I was sending the link to this text to the people masturbating on www.manroulette.com with the text "but then again, you don't have to do it here". The results were very interesting.
Porn is no less important than the president/PM
Porn is politically relevant. Porn is an ideological state apparatus. I guess there are zero males and not all that many females whose sexuality hasn't substaintailly been influenced by porn. And given that sexuality is perceived as the ultimate truth of the individual in the advanced capitalism ("most intimate", "defining all we actually desire (to possess)"), we have to take porn seriously.
By and large, since in capitalism your masturabtion is your (most?) private thing, and there is no serious political discussion of it possible, it's no wonder that porn can get away being the bastion of the phallocentric, dehumanising, non-fluffy discourse, which I am trying to defy here. But before you decide I am just vandalising your daily bread without a clear project, let me focus on one aspect which seems crucial to me - it is crucially dehumanising to the masturbator as well.
Self-dehumanisation
The obvious part, common to all phallocentric sex, is that you are reducing yourself to the poor_and_needy_being_which_just_needs_one_thing, suspending all your creativity and uniqueness for the moment. This, I believe, amounts to training ourselves in a dangerous skill - taking a break from accountability, we learn how to suspend our humanity, how to objectivise the other, a skill which comes in handy when it comes to Africa, or Afganistan, or beating someone to death.
But there is more. We do wrong to our "body" as well. Watching porn typically means closing down our body's affectability down, reducing one's senses to vision and one's body to the genitals. We are less_than_human to our "regular" selves. Consequently, we are missing the whole world of sensations, the whole life (in the sense of zoe) we are high functionaries of.
Or let me put it bluntly: sustainably fluffy people have better sex and better masturbation.
Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason
Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason, you are saying no to the life in you. (The one which doesn't answer to your name, the one you are time-sharing, as Rosi Braidotti would put it.)
But don't you worry, life/zoe will ask you the same question many more times and you will always have the chance to say yes. And don't you worry about all the toilet paper you wasted in front of your computer, ethical responsability is a feature of the very moment when the decision is being taken and there is no god, no community, no entity whatsoever that can judge you for wasting the life in you in this way. After things have happened, that decision becomes part of the past you cannot change, but you can learn from.
So what do you do when you do yourself?
I am not really sure, I believe in ultimalty individual sexualities. I tend to think of the natural fecundity of things and the natural affectability of all people. I guess you are on your own there. And there is exactly where you should be on your own.
Porn is no less important than the president/PM
Porn is politically relevant. Porn is an ideological state apparatus. I guess there are zero males and not all that many females whose sexuality hasn't substaintailly been influenced by porn. And given that sexuality is perceived as the ultimate truth of the individual in the advanced capitalism ("most intimate", "defining all we actually desire (to possess)"), we have to take porn seriously.
By and large, since in capitalism your masturabtion is your (most?) private thing, and there is no serious political discussion of it possible, it's no wonder that porn can get away being the bastion of the phallocentric, dehumanising, non-fluffy discourse, which I am trying to defy here. But before you decide I am just vandalising your daily bread without a clear project, let me focus on one aspect which seems crucial to me - it is crucially dehumanising to the masturbator as well.
Self-dehumanisation
The obvious part, common to all phallocentric sex, is that you are reducing yourself to the poor_and_needy_being_which_just_needs_one_thing, suspending all your creativity and uniqueness for the moment. This, I believe, amounts to training ourselves in a dangerous skill - taking a break from accountability, we learn how to suspend our humanity, how to objectivise the other, a skill which comes in handy when it comes to Africa, or Afganistan, or beating someone to death.
But there is more. We do wrong to our "body" as well. Watching porn typically means closing down our body's affectability down, reducing one's senses to vision and one's body to the genitals. We are less_than_human to our "regular" selves. Consequently, we are missing the whole world of sensations, the whole life (in the sense of zoe) we are high functionaries of.
Or let me put it bluntly: sustainably fluffy people have better sex and better masturbation.
Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason
Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason, you are saying no to the life in you. (The one which doesn't answer to your name, the one you are time-sharing, as Rosi Braidotti would put it.)
But don't you worry, life/zoe will ask you the same question many more times and you will always have the chance to say yes. And don't you worry about all the toilet paper you wasted in front of your computer, ethical responsability is a feature of the very moment when the decision is being taken and there is no god, no community, no entity whatsoever that can judge you for wasting the life in you in this way. After things have happened, that decision becomes part of the past you cannot change, but you can learn from.
So what do you do when you do yourself?
I am not really sure, I believe in ultimalty individual sexualities. I tend to think of the natural fecundity of things and the natural affectability of all people. I guess you are on your own there. And there is exactly where you should be on your own.
