Alain de Botton: Thinks we should have a new kind of porn. (Picture from TED Talks: http://youtu.be/MtSE4rglxbY)
The background
Have we had too much of the wrong kind of porn? Philosopher Alain de Botton certainly thinks so. He’s followed up publication of his book, How to Think More About Sex, with the idea that we need a new kind of pornography, in which we don’t abandon our intelligence, ethics, or aesthetics. He’s going to launch a “Better Porn” campaign and website, which harks back to an Ancient Greek view of the world in which there was no difference between being human and being sexual.
His site, according to Joe, will be something that parents will feel happy about their son or daughter accessing. According to The Independent, it’s part of the School of Life movement, which he started up as a way of giving people advice in living a fulfilled life today. His concerns are modish, certainly – the government has consulted on attempts to protect children from internet pornography, in which people would have to opt in to receive “adult” content. It’s timely, too, as the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey is topping bestseller lists, reported The Huffington Post.
“If we have reached porn saturation point, and porn is everywhere, what next for porn?” breathes Alain de Botton, quoted on The Guardian.
Alain de Botton is silly
If you think that philosophy is “little more than stating the obvious with extra jazz hands,” than you won’t be otherwise persuaded, scoffed Hadley Freeman in The Guardian’s Comment is Free. All he wants is “hotter porn stars.” And he’s stroking the wrong part of his anatomy whilst watching it – his chin. He sounds like “a priggish little boy.” Sexual images are ubiquitous – most people ignore them. He’s right, though – we do need a new kind of porn. How about finally getting “phone reception” after spending a week in Cornwall? Receiving an email in a boring meeting? Looking at The Daily Mail’s website?
Alain de Botton is wrong
Plus, we already have what he calls “ethical porn,” said the Anti-Porn Feminists blog. It’s called “art, literature, film.” He’s making the mistake that the only thing wrong with porn is its quality. Consuming porn is “an act of male supremacism.” It lets men feel superior. And de Botton doesn’t address those things at all. His analysis “doesn’t seem to belong in the real world” – where “where rape, rape culture, sex trafficking, child sexual exploitation and victim-blaming exist.” Porn is used by men to hurt women, and that’s all.
Alain de Botton is right
Nonsense, said Nichi Hodgson in The New Statesman. de Botton should be championed. Porn doesn’t have to be ethically poor – Angela Carter wrote about that 30 years ago. We can make our porn better – it ought to have an “ethical stamp”, for a start. The only problem de Botton will have is in persuading people that his sort of porn is sexy. de Botton should follow “an Arts and Crafts approach” – “Avoid elitism, invoke passion, and society will be better off for its production.”
Just make sure you get it right
Emmett Purcell on Joe suggested: “don’t forget not to skimp on the boobs Alain and then we’ll wish you the best of luck.” The Heresiarch’s Dungeon blog suggested, with its tongue firmly in its cheek, that porn could be used as “an aid to cogitation, a genuine art form in which the viewer might emerge from watching an intense thirty-minute session of group sex with a new (and hopefully lifelong) appreciation of Proust. The blog then gave a rundown of philosophical interpretations of sexual tropes in pornography. On Celebrity Tapes: “A celebrity without a publicly released sex-tape is thus only half-formed and so, for all his or her ubiquity, not quite real. Understood this way, the sex-tape is less a violation than a validation.”