The Porno Ceremony

Porn is often regarded as the most rudimentary of genres for the most rudimentary of consumers. However, pornography is very challenging for its user. If watching porn is easy, being watched watching porn can be very difficult. This is one of the biggest paradoxes when discussing pornography. If you are susceptible to porn, then become someone who actively seeks out porn, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognise yourself while you are watching porn. Only when you are capable of resolving this triple conundrum, does it become interesting to talk about the subject. This book evokes the musings on pornography throughout history of writers from De Sade to Santa Teresa, from Bataille to Barthes, from Madonna to Martin Amis. ‘Pornophiles’ and ‘pornophobes’ have always faced each other in intractable warfare, which, perhaps now, has reached an impasse: from pornography on the internet to webcams, the passive consumer is now becoming the producer and the subject of pornography. And the massive consumption of pornography in societies that have been officially repressors tells us that perhaps we are arriving at a new phase in the private and public relationship with pornography.