To Rachel For Editing
What is hard for me and perhaps easier for you, Rachel, editing this, accomplishing with my
writing what photographers do in the dark room with the printing of their negatives: including cropping it. What I think is needed is your doing a Reader's Digest bit of condensing this blog.
Read below and tell me what do you think. Edit it if you think it needs it.
'On the crude side of looking at pornography, (given that most people are drawn in looking at that which is not "meant" to be looked at, it is transgressive..... (I paraphrase.) Pornographer intend their being transgressive.
Soft porn or hard, in our zeitgeist, we know we are not allowed to look. Sexuality is not to be looked at. Something biblical, something that goes on about 'the nakedness of our fathers' and all that. Seeing one's parents at it goes to the heart of the matter.
In the culture such as when I came in on it, looking was taboo. It was to acknowledge my seeing how often it was acknowledged by Christian and Jew alike in breeching. It is what makes porn the very antimatter of the matter of being God fearing.
And the perennial multimillion dollars of world wide industry pandering to its being honored in the breech. Given, that Christianity is the prevailing common nexus governing our emotions / notions: in this part of the planet it appears to me that we all think pornographically about our sexuality.
A journeyman myself, once, having consciously attempted this genre in the decades of the 70s thru the late 80s in the drawings I made, I remember wanting my drawings at least to be honest as pornography. Not about suckering poor horny slobs like me to go and buy something that was contemptuous of my loneliness and state of need.
I was emphatically not intending making art. The drawings were about my own horniness, serving but a singular function: allow me in my be-numbedness to feel something, even though it engaged me genitally. It was at least 'honest'. Rachel, in the editing, do not delete this. And do not delete that the sole criteria as to whether or not I 'authenticated' it was my own erection and my own ability to experience exquisite orgasms. It was not solely that. At the same time I was acknowledging all manner of realizations about this. Some mundane: that my status was as a closet, pornographer, an amateur. I reasonably adhered I rule out measuring my panels or making them with a straight edge. It was to be 'home-made'. For 'my-eyes-only'.
In the latter 60s and decades into the 80s I made many comic strips I thought to be pornographic. I knew I was in defiance of the moralities and religious convictions of my neighbors on my street, and the parents of the children I I was teaching in the school I worked in. It was a dreading sense of this that I did this, spending inordinate hours at it. I was aware of the danger I was in should ever I be apprehended at it.
Yet, what seemed to warrant my justifying it was the realization of what sorts of things I was addressing, what sorts of taboos I'd chosen, singled out: this curiosity I had as to this aspect of the partnering! I, a married man, found myself inordinately turned on by couplings that were lesbian,gay! Drawn as to a flame that were I to get too close ......?
Rachel, I couldn't buy into sex that to me was violent or sadistic. Such was not about the sex I sought for myself. My interest was not in criminality or power struggles or aggression. The motifs I centered on were about sexual initiation and sexual seduction. orgasmic achieving encounters, the tactile experiencing of the naked alignments of genitals, lips, hands, and so forth: attaining rapture. The story that accompanied my doing this work, the one I kept telling myself all during those decades was I was also learning how to draw. That aspect of it, if nothing else, was valid. Came true.
This, the facture crossed other terrains. The journey took me beyond my own provincialism. My intent was merely to cross barriers of taboos. Yet I found myself doing other things also: immersing myself in mysteries. Most especially pertaining to my accessing 'identities' having to do with my parents and how they tried and succeeded in thwarting my efforts in trying to discover who I was. (I was my father's child from a prior marriage.)
There were many layers as to my inquiring into sex and sexual taboos and making 'pornography'. My addressing these motifs were something very like dissections. I remember in biology lab in college, my being given this frog to cut up. And I learned how delicate a task it was without doing damage (obfuscating what it was I was supposed to be clarifying / reveal). The morality questions as to my really making 'porn' laid less heavily on me than my fearing I could damage my specimens. Working in this genre had me realizing there is about human sexuality expressions that have direct bearings on how we think of ourselves. Know and not know.
It is in this context, Rachel, that I discovered another significance of this work: It did me.'
