Pornography with Purpose | Andrew Deman | TEDxUW
so today I'm going to start by talking to you about the more broader concept of passion uh this is something that our culture talks about extensively we are constantly referencing passion in some form or another it's a very acceptable topic to discuss so for example uh the famous astronomer Galileo tells us that passion is the Genesis of Genius uh the legendary British prime minister two time Benjamin Disraeli says that man is only great when he acts from Passion uh and the legendary business leader Steve Jobs says that people with passion can change the world for the better now these are short brief to the point statements if we want something a little bit long winded we go to an artist this is my favorite passion it lies in all of us sleeping waiting and though unwanted unbidden it will stir open its jaws and howl it speaks to us guides us passion rules us all and we obey what other choice do we have passion is the source of our finest moments uh the joy of Love The Clarity of hatred the Ecstasy of grief it hurts sometimes more than we can bear if we could live without passion maybe we'd know some kind of Peace but we would be Hollow empty rooms shuttered and dank without passion we'd be truly dead this is from Jos weeden's Buffy the Vampire Slayer uh but it offers us something that we can talk about at least a couple times so our artists our Business Leaders our scientists uh and virtually anybody in any field you can think of really likes to talk to us about passion uh again it comes up again and again and again meaning seemingly different things but we don't actually know what it is in fact we have a really poor understanding of passion as a concept even as we recognize how fundamental it is to our lives and how Central to many of our human experiences uh this is what the Oxford English Dictionary gives us passion a strong and barely controllable emotion and that's it uh now we have a ton of different emotions most of them at some point or other are strong and many of them are downright uncontrollable in the right circumstances or situation so you can see how the dictionary definition again doesn't give us a lot to work with uh now we can again go do something that a lot of English mangers like to do which is go back and see what Shakespeare does uh and Shakespeare's theory on passion is actually really inconsistent with what we might think we might think of the bar artist constantly talking about passion as this beautiful wonderful Transcendent Force but no Shakespeare often if not consistently uses passion to describe a state of intoxication where you lose rationality he sees it as kind of a bad thing not unlike inebriation uh so once again we're kind of left in the dark a little bit uh beyond that not just in terms of what field we're talking about with passion uh but in terms of what passion can actually be we see it come up in discussions of violence uh the passionate Soldier we see it come up in discussions of romance a passionate love and we see it come up frequently in discussions of creativity the idea of I guess inspiration uh the passionate artists consumed by their mission uh so what if all these passions to some degree were essentially the same thing that The Passion of the warrior is the same as the passionate of the lover is the same as The Passion of the artist inspired uh this is the suggestion that the book I want to talk to you about today evokes uh Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda gby suggesting that passion is passion is Passion all that matters is how we choose to express it uh but all essentially the same now um for me personally as mentioned in the introduction I came to the University of water 13 years ago to become an expert in American Poetry uh when I got here I very quickly learned that my voice was being lost in a sea of voices that valued things that I did not value it wasn't the right field for me completely despondent I went home one Thanksgiving to figure out what to do with maybe not even just my career but my life uh and I found my old comic book collection uh and I rifled through it and I wondered if there might be something in there to be inspired about I pursued that uh eventually it brought me to the famous comics' literature movement which is still ongoing uh showing me great works of art like art spiegelman's Mouse Craig Thompson's blankets Mariana copy's prilis and eventually lost girls uh by Alan Moore and Melinda Gabby uh which I came to not out of genuine interest but I literally got assigned to do a review of it uh and as a result of that I was a little bit shocked by the material uh and frankly even a little bit offended uh but the book as a whole forced me to ask questions that I was uncomfortable with um questions that on a day-to-day basis I didn't want to ask I didn't even want to think about uh and as such I think that actually is what makes it a great work of literature its capacity to challenge me outside of my usual comfort zone um so as I said Lost Girls made me uncomfortable um but also kind of inspired uh now the writer of Lost Girls I use that term a little bit Loosely because the way it was composed is different from how most Comics are composed is Alan Moore uh