Pornumentaries and Sexploitation
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One might wonder what is understood as “private"’ since the site is accessible to
anyone willing to pay the monthly fee. Rather than exploring our sexuality, we
are being exploited by someone else’s. Moreover, we should probably be fairly
alarmed that our capacity for sexual imagination has become so poor that it
needs assistance, proving unable to create on its own a satisfying self-expression
of desire, a problem that one Marquis de Sade definitely did not have.
This rather bleak panorama of current sexual narration13 should
nonetheless be tempered by the mention of one particular cinematographic work
which includes explicit sexual representation in its narration without falling into
the category of sexploitation: Tinto Brass’s 1980 film, Caligula.14 The
particulars of this film are significant for our purpose, for two different versions
were released in 1980, and the one promoted through theaters was the “clean""
one. The complete version (now widely available on DVD) includes additional
scenes, all of them of an explicit sexual nature, directed by Giancarlo Lui and
Bob Guccione, and deserves to be considered as the only well-known narration
which used the sexual narrative motif without manipulating our built-in
bourgeois morals. The fact that it tells a story of ancient Rome—that is, before
the onset of judeo-christian morality—most likely contributes greatly to this
necessary separation between sexual expression and its prohibition. The Romans
did not need to hide sexual expression; and so, naturally, it was much more
difficult to sell than it is now.
The prohibition of sexual expression in our morally bourgeois society,
by favoring an exploitation mechanism which feeds on itself according to the
logic of profit is slowly depriving us of any ability to construct an individual
fantasy; in some ways, sexploitation is the corporate appropriation of our sex
lives, reducing us to passive, sexually-mute consumers. Our sexual expression is
kept in an infantile stage by our bourgeois morality so as to insure the
prosperous future of the pornographic industry in all its shapes and forms; there
is no doubt that we h