model: Tassos

PAUL MORRIS:

A blogger recently asked for my thoughts on unsafe sex. Here is my response:

“Unprotected sex” is an interesting phrase. Sex among men is one of the great achievements of humankind, an unthinkably complex and beautiful behavioural language that has been developed over the course of our 85-million-year history as a species. It is one of the essential anchors that ties us both to our own nature and that of the world around us. Regrettably — and perhaps ironically — in this time of eco-awareness, our sexual nature — a priceless heritage — is itself more and more unprotected and in danger of being vitiated (through commodification and control) and forgotten.

Recently ornithologists did some interesting studies in the rhetoric of birdsong. They recorded the songs of a particular species of birds, broke the songs up into their constituent parts and removed some of the “syllables” of the songs. They then substituted these rearranged and reduced songs for a small group of fledgling birds who otherwise would have heard the complete songs in nature. When these fledglings grew up, because the complexity of the song had been tampered with, they hadn’t learned some of the basics of being a bird. Among other things, they couldn’t fly. The information necessary for this essential behaviour had been in the subtle arrangement of all the parts of the songs: intelligence embedded in patterns beyond the intellectual comprehension of both birds and men.

The same is true for men and their sex. There is meaning in the complexity of sexual behaviour that goes deeper than pleasure and certainly far deeper than pornography’s commodification or public health’s reductive dicta. Constrain the sex, render it rule-bound, dictate it through the artificial and short-sighted social and “health” optimizations of biopolitics or the homogenization of commodification, and you run the very real risk of losing information that enables us to be human and to be the exquisitely calibrated thing called “men.”

Our sexual culture is currently at a point of dangerous low ebb. Where we once had vital and creative practice, we now have almost infinite access to images of sex coupled with a reduced access to real sex. But our eyes are not substitutes for our bodies.

To my way of thinking, it’s the responsibility of porn to engage the viewer with sufficient reality and sufficient information so as to inspire him to engage in creative and real sex himself. Optimally, porn should aim not only to excite, but also to incite. This requires showing every reality of men engaging with men in ways that are real, creative and honest. This is dangerous because the social order is afraid of what can happen when men learn the power and pleasure of true fucking, true cocksucking, true fisting, rimming, real and unfettered connection. A world of men having limitless pleasure among men is a domain of meaning that’s commensurate with that of any other value system that society deems profitable or stable or politically viable. To put it bluntly, sex is more important, more powerful than money, status or political power.