Pornography of Ethics: Sex n' Lit Round 2

ding ding ding. Yet another response to Liza Libes

In my previous article, ‘Write Porn for the Plot’ I made the relatively vague statement that sex is not about sex.

Liza Libes

, author of ‘Stop Writing Sex Scenes’, the piece towards which I had made this response, criticized this statement by saying that I didn’t offer what sex was about. I thought that was fundamentally missing the point. It’s not about ONE thing, it’s about whatever it can be about. Writing is an exploration of the psyche, soul and world therefore writing about sex is an exploration of the psyche, soul and world. In an exchange of comments Libes did reveal the sole thing that she believed sex was meant to be about: specifically a display of love. I think this idealism is beautiful, I also do think that sex can be about love, in fact, that is the ideal, for me personally. But if you’ve ever had sex, you know that sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s compromise. Sometimes it’s clout. Sometimes it’s escape. So little of life is ideal. It’s unfortunate, but as writers, we shouldn’t lie to our readers in the way that pornographers lie to their viewers. And at least these less-than-ideal situations are often interesting.

In her article, ‘Your Kink Isn’t Art’, Libes has amended her initial statement that “all sex writing is bad writing”. This shrinking of hyperbole is a good thing, it means she actually wants to engage with her opposition. And frankly, I don’t care for most of the comment responses to her article. I once had 3 seconds of beef with a fellow Substacker (who I now consider a friend) about how he was (correctly) assessing another substacker’s work while (incorrectly) modelling the form of his criticism in such a way that would only result in stupid responses. This feels familiar. Libes got a lot of stupid responses. “There’s no ethics in art”, “You can’t tell people what art is or isn’t”, “Sex is art”. These are lousy offerings of angry disengagement with an idea, because like Libes’s initial argument, they are effectively hyperbole at best, unformed bumper sticker worldviews at worst. But they are the responses that her initial article deserved. A few other writers chose to engage with her claim seriously, and now we have arrived at a place where she is getting to the heart of what her article actually meant. Now, after a serious bit of effort, we are having a [more] real conversation.

I do sympathize with Libes. There is not a lot of smut that engages me, but when it does, it does (

Pablo Báez

,

Edith Bow

); this is the stuff I call anti-erotica because it does not use sex as a dangling carrot for a mediocre audience. When reading these pieces you’re not engaging with a work for the sex (though, sometimes, half the fun is unpacking an idea in the throes of fantasy, kind of like–well–the whole genre of fantasy), you’re engaged with it for all the potential things that sex can be about. That’s also one of the reasons why we read hard literature, correct? Yes, I think so. Teasing out themes and meaning is one of the greatest joys of dealing with fiction. Yes, we read for a story, but at heart, aren’t we all trying to understand the scaffolding behind the story? Because understanding theme is telling something about us, about what we know, how we think and about the person who wrote the story. 

Libes claims that in the sex scenes she is willing to tolerate, she is looking for a “comment on a universal aspect of human nature. . .” which is delightfully nonspecific, but at least marginally better than utterly sexless fiction. She continues, however, by saying that with a sex scene, she is expecting goodness, truth and beauty. She demands Moral Idealism for sex to be considered literary, and not pornography. I am familiar with this perspective, that art must contain within it the spiritual ideal. To an extent I agree with this. But every story that leads a character into any sort of struggle has already shown us something of a less than perfect world and less than perfect perspectives. That’s what makes it human. So then, by this standard, art is meant to reveal how one interacts with the less than ideal, and at its highest value, indicate what we are meant to strive for in our personal lives. I don’t fundamentally take issue with this, but I also don’t want to reduce art to fables and parables alone. The most interesting art is art that leaves me something to grapple with. An idea, a claim, a problem. Not only do I find this a pleasant way of openly extracting one’s own personal beliefs, but if one of the purposes of art is to spend time with it, then this is an effective way of achieving such an end. That end can be achieved in many ways, though. 

