OUAD603- Collecting the images for the video

I am finding this process incredibly difficult. I am hoping to raise the point that the regulation of the porn industry is the biggest problem, and that it is too easily accessed by anyone of any age. Even if one were to be looking for ethical/feminist porn, as soon as you type those words in, the most graphic de-humanising images still pop up. These are the ones I want to show on my video to represent the quantity and availability of the porn that is on the internet, that is completely free with no age-restriction, even when trying to seek out this ‘morally ok’ porn.. I am finding it difficult because it is the last thing i want to be looking at.

However when doing the research looking for the feminist “art porn”, an article explains how porn is thriving in australia, and that majority of it is being made by women. However I was shocked at what was being made in this “feminist artistic porn”, that was being celebrated art film festivals in australia.. I would be horrified if I was a child and I was to see this sort of stuff. Follows is a snippet I took from the article:

Across the country, there’s a variety of women making feminist, queer, alternative, and generally experimental films. And of these, 30-something year-old Gala Vanting is a central figure. According to her, one of the reasons Australian porn is so arty is that censorship has quelled the formation of a structured industry like in the US. “Here, there’s no real machine to insert yourself into as a producer,” she explains. “You chart your own path, and do so with things like feminist politics or queer identities—which are bound to produce diverse results.”

The blood-play scene in Love Hard. 

Her latest film, Love Hard, just won Hottest Kink Film at the 2015 Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto. It features a couple casually discussing BDSM in their kitchen before cutting to a forested hillside where the guy is tied to a tree. The woman slashes his torso with a needle, then whips and bites him until he’s bleeding. By the end they’re both arrestingly covered in gore but still kissing.

Text taken from: http://www.vice.com/read/australia-has-a-thriving-art-porn-industry-run-by-women

I feel sick to the stomach that young boys and girls could be looking at the stuff i am seeing.  I really don’t want to have to go through this process, i feel ill looking at some of these images. For me the line of what is right and wrong in the porn industry is just so grey, however I feel very strongly about underage children seeing this stuff.

However how censored should it be?

Follows is a snipped from an article on how they have been trying to ban porn in India.

“There is a grey area between pornography and eroticism, and what is considered lascivious in nature,” said Pavan Duggal, an Indian Supreme Court advocate who specializes in cyberlaw. But while Indian law specifically punishes the publication, creation, browsing, downloading, or exchanging of any depiction of children in an “obscene or indecent or sexually explicit manner,” Duggal believes that there is still some legal ambiguity about the blacklisting of other material.

“The trouble lies in the identification,” he noted.

Because many ISPs in India are small businesses that simply work to provide internet access to customers and have no authority to create, disseminate, or promote online content, it is hard for them to identify and monitor websites suspected of obscenity.

Above text taken from: https://news.vice.com/article/rubbing-out-internet-porn-wont-be-easy-for-the-indian-government

To put it in my own words… censorship is so difficult, because where can you draw the line with what is ok and what isn’t? Living in such a liberal country like England, I am influenced by the idea that everyone should have a freedom, to take part in, or to view what ever they like, if they are at an appropriate age to do so. The topic of censorship is a large one, and not one that I want to enter, however I don’t think that people ask the question, or think enough about how children are accessing all this stuff online. INstead of going back and fourth with what is right and what is wrong, should we not be concentrating on who is watching this stuff online? What measures can be taken to prevent 11/12 year olds like myself, being shown rape like scenes on boys phones at school?

To get this message across in my film, I am deliberating whether to make it more like a virus, or something like this video that Sam Taylor wood made, titled A little Death.

The time lapse, at first you are not too sure what is going on and then you start to realise. Maybe I could do something quite similar, say looking at a children’s cover to a film or something similar, and it slowly changing into something explicit? However first I want to try an image sequence with flashing images, referencing a virus, but also playing with the subliminal nature of loop flashing imagery.

OUAD603- Older ways of viewing porn

One of the oldest ways of commercially selling porn, dating back to the victorian times, were the: What the butler saw machines.

The consumer would insert a coin and start to turn the handle, which would internally rotate the stills flicking them in front of a light, so that together it would move like a film. It would be amazing if i could get hold of one of these, or make something like it.  They are called Mutoscopes, however they are thousands of pounds and even getting the parts for them is very expensive.

However these have inspired me to scroll down, rotating the wheel on my mouse intsead of looking at the images indiviudally on my screen. It shows the thousands often really disturbing images that can be accessed by people of any age. Even when I type in “ethical porn” and “feminist porn” their are really dehumanising objectifying and violent images of men and women. Maybe I can use this method of scrolling, like turning the handle on these old “what the butler saw” machines as a way of documenting the too easily accessed amount of damaging pornographic images.

