Pornography Is A Washed-Up Unicorn
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 "Where everything is available, nothing is sacred."
I was thinking about this sentence today, which popped up in a dream I had, when it occurred to me how boring most pornography has become, even though I rarely seek it out. When I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, pornography was a rare oasis of titillation found in an old, smutty paperback at the bottom of a friend's father's closet, mouldering alongside forgotten shoes and boxes of photographs. It sneaked in as soft core French films in the middle of the night with the sound on the television turned down low. If I was lucky, it would turn up in a magazine, normally kept on the highest rack, already looked through and discarded among the others on the lower shelves. Pornography, so elusive to those of us too young and too sheltered to score some for our very own, had to be mentally hoarded away in what few stolen moments we could find with it when it found us.
It was not the quality, but the promise of verboten knowledge, that sickly sweet twist in the gut, that made these rare brushes with pornography seem divine. I remember a book I once found, a well-read 1970s paperback with a comedically staged photograph of woman in a french maid outfit on the cover. For days, I made a ritual out of taking my secret find out of its hiding place, crawling into the back of the basement storage room, and reading a few pages of its lurid story. If I read it now, I would probably find it laughable, but then, when I feared that even the sound of my own breathing might block out the sound of incoming parental wrath, it was the filthiest piece of pornography I had ever encountered. It was remarkable.
Pornography now clogs up magazines, television, e-mail, and college-kid-heavy bars every weekend. It's in thousands of teenage cell phones in thousands of high schools. I've seen so many varieties of porn on the internet, both in images and text, that I am more surprised when I come across a practice or extremity of practice that is new to me than by what kind of hooved creature is being abused. Pornography is more plentiful and easier for me to find than almost anything else I can think of, or at least it was the last time I bothered to check. I don't bother to check anymore. Pornography, the merest possibility of which used to inspire the hushed silence of a religious service, has become boring. In fact, it no longer bores, because you have to notice something in order for it to be able to bore you. Porn has now gone so far as to fall off my radar when it's not flashing its tits at me from some unwanted pop-up window on my computer screen or the side of a city bus.
This isn't about the sacredness of pornography, though. This is about the sense of sacredness it once inspired in generations of children; this is about the sense of sacredness a lot of things once inspired; this is about availability, over-saturation, ease-of-use, and profanity.
I was out with some old friends the other night, and one of them brought up this story about a unicorn. (It might be from a recent book that he has been reading, in which case this idea might have originated from someone else. If it belongs to someone else and you know its source, let us know in the comments where it can be found.) The idea is that there is this unicorn in the forest. Everyone knows about the idea of unicorns, but no one has ever seen one in real life until the first time someone stumbles across it. The stumbler is awed by the experience and tells the tale of this magical creature. After he shares this awing experience with a few of his friends, word begins to spread about the unicorn. The next few people are pretty excited about this unicorn, and they tend to wax rhapsodic about how enchanting it is over pints at the pub, but actual awe is now reserved for things like gryphons and gorgons. It doesn't take long before people organize school field trips, permission forms are signed, and children feed the unicorn apples and carrots over the fence. The unicorn is still an event, but it is a staged one now; the bloom is off the rose, so to speak. Eventually, the guy who used to mend the fence and keep things neat doesn't anymore, and some corporation discovers a vein of a minable resource on the land under the unicorn, and since no one's bothered to come look at the unicorn in a long while, they airlift him to a shabby zoo somewhere in Europe looking to increase its ailing reputation. No one cares about the unicorn anymore. The unicorn is just another depressed creature eating hay behind a fence next to other depressed creatures eating hay behind fences.
I used to sit in far back corners of libraries wherever I was — elementary schools, high schools, small towns, cities — and pour over books about art or philosophy or whathaveyou. The aura of distress around these volumes, the creak of their spines and snap of their laminated covers and sweet smell of slow decay, instilled in me a sense of reverence that emanated viscerally upward from my belly. I thought about how these books were written by people who might no longer be alive. The words in them had been created by authors' hands on paper with pens and typewriters. I could feel the heart and dedication sitting weightily along every chipped, wooden shelf where the librarians had long forgotten me, and I hunkered down into knowledge that was meted out at a rate determined by the speed at which I could read and find new volumes on the shelf. There was no more than what could be found, and I was awed at the finding.
Just recently, a younger cousin of mine who is still in high school moaned about an essay she was asked to write using only physical books for reference. "Why would they do that to us?" she asked. "Anything we want is already on the internet." It occurred to me that she was used to finding what she wanted, not finding what she found. I felt uneasy at my Job-like resignation when I thought I guess you find what you want now, which is akin to his "There is no new thing under the sun". There is an element of mystery in slow information for which search engines make me nostalgic, and I kind of miss the days when porn was tucked behind muscle magazines on the top shelf.
