Essay: Porn as Art

[lb_lee]

Porn As Art
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Summary: “Dirty books are fun; that’s all there is to it.” --Tom Lehrer, "Smut".
Notes: This essay won the vote for this month, and was paid for by my lovely Patreon folks! Also, shocker, in this essay, I discuss sexually explicit material, have one explicit image, and also make a couple glancing references to rape, violence, and the AIDS crisis.


Once, somebody tried to insult me by saying all I read was nonfiction and porn comics. I didn’t have a comeback; it’d never occurred to me that I might need one.

Porn is supposed to be titillating garbage, devoid of art, craft, quality, or ethics, worthless for anything but masturbation, which is of course a shameful, shameful act. To read porn and discuss it openly like any other genre is to be treated as the object of disgust.

And that’s horseshit. Porn is art, pure and simple, capable of the same quality and crap as any other kind. Not only that, but possibly more than any other genre on earth, porn helped me break out of the violent, predatory sexual dynamics of my family. It was a flying fuck you to everything they taught me. Which means that porn isn’t just art to me; it is life-affirming art. And contrary to popular opinion, it's not easy to make good porn. When we denigrate the work put into it, we denigrate the people doing that work.

So let’s talk about porn.

Disclaimer: No, Not Erotica

I’m not using the term “erotica” in this essay because I don’t use it in real life, and because as far as I can tell, the term only exists as a defense against charges of obscenity or bad taste. Whatever its quality or message, whether I’m reading it for artistic or sexual reasons (or both), it’s still porn, and acting like sex and art are mutually exclusive devalues both.

With that said, let's get on with it.

Ink and Paper Porno

I'll mostly be talking about my preferred forms of porn here: namely, prose and comics. Video porn has never been my thing, because film isn’t my medium. In film, events carry on at their own pace, regardless of the viewer’s desire or intent. If I want that scene in slow-mo, I have to fumble for the remote control or the keyboard and make it happen myself. If things suddenly go into the “do not want” zone, the movie doesn’t stop itself; I have to make it stop.

With comics and prose, though, I set the pace. Events can not progress without my active participation. Is there a panel, a page, or a sentence I like? I can read it over and over, savor every detail, before moving on. (Haven’t we all had those favorite books that came to fall open at our favorite parts?) I can effortlessly skip the parts I don’t like. I can read scenes in any order I want—flipping through pages is way easier than fiddling with a temperamental rewind or fast-forward button. If I’m having a spacey, slow day, the books will progress as slowly as I read. And when the enjoyment just isn’t there, the story stops the moment I blink.

I can understand why people enjoy live-action video porn! But what illustration, comics, and prose lack in three-dimensional reality, they make up for in other ways.

In porn without live people, none of the participants can be hurt, degraded, or exploited, except in our imaginations. In the safe bounds of fiction, we’re free to enjoy things that we would never want to happen in real life. We can explore the taboo, the unethical, and the physically impossible.

Since the characters aren’t real, they can have bodies and reactions far beyond human. Want to see gigantic dual-sexed scorpion men with phosphorescent slime? No problem! Want half a dozen of them to gangbang? Never fear, none will get an inconvenient charlie horse. Anatomy can be divorced from gender or biology, offering freedom to explore and imagine.

In ink and paper porno, the metaphorical camera can do all sorts of things that would be impossible in live-action. It can have selective X-ray vision, be inside a character’s body, mind, or soul, and it will never get in the way. In prose, sensations and emotions can be depicted in lavish textual detail that video just can’t match. What does it feel like for a robot to have its magnetic fields tampered with in a sexy fun way? Read and find out!

And then there’s color. You can use color in comics and illustration in ways that would be distractingly trippy or experimental in film. I have one porno comic where an empathic character feels his partner’s sexual desire and pleasure in magenta, while everything else is grayscale. The hotter things get, the more fuschia—its vibrancy, warmth, and brightness is separate and yet intimately intertwined with the real world. (Sorry, no examples; the creators have requested it not be posted online.) I’ve also seen erotic art where people touch with light or darkness, leaving lingering trails all over each other’s bodies.

