Last night, I made acquaintance with someone who works for a porn distributor website. Briefly, we engaged in conversation about sexuality and the expression of sexuality as a consumer product. I am interested in pornography as a function of the super-mind, a larger movement of human consciousness operating in total, that pornography can be understood as a domain of power, the art of power rebellion.
•Following Foucault's lead, sex as a basic 'power drive' has been manipulated to serve goals outside of the root objective- sex is fun, sex is a natural part of life, sex IS life- to a means to collect bio-power: human energy as a commodity in a market, to be used and traded just as any other.
•With an Internet connection, one has access to a far wider range of information than ever before. Boundaries of thought are being eradicated at an ever increasing rate; the average Internet user's mind being conceptually and abstractly orders more 'intelligent' than their counterpart one hundred years ago.
•Pornography, as an expression of super-mind, has shown individual mind depictions of sexuality formerly unfamiliar, thereby undermining potentially obsolete beliefs about what sex means, and therefore what power means and where it is located. Control of bodies, control over minds, etc.
•technologies like The Pill, and Viagra have liberated bodies of women and men. Women are empowered to express sexuality in new ways free from the burden of threat that their bodies are simply a vessel of procreation and pleasure is secondary. Sex is allowed to be pursued as a form of pleasure and and exchange, of ideas as well as of sensation, as a primary goal for both women as well as for men.
•What roles are developing with sex? What does it mean that a female body can express sexuality more freely than before? What becomes of monogamy and intimacy and the closing gap of the difference between gender identity.
II miscellaneous tertiary notes on gender power-
•In Sex in the City, Samantha represents a woman in control of her sexuality. What is interesting, is how her perspective, if she was a he, would be traditionally Alpha Male. That a decision to remain free from the confines and pressures inherent in monogamous relations in order to pursue her career goals (read: market worth) as well as her sexual desires (power) was once a solely male privilege. It is interesting, too that there is an implicit imperative embedded in this character identity. That in order to be read as 'in control' of her sexuality, she must also be successful in a market context, i.e. a highly successful PR entrepeneur. If she were poor, or less career-motivated, the attitudes she held about sex would be seen as dependent, instead of independent.
-Justin, via iPhone.
