The Subject of Pornography

Pornography is not meant to represent directly the fantasy in which the individual wishes to insert themselves. Expressions of fantasies operate on the dream-logic of sublimating unconscious currents and flows into theatrical-symbolic productions. Of all forms of this sublimation, there are few places where this more true than sexuality and masters of this idea such as Klaus Theweleit spent much of their time attempting to find sexuality in on the surface, non-sexual scenes, as sexuality. It is in this that pornography operates, ideas almost impossible to verbalize due to their pre-verbal flowing nature being sublimated into mediums of theatre and symbol.

Throughout the landscape of modern pornography, single thematic element is overwhelmingly dominant. The woman is centered in framing and posing - in acted porn the most common angle is a variety of framings showing the penis emerging from some edge of the screen to interact with the centered woman. The same pattern repeats in drawn or animated pornography, with the character now fully abstracted into the “faceless male” or tentacle tropes, the penis turned into the phallic abstraction of the tentacle or the phallic-body not even granted a fully featured (or fully human, in the case of when the face is drawn in order to be ugly) face, the eyes often shaded out to show only a mouth.

With this pattern of relations of man-woman in mind, there is a striking replication of it across genres. The man, through his penis and phallic-body contains within him all sexuality of the scene with which the woman, on her own desexualized, interacts with in order to become-sexual. The woman of pornography is the Subject, while the man is the Real. The relation of pornography is the relationship between the Ego, the untarnished soul and sin, the physical body which prevents its transcendence. It is for this reason that overwhelmingly pornography ends with the woman “corrupted” in some way - her face covered in semen while she smiles to the camera, tattooed with a dark ganguro tan, with a glowing purple tattoo on her mons pubis, and etc, that signifies her unification with the brutish physicality of sex. Sexuality is feared from this dynamics because, before anything else, what occurs within sexuality is a uniting with this Real, the shit and dirt of humanity and from thus comes its fear - the Subject not only constantly engages in flirtations with the thing it is supposedly above and beyond in our common Cartesian wisdom, it desires it, however much it protests, shown in “cock shock” scenes of revealing to the subject the horror at the bottom of their soul, how much she deeply wants the very thing the Ego-basis of a Subject is built around rejecting, transcending.