Jess Fink, in Chester 5000 XYV, gets her panels in on the business. They’re conventional rectangles and squares during non-sexy business, but once things turn sexual, the panels grow increasingly curvy and baroque in their framing, until they look like flowers or infinity signs. The effect shows the softness, pleasure, and ecstasy of sex, flying above the rest of life.

These creative choices aren't made lightly. It takes practice and skill!

Working Hard Ain’t Hardly Working

Enjoying a great sex scene in live-action is, I think, similar to appreciating athleticism. It’s enthralling, awe-inspiring to watch the human body in motion, transcending its apparent limitations. It’s true for sport, fight, or dance, and it’s true for sex. It takes serious work! For an example, a few months back I found a random unsourced porn still in a zine that impressed me so much that I had to sketch it. Here it is:



Imagine holding that position for god-knows-how-long, under hot lights and multiple takes! Imagine having to make it sexy over and over again, on command! That's hard work! How can I fail to be impressed?

The art of live-action sexiness might be even more challenging than other forms of athleticism, because taste is so individual. Just about all of us can watch Usain Bolt sprint and agree that he’s great. Not so for porn stars! How do you measure sexiness?

Being a porn artist or writer requires different skills, but at similar levels. A perfectly adequate cartoonist can still suck at making porno. For instance: how do you choose to show the sounds people make during sex (or don't)? Consider the following three panels:



From Iris and Angel #3, writing by Spike Trotman, art by Amanda Lenefrais



"Are You Sure?" by Laurel Lynn Leake and Kimball Anderson, from Queerotica



Wavelength, Ch. 1, by cosmicdanger

Three porn comics, three different ways of depicting sound. How does that change the experience? How would that panel from Iris and Angel differ had they chosen to put something in that speech bubble, or have no speech bubble at all? Meanwhile, Wavelength is the opposite: words but no bubble! Does that make the moment seem frozen in time? Does it integrate the words more wholeheartedly into the action? What do you think? When should sound be depicted symbolically (a speech bubble filled with nothing but hearts), versus more naturalistically, like in "Are You Sure?" How does that change the experience?

These are not lessons taught in art school, or even comics courses. Most of the time, a reader only notices such things when done poorly. Done well, it's invisible. And unless you're at a specialty conference with a rare presentation on porn comics (I've been to exactly one), you're unlikely to ever hear those pros discuss it with their audience. Unless you have a crew of pornographer friends, you're stuck learning from other porn.

You better hope you get some pornographer buddies. You'll need them if you have any hope of selling.

Obscenity

Sexually explicit material might be big business, but it's a dicey one. I own a Physique Pictorial from September 1967, full of scantily clad muscular men posing, but no genitals, and a terse article titled "THE NEW LEGAL CLIMATE" explains why. "Everyone is heartened by the victory of DSI in Minneapolis on 29 counts, in which the government charged they were selling obscene material. At almost the same time, however, another very negative decision came out of Baltimore in which certain bonafide [sic] male nudist books were adjudged obscene. From our point of view, the waters are as muddy as ever and there do not exist any clear guidelines. As we see it now anyone exchanging nudes through the mails [sic] might still be prosecuted and might well be found guilty in some provincial jurisdiction, but then if they were lucky enough and rich enough to have their case heard by the Supreme Court they would probably be freed." That was fifty years ago, but a lot of the same problems remain.

Last year, while at the Queers and Comics conference in New York, I had the privilege of being in the audience of the sex worker cartoonists' panel. It was the high point of the event for me; the panelists were a mix of ages, genders, and types of comics and sex work they did, but all of them talked about the bullshit they had to deal with. Printers and publishers wouldn't touch their work, or would dump them without notice. They had to do all sorts of contortions so as to avoid being denied housing, employment opportunities, healthcare, or just the awkwardness of, "so, what do you do?"

When we devalue porn, we devalue the people who put their work into it. This should be obvious! These hardworking people carry the burdens of our erotic imagination; they deserve better than the projections of our guilt and shame!

