At this very moment there is a street festival outside and music comes to me through the open window. Stolidly dousing, some jazzy Italopop or poppy Italo jazz, who knows. The difference from what I’ve heard immediately previously couldn’t be any greater: psychedelic rock from the 1960s, synthesizer pieces from the early seventies. Old, but still refreshing – and intensive.
Whatever became of intensity?
Of course, the observation that many things have become stale and boring is a subjective one. The repetition of the same lulls us equally as it’s filling us with boredom. This is both reassuring and oppressive. Whoever feels the oppression tries to break out. He’s looking for the contrary extreme, the excess.
How is that involved with pornography?
When in 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing issued his work Psychopathia Sexualis (the “naughty passages” were written in Latin), he mentioned among other things an old Russian nobleman, whose overwrought sexual drive could only be stimulated by extreme perversions. A weak erection was only possible for him when a boy child defecated on his chest. Wow!
And suddenly we are on the subject of pornography! Because such an old Russian nobleman is in everybody of us. We’re soon getting used to all that sex, we need stronger stimuli, again and again. Because the mere watching of people having sex is no longer sufficient: it started with blowjobs and vanilla sex, then anal sex joined, then double penetration, gaping, ass-to-mouth became an innovation of the 1990s: we’re not too far away from excreta. There’s not much left to reach one’s threshold of disgust, and when I was looking at scat-smeared faces in my tumblr dashboard I suddenly knew: this is too much for me.
So what can we do?
Let’s return to the initial question: where did the intensity go? Permanently exhausting inhibition thresholds can’t be a solution. And although pornography is latently omnipresent its social status couldn’t be lower. Probably this is leading to a possible answer: if we try to produce and look for high-quality pornography, a pornography that still leaves something of the mystery of sex, something that’s surprising and exciting: this would be able to leave the endless spiral of disgust that porn has entered several years ago.
Quality makes porn a serious thing
In previous decades, when porn was still avant-garde, it had an educational claim: remove the taboos from sex by applying porn to society. The objectives of that time were not sufficiently achieved. Porn has disappeared in the red light district of smut, it’s deeply trapped between the deadly competition of its producers and society’s hypocrisy. The only way out, IMHO, is quality. Quality that’s creating exciting pornography without disgust. In an industry that pays its performers well and doesn’t make them whores. Porn that’s treating its actors and consumers with respect. Pornography that is not made just for ‘adults’ but also for grown-ups. Perhaps then we won’t become such an old Russian nobleman who needs somebody to shit on his chest so that he still feels something.
Post Image Source: Psychopathia Sexualis title page. Taken from Wikipedia
