Eco on Pornography

CW: Sexual assault

http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2006/11/umberto-eco-how-to-recognize-porn-movie.html

I ran across this little essay from deep in the mists of the Blog Era, perhaps while killing time on TVTropes.  I found it a fascinating read, in large part because it has so little overlap with my experience of pornography.  I get where it comes from.  The stigma against discussing pornography, except in the coarsest of terms, means that people's relationship to it can be intensely personal and self-revelatory.

I had to look up when it was written.  1994.  His writing also says much not only about Eco as a person but about the times he lived in, his experiences with pornography.  Over the past few years, as the economic center of Western porn has shifted from Hollywood to Quebec, it has increasingly seemed to me that much pornography represents not the unspoken desires of the masses, but the values and beliefs of a few.  This was as true of the porn industry in 1994 as it is of the Pornhub-based status quo in 2020.

It is not enough for me to speak of a cinema of transgression.  Not all transgression is equal.  Smashing the state cannot be equated to sister-fucking.  The question to which I return over and over again is Cicero's, the question at the center of all conspiracy thinking: Cui bono?  Who transgresses, and why do they transgress?

This is not, I would argue, a sound basis for judgement.  This is the realm of unverified secrets, of malicious lies, of religious ecstacy and terror.  Aaaaand I think i am overwriting a little bit here.

Getting back to Eco.  His "obvious reasons" are, we can say now, neither obvious or necessary to anyone but him.  He postulates a movie consisting of nothing but violation as "intolerable", but my feeling is that humans can tolerate, and even desire, rather more than we are comfortable imagining.  Eco argues that the essence of porn is to arouse by transgressing, and that in order to transgress it has to establish a mundane reality first.

I disagree.  For me, the mundane reality is lived reality.  Establishing a fictional mundane reality serves no true narrative purpose; it is just swindling, or if you prefer cock-teasing.  Because men do, it seems, come astonishingly quickly.  The pornographic film is a useless medium, because the purpose of porn is not a purpose that takes the typical man 75 minutes.  Hence, freed from the rather arbitrary technological strictures of film, we see visual pornography taking a shorter, more concentrated form.  Much of the audience for pornography, from what I can tell, just wants to see the fucking, and thanks to the miracles of technology, they can, without any anticipation or delay.

For the fetishist, well, perhaps it may work differently.  What if, say, your concept of sex is not built around penetration building to orgasm?  What role does time play in relation to sexual stimuli?  I recall a novel I read once, decades ago, by a person by the name of Nicholson Baker, called The Fermata.  It was a fetish novel about a young man who chanced upon the power to stop time, and used this power to sexually assault unsuspecting women.  Nasty business, that, but the idea of fetishizing time itself... I suspect I might sometimes do that, if to say so doesn't abstract desire, doesn't abstract sexual stimulus/response, too terribly much.