You wrote:
>The coding of desire as desire for knowledge, and that of knowledge as
>guilty >and sexual, are of course the staples of pornography, non-Marxist
>Western >philosophy, and Christianity.
You and I have been arguing for years, so you already know how thick I can be. Could you unpack this little ofcourseness for me?
And then you wrote:
>In other words, for a man to (desire to) know what a woman knows (that is,
>to become the Object of Man) leads to his destruction, or so says _The
>Vanishing_, in its misogyny and homophobia.
*The Vanishing* is a misogynistic and homphobic film?
And the woman stands for all women, and the men for all men, and their relations for all relations? Does every film you watch deploy its characters as indices to their gender assignment? Every relation as an index to structural meta-relations? Does every woman confront every man as objectified subject? If so, what in women is destroyed by this dehumanisation? I mean women in the West do live a lot longer than men. What is Sluizer referring to when he kills girl-as-girl and boy-as-girl - and is it really the experience of girlness the doomed boy is seeking to feel?
And do films really warrant this kind of attention?
A good film, but. And, thanks to you and Mike, I'm confirmed in my smug self-congratulation for not bothering to watch the Yank version.
Oh, and I have no idea what purpose 'money shots' have (I'd never heard of 'em) - nothing to do with identifying, I'd have thought - mebbe an index to the ideal sex-partner's lust for we men in general - she doesn't just want us and our ministrations, she wants to see, feel and taste our seed as well?
I certainly don't think we boys are supposed to identify with boys in porn films, as (and I may be giving more away about myself than I'd like) I can't imagine all of us are as enormously endowed as the lads who featured in the flicks I've seen. You gotta get personal when it comes to discussing how porn works and, while I may want to imagine myself as the person the lusting lass is addressing with her antics, I don't think I'd do it through the male actors, who unfortunately look and act nothing like my self-concept would have me do (I'm a worse looker and better actor, for a start). In truth, sex is not a particularly good-looking business (men are prettier playing soccer, and women are prettier, full stop).
And, whilst your 'final mystery'/'ultimate erotic gesture' angle on pussy-shots sounds about right, extreme close-ups simply take away too much context. And Playboy and Penthouse don't do that much so's I've noticed. One's imagination does need something to work with - something to distinguish it from a gynaecologist's casebook, at least ... which is sorta how my rather surprisingly extended engagement in this thread started - I maintain we have to build a subject around the object to get the benefit - a ridiculously narrow ideal-type, perhaps, but something a lot more human than an organ.
I hereby resign from this thread, lest I'm entering the realm of gratuitous self-disclosure rather than that of constructive discourse ...
All the best, Rob.
Cheers, Rob.