Dear D ,
Oh my goodness, are there still young women around lecturing their friends about doing porn? I didn’t know they existed anymore—I thought your entire generation was off starring in an Eon McKai film and showing your star spangled tits on altporn sites. Or is this a whole new crop of anti-porn feminists, a backlash backlash backlash as it were? How thrilling! Dworkin’s dead, long live Dworkin!
Porn is often classified as something that intends to elicit a sexual reaction without further merit—meaning if you give someone a soaker in their gusset without making them write a paper about it, it’s porn. So basically dessert without your vegetables. Potter Stewart was the member of the U.S. Supreme Court who famously said, “I know it when I see it” and though this quote is truncated from the original, to me it is the perfect description of this medium, meaning one of its defining qualities is that it’s incredibly subjective.
Of course, when you apply a subjective opinion to a subjective medium and additionally that opinion belongs to someone in a position of great power, you quickly understand that this insightful statement is rarely used to make a point about porn’s subjectivity and peoples’ personal right to it—it’s used to regulate it based on the presumption that there is some universal concept of pornography and, moreover, that porn is inherently detrimental.
I once interviewed a dominatrix who had a client obsessed with navy blue cable knit tights. Nothing but navy blue cable knit tights would do for this gentleman. Perhaps he’s even reading this right now and getting an erection. What are anti-porn advocates to do about a guy like this? Ban all films made in England in the mid-’60s?
Here’s another little anecdote: a couple of years back, a few of the gals who do burlesque in this town were shocked, shocked I tell you, by the fact that I used to be a stripper (newsflash ladies, I also worked at St. Cinnamon. Trust me, the uniform there was much more offensive). I just about peed my pants laughing when I heard this. Good lord, neo-burlesque dancers are strippers themselves, merely profiting off the fact that enough history has passed to make how they’re doing it less objectionable. Which brings us to another concept that distinguishes porn from art: the passage of time. If you apply time, so really just change, and the concept of “I know it when I see it,” well, you can see it’s unlikely we will ever come up with a satisfactory and enduring differentiation between porn and art. Definitions and opinions of both these things are subject to so many variables.
Nevertheless, is pornography a form of art? Do you need to know because you think it’s less reprehensible for a group of artists to paint you than for some guy who hands you a well-worn line and a business card on the subway to take a picture of your split beaver? And for the end consumer of the product, is it more socially valuable that they look at a nude representation of you while stroking their chin rather than their dick? Does there need to be value beyond sexual release, and if so, how do you determine if that value is merely slapped on as placatory window dressing?
D, if you want to get into being photographed without your clothes on, I say have it however you want. Whatever you do, remember that pleasure and desire, guileless and unpretentious, are timeless, so whether you’re throwing it up on a gallery wall or at the Pussycat theatre, if you like what you do, it shows.
