Ready to Jacque?

Several fellows have contacted me outside of this Blog to discuss, and mainly defend, their Porn habits. I feel a need to say this: if you want to discuss this subject, please do it in the light of day, as I am not responding to anonymous emails any more.

And speaking of being in denial, or perhaps more kindly, "not being ready" for the truth, I am continually running up against porn influences in this little Comic Art backwater I'm currently in, and predictably also encountering even more fellows with their heads in the sand about it.

I confess that in the early 1990s, I did a good bit of work for SQP--for Sal Quartuccio Publishing.  In fact, they did my very first two art books titled "Sorceress" one and two.  They published many, many other titles, all with their own themes, like Vampire women, Warrior women, and so on.  The overriding theme was definitely, always, "women".

 What Publisher SQP has been up to lately, as if you couldn't guess.

The reason these books were so widely and wildly popular is that they are essentially "presentable" pornography.  In other words, because the figures are "drawn" the viewership can easily rationalize that the stuff is not Pornography but Art. The idea essentially is that if it's drawn, and doesn't actually show penetration, then it can't possibly be porn. You can keep it in the house and not irk the wife, and probably study it without being tempted to "jack".

And you can collect all the books in the series, with SQP, possibly hundreds of them, and not think it's any kind of "habit".

Other rationalizations cover more but different marshy ground, calling softer porn "Erotica", "Cheesecake", "Pinups" or "Nudity", or describing it otherwise as "Titillating" and so on, basically anything other than the big "P" when in fact it's all Pornography to one degree or another.

Bougereau: an "artistic" excuse for yards of exposed flesh. Do you care what these "people" think or feel, or who they are?

Not to say our culture has cornered the market,  or that it's all a case of living in some modern Sodom and Gomorrah, there's been porn in other cultures where folks had too much time on their hands and therefore are easily exploitable.

So how can Art portray nude or naked people, or handle subjects like sex, without becoming Pornographic?

New Arrivals...

Here's some feedback on my recent Porn essays I recently received from a source who'll remain anonymous:

What's wrong with a little legal porn? There are a lot of people who don't have lovers at the moment and enjoy the visual stimulation. Yes there are some horror stories in the porn industry. But most of the actresses know what they're doing. They are not being exploited because they are being paid fairly. In fact many of these women end up owning their own production companies. God forbid you ever become single. No self pleasuring until you find a girlfriend. I don't think so. Plus scientific evidence shows frequent ejaculation wards off prostate cancer. Just another point of view.


Porn objectifies--all of it.  If it didn't, it wouldn't be Porn.

And there is no love in it, none at all.

http://pornaddiction.com/

Boob Tube Continued...

This image recently arrived from my friends at the MCBA, or Minnesota Comic Book Association, which is a non-profit organization that puts on conventions.  I like their shows and have attended a bunch of them as a guest.

"Fabletown" claims to be a sort of Comic Book Renaissance movement turning away from Superheroes.  This art could be Adam Hughes, I don't know.  I realize that most Comic fans would find this pretty innocuous, and certainly not "Porn" in the familiar sense, but take a closer look.

First, you get every "flavor" of woman:  blond, brunette (or brown), redheaded and black hair. All bases are covered there. And, not only are the women as slim and elongated as any fashion model, they also have massively pendulous breasts completely out of proportion to their body-types.  For their breasts to be this freakishly large would require either implants or some incredible rare genetics.

They are also depicted in bed, and their expressions reflect joy, exuberance or pensiveness.  You can fill in the rest yourselves without more ethics lectures from Hoffman, but my salient point is that this stuff is still more objectification and exploitation of women, and that fact that it's front-and-center as a promotional image doesn't say much good about the health of Comics generally or of this new- self-proclaimed "break" from the status quo, "Fabletown".

It's no break at all, kids--it's exactly more of the same.

Porn Revelations...

I was recently asked to contribute to a "Doomsday" portfolio, and until then I didn't know what a "Doomsday" was.  So I did some research first before saying yea or nay.

 No softness here.

Turns out this character looks like a cross between a walking gem show and an overblown bodybuilder with a really tiny head, the idea being I guess that crystals and diamonds are hard and so they'll make muscles seem harder too. I was instinctively revolted and naturally had to figure out exactly why.

I'd also add that this character is best known for "killing" Superman, which is yet another example of Comics falling on its face. Killing the hero is easy and obvious, and dumb because a dead hero never was a hero.

In this case, the analysis didn't take long.  My feeling is that "Bodybuilding" and the body-image it represents is like the opposite of anorexia in women--though in all fairness, men can have anorexia too. What the promotion of this steroidal imagery does is tell males that their bodies aren't up to society's current standard, in the same way that Pornography tells them.

Hoffman gets in the way again.

And nowadays, not only is mainstream Porn making some guys pressure their wives and girlfriends into getting surgery etc, but they also are getting pressure to adopt the male porn-star "tat" look. In fact, the Porn industry is actively promoting its own lines of fashions for a mainstream audience.

And Comics have bought into Porn, mainly via its intense inferiority complex of recent years.  Those feelings make it imitative of any other popular medium--Movies, especially, and Gaming, as examples, and most disturbingly, Porn. That's Marvel and DC, kids.

The key indicator for Pornography is basically simple: it's when you objectify another person for your own sexual satisfaction.  

Here's a brief artist's statement I wrote to accompany my "Doomsday" drawing.

“My intention with Doomsday was to depict a man-made creation symbolic of evil that has been transformed into fertilizer for flowers while beings from a different vibratory plane visit to offer him their love and good wishes for his new life.”