Alan Moore is probably the most famous Comics author alive um very well known and has had tremendous success in spite of the fact that he refuses to leave the small town in northern England where he resides uh he's most famous for some of the Creations that you see here uh Watchman uh V for Vendetta the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Batman The Killing Joke Melinda gby his partner on this project is best known as a feminist Comics artist associated with the women's Comics Collective uh someone who brings Comics into a very sort of political Arena uh in a direct fashion now as I said normally when we think about illustrator and writer in comics we're talking about um a situation where they don't even have to be in the same room in some cases they don't have to be in the same continent uh but more and gby didn't want to work that way uh so what they did was they formed a stronger collaboration uh where they would be together where the writer would help inform the art and the art artist would help inform the script uh back and forth and back and forth until everybody was happy with it they worked on this project for 16 years uh before it eventually reached fruition and was published so imagine a hotel resort in Austria roughly a century ago three women come together there and almost immediately begin a passionate Affair one that is sexual yes but also spiritual and deeply deeply creative unbeknownst to these women Ferdinand or sorry France Ferdinand is about to be assassinated right around the corner and thus their Affair begins just as World War I is about to take place uh these characters are not chosen at random they're not created whole cloth they are familiar to the average reader uh Moore chooses as his three protagonists um Wendy from Peter Pan Alice from Alice and Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz now all grown up uh these characters come together uh and as I said try to figure out sort of what their individual sexual histories have meant to them as individuals how it has informed their personalities their character the meaning of their lives um to give you specific examples Dorothy's story is a story of three passionate Affairs uh each with a farm hand uh the first first farm hand has no courage the second farm hand has no emotion no heart uh and the last farm hand uh is essentially got no brain can't hold a conversation with her uh now obviously we're referencing the original Wizard of Oz here in terms of the Tin Man the Cowardly Lion uh and the Scarecrow uh Alice meanwhile Alice in Wonderland we know is a story of a young girl who is taken down a rabbit hole to a world of madness uh in this particular case the White Rabbit isn't a literal rabbit it's a pedophile uh who takes her into a world of actual Madness uh through a series of sexual abuse uh meanwhile the neverland that Peter Pan takes Wendy to isn't a second star to the right uh as we're familiar with from that original story uh it's actually a meadow in a public park uh where a bunch of younger people get together to have a series of sexual interactions uh and through that she's able to explore her sexuality a little bit um I would say what we're talking about here is kind of Slash fiction to use a contemporary term but imagine that only like like literary SL fiction uh that's what more and gby are setting up so as I'm making it clear here the specific passion that Alan Moore and Melinda Gibby are working with is lust physical passion uh of course that is only their Touchstone that is their Foundation upon which they build their larger uh I would say more insightful argument uh more specifically suggested that what he and gby were trying to create was a new form of pornography one that is non-exploitative and emotionally resonant something that we tend to not see uh in our current culture uh here's his overview of his mission we're working for hopefully something human and Timeless like I think our sexual imagination has proved to be thus far it's been with us since the Venus of vindor uh and will'll certainly be with us until we've managed to eradicate ourselves from this planet we wanted to speak to that quality that Timeless Eternal human interest in sex uh so human sexual imagination uh definitely one of the main things that lost girls is trying to take up suggesting that that imagination is as noted here constant Eternal but in our culture not commonly discussed as much as we love to talk about passion sexual passion is often a taboo or forbidden topic uh and for Moore and gie that is itself kind of of a tragedy uh because there's value in discussing these things uh in terms of what human sexual imagination does for us in our actual like sex lives uh the obvious uh we have things as complicated as roleplay or as simple as generating arousal even simpler than that we have masturbatory fantasy and the role that sexual imagination can play in that in fact there's a colloquial term for the sexual imagination with regard to masturbatory Fantasy and it's called spank bank uh Bank being the operative term here this is something with value something with currency so is this all that lost girls is is it a discussion about how pornography can help our sex lives no not at all uh that's just the starting