[lbo-talk] Theory of Porn, Hypothesis of Smut

Kenneth MacKendrick kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Tue Feb 3 16:34:31 PST 2004


-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Dawson -PSU

Meanwhile: Sex is fun because of our wiring, and porn is old. What's the point of denying these two plain facts, anyway?

Michael,

I'm assuming that you can tell the difference between Michael Ninn's Latex, a theatrical production in a mental hospital by Sade, and the macabre-erotic writings of Buddhists describing everything evil in the world as being embodied in female form (as the story goes [this is for Kelley] the Buddha gazed upon a harem filled with lustrous female bodies sleeping... to cure himself of desire these figures were imaged to be dead, worm eaten, and diseased... and he became an arhat, a virtuous one). The question here is this: is there a qualitative and quantitative difference between each of these productions? The only similarity I see is not pornographic but masculinist. Men achieve their mature sense of subjectivity through the objectification of women's body and a simultaneous denial of female subjectivity. I'm interested in the difference - because that difference makes a lot of difference: form and content. Maybe we can compromise: pornography is everything everywhere and smut is a product of the 19th century. So, I've changed the title to theory of porn: hypothesis of smut.

I'm planning a nice post of Zoroastrian purification rituals for tomorrow... I'll include comments about sex, fertility, decay, and bull urine.

ken, making a living out of it

Oh yeah... sex is fun because of our wiring? What do you make of 40,000 years of cross-cultural religious history whose manifest writings and practices deny that sex is fun? Even the tantrics despised sex... the main goal was to burn so hot from transgression to explode into enlightenment (yes, they had sex in the graveyard... but it was transgression...). In order for sex to be fun, it has to be good to think. People keep getting killed in battle. Does that mean we're wired for nuclear weapons? (it's not a fair comment, I know, but is it true?).



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