The TGIF Sex Blog [Pornography and Erotica]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I just heard our president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s his response:

“I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize... That is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21^st century.”

I see the online responses, the gnashing of teeth, and the tearing of clothes, and the neocons going into their feces-flinging act, and I have to shake my head in wonder. Let me put it this way: we went from a president who suffered the indignity of having shoes thrown at him (an expression of extreme disrespect) to a president being awarded a prestigious, internationally recognized award. Deal with it... I will be gone all day.

Today is Friday and it’s all about S-E-X!

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-=[ Erotica & Pornography ]=-

See today’s blog art? Pornography or art? Why? (It’s a rhetorical question! LOL).

The boundary between pornography and “artistic” erotica varies from individual to individual, and is conditioned by religious and socially defined moral beliefs, upbringing, and personal experience as to what is art and culture. It is for this reason that a society’s perception and definition of pornography is a good measure of the spirit of the times.

The publication in 1948 and 1953 of Alfred Kinsey’s massive sociological study on human sexual behavior, for example, resulted in an openness about sex, leading tot the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and early 70s. During this time, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, generally seen as the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. In 1965, the US Supreme Court legalized the sale of contraceptives and in 1969 Denmark became the first Western country to drop all laws against the publication or sale of pornography.

At the time, many forward-thinking individuals saw pornography as a vehicle of free speech and a force against authority. The social critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1967, compared the pornographic and religious imaginations as two all-inclusive ways of describing the world (imagine someone proposing that idea today!). For Sontag, the pornographic universe is a “total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it,” and turn them into a reasoned form of dialogue around the need for erotic exchange -- just as religion turns them all into the hunger for God.

This is why pornographers such as the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Pauline Réage (author of the Story of O) create a world in which there are no sexual taboos. They make no distinctions between the sexes, or between humans and animals or humans and objects. They are essentially multiplying the possibilities of exchange Bataille was especially clear about eroticism. For him, eroticism, like poetry, violence, and religious sacrifice, leads to the “blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity; it leads us to death, and through death continuity.”

Whew! LOL

Of course, not all pornography has such a profound effect: oftentimes it is a vehicle for fantasy and escape. Still, some of the most extreme forms of modern Western pornography are, in Sontag’s analysis, among the vocabulary that answer the human need for personal transcendence since religion has, for the most part, failed in that role.

Love,

Eddie