Reading Porn vs. Watching It · 6:12pm May 31st, 2015
On the topic of writing sex(y), one might venture to introduce the question of reading.
Now, how does reading sex really differ from watching sex? And how should the difference, if there is any, affect the way we write about sex? These are the queries we will strive to answer today.
We’ve all watched porn. Gay, bi, straight, fetish, vanilla, whatever. Discounting all the issues concerning content, what connects all the various ways one can watch porn is indeed the (audio)visual aspect of the deed, the mishmash of skin, hair, organs and fluids that travels all the way from the depths of the Internet to your cerebral cortex, shortly passing through a screen and eyes. A sight to behold, surely.
Now consider reading some erotic material – and I really mean reading, not leafing through a magazine filled with pictures. Line by line you dwell deeper into the story, if there is any, taste every word that catches your tongue from the textual stream. Perhaps you’re looking for something, some choice expression which you know strikes the pink chord within. Gradually, the scene unravels (before) you, all the way to full presence and beyond.
In this perspective, there is no stark line between the two forms of carnal consumption, although it could be pointed out that the study we’re undertaking is already biased in the sense that it operates completely from the viewpoint of one side of the separation the very existence of which it attempts to examine. Does the fact play a difference? If it does, we could hardly prove, in writing, that it does not – and vice versa. Thus we shall forget the issue for now.
On a very general level it could be said that the distinction we’re after occurs at least once, namely in the case of characters. In both writing and watching they play a vital role, naturally. As natural is the suggestion that these roles are of very unlike nature. For one, where the visual porn often neglects the mind, i.e. personality, of the protagonists, writing cannot but concede all things visual to the reader’s responsibility*.
If this claim holds it becomes clear that reading porn demands a great deal more imagination from the reader than watching it does. The audiovisual amalgame does not inspire imagination: it imagines for us. Inclusion of a “plot”, a thing increasingly rare in modern porn, hardly changes the fact: the very “point” of visual porn is to strip its objects naked, to leave nothing secret from the mind’s eye, to “show everything”. The gap between the viewer and the camera is minimized, even dissipated, for the quest of complete objectification.
But the complete lack of a veil between the subject and object does not – and this is my boldest claim so far – result to an immersion, but to the contrary it leads to the impossibility of such a thing. In visual porn, the content is not lived; it is consumed.
One should not read too much into this metaphor, not at least in any such way which leads to judging its message as somehow akin to the sin of moralizing. I’m not moralizing anypony. To me it’s all the same what gets you off, how and why. I’m interested in putting these questions in words, not in rules.
That being said, how does a text support immersion, which then supposedly stands apart from objectification? The main principle was already stated: writing, by its “nature”, urges the reader to visualize the events presented, to interpret them; in a word, it urges one to become a part of them. A text can never “show everything”, because in a sense it shows nothing – a written sign, a sentence, is always arbitrary, sensitive, exposed to a reading.
More importantly, this is an important goal of writing, a criterion of success most easy to prove. Imagine a piece of textual porn that really “showed it all”, that depicted every single change of muscles, shift of bodies, pearl of sweat etc. Not only would such a text be preposterously long, even to the point of unreadability: it would essentially make for a very boring experience. When James Joyce wrote porn (see some of his letters to his wife), Ulysses was not in the same room, propably not even in the same universe, with him.
A text charms precisely by not showing everything. Going further, one could argue that the less a text “shows”, the more alluring it turns. A picture might tell more than a thousand words, but only in the case one did not really know what words to choose. One word in the right place is worth a thousand pictures.
Of course, the same principle applies to movies and games, i.e. to essentially audiovisual products. Anyone who has played Amnesia or watched a decent horror film knows this: the monster is scary only as long as you see bare traces of it. But if that’s so, why couldn’t visual porn save the veil, so to speak, and “not show everything”? Without denying the possibility, I can only answer it by a counter-question: in the case porn did not show everything, would we still call it porn? Even “soft porn”?
Let us elaborate the point, for I think it will be worth our time. In Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek presents the idea that ordinary movies containing some erotic, suggestive or romantic material cannot, for structural reasons, show hard porn. That would all but ruin them as stories. Imagine, for example, some classic romantic movie, say Titanic. Now imagine that, during the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sneak into the cargo hall to have sex, the camera did not limit to a few captions of a hand pressing against the steamy inside of a car, but instead moved inside of it, showing how he fucks her on the backseat. After some minutes of this, the movie would go on normally.
Would it still be the same movie? In Žižek’s opinion, no, the movie would not be the same although what was added were mere few minutes of extra material, completely irrelevant to the plot as such. The hard porn would have ruined the credibility of the characters, their depth, the very seriousness of the story. This is not simply because of the supposed conservative views of the audience: they could be as liberal and open-minded as they pleased, but it would not change the fact that the porn broke the line between the viewer and the camera, by that token the distance of the subject and the object that is the foundation of immersion. When nothing is left for speculation, what reason is there for one to invest oneself in the plot, in the story, in the characters?
Thus we can conclude that there indeed exists differences between reading and watching sex. Not all of these were brought up here, naturally, for the topic is vast and my time (and knowledge) are sparse. Moreover, although I wrote at length, I did not mention a word of how to write good porn. So, if we have agreed that writing does stand as a unique form of porn production, at least partly due to its focus on imagination and characters that inspire it, what would it take to write good, sexy characters? How to conjure personalities who tempt us, not with the size and shape of their organs, but with the cloaks of words serving as their dresses?**
That we shall, hopefully, shortly show.
*Of course we could conceive a text accompanied by images, not only of the characters within but of the milieu, too. In this age of technology we’re living, the lack of (audio)visual material in a text has become an exception rather than the rule. Still, I wish to press the point that, unless a certain barrier is crossed, the images accompanying any piece of writing merely serve to gently guide and inspire the reader, not to lead them. If they did, what would separate the following text from the subtitles of a movie?
**Isn’t all this equivalent to saying that, in written porn, people are never naked?
I wish I wasn't half asleep because this seems interesting.
3112633 I'm glad to have caught your interest, sleepy or not.