PR0N VS. EROTICA

Porn has a bad reputation.

The art of slut-communication (Gr. pornos graphia) got a bad name from Victorian prudes.  That's the legend, anyway.  Apparently the curators of British museum became nearly hysterical at the sight of artwork recovered from the volcanicallly preserved ruins of Ancient Pompeii.  This lost Roman culture-city featured graphic sexual art in family dining rooms, churchs, etc.  It was a sophisticated plateau of Pagan civilization that was happily preserved by a sudden blanket of hot lava.  

The recovered art objects were so stimulating that a handful of wealthy, white British Christians hid them in private rooms in the backs of museums.  They claimed to be doing a good deed by keeping this provocative material out of the hands of women, the working class and other sub-human types with notoriously weak powers of self-control.  These early porn-addicts had to have it all for themselves... private collections for private contemplation.  

It was here, the story tells us, that the English word "pornography" was introduced -- to mark the low, filthy nature of this obscene entertainment.  If it wasn't for them we wouldn't have any negative or "dirty" connotations with sexual art.  

They repressed our culture.  We're the victims.

Unless there IS something "dirty, filthy and nasty" about sexuality...?

In esoteric Hindu philosophy the muladhara chakra is a intelligence cluster as the base of the torso (ass, genitals, thighs).  This is a sewage station.  It links us to the unwashed mamallian humping-biting-and-shitting festival that human beings share with their furry cousins.  Both filth and pleasure mingle in this psychological organ.  Our basic regenerative powers is stored in an orgiastic barnyard.  

We give British social conditioning a little too much credit (just as they would want from us!). Perhaps they have only skewing the manner in which we juggle the sacred and obscene dimensions of our primitive biology.  Anyway, stigmas are co-created by those who enjoy them and those who despise them.  Both groups work hard to convince the general population that a word has been stigmatized. 

Stigma is not always obvious.  We have all learned that politically correct terminology is not a way to lubricate discourse but rather the left-wing equivalent of racism -- a minor fascism. 

Consider the difference between "erotica" and "pr0n"-ography (this mispelled word is a traditional usage in cyberspace).

One is comical, sleazy, subversive - masturbatory filth.

One is exotic, tasteful, sophisticated - art.

One goes on upper middle class coffee tables while the other is dealt with the anonymous back room of the video rental store.

The concept of "erotica" tends to mean "pornography that is better than pornography."  Yet it only creates this subtle superiority by denigrating its own roots.  Everyone who prefers erotica to pornography bears part of the guilt for unjustly slandering porn.

It is really pathetic to see Erotica, like "soft porn," desperately selling out in order to gain a modicum of social acceptance & tolerance in the eyes of imaginary cultural police.  The slight reluctance of feelings toward pornography is a crack in which residual sexual repression still thrives inside an open-minded society.  

There is, of course, no general need for porn.  Yet the absence of need is never a rational justification for a negative attitude.  The following expressions exhibit a common minor hostility toward sexuality:

"I'm not against porn, I just can't find any that I like."

"I wish these movies movies had better plots and more interesting characters."

"I'd probably like it more if the production values were higher."

"Does it have to be so graphic?"

"It's not very convincing."

These are not un-interested statements.  They all express a stance of small but willful distance from certain sexual sensations within own's own body.  One or more types of sexual feeling are being artificially neutralized.  This is all too often the case with erotic art and soft core pornography. Afficiandos are attracted to the stimulation but are careful to exclude a certain range of "disgusting" feelings that are generally linked to bestial carnality.  Often this bestiality is subliminally imagined in 

the form of the unseen "gross viewers of filth."  

Think of obscene juvenille graffiti and the scrawled images in public washrooms as an attempt to supplement our culture -- to add a missing vitamin.  

The idiosyncratic British writer Alan Moore – regarded as the creator of the most profound “comic books” of all time – recently took a stand in favour of the world “pornography.” His provocative Lost Girls depicts a synchronistic encounter between the sexually mature and psychologically disturbed women who were once the young girls in popular fantasy novels.  The material is quite explicit and definitely puts the “graphic” back in “graphic novel.” 

While his publishers wished to call it erotica he has taken a defiant and public stance to insist that this is hypocritical.  He will only call the book “pornography.”

There are decadent instincts in some men and women -- seductive compulsions to grasp carnality and hide it, to keep it from public acknowledgement.  In a healthy, better-informed society these spooks will become a small minority -- but their traces linger within us all.  The desire to maintain an innocent feeling of sexuality, free from disgust, bestiality, banality, possessiveness, aggression & lascivious primitivism is a continuation of the same drive which bans books, covers up ancient statues and fixates obsessively on the merely reproductive aspect of sexuality.

So the contemporary feelings that appear to degrade pr0n in the face of erotica are just new names for the normal feelings of the human body in some of its arousal modes. Exaggerated fixation in any of these feelings is just as likely to be evidence of trouble as such fixations in another other area of life.