OUAD603- Taking my work to the precipice

I was feeling quite literally on the precipice with my work, I didn’t know where I was going and what exactly I was trying to say. Reflecting back, I think it was going there that gave me some clarity on how to drive my project further. I was thinking of what I could launch over the edge, and thought of the old ways people watched porn. I immediately thought of the x-rated section in the video rental shop from when I was a child, that I was not allowed to ever enter, and what a contrast this was to the easily accessible stuff any person of any age can now find on the internet. I decided to buy some old video tapes, take them apart and throw them over.

I was left with the video plastic covers at the top of the precipice and the broken tapes smashed at the bottom, with the tape flying in the wind. When I saw the smashed remains at the bottom, it was strangely symbollic of the end of an age, where porn could mostly only be purchased, by an embarrassing trip to the video store, and censored to under 18s. It was then I thought of using the video tapes as a medium for my work. I thought I could use them as a material to project the video on. The reason why i think this is a good medium to use, because I could line them up, similar to how you found them in a shop at an old video rental store, displaying perhaps, 100 films, which would be in contrasts the 100000000s of films you can find online. I could then project thousands of images in minutes flashing projected over them, almost like a virus. I started to look at artists who had use video tape as their medium. An artist named Monika Grzymala, created this impressive installation made out of video tape: There is a deconstrucvtive element to her work. I wonder if the process of deconstructing the video tapes, to then project onto would symblose in some way the change from the video era, to the internet age? However I want my audience to recognise the distinctive shape of the video tapes, so that they really think about that change.

OUAD603- Taking a step back

After feeling very stuck, with not being able to do practical viewing methodology experiments in the studio, and unsure of what direction my content was going in. I set myself a plan: to concentrate on the practical experiments at home, when I have more space. After I put this pressure aside I was able to take a step back from all my research, I looked at what angered me the most, and that was the mass of availability of the unethical, none feminist porn on the internet. If porn was properly regulated, it would be far more ethical, age restricted and with a lot less depictions of violence towards womens, and would be something I would back up. Howveer because of the mass availability and free porn you can so easily find on the internet, any attempt of feminist porn creation is completely shrouded by violent, and unrealistic representation of sex. This is being seen by really young children completely screwing with their ideas. I know this from personal expderience, of 12 year old boys showing me horrifying  and disgusting videos on their phones at the age of 12. I have decided this is  what I want to show in my work.

I am going to do this by collecting all the images I find on the internet when trying to find ethical, feminist porn, and then compiling them into an image sequence. Speeding it up so quickly, that the audience is confronted with flashing flicking images of the porn industry, so fast that it seems like a computer hack, an overload of information spilling onto a screen. I hope that this will highlight the biggest problem with the porn industry. However I am yet to know what screen. This is where I am gong to experiment at home. I am not sure what I am going to project onto, and how my audience will view it.

Olafur Eliasson in the light show at The Hayward Gallery used a strobe light to show his work. Maybe I could do something with a strobe light? I also need to start looking at if I want to include sound in my piece.

OUAD603- Focusing on Content

The more reading I do, and the more research into the positive and negative effects of pornography, the more confused I get over hat I am trying to say.

The woman’s hour debate on BBC, over whether porn can empower women, made me want to represent the feminist trends, the ethical porn, and feminist and gay porn producers out their that fight to create porn that contradicts the general perception of degrading objectifying pornography. However the research I have done on the depression caused from erectile dysfunction, and porn addiction, makes me want to high light the danger of children having access at an early age to porn.

Discussions like the following:

‘Many observers have linked the two trends, viewing pornographication as a significant factor in the mergence of feminism, gay rights and other forms hitherto marginalised sexual identity politics. From this perspective the growing availability of gay and lesbian porn, for example, has played an important role in articulating and servicing the needs of still stigmatised communities‘ (Feona Attwood, 2012)

make me want to highlight the importance of these platforms for many in society. This leads me to researching artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and his representations of the sexualised body:

Tit Profile, 1980

Derrick Cross, 1982

His work attempts to reclaim the body from sexual objectification, and rather put the power into the hands of the participant. This kind of work really sways me towards representing a similar view. That very much similar to the 70’s feminist movement.

however the more research I do, the more curious I become of what exactly are these ethical, feminists porn productions online? So I started looking online, however the majority of stuff I find, floods in from countries around the world, completely free with no age restriction, stuff I really don’t want to be seeing. Way more often than not it is dehumanising pornographic female submissive violence- all things that I am strongly against. So the more research I do the more confused I seem to get, because even though people speak of this feminist and ethical porn, if anyone were to even try find this they are bombarded with very contradictory imagery.

The following article  addresses the feminist and ethical porn producers but speaks of the porn stars welfare, which casts doubt upon the way I think about pro-feminist porn. I have included the whole article, because I don’t want to select quotes in fear of the selection process becoming bias.

