Pornosophy: Poop Dreams

Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Boccaccio’s The Decameron are famous for being sexually explicit.And there are parts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales which are down right filthy and would qualified as pornography in literally any era (the controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini produced his own boundary breaking versions of both The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales). Going back to Roman times Catullus was notorious for his X-rated poetry and Lucretius’s famed poem De rerum natura --On the Nature of Things—the subject of the Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt’s bestselling The Swerve: How the World Became Modern-- is rife with sexual references. Remember that though Aristophanes Lysistrata falls into the category of political satire, the playwright’s conceit involves Grecian women withholding sex in order to stop the Peloponnesian Wars. All along the way, these works document manners and mores and provide an anthropological record of human sexuality. We know for instance that anal and oral sex were both performed even more vigorously by some of our ancestors in ancient times than they even are today. The Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (another classic work which Pasolini adapted for his film Salo) and later Pauline Reague’s The Story of O ushered in the modern era's preoccupation with sadomasochistic sexuality which paved the way for Fifty Shades of Grey--a milestone in the history of mass market commercial fiction. But what does the future hold? What new taboos will be broken? Will water sports and coprophilia become what fellatio and cunnilingus are today? Will some new work begin with the words, “I am going to go to the bathroom on you,” with the matter of fact reply being, “why don’t you use the toilet?

Sperm Count: Fifty Shades of Janovic Paint

Fifty Shades is such a ubiquitous part of the collective unconscious that’s its spawned a TV series, Submission, in which the characters' fantasies are fueled by a book called The Slave (though creators of the series have tried to differentiate it as a more realistic portrayal of human sexuality than that of its predecessor). It’s a little unrealistic to have a book like The Slave lying out everywhere, as it is in the series. Usually you keep Fifty Shades clones, in a drawer or under a mattress. The Story of O, for all its notoriety, never had it so good. But what'd most interesting is the meta universe in which the series exists. Unlike Fifty Shades, the willing suspension of disbelief is constantly cut short when characters wake up from their fantasies. And daydreaming is really what Submission is about. Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, but someone could do an analysis of the show called The Interpretation of Daydreams. Further, the world in which the series takes place, in which much of the sex is catalyzed by fiction, is a comment on our pornographic culture, in which those who read highly stimulating texts or go on sites, are inundated with imagery that ultimately separates rather than unites them with others. So strong are the images that may have stimulated sex that they end up overwhelming the sex itself, leaving the person who's fantasizing as solitary as he or she would have been were they simply masturbating to the same scenarios. E. L. James may find herself writing yet another sequel entitled Fifty Shades of Janovic Paint to deal with the color combinations on the walls of the rooms in which the characters of Submission live out their reveries of being enslaved.

Fifty Shades of Grey

Love Story was the big splashy romance of l970 which every serious filmgoer and critic loved to trash. Fifty Shades of Grey is the candidate for 2015. The difference was--and it would be quite telling to analyze the cultural substrates out of which both films were conceived--that Love Story’s melodrama derived from dispossession while the catharsis or lack thereof in Fifty Shades derives from possession. Possession is part of the lexicon of sado-masochism as is control which Fifty Shades underscores as a kind of meaning making in and of itself. Action seems to have more significance precisely because it becomes a religion which is prescribed and ritualized to the point where its intention is totally transparent; the freedom and poetic ambiguity which is the lingua franca of so-called normative love is replaced with something  more emphatic. For instance one of the great S&M masterpieces of all time, The Story of O,  derives its power from the protagonist’s complete and utter abandonment of her ego, the loss of self that  comes from giving one’s will over to another person entirely. Fifty Shades is a romance in which there is a sado-masochistic sub plot. It’s a peccadillo of Christian Grey’s (Jamie Dornan) that Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) has to put up with to win him over. Similarly though Grey claims that he's not looking for love, he's constantly negotiating and caving in on his demands in order to win over a woman who is more a wild card than a true submissive. It’s always fun to consider works of popular entertainment like Fifty Shades beneath contempt. But it’s also boring because what's bad about it, the stock characters (the rich guy and ingénue girl with their respective wounds) and settings (the dressing room filled with ties that have multiple uses and the overly polished executive suite with its fashionista secretaries) is more obvious than what has potential interest. For instance Christian presents Anastasia with a contract specifying the acts which she will consent to participate in and the devices. She rejects genital clamps, along with anal or vaginal fist fucking. But she’s a good sport when it comes to floggers and suspension. It’s the sadomasochistic version of a prenuptial agreement. But isn’t this exactly what the state of California is requiring in its latest affirmative consent statute whereby on campus foreplay becomes reduced to litigation (“I’m not going to touch you until I have your written consent,” Grey says). True sadomasochism in both pornography and serious art films like Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac participates in no such mediation, providing instead the illusion of the disturbing kind of degradation and humiliation that's the vehicle by which not only clothes but ego are shed. The character of Christian Grey as rendered by Sam Taylor-Johnson's direction of the E. L James novel, is too tentative to be truly unsettling. His childhood trauma has made it impossible for him to trust or tolerate intimacy as much as he's portrayed as desiring those very things. So the affect of dominance allows him only the illusion of control. In fact, he’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The ambivalence with which Grey undertakes his calling may account for the character’s commercial appeal. But in this case, it also humanizes him and almost makes him interesting.

