random openings

Our relative discomfort with any single piece of pornography will be directly related to whether we feel ourselves to be the object or subject of the work -- and to how comfortable we feel being the object or subject of anything. Do we feel like actors, or the acted-upon? Which is more comfortable? Since pornography springs directly from an unfiltered and unedited (and still almost completely unanalyzed) imagination, eliminating porn wouldn't actually accomplish much, anyway. "[We] would still be left with the content of our fantasies," writes Richard Goldstein, who wants "excess and extremity" because that's what he doesn't have in his real life. "Those who long for realism in pornography -- ordinary acts with plausible partners -- ought to be condemned to dream that way." Porn is excessive in its emotional as well as its physical expression. Rarely does any sex act contain the intensity and the dramatized states of surrender, fear, anxiety, desire, and satisfaction that porn shows. We the lumpenproleteriat disappear into it as into a dream.

--sallie tisdale, talk dirty to me: an intimate philosophy of sex [doubleday, 1994], pp. 164-165