Pornography doesn’t make sense.
The plots and relationships are contrived, meaningless, and nothing gets done. If the plot involves a deliveryman, he is the worst deliveryman. His cock winds up in your pizza, and he ends up fucking your girlfriend. If the plot includes a mechanic, he is the worst mechanic. He shows up to your house, your wife makes a poor joke about pipes getting cleaned, and he fucks your wife which maybe coincidentally fixes the toilet. If he fixes anything it’s through magical means involving the direct application of his penis.
A woman gets her hand stuck in a sink. How? It doesn’t matter, it’s stuck. Someone comes up behind her, maybe a family member, maybe an intruder, maybe a friend, and fucks her silly. Her hand comes out. She’s flustered, covered in cum, but relieved. There will be no consequences.
A woman is in a bus. A man rubs up on her, gropes her. She tries to move away, but another man boxes her in. Soon 5 men are groping her. She falls to her knees, is stripped naked, forced to suck or fuck a flock of cocks. Around the rapey gangbang no one pays attention. A car full of passengers stare into the middle distance. No one cares.
There are as many scenes as one can imagine, immediately available, free online. Any scenes one cannot find immediately may be paid for or commissioned privately. Never, never will the pornography make sense.
In pornography social and physical mechanics break down because they revolve entirely around sex. Nothing is ever done properly because the structure and plot serve as a vector for fucking. When sex itself isn’t the fetishized activity, one finds other sexualized activities at the core of the world. A teenager rubs his feet all over a door. A woman sits on a thousand balloons, popping them all, ruining a birthday. No one moves to stop the woman. All gasp and behold the activity. Their lips are crimson. The cake is anemic. No one lit the candles. The teenagers are all 32.
All elements of normal socialization or activity in pornography can be considered an artifact. Everything in the video exists in thrall to or as a medium for the communication of sexual or fetishistic activity. The world around the sexual act becomes vague, low resolution. Sex drips from every single act, infests every aspect of the world. Nothing could get done in this world. It must exist in fantasy.
The fantasies depart further from reality. A million tentacles piercing every orifice. A woman the size of a city eating an army of men, ants crawling down her esophagus, ecstatic in the press of peristalsis. A wall made of genitals one presses into, experiencing impossible ecstasy, screaming as their brain becomes a single orgasm.
All elements of experience dissolve into a slurry of objects reassembled into forms imposed by libidinal thrusts. Reality becomes a dream and the relationships between all things are mediated by sexuality.
In similar fashion follows narrative itself.
Narratives, broadly, are an attempt to communicate ideas using technologies of storytelling. Relationships are created which invest the reader or viewer in some amalgam of human traits they can identify with. These amalgams, characters or objects engaged in actions and interactions, push through a string of obstacles and activities, accomplishing goals or moving through metaphors in such a way that ideas are communicated. To effectively communicate these ideas, elements of the world around the action of a narrative are left out: in a well-crafted narrative only what is relevant remains. Sometimes this leaves the resolution of the world surrounding the action of a plot low, however the point is, ostensibly, communicated, and the purpose of the narrative technology upheld.
In pornography, the narrative is secondary to the sexual act. In the narrative, the sexual act might carry another purpose: a point about human nature, about sexuality, or simply to retain a reader’s interest. Regardless, the purpose of the world revolves around a specific point; the piece of media exists to absorb a consumer’s attention and command a desired response.
We come to a fundamental point: all media or communication exists to command a desired response.
The human environment shifted radically in the past century. The majority of people globally live in urban environments. Human beings, broadly, live in habitats that are mostly human-made. They live in artifice, among artifice, and most of the inputs and symbols they receive daily are artificial. Increasingly too, humans live within media-centric environments. Personal relationships are mediated by exogenous symbols and words, people live within narratives presented them wholly from media objects.
People are flooded with information of artificial origin, selected by artificial means, in such quantities that they cannot possibly make sense of it all on their own. As the natural world and natural inputs are replaced by created ones, man finds himself swimming in an environment where both the objects he exists among and the narratives about those objects are fabricated to command a desired response. Because there is tremendous diversity of purpose in many of the created objects and bits of information, there remains a tension in the individual. He has space to decide for himself the meaning of some of the information and objects he is surrounded by. The failure of many of the narratives supplied to string comprehensive meaning between the granted pieces of information in a consistent fashion leaves space for people to consider the words and narratives as objects-themselves, increasingly the primary objects of their lives.
However much of the world appears absurd, increasingly in low-resolution. Most of the world exists for some purpose, increasingly the objects within it were created for purposes, and many of these purposes are outdated, outmoded, incomplete, uncertain. They communicate ideas that are themselves low-resolution compared to the ones more recently generated. The data that contributed to the old narratives and objects dissolved, are no longer available, or are derived from absurd sources.
So we come to a point: man’s world, both the objects in it and their meanings, is increasingly created by men living in a world created by men. The objects within it and their narratives are crafted toward specific ends that ignore the world around them for the purpose of exactitude, and as such natural laws and referents dissolve into objects of narrative wholly divorced from natural context. The bits of information granted as the base pieces of reality are strung together by narratives that are increasingly comprehensive as the range of available objects narrows entirely to artifice, and the whole of one’s world is shaped toward ends. As the environment one lives in becomes increasingly digital, the natural dissolves to the point where one may never exist outside an artificial frame wholly populated by artificial objects. The entirety of the world around these narratives may become meaningless, senseless, but it will not matter to the individual living within the crafted world, for whom there is no other set of objects or understandings.
Food flees from nourishment into a set of scientifically refined and engineered traits, the experience of salt, fat, and sugar that satisfies cravings rather than hunger. Stories flee from meditation to spectacle, with all the parts of a story, say a villain with Malthusian pretenses and no theory to support him or combat him beyond “killing innocents is bad”, filled with a million references and the technical frame of a narrative but which communicates nothing. A man sits alone in his room paying a girl to masturbate. His heart rate spikes when a tokenized sound rings out. She moans his name and for a moment he believes like he’s significant. The words in conversation become meaningless as a machine attempts to learn the appropriate context for speech rather than its content, and an individual finds their desire for conversation satisfied by an algorithm without their needs driving them to attempt socialization with a human being met. All of the cravings or desires of life are being manufactured in a way that does not meet needs, because production is not about the satisfaction of needs. It is about the satisfaction of cravings in a way that captures capital rather than providing human solutions.
All problems become problems of capital. The libido is captivated and solved for in a way that accumulates money rather than solving the human condition. The company that produces food is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. The company that produces sex is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. The company that produces health is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. By this mechanism, the entirety of the world around capital starts to degrade, fall into lower resolution. The market no longer solves for human necessities, but increasingly the demand of money and ownership itself. The market in money diversifies, assets become increasingly abstract, intangible. Food increases in price, vast swaths of the middle class priced out of the notion of starting a family. The stuff of life dissolves into dreams. Objects themselves become abstract from their meaning, form divorced from function. The body becomes an object mutable as all else, something liquid, then something barely lived in. The world is experienced as through strings of graphical user interfaces. References are unbound from referents. Desires are unbound from material constraint and their satisfaction is a right, the only right left.
What is the difference between pornography and literature?
Pornography is the satisfaction of a craving unbound by reality as an end in itself. It is a solution for libido that contains no nutrition. It is a closed loop, entropic soup, a semiotic slurry designed to capture desire without solving for it. Literature is the attempt to transmute desire into meaning. Literature produces nutrients from baser matter.
- 11.17.2021
