Sontag: Porn, Sex, and loss of Self

“What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a full human being and one’s existence as a sexual being – while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don’t experience, at least don’t want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not. Insofar as strong sexual feeling does involve an obsessive degree of attention, it encompasses experiences in which a person can feel he is losing his “self”. The literature that goes from Sade through Surrealism to these recent books capitalizes on that mystery; it isolates the mystery and makes the reader aware of it, invites him to participate in it.”

Susan Sontag, 1967 The Pornographic Imagination first published in Styles of Radical Will, reproduced in Penguin Classics edition of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye pp.104-5
2 comments
  1. Hi Dave, that’s interesting. This essay is filled with great quotes I could have used, but many of them are Sontag articulating other people’s opinions of porn, in order to analyse and argue against them. Out of context they would appear to be her own opinion, and she could be made to sound like she was giving a real telling off: “All pornography amounts to is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent, for purchase by so-called adults.”

    And you’re grounded for a week.

  2. As an undergraduate, Sontag’s thoughts on the gaze/image/self seemed doubly cool because she was not part of the hetero-patriarchal normative paradigm that sought to oppress free thought and action; juxtaposed with TIM imagery, it feels a bit like my mum telling me off…

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