Alain de Botton's "better porn"

[OatyBeatie]

As far as I know, the ideas-entrepreneur (seems a more apt term than philosopher) Alain de Botton is still planning to develop his Better Porn website in which (the claim goes) sexually arousing content will be presented in contexts of wit, kindness, beauty and intelligence, "so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life" -- instead of being allied, as in non-de-Botton porn, with brutality, stupidity, and exploitation.

What do you reckon? For me, it seems like the kind of claim that the hmm emoticon was designed for. I am trying hard to imagine the kind of content the site might flog, but whatever I picture, it seems that it would fail in one of two ways.

Either (1) it would not be really be porn, and would instead be generic imagery which is both sexually arousing and representative of things other than sex, like any standard hollywood film (or indeed like life itself). Or (and very much more horrible) (2) if it truly was porn and not just generic imagery, it would have the nasty effect, not of ethicising/aestheticising (etc.) the porn, but, contrarily, of sexualising those outside-of-porn values that de Botton claims to want to celebrate within porn.

Female nurses, for example, already have to put up with the fact that just by being in a uniform and performing some of the tasks of caring for a patient, they are placed into an arena which has been colonized by porn imagery. De Botton might be committed to saying, of some pornographic imagery involving nurses, that it invests porn with the virtues of caregiving, kindness, and the grateful receipt of care. But what we have reason to fear is that it does exactly the opposite: it infests caregiving, kindness, and the grateful receipt of care, with porn, by licensing a pornographic perception of nurses in their real life, as real people.

Doesn't de Botton just want to take the nurses' plight further, and colonize all of our value-rich behaviour with porn, so that we carry the burden of its tropes in even more arenas?

Wasn't The Erotic Review siupposed to do that?

Yes, whatmeworry, I guess it is hard to see it as really novel. I do wonder whether de Botton is not just trying to stir up publicity for his School of Life by being controversial. The idea of "ethical porn" is structurally so similar to his other eye-catching piece of deliberate incongruity, his "atheist temples": Take two apparently opposing constructions (atheism and religious buildings; noble values and porn) and throw them together.

I suppose he would dignify both of these by invoking the concept of dialectic, where opposing ideas are synthesized to generate a higher truth. But realistically I think you have to strike out the words "higher truth" in the Bottonian dialectic and replace them with "publicity".

I do wonder whether de Botton is not just trying to stir up publicity for his School of Life by being controversial

...and that Porn for Women (that the chatteraiti have sniffily deigned as poorly written) is currently all over the news :)

But realistically I think you have to strike out the words "higher truth" in the Bottonian dialectic and replace them with "publicity"

Perish the thought....

I think I made the mistake of thinking his proposal for "better porn" was more interesting than it actually is. I thought he must have something thought-provoking in mind because he is an acknowledged public intellekchooual and all that. But the lack of interest in the discussion here makes me realise just how dull the proposal is. Presumably the presentation of soft porn as "porn with values" is just a way of making it more marketable to men of a certain kind.