ALL THAT PORN STUFF

In a country where Stormy Daniels, glamorous “porn” star, makes more sense and has higher standards than our unelected president, it seems necessary to reflect on the nature of this “porn” classification.  I hear about food porn, jewelry porn, house porn and so on.  Evidently it has something to do with desire, wanting something but not being able to get it.  But the hard-core use of the word is usually about something humanly physical.  This time I’m going to reflect on it in terms of the human ability to echo in one’s own body what is happening in someone else’s, even if they aren’t there — only depicted.

Porn is not the reality of acting an imitation or actuality in order to give other people a pornographic reaction.  Actors “doing it” for the camera are not echoing.  If they are being forced to do it, either by threats or out of need, that’s the moral atrocity of it, the part that should offend us all.

But many people who are addicted to porn are not reacting to the sex, but rather to the context.  They’re getting off on the transgression of the standards of “nice people”, the cheap thrill of offending them.  If there is a law against what they are doing, breaking that law is what turns them on.  Consider the content of Trump’s perversions:  urination, which is meant to be confined for hygiene reasons; or having his bottom smacked with a magazine that features him on its cover, a child’s punishment mocking the imagined honor to say modestly it is “nothing.”

Many years ago I think it was Kozol who told us that when he taught in the ghettoes of Boston, the kids insulted each other with sexual or gender-assigned taunts:  sleeping with one’s sister, wearing combat boots, making money from sexwork.  But when they really got serious about inflicting pain, they spoke of nappy hair and fat lips, the emotional reality.

If desiring sex with the same gender as oneself were not defined as unnatural and bad, it would not be pornographic.  Everyone must eliminate unwanted materials from their bodies, but it is only pornographic when sanitation and culturally-imposed privacy are ignored.  Or the person imagines that others would be horrified, like that superintendent that pooped on his rivals’ athletic field.  Somewhere in the head is a little gizmo that acts as some offensive order-keeper so the thrill of defying authorities registers as pleasure.

This has been a hard time for people who were raised to stay fully clothed so emphatically that the simple human body of all ages and conformations becomes a source of arousal.  At first the commercial human body porn was mostly young beautiful females.  When young beautiful men began to show up in perfume ads and “realistic” romantic stories,  the public taste went to full-frontal het penile interaction — white, then black — or the thrill just wasn’t there.  

That’s about when violence showed up.  Because mirroring witnessed violence through our own bodies is pretty effective, esp, if the victim is innocent but aggravating, like a smart-aleck child or older woman.  When Chris Meloni pioneered rough sex with the same gender in “Oz”, it was not an accident that it was in a penitentiary.  I go back again and again to ask why in the US children are supposedly kept innocent about sex, but not about violence, while in France the cultural standard is to cloak violence while accepting sex as natural.

And I think about the problem of persecuting Tempest Storm for an act with big dogs since there was no law against bestiality on the books.  Of course, she could have been prosecuted in civil court as offending or damaging someone.  That’s what happened with O.J. Simpson’s murder case.  But today’s tolerance, or at least confusion, about sexual matters tends to be economic:  how much payoff is involved, esp. when the actions were seminal, creating a child who was then destroyed before birth.  Law and order in our times often seems to be mostly economic, no doubt because the amounts determine the percentage the lawyers get.

But there is a political angle.  If the society as a whole tends to disapprove of illegal immigrants, then the idea of offending proper behavior of “good people” by forcing small children out of the arms of their parents because they have broken a law will create a “frisson” of emotion.  When Trump stands at a loudspeaker and proclaims lies, racial abuse, revenge, mockery and other desires we normally keep quietly to ourselves, he is being pornographic.  He didn't really do anything himself.

He shadow-plays wealth and frames it in terms of gilt and sex, secrecy and illegality, an imitation of bogus law and order that is economically forbidden and excessive.  His secret is that he can never see himself, since he’s inside himself looking out, so he doesn’t know how obscene he appears except to those like him, who use him as an excuse.

But pornography doesn’t have to be about breaking laws that are held dear by the legislators whereever they are.  The pornography of self-righteousness is also potent, imagining the praise they will get from rescuing small fuzzy animals, virtuous old women, or small dying babies the way Mother Theresa did.  We go looking for the suffering, the damaged, the traumatized, but only as a pornography — not a reality where we are present and effective.  Check out YouTube.  As they warn, you will have emotional reactions but luckily they mostly emphasize the laughter, even when what’s portrayed has a dangerous edge to it.  The real tragedies headline the news.

Pornography works in chiarascuro, emotion in the extreme.  It’s Manichean, binary.  Extreme virtue has to be established so that the violation of it will be worse, but it’s all stereotypes: a giant gorilla carrying off a nearly naked blonde.  Unluckily, our recent history has offered many ghastly atrocities for use in pornography.  We sit down at our glass screens willingly to reflect on them.  I’m just as complicit, with my taste for stoic Scandinavian procedurals played out against a dark landscape full of gripping cold and unseen danger.

We never see depictions of quiet clerks sorting through the precedents and strategies of justice, but they are always there.  The abiding question is how to define justice for lives that are appalling for their choices and often, like Trumpists, living stories that don’t really exist except as emotional titillation.  Can we tolerate a just world?