point waren gby quickly go a step further suggesting that when we fail to articulate our sex lives and the role of sexual imagination within our physical passions we fail to articulate the way that our sex lives our sexual imagination and our sexual passion interact with a number of other PR important things to how we live our lives uh that we fail to articulate our violent urges uh or our love or our creativity but when we allow ourselves to talk about these things then suddenly we start to see the interconnectedness uh that lies within uh Rivers essentially if you will all running from the same Source just in different directions the plot makes this very very clear uh as mentioned Alice shows up at the hotel H she begins a passionate affair with Dorothy Wendy driven by essentially curiosity soon joins them uh their sexual encounters take place over many different interactions uh and what they do the pattern that they sort of fall into uh is two of the characters will actually be having physical sex with each other and the third will be telling them a story about their individual sexual history uh that story will arouse The Passion of the other two further uh so thus they're actually kind of creating pornography uh within their sexual acts themselves quickly though uh we see how this escalates way Beyond just working with their sex lives uh again it's not just physical passion they're achieving it's actually emotional intimacy because they're not just sharing random sex stories that they make up in order to inspire each other's passion there's no fiction this is reality what they're doing is disclosing important moments from their history thus this is a very intimate interaction that we're receiving uh and this really um sort of becomes full circle uh when during one of the sexual interactions Alice says this we're all coming together uh this is achieved at a moment of simultaneous orgasm but of course it's meant to refer to so much more than that that what they are achieving through this personal disclosure is something again much more spiritual something much more profound they're sharing this hidden history all these things they're not allowed to talk about with each other uh and as a result of that they are coming together uh in again kind of a a profound and significant way uh here's Alan Moore on the subject of sexual potency I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful uh so sex in law girls is not just like universally a good thing U Mor and gb's message isn't sex is good it's not sex is bad either it's neither of those things sex is powerful sex can be channeled in a lot of different directions sexual passion can lead you to Joy or atrocity to destruction or healing uh depending upon how it's done the sort of pivot point in terms of deciding whether you've got the good thing or the bad thing seems to be in Lost Girls when the women are free to explore their sexuality without shame or fear of violence when they do that they find Healing they come to terms with who they are they come to terms with their sexual past uh when they don't have those things in place sex can be dangerous and damaging uh and again neither good nor bad uh the overall point that more is working with is that again this is something that our culture represses these discussions are not being allowed to happen and again whether we look at sex is good or bad that's not productive the climax of the novel is I would say pretty appropriately an orgy uh a hotel-wide orgy featuring at least dozens of people uh a little a bit hard to keep track of uh but then after that the text ends on a very very tragic note uh the characters learn that the soldiers are coming World War I is breaking out and this sexual escape and this intimate personal disclosure and this safe space that they have found with each other is going away so they say their goodbyes they express some optimism for their Futures and they get out of the hotel shortly thereafter the German soldiers arrive and they burn it to the ground now the last two pages show a battlefield that's what the hotel is now it's just an empty field where people are killing each other uh what we get is a picture of a soldier in closeup all we can see is his face uh with this like look of bliss on it uh frankly it looks like orgasmic Bliss which we have been conditioned to see throughout the earlier many chapters of the novel uh but then we pan back a little bit further uh and we see it's not orgasmic Bliss at all he's dead head uh he has a horrible gaping wound from crotch to sternum uh and has been essentially just wiped from the face of this Earth uh then we pan out further and we see that the clouds themselves take the shape of a popping a symbol of remembrance uh but also a symbol of War uh and a symbol of um sort of an aesthetic if you will uh what Gabby does with it is she channels that particular poppy to make it look like once again female genitalia just as the wound of the soldier is rendered to look like female genitalia uh in order to create an obvious kind of inversion uh from our expectations um so this is maybe a little bit weird kind of surreal stuff uh we're left in the position that most literary texts leave readers in at one point or another the Eternal