Tedious transgression

Artists today face a choice. They can churn out pseudo-edgy slop for the benefit of the establishment, flattering funding bodies into believing they are bankrolling something daring, radical and counter-cultural. Generally this involves being “sex positive” and scattering the magic letters LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC across application forms. Or they can pursue talent and integrity, which might threaten the prevailing orthodoxy and are therefore less lucrative. 

The former strategy was plainly pursued by the art wankers behind last weekend’s Brussels Porn Film Festival (BPFF), which secured backing from local and regional government, the Belgian National Lottery and assorted arts bodies. Now in its fifth year, the festival aims, predictably, to reduce the “stigma” surrounding what organisers describe as “the most widely consumed and produced audiovisual genre in the world”. 

As non-binary, sex-positive kinksters and human pups gathered in Brussels to celebrate porn as a “counter cultural” force, in Britain the feminist poet Abigail Ottley was preparing legal action against Arts Council England (ACE). Aftershock, an ACE-funded magazine established to publish “poetry shaped by survival, identity and lived experience”, withdrew her work after she criticised pornography and failed to appear sufficiently “sex positive”.

In an essay, Ottley described becoming a feminist through two formative experiences: the rape she suffered as a child, and conduct of her then husband in the early 2000s. She hoped to break the silence surrounding abuse endured by women, which of course is not as sexy as getting your tits out to end stigma. Legal filings later revealed concerns over her references to her former husband as a cross-dresser and performer in “sissification pornography”.

Despite the claim that pornography “serves as a potent political and creative tool for marginalized groups”, the adverts for sessions at the BPFF are, to the unreconstructed masturbator, indistinguishable from any other smut.

On the landing page — which is not age-gated, as British law would demand — you can see a woman dressed as a “sexy school girl”, complete with frilly socks and bunches, pointing at her fully exposed labia. But should that fail to sufficiently titillate you, there are also pictures of naked men, men in dog latex masks and the perennial favourite, women being strangled.

One picture, displayed twice on the site, shows a black woman bound so tightly that the ropes cut into her flesh. She cannot cry out because she has been gagged. This apparently advertises a panel comprising “a porn performer, an erotic artist, an experienced kinkster, and a sex-positive event organizer”, alongside the screening of a film made by two men about how “the world of sex” is experienced differently by “Black people, racialized people, [and] non-white people.” Without wishing to invoke the ghost of Roland Barthes, I’m not convinced the liberatory intent will weigh heavily on the minds of the men of all colours who choose to use such images as masturbatory fodder.

The contemporary art wankers can detect racism in a Victorian mural at fifty paces, yet somehow cannot recognise misogyny when it is literally bound, gagged and photographed.

In any other context, displaying an image of a bound black woman would be reputational suicide. But call it “sexy” and critical faculties are suspended. By way of example, if you go to Tate Britain today, and venture into the former cafe to see The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, you will not be able to view the work without being hectored. The room is kept in near darkness, and a specially commissioned film, Viva Voce, provides the context of an imagined conversation between artist Rex Whistler and a fictional black academic. It is fair to say, as the Tate does, that Whistler’s mural “includes racist imagery that speaks to legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and British colonialism.” But the difference between how racism is treated compared to sexism is stark.

Throughout the rest of the gallery are any number of pictures of women voyeuristically captured by male artists. Some have artistic merit, but it is difficult to look at them without a prickling of conscience for these long-dead and, doubtless in some cases, exploited models. The talented sculptor Eric Gill is a prime example: a rapist who sexually abused his sisters, daughters and even the family dog. His works are displayed without moral framing, contextual lectures or trigger warnings. This is not to suggest that they ought to be, but rather to point out a stinking double standard in the bourgeois sensibilities of the art world.

Pornography is about as counter-cultural as Paddington Bear

Which perhaps explains why Abigail Ottley’s writing about the emotional toll of living with a cross-dresser was considered too morally dangerous for an ACE funded literary magazine. In the contemporary arts world, discomfort with fetishism is treated as more suspect than fetishism itself. 

But pornography is about as counter-cultural as Paddington Bear. It is one of the most profitable and technologically sophisticated industries on earth, and perhaps the only cultural product capable of uniting wrong ‘uns of all classes and political persuasions, from Jeffrey Epstein to Andrew Tate.

If sweaty pseuds like the organisers of the Brussels Porn Festival want to meet up, who am I to stop them? They can decolonise the anus and deconstruct the “shenis” until their grubby palms are hot and damp. But they should at least be honest about what this is. It is not avant-garde. It is not political resistance. And most of it certainly is not art. 

The BPFF asks: “What do we really see when we watch porn? And above all: what do we not see?”

Apparently, the possibility of not watching pornography at all lies beyond the imaginative limits of regime funded progressives, let alone criticising it. And the crushingly conformist arts world fails to see is the transgressive power of a woman like Ottley saying No.