"We could have Erotica. But we choose porn."
Alicen Grey on the Tragedy of Porn & the Possibility of Erotic Art
Hey Folks,
What you about to read is an essay by Alicen Grey called If Porn were Beautiful. It is republished with her gracious permission.
To be honest, I’m new to Alicen’s work, so I can’t give much of an intro, other than to say that this essay is some of the most compelling sex-positive writing that I have encountered since I joined Substack. She is saying something that needs to be said.
She’s also saying something that’s scary to say. Despite porn being completely mainstream, it’s still shrouded in shame. I’ve made it my thing to write about taboo subjects, but even I haven’t touched this one. It’s that taboo.
If you asked me whether the ubiquity of internet porn is a good thing for society, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer with an emphatic “Hell No!”
If you ask me, both the incel phenomenon and the trans craze are direct results of internet porn, as is the Great Sex Drought.
I think we can safely say that the data is in at this point. Porn has disastrous social consequences. Not for everyone, but for enough people that we’re going to talk about it at some point.
Personally, I’m pro-freedom, pro-privacy, and anti-censorship, so I can’t get down with a crackdown approach. People have the right to produce and consume porn.
If you ask me, the only viable option is to beat the pornographers at their own game - to create erotica that is more alluring than the alternatives.
Thank you to Alicen for permission to repost her work, and I encourage everyone to subscribe to her blog to keep up with this rising star of Substack.
for the wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
Oh yeah, and if you haven’t subscribed to NEVERMORE MEDIA yet, quit yer dilly-dallying and do it already!
If Porn were Beautiful
by Alicen Grey
Devastated.
That’s how I feel, when I let my thoughts linger a bit too long on the phenomenon of internet pornography.
Devastated, like I am about how we used to build cathedrals, but don’t anymore.
Devastated, because I know — I gno — in my heart, in my sex, in my bones — that we are capable of so much more.
We are capable of Erotica that inspires alive-ness, that catalyzes resurrections, that constitutes High Art.
We are capable of beautiful, opulent, luminous, divine Erotica that transfigures the soul and elevates humanity to greater heights of Consciousness, Love, Truth, Beauty and Bliss.
We are capable of heart-healing, dimensional-doorway-opening, timeline-shifting, world-creating, drug-free psychedelic sexual Art.
And yet,
we choose porn.
Filthy,
putrid,
fetid,
slimy,
rancid
porn.
We choose the lowest of the low-brow,
the most pathetic of all the possibilities,
the most tainted of all timelines.
We could have Erotica.
But we choose porn.
The porn we choose ranges from cringe, immature, and cartoonish to the straight-up sadistic, abusive, vile, and hateful.
Even the “big production” stuff is an embarrassing failure of human ingenuity, craft, and creativity. All of it, a sordid display of our depravity. All of it, an Ozymandias-style proclamation made from atop an anthill: “Look at me, everyone! I got laid!!!” — because that, unfortunately, is the greatest “accomplishment” some humans will ever experience. Not because they aren’t capable of accomplishing more, but because they choose to waste their precious energy on every trivial temptation that teases their consciousness.
We choose to drink blood when we could instead drink the waters of Life.
We gorge ourselves sick on the excretes of Hell.
Do you feel judged?
Miss me.
My porn addiction started at the tender age of 11.
Prior to being exposed to porn (randomly, one day, home alone playing on the family computer — because we had shared family computers back then, horrifyingly), my fantasies were so innocent. So pure. To simply imagine kissing a boy was exhilarating.
And then, it happened. I’ll never forget the image.
It was so clear that this was a woman with her legs spread wide open, and yet, I didn’t know what I was looking at. What was the purpose of it? Though my mind stalled, my body responded, stimulated by the intensity of the image. I suppose I was technically “turned on,” but not in a way that felt good or made sense, and definitely not in a way that I wanted.
Still, curious, I clicked around and only found increasingly confusing images and videos of sexual acts I didn’t understand the point of. I hadn’t even had a Sex Ed class in school yet. What were these people doing?
The rest is a blur. I don’t remember what compelled me to keep watching, or how it turned so quickly into a dirty, secret addiction, watching every time I had a flash of privacy. If I’m being honest, I don’t even remember what I saw.
All the same, it became deeply embedded in my young, impressionable mind — forgotten (you might even say repressed) on the Conscious level, but still directing my behavior from the Unconscious level, slowly decimating my belief in Love (the ripple effect of which was quite obvious in the relationships I’d later have in adulthood).
As it is often said, “Until you make the Unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
Ultimately, our family computer then got swamped with viruses (thanks to yours truly). I remember the animation of digital bugs crawling across the screen, my useless attempts to get rid of them, and the sinking realization that this was all my fault. The hard drive had to be wiped clean. Thus, every photo and video I had prior to age 15, was erased from reality.
How symbolic. It’s a fitting metaphor for the sickness that invaded me from the inside out, erasing my previous innocent identity. Porn eviscerated my little innocent mind before I even got a bleeding chance to find out my own sexual Truth.
I grieve for the innocence that was, so easily, bloodsucked into oblivion by the succubic realm of pornography.
But I am far from the only one.
Did you know the average age of exposure to pornography is 11?
That means there are younger ones than me.
And with the proliferation of Saturnian black cube smart phones in every kid’s pocket these days, giving them easy access to all the world’s most degenerate sexual horrors?
I grieve for them too.
High Art Erotica
I think a lot about Art.
Mostly, I think about what differentiates “art” from Art. Art-with-a-capital-A.
