[This piece forms part of a symposium attended, hopefully, by some or all of the following: bacteriagrl (bacterial porn), k-punk (let me be your fantasy), owen (I still dream of orgonon), different maps (fucking in rhythm and harmony, part I; empire state, part II; we want discipline, part III, sex of the real (Heidegger mix), part IV), poetix (not safe for work, dickweed). If anyone would like to contribute to this symposium on any pornography-related topic, please feel free, or bound, as you prefer. No biscuits were shared during the making of these posts.

UPDATE: The Impostume rises to the challenge! Plus, sent by a kind reader, the introduction to Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir, can be found here

UPDATE II: Carceraglio also contributes with Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it., with added link to sexpol film in the making

UPDATE III: Martin from Byndthmpld contributes with porn post 1, porn post 2

UPDATE IV: Tom at Bad Zero with a seriously good porn post]

‘It is not a woman in the nude that is indecent, but a woman whose skirts are tucked up that is. Adorn the Medici Venus with rose-coloured garters and tightly pulled white stockings, and you will strongly feel the difference between decent and indecent.’ – Diderot, 1767.

Feeling the frisson of difference between the decent and the indecent is no longer the dialectic of visual titillation. The sheer hard work of contemporary porn informs you that, without delusion, sex is just like everything else – grinding, relentless, boring (albeit multiply boring). The pneumatic Calvinism of rubberised piston porn-duty, the grim orgasm of unsmiling physical moil. As if the abject fallenness of humanity, its total depravity, has been fused with the work that may be the only faint method of glimpsing the sovereign God’s decision...From erection to election... Annabel Chong’s 251 men in ten hours, refusing payment from the massive video sales (or letting the matter slide, which is the same thing) – on man 161, what kind of God wouldn’t have allowed a brief splinter of heavenly light to filter down onto the back of her ravaged, kneeling, broken body?



But sex-as-work is the lesser partner in the invention of porn-capitalism. Where does it all end up, after all but in the money shot. The trajectory of the money shot is the history not only of filmed pornography (a contradiction in terms given the 'graphy' of the original medium – the 'writing of/about prostitutes' in the name of a social materialism that sought to bring down the church alongside its concomitant bourgeois hypocrisy), but also the sheer explosive pointlessness of capital itself, abasing itself in a repeated act of onanism that blinds and silences the other in a gobbet of slightly-disappointing sexual-Tippex.



One of the most interesting things about so-called 'vintage erotica', those short mostly French and German films made 1910-1950, for all its indifference to the well-timed cut, its wasteful expenditure in the pursuit of female pleasure, and so on is the presence of the ‘money shot’ (of course, this term too is now beyond sweet – we mean cum shot surely). I was initially surprised – the money shot seems like it should have been a recent invention, but there it is, all over the 1920s, as if the logic of the tension between make-believe and authenticity has already been encoded for the big porn other. Incidentally, if you can get hold the stuff, vintage erotica tends to be exempt from classification, as if no one now could come to black-and-white fucking, particularly all that hair and excess (read normal) flab. But isn't this true?



The money shot has always been about different kinds of 'money', however. Etymologically, it’s not clear whether the mainstream 'money shot' (literally, the most expensive scene in the film – the climax, indeed) got transplanted to early porn or vice versa: the money shot these days is just as likely to be the hero's virile escape from a terrorist-induced explosion as a guy trying his best to 'put out'. But the porn meaning is complex: is it the point at which the guy completes his 'product' and thus makes the thing he gets paid for, in a base capitalist form? But where, then, is the alienation here? (And we should bear in mind that porn is one of the only industries in which men usually get paid less than women). Or is it, instead, the point at which the audience 'get their money’s worth?' in the sense that what has been delivered to them has finally, irrevocably been proved to be 'real': 'oh my God, honey, they really did it!'... La passion du réel indeed, for politics as for porn...Or is porn simply operative as a basic animal stimulant, in which the 'act' is a reminder of basic physical capacity? Or that one 'identifies' in one way or another with the bloke or the gal, or the bloke/bloke, or the girl/girl....or do people actually get off on the idea of being filmed, such that porn is the paranoic desire for representation made manifest ('make love to the camera')....and that wanking to porn is like being faintly smiled at by the big other.