question what does it all mean uh so for more for GB it seems like this Palace if you will of sexual Joy is now a horrific location of tragic death the suggestion being that what's going on there is a terrible terrible alternative to what had been happening there previously with our three protagonists um basically all we're talking about here is poorly channeled passions uh now a quote earlier in the text speaks to this uh this is the hotel manager he says I'm afraid lots of boys will be dying in mud when they should be effing in bed war is such a frightful perversion now normally when we use a term like perversion we're using it in a sexual sense not in the war sense uh but seeing this unfold and again the alternative uh by the time we read the end of this particular book uh it seems almost hard to argue with it uh which one is the more perverse action of the two uh so this is the idea of essentially once again um that human beings have this passion and some sometimes they Channel it towards creative loving or even just sexual ways uh and other times they Channel it in the other direction the unhealthy Direction violence destruction and death uh we see this manifest in uh 60s counterculture uh one of the more famous slogans to come out of the Vietnam War was Make Love Not War uh an expression so famous that it actually featured in the lyrics of both John Lennon and Bob Marley in the same year alone uh the idea was pretty simple that we have a choice we can make love or we can make war and we're wasting our time and our energy when we're doing one of the other things uh as a result of this uh we again have sort of this connection to the war that we see take place in Lost Girls which is World War I Vietnam War World War I same thing human death on a catastrophic scale for reasons that might seem questionable to just about anybody now last time we see our three protagonists um this is what we get Alice I suppose that's what war destroys all the art and architecture the fields of flowers and young people's dreams all the imagination uh this leads us to discussion of again that third passion and its connection to sexual passion or sexual imagination uh and that is creativity now as I mentioned each of these stories is familiar like they're drawing on classic elements of uh Wizard of Oz uh and Peter Pan and Allison Wonderland except those stories are like pornographic versions of the original stories that we know and are familiar with thus suggesting that the stories they're telling have some sort of connection to this deeper creative impulse Alice's story is complicated but it speaks to the long-term trauma and sexual confusion created by childhood sexual abuse Dorothy's story meanwhile uh explores the concept of basically recreational sex is it possible to just have fun having sex or are there consequences are there potentials for collateral damage let's say uh Wendy's might be the most most nuanced of the three of them uh Wendy's Story presents a complex view of how the threat of sexual violence can repress female sexuality uh and as an extension how there's a sort of double standard in our society where men are much more free to express their sexuality than women are and our culture seems to be much more attuned to expressions of female sexuality uh in terms of taking offense uh there's also a nice double standard in Lost Girls In general the idea that lost girls places emphasis on female sexual pleasure uh where most of our you know pornography Industries as has been famously documented by a number of theorists suggest that we tend to really really overemphasize male pleasure uh often at the expense of the female characters so each of these stories have a sexual energy behind them theoretically uh the idea being that passion is a well source for creativity that the sexual drive and the creative Spirit are importantly comingled and we can actually see examples of this in our culture uh almost intuitively the number of great artists who have intentionally practiced absence in order to enhance their creative potential kind of suggests that we're again drawing from One Source uh two forms one passion uh when we break it all down uh now for Mor and gby this intersection of creativity and passion turned out to be very very direct uh during their work on the Lost Girls project they formed a relationship uh and eventually a marriage they're still married to this day uh more offers this advice um to wouldbe couples I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together I think they'll find it works wonders for myself personally laws and other texts liked it like it helped to reignite my passion for the field of literary studies just as the book continues to reignite the passions of the many many people who have been reading it ever since and giving it that position as again a work of literature something that people seek out as a result of its sheer quality and its resonance um it's confusing it's offensive and what it means isn't always clear but I think it does once again boil down to the concept of passion passion means a lot of things to a lot of different people passion is powerful beyond our Reckoning passion might actually be what makes us human we should probably be talking about it thank you