I've been lucky; I haven't had to deal with anything but maybe weird looks from my printer. (I won't name them because I don't want to screw myself.) But I still have to make mental notes over exactly where I can print what. If I print a porn book with a spine and don't want to have a long, awkward conversation with potential homophobes, I'll have to go to Ken Ess for black and white, Colour Code Printing for Risograph. (And Colour Code isn't even in my country, which brings overseas shipping charges and border agents into the equation.)

Even if I print the books, there's the issue of how to sell them. Most online payment places, like Paypal, won't pay for sexual material; all the porn I've bought online has been through esoteric payment interfaces or carefully couched euphemisms, hoping to avoid notice. Hell, even giving porn away online is a challenge for small fish! Even sites that originally welcome them toss them off (like Fanfiction.net or tumblr) or crack down hard (Patreon), and the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA package has now made websites liable for things their users do... meaning that humble sex workers and pornographers are getting cracked down harder than ever. Why do you think I'm on Dreamwidth? It's one of the few places where I can post my porn, control its access, and feel assured that I won't get ejected in a year or two.

I know cartoonists who only sell their porn books at in-person conventions, because it allows for money to change hands directly, cutting out the middle-man, and because con staff can be more forgiving. (They use ID checks, censor stickers, sealed bags, and 18+ ADULTS ONLY notices to weed out kids.) Believe it or not, I buy the vast majority of my porn in public, surrounded by huge crowds who know exactly what I'm doing, because it's easier and more convenient!

And this doesn't even cover the reputational inconvenience or damage that can come from being known as a porn artist.

None of this is stuff I have to worry about selling All in the Family. It is more acceptable to sell rape comics, it seems, than porn comics.

Healing Porn

Porn can help heal pain and isolation, not just create it. In the introduction to the Small Favors omnibus, Kelly Sue DeConnick thanks the book for helping her through the Trump election: "it makes me laugh, it makes me smile, it makes me tingle in my girl parts. [....] I need all the sunshine I can get." In Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It, Inu Yoshi describes how a gay magazine helped him find his way into Japan’s gay subculture: "in the back of of the magazine there was information about stores and bars and places like that" (69); Jiraiya states his hope that his own work “makes them [queer readers] feel better” in a homophobic world, because in the pages of his comics, gay men find happy endings (137). Don Shewey writes in The Paradox of Porn, “I experienced the healing power of porn most strongly in the 1980s during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic […] I would visit young guys—guys my age—in hospital rooms and rub their swollen feet, hold their hands while they dozed in a medicated haze, and do my best to engage in chipper conversations about movies and plays and anything but their skeletal frames and the KS lesions covering their arms and their faces. Afterwards, I would often stand in the stairwell or stop on a street corner and cry for a minute at the sad, savage spectacle I’d just left. Then I’d head straight to the Adonis to spend an hour or two watching guys fuck on the screen and fool around in the seats. Was I numbing my grief? Maybe. I thought of it as visiting a temple to gay male desire, an affirmation of life” (132).

I have a similar story. My childhood and adolescence were filled with rape. I couldn't bear to touch or think about my body sexually; it only reminded me of past agony. So did most porn.

But then, as a teen, I discovered prose monster porn. It was less visual, and it was second to none at showing the private, inner thoughts and experiences of the characters. Best of all, their bodies came in shapes, sizes, and colors that no human ever could, and that made them easier and safer to identify with. There was nothing to remind me of my attackers.

When I was seventeen, I dared write my first queer kissing scene, because it turned me on. It was my desperate hope for a better future, a place where people like me could find love, sexual pleasure, and joy.

My mother found out. But no matter how many times she choked me and deleted my story, I revived it from hidden back-ups. On some level, I knew that anything that got her that angry was freedom and power. Even my father could only get me to censor the story until I moved out!

In a youth filled with sexual violence, this was the only form of sexuality that was mine alone, that was completely under my control and not degrading, painful, or dangerous. (After all, my writing didn't hurt me; my parents hurt me.) Porn gave me a safe place to imagine, to enjoy, to want. It let me write myself into a kinder, more pleasurable world.

