Reality's not in the competition

Laura Kipnis, via Ross Douthat: "But if reality can't compete with porn, isn't it reality that should be doing the apologizing?"

Kipnis writes:

Pornography's capacity to reimagine the world and the quotient of sexual gratification it contains is obviously what most irks its critics, and what its fans can't get enough of. The usual impediments to acquiring sex don't exist in pornutopia: Forget social convention, sexual repression, your partner's personality foibles. Porn is a world where personality simply doesn't matter: what a refreshing vacation from the daily reality of coupledom in which one partner's personality tics and the other's inability to deal with them is surely the leading cause of couple dissolution, not to mention the sexual anesthesia (or antipathy) that generally precedes it.

How is porn's role as an escape something at all unique to porn, or, as Kipnis suggests, to porn and sci-fi? Everything from the Gilmore Girls to the biography of Bernard Lazare I'm currently reading takes you out of the daily concerns of what's the deal with the opposite/same sex, what to eat for dinner, gee, isn't it warm out today, and so on. And then again, things like dating, eating out, or appreciating the weather are in themselves escapes from, I don't know, the angst that develops if you sit in your room and stare at a wall for too long....What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that reality never enters the competition, and that society would stagnate if all we did was watch television or read about Bernard Lazare or watch pornos. (Insert comment about masturbatory nature of academic pursuit here.) But reality and escape are highly intertwined, and one can never win out over the other....

But what confuses me is how Kipnis can go on and on about whether Deep Throat is feminist or anti-feminist--when I saw that movie at DOC last year, even with my Chicago-trained critical eye, saw only huge, big-screen blow-ups of genitalia, which seemed alternately silly and revolting. If porn is to be looked at by an educated, enlightened, Kipnisian audience as an escape, how can it also be looked at as something to pick apart for academic purposes, unless the escape is the academic pursuit itself?

More thoughts on this later, perhaps, but it is quite nice out here today, so I'm gonna go frolic outside the Reg.