“Generally I didn’t feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn’t really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together.” — “The New Face Of Porn”

“Porn has always existed in one form or another. It always will. What consenting adults do for pleasure is really none of my business unless I’m one of them. Arguments over what is obscene and porn policing are a tremendous waste of time.” — Newsvine

“Say what you will about pornography, objectification and exploitation, the growing legitimization of the pornography industry — which led to much more government- and self-regulation — also led to a significant decrease in the kind of exploitation described by those performers as well as increased opportunities for women to participate in the higher-earning aspects of the production.” — Jezebel

“It is not surprising that pornography is not the most pleasant job. It is not really like having sex. But it does not follow that it is less pleasant for the money than many other jobs we don’t object to people taking.” — Huffington Post

“Sure that stuff is pretty pathetic and shocking, but I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for the women in it.” — Web of Mimicry

From The Reverse Cowgirl

Are we aware of the same porn? The New Left is forever showing that it is full of shit.

Doesn’t the blurring together of bodies infer a dehumanizing objectification? If we look to how the image of porn is constructed—the headless man as avatar for the viewer or the affected close shot imprisoning the woman within this view—we see that nothing has changed due to an economic legitimization of pornography. For whatever unions they get, pornography still positions women as the constant subjugate, so to acknowledge its historical existence should always presuppose such a subjugation and its projection of a greater systemic subjugation of women.

Frank Relle
Katrina

“Seeing yourself as another person, seen from both the point of view of others and yourself; to see yourself as others see you at the same time as seeing yourself as yourself, but also separate from you. All this must take place at the moment you see your portrait.”

Or do we see only a compilation of all things others see in us. As the portrait is painted there is what the painter sees in you and also that which the painter believes you see in yourself but also that which the painter believes all should see.

What we see in that moment where all things are held in an equilibrium of a moment—where we are surrounded by what we should be remembered by—as decided by others or by what we see in others, not by that which truly surrounds us and not by those things that others surround us in. It is only an average. We were never in that position in the painting or if we were, only for a moment.

To look at the portrait is to look at a vision of visions through one vision—a process of ignoring those voices surrounding the subject or embracing them only magnifies this—and in the moment the portrait is shown we see only this.

In moments after we reference the self, extracting the head and the hands from objects but such an extraction is not seeing the self it is finding the self. We must add alterity to this representation of our true face and find in it our memories of its production or of the feeling of such a facial expression as represented in memory.

This seems different from a photographic portrait or a video as lines are drawn in their very conception, but in the painted portrait we find only an abstraction of self.

errol morris - vernon, florida - 1982
cinematography by ned burgess

By Art of Memory

Silent Storm Poem 13

Found at Monster Brains

We can move past how unfortunate an existence such as the one this man must have lived by turning away, but its hard not to think about the attributes we have given the monster. What monsters exist in our lives that truly look monstrous? How many monsters in life are exactly the opposite of this face?