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I am gross and I love putting my fingers in things they don’t belong and I dooooon’t careeeeeee

Awhile back one of my followers advised me that Duke University was attempting to start a Porn Studies PhD program.

I flipped my shit a lil. I mean what I’m attempting with this blog is a less formally academnified version of exactly that premise. And as much as I feel alienated from academia these days–there is a part of me that knows that if nothing else I function exceedingly well in that framework.

I looked into it and turns out the information was only about 10% true. A professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at UC-Berkley named Linda Williams published a book called Porn Studies through Duke University’s press in 2004.

But Williams’ notions are absolutely fascinating. Via Wikipedia:

[S]he argues that horror, melodrama, and pornography all fall into the
category of “body genres”, since they are each designed to elicit
physical reactions on the part of viewers. Horror is designed to elicit
spine-chilling, white-knuckled, eye-bulging terror (often through images
of blood); melodramas are designed to elicit sympathy (often through
images of tears); and pornography is designed to elicit sexual arousal
(often through images of “money shots”).

Two things about this relate directly to what Vex and Four Chambers do and do with beauty:

So-called “body genres” tend to be relegated to a default subset I’d term not-art. (Alien would be an exception but note that it’s first a sci-film and only secondly a horror piece; and so the skillful genre fusion allows critics to sidestep the horror isn’t art prejudice.)

The work being made by Four Chambers isn’t just of an exceedingly high production value, I would argue that it’s capital-A Art.

And as much as I’d like that argument to take a form similar to the Buddhist monk who when tasked with passing wisdom to those gathered to hear him speak, merely held up a lotus leaf for all to contemplate–in other words, I’d just point to this image and say: duh, of course this is Art; there is something else that applies.

The fantasy that the majority of porn sells is centered on cishet white male pleasure. It’s formulaic and sterile–the only mess pertains to the money shot.

But, in reality, sex–at least when you’re doing it right–is hell of messy. I swear there’s a dissertation for a Porn Studies PhD just waiting to be composed about how Four Champers represents sexuality as messy and rich with fluids. (Literally pick one of their videos at random and you’ll see what I mean. The one I happen to have handy is this image that I was going to save for a future post.)

You can call it gross or more honest or both even but whichever way you cut it, there is a subversive push to decentralize the fluid mess of sex from cishet white male pleasure. Not only is that hot as fuck, its importance and absolutely vital.

Source: fourchambers

Hans Bellmer – Girl (19XX)

I’ll take Bellmer’s profane drawings over his Venus of Willendorf-esque, kitsch-as-all-fuck Dolls any day of the work (and twice on Sunday).

But this…this has gotten right under my skin to a degree only a handful of things–mostly music–have ever managed.

My instinct is to start by diminishing any personal interest in the hebephilic content. But in so doing, I distance myself from the work; I engage it on my own terms with a near total disregard for context. This strikes me as gallingly disingenuous.

It is fucking absurd to divorce something like this or the majority of Balthus’ oeuvre from a reckoning the relationship between the female experience of puberty and the formation of an individual sexual self. For fuck’s sake, it’s not just a pathological fixation, it’s the goddamn foundation of the work.

I won’t argue that hebephilia is a ‘normal’ sexual orientation; but I refuse to relegate it to abnormality. (Also, what the fuck is ‘normal’ anyway. whatever it is, I am sure it is fucking God-awfully boring.)

I will argue instead that dismissing the inconvenient or the problematic in a work demonstrating such rigorous mastery of craft should be tempered by two considerations:

As a capital-A Artist, there is less duty to notions of social propriety and strictures and more to the abiding by the commandment: homo/mulier sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Be mindful of Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion, i.e. to be human is to be subject to consequences.

In her widely acclaimed Bellmer biography The Anatomy of Anxiety, Sue Taylor reports that Bellmer told Unica Zürn that without the valve that drawing young girls offered him, he would’ve almost certainly have “resorted to sexual murder.”

In all likelihood, Bellmer and Balthus as well, while were at it were probably not far off from what Dan Savage terms a gold star [hebephile]. Yet, instead of submitting to an instinctive programmed drive, they sublimated the drive and openly integrated it into their creative efforts.

Maybe I am the only one, but I find something admirable in this. Yes, it certainly makes for unsettling work–something I expect from art is a degree of terrorism. But to me, I prefer the truth to any sort of self-deception. At least, Bellmer and Balthus are out in front with it. There are the Jock Sturges’ of the world who mask who and what they are with an empty sheen of art pretense.

I’ve gotten far afield from this image–which to be clear, I fucking love. It’s partly something about the clean lightness of the lines, partly the surrealist globular floating secretions that could be either vaginal or seminal. (If the latter, then there would be a rather strong correspondence with this.)

More than all that, it reminds me of what it felt like to feel both curiosity and shame about my own body. But to have curiosity always win out and the liquid feeling of pleasure and shame that always descended in slow, powerful waves after. As well as the Freudian gender ambiguity. I am just stunned by this because it so effortlessly captures a feeling that resonates with my own memories of sexual awakening.

Source: inneroptics