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”.

I’ve often thought it odd that people equate testicles with strength, even before I ever read the (possibly wrongly attributed but persistent) Betty White quote about balls and vaginas. Balls are spectacularly vulnerable. I know. I’ve kicked a lot of them.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who questioned the phrase “grow a pair”. The excellent Steven Baxter recently wrote an article for the New Statesman about exactly that. Here’s a little nugget of it:

‘…It’s irritating nonsense, for several reasons. Courage isn’t inherently a masculine quality, of course, but there’s more to it than that. People often use the phrase “grow a pair” or “strap on a pair” as a way of belittling someone who has shown weakness, or vulnerability – someone who didn’t show the requisite assertiveness that apparently lives in the testes.

As well as that, it reinforces the very worst stereotypes of the “man’s man”: the rush to confrontation, rather than negotiation; a certain headstrong or even bloody-minded quality; the idea of maleness as something that is aggressive, rather than collaborative.

For those of us men who are more team players than the all-conquering alphas we’re supposed to aspire to be, it’s a tiresome thing. Not all of us are meant to shout and bellow and fight our way to success; some of us prefer other ways of doing things. It’s not through a lack of balls, but through a lack of unfeeling uber-competitiveness.

Must we still, in this new century, be talking of men as people who should be nasty, assertive, pushy, unpleasant, in order to be proper men? We’re not all Gordon Ramsay (who has a fondness bordering on obsession for talk of “big bollocks” when upbraiding some poor cookery sap on television).

But there’s something else, too. The real quality that testicles have is staring us in the face. Human males, unlike many other mammals, have external testicles, dangling merrily away from their undercarriage like a couple of lychees in an old leather purse.

This evolutionary quirk exposes the adult male to extremes of pain and suffering at a stroke. A well aimed kick from an attacker, or punch from a young child (children happen to be at the perfect height to connect with full force), and even the toughest man will be reduced to a quivering foetal position of helplessness. There are no words for the pain, which I am pretty sure is definitely entirely worse than childbirth (THIS IS A JOKE).

How humans could ever have believed that a benign (and in many cultures apparently male) creator decided to place a couple of pain grenades hanging invitingly down as they do is a question for anthropologists. What it means, though, is that men’s testicles, far from being a centre of our strength, are our most visible sign of weakness…’

Full article here.