Reader Comments (11)
Very interesting to think of porn as sacred, but I get what you mean.
We've become so numb to things that used to shock, titilate and interest us, and because those things are easy and almost acceptable to find now (I mean, Oprah was talking about porn a few months ago). Those things don't get us off, so to speak, anymore so we have to turn to something bigger, stranger, more shocking. I think this explains the phenomenon of celebrity gossip, which has become so mean and destructive. And the phenomenon of McMansions.
Once something is commonplace, it loses its perceived value.
I need to clarify that I do not think porn is sacred, and it never was for me. It had that feeling of being sacred.
I am actually anti-porn. It titillates, but unless I can know that the individuals who gave of themselves in front of the camera aren't high to get through it or aren't being abused or aren't reacting to something else that's negative to put it out there, I can't take part in it in all good conscience.
At the same time, porn is not nearly as public and mainstream as it used to be. Marilyn Chambers' death should remind us of a time when porn seemed to be about to leap out of its box and become commonplace, with all the drawbacks and rewards of everything else that is commonplace in this world. These days it seems we're in a constant retrograde motion with pornography, even as pornographic elements have insinuated themselves into so much of our lives. The result is that we're being constantly asked to look at the pornographic and be aroused by it, but we must also condemn it.
I remember a few years ago I read a list of the top 100 porn films of all time. I was astonished because, although I don't consider myself a consumer of pornography, I had seen at least a quarter of those films. It made me reevaluate our culture's relationship with smut - namely, that we were swimming in the stuff and we didn't even notice it. It felt like we were damning tomatoes as we ate pizza.
It reminds me of how sad I felt when they took card catalogs out of the library. You never knew what you would find when you pulled out one of those drawers....
I don't want to get all 1000 yard stare here, but I feel fairly saturated with everything, not just pornography (certainly that), but also media, government, politics, responsibility, advertising, religion, etc. etc.
With each of these things, the moral calculus is far beyond my impoverished math skills, and so I remain sort of metaphysically ambivalent.
There is an elusive quality inherent in everything, that quality that stimulates you. Pornography is meant to stimulate, and yet by-and-large it fails. Still there are elements of it that are compelling, and I think this is true of most things. I hate politics, but there is an elusive something that still makes me turn and look. Religion? Yes. Advertising? Yes.
The sacred is still there, but as things turn into commodities (pornography has undergone this massive commoditization), the sacred slips away, and we're forced to turn to ourselves, in our bedrooms, with those we love, probing at the edges of our vulnerability, to reconnect with it.
Emlyn
Emlyn, I agree with you. I used pornography as an example of a larger trend I've noticed, but I find that it is the same with everything else that has been commodified and over-saturated.
I think the issue, and your porn example illustrates this perfectly, is mostly about signal-to-noise ratios. When there was only a little porn, it was easy to identify the stimulating bits. Now that porn is a series of high waves, crashing over our heads on a daily basis, it's harder to catch our breath and....metaphor dying...see what's so...um...you get my point.
The thing that fascinates/revolts me is that, as conventional porn has gained acceptance, more deviant trends are also emerging. I try not to be judgemental, but WHOA!!!! People are into some weird stuff. I am shocked by the violence of some people's tastes.
It makes me feel as though I should have a safe word just to walk around town.
Emlyn
Like Donna Lee, I miss the card catalogs and that's what I was thinking most of the time I was reading this post. I always felt there was magic in them and that whenever I was looking for something specific in them it would lead me to things I didn't know I wanted to know. It was a very organic way to have my knowledge broadened gradually: through bumping into the unexpected card and finding myself in a new section of the library.
That's what I'll be thinking about now as I go dig my potatoes into the ground!
I wonder if the list that appears on our screen when we search is the modern day card catalog. Of course it's not the same.
I took my son to the library the other day and he was searching for a specific book in the computer. It was checked out and he was distraught. "Look through the shelves" I said. "see if anything jumps out at you." He would have no part of it. TOo bad for him.
The sadness of the unicorn story and then compared to porn. Odd but profound.
Today's children are inundated with information at all times now. Writing research papers is much easier than it once was...or is it? What generations past had trouble with was finding enough resources. Current generations have the opposite problem: too much information. Critical thinking has never been more important, because humans have limits in how much information they can take in at any given time and the amount of bullshit being thrown at us is at an all-time high.
Your blog has made me think of the following quote. Please forgive the length:
“If I were to read a book a week for my entire adult lifetime, and I lived an ordinary lifetime, when I was all done I would have read maybe a few thousand books, no more. In this library, that’s from about here [takes a dozen or so paces], roughly, to about here. But that’s only a tenth of a percent or so of the total number of books in the library. The trick is to know which books to read; but they’re all here.
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny, dark squiggles; but one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia an author is speaking clearly, and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.”
Carl Sagan from episode XI of Cosmos