So I was reading this article in Sequential Tart, A Lady's Guide to Comic Book Porn . The author proposes that the point of porn is whether you get off on it or not. I'm also rather certain that I've read Susie Bright saying something similar. Maybe it's a question of semantics, but it bugs me. First, that people feel a need to define a "point" for porn, in a way that one would never worry about a "point" for literature;" and second, with the word choice of "getting off."
It's ambiguous. Does "getting off" mean getting aroused? Or does it mean having an orgasm while reading/watching this bit of media? Or does it even mean thinking about it after the fact, in an intimate situation, either alone or with someone else? (Not that anyone would ever think of anything but the person they were being intimate with because that's immoral.)
I think porn has the same "point" as all literature, film, and media: to make you feel and/or think. I think about porn a lot. More honestly, I think about sex a lot. What it is to be sexual, why some things make me respond positively or negatively, what it means to have certain cultural biases that I don't really seem to be in conscious control of, what it means to be a sexual female, both historically and maritally.
For a highly inexact gallop through etymology, based strictly on my memory since I'm too lazy to go look anything up, if "porn-" comes from the goddess Porne, an incarnation of Aphrodite dedicated exclusively to sexual pleasure and lust, the kind of lust that has a voyeuristic edge or intent to titillate, and titillation means to tickle… Then it makes sense to me that porn is about being tickled. Porn is erotica is smut is something I read or watch that gives me little tingles in my body. Not exclusively in the naughty bits, but all over. Something that makes me feel my flesh, reminds me that I have a body between my shoulders and knees, that I'm not just a brain in a jar hooked up to a computer, a robot stuck in cubeland.
Porn is something that makes me feel alive, in a visceral way. Something that reminds me that for all the last two thousand years or more of dualism, it's impossible to totally ignore that I have a body, that my body is me. Porn is that which reconnects me to my flesh, makes me unable to deny my "animal nature." And I am an animal, not an incorporeal spirit, with warm skin and light touches and pleasure and tickles and tingles and rushing blood and pounding heart and pulsing clit and contracting nipples and moistening cunt and heavy breathing and beads of sweat and dilated eyes and gasps for air and coming and coming and coming and yes!
Ahem.
Where was I?
Oh yes. The point of porn. I think the point of porn is to provide a mental/physical tickle, a reminder that there is a body and that it is definitely a good thing, one that should be enjoyed.
I'm not advocating a life of total hedonism, just trying to point out that many of us live rather monastic existences, with the occasional bi-weekly hour-long exception in a darkened bedroom with a significant other. Sex can be more than that. For myself, I've been making a sincere effort to rediscover my sexuality, to reclaim it, to credit it with the seriousness that I honestly think it's worth. Sex is important and serious and essential to my happiness. I'm working on how to not be ashamed of that, and how to focus more on regaining my post-adolescent desires to explore everything, try everything, experience it all. It's not too late! We all still have time!
So if I seem to be dirty-minded, that's why, and if I seem embarrassed or shameful, that's also why. But I think these explorations are important, and it's a path I'm committed to traveling, at least until I find myself somewhere I don't want to be.
And I must say, so far, the scenery is delicious!