these opinions should never be taken seriously; what’s hilarious, though, is to read them from the hands of people seemingly engaged, for example, in porn studies or psychoanalysis—then it’s intellectual dishonesty, and it pisses me the fuck off.
on pornography: consent can only be present as part of a given film’s narrative, it is not a material object on the screen which we can point to—but if one’s willing to engage with sexuality as a real that exceeds the moving image we need to look no further than one of our beloved classics: 1972’s blockbuster deep throat, about which linda boreman claims we’re “watching [her] being raped”—a truth that doesn’t contradict in the slightest—and why should it?—another one: that we are watching (also) a pornographic film—a film that exists, functions, circulates (and, of course, sexually arouses) as pornography regardless of the fact that she was being sexually violated and we’re watching it—so why exactly should child pornography be excluded from the blessing of being encompassed by the category of porn on the basis that it is sexual abuse material? that it is pornography should mean solely that it can be comprehended by porn studies as an object of analysis, with particular—informal—conditions of production and a specific—underground, black—market, among other factors and specificities.
but it won’t be—because no one wants to compromise the hard-won legitimacy of an academic field and its social currency, and yet everyone in the world with a smartphone and internet access can also, today, have access to the (abusive, sexually violent, pornographic) material under discussion and many, many do… plus, no one wants to actually make the claim that sexual violence is absent from pornography’s formal economy, so i don’t know what the fuck it’s being defended here—besides our own (libidinal, intellectual) complicities and the lies it takes to conceal them, of course.
this all brings to mind kadji amin’s critique of queer theory: its (liberationist, antinormative) political ethics often weakens its methods of historicization by ideologically restricting what objects of analysis should be centered as properly and legitimately queer (because of their political value for queer theory) in opposition to those objects that should be discarded as historically retrograde or taken as unworthy of analytical attention—the difference between a daddy/boy bdsm sexual dynamic deserving of liberationist defense and a pederast/adolescent sexual dynamic that ought to be historically forgotten. what i take to be one of amin’s central points, though, is that approaching social reality under such an epistemologically limited lens might prevent one from perceiving those moments in which the good, modern object and the bad, antiquated object are one and the same, or in which their forms begin to blur—or the very (libidinal) inevitability of this blurring: pederastic relations never died, and even less the power asymmetries and violences sexually driving current queer relations.
snowghoul
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
janainaart
gummygunk
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
titsay