I think of Refn’s Drive (2011) quite often because I thought that movie was a good time when it came out. But golly, did it use violence. It was a system shock. The first scenes of ultraviolence in that movie cut through the neon fantasy and shot us down to the land of Real Consequences faster than Lucifer got his ass blasted out of the Heavenly Choir. Then, after some time, the violence becomes the fantasy and the story can take center stage, within this new realm of serious consequences. In fact, the hyper fetishism of violence allows us to engage with Drive’s story which otherwise would feel more like an arthouse dream. It grounds its own absurdity, by allowing our focus to shift back and forth between the extremes of romance and destruction and compare the two as narrative tools. The violence in Drive is the foundation for the beauty of the story. It guides the viewer back to the heart. Do I think Drive creates engagement better than a movie like Days of Heaven? No. Do I think it works? Yeah, dude. I think this movie performs a brilliant reversal of fantasy. Many contemporary high-octane action flicks are not violent, in that they don’t show us anything truthful about violence, but they are violent in that there’s a lot of punching, kicking and shooting (hell yeah brother), thus the fantasy of violence is what actually influences the central theme of the contemporary action flick (Hey, why does the Department of Defense fund Marvel movies again?) because it becomes the aspirational element; It takes its form as morally ideal, because it’s unobtanium. Meanwhile, the truth element is the protagonist's love of family or revenge or whatever motivating factor, even if these relationships are unrealistic, they are grounded. The story in these flicks exists for the libidinal elements, not the opposite. And in reality, the libido exists for the story. One could call these movies pornographic. For Drive, the ideal was the fantasy of love story, the redemption, the act of goodness, the alterations required to turn evil into good. These elements are generally unrealistic when taken to their thematic extremes. The real world is more like Only God Forgives than Lord of the Rings (I am not a nihilist, I am an optimist, if that matters. I am not attempting to be grim.). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t shoot for LoTR, that also doesn’t mean LoTR is not present where there is grit, grime and depravity. In Drive, again, the truth is the violence. But we are able to engage with the ideal, because of how it is framed by the horror of truthful consequences. 

Perhaps, from the horror of truthful sex, we can reveal the ideal of something meaningful.

Can smut do this? I think that’s a dumb question, frankly. Sure it can. There is no reason that it couldn’t. Smut contains within it a story. It does not exist in a vacuum. How the writer teases that out is up to them. It would require that the writer has a firm grasp on what they intend their scenes to mean. And again, I sympathize with Libes. I haven’t read a lot of great smut. But I have read some remarkable and unforgettable smut. I refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. In fact, one of the absolute best examples of this is Lugubrious Wanton Levy, which, at its heart is a meditation on the spiritual effect of promiscuity. It is beautiful in a way, but it is not morally ideal. Instead, it poses a question: What are we to do with our track records? Because that’s part of who you are. And what happens if your track record becomes your current relationship(s)? These are serious questions. And while it does not present a moral ideal, it paves the way for an uninhibited conversation about how these things can be addressed by serious people rather than dogmatists. Recall, we don’t live in an ideal world. Shouldn’t we address reality relative to what can actually be done? If art cannot grapple with the Real (real-enough), then it’s time to put down your pen and start laying bricks, Liza, unless that is you are writing pornography in your own way, because pornography, as you may or may not have observed, does not grapple with the real. I agree to an extent, though. Smut can be demoralizing and dehumanizing. Libes acknowledges that sex writing doesn’t need to be. But moral idealism is not the ONLY solution to bad writing, bad taste, or ill-will. Looking at the problem head on can also work.

She criticizes vulgarity in her latter paragraphs as being something that cannot be elevated. I’m assuming Libes has never read JG Ballard’s Crash because, frankly, the claim doesn’t hold water. Perhaps she means writers don’t use vulgarity well. Again, I agree. That’s a hard tool to work with. But if she was being imprecise with her phrasing, she missed the mark. If she meant what she said, she’s simply wrong. 