Ideologia Sexualis

Reginald Marsh Illustration of Dreiser's An American Tragedy

In a piece in a recent Sunday Review Section of the Times, Maureen Dowd quotes a Harvard educated phone sex dominatrix who uses the name Jennifer Hunter to the effect that “Every good dominant knows that the submissive is really the partner in control. All a submissive woman has to do is relax and enjoy the ride while delicious sexual acts are visited upon her. She’s the star of the proceedings. Someone is ministering to her needs for a change. Master is choreographing all the action…after a long day of managing employees, making all the decisions and looking after children, a woman might be exhausted about being in charge and long to surrender control.” (“She’s Fit to be Tied," NYT, 3/31/12). The occasion of Dowd’s piece is the enormous success of the E.L.James trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey. It used to be said that intellectuals provided the ideology for revolutions. However, now it seems as if ideology is providing the lubricant for sexuality in this segment of the evolutionary time line--when it’s so easy for instinct and consciousness to be at cross-purposes. For example, classic romanticism, the act of falling in love, is aided and abetted by a certain degree of voyeurism and arrivisme. Falling in love in this formulation is a form of social rising, to the extent that the aura which becomes the conduit of sex constitutes the hope for a new life. Similarly, S&M as expressed by Dowd's dominatrix appears to be motivated less by the emotional need for punishment than by the desire to relinquish the responsibility of self. In this case, the process is reversed and slightly more complex when it comes to the ideology of the sexuality. Sex may actually begin as the horse driving the cart, but what’s at stake is not only the relaxation from pressure that Dowd’s dominatrix acquaintance describes, but freedom from the bondage of self. Such liberation is a characteristic of Buddhism and other spiritual practices where desire is deemed the beginning of suffering (with happiness ultimately residing in the forsaking of pleasure). Isn’t the true pleasure conveyed by the swashbuckling master that of devotion to a leader or belief system that takes away the headache of individuation? Many women who read Fifty Shades of Grey or The Story of O for that matter think they are indulging in the forbidden, the naughty, the rebellious and the risqué. But are they that different from their more prim contemporaries who throng to communion or confirmation, who takes the sacraments, don the chador or bath with their sisters in the mikvah?

Sleeping Beauty

Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is a 21^st Century Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai  du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Chantal Akermann’s l975 work, which dealt with the quotidian existence of a prostitute, could be called feminist in the same way that Leigh’s work is—both films turn the female body into a commodity. The fact that Jane Campion the director of The Piano is the producer of Sleeping Beauty would seem to be significant, though the hierarchical universe Leigh’s movie portrays is a far darker view of the existence of at least one woman. There are also shades of Salo, The Story of O, and Genet’s The Balcony at work in the movie. The story takes a university student named Lucy (Emily Browning) from her stultifying existence doing office work, waitressing and offering her body up for scientific experiments to a chateau where she is the subject of another set of experiments or shall we say examinations by a succession of aging men who don’t really need to be told that penetration is forbidden since most if not all are incapable of the act. There are many levels to Leigh’s first feature and many of the set pieces are rich from the point of view of iconography. In his essay on On Racine Roland Barthes deals with the significance of the varying chambers in which the tragedies evolve and here the lush chamber in which Lucy’s self consciously pre-Raphaelite form rests in a drugged stupor allows for a mini disquisition on colonialism, for these impotent old men are definitely representations of a dying order. There’s also a perverse allusion to the crypt in which Juliet lies in the Shakespeare tragedy. The layering of meanings allows the director  to go beyond the limitations of a simple feminist diatribe. Lucy, for instance, moves into a glass tower where none of the windows are covered and everything is revealed while her life as a prostitute is totally shuddered in hiding and secrets. In this version of the myth, by the way, our princess wakes from her sleep screaming. It is interesting to note that another woman director, Catherine Breillat, has recently also offered up her version of Sleeping Beauty.