“Do you watch porn?” Stephanie asked me. Among the titles in the small bookcase at her incall apartment were A History of Pornography and How To Make Love Like a Porn Star.
I admitted that I did.
“I like noise,” she said.
Like many of my generation, porn has become an vital expression of my sexuality. I had little access to pornography growing up. My college filtered our Internet access, so my encounters with sexually explicit material were titillating but sporadic. It was only after college that I was able to absorb the cornucopia of porn available online. In absence of any formal sex education, porn has instructed me. Its unabashed physicality fuels my lust. Its presentation of sex without affection appeals to me. Having watched it only furtively, it feeds into my double life. Its exploration of taboos fertilizes my dirty mind. It offends bluenoses and feminists, feeding into the transgressiveness that characterizes the erotic.
There is no better window through which to view the darkness of eros than porn. Camille Paglia writes, “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.” I just saw a statistic that 88% of the scenes of the most popular porn depict physical aggression, of which 94% is directed against women. Outside of a few niche sites, intimacy and affection are absent in porn. Men and women fuck with impunity, liberated from the strictures of religion and bourgeois prudishness. Porn is nihilistic. Doing what it takes to produce the “money shot” is the only normative principle.
Some concerned citizens lament a “pornified” culture in which sex is commoditized and reduced to its brute physical components. This is precisely what I find so compelling about porn. Others complain that porn is unrealistic. Yes, it may be unrealistic in its anatomical acrobatics, but it taps into those dark forces that animate sexuality. It penetrates the mysteries of sex. It exposes romance as a chimera. It highlights the aggression that accompanies the sexual act. It reduces sexuality to raw fucking. It exalts personal pleasure over concern for the other. Women are defined, and define themselves, solely by their sexuality and their capacity to satisfy male desire. Orgasm, as evidenced by male ejaculation (the cumshot), lies at the heart of sexuality. It’s addictive qualities demonstrate the coercive power of sex over our own lives. One insider in the porn industry called it “the playpen of the damned.” “Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,” wrote Susan Sontag in “The Pornographic Imagination.” Porn documents the unleashing of those forces with brutal honesty.
Lutheran Guilt 