Sontag: Porn, Sex, and loss of Self

"What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not. Insofar as strong sexual feeling does involve an obsessive degree of attention, it encompasses experiences in which a person can feel he is losing his "self". The literature that goes from Sade through Surrealism to these recent books capitalizes on that mystery; it isolates the mystery and makes the reader aware of it, invites him to participate in it."

Susan Sontag, 1967 The Pornographic Imagination first published in Styles of Radical Will, reproduced in Penguin Classics edition of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye pp.104-5

Steiner: Pornography vs. Imagination

"Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow."

George Steiner, 1967 Nightworks in Language and Silence

TV generation / diphasic personality

These quotes strike a chord very deeply with me:

"I was part of the TV generation. I was mediated. I was "Pop." I didn't feel connected in any way to my family, to my country, or to reality for that matter: the world seemed to me a media facade, and all history a fiction - a pack of lies. I was experiencing, I think, what has come to be known as the postmodern condition, a form of alienation quite different from postwar existentialism because it lacks any historical sense - there is no notion of a truth that has been lost. It is characterized by the feeling that there is a general evenness of meaning."

Mike Kelley, 1999 Cross-Gender/Cross-Genre in Foul Perfection p.102

"My father talked about being a kid on the farm and going out hunting and doing things connected with the earth. Real stuff that kids of his generation had to deal with, life and death stuff. We barely had contact with the real world. We were silly, wimpy, suburban kids playing games inspired by movies, television, and comic books. For us it was all filtered through the mass media. Everything came out of the mass media. We were children of the media, the first TV generation."

Robert Crumb, 2005 The R. Crumb Handbook p.25

The experiences that Robert Crumb and Mike Kelley are describing remind me of Robert D Keppel's description of the "diphasic personality". Keppel was Chief Criminal Investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's Office. He helped to develop psychological profiling systems, and believed that the diphasic personality type was typical of serial killers:

"A diphasic personality is one in which there is a split development into two phases. One phase consists of a construction and retreat into a fantasy world where it's safe and the child is in complete control. He can crawl into that world in his mind whenever he wants and never have to confront the trials that are out there in the real world. The other phase of the child's personality development takes place in the real world. He may not commit very much of himself to this personality, because it's only out there as a placeholder. Because there's little or no commitment, it's as if the child's not really there at all."

Robert D Keppel, 1997 Signature Killers p.341

Baudrillard: Sex as Work

"All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular Möbian compulsion. Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently opposing itself to that of nature, the discourse of desire to that of power - today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios."

Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (1978) p.18

"The Disaster of Liberation.

For us sex has no symbolic meaning - the sexual has become the staging of desire in a moment of pleasure. Ours is the culture of premature ejaculation.

The imperative for immediate realization of desire. Repression and liberation are part of this code.

Baudrillard asks us, what should we do after the "orgy" of sexual permissiveness - the desublimation of repressed desires, following the 1960s?

Answer: see it as a disaster leading to an oppression which parades as liberation."

Chris Horrocks, Introducing Baudrillard (1996) p.90

Sartre: Sex vs Existential Angst

Can sex give relief from existential angst? Sartre thinks so, albeit only briefly:

"After all, you have to kill time. They are young and well built, they have another thirty years in front of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they've been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938) p.161

Porn can also be distracting:

"I started looking through the books on display in the second-hand boxes, and especially the obscene ones, because, in spite of everything, that occupies your mind."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938) p.220

Is this why sex (including masturbation) lends itself to habitual, or "addictive", practices; Like a drug, offering escape from thought, consciousness, anxiety?

Is this why sex jargon refers to a man having sex as being like an "animal", or a "machine"? As if functioning without conscious thought?

What is a lifetime spent sucking cock at gloryholes, cruising, jerking-off over porn, hooking up, giving and taking loads at sex clubs and parties? Is it an attempt to live without thinking? And is there anything wrong with that?

Heavy! And on the subject, here's an old drawing I did when I was an angsty 19 year old - before reading Sartre. I rediscovered it just now, and it fits perfectly with this theme.

Orwell: Sex vs Hate and Power

"It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual deprivation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'"

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) p.139

And to illustrate Orwell's point, here's Titch Jones' cock sinking into Aaron's ass.

DeLillo on sex

"Sex is what you can get. For some people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college for six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself."

Don DeLillo, Underworld (1998) p.297

Genet and radiant anguish

"If I bugger... , as I bend farther forward I get a profile view of his face crushed against the pillow, of his pain. I see the wincing of his features, but also their radiant anguish."

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal (1949) p.26