Thesis

Pornoculture has become much broader than originally expected. This paper will examine its effect on body,
mind, and society as a whole. This essay will likewise find pornography too limiting a scope, and will discuss the
treatment of sex work and commodified sex in general.

Masochistic Body

“But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.” — Clive Barker, Hellbound Heart

Morphology and sex are necessary bedfellows. The body’s shape, organs, and mobility all are integrated into the phenomenology of sex, with the image spectacle of pornography taking all these aspects to the limit. Pornography’s power is that it goes beyond image, both in the sense that it portrays a real act and in the sense that it seeks audience participation. Sexual acts often take a very extreme form, displaying violent and coercive scenarios, taking the body to an absolute limit. Likewise, pornography often contains extremely fetishized bodies, even replacing skin with material. We see the body get pulled apart. Sex should not be reduced to penetration on this basis because of what we know, or even objectification. One can take Dworkin’s description of lesbian scenes in which she codes scissors as representing a more violent and authentic phallus, when in reality they function much more are an object of sculpting the body. The pornography has every part of the body is acted upon with violence, its integrity being attacked either through having it binded or pummeled or covered. What is created is a body subjected to a regime, an intense materialism in which something new is created: the masochistic body.

This should not be viewed as some sort of positive transhumanism, but as the realization of rarified flesh of pornography. Pornography, likewise, has its reality transform into the rarified and is articulated again in the real world. A real hellish version of this is found within BDSM. Inferiority is the destruction of integrity to Dworkin, the body losing its ability to maintain itself and finding it being constantly dismembered. Women especially are subjected to this constant sadistic dismembering, eventual so that womanness becomes this limbless entity. In all pornography and in all fucking, there exists this threat to flesh, losing something through sex, turning into a leper with appendages falling off.

Our morphology is affected greatly by pornography. The pornographic images appear in front of the viewer, often POV, often with instructions. It is porn demanding physical engagement, to bring the fantastic image into reality through act. Regardless of whether the act is dominating or submissive, it can only exist through an integration, an integration of the image into reality. Movements on the screen are rarified and exist as training. The motions of the coomer are also embraced, and it creates something new entirely. Such desires aren’t taboo anymore; if anything, there is a certain embrace of porn consumption. It is produced on a large scale, with most of the independent releases being masturbation (the Manyvids phenomenon). The pornography becomes a mirror in which the viewer and the performer are masturbating at each other, no communication, and creating an inferred discipline. Pornography is socialization. Fantasy does not exist…it is always flesh. The image reaches out of the screen and changes our bodies, changes how we fuck. Going to stores and buying paraphilias and saying those clichéd things in clichéd fantasies trying to break away from the self. Both actors find themselves mutilated in the act.

“In that space, when you’re building that little character that is you, but is not you in order to protect your boundaries, there’s no time or room to have any of your interior life. It’s just gone, lost in the face of work. That’s what’s so painful for me in the dullness of sex work. It’s sitting across from these people, these men—these rich men, usually—who you have nothing in common with, your mind going completely numb.” — Rachel Rabbit White (sex worker, poet), “Rachel Rabbit White with Sophia Giovannitti“

Will is completely subordinated in this moment, the body experiencing a complete override. Everything becomes subordinated, restricted, and pathologized. Women’s bodies were ground zero for what is becoming more and more total. These behaviors are unreal, but they are not performative. Rather, the dancer dissolves into the act. We achieve the masochistic body through our inability to act, to move, as is required. Our movements of resistance, flinches, wriggles: all these things must be suppressed. This necessarily produces a body in bondage. Our bodies are constantly contorting into more and more punished forms. The flesh of our bodies and ideal flesh of our tongues is twisted and bound. Above all, it is calloused.

Pornography’s status as image falls away. It bleeds into our sex, and our relationship with our bodies.

“In summary, the modalities of feminine bodily existence have their root in the fact that feminine existence experiences the body as a mere thing—a fragile thing, which must be picked up and coaxed into movement, a thing that exists as looked at and acted upon. ​​To be sure, any lived body exists as a material thing as well as a transcending subject. For feminine bodily existence, however, the body is often lived as a thing that is other than it, a thing like other things in the world. To the extent that a woman lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities.” — Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Human Studies

The fuckers are not somnambulists; rather, they are in the world, the phenomenology always grasped. Even the loss of control lives within this very framework, pinned down to the room, the moment, the position. Speed and heat bound up in the moment.

From this, the masochist body becomes so far away that we are forced to retreat into the mind and understand the inner experience that brought about this new mass. “I’ll just make myself into​ this caricature of femininity”[1]; surgery becomes an effective method to resolve the problems of the body in the world. It’s not even a bad move; it would be foolish not to do so. One gains nothing from some false pretense of purity because everything is already submerged.

