SeeSaw by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Canongate Books

Thomas Ruff

In the mid-1960s, when Philip Larkin saw a couple of kids and guessed he was fucking her and she was taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, he knew this was the paradise everyone old had dreamed of all their lives. A paradise that turned out – isn’t that the way with any paradise? – to be transitory, from which we were expelled with the advent of AIDS and the return of the presumed-obsolete condom. Then a substitute paradise came along, one in which the idea of expulsion and exclusion was not imminent but immanent: online porn.

I didn’t see porn of any kind until I was thirty-four, when I stumbled across it by accident – and for free – on TV in a hotel in Belgrade. I’d been told that porn equals woman-hatred, but it didn’t seem hateful or hate-filled. What it looked like was people having sex. Camerawork and lighting were devoid of subtlety, but the fact that the film showed people actually having sex rather than resorting to cloying visual euphemisms and discreet elisions gave it the quality of a revelation. I know, I know (I mean I know now), it wasn’t people really having sex, it was people having sex on a film set, for money, surrounded by a camera crew and equipment, but it was real in the sense that things were really going in and out of other things. I’d never seen anything like it. Despite the aesthetic shortcomings, it was a glimpse of crudely illuminated bliss. This was in 1992; nowadays it is almost inconceivable that anyone could reach the ripe old age of thirty-four without having encountered porn via its latest online mode of distribution and consumption.

Porn can be all things to all people. Whatever one’s desires, porn will already be alert to them, will pander to them – and, by pandering, shape, mould and form them. In some ways it is better than real life – an essential characteristic of any kind of paradise. In a well-known essay Martin Amis asks John Stagliano, a pornographer, about ‘the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex’ in his work. Good question – the key question, in fact, since in some ways anal sex can be seen as a metonym of porn itself. (Friends who are art collectors have a blurrily explicit greyish painting – of a woman being fucked from behind – by John Currin in their bedroom. What makes this art rather than pornography? Simple: if it was porn, he’d be in her ass.) Stagliano’s answer to Amis is that whereas with straightforward vaginal sex the experienced viewer, far from sharing the astonishment I felt in Belgrade, is asking himself, ‘Is this for real?’ With anal, on the other hand, there’s no doubt about it: the actress is obliged to produce ‘a different order of response’.1

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