Grand Art. High Art. Divine Art.
Art that represents the best that humanity can give.
One day it dawned on me that the most enduring Art is the Art that’s made about God.
Before you dismiss me as a religious nutcase, please hear me out:
The most longstanding Art — the kind we go to museums to see — is ancient religious Art. And no, I don’t think it’s because “religion is the opiate of the masses.” It’s because we all gno in our souls that there is something eternal, something indestructible, which Transcends our mortal limitations. We call that something “God.” From holy texts to elaborate temples, the Art that’s inspired by God is the Art that continues to speak to the human soul, from generation to generation, like an ancient flame that cannot be extinguished.
In all my pondering of Art, I have arrived at the notion that High Art is a byproduct of an enduring Will to unify with the Divine.
It’s no wonder why the term “Magnum Opus” refers both to
a magickian’s completion of “The Great Work” (which is alchemically transfiguring the Unconscious into Consciousness, and in doing so becoming reunited with God),
and an Artist’s greatest, most enduring, impressive, impactful work of Art.
They are the same endeavor.
Read me:
To touch the face of God and to make grand Art is the same endeavor.
So, that being said,
WHERE IS THE HIGH ART EROTICA?
Where is the Erotica that expresses a deep yearning to experience God through the luminous portals of each other’s bodies?
Where is the Erotica that raises Consciousness to new heights of Transcendence?
Where is the Erotica that exalts what is Beautiful and True and Righteous?
Did it go to the same place as the cathedrals we used to build?
— frozen in time, surrounded by hypermediocrity, waiting patiently for us to remember that God exists?
“We can be making better porn. Why are the scripts so bad? Why is the music so bad? Why isn’t there beautiful cinematic porn?”
~ Grimes
There is good news.
My journey of healing from the porn addiction has been slow and strenuous, but I can honestly say I do not find porn alluring anymore.
In fact, I tried to watch it recently out of pure boredom (after not watching it for so long that I don’t even remember the last time), but I was so genuinely weirded-out by it that I couldn’t even take it seriously. I literally shouted “EWWWW” and turned it off.
Years
and years
of Inner Work —
developing my imagination & my ability to visualize and feel what’s going on in my Inner World, and clearing away the shame that for too long had my Desire in a stranglehold —
has finally replaced the need to “outsource my imagination” to pornography.
And that’s the key, isn’t it?
It’s all about Consciousness.
The more Conscious I became — of my real Self, of my desire to connect with God, and my belief in True Love, to name a few things — the less appealing porn was.
The more vivid and clear my internal mental pictures became, the more I was able to generate beautiful, fulfilling imagery from within, through my inner senses…
…and the less power porn had over me, with its over-reliance on hyper-stimulation of the physical eyes.
And this is where I depart from politics-based critiques of the porn industry.
It’s not enough to simply pull statistics about the porn industry, or to reason with porn addicts, to get them to give it up. Approaching the issue from a purely rational, quantifiable standpoint misses the heart-felt, spiritual problem.
Do I need to pull all the statistics to “convince” you that something is deeply, sickeningly, horrifyingly wrong with porn — like on a cosmic scale?
Or is the gross emptiness you feel — after you masturbate, and the clarity returns, and you realize What You’ve Done — enough?
I would hope it’s the latter.
That’s your soul calling, loveling.
Listen.
This is not an admission of defeat. This is a proclamation of victory.
I see visions of High Art Erotica.
Beyond “feminist porn” which play-acts at enlightenment with diversity quotas, “representation of all bodies” and other superficial Woke non-sense that temporarily tempers the body but fails to transfigure the soul,
and beyond “purity culture” which weaponizes shame, fear, and guilt to artificially control sexual behavior but backfires in the form of metastasized perversions,
I feel an awakening of Love on humanity’s horizon. True Love.
The kind that inspires us to perceive and touch each other — and paint, and write about, and even film each other — with kindness, devotion, reverence, and a sexual desire so truth-full and holy as to be incorruptibly pure.
I see people forfeiting their derogatory words, and speaking only worshipfully to their lovers. I see them beholding each other in wonder and awe.
I see lovers smiling, laughing, melding at the heart-level. I see their sex reflecting that, like a fractalline reverberation of their heartbeats made manifest in the erotic dance of their bodies.
I see people so inspired by Love that to make anything less than High Art with each other is unconscionable.
I see Sex in Utopia.
If believing in this Better World is insane, then I’m insane! I am mad in Love. Mad.
I gno Heaven on Earth is ours to enjoy, here and now, if we want it.
And I want it.
I want it good and deep and hard.
Thanks for reading, lovelings!
She's not wrong.
We could have Michael Angelo's David and "Birth of Venus" by Boticelli, but we have An upsidedown cross in Urine and Brazzers.
We could have grand cathedrals, but we have a church in an old Pizza Hut building.
We could have building that inspire, but we have buildings that I don't even want to step inside.
We could have prisons that inspire the inmates to become members of society, but we have boxes with more boxes inside.
We could have "The Story of O", but we have "Debbie does Dallas."
We aren't progressing, we are regressing.
Porn is addictive and it ruins marriage and normal loving sex.
Back in the good old days, it was kept in the back rooms and people were ashamed to go beyond those curtians.
Now, it's out in public and ruining lives.
Hey! Wow, this is worthy of a lengthy response... but it might be a minute before i get around to it. Im thinking about posting this as its own post. How would you feel about that?
After all, Nevermore is all political reorientation, not just what i think...