Coomer

“You’ve just been fucked by Psyops…because physical wounds heal.” — patch made by sergeant in the 15 Psychological Operations Group (1995-2015)

It’s very strange it’s called the male gaze when everyone has it. Patriarchy actualizing in the mind. Watching death tapes with the boys oscillating between disgust and laughter and fascination. A false barrier must be enacted to reveal its own falseness. We return now to the image, not as it is presented or trains us, but in how we think. How the mind is knife-sculpted into the mind of a coomer. Such a phenomenon can be similar to the overcoding of bourgeois consciousness, becoming our real conscious and negating sublimating any feelings into one of shame. What is produced in the case of pornography is a unique entity, separate from the pauper with the thoughts of a millionaire. This figure is the coomer, a neologism used here not in the limited sense of a porn addict, but in the broader sense of someone completely embracing pornoculture. It can seem far away until it actualizes in a conversation, or in an image flash, or in a dream, or in a glance. Then you mumble to yourself, “this is not good.” All is made one flesh, totalitarianism being an organic principle. Phenomena becomes the same as the image with no freedom and no exit.

“Like ​a herd chased by an infinite shep​herd, the bleating flock which we are would flee, would flee without end the horror of a reduction of Being to totality.” — Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

Coomer becomes our mind and our face. This impersonal mass contains its own fleeing in the great multiplicity of fetishes it creates, each desire being unique to oneself, being something one can claim makes them not like the others. We lie to ourselves and claim oneness, but as Hegel writes in Phenomenology, “[b]ut all the same it is in its very nature one and single, and has essentially the form of being that​ in which these subsisting elements are superseded,” and get eaten up.

“Culture tells me it’s okay. It can be empowering for women. It breaks with old prudity.”

I know a sell when I see one.

Emancipation rhetoric is utilized by any order and these emancipations, despite how one may decry them, are authentic. These things are unleashed, actualizing and making the glorified manifest. No one is empowered by this, save maybe the pornography industry and the force itself. We aren’t able to achieve rational thought, every consciousness being false, just creating a different illusion. Force submits us to this forever and ever. To think like this can leave you more bitter than ash. All these horrific feelings become processed through bitterness, pounding and extracting until it just calluses over…too burnt out to have anything but call response left in it.

People and all their horrible motivations, horrible bodies, and worse behavior. Our mind becomes our flesh and our flesh our mind, the rarified and the material losing their distinction and becoming one. Praying some measurement can give them answer, some time and space quantity that can make it feel more stable and more bearable. Pathological documentation of all the varieties of human sexuality and expression, often as binary, often as a physical point on a plane. This is not to say that identity is clean, but rather, that it is now getting articulated down to the minutiae. No one says a thing about economics in these things, anyway…

It doesn’t matter if the consciousness is false if it eats your entire mind. These aren’t fantasies anymore. All these events are real, both within our own mind and within the images and sequences.

Mass Graves

“When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
As by a shining brainless beacon
Or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
When you are calm and joyful
And finally entirely alone
Then in a great new darkness
You will finally execute your special plan”

Current 93, “Special Plan”

We are shown here how everyone dies. No one is freed through sexual ecstasy or discovers themselves or can flee away from this. Whatever narcissism gets entombed in this is meaningless. The earth flesh becomes hard and, like sepulcher entombing us, already dead. Our glorified flesh is just as mutilated as that of our bodies.

“…the experience of ​sexual possession for women is real and literal, without any magical or mystical​ dimension to it: getting fucked and being owned are inseparably the same; together, being one and the same, they are sex for women under male dominance as a social system.” — Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Uniqueness makes it palatable. To see it as total is too horrific. Dworkin’s woman is becoming the total condition. Coomer consciousness overcomes all, the masochistic body becomes the general form, and the totality it articulates into is pornoculture. There is likewise no rupturing, no cataclysmic fall as a result of the stress inflicted. The masochistic body structurally transforms that pain. It is again like bourgeois consciousness, leaving the worker with the consciousness of a mirror, unable to subsist by itself and only able to manifest through reflection. Pornography is an industry, likewise sex work, and despite its unsteady legality, it still is part of that game of money.

The ontology and phenomenology were not able to maintain their independence. Rather, it is all made one flesh. Constant performativity just grants one an actor’s ontology, the moments of which one can be alone just stepping off the stage. Likewise, the individual cannot maintain their independence and become one flesh with the culture. Such a mode is typical, and the fruit it bears is horrific.