Neutrality in art does not exist. Again, neutrality in art does not exist. That’s effectively Design Theory 101. That also means that you can’t write a neutral piece no matter how hard you try. Even to ask a question is to suggest that the question merits answering. It suggest an opinion. The ethics of a work of fiction are fundamentally there between the lines whether intentional or not. It is her unwillingness to engage with those ethics that is driving her to suggest that certain writings cannot be considered art. All writing that is not generated is written by a person with a perspective. Meaning is always there whether the author is aware or not. She finishes that argument with this claim: “Literature must contain beauty and meaning.” We have established that there is no escaping meaning. Does art need to contain beauty? My response won’t convince her, so I won’t use it. But I will say that beauty is a thing that holds various different values at heart. If “normalizing kinks and sexual self awareness” (I’m rolling my eyes at this buzzfeed ass sentence but with understanding and sincerity) improves people’s real lives, then beauty is within the end game of such a product. 

Her final paragraphs criticize the notion “normalizing kinks and sexual self awareness” is a purpose of writing smut. And honestly, yeah, as a point, that deserves criticism, not because I’m anti-kink. I am profoundly and fundamentally pro-kinks. But I roll my eyes for the same reason I can’t get behind Libes’s argument for lit being ONLY a vessel for goodness truth and beauty. Didactic fiction generally sucks. Her argument goes on to suggest a slippery slope fallacy about kinks turning us all into Neil Gaiman. Frankly, this argument is for the birds and I think the dumbest dipshit can tease out why. She was also concerned with BDSM related injuries, but have you ever seen someone with skinned knees and thought “either you’re a skateboarder or you should invest in softer carpet”. That’s not even BDSM, that’s just a good time, any way you look at it. Kink normalization is a lousy reason to write anything. “No one wants to read that” (her case, paraphrased) for the same reason no one wants to read Moralist Fiction. It appeals to who it appeals to. It’s lying to a reader base that wants to receive lies. Because life isn’t all gray, that’s true. But enough of it is gray, and the things that are black and white, we all already know. Nazis are bad, the sky is blue, revenge is hollow, sex is best where love is the driving force. To pretend there is nothing else is to lie. Good fiction is interested in black, white and gray. Not normalizing kinks, not spreading the holy gospel. We have therapists and churches for both.

I did not engage with her whole argument here because there are worldview axioms we’d have to spend an eternity debating before even getting to the question of smut, porn and sex in literature. So, I drew circles around the stuff where a meaningful conversation could be had. Forgive me for not dealing with the implicit slippery slope and categorical fallacy of BDSM leading to Niel Gaiman.

In conclusion, there’s a fantastic book called ‘The Enigma of Reason’ by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber that I cannot recommend enough. In writing this response essay, I was reminded of it, and the impact it had on my life. The central thesis is effectively that reasoning is an evolutionary tool meant to justify one’s intuitions and emotions; that’s the real short, dumb guy version. I believe we are seeing that in real time with Libes. Not that she is disingenuous, in fact, her compromises have shown that she is willing to consider something outside of her baseline ideology, or at least expand that model. But, if she is not intending to be hyperbolic for the clickbait, these flash fried bumper sticker claims (“sex writing is bad writing”, “Your kink is not art”) are strong emotions with an Associates degree. If she is intending to farm views, honestly more power to her, can I have some? (At least I am honest) And of course, reasoning out one’s intuitions is how we come to a model truth (or true enough), so this is not inherently a bad thing. It’s how we build models of reality that are functional enough. It requires that we deal with the real, as closely as we can with our limited access. With a little self awareness we can build better models, more accurate ones, and maybe that’s how we make better literature. It’s at least how we make better smut.

There are a lot of crusty ass cruel comments out there towards this author. I get it. But, I say engage with the idea as if it’s serious, even if you can’t take it seriously. Why not? It’s at least fun to think, isn’t it?