But what is sexytime, really, if you stop and think about it?

[The is in the title of this post should be italicized.]

This post is about pornography.  I want to get that out there right away so you don't get turned away by the green smoothie.

Lately, for breakfast, I have been ingesting "green smoothies."  Here's how it works: you put soy milk, apple juice, bananas, blueberries, flaxseed, and spinach in a blender, man; you blend the everlovin' shit out of it; and then you drink it!

And what, you might ask, does this have to do with pornography?

According to my layman's understanding of Freud, there are three main things you can do with an impulse: indulge, repress, or sublimate.  So if a 21st-century man wells up with violent caveman lust for a passing woman, he could—

1. hit her in the head with his club and drag her back to his cave, so to speak—rape her, in short [indulgence];
2. go back to the cave alone for some good old-fashioned self-flagellation—which in this case I mean literally, or at least not as a sexual euphemism—or, maybe, more to the point, he could deny up and down, even to himself, that he has anything but the purest G-rated feelings and probably work up a reasonable froth of self-righteousness about the kind of horrible animals whose feelings edge toward PG-13, maybe even seeing the woman in question as an evil and whorish, a satanic temptress [repression]; or
3. enter into an open, respectful, caring relationship with her, maybe get married, make babies, have friends over for dinner—plenty of sex, no hitting-over-the-head with a club [sublimation].

I'm pretty sure I have this at least slightly wrong, but Freud's not the point here.  The point is the application of the general idea to other things such as...well, pornography, yes, but, before we get to that, also—

Exercise!  Exercise is not just good for you...  Scratch that.  Start over.  Exercise is something that (in a very basic way that may smell counterintuitive because of the basic laziness of our culture*) we're essentially desperate to do—not consciously, I mean, or even unconsciously, but rather, what's the word, existentially?  Look at us as whole mind+body creatures (fuck Descartes), throw in maybe a pinch of the idea (articulated in Fromm's Man for Himself) that the best-and-only ethical thing for us to do is the full expression of our potential (i.e. pretty much be human), and it starts to become clear that we, as physical animals, need to fuckin' get physical.  Yeah?  So but now what do we do with the need (a kind of lower- [upper-?] level want) to get some exercise?

Wait wait...forgot the smoothie.

Just as I was saying about our need / whole-human desire for exercise, nutritious food is something that we not just need but can say on at least one interesting level that we really really want.  (That's why we like junk food, reportedly: the theory goes that we're programmed to freak out and eat like crazy when we come across fruit, which is sweet, and our invention of even sweeter food very simply tricks our program...like [here comes a bad analogy] if you taught someone to eat mushrooms and neglected to inform him that some mushrooms are poisonous.)

Pornography coming up before too long, keep your panties on.**

So what do we do with our call it in this case a desire to eat good-for-you foodstuffs?  We repress, as I did up until about a year ago, eating plants only very rarely and living on a pizza–cookie–ice cream diet, with bacon and eggs representing just about the very height of healthy eating; we indulge, eating big old salads all the time, which in my case and I think many others' would involve a significant amount of very real sacrifice and discipline; or we sublimate, the medicine-in-the-ice-cream solution [N.B.: that's a metaphor, not an example], figuring out a way to eat nutritious foods in delicious formats—just as I eat my disgusting spinach in a delicious banana-and-blueberry-flavored form.

Popeye was a big commercial.

With me so far?  So!  Pornography!

No no wait: exercise first!  Our need to exercise probably comes from our need to hunt, fight, run around, whatever.  So what's the repression/indulgence/sublimation breakdown?  (I recognize, by the way, that the analogy is weak, but I'm sticking with it, God damn it!)  Repression: why exercise when you could sit on your ass and look at pornography?  [Wait for it!]  Indulgence: hunt, fight, run around.  Sublimation: sports.

Here's where it gets interesting.  What's running on a treadmill?  I submit that it is not analogous (in our weak analogy) to sublimation.  I submit that it is a weird and very poor substitute: better than nothing but somehow very sorry and sad.  We need to move around, so we get on a machine that simulates real action, mice in wheels.  

And this is how we get to my problem with pornography.  I don't think it's immoral in the Puritanical sense or unethical in either the gender-wars sense of its being bad for relationships or the human-rights sense of its exploiting women (some surely does, but I deny that exploitation is inherent in pornography); I do think it might be unethical in that Frommy sense [like Spidey sense? –ed.] discussed above.

Because what are you doing when you're looking at pornography?  You're responding to a natural impulse not by indulging, repressing, or even sublimating it, but by stimulating it artificially.  You're like those bikers in Triplets of Belleville, pedaling furiously down the projected road; you're a brain in a jar, a monkey baby hanging on chicken wire***, one of the Brave New World test-tube centuplets on a VPS****; you're like the last human being in the universe, satisfying his need for human contact—for friendship, for closeness—by confiding in a well-programmed robot.

* Of course ours is not just a lazy culture but also you might say (if you were eight years old in 1986) a spaz culture—just the kind of doublethink-friendly combo we find in apple-pie American porno-Puritanism.

** Yes yes yes yes it's a run-on OK.

*** Thank you Mr. Yazbek for the word choice.

**** Violent Passion Surrogate.