Can Alain de Botton even *read*?

[elfs]

Can Alain de Botton even read?

I ask because this de Botton has out-parodied himself again by announcing that he was launching a porn website free of "stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation."

The real problem with current pornography is that it's so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.

Which is what leads me to the question, can Alain de Botton read? Because literary pornography is deeply embedded in questions about the world, about why people have sex, about awkward sex, about contexual sex, about great sex, about sensible, moral, kind and ambitious sex.

What have been doing for the past twenty years if not writing sex that marries the characters to their ethics, allows them to embrace their virtues even while having sex? Fuck me, if The Journal Entries didn't ultimately evolve into a pornography in which characters expressed, even during sex, their highest principles, then all of that writing has been for naught.

And I'm sure I'm not alone in that assessment.

Comments

[edichka2.livejournal.com]

(earnestness?)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah! What is wrong with earnestness in pornography, anyway?

[edichka2.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's some sort of translation problem.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

The simple idea that he can speak to 'pornography' as if it's some monolithic endeavor that he can go on to address with such adjectives was difficult to defend in the 80s and 90s and is completely detached from the reality of sexual expression in the second decade of the 21st century. You can't throw a stone on the internet without hitting a porn site trying to do happy sex positive healthy porn.

Also... 'earnestness'? Where does he get off (har har) launching a porn site free of brutishness, stupidity, and exploitation while also complaining about earnestness? His entire screed drips earnestness from every pore. Are only other porn sites made by people with social justice concerns earnest, while he managed to both be free of vulgar exploitation and anxious high mindedness and/or sincere good intentions? What would such a site even look like?

everyone has a price...I think somebody found AdeB's

[rkda.livejournal.com]

Having watched my share of video porn, much of which did not appeal to me in the least, I have found here and there, some which does. Much of the video-mill porn is complete rubbish and not worth the bandwidth to download.

Then there is also written porn. Of which, I consider the Pendorverse to be one of the best and brightest examples.

I seriously doubt that AdeB is interested in reading your stories, or even watching the kind of "enlightened porn" he is espousing. I suspect, rather, that he is laying the groundwork for mainstream marketing of a new porn site, for which he is the front man, and he is being quite well paid to raise the profile with an audience that porn can't normally reach.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I think Alain de Botton is just reading the *wrong* porn.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's what gets him hot. Until he gets off, of course, then he feels ashamed of himself.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Translation: *I* haven't seen any porn that does X, Y, and Z, but that might be because I haven't looked very hard for it.

I suspect though, that he doesn't really have literary porn in mind. Even so, apparently he's never heard of kink.com either, which goes out of its way to demonstrate, y'know, that its actors actually enjoy being beaten, humiliated, and degraded. Sometimes all at once. Which of course, is generally contrary to sex as everyone else knows it.