THE VULNERABILITY OF THE HUMAN BODY

Terrierman  terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/‎  has been running sets of memes he calls “house porn,” or “car porn,” meaning a series of impossible objects of desire, which is one definition of porn when used in reference to human sex: imagined access to a particularly desirable body.  Patrick’s “objects of desire” are innocently (more or less) materialistic.  This is not always the case when people speak of porn.  I’m coming at this from several directions at once.  (When don’t I?)

One is through sci-fi in a roundabout way.  Remember that sci-fi story I told you in which an alien sex-worker took off her turban, revealing a Medusa-like squirming mass of not snakes but a kind of worms, which took the customer to unimaginable heights of orgasmic pleasure but left him nothing but a husk?  I was thinking this might be about the experience of drugs like heroin.  But then I read an article in the New York Review of Books called “The Footed Void” which was about octopi, a wonderful natural history account of the animal, that mentioned “octopus porn” in Japan.  Naturally I googled, blundering into overwhelming images plus the information that this is only part of the genre called “tentacle porn,” which overlaps with Japanese manga.  I must warn you that Japanese conventions about some categories of culture are QUITE different from mainstream USA.  And they have a love/hate relationship with sea creatures. But mainstream Americans do not veer off from pornographies of violence and gore, not even the sexualized ones that they pretend to censor, which increases their value.  

We are gripped by the most recent “disaster porn,” images of the Oklahoma tornado that demonstrate the vulnerability of human bodies and constructions.  On the one hand we don’t want to be exposed to the horror of it, but on the other hand there’s a kind of icky curiosity and maybe a notion that knowing about the worst will protect us from it.  It’s like driving past a car accident and becoming a Lookie Lou, getting in the way of emergency responders even as we try to process what happened and how bad the outcome really is.  Could we be next?  What preventive steps should we take?

Once I visited neighbors in the midst of a show on their 4-foot-wide screen which gave a fine view of a botfly hatching from a man’s thigh.

Botfly larvae hatching from a head.

He was a scientist who had infected himself on purpose to research the critter, repulsive and painful as it was.  These watchers were old people with multiple health problems and the voluntary horror on the screen seemed somehow to tell them something about their own physical vulnerability.  Medical pornography is rampant in our country, combining the vulnerability of our bodies with the promised bliss of relief if we just obey the doc and take the med or authorize the invasive procedure with menacing equipment or actual surgery.  (No matter the expense.)

The vulnerability of flesh -- created by age or disease or war or natural disaster or accidents -- does not have to involve explicit sex to be pornographic but will almost always hint at the emotional intimacy that is an expression of bodily defenselessness normally a factor in sexual acts.  Allowing someone such deep access as to become painful or even damaging is sexual, but it is also “power-over” -- an expression of trust.  Without trust and permission, it is rape.  At that point the law must be involved, society must object -- but they won’t in the case of war or law enforcement.  Care givers are also in an ambiguous position.  Hemingway wrote a horror short story about a soldier with his limbs blown off, unable to talk, the victim of a nurse who treated him like a big doll.

An enforceable law is one with a clear boundary between legal and illegal, but the actual facts of vulnerability, permission, intimacy, damage, emotion, and so on are simply too blurry to ever be the subjects of easily enforceable laws.  So now we rely on warning systems:  “Look out!  There is cussing on this program.  People take their clothes off!  This account of amputation will show actual examples!”

But then we also use such warnings to give ourselves permission to see XXX movies, “torture porn” (all simulated), “splatter movies” (all CGI), and even “snuff movies” (we can only hope). The Hollywood geniuses are hard-pressed to come up with scary creatures like Alien or Scissorhands for the junior high kids who are the best customers since they are so electrified by their own bodies.  

There’s another direction the media also explores for emotional impact that is less recognized: amping up the vulnerability of the victims.  So the emphasis in the news reports on disasters and battle aftermaths is on the most vulnerable: the children, the old people, the hospitalized.  The most shocking image in the octoporn I saw was a little cartoon candified pastel toddler with huge eyes and impossible breasts in the grip of a rippling monster octopus.  Suddenly one saw the link with a molester of infants and baby beauty queens like Jon-Benet -- responding to that soft tenderness, the impossibility of retaliation for transgressions.  The freedom to damage the vulnerability that they hate in themselves.

Some think of exhibition wrestling as a kind of porn where huge scary men, seemingly impossible to hurt, appear to be deliberately damaging each other so that we see they are not invulnerable after all.  What about the porn of the insulting woman, who tortures the football team with her low opinion of their prowess?  Is she hoping someone will take her on and prove her vulnerability?  The football team might think so.  It would be possible to make a case that most of our sports events involve porn on some level, even without bringing up cheerleaders or group showers.  It’s arousing and meant to be exactly that.

For every porn there is a phobia.  For every Lookie Lou searching the internet for photos of dismembered victims of violence, there is someone who won’t even look at the general newspaper story about the event.  “It’s all so depressing,” they say.  Meaning they don’t want to think about it -- only feel and then only pity. No impulse to take action.  This vulnerability phobia/paralysis becomes a means of control for those who are a little tougher.  If war is only “depressing,” no one will think of the profits, the manipulated political dynamics, the actual facts of battle strategies.

Media who deal with physical or emotional vulnerability, particularly in movies, use anticipation, curiosity, vengeance and the like to weave suffering into their films, whether invented plots about resistance, capture by enemies, torture and the like -- or real footage in documentaries, which tend to be more after the fact of the event.  It is the difference between the building-up of psychological suffering of the ballerina in “The Black Swan,” and the total surprise and shock of the Boston Marathon bombing -- except for the bomb-makers who enjoyed all the anticipation.  Which is more pornographic?

The moral element is what seems to make the difference, and in America morality is intensely focused on sex.  This means that to most people the sexually stressed dancer is pornographic but torn-off legs are just pitiful.  Sex means avoidance lest one might be captured or abused.  Torn-off legs mean a need for emergency response, like tourniquets, so one goes towards the victim.  The dancer will be stigmatized even as a victim, but the marathon runners will be admired in their struggle to master prosthetics.