This passion for authenticity, which unsurprisingly works even better as the only-ever-hinted-at 'real' sex-scene of the mainstream film, is curious: is it not enough that we see and hear ‘pleasure’ on the face of the participants? Of course not – just like any other woman, the porn actress could be faking it. But there is no way of measuring her pleasure, of course, even though vintage porn does its best to assure us that female jouissance has its own place. 'I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra (en plus)'.



But the money shot has moved again - from mainstream cinema, to porn, to TV – in this latter context it is used to describe the key scene in a reality show that provides a kind of low-level climax for the programme to hook the trailer on: a clip of a contestant breaking down and crying during his or her post-elimination, or falling, or screaming. Even money can sometimes get cheaper...

But the internal logic of the purely pornographic money shot has shifted; travelling upwards, spreading inexorably from the blank expanse of the woman’s body just above her sex or the small of her back, to the face. There is nothing more 'now' than the sight of a yelping woman with semen all over her face. Or a silent one in which the tears mingle with the visual debasement in a process of physical absurdity that somehow captures the horror of the entire universe. Or, then again, one that sells you mobile phones...with free video-messaging...



The Bunuelian specificity of cum-shots. It is not enough to splatter willy-nilly ('It’s raining cum and these sluts use their faces as umbrellas'), but in keeping with the varieties of linguistic invention inherent to porn, indeed the very desire for the image to keep up with language, there has to be an ever-increasingly specific remit internal to porn classification itself - not just 'facials', but 'eye-shots', 'ear-shots', 'mouth-shots'. God, I hate it when they come in their mouths, for fuck's sake, that's such a turn-off. I only like eyes...



But what of the female voice in all this? American bukkake seems to add in the more traditional porn shouting and begging of the woman as a prelude to her vocal or visual occlusion, whilst the 'original' Japanese version seems to fetishise context and clothing and, above all, the silence of the woman, as if to say this is about what it looks like, not what it sounds like, obviously.

The American model certainly buys into a more banal logic: The simultaneous importance of the female voice ‘oh yeah, come on, do it, fuck me’ at the same time as the desire to shut her up. The reflex to close your eyes when something gets close to them, however, is much less conscious, and surely closer to the truth of facials (tossing yourself off into the face of a kneeling woman), insofar as such gestures can have a truth. It's certainly fair to say that Lacan's claim in Seminar XX that 'no relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings' is nowhere better borne out than the silencing of the woman with cum (and what are we to make of the sub-genre of bukkake, in which two women take it in turns to swap cum mouth to mouth until such point as it eventually dissipates, made invisible in the passage to the impossibility of communication?). Or is this instead a battle over the very substance of language, an aggressive response to the non-relation that characterises all human interaction?

Aggression is certainly the key to contemporary porn: the unthinkable would be the sweet smile, a pure form of affection that believes in nothing - not work, not competitition, but only in a momentary secret complicity with the other. But of course, it is much easier, the signs are clearer if sex is reduced to a form of literally hard labour - the scandal of Grand Theft Auto is not the psychotic murder of random other figures, but the idea that you could also have sex with your girlfriend. But think of the children...!.




This is hurting me more than it is hurting you... No one comes with a smile on their face anymore, all is pain. Contemporary sex as a recapitulation of the shame and wretchedness of Eve's expulsion. Knowledge is not power, it is misery.

I blame the fifties. With the introduction of sex toys (the vibrator, but also the radio, the telephone, the television), porn becomes radically miserable. Women sit alone in houses filled with consumer goods, popping out only to purchase the biggest vibrator they can find. Occasionally they might flick through a book, or more likely, a magazine, but it never distracts them for long. Unlike the comedic role-play of twenties and thirties porn, or the frenetic war-apocalypse porn of the 1940s, Fifties European porn looks like a cross between a Godard film in which women hang around looking a bit bored (most of them, surely) and a rape fantasy.



Utter ennui amidst the products.



Idly flicking through random literature and photos.



What are we to do with all these objects?





In a final, psychotic twist, one of the short 1950s films involves a bored housewife inviting over the sex-shop owner who has just sold her a vibrator. Once at her place, she spikes his aperitif and orally rapes him with the same dildo while he sits unconscious in her chair. Clearly she can't splatter his face, even if she would like to, but the scene is filled with menace. I believe that the future of the money shot will involve the impossibility of male ejaculation, which is still too human, too teleological. Impotent men will toss themselves off in vain while a pretty young girl gazes up at them as if at the cosmos itself. There will be no mediation.