Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Notes on Porn

Porn is eerie because it takes the most emotional event in most people's lives and renders it in a completely unemotional way. There's something vaguely scientific about the films, as if they record the effects of crash impact on the human body. Most fetishist gatherings tend to be intensely boring; like listening to bored suburbanites discussing different models of outdoor grills. Perhaps the erotic imagination cannot survive the loss of a cthonian element, the loss of the night world. Western Art has always contained a strong element of pornography, but modern porn has its strongest kinship with the mug shot.

The models are streamlined and hairless and aggressively tanned. They look like hood ornaments or survivors of a nuclear blast. They're humans without the gross organic physicality. Eventually, porn will consist of ghostly x-rays captured on video. Strange that a genre that prides itself on physical obscenity would find pubic hair taboo. Perhaps American pornography will never be erotic until this society accepts death as a fact.

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