck like drunken teenagers? There’s a big difference between having meaningful sex and having better sex. Porn isn’t capable of solving any problems related to the former (and might well create some if monitors are left on when they shouldn’t be), but sex should be a jolly old romp, the longer, the noisier, the sweatier the bettier. 

‘Watching too much porn’, my mother would say ‘will seriously warp your idea about what the majority of the female population are actually like’. The idea here is that not all women are promiscuous, perennially horny and rubbery to the touch. Fine, I accept that. But what if I’m into, say, fat women, or older women. What if I dig the little imperfections –the real norks, an unruly pubic expanse, wheelbarrows of cellulite? (I don't). Go a bit beyond that and you’re just looking at normal women (or, indeed, men) naked. That’s not warping my idea of what’s under the bonnet at all. I crave the real! Allow it me! I get that this doesn’t really address the main issue, the ‘ethical’ issue – but we’re dealing more with the conceptual side of things here. And anyway, when straight men do gay porn are they being exploited? What about when they call it ‘a job, like any other’?

I would like to draw a parallel here. In our culture, particularly (though not exclusively) amongst women there exists a prodigious and seemingly unstoppable fascination with celebrity. Those girls who routinely buy Grazia but forbid their boyfriend access to PornTube will be distressed to hear that they are peddling the same intellectual and cultural ills as their nut-crushing darlings. Serial voyeurism? Mindless indulgence? Self-aggrandisement through one’s imagined proximity to a coveted object? (Whether it’s a designer cunt or a designer handbag it doesn’t really matter, you’ve still got an addiction to something vacuous, irrelevant, low-brow). The same goes for blokes too, I’m afraid. You can’t knock The Hills if you’ve bashed one out over a home-made starring the main girl.

Libidinous normalcy is a myth. Fetishes for the peculiar (or, more commonly, the grossly stereotypical) are things ready to blossom well before the porn and don’t disappear when the ‘perfect relationship’ comes along. The sooner we accept this the sooner we can start being honest with each other about matters of the flesh. Reality can be as fake as these orgasms.

For a list of compelling reasons to disagree with me, most of which I agree with, read this excellent article by Edward Marriott in The Guardian: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7