Worry About Porn Stars, Not What They Act Out On Screen

October 3, 2013

by Frankie Mullin

 

A photo taken on the set of a “kink porn” shoot. (Photo via)

Everyone has their own pornographic preferences. Some are clearly far more niche than others, but that’s where internet porn has proved itself a useful resource. Think of all those nervous foot fetishists who no longer have to apply for summer jobs at Barratts, or the group sex enthusiasts who don’t have to submit themselves to an STD lottery every weekend in order to get their kicks. Sure, it’s not the real thing – but so often, the fantasy is better (or at least less harrowing) than the reality anyway.

However, if David Cameron gets his way with a piece of impending legislation, one specific breed of smut consumer is going to find their chosen fantasy forbidden by law. That fantasy is what’s been dubbed “rape porn” – videos that Cameron says “normalise sexual violence against women” and that are “quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them”. The government have vowed to ban anyone from possessing or viewing this kind of porn online.

Whether they’re actually capable of doing this remains to be seen, but the proposed ban has once again opened upa dialogue about what kinds of sex we should be allowed to watch consenting adults have on camera. But while the debate about what is or isn’t acceptable masturbation material continues on the message-boards of mumsnet and in the pages of theTelegraph, there’s another, arguably more important, issue picking up momentum: how much attention is paid to the safety and treatment of performers – the real women, not the fantasies.

Horror stories have long emerged from porn sets and they continue to do so; women have their consent violated, are coerced into performing acts they didn’t agree to perform, have their requests to use condoms turned down and aren’t paid what was promised. On top of all of that, the industry is reportedly full of racial inequality: Black performers are paid substantially less than white performers and white women are reportedly told by agents and managers to avoid scenes with black men for fear that it will damage their career.

In response to all those depressing accounts, writer, sex-educator and one-time professional dominatrix Nichi Hodgson has launched the Ethical Porn Partnership. Hodgson is concerned about the ethics of production in porn and is aiming to create a self-regulatory body to monitor abuses and bad practice within the industry – it’s an attempt to breed a culture of Fairtrade fucking, essentially.

“Lots of companies already make pretty good porn,” she says. “What we lack is transparency about how it’s produced, and that’s what the Ethical Porn Partnership is about – building user confidence in porn, saying we can guarantee that it’s been produced in an ethical way.”

Hodgson says she wants to “reclaim some moral high ground” with the partnership, proving that porn producers aren’t all sleazy reprobates who care more about money or getting their end away than a human’s wellbeing. That will translate into a kite mark attached to porn that meets a certain set of criteria, and producers who wish to be accredited will have to present health certificates and records. There are also plans to set up a system for anonymously reporting complaints, which the EPP will have the capacity to investigate.

A scene from one of Petra Joy’s movies.

Sex worker, performer and activist Kitty Stryker, who works in alternative porn, agrees that it’s performer safety, hiring practices and working conditions – not the fantasies you see being portrayed on screen – that should take priority in any debate on porn and morality. “You can’t tell by watching a porn film who is being degraded,” she says. “There’s a major porn company that talks constantly about how ethical they are, but I know lots of women who have worked there, some of whom have had terrible experiences. It’s not the kinky sex we should be worried about, it’s the shit behind the scenes.”

There are those working in the industry who define themselves as “feminist” porn producers. People like Anna Span, who seek to differentiate themselves from the norm by making films that include more shots of male bodies and a focus on storyline. Meanwhile, award-winning producer Petra Joy claims to “blur the lines between art and porn” (even if often this simply equates to some footage of people having sex interspersed with shots of trees and birds). These producers and the companies they run and work for have already placed an emphasis on creating fair working environments for their performers, and as such they’re likely to be the first to get on board with the Ethical Porn Partnership. However, despite this distinction being made between feminist and alternative porn and the more stylistically misogynist mainstream “gonzo” type of porn that Cameron seems to most abhor, Hodgson is wary of excluding mainstream porn companies.

“I will be approaching some strictly feminist producers, but I don’t want to encourage a sense of censorship around representation,” she told me. “While there’s no denying there’s a female perspective, there’s definitely an element of snobbery in the distinction [between mainstream porn and feminist or alternative porn]. Often material isn’t that different, it’s just the cultural frame put around it – if porn is packaged in a certain way and shot with certain camera angles, then it’s going to feel like a completely different experience.”

Following that same thought, Hodgson says that there will still be space for “extreme” porn within her Fairtrade framework, and is outspoken against any legislation that attempts to police fantasy. “I’m really concerned about the clampdown on so-called ‘rape porn’,” she says. “The latest research suggests that 65 percent of women have admitted to having rape fantasies. Desire is amoral – what you like to watch or fantasise about isn’t necessarily anything you’ve dreamt of doing in real life.”

