Capitalism as porn?

At the moment I’m writing a piece in which one of the protagonists works for a venture capital company. Several crabwise steps in the name of ‘research’ (that’s what I call it anyway) took me into an investigation of sexual customs, which led me to a description of prostitution in Ancient Greece. Don't worry, it's just the way my mind works. There were, apparently, three classes of prostitutes of which the lowest were the pornai: slaves or abandoned girls working for pimps, possibly in brothels. The etymology of the term pornai appears to be from the verb meaning ‘to sell’, thus designating them as items available for sale and purchase.

For the mildly interested, a discussion of prostitution in ancient Greece and Rome appears in Wikipedia.

Which leads me to the unsurprising speculation that if you wanted to describe capitalism as an ‘industrial system of porn’, you might be more accurate and more strictly correct linguistically than you’d think.

I’d be interested in comments from those of you who know Ancient Greek!

Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use?

I haven't posted much here recently because I've been busy hunting and gathering words, and then training them to go in the right order on some pages.

However, this attracted my attention the other day: a BBC report 'Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use'. Apparently 'A quarter of men aged 18-24 are worried about the amount of porn they are watching on the internet, new research suggests. Heavy users in the study were much more likely to report problems with their jobs, relationships and sex lives.' The research was conducted jointly by the BBC and the Portman Clinic for the report.

The issue of 'being worried' by the amount of porn they're consuming was based on self-reports of worrying about this, though the actual amount of porn these people watched was presumably variable.

The BBC quotes Jason Dean, a counsellor who runs a website for online sex addicts, as saying of his clients: "It used to be mainly middle-aged single guys but now I get more contact from women, teenagers and people in their 20s."

This report is interesting at a number of levels, mostly to do with questions the news report doesn't address (and the full study, incidentally, doesn't seem to have appeared on the Portman Clinic's website).

How and why, exactly, are people (okay, men) coming to use pornography at a level they consider worrying? I can imagine several dynamics at work. For example, the stress involved in everyday life and worrying about a job can make someone more withdrawn, less able to cope with others, more likely to use porn as a substitute for social interaction, and the visual stimulation becoming more 'real' than any actual relationship. But then I was brought up on a mixed diet of Frankfurt School philosophy and poststructuralist thought that would make that sound a reasonable explanation of what's going on.

A more pithy view, expressed by the late science fiction writer J G Ballard, might also be applicable: 'A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.' Well, possibly not so much extinction as a radical change in social relationships that make porn itself more intimate, more desirable, than sex-for-real?

Ballard also said (in his book The Atrocity Exhibition): "Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all." And this, too, seems to me to speak to the situation. Porn as a common language? Porn as the shared set of social expectations by which people relate to each other?

I'm not quite sure how to read Ballard's comments but they seem somehow prescient and significant.Maybe that's just me, because I used similar ideas in a story collection that should (I hope) be out in the next week or two. And I'll run off now because I feel I should make notes on this theme for later recycling in a story... But any thoughts or responses are welcome!

JG Ballard

JG (James Graham) Ballard (1930-2009) remains one of the most prominent and transgressive authors of the 20th century. He wrote primarily in the genre of science fiction, but almost always with an eye for the psycho-sexual foibles of individuals and how they might be formed by, or inform, society - and he didn't shrink at dealing with matters considered too bizarre or too controversial for others to write about. The most cited, though by no means the only, example is his 'Crash' (1973) which deals with the sexual fetishism of car crashes. It was later made into a film - which is still banned in a number of places, including the Borough of Westminster in London, apparently. His later book, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', was at one point prosecuted as obscene in the UK.

He is the source of a number of quotable quotes about sex, fetish, and pornography, including those below:

"A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction."

"Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography."

"All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

“Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire."

"The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way."

"I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he’d had a shower" (character in th enovel Super-Cannes)

"She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there." (think this comes from Crash)

"Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse." (Crash)

"One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops."

Too clever by half?

I've been musing over my latest royalty/sales figures.

What interests me is that the best selling stories are consistently the ones with lesbian BDSM themes, and the harder-edged ones that involve a significant amount of string-em-up-and-flog-em - and go light on some of the more real-life issues of consent, limits, negotiation and so on.

What also interests me is that given who I'm publishing with, I'd assume my purchasing public is primarily female.

I'm not complaining about this in any way, shape or form. I have many lesbian and bi friends and I'm more than capable of writing stuff they enjoy. And I'm ready, able and willing to write nasty and cruel sex scenes.

I do, though, suspect I've been guilty of making an unwarranted assumption that writing primarily for a female audience implies holding back on the levels of implied coercion and the amount of pain inflicted on my characters.

I suspect since the Black Lace books started coming out well over a decade ago, a lot of women have become used to erotica that isn't just strong in a sexual way, but heavy-handed with the whips and floggers and multiple partners and domination/submission as well. Maybe those fantasies were always there, given that forced sex is reported in academic, psychological/psychoanalytic papers to be a common fantasy theme among women.

After all, even mainstream literature now has scenes of multiple partners, sexual slavery and repeated anal intercourse (yes, I'm reading Pynchon's Against the Day at the moment, and Gravity's Rainbow has several bondage scenes, not to mention a bit of coprophilia).

I've been striving in some of what I've written to explore a few of my more experimental literary aspirations... and I'm not going to stop doing that, but the sales figures are a useful reminder that I should remember the basics and make sure there's lots of good, vicious sex in there.

Idle thought

You know how in the arts and literature you get people who are 'artists in residence' or 'writers in residence'? Usually they work within a community organisation, or some kind of institution, writing stuff and maybe running or contributing to community/institutional activities.

My idle thought of the day is: can you envisage any situation in which there might be a demand for a 'pornographer in residence'?

Fired with enthusiasm I looked at a bunch of pornography-related jobs advertised on the net. Some are academic (criminal justice programme seeks lecturer with expertise in drug abuse, gambling, pornography...). Some are kind of administrative and usually involve things like sysadmins to be responsible for preventing illegal pornography and spam. Others are people like producers/VT editors for adult companies. But nothing that fits the 'pornographer in residence' bill...

I can't say this surprises me, not least because I suspect the vast majority of the adult business, the 'creative' side of it anyway, operates on personal networks and freelance work. But it still leaves me musing about what, in principle, such a job might look like, what it might involve, who might be prepared to fund it and why. And more generally about whether the way the industry works really parallels other business sectors or whether there are particular features of it or lessons that could be drawn from it.

Hmm... story coming on, I think...