Here is something I wrote to a female friend (a college professor), about ten years ago, after she had asked my views on porn.
Doing a little good and not a lot of harm: a worthy goal, indeed. Porn, at its best, could serve as something of a travelogue, a sexual travelogue, wherein the display new vistas and strange customs would facilitate the stretching of our erotic imaginations, broadening our conception of what is possible, and possibly deepening our comprehension, empathy, and sensitivity for the other man's or woman's sexual fixations, fetishes, obsessions. And as Mark Twain is often quoted by travel agents,
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Even if porn were reduced, as it usually is, to just a catalog of possible sexual positions and practices, porn would do some good. For example, how sad it would be not to know that oral sex existed. And I am in porn's debt for it having showed me that it is possible to perform 69 while standing, with me holding the woman upside down, her legs wrapped around my neck, my hands clutching her hips, our mouths busy. Indeed, porn might ascend to a true art form, "man's revelation to man," as Northrop Frye puts it. At its best, porn would bring about a transference of erotic imagination and imaginative energy to its readers and viewers.
On the other hand, much like Hermann Hesse who found it much easier to describe and catalog the many ways that one can stray off the path to enlightenment in his novel
Siddhartha, I can list a thousand evils, small and large, perpetrated by porn. For example, I sicken at the sight of a cock leaving an anus and then plunging into a vagina or mouth, without any intervening cleansing. What the fuck were they thinking? Do they think? And now trendy choking and stepping on the female heads fills me with revulsion—and sadness at the thought of these scenes being reenacted in bedrooms across America. In addition, I hate seeing the female attempt to disguise her pain with fake pleasure. Often, the frenetic and overly hung male will plunge too deeply or at the wrong angle, provoking a flash of discomfort across the female starlet's face, which she then covers in counterfeit oohs and aahs of sexual bliss.
Moreover, I mourn the erasing of distinctions. Anal sex is not vaginal intercourse, no more than dressage is bronco busting. I have always treated anal intercourse as a much calmer, cautious, slower, softer and more tender form of sex, entirely unsuited to wild banging, being more of an exploration without a destination. In the world of porn, however, an orifice is an orifice, something to be fucked without pity nor deliberation.
Where to end the inventory of misfortunes and
malo animo which is modern porn? Perhaps here: if nothing else porn should titillate, should provoke an erection or lubrication. But far too often, porn bores us. How is it possible for the obscene, the bawdy, blue, coarse, crude, dirty, filthy, foul, gross, gutter, impure, indecent, lascivious, lewd, nasty, pornographic, profane, raunchy, ribald, smutty, stag, trashy, unprintable, vulgar, wanton, X-rated ever produce boredom? Easy. Just subtract the taboos and make it a commodity. Recall Stendhal's wonderful comment on ice cream:
"This is marvelous! A pity it isn't forbidden."
Today, porn is a commodity. Soon, the government will issue porn checks, just as they issue welfare checks. Then the human race will end, as no one will ever have sex again.