Far more salient than asking whether or not we should feel guilty about our fantasies is the question of how porn is produced and whether performers were genuinely safe while producing it. Unfortunately, producing porn – mainstream or otherwise – costs money, and with most of the wanking public now used to free material, this will be one of the largest challenges in getting people to consume “ethical” porn. But if we’re going to continue getting het up about porn – seemingly unavoidable in the context of Cameron’s crusade – let it be about making sure women are safe in the real world above whether we’re disturbed by what they act out on camera.

“I don’t like gonzo porn,” says Petra Joy. “But I think the important thing is that we now have more than one kind of porn, and that if you don’t like the mainstream gonzo style, then there’s now something you can watch that turns you on.”

My opinion is so nuanced, on one side porn is something that has become socially accepted to a certain degree in our society, and I think for the right audience, ethical and feminist porn, if they truly are so, is ok, however their are so many sides and dimensions to this opinion. I think it is almost impossible to show all the sides of this in one piece and so I need to stop trying to pin point one argument, and look at who is viewing this stuff.

Carolee Schneeman in her Film, ‘Fuses’ (1965), recorded herself making love with her lover.

When discussing this piece of work she said,

‘I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt- the intimacy of the lovemaking…’ ‘…It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen- – that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman.’ (Kristine Stiles. (N/A). 10/12/14).

Follows are some stills from her video:

Her work celebrates heterosexual pleasure, and looks at sexual intercourse as an equal platform for enjoyment. She later comments on how ‘…neither sex’s experience is inferior, just different.’ (Kristine Stiles. (N/A). 10/12/14).

Carolee Schneeman’s art is similar to what feminist and ethical porn producers are trying to create. I do not condemn this type of porn making, at all and perhaps could show something like this in my work. Howveer their are other sides to the story, like the above article that make me question wanting to show this in my work.

Bibliography:

KRISTINE STILES. (N/A). Fuses. Available: http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/works.html. Last accessed 10/12/14.

FRANKIE MULLIN (2013). Worry About Porn Stars, Not What They Act Out On Screen. Available: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/lets-talk-about-the-ethics-of-porn-production-not-whats-being-produced. Last accessed 04/04/2015.

OUAD603- Combining reflection and projection

Here I am testing projected text onto a reflective surface. I realised that projecting straight onto a mirror does’t really work, and if i am wanting to combine the audience’s reflection with projection I would have to find a material that was translucent, but transparent enough for them to still see their reflection, but opaque enough for it to be project onto.

The most effect experiment was using OHP plastic to project onto because it was still transparent enough to see the reflection. I need to experiment with this on a larger on scale. I am still not 100 percent I want to use the audiences reflection in my work, for it could be a little confusing. However I will only know when I scale up my experiments. I plan to use the space I have at home in lincolnshire to scale up my experiments. The experiments i have done so far in college, I have had to take down, meaning no continuity, and the results don’t really give me the answers I am looking for.

OUAD603- Magnifying

Daniel Böschung is an artist, and calls himself a ‘face cartographer’. He takes the highest of resolution photos of peoples faces, making them into landscapes. You can then navigate around them seeing every every tiny detail. The closer you look, the more abstract they become because you no longer recognise parts of the face but rather cavities, hairs and wrinkles. Maybe I should start looking into photographing womans lips, really close up, so they become more part of the body rather than a sexualised tool? Above are snap shots that I have cropped of his work. However I wonder if i want this to be the content of my work, because it kind of means I am supporting the porn industr. After reading articles like The Vice one following, I realise I feel more strongly about what damage the availability of porn is doing.

I have included the whole interview because I think it is important to read the whole thing.

Internet Porn Ruined My Life

January 4, 2013

by Alexander Walters

If you were a teenager in the 90s, your porn came from three trusty sources: magazines shamefully bought from the newsagent and hidden inside a newspaper on your way home, those soft porn B-movies on late-night Channel 5 and – when utter, unavoidable desperation hit – the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue and back page boob-job adverts in your mum’s magazines. Besides being ball-clenchingly embarrassing to look back on, it was a comparatively innocent time – the Brideshead Revisited of pornography to today’s internet-enhanced Cannibal Holocaust. That shift to online didn’t only make us pick up on fetishes that older generations went to their graves unaware of and normalise hardcore smut that would have Mary Whitehouse spinning furiously in her grave, but also made porn instantly more accessible, driving up viewers’ demand. YouPorn is now estimated to account for two percent of all web traffic, which probably doesn’t shock you too much, but is an insane statistic considering that’s one website and the internet is a pretty big place, all things considered. The shift had a bigger effect on some than others – like Michael Leahy, for example; a man who developed a crippling porn addiction and managed to ruin his entire life with just an internet connection and his right hand. Clearly this is just about the most extreme case you could ever come across – it’s not like five minutes a day is going to make everyone in your life despise you (unless you have inexcusably boring friends) – so I called Michael up to see how he got from where he was to the author, speaker and expert on pornography addiction he’s become.

