Pornography – does it emancipate us from Freudian hang-ups or does it shackle us to our animal appetites?
It’s a question that every writer of erotic fiction ought to be prepared to address. My work is out there on kindle, listed alongside sub-standard fiction merely concerned with the mechanics of genitals docking in a variety of ways. I may comfort and console myself that my work is superior to there’s but in the end I am working within the same genre – working towards the same ends – driven by the same goal. Essentially – and frankly - if a reader fails to masturbate after reading one of my short stories then that story has failed to deliver.
But in providing the cuisine to fuel sexual fantasies am I consoling the reader or am I complicit in twisting their character?
How much of the sex in the head, we pornographers provide, overflows harmlessly into tissues, bed-sheets and underwear and how much accumulates dangerously within the psyche?
Take this man! He turns a page and a glossy woman proffers her vagina – he flicks through Freeview and is rewarded with a free view of a woman simulating masturbation with a phone – at a click of a mouse he locates an “Adult” site, selects “POV” and a young woman feeds on what appears to be his penis. He reads a story in which an unabashed girl strips and rides him.
The images and the prose pitch into the man’s head – they become addictive – more time is spent seeking them out. Gradually – gradually - the woman up the street always willing to chat, the girl in the office who flashes a smile, the lass walking home at night - all reveal themselves to have ulterior motives.
These are not pleasant thoughts.
But we can’t deny that pornography is profitable. It’s implicitly threaded into the capitalist tapestry. It tastes like money. And, let’s face it, is at its most honest when it’s a commodity than when it’s a marketing strategy. But how else (in the absence of smelly-vision) can a company sell perfume than to present a skimpily-dressed Thin-derella with cum-filled eyes walking out of a frothing sea?
“Sex sells everything and sex kills” sings Joni Mitchell. And sometimes it does.
So – behold the hypocrite! Writing “tastefully”, “humorously”, “wittily” within a contaminated genre – hoping that the fantasies I create and to which I, myself, masturbate, are being read by the “right” type of reader who can successfully compartmentalise reality and fantasy.
Well?
