Alain de Botton is going to make some porn. Yes, that Alain de Botton. The writer and philosopher. I have absolutely no idea what to make of this:
“…We shouldn’t have to choose between being human and being sexual (the Ancient Greeks knew this very well). Ideally, porn would excite our lust in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life. No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation; it could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.
The real problem with current pornography is that it’s so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it. Yet it is possible to conceive of a version of pornography which wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue – a pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values…”
Yes, I’ve banged on about the concept of fairtrade porn for years – and, of course, there are the inevitable problems of exploitation of workers at the production end and banal, populist content at the consumer end when capitalism meets eroticism – but I’m not sure what de Botton means by “better porn”. Sexuality is something infinitely eclectic. What turns one person on will turn another off. The sacred and the profane are kinks in their own right.
Material that excites us should certainly be produced ethically, but the subject matter of fantasy itself is a more complicated area. I agree that profit often boils mainstream pornography down to a lowest-common-denominator, fairground-mirror reflection of human desire that sells to the widest, least-demanding, highest paying audience, but there are bits and pieces of far better porn out there that suit individual kinks and preferences better than the one-size-fits-all (albeit uncomfortably, with a lot of lube) model that’s so prominent in modern wank-fodder and that society is – in de Botton’s own words – “awash” with. I’m all for his noble mission to make better porn, but he should probably watch some of the good stuff first. It’s hard to know what we should point his stiffy at without us knowing his personal peccadilloes, but have you got any recommendations for him? List them in the comments section…
Click here for the Indy article on Alain de Botton’s “Better Porn”.
