Pornotopia.
Wednesday August 29, 2001
That place where “all men… are always and infinitely potent, all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.”
Steven Marcus coined the term in his 1964 study of Victorian porn, The Other Victorians, which I do not have to hand at the moment, and so I’m quoting Keith DeVries, who quoted Marcus in his review of Martin F. Kilmer’s Greek Erotica in the August 1995 edition of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.
Gotta love that internet.
Susan Sontag (see below), in her seminal essay on assessing pornography critically, “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967, collected in Styles of Radical Will), likens pornography to science fiction—not because both are paraliterary genres (genres that have proven themselves more than capable of creating lasting works of breathtaking art which, nonetheless, have yet to be taken seriously by academia, keepers of the literary canon) (though yes, her argument does make that point about both—ancillarily), but because both take place in a heightened or hyper-reality. “The ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed—these occur almost as often in science fiction as they do in pornography,” she says, which immediately begs the question of what science fiction, exactly, she’s been reading, and where can I get some? —Leave off for a moment how science fiction frequently fetishizes its “ahistorical” status with detailed timelines of future histories yet-to-be, and sidestep her assertion that science fiction, like pornography, is one of those branches of literature that aims at “disorientation, at psychic dislocation”—it’s clear she never took into account Star Wars novelizations; then, one might imagine her sniffing, “That’s not science fiction,” which is a back-handedly funny punchline to a very old debate I don’t want to go into now, as I fear my point is lost utterly—wait—I think I’ve got it—
It’s interesting to think of pornography as a fiction of location. Like science fiction, or fantasy in general, the place where the story occurs is as important as the characters and the plot (such as it might be). Moreso, even.
Pornotopia: think of the endless dreary castles of the Marquis; the yacht and islands of Pleasure Bound; Anonymous’s isolated country estates and chateaux filled with randy aristocrats who think nothing of schtupping their own daughters and sons and siblings and cousins and chambermaids and stableboys and even, on especially perverted occasions, spouses; the too-comfortable suburban houses filled with kitchen tables that don’t bruise your thighs or your back or scrape the floor, shag carpeting that never chafes, phones that never ring at inopportune moments (unless it’s to signal more randy fun); the eternal jet-setting party filled with descendants of those randy Anonymous aristos lolling languidly about the pools in Belize or Tangiers— Certainly, a lot of energy is spent on imagining the participants, and the things they get up to, but as much is spent on laying out the space that allows them to get it on. And not just the physical space, either: the emotional, the social, the political—it’s a world like ours, but subtly different, here, and there, and there. And not so subtly. (And not just in the size of the average dick and lubricity of the average cunt.) (Think, to name but one gross example, of the one-stop contraception and STD-prevention vaccine in Mark Aster’s My Friends, the Allens—and how that might have affected the overall arc in the plot which leads to the narrator and Pat deciding to have a kid.)
But think also of Kilmer’s quote regarding the Greek erotica he’s studying: “it is… something of a misnomer to call these representations ‘relations between human beings.’ They are rather juxtapositions of human bodies, parts of bodies, limbs, and organs; they are depictions of positions and events, diagrammatic schema for sexual ballets—actually, they are more like football plays than dances.”
Bodies moving in space; the space which allows, facillitates, encourages that sort of movement. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t want to live there…
(And it’s not that I’m going to be this prolix or hardcore all the time, you understand. All this, I think, is just by way of me fumbling for something of a mission statement. Ick.)