How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, ‘sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality’ and transformed into ‘promotional eroticism’ or ‘operational sexuality’.
“Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality” by William Paulett
I’m having to keep my mind on two things these days – my paper on the function of the Happily Ever After convention and trying to carve a cohesive and intelligible statement for what the critical portion of my PhD studies will examine.
There have been myriad discussions on this blog about the nature of erotic fiction and how it differs (or should differ) from pornography. I’m not the only erotic writer to wrestle with this question, but it has haunted me for almost as long as I’ve been writing.
I have said often that I am extremely interested in sex and sexual desire as a lens through which to look at the human condition. That there is a unique exposure that occurs in authentic moments of erotic desire that can strip away all our contrivances, our courtesy, our sophistications. And please don’t get me wrong: I write with the intention to arouse. But not at a specifically genital level. My aim is to prompt the reader into what I would call an aroused state of self-reflection.
At the same time, we find ourselves in a culture of pornography – constantly bombarded by sexual imagery as a way to sell things: sex, of course, but almost everything else as well. The memes and the language of porn has become so ubiquitous, it eclipses the act it was designed to represent – erotic acts shared between people.
I am not your run of the mill romantic. I don’t think that people have to be in love in order to have the best kind of sex. I do, however, think there needs to be an acknowledgement of the humanity of the other. Some essentially complex value in the desired. I think most people would agree that there is genital sex, and then there’s the kind of sex that fundamentally changes you. And that kind of sex is not the kind you find in a particularly casual encounter.
I want to pause here and explain that objectification and dehumanization can be very erotic. But only when it is intentional. Only when the essential importance of that humanity is there, like a ghost, in its very intentional absence.
One of the great problems in trying to write the kind of erotic fiction I try to write is that the grammar of the erotic has been, for the most part, appropriated by a consumer culture that has employed it with the aim of commodification. Originally pornography was not free. It was sold, like the services of a prostitute are sold. It was sexual stimulation in exchange for money. The language that had once been used only behind bedroom doors, only in secret diaries, only in whispers, became the public language of the porn industry. So did the acts. But of course, because early pornography sought to establish its authenticity to its audience, it developed some incredibly strange memes in order to prove that what was being portrayed was ‘real’. The most obvious example of the is is the ‘money shot’ or the ‘come shot’, devised in order to prove that a real ejaculation had taken place. There are, of course, more subtle ways in which pornography attempts to establish its realism – with extreme close-ups of penetration, vaginal spasms, etc.
These memes, along with the language of the explicit, first became the preserve of porn and then, by a strange reversal of phenomenon, were fed back into people’s concept of what real sex should look like. Now you can see amateur ‘money shots’ on PornTube – where ordinary people are intent on showing what great sex they are having by adopting porn memes. It’s not that we don’t believe they’re really having sex. The ‘money shot’ or the ‘cream pie’ is no longer about proof of the real; it has become the real.
How does one write authentic representations of desire when the grammar of desire has become inextricably bound to the marketplace? When the depiction of a face-fucking no longer bears the semiotics of a purposefully sexual objectification but now simply triggers a memory of the last porn film you saw?
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. His works are notoriously hard to read and his lectures aren’t much easier. But one of the things he talked about was how pornography – the over-exposure of sexuality – makes realism in sex impossible. I don’t agree with him. I think he came to believe that the media and people’s interior lives had become intertwined to the point where they were indistinguishable. Personally, I think he just spent too long studying examples of incidences where it had. I still believe there are lots of people still having very real sex that doesn’t look anything like pornography. But I think his point was very well made. I’ve met a lot of people who can’t seem to tell the difference between commercial representations/reenactments of sex for the purpose of performance and entertainment, and the authentic experience of humans who want nothing but each other’s pleasure.
I think it is my job as a writer of erotic fiction to keep producing representations of the complex, messy and sometimes unlovely beings we become when we really do experience erotic desire and when we do have real erotic experiences. And to point out that, when we do this, there is not just pleasure, but many other things.
p.s. if you’d like to have a little taste of Baudrillard, YouTube has a series of his talks on “Seduction, Sex and Pornography“, but again, I warn you, he’s hard to understand and not just because of his French accent. However, there are a number of writers who’ve distilled and summarized his ideas very well. And one of them, William Pawlett’s book, is online in PDF form: Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality.
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