 

 VICE: So, Michael, how did your crippling porn addiction start? Michael Leahy: My story really begins at the age of 11, when I first encountered adult material. It was hard back then – in the late 60s – to get hold of it. It was about finding a stash of magazines at your friend’s dad’s place or in the woods, or whatever, so my exposure was pretty limited. I was a recreational user of porn for a long time, even at college when video came along. Later on, the advent of higher quality porn and digital distribution on CD-ROMs increased my usage, but it wasn’t until the internet arrived that the real problems began. What was it about internet porn that changed things? This was the early 90s and it was like the Wild West days of internet porn. We could literally watch the number of sites that were available grow right in front of our eyes, to the point where – pretty soon – we couldn’t see the edges of it. That was the beginning of the end for me. The internet changed everything. Within a fairly short period of time, I found myself watching up to eight hours of pornography a day, every day. How? Were you unemployed or just doing it at night? No, I was doing it at work. I was working for a big corporation and we had something that was very rare back then: a high speed internet connection. Didn’t you get caught? This was long before companies realised what people were using internet connections for, so there was nothing to stop you accessing any sites you wanted and there was nobody checking up on us. What effect did it have on your work? It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a business trip and stay up until 3 or 4AM watching porn, knowing full well that I had an 8AM meeting the next morning where I was making a presentation to sell multi-million dollar software to corporate directors. I’d literally nap for a couple of hours, wake up, tired, put my suit on and go to the clients. I’d maybe schedule a trip for three or four days and only see half a dozen clients, then spend the rest of the time watching pornography. As you can imagine, I began to find it pretty hard to hold down a job. Yeah, I bet. How did porn change your sexual behaviour in real life? One of the fetishes I picked up online was voyeurism, so I would often schedule business trips around that. I’d be able to expense hotels at £125 per night, but I would choose to stay in £40 motels in a seedier part of town because I knew that the rooms were crammed together, buildings looked over each other and there was little privacy. I’d spend hours and hours looking into other windows, masturbating and waiting for someone to walk by their window undressing. What was the peak of your addiction? The addiction escalated into an affair with a woman who I met online. The relationship was exclusively about sex – she was nothing more than porn with skin on. It was like a 24/7 high as opposed to the occasional high that I was getting from watching porn. When you’re having an affair and you’re hiding the relationship from your wife and kids, there’s an adrenaline rush and a buzz that you get from doing it. That was the peak. When my wife found out about the affair, I admitted to my pornography addiction and my compulsive behaviour. I’d say I was going to stop every day and I made myself believe it, but I continued going back to porn. Was there anything loving about your affair? You describe her as porn with skin on, as if she were an object.  What made her pornographic to me was that she was exactly like the woman I’d been searching for every time I browsed the internet. She was the epitome of it. It wasn’t until my wife had divorced me that I realised my affair partner was also an addict, of a kind. I discovered at the bottom of my depression that she was seeing about five or six other guys who were married with kids. I got exactly what I was asking for – that perfect porn woman who doesn’t want any ties or a long-term relationship. Of course, I was so attached to her by then that I wanted commitment, but it was the last thing on her mind. So by this point you’d lost your wife and become estranged from your kids – what made you turn it around? It was when I was lying on the floor of my apartment in Atlanta having suicidal thoughts. I was thinking seriously about walking over to the Wal-Mart not too far from where I lived, buying a gun, sticking it in my mouth and pulling the trigger. It was when I started thinking about writing a suicide note to my boys – that, thank God, is when I woke up. I decided that it wasn’t the legacy I was going to leave to my kids: the father who killed himself because of an addiction to porn. And you’re better now? I might be “recovered”, but I still see counsellors and go to group therapy. I’m sure I’ll be in counselling for the rest of my life. It’s kind of cathartic to be able to talk about it and revisit some of it, but some of it is still painful. I have a really hard time talking about my boys and the price they paid. I’m reconciled with them again, but my wife started seeing someone else and eventually remarried, which closed the door on that. We’re friends, but it’s sad to think of what might have been. You know, the sitting-on-the-porch conversations about the kids as you grow old together. And you now tour the US speaking to college students about your experience – isn’t that painful? It’s painful, but it’s important for people to hear about because these are some of the consequences you don’t think about when you’re a college student. You think you’re going to meet the person of your dreams and won’t need porn anymore because you’ll have this wonderful wife who you can have sex with whenever you want, but it just doesn’t work like that. So you’re saying porn is damaging? Well, sex is a permanent fixture in our consciousness and our relationships. To abuse that part of who we are is just asking for trouble. That’s why even porn on a recreational level will damage you, probably in ways subtler than it did to me, but it will do damage. You’ll feel a level of sadness when you catch yourself thinking about your old girlfriend, or Miss November, or a porn star, or whatever, when you’re having sex with your lover. You’ll know that connection wasn’t there – that intimacy wasn’t there – and she’ll sense that too. So what’s the answer? Ban porn? In my speaking tours and books, I make it clear I’m against censorship, that I’m not interested in morality discussions and that I’m not here to tell anyone how to live their life. What I’m interested in is the facts, how pornography affects our brain chemistry, our physiology, our relationships. I very much bought into that whole porn culture. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, I didn’t believe I was hurting anyone and yet eventually that lie would end up costing me a 15-year marriage, my two boys and my career. Thanks, Michael – I’m glad things are working out for you.

