catapult magazine

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discussion

Pornography

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CanadianIre
Jun 22 2007
04:30 pm

I would think pornography would be that material explicitly created for the sole purpose of providing a masturbatory aid. Erotica would be that subject matter not created for this purpose. Sometimes erotica is called pornography because those persons see something in that subject matter that may be an aid to masturbation (i.e. the bangkok breast). Matt disagreed with the criticism of the photograph because he did not find it masturbatory, but the detractors did. There is very little consensus on what would provide a definitive aid to masturbation, and so it can be very difficult to decide which is porn. When I was a little boy, I liked looking at the Sear catalogue around Christmas. My parents removed the section containing images of women clad in brassieres. They did this on the off-chance these images would produce some kind of sexual arousal. I don’t think Sears intended to create porn, but their images were none-the-less treated as porn by my parents. So, I suppose, in that sense my parents were simultaneously the producers of porn, and the with-holders of porn. It only became porn when they decided it was. Sears didn’t decide, I didn’t decide. Porn, in this case, was born in the fear of porn — the fear of porn turned the catalogue into porn. I do think that the fear of porn sexualizes many things that wouldn’t normally be thought as sexual. In a sense, the fear of porn can be the source of many unusual fetishes…