Breath of bale

Thoughts about porn inspired by the Porn Symposium and the examples of Different Maps, The Measures Taken, InfiniteThought, Beyond the Implode, and K-Punk

Property porn: it's hardly the property which is being degraded by the glossy photo spreads, or the cars by those revealing open bonnet shots. Pornography is an opportunity for the viewer half-consciously to degrade himself, to feel both the rush and its short-lived inadequacy. Such material naturally incites violence. Gastronomy porn provokes daydreams of plunging one's fingers in cake and cream, smothering one's face in it. It's the rage parodied in a zombie film - images of the undead messing their hands in the entrails. It's the desire behind disaster movies, symbols of Capital lasered to rubble. Some films play out these fantasies of destruction, only rarely in fact to progressive effect, while others are content with the gloss image and unobtrusively stoke the aggression and anger which make us productive. Immersing oneself in the latter, one often feels disgusting. After watching a cannibal movie one can feel strangely cleansed.

Political pornography: Sometimes by watching exploitation films the apparent chaos of political relations starts to seem a bit clearer. Some political sources seek to clarify, others provide a more dirtying thrill. The pornography of dust-covered babies exhibited like holy relics on the one hand and revisionist photo analysis on the other. Could the child have been reburied? Is the dummy merely there for effect? Nazi girl band Prussian Blue is named for the cyanide deposits not found on the walls of the 'gas chambers' in Auschwitz. The very name is a smiling denial, clean and insolent.

Violent pornography: Joe D'Amato, whose horror films are notable for their childlike honesty and fearlessness, also made a vast number of porn films. He was the first to use fibre optic technology to develop the "snatch cam" and shoot the scene from inside his actresses. In "Trap Them and Kill Them" (aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals 1977) women's stomachs are slit open with knives and their guts pulled out and eaten (by Vietnamese asylum seekers in need of work). D'Amato isn't afraid to light the scene so that the rubber nature of the torsos is discernible. His method is always to switch on the lights, and if what gets revealed is banal and disillusioning, so much the better. Are the snatch cam and its sister the "butt cam" actually effective in turning on the punter? D'Amato follows the lust to reveal, to possess, or to disassemble to its final absurd (cf. Absurd (D'Amato, 1981)) , unerotic conclusion. Pornography, and violent pornography in particular, often foreground the desolation which succeeds the orgasm, the shadow of impotence which threatens even the moment of triumph. In real life, rapists often lose their erections when they try to penetrate. This may, of course, lead to a substitute form of aggression. The Japanese director of "pinku eiga" Koji Wakamatsu highlights this in such films as "Violated Woman in White" (Okasareta Byakui 1967) in which a young male intruder in a nurses' home, unable to relate or respond to the girls he finds there, and traumatised by the sight of two of the girls having sex, tortures and kills them. He is incapable of physically raping them - this is the case with many of Wakamatsu's male protagonists - and engages in acts of violence in order to break through the girls' apparently sealed self-containment, in the hope - I suppose - that it might efface his impotence. The film tracks the futility of his attempts. At the conclusion of the film, he curls up in the lap of the surviving girl, surrounded by corpses, crawling up the umbilical noose into pre-natal oblivion. Wakamatsu relates this to politics, the violence of the student Left being a product of political impotence - precisely impotence, and not merely powerlessness, an impotence provoked by the sight of stacked shelves in a supermarket or cheesecake photographs in a magazine. Impotence produces impotent rage, which stops far short of liberating parody. Joe D'Amato's films often engage with political subjects - with race and with social and political corruption in "Emanuelle in America" (1976) for example - but always in the form of parody. His touch is far lighter than Wakamatsu's, but the effect can paradoxically be heavier and more desolating. D'Amato's vulgar, inscrutable eye never imposes a vision, but simply presents things in the cheapest, most direct way possible, so the world's sordidness lies helplessly on display. He reminds me of the monkey smoking a cigarette in "Trap Them and Kill Them" as it contemplates a lesbian encounter in the jungle - it's a beautiful scene, and perhaps best understood as a self-portrait of the director.

Emotional pornography: That which tries to do the dirty on emotion, or keeps the emotion in a hutch like a guinea-pig or thinks it can lead it somewhere deserted and get it to stand on a chair with a noose round its neck and kick the chair away. I figure that when Tom Baker left, Doctor Who lost the ethical heart that made it valuable, a sensibility that only Baker himself was able to safeguard, and from that time on the programme evolved into cheaply manipulative showbiz. "Black Orchid" was the story that shocked me, that final scene where the display of the book neatly softens and cleanses all emotion, the Doctor smiles, and the 'sting' before the closing credits stabs home the episode's total cynicism.

Child pornography: A pornographic view of childhood revisits "lost innocence" and tries to infuse it with dirt. If you believe The News of the World, child sex-murderer Robert Black used to like wearing a child's swimming costume, as an act of paedophilial transvestism. It's curious how all the girl bands have their songs written, filmed and choreographed for them, for the most part by men. But how strange, always to write in the persona of a young girl, for an audience of young girls... I imagine them preparing to write, assuming an imaginary mask, inhabiting the part, living in that sound world. How scared and ridiculous they might feel if all the lights were suddenly switched on and there they were lying on the bed, jammed into the clothes of a nine year old. A pop sexuality is a paedophile sexuality, maybe - the same pattern of addiction, constantly tugging the sufferer back to that perfect light, that perfect hit, the one sunlit time. And then naturally enough one resents such perfection, one would like to make it filthy. Hence something dimly remembered from childhood gets "a new adult look". I remember seeing a girl sitting on a low wall, she must have been about nine, she looked like one of the All Saints. Except she made the All Saints look ragged and old, and I suddenly realised "Oh, you're the original!"

My porn name: it brings to mind the miseries of life at the call centre.

"How many hits have you had in the past hour?"
"five... "
"seven..."
(glumly) "three..."
"ELEVEN!"
"Well done. Keep it up".