{"id":11248,"date":"2010-09-26T20:35:12","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T03:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11248"},"modified":"2010-09-26T20:35:12","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T03:35:12","slug":"fragments-of-evolving-manhood-thinking-about-pornography-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11248","title":{"rendered":"Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Thinking About Pornography 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translation work has taken me away from this series, and I have been missing it. A conversation I had today with a friend reminded me, though, of the conclusion to an essay about pornography called “Inside The Men Inside ‘Inside Christy Canyon,'” that I published in 1994 in the now-defunct literary journal called “The American Voice.” This is a slightly edited version of that conclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Male dominance instructs men that our bodies are tools. By turning male orgasm into the “cum shot,” heterosexual pornography reflects and perpetuates this image of the male body. Yet it does not have to be that way. Erection, for example, the gradual hardening of a man’s penis–in the hand or mouth or inside or against or at the sight, sound or smell of the body of his lover, or in his own hand–is the physical corollary of, a concrete metaphor for, that man’s capacity for trust, something Sharon Olds explores in her poem “The Connoisseuse of Slugs:”<\/p>\n

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
\nI would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
\nnaked jelly of those gold bodies,
\ntranslucent strangers glistening along the
\nstones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
\nat my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
\nto nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
\nbut I was not interested in that. What I liked
\nwas to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
\nodor of the wall, and stand there in silence
\nuntil the slug forgot I was there
\nand sent its antennae up out of its
\nhead, the glimmering umber horns
\nrising like telescopes, until finally the
\nsensitive knobs would pop out the
\nends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
\nwhen I first saw a naked man,
\nI gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
\nmystery reenacted, the slow
\nelegant being coming out of hiding and
\ngleaming in the dark air, eager and so
\ntrusting you could weep.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That trust as a necessary condition for sex, as that without which sex becomes exploitation by definition, is what is missing from the male performances in movies like Inside Christy Canyon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I want a mainstream heterosexual pornography in which this male trust is eroticized, in which the places we have not been, I<\/em> have not been touched, the places it is in the interest of male dominance to keep hidden, are lifted into the light and brought into knowledge. I want a heterosexual pornography in which the sensations of the penis are not limited by the in and out and up and down that leads to ejaculation; in which our availability, my<\/em> availability to the eyes and hands and mouths of my lover(s) teaches me what it means to be known and desired entirely, only and wholly for myself; in which the touch of sex–because at the level of the body touch is all sex is–creates a space where the embodied life of one human being opens to the embodied life of another; in which what is made from that opening is understood to be what the love in making love<\/em> is all about.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translation work has taken me away from this series, and I have been missing it. A conversation I had today with a friend reminded me, though, of the conclusion to an essay about pornography called “Inside The Men Inside ‘Inside … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender-and-the-body","category-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}