OUAD603- Voyeurism

I really want my work to have a strong element of physically engaging my audience. My favourite thing about my previous work with the peep-hole boxes, was what it made my audience do, and how it made other people want to peep too when they saw others peeping. Adding another layer of voyeurism. I don’t necessarily have to work with a peep-hole, but really need to start experimenting more with visual methodologies.

I thought of perhaps using a magnifying glass, to magnify the reflection of your eye when peeping. So your confronted by the reflection of just your enlarged eye.

Here is an image of Wills enlarged eye. I think zooming in on the eye reflects the visual stimulus of porn. It is quite confrontational and alarming too.

Although this next image is quite amusing, the magnification of the lips, comments on the whole tittilation of the lips, and erotic fantasies, and fetishes.

Here is the research I did on titilation of the lips, and fulfilling fetishes:

Freud (1927) in discussion over fetishism states that no,

‘male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals’ ‘fetish is a penis- substitute’ (Freud, S. (1927). P201).

He suggests that the origin of male fetishes come from a fear of castration, and that subconscious thought processes replace the lack of phallus in a woman. For if a woman cannot be castrated then the fear of castration is diminished (Freud S. (1927). Edward L. Bernays, Freud’s nephew became famous for his promotional campaigns for the cigarette brand: Lucky Strike. He studied his uncle’s theory on fetishism and put it to the test in cigarette adverts. He created images that referenced the titillation of women’s lips when smoking on a cigarette, (replacing the lack of phallus). The campaign was hugely successful mainly because of its subliminal nature (Christine Strotmann. 2013).

I have been looking for the subject matter of what my audience may look into, and what they will see. I want to experiment, and hopefully find a material that can be both projected onto as well as reflective. Because then I can combine my audiences own reflection, with some sort of imagery that is suggestive of the porn industry. The image above of wills lips has inspired me to look and magnifying lips, and perhaps taking videos of magnified lips. The audience could then be looking in onto videos of magnified lips, or perhaps other body parts, as well as their own reflected magnified eye? These are all things I want to experiment with. However I need to be careful not to objectify women in my work, and somehow stay true to what I believe and commented on in my previous work.

Bibliography

FREUD. S. (1927). Fetishism (J.strachey, Trans.) The complete psychology works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XXI, pp. 1470157) London: Hogarth and The Insitute of Psychoanalysis

CHRISTINE STROTMANN. (2013). Edward L. Bernays (1891–1995).Available: http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/entry.php?rec=145. Last accessed 19/01/15.

OUAD603- Mirror

I am still wanting to experiment with mirrors, as I really want my audience to be aware of their presence. So it becomes self-reflectory. Whether a member of my audience has experience with porn/webcammng or not I think the use of a mirror will make them question their own beliefs. Forming a unified self (This is referring back to the research I did on Jaque Lacans theory) and then I can perhaps subliminally or consciously form that unified self with an awareness of the affects of the porn industry, and voyeurism.

I decided to smash up a mirror because the rectangle shape would immediately suggest mirror- as is, to my audience, which is not what I am wanting to achieve. I thought by smashing it, and deconstructing it, it might take away the association with mirror and rather draw attention to just the reflection. Below is a video of me smashing the mirror. The process may not be necessary however I wanted to film it to see how the glass breaks, so i can reflect on it.

The images of the smashed up mirrors make quite interesting pictures on their own. However next I want to experiment with positioning the mirrors so that my audience is reflecting in the mirror. Perhaps the broken mirror, breaks down the unified self idea, and reflects on the detrimental affects of porn addiction.However this is confusing me, for I think I am almost getting to theortical. The audience won’t know I am commenting on he split self because of my use of a broken mirror? I am going to put the broken mirror to one side and focus a bit more on my content for now.

