PORN
Daily Telegraph - July 2006

In case you missed the flyers at your local book exchange, this week sees the opening of Sexpo, a “lifestyle” convention that breathlessly proclaims in its TV advertising that “if it's adult it will be at Sexpo”.

I am guessing, but I reckon the definition of “adult” here does not include many of the more common diversions of life after 18, things such as shattered hopes, unwanted marriages, the burden of responsibility, bad hangovers, missed opportunities, a slowly disintegrating body and seemingly endless regrets.

Porn, it seems, is less a compensation for being adult than a way of rubbing it in.

I don't entirely get porn. Some chronic inability to suspend disbelief always finds me saying, “Yeah, but it's just a picture, isn't it?” What I really don't understand, however, is the normalisation of porn. Not because I'm especially anti-porn but rather because I can't see the point if it's not dark, illicit and wrong.

Porn, it seems to me, is the sort of thing that should be passed through many hands under school desks or found in some remote and sinister parkland. The notion of turning up to Hordern Pavilion to buy porn, as if you were off to the garden centre for a pot of herbal tea and some discount fertiliser, strikes me as contrary to the spirit of the exercise.

It is not unfair to say in recent years porn has become utterly ubiquitous. Not just the amount, but the columns, films and books devoted to its analysis. Why porn?
It is my theory that our society has become obsessed with pornography because it is the only remaining entertainment uncorrupted by irony. Porn has a, shall we say, practical purpose and relies for its success on the believability of its illusion. Weirdly, porn is sincere in a way other entertainments in our post-modern age are not.
Unlike, say, a bad action movie which we accept as absurd, porn wants us to think we're in with a chance, that this could happen to us. Porn must convince that the things it depicts could and in fact did happen, no matter how ridiculous. (This is not to say porn is realistic - people in porn are often quite the opposite and, believe me, look a hell of a lot worse off-screen.)

For this reason irony and jokes are banned from effective porn because they destroy the integrity of the fantasy - which is why all those men in leather pants who sell indescribable gadgets at sex shops have absolutely no sense of humour about what they do. Likewise, turning porn into something you might pick up at the shop with a litre of milk robs it of any allure it might have had.

Minus its illicit mystique, porn is revealed for what it is - deadening or just plain silly. Sexpo is less a perve-fest for sweaty-palmed freaks than another suburban banality to add to our already depressing, thoroughly adult lives.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008