Saturday 7 February 2009

Copernicus V Porn

Thanks to Helen for this example of hyperbolic claims on behalf of porn (can it be bettered?):

Pornography’s truths are subversive because they claim that people can empower themselves and create their own erotic norms. Political structures just hate when ideas or cultural products empower people. This is the recurring lesson of Copernicus, Guttenberg, Margaret Sanger, Lenny Bruce, and Timothy Leary.
Marty Klein

So, when you take a break from reading Collapse V to indulge in a little porn you can rest safe in the knowledge that they are equally 'empowering'...

5 comments:

Dominic said...

Whenever I read something like this, I wonder what pulsating portal to a parallel reality the writer got their stash of individual-empowering porn from. I think I was just born too late to see porn as countercultural, or counterculture as inherently liberatory for that matter. Very much a conceit of a previous era.

I was very much into metal around the time of the PMRC, though, and would probably have gone along with claims that the ugliness, vulgarity and dubious sexual politics of metal constituted a valuable and empowering form of self-expression and were an affront to the forces of law and order for just that reason. But then I was about 14.

Benjamin said...

yes, I think certain modes of 'empowerment' do seem to involve the adolescent mentality, my negative version was via Re/Search, Apocalypse Culture et al; although the soundtrack was usually techno and hip-hop rather than industrial. I'd certainly be impressed if someone manages to come up with a better recorded claim for the radical effects of porn, however. You've got to admire the delusion...

Mary said...

I wish I had a dick in my ass right now.

kvond said...

I always found it interesting that de Sade put so much of his narrative in the mouths of prostitutes, pornography (literally, the writings of harlots). It makes one think that there needs at times to be a mixing of lexical components,

Pornosophy
Philography

The Wisdom of Harlots (Socrates's teacher Diotima comes to mind), the sapientia that comes from living at the line of embodied commerce/eros, which literalizes our own condition.

The Love of Writing An embrace of the material-eros ciculations that make inscription a very bodily act, the way that mark-making is seen ultimately as productive differentiation. One writes because on is drawing the body out to its utmost terminus.

nothing said...

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