OUAD603- Reflecting on Prurience

Prurience taught me a lot about porn addiction. I wasn’t sure what to expect before I arrived. I thought it was perhaps more of a formal performance piece, but instead I found myself in an “alcohol anonymous” type circle, participating and confiding in the group when asked of the first time I had encountered porn. I had no idea who were the spectators and who were the performers. A number of different people stood up to give their personal accounts of their seemingly uncontrollable porn addictions. Terms like, “fucked up neurological pathways”, “reboot” and “E.D” were being thrown around, then interrupted by urgent enquiries into the meanings.  As it went on it became a little more clear of who were the ‘under cover’ actors, and towards the end of the piece, only the actors were the ones participating. It all became incredibly intense, leading up to the climax where one by one the actors in the room starting singing a song that left the rest of us in the circle, the audience, in complete silence and awe. I felt a mixture of shock, sadness, and admiration, not quite knowing whether I should clap or sit in silence as the actors picked up their coats and left whilst singing.

Prurience was not only educational, but gave a fictional first hand experience of men and woman suffering with a crippling addiction. It was heart-breaking, funny, shocking, intense and incredibly moving. Previous to the performance I felt a little sickened by the predominantly male porn/ webcam audience, and although I am aware of the vast spectrum of individual cases, Prurience made me feel sympathetic for the victims of the porn industry. Porn and the webcam industry is an ever growing phenomenon, that is too easily available to watch. A lot of porn is free, with no enforced age restriction and so is easily accessed by a young audience.

A statistic that I haven’t been able to find online, was given after the performance ended. The statistic was given by Prof. Feona Attwood, who’s research specialised in male Erectile Dysfunction, (E.D). It was something along the lines of,  ‘Immediately after bandwidth expanded in the UK, E.D sky rocketed.’. Giving evidence that online porn and webcamming etc, is one of the main contributors to the rising numbers in E.D.

In Layman’s terms, according to the research done by people like, Prof. Feona Attwood, the younger the man starts to watch porn, the higher the risk of suffering from E.D. This is because the brain becomes too used to following the neurological pathways that stimulate the male from a purely visual source. And so, when confronted with a real sexual encounter, the brain finds itself on foreign ground, unable to send the stimulating signals that results in E.D. The only way of reversing this is by “rebooting”. This is when one completely abstains from watching porn for a given amount of time. This is usually four months but can be longer or shorter depending on the severity of the addiction.

This has influenced my work in way that I want to educate my audience more on the topic of porn addiction. Not necessarily that it can/will cause Erectile Dysfunction, because it could start to sound like I am preaching. I think I want more people to realise how accessible it is, and that really young impressionable people are so easily accessing it.  However I am aware that a lot of people watch porn, without being addicted or suffering the consequences of E.D. I still feel strongly about women being less objectified when they confront objectification with their own choice to take part. However this opinion is flawed, because even if a women on the internet who is taking part in say, violent porn and saying she wanted it, the viewer, who watches it for free on some arbitrary website, can take whatever meaning he or she wants from it. My opinion is far more nuanced now, and whilst I still believe webcam girls, and their choice to take part should not be disrespected, the availability of violent porn on the internet free of charge is a completely different topic.

Follows is a personal account of a porn addiction that I found at:

http://www.vice.com/read/i-gave-up-porn-for-a-month-294

What I Learned from Giving Up Porn for a Month

March 20, 2015

by Pieruigi Smith

 

Illustrations by George Heaven

I remember the moment I figured it might be time to quit watching porn. Half of my Facebook friends were sharing this story, which links out to a bunch of tests that tell you whether the amount of jerking off at a screen you’re doing is healthy. The lead image is an empty black leather couch in the middle of a room, facing a dark shiny desk. Sound familiar? If not, good for you. It rang some bells for me.

That couch is the first shot of many a porno. Generally, these videos tend to involve a woman walking in and sitting on the sofa, a seedy guy with a ponytail and big hands pretending to cast her for some photo shoot, her undressing, and the two of them eventually fucking over the desk. The article warned that if you immediately associated that black couch with porn you might have a problem.

I knew I had a problem.

Thing is, my problem wasn’t that I was watching porn every day; it’s that even if I wanted to I couldn’t use my own brain to summon up fantasies. The internet was always right there, the sirens of PornHub singing their sweet song 24/7, lulling me in with their ballads of anal beads, BDSM, and bukkake. So why bother doing all the work myself?

At New Year’s Eve, talking about resolutions, my friend Matteo said, “You know what? I’m going to stop watching porn for a while. I need to detox.” He then told me that Milan—the city where we both live—has one of the highest per capita rates of porn consumption in Europe. The thought that I was contributing to this number—to this faceless army of fervent masturbators—was a uniquely depressing one.

“I’m going to stop, too,” I said, with all the right intentions. The next day I watched some porn. However, when February rolled around I decided to start my mission in earnest.

