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Essay: Porn as Art
Sep. 4th, 2020 04:51 pmPorn 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.
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.
