Sticky Acts of Intimacy
by Derick Varn

It’s amazing what conversations between beautiful friends lead you to ponder. At two in the morning, I was lamenting to my best friend about the lack of any pornography--or even erotica--that wasn’t a) boring, b) degrading to the faulted beauty of sex, and c) not taking full advantage of the massive liberating implications that sex can have as a tool. With mainstream pornography, all the airbrushed bodies, horrible dialogue and plot, and unrealistic poses really tend to kill a genre that is based on the very essence of what it means to be alive. The hyperbole of the sex act and the focus on women as an object increases the banality of what should be my favorite topic to a point rivaling Hannah Ardent’s view of Eichmann.

If hardcore pornography's general banality was not enough to frustrate me, then there is the romance novel–now that's enough to make me hemorrhage. Here you take love, give it over to a ton of clichés, adding in all the trappings of the unhealthy and unrealistic romance fantasies of our past, then you mix in some of the worst melodramatic stylistic choices a human being can possibly make. When you add the horrifying predictable dialogue and the sheer plastic nature of the sex acts and then those “oh so dynamic” characters, I find that I have thrown the book in the path of ongoing Mack truck. Fortunately, those writers used pen names most of the time, or I am sure someone would have tried to do the same to them.

This thread of thoughts came after I read J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, and I realized the true power sex has. So I mentioned the frustration to my best friend–she and I share a hedonistic morality which gets really offended when you cheapen the experience–and thus I began my search for something that treated sexuality without clichés and kid-gloves, but also managed to get over the banalizing features of most popular pornography.

I found more than a few writers and photographers who have similar inclinations, but the capitalistic nature of the sex industry has really kept most attempts of innovation down. Companies like Vivid and Wicked, for all their supposed deviance, simply reinforce a lot of the social stigmas of their time: women are to be viewed as something slightly less than human and the spirit of capitalism justifies all these actions. Like the pornography of the Victorian England, the objectification of sexuality and women is a way of maintaining the roles of assigned to them.

That, however, doesn’t lead me to believe that sexuality in art is a bad thing or that even explicit sex acts in art are always degrading. J. G. Ballard noted, in the annotated edition of Atrocity Exhibition, that

“Pornography is under attack at present, thanks in part to the criminal excesses of kiddy porn and snuff movies, and our newly puritan climate– the fin de siecle that dominated the 1890's, and which we can expect to enliven the 1990's, may well take the form of an aggressive and over-the-top puritanism. A pity, I feel, since the sexual imagination is unlimited scope and metaphoric power, and can never be successfully repressed. In many ways pornography is the most literary of form of fiction–a verbal text with the smallest attachment to external reality, and with only it’s own resources to create a complex and exhilarating narrative . . . Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance.”

Now, as the 1990's are almost as dead as the 1890's, we see how true Ballard’s prediction was. Ballard, like Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag, realizes that the battle over sex--and the abstract of sexuality–is a battle over the right of life and death. That noted, the limited language and the inability to treat sexuality as the subject is something that really bugs me.

Which leads me to address the language of genre in sexual arts: the splitting of pornography, from mass market romance novels, then splitting again from artistic erotica. Now, there are lots to respect in a lot erotic literature and art that’s going on right now; however, the distinction between it and pornography is one of craftsmanship–not of taste or morals as so many people like to try to convince me. Admittedly, erotica is far better at showing women and sex as subjects instead of objectives, but often does so at a distance that sacrifices the intensity of the experience. Especially in the visual aspects of erotica, lushness, subtly concealment of sexual interplay, and a veil of darkness are often used subterfuge the sex act itself. There are several reasons for this, both practical and moral; these reasons involved everything from a want to be artistically acceptable to a moral cowardice when dealing with the sex act itself. Documenting intimacy in erotica often falls to the realm of implications and thus does not directly deal with the subject at hand.

That leaves me where I am–calling for a merging of erotica, pornography, and art to create something beautiful: where love and sexuality is the subject as opposed to the object, where the subversiveness of the sexual imagination can be explored to power both men and women to handle the true essence of their life, and to give me something sexy that doesn’t get boring after five minutes. New languages and images should emerge to accurately represent the full spectrum of the sexual imagination. It’s a battle over life, it’s a battle over bodies, and it’s a battle over boredom.

Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.