Porn as Bonding

Now I’m living in that kinder, more pleasurable world. I don’t have to hide my sexuality—I have a whole shelf of sexy books! And not only that, but I get to share them with the people I love, and vice versa, which has brought me delight I couldn’t have imagined as a teen. I love finding books for people, of any kind. If my partners have an unusual kink, I love finding exactly what they want and giving it to them. There’s joy in learning more about their desires and my own, enjoying it together (if we want).

The last part doesn’t require the porn be something we both get off on. Mac’s into girls, while I’m mostly not, but I can still enjoy the art and his pleasure. And while he may not be into prose porn so much, that hasn’t stopped him from using it as part of a game like How Long Can You Read and Resist Me. There’s a reason I proposed marriage to him after such games; I knew that someone who could see me that intimately, bring me such joy, and enjoy goofy gay superhero porn with me was someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

There’s something intimate about reading porn together. We can talk about the parts we like most or least, whether we’d like to try some of it in real life or not, what we think would be even cooler to add. Mac and I were first able to discuss our kinks with each other because porn paved the way. It gave us language to describe our desires, examples of it being potentially enjoyable, helped break the shame. Talking about sex is hard, talking about freaky sex is harder, but once you’ve read self-insert xenophilic ovipositor mpreg porn together, it gets easier. It opens up my world, seeing my partners enjoy things differently from me, learning what they like! And even if it doesn’t lead to sex itself, there's nothing cozier than cuddling up together under the blankets with a favorite porno while snow seethes down outside.

Happy Endings

Barbara Carrellas, in her book Urban Tantra, writes that sexual energy is life energy. At first, I thought this was nonsense… until I realized that when I’m feeling rundown, drained, and blah, I read sexy stuff. Even if it doesn't turn me on, it gives me a feeling of warm vitality and life. It emphasizes the triumph of connection and pleasure over isolation and pain, depicts bodies and other people as sources of joy, rather than suffering. It gives a happy ending. (There is downer porn out there; I don’t read it.)

Porn can be a powerful force for good, and it's an art form that's mostly ignored and denigrated... as are the people who make it. I hope we can find ways for everyone to find that warmth and vitality, in ways that are kind to the folks involved.

And I hope to god that one day, we can post our harmless cyborg jizz art in peace.

Comments

[talewisefellowship]

That was fast and a neat read! Thanks for sharing!

--Hikaru

[stealthsystem]

Hey. I'm on the wrong journal. But I want to thank you. As someone who is an Android in her own right, I like seeing things about people whose bodies are like mine, and reading stuff that reminds me of me and Garnet, and that is truly art.
I agree with everything you just said here.
-Sapphire

[minoanmiss]

*cheers in agreement*

I needed something life affirming today. Thank you a LOT.

[wolfy_writing]

This is really interesting! I'd thought about how ink-and-paper porn doesn't carry the same potential for abuse and exploitation as film-and-video porn, but I hadn't thought about how it gave more control to the audience.

[lb_lee]

I mean, ink-and-paper still can exploit the artists who make it! (The number of artists I've seen whose art has been robbed and spread online against their wishes, cheating them of money and putting their day jobs at risk because employers might fire them for having porn on the internet!) So I don't think that's a major distinction. Workplace exploitation can happen regardless.

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, I think some of the exploitation in video porn can be more severe and traumatic, but it's not an absolute distinction by any means.

[lb_lee]

God was it a nice change from Plural History! I figured everyone needed a break. :p

--Rogan

[lb_lee]

No problem! It's always fun to talk about good art!

[writerkit]

I always thought the differentiation between porn and erotica was whether it was prose or visual media-- porn is watched, erotica is read, and then comics can go either way depending on who's talking. I haven't heard anyone try to make the "it's about the artisticness!" argument in years.

[lb_lee]

Ah, that makes some sense. (Though I still ran into arguments mostly that erotica was superior and less abusive or toxic, which I disagree with.) Still not sure I agree with it, but at least it doesn't get up my nose as much.

[writerkit]

...well those people are wrong; anything can be toxic in the wrong hands.