I’d been watching porn on a very regular basis, clicking on RedTube or YouPorn or Tube8 most nights before going to sleep, or sometimes during the day if I was bored and felt like giving my wrist a bit of a workout. With that in mind, I assumed it would be hard to just cut myself off cold turkey, but for the first few days it was actually surprisingly easy. The closest thing I can equate it to is quitting smoking; not lighting up becomes a point of honor, a personal challenge, a battle you need to win in order to continue thinking of yourself as a decent human being.

This feeling—for the first couple of days, at least—was more pleasurable than the craving I’d decided to forego. I masturbated as I’d always done, and the novelty of using my mind again was exciting. I fantasized about ex-girlfriends and lovers and the things I’d always wanted to do but had been too shy to suggest. None of this was completely new, of course, but I’d never done it in such a systematic way. Now, every time I wanted to jerk off, I had to create a video of my own: concentrate, add details, flesh it out, give it a chronological order.

Feeling slightly self-righteous, I started to believe that the no-porn month laying ahead of me wasn’t going to be so hard after all.

Turns out this confidence was premature.

The first—and most troubling—problem was my imagination. My fantasies quickly became repetitive: the same scenes, same places, same people, same bodies, same sex. I was unable to stretch my inventiveness any further than it had already been stretched. Each time I tried to expand on what I had, I fell back on what I already knew, like an old married couple going through the motions: lights off, missionary, leg cramp, a glass of water, silence.

Ten days into the experiment I stopped masturbating. However, I did still feel the need to orgasm. I’d forced blue balls on myself because I didn’t want to undergo the process to achieve the end result. I soon realized—and this might seem quite bleak and obvious, but until you’ve experienced it firsthand it’s hard to empathize with the concept—that using your imagination can be a bit of a chore. A chore I wasn’t used to anymore.

I realize how lazy this sounds: a man who literally cannot be bothered to summon up a mental image of a naked woman. But the main problem I had was in synthesizing a sense of desire. I’ve been masturbating for roughly 15 years, and in this time porn has become a sad surrogate for lust—thousands of videos, most of them blurring into one image of a dick mechanically entering and exiting a vagina, helping me create what was missing. Dejected, I recognized the fact that I had rarely used my mind to orgasm in nearly a decade and a half.

Jesus, that fucking sentence.

Thankfully, this second phase slowly came to an end. The next step was a welcome return of natural desire: For the first time it was about my body, not my head. It was something I hadn’t experienced before, or at least couldn’t remember experiencing.

Before I quit watching porn, the pattern was as follows:

1. I felt like jerking off.
2. I went on a porn site.
3. I found a video.
4. I jerked off.

None of the process felt organic, which is probably because it wasn’t. The porn was just one step in a tedious, familiar plan, helping me to achieve something I’d already mapped out in my mind. Now it had gone back to some thought or image randomly awaking a sexual desire, me fantasizing about something, and then masturbating. Much better.

I also noticed that, for the first time, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Not the French couple, not the threesome in an Ikea-furnished bungalow, not the college orgy—rather about physical sensations and actually being able to appreciate them. It was more similar to sex than any of the many, many times I’d previously jerked off.

I shared my thoughts with a friend. She told me—and it was the most obvious thing in the world to her—that when she masturbated it was rarely to a defined set of images. That it was more about creating a sensation. She also underlined something I’d never noticed before, despite having watched thousands of porn videos throughout my life.

“In 80 percent of porn there are no hands involved,” she said.

“What do you mean no hands?”

“I mean no hands. Exactly that.”

The need to show penetration and to focus on the woman means that all the acts we associate with good sex—hands, grabbing, hugging, pulling—are eliminated in favor of getting the best angles. Sex without what makes sex great.

After that little lesson, I noticed a substantial improvement in my orgasms. Before I stopped watching porn, as I came there would be a moment when the sensation peaked, before quickly disappearing and leaving little trace. But not any more. Coming lasted for much longer. As it happened, the sensation lingered throughout my body. I felt much more involved.

If, before, I clicked on a video, skipped through it, found a scene I liked, came, and quickly closed the computer to hide my embarrassment, I was now taking my time. That sinister post-masturbatory depression was gone.

A little over a month has passed, and I’ve decided to continue with the no-porn jerking off policy. I don’t know how long I’ll last, because you can basically keep anything up for a month without it becoming too much of an issue. It’s in the post-honeymoon stage that it starts to become a little more difficult, when the novelty of the challenge wears off and the power of a well-established pattern starts playing on your mind.

I reckon I’ll be able to keep on going for a long while yet, but I’m also realistic about how easy it would be to slip back into it. I guess it’s like smoking a cigarette after you’ve quit: The first couple of drags taste awful, but give it a couple more and you’ll be hooked once again.

For me this shows how many people my be addicted to porn without even realising, and that it si having negative effects on the personal lives. This is something I think I need to address in my art.