Warren Ellis Says America Broke Sex

America broke sex.

Due to my small notoriety, people send me information that they say they believe is useful research material but which in actuality they hope will hurt my brain. They send articles, anecdotes, pictures and clips. Due to having written a couple of things related to the American porn industry, I get sent a whole bunch of stuff related to that, and so build up a vague picture of what's going on. And America has broken sex...

This is how you know you're living in the future: when the pornography bears no earthly resemblance to sex as even the filthiest of us know it. You may as well be renting DVDs of aliens fucking. And America, as Martin Amis once said, is where they road-test the future.

Tell Me You Love Me, but, Please, for the Love of God, Don't Have Sex in Front of Me

Tonight, I was over at a friend's house. Scrolling through the cable channels, I discovered HBO's newest I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Porn dramatic series, "Tell Me You Love Me." When the show debuted, it caused a stink among TV critics who were aghast at all the seemingly real sex on the show. After all, this is a show about a sex therapist, a series of couples who are her patients, and their sex lives. According to the reviews I'd read, there was about to be a whole lot of shockingly real simulated intercourse happening, fake intercourse so real that my jaw would gape open, pseudo-intercourse so pseudo-raw that I would think of HBO as not not-TV, but a new porn channel airing not-porn porn. On the TV screen, a glum couple disrobed. They began rolling around on a bed. For a brief moment in time, there was a flash of the woman's crotch in shadow, so in shadow one would have had to use TiVo to revisit the moment to make sure it was a real vagina, and not not-vagina vagina. The man climbed on top of the woman where he delivered a few desperate humps. The camera devoted far more airtime to the man's butt than it had the woman's crotch. In the end, nobody felt better, myself included. Perhaps sex on TV and in the movies has its own kind of Uncanny Valley. That is, maybe part of what makes pornography appealing to us is its unreality. Porn stars are plastic versions of us for a reason. By becoming iconic, they disappear as human beings. In porn, we can slip inside them, be them, if but for a moment. The unhappily humping couple on "Tell Me You Love Me" was too real. And that's the moment we fall into the Unporny Valley.

The Book of Porn

Want to read a book about porn? These are your choices. There's the celebrity twist: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale and Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. There's the right-wing polemics: Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families and Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future. There's the academics: XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. There's the anti-porn feminists: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and Pornography: Men Possessing Women. There's the photographs: The Valley and XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. There's oral history: The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. There's an autobiography: Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. Where's the book that's about the porn industry, that reveals why Americans watch pornography, that tells the true story of porn at the dawn of the 21st century? I don't know. It's a mystery.

Perhaps it's that buried under all the nervous stereotypes of pimply teenagers, furtive perverts in raincoats, and anti-social compulsively masturbating misfits, is a sneaking recognition that pornography isn't just an individual predilection: pornography is central to our culture. It's not just its immense popularity -- although estimates put its sales at over eleven billion dollars a year. It's that pornography is revealing. It exposes the culture to itself. Pornography, it might be argued, is the royal road to the cultural psyche (as for Freud, dreams were the route to the unconscious).

So the question is, if you put it on the couch and let it free-associate, what is it really saying? What are the inner tensions and unconscious conflicts that propel its narratives?

When writing about the pornography of the past, whether visual or literary, scholars and art historians routinely discover allegorical meanings within it, even political significance. Historians have made the case that modern pornography (up until around the 19th century) operated as a form of social criticism, a vehicle for attacking officialdom, which responded, predictably, by attempting to suppress it. Pornography was defined less by its content, than by the efforts of those in power to eliminate it and the social agendas it transported.

Despite knowing this, it's difficult to envision contemporary pornography as a form of culture or as a mode of politics. There's virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense -- the only expressing it's presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay. That it might have more complicated social agendas, or that future historians of the genre might produce interesting insights about pornography's relation to this particular historical and social moment -- these are radically unthought thoughts.

I've proposed that pornography is best understood as a form of cultural expression. It is a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm; it neither reflects the real world, nor is it some hypnotizing call to action. The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters. It doesn't and never will exist. But what it does do is to insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy. And this is the basis of so much of the controversy it engenders, because pornography has a talent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous, socially destabilizing things.

Like any other popular culture genre (like sci-fi, romance, mystery, true crime), pornography obeys certain rules, and its primary rule is transgression. Like your boorish cousin, its greatest pleasure is to locate each and every one of a society's taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties, and systematically transgress them, one by one.

Pornography manages to penetrate to the marrow of who we are as a culture and as psyches. As avant-garde artists knew, transgression is no simple thing: it's a precisely calculated intellectual endeavor. It means knowing the culture inside out, discerning its secret shames and grubby secrets, how to best humiliate it, knock it off its prim perch. A culture's pornography becomes, in effect, a precise map of that culture's borders: pornography begins at the edge of the culture's decorum. Carefully tracing that edge, like an anthropologist mapping a culture's system of taboos and myths, provides a detailed blueprint of the culture's anxieties, investments, contradictions. And a culture's borders, whether geographical or psychological, are inevitably political questions.

Pornography is thus a form of political theater. It's a medium for confronting audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from sanctioned speech, mainstream culture and political discourse. And that encompasses more than sex. --Laura Kipnis

Woodsman at Work

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I Know It When I See It and This Is That

On a cold morning in January, FBI agents converged on a modern brick office building in Koreatown in a mission conjured up at the highest levels of Washington: to rid the world of adult films by an obscure niche producer named Ira Isaacs.

From his 12th-floor suite above Wilshire Boulevard, Isaacs, a stout, fast-talking 56-year-old Bronx native with a short ponytail and a lopsided "soul patch" of black hair under his lip, sent out some stomach-churning porn...

Specifically, it raises a question of whether increasing public acceptance has shifted the legal standard of obscenity--once aimed at the works of such authors as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs--so that only the most extreme margins of porn can be stopped. --Los Angeles Times