This draft 2/ 10/ 2007
writing what photographers do in the dark room with the printing of their negatives: including cropping it. What I think is needed is your doing a Reader's Digest bit of condensing this blog.
Read below and tell me what do you think. Edit it if you think it needs it.
'On the crude side of looking at pornography, (given that most people are drawn in looking at that which is not "meant" to be looked at, it is transgressive..... (I paraphrase.) Pornographer intend their being transgressive.
Soft porn or hard, in our zeitgeist, we know we are not allowed to look. Sexuality is not to be looked at. Something biblical, something that goes on about 'the nakedness of our fathers' and all that. Seeing one's parents at it goes to the heart of the matter.
In the culture such as when I came in on it, looking was taboo. It was to acknowledge my seeing how often it was acknowledged by Christian and Jew alike in breeching. It is what makes porn the very antimatter of the matter of being God fearing.
And the perennial multimillion dollars of world wide industry pandering to its being honored in the breech. Given, that Christianity is the prevailing common nexus governing our emotions / notions: in this part of the planet it appears to me that we all think pornographically about our sexuality.
A journeyman myself, once, having consciously attempted this genre in the decades of the 70s thru the late 80s in the drawings I made, I remember wanting my drawings at least to be honest as pornography. Not about suckering poor horny slobs like me to go and buy something that was contemptuous of my loneliness and state of need.
I was emphatically not intending making art. The drawings were about my own horniness, serving but a singular function: allow me in my be-numbedness to feel something, even though it engaged me genitally. It was at least 'honest'. Rachel, in the editing, do not delete this. And do not delete that the sole criteria as to whether or not I 'authenticated' it was my own erection and my own ability to experience exquisite orgasms. It was not solely that. At the same time I was acknowledging all manner of realizations about this. Some mundane: that my status was as a closet, pornographer, an amateur. I reasonably adhered I rule out measuring my panels or making them with a straight edge. It was to be 'home-made'. For 'my-eyes-only'.
In the latter 60s and decades into the 80s I made many comic strips I thought to be pornographic. I knew I was in defiance of the moralities and religious convictions of my neighbors on my street, and the parents of the children I I was teaching in the school I worked in. It was a dreading sense of this that I did this, spending inordinate hours at it. I was aware of the danger I was in should ever I be apprehended at it.
Yet, what seemed to warrant my justifying it was the realization of what sorts of things I was addressing, what sorts of taboos I'd chosen, singled out: this curiosity I had as to this aspect of the partnering! I, a married man, found myself inordinately turned on by couplings that were lesbian,gay! Drawn as to a flame that were I to get too close ......?
Rachel, I couldn't buy into sex that to me was violent or sadistic. Such was not about the sex I sought for myself. My interest was not in criminality or power struggles or aggression. The motifs I centered on were about sexual initiation and sexual seduction. orgasmic achieving encounters, the tactile experiencing of the naked alignments of genitals, lips, hands, and so forth: attaining rapture. The story that accompanied my doing this work, the one I kept telling myself all during those decades was I was also learning how to draw. That aspect of it, if nothing else, was valid. Came true.
This, the facture crossed other terrains. The journey took me beyond my own provincialism. My intent was merely to cross barriers of taboos. Yet I found myself doing other things also: immersing myself in mysteries. Most especially pertaining to my accessing 'identities' having to do with my parents and how they tried and succeeded in thwarting my efforts in trying to discover who I was. (I was my father's child from a prior marriage.)
There were many layers as to my inquiring into sex and sexual taboos and making 'pornography'. My addressing these motifs were something very like dissections. I remember in biology lab in college, my being given this frog to cut up. And I learned how delicate a task it was without doing damage (obfuscating what it was I was supposed to be clarifying / reveal). The morality questions as to my really making 'porn' laid less heavily on me than my fearing I could damage my specimens. Working in this genre had me realizing there is about human sexuality expressions that have direct bearings on how we think of ourselves. Know and not know.
It is in this context, Rachel, that I discovered another significance of this work: It did me.'
This draft 2/ 10/ 2007
posted by Norman Shapiro at 8:18 PM
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