October 24th, 2020
I have learned a great deal about game design by examining other media, such as cinema, literature, theater, and even painting. I have also learned much about human nature from these studies. After all, art is fundamentally a statement about the human condition; we value it because it teaches us.
So it was with some embarrassment that I realized some time ago that pornography is also an entertainment medium, and could potentially have some artistic merit, yet I had never examined it analytically.
Unfortunately, most pornography is about as meritorious as most video games. Where video games express simple ideas about violence and physical problem-solving, pornography expresses simple ideas about copulation. The two forms share the common trait of expressing the same simple idea over and over and over.
The vast majority of erotic imagery is a straightforward expression of the male desire to copulate with females. There are, of course, many exceptions to this basic expression, and one of the most fascinating of these is the work of a woman I shall call “X” so as to protect her privacy.
X has published a great deal of work, much of it consisting of images of her heroine-avatar fully dressed and simply looking pretty. However, she also has three sequences of images telling three similar stories. In each story, a beautiful and innocent young woman is somehow induced by a callous young man to engage in a dangerous erotic project.
In the most striking of these stories, a beautiful woman goes to an icy lake with her boyfriend. She removes her clothes and her boyfriend hogties her, then uses a crane to lift her and lower her into the lake. Once she is underwater, he is apparently expected to raise her out of the water, but something goes wrong and she is left underwater. It appears that she drowns in the ice-cold water, but somehow the boyfriend corrects the problem, pulls her out, and places her back on the ground. While emerging from the crane he strikes his head on the door and falls unconscious to the ground. The girl appears to be frozen; her skin has turned a dark color and icicles hang from her hair. Several images clearly indicate that she is dead. Despite this, she somehow awakens, manages to loosen her ropes enough to stumble over to the prostrate boyfriend and awaken him. He cuts loose the remaining ropes. She then strikes him over the head with a green bottle (the green bottle shows up frequently in X’s work), knocking him unconscious. She dresses, builds a large bonfire, hogties her boyfriend, and uses the crane to suspend him over the bonfire in such a manner as to burn his genitals.
Most of us would surely find this tale rather confusing. Why would anybody desire to be dipped into an icy lake while naked and hogtied? How could a woman survive drowning and being frozen?
The basic tale is repeated in two other stories with substantial variations. The common elements in the stories are striking:
The woman consents to a dangerous undertaking.
The undertaking requires her to be naked and firmly tied.
The undertaking puts her underwater.
She dies while underwater.
Somehow she re-appears above water, alive and well.
She takes revenge upon the man who put her through the ordeal.
These common elements can be quite confusing if the stories are taken literally, but I believe that the oddities of the stories are themselves representative of much deeper ideas. For example, I believe that the woman’s death is metaphorical, not literal.
I believe that these stories directly address the emotional quandary that women are placed in regarding their sexuality. Regardless of her sexual desires, a young woman is expected to be chaste. Women should not be sexually aggressive; they should resist sexual advances from men and remain sexually conservative. Yet many women enjoy and desire sex.
One resolution to this quandary is the bondage fantasy. The chaste and innocent woman is tied up and has sex forced upon her. She retains her innocence while freely enjoying the sex.
I suspect that X’s stories are a metaphor for the entire sexual experience. The woman, at the instigation of the man, is rendered helpless and is metaphorically raped. Her death represents orgasm. Afterwards, she re-asserts her chastity by taking revenge upon the man.
Two aspects of the imagery are particularly striking. First, the woman is presented as completely innocent. Her facial expressions never reveal any excitement, anticipation, or enjoyment of the experience. She is wide-eyed and innocent, wondering, and obedient throughout most of the story. Innocence is the most striking aspect of her expression.
The second aspect of the imagery is the sequence of images while she is underwater. X produced eleven images of the woman underwater; the contrast between her body and the blue of the water is striking. The woman, still tightly bound, drifts around in various positions and angles. She lives in two worlds: the world above water is dull and bland, but underwater is an entirely different world, intensely colorful and beautiful. I believe that being underwater represents sex: a beautiful experience that she can experience only while tightly bound and whose consequences are extreme. Perhaps death represents orgasm; I don’t know.
Another set of images emphasizes the purity of the woman by placing her against a background of extreme impurity. In these images, a near-naked woman appears chained and clinging precariously high up in an old rusting factory. The woman herself is absolutely pure in every visual aspect. Her skin is perfect, without a single blemish. She is wearing satin stockings that are also perfectly clean. By contrast, the steel pillar to which she is chained is extremely corroded. Everything about the factory is old, filthy, and ugly. The contrast between the filthy background and the absolute purity of the woman is stunning. The woman strangles in the final image — another likely representation of orgasm.
Another image appears to present X’s idea in concise form. A mostly naked woman sits dead in the corner of a room. You can see that she is dead because her eyes are rolled up in their sockets and only the whites of her eyes are visible. The woman is loosely chained in place; her arms are loosely elevated by the chains holding them.
The most stunning elements of the composition are the eight long needles piercing her body. One impales the palm of one hand and pins it to the wall. Two more go clean through her thigh. Three needles plunge through her right breast, leaving blood tracks dripping down. Most shockingly, two needles diagonally pierce her groin on either side of her clitoris, penetrating the vagina and emerging below it. To add to the shock, an empty glass bottle has been inserted into her vagina, stretching it wide.
Her surroundings add to the intensity of the image. A nasty-looking knife is stuck into the floor near her vagina — how’s that for a phallic suggestion? The walls of the room, and even the floor, are red. So is the woman’s pulled-down bra and the ball-gag secured in her mouth.
As with previous imagery, the woman’s innocence is accentuated in a number of ways. Her body itself is perfect; not a single stain, smear, freckle, mole, or spot of dirt appears. Her armpits are clearly visible and they show not a trace of hair or even stubble. Her glossy hair tumbles down her shoulders and partly covers one breast. Around her neck is a simple gold chain with a tiny gold heart, as if to say that she wanted love but got death-sex instead. Her silk stockings are flawless; they don’t even show any stretching.
Again, there’s a powerful contrast between the naive innocence of the young woman and the evil that has been done to her. From any other artist, I would interpret this as a protest against the abuse of women. But with this artist, I sense that it represents a conflation of sex and death.
Lastly, I must address the political objection to this essay. I expect that some women might vehemently object to the very notion of rape fantasies in women. Certainly the idea of rape fantasies is often used by men to justify sexual assault. But the fact that an idea can be used for evil does not make it false. Society places so much shame onto sex that it is only natural that people would fantasize about having sex forced upon them. I suspect that this applies to men to a lesser extent than to women, as mild versions of rape fantasies by men appear in cinema. For example, here’s a fantasy sequence from Star Trek Voyager:
Postscriptum: I was just reading a piece about the French essayist Michel Montaigne (1533 - 1592) in Will Durant’s book on the Age of Reason. Durant wrote:
“He carefully hands down to us the remark of the Toulouse woman who, having been handled by several soldiers, thanked God that “once in my life I have had my bellyful without sin.”
