Pornography – writing, photography, film – is generally not regarded as serious creative expression, and never as fine art. Explicit sex is buried or disguised among other elements, never celebrated merely for itself.
In an essay for Lit Hub, Kathleen Woods say pornographic literature can show us something about human nature. Woods quotes Susan Sontag as positing that sexual drive is enough to overcome morality, memory, and even personhood. Being horny can make you forget trauma, oppression, or ethics.
“Given this foreclosure of self-knowledge, pornographic writers must be intentional in translating the extreme consciousness to the page,” Woods says. “But how to write that distance? How to navigate one of the most basic, slippery elements of fiction: point of view?”
Woods uses Pauline Réage’s 1954 classic, Story of O, Samuel R. Delany’s 1969 novel, Hogg, and her own White Wedding, to examine different ways to handle POV in pornography, and what the writer can reveal and withhold.
