Porn Happy
Checking in on Susannah Breslin’s fascinating novel-in-progress Porn Happy, a semi-fictional tale about Porn Valley in California, I found this interview with her at Suicide Girls. In it, Breslin says “I haven’t lost interest in porn, per se, although I’ve always been far more interested in the porn industry itself–its population, its vocabulary, its laws–than the product it produces…I think, right now, though, people are more interested in the culture of pornography than they are in the porn. One reason porn is so intriguing is that it is both pleasurable and unsettling at the same time. It exposes more of ourselves than we are used to seeing, almost more than we can tolerate.”
Indeed. Recently I’ve set up an embryonic new site called Pornlit.com. At the moment it’s a very basic blog digest of sex and porn related items I’ve found interesting from various feeds - there’s a fair bit from the usual suspects like Boing Boing and Fleshbot, but also more obscure stuff. A lot of it is hilarious, a fair bit peculiar and some just unsettlingly strange. It’s definitely better read through a RSS feed rather than the Web at the moment
Why am I doing this? Because I’m a filthy bastard. But also because, like Susannah Breslin, I’ve had a fascination with the culture of porn, the mechanics of it and the $10 billion a year industry behind it (and that’s just in the US alone). There is a welter of interesting books that surround porn and its movement into the mainstream - just check Amazon to see what I mean.
Porn itself is deeply conservative and quickly becomes distinctly unerotic in its unrelenting sameness. I find reading about porn more interesting than porn itself - more of a turn on even. It’s perhaps because reading about it reconnects you with the intimacy of other people - the most extreme depravations caught on camera can’t get you any closer to someone. Reading what they talk about before and after does.
This couples (ha!) with the erotic impact of two of my favourite novels I’ve read in the last two years, both by Michel Houellebecq - Atomised and Platform. Both are full of what would usually be termed pornographic scenes, certainly explicit, and almost clinical in their description of sex. Yet I find Houellebecq uses this style not as a tedious shock tactic but as an honest way to depict the characters and also to capture the intense tenderness that bed-breaking sex can show between lovers. The reader becomes drawn into this intimacy rather than a voyeur. A fusion of the intellectual and sexual; now that is erotic. That’s pornlit: unashamed to be explicit without being prurient.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke is another great example. There must be hundreds of others that use sex as an exploration of being alive rather than simply life being the byproduct of it. I want to find those books.
How quickly I will develop pornlit into something substantial is uncertain - but any suggestions for other books are welcomed, as indeed help to define what it is I’m trying to get at here. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
More on porn literature:
Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Other Splinters posts of interest:
