last summer have a french-sounding place called no padam but in Indiana in the United States I gave a chapter of reflections on pornography and my point there was to to show its relation with the imagination in general it's vital importance for differentiating imagery and therefore differentiating instinctual behavior when the image has changed and the behavior changes that is pornography's psychological artistic and social importance and my second point then was to warn that the freedom of erotic imagination has to be protected otherwise we shall be subjected to the worst sort of Orwellian mind-control some of this mind control is already being built into our Western legal system for instance in Canada where a law written in part by Catherine MacKinnon that's the wife or well I think she's the wife of Jeffrey Masson who's well known to some of you prohibits pornography that is harmful to women even if the prohibition infringes upon freedom of expression in other words the freedom of expression takes second place to the supposed damages that pornography does it justifies censorship now even if women give consent in the pornographic descriptions or depictions it's still outlawed in the United States the attack has taken a very different route a law before the United States Congress that was watered down would make the purveyors and producers and writers of pornography legally liable for any acts that can be traced back to pornographic material what does that mean if I commit a sex crime and show or can show that it was inspired by what I saw on a porn film I passed the responsibility back to the film not the doer of the deed is responsible but the producer the writer or the filmmaker is responsible and can be legally sued and has committed a crime the maker of the image now you hear behind that you hear behind that the fear of the image the recognition of the power of the image but presented through this legal Distortion it's a vicious backhand way of saying images really are very powerful an idea that the church recognized in the Middle Ages and controlled images so that all the images that you see whether in Notre Dame or shaft or wherever all those images were those images were allowed even if the individual sculpt or could do them in his own way they had to be controlled I warned last summer that the attack on pornography is aimed at the exculpation of the imagination at its instinctual roots and it is a continuation the attack on pornography is a continuation of the attack on the pagan gods that has occupied Western Christianity for 2,000 years still occupying it today I would say and I'll even say further it is an attack on the body of Aphrodite one more violation of the divinity who has suffered repression for many many long Christian centuries as Jeanette patty brought out as Jay Lee Buono brought out and who we are honoring Aphrodite here in Avenue and it's fortunate that it is a venial for this city does not please not belong to the Pope's it belongs to her too verdi T the Pope's came here as if to a mission station to subdue the natives for the name of Avignon had become synonymous with debauchery since the days of the papacy even earlier Petrarch mentioned it is being quote from Petrarch the sewer in which all of the filth on earth has come to congregate and medieval chroniclers spoke of it as quote the cesspool of every vice and infamy is it any wonder that this City happened to be the birthplace of the family of the milky desaad this aspect of Avenues reputation spread abroad and great cities of Europe like Rome and Barcelona baptized their red-light districts with the name a venial so widespread was this connotation than in Italy the expression andari al Yvan hazy was a slang expression suggesting a visit to a bored L this is pink madness city unless we forget says crossbow hell the image of a brothel gave birth to that painting Demoiselles d'Avignon that masterpiece painting of Picasso's which starts cubism in a big nude pink crazy way its original title was not game was el Divino but its original title was LeBeau del d'Avignon years later in 1933 Picasso explained to Kahnweiler his dealer quote Picasso talking now you know of course that it was called LeBlanc del Divino in the beginning but do you know why having yeol for me was a name I had always known a name connected to my life I used to live a few steps away from the calle de vino it was there that I bought my paper my watercolor then as you also know max Jacob's grandmother was from having y'all we joked a lot about this painting one of the women this is the five women that you see in de Mars el Divino one of the women was Max's grandmother another fair known another Mattie Laurel so all in a whorehouse in having your Kahnweiler ads that max Jacob told Picasso about a special bordello in Avenel a fabulous place full of women tapestries flowers and fruit a high sanctuary of carnal pleasures in the heart of which still life and very real life were found side by side so with that little tribute to a venial let's begin Andiamo ali-a von yes if you had been put in a closet for hundreds of years by priests philosophers and prudish women who loved their religion more than their bodies what would you do to let mortals know that you are still alive and alive in your sensuous style of life and if you were banned from actual life except for occasional opportunities in certain circles dedicated to you or at specific times or occupations finding no frame in which to fit in the literal realities of medieval piety Reformation or capitalism Industrial Revolution colonial administration scientific progressivism as it transformed into therapeutic salvation ISM if there simply was no place for you in the big literal world what Avenue would be left except fantasy remember her terrain is simply said the evocation of desire the provocation of attraction the invocation to pleasure but long hair is not allowed on the production line gets caught in the cogs but at Shelley's lovely lady would have to wear a white hygienic cap skin should be covered to be to protect from cancer toes shod nails clipped musky odors of the warm based flesh band with astringent deodorants that last all day into the sweet hours thank a set one of the main ways they advertise deodorants in America is to say they last into the evening to hike with Artemis is okay to bring a present home from work to Hara is okay to plan strategy over competitors all day long with Athena is okay to jog with Hercules for muscle tone and circulation and to defeat Jairus old age is okay so today I'm trying to be open to what she I hope it was she Aphrodite said to me a retired psychoanalyst man who saw hundreds and hundreds of dreams and fantasies and obsessional ideas that we call pornographic in the psyches of what are called patients those humans suffering from the absence of Aphrodite in their actual lives so to go on with her appeal I am NOT happy she said and it is my nature to be happy I need to be happy no I'm not happy about being a being allowed only this one access the access of fantasy so I am a bit spiteful revengeful after all my sister or half-sister was named nemesis a nemesis or retribution and I are linked very closely for instance usually where I come into a human's fate nemesis comes to bringing some sort of retributive justice for instance Paris rightly preferred me to Athena and Hera and out of that came terrible marvellous retribution the Trojan War and Homer well I want to tell you more about my boy pre office actually not a boy now but a rather heavyset balding ruddy bearded full grown man though for me he will always be my boy according to some tales pre-op us was a brother of hermaphrodite hermaphrodite us both were said to be offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite but others say Priapus was sired by Dianna sauce some say even by Zeus finding the father is never easy even among the gods and whom am I to tell even if I knew says Aphrodite whoever the lucky father was who had the pleasure of Aphrodite's bed and body pre AAPIs is definitely her son and Aphrodite is always there as a mother is waise there in her son whenever wherever Priapus raises his balding head Aphrodite is also there this suggests vulgar as it may seem to those who cling to prissy pretty sex every hard on is mothered by Aphrodite and is somehow somehow carrying out her intentions her fantasies as the mother instigates and inspires the activities of her Psalms of course as the stories go Aphrodite was horrified by the gross genitals of her baby boy she could not bear the sight of him she saw them as a deformity so hung up she was on her notions of beauty interesting the intolerance of Aphrodite criteria of beauty the intolerance of Aphrodite criteria of beauty I think that's important it's it's as if she took possession of the idea of beauty and there could be no other kind there is a lesson here for all you worshippers of the Shapley the perfect the lovely the smooth and pleasing ideas of beauty but to go on she bore him but she could not bear him the sight of him was too much so she exposed him on a mountainside you know the old trick a shepherd found him that marvellous figure the shepherd like the one who found Oedipus the one in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale who saved Perdita and all of us go on with this myth eeeem in therapy our abandonment from Beauty our rejection by the mother our genital peculiarity or inferiority or grandiosity saved by the greatest of all Shepherds Jesus Christ and you know that JC with the shepherd's crook the bishop the Saviour one of his fundamental images is the Saviour with the Shepherd the shepherd he's the Shepherd the Good Shepherd but this Shepherd and David Miller has done a great job on this figure in one of his early papers this Shepherd is able to save Priapus not because he is a compassionate Redeemer but because he himself perverse crooked as his crook the shepherds God is usually pan the goat God the inventor of masturbation he is peculiarly twisted himself and he lives his life liminal e at the edge of civilization half wild and is also the shepherd a source of one of the main streams of our poetry bucolic poetry and sexual poetry chasing maidens all the time shepherds and one of the main streams of our humour like what is virgin wool it comes from sheep that can run faster than the Shepherd I couldn't resist them but I have another one yeah alright there's another one the jokes the Australians tell about the New Zealanders you know New Zealand is where they have more sheep than people the news that the Australians say the New Zealanders raised the sheep but it took the Australians to teach them that they had other uses and were good for meat and wool well but that's we're almost finished with the shepherd now but back to pre AAPIs exposure exposure exposed on the mountainside his whole life can be condensed into that acorn of exposure forever after pre office is the exposing one the one who exposes his member in statuettes cult objects souvenirs paintings charms he exposes himself yet is always undercover under a cloak a kind of skirt a toga raised in the modern jokes it's the raincoat he exhibits his erection and that garden where pre opposites to be found as he is a God of gardeners by the way but come on now let's again the scholarly way of doing it don't be calmed the garden is one of the oldest euphemisms for the genital region of women a direct term for it in Greek que pasa pudenda muli abre just as we use the word bush and endless words of fruits and flowers like fig and plum and peach and cherry and melon and of course rose so that he Priapus the gardener is he who takes care of the garden and his life is in the garden scholarship has had to cover all this up with fertility they're always trying to cover the member you see the because Priapus is covered in order to be revealed as Lopez Pedraza said years ago and did in his in his chapter on Priapus trying to reveal pre offices true in other words when you begin to work scholarly with pre office you're caught by the same archetype and you try to uncover the the naked truth as I'm trying to reveal his nature so with this we come to what's clinically called exhibitionism could it be pre AAPIs who is displaying himself in this urge is this urge saying look at my parts that Aphrodite rejected I need to be seen appreciated taken in from abandonment saved from this cursed orphaned condition I'm the son of Aphrodite - I'm the one who was exposed by her and so I must return by the same route exposure of the very part that caused by exposure is this what exhibitionists tried to say to everyone they can show their genitals to look at me I mean you no harm and you know that clinically exhibitionists are not violent not rapists but usually mild and timorous men is he not saying receive me see I am beautiful despite what my mother says about that curse at birth and now we're getting into something good like this now what's coming there is more to say the growth genitalia that so horrified aphrodite's sensitive good taste that penis that surpassed the standard benchmarks for the standing male member do you know the full story of his birth well it's high time you did because Aphrodite about to give birth retired to a town on the Hellespont called lamp sockos a place later that considered Priapus its founding hero God for their he was born and later his cult was celebrated and coins bearing his image were passed and pre-owned rituals performed heroic Alexander wanted to destroy the town for it's pornographic excesses now Hara yes Hara was enraged at the trifling of Zeus or of dionysos Zeus is son by Hera's despised rival Semele so either Dionysus or Zeus was supposedly the father of Priapus inheres mind and all that were those were enemies of Hera and she did not forgive in Hera's mind this child to be born was an insult to her because it was directly or indirectly from Zeus and she Hera queen of heaven who was not chosen by Paris and so on and so forth Hera known for her spite and it doesn't matter her reason about Zeus the child to be born would be a living testimony of philandering the very progeny of philandering which she was in her ordained way to be the opponent of so she did her own cheating and deception by preferring aid to Aphrodite during her lying-in and birth pangs so the Aphrodite was going through the process of birth she was suffering she was in pain Hera said I will come and help you she touched Aphrodite's belly with her finger causing the child's unshaped leaders so you must see the long finger of Hera in the gross genitalia of Priapus she is the source of what Aphrodite sees as deformity is the hero archetype if you will that causes us to see pre-op us as we do they say that again it is the hara archetype if you will that causes us to see pre-op us as deformed and distorted as we do now the enormity of Priapus has many gods in it lots of gods it can't be read simply as lopes Pedraza says each pre-op e'en excitation has in it the power of our Aphrodite of Dionysus of Hades of Zeus maybe Hermes and so on but in all of this let us never forget the finger of Hera this is what a polytheistic psychology teaches about any event there is a complex imagination released rather than a simple explanation we get a story rather than a reduction and each mythical story involves another story as the German Romantic said never never does one God appear alone now I stress Hara here because the other sons of Aphrodite and favorites of hers Aeneas and Hermes and anti-seize and Paris hermaphrodite us adonis eros Dionysus all these figures around her were certainly not malformed pre office was the only one the only one touched by Hera only the one touched by Hera one touch of era and the preoptic becomes deformed vulgar gross we turn from it the priapic moment and the pornography that it brings about or shows it via John Holmes and we regard it as ex and most unbeautiful we turn from it Hara would like only one kind of erection that which serves the mating instinct the mating kind Jay pointed this out yesterday in regard to easily the coupling husbandly kind suits Hara Hara is then the authoress of the banning of hardcore porn the direct kind that shows erections and invites priapic erections that shows erections and invites priapic erections she would exclude the excessive sexual imagination to keep it within the bounds of conjugal relationship it is she who makes it ugly not that it in itself is ugly and crude she causes it to be placed marginalized on the mountainside to the red-light district to the combat zone now I'm not here to blame Hera or to invite her enmity I have enough troubles in her domain in fact dear lady I regard myself as one of your devotees having done obeisance in your sacred places in Sicily and paste them and have made notes for a little book once on your in your favor and on your virtues for our culture nonetheless Hera allow me this analytical moment of penetration into Europe reserve the localization of pre-op Ian's sexuality the course the rude the read in a red-light district the banning of the sex shop from the nice married neighborhood is the geographical literalization of a mythical domain seduction pornography perverse and you know perverse means turned or twisted and that one of the marks of the preoptic is that his genitals were twisted and turned to the rear that is perverse turned back in around all of this is a metaphor perhaps as well as a physical sign does not belong this kind of perversion does not belong at home where the twists of the imagination are supposed to be domesticated that's one whole point of the Zeus Hera story domestication and saint paul ii said it is better to marry than to burn marriage is not for burning it is for cooling off the pink madness Harris Harris domestication is supposed to calm it all down so that after a while people say where did it all go to make this clearer Hera in one of her tales told yesterday so well by Jeannette Perry had to get Zeus away from his obsession with the Trojan War get him off his job his watchers perch above the battlefield out of his CEOs office if you will so Hera asks Aphrodite for help to make her seductive and Aphrodite lends you some stuff a girdle to mask a to make her more charming only sexual attraction will get to Zeus I see the see the role of sexual fantasy that's the only thing that will get to him pull him out of the office and he can't resist anything in girdles and if you notice that the sexual imagination is stronger than anything else stronger than war and battle strategy winning and losing and the joys of the superior mind the great trick of the gods to get at the superior mind is seduction that's the pink madness only a crazy attraction can get to the Olympian above it all posture that affects our Western culture again only a crazy attraction can get to the Olympian above it all posture that effects or afflicts our Western culture mm-hmm yes only pink madness can get to the Olympian above it all attitude that that afflicts our Western culture it takes seduction the temptation of the pink to bring it down and again and again in men's dreams the only way through to reach the isolate Olympian mind is via seduction of pink figures erotic dreams I mean this is also BJ's Carmen in a way isn't it but para did not want to do any of this in the open the seduction of Zeus so we're back again to our theme of concealment and exposure those priapic themes that I began with for Hera wants to keep sexual acts concealed and private Hera does not say let's just do it right here and now it's got to be her place she says I could not not I return to the house after rising from a bed of love in the open it would not be seemly that's danijon that's animal and Zeus easily takes on animal forms for his seductions to do it in the open Hera must make love inside the thalamus the bridal chamber the domestic space inside the house civilized in the story there's a golden cloud placed around them and a kind of romantic fantasy makes it possible but this is not priapic priapic belongs outside not in the wild hills of Dionysian ecstasy or the rocky wild places of Pan's chases pre-op is's in the garden and the orchard the cultivated regions around the house but not in it for once when he does try to come in the house to Hestia the salty virgin lady by the hearth an ass Braves saying not here in this Randy foolishness not here and wakes her from nodding by the fire and pre offices chased out you don't belong in the house this ass is very important this donkey this border all this that's his animal as the goat is pans as the owl was Athena's in the dove aphrodite's so of course hardcore priapic pornography is stupid course blunt clumsy single-minded and rather sad the ass degrades and suffers degradation as the donkey's braying stubbornly repetitious can't almost can't stop like any hardcore cheap porn film is stubbornly repetitious and the charges against pornography that it is stupid and that watching it is foolish and that it is dirty low-class unromantic are charges leveled at the ass toulouse-lautrec understood this he brought down the high Aphrodite to his deformed level and there's a little passage where he says Toulouse Lautrec he asked several women half undressed in colourful shifts and dressing gowns to dance to a player piano holding each other by the waist he had to move forward and back so that they would face him and he went into raptures over attitudes of these course [ __ ] that reminded him of Botticelli's Primavera and the frescoes have been not so gods Olli you see with Toulouse Lautrec you get the capacity to make the ass part of the whole the donkey the burro part of the whole pornographic into images he doesn't escape into Botticelli ideas of beauty and the asses brings down the high Aphrodite to the asinine which is essential to artistic and real and the religious imagination st. Francis and his ass Sancho Panza so our definition of pornography are Hera's even if stated by the US Supreme Court if what is display violates community standards has no redeeming social scientific artistic value that's the way they describe pornography then arousal is obscene it must serve the community and this is Harris finger and I'm fingering you Hara by which I mean informing on you not something vulgar so when Sally Tisdale writes a splendid piece in Harper's Magazine about her desire a woman's desire to visit porn shops and buy porn videos and look at them and rights of her shame and overcomes it to free her curiosity this shame is not brought on because porn viewing is a male activity exclusively it is also that porn does not belong inside the consciousness of normal community and domesticity and household as defined by Hestia and hara the resistance sally Tisdale a very famous article in favor of women's pornography and women looking at porn the resistance she overcomes is not patriarchal conditioning it is the archetypal resistance of these goddesses as this why usual wives don't want to watch porn at home with their usual husbands the sex of two couch potatoes in front of their screen when Sally Tisdale visits the shop she is one of the women who leaves the house for the wild hills of Dionysian mysteries women's mysteries those exclusive women's festivals of which Carini writes exclusive women's festivals to which men were not admitted the participants said the most shocking things to one another at the Feast of the Halawa they were not only obscene mockeries but some very indecent behavior the married women were led on by means of ritual play two things forbidden in marriage so I've taken this time to tell the story of the origins of pre opposite of Hera's finger on Aphrodite's belly of his exposure his marginalization in order to realize that a curse has been put on pre office and therefore on all vigorously erected image consciousness that aroused imagination which pornography seeks to achieve it is blamed for male violence the beating of wives sexual excesses molestation of children rapes all this argumentation is part of the curse put on the priapic by Hera and by her domain of the domestic the communal the societal over this child of Aphrodite pre office I have a little bit more if we all have patience still yes we want to stretch the most recent appearance by the way of pre AAPIs in public life was at the exposure of Clarence Thomas a stocky middle-aged balding swarthy if not ruddy asinine man before the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate there he was uncovered on TV indecent exposure almost physical when his penis was referred to as Long John Silver and there was mention of a suggestive seductive cubic hair in these hearings before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee may I remind you that one of the many plants used to honor Priapus with garlands and leaves and wreaths and flowers and ferns was the Audion tube in Roman times this plant was known as Capello's veneris or maidenhair or Our Lady's hair and quote the hair implied in these names was that of the pubis now if eros hermaphrodite us and Priapus are all her sons their brothers then in a sort of half way they're all in the family of Venus different but related so sexual freakishness Lopez's term for hermaphrodite Asst including all the transsexual surgery cross-dressing bisexual lifestyles drag and get up show some of the pink madness of Aphrodite a madness now permeating even the United States Navy and Marine Corps via hermaphrodite Asst the fear of the freak called homophobia especially when hermaphrodite Asst is fused with his brothers that is with heroic handsome Aeneas and with eros and falling in love and with the priapic fear of an erection in the shower and they get mixed together pink you have pink madness inside a light cruiser that's of course a warship they are the light cruiser we have spent a disproportionate time with Priapus because he is instrumental in most hardcore porn either as what's depicted or what it's aimed at if there is a God in the disease as jung says the goddess Priapus and porn is aimed to resurrect his erection for the idea of divine resurrection must be recaptured from christian usurpation and placed where it today belongs the insurrection of the flesh as st. augustine called his libidinal desires the resurrection of the pagan powers the animal divinities of erections like the baboon who greets the son of the egyptian new day the ass that braised and the [ __ ] the crows at dawn at the return of the pagan light after christianism's clerical cloaking of the ancient imaginative powers of pink pleasure can you handle that one [Laughter] okay I'm sorry Enrique the son of the new day the ass that Bray's and the [ __ ] that crows that dawn at the return of the pagan light after christianism's Clos Akal cloaking you can't do that of the ancient imaginative powers of pink pleasure pink madness also invades the especially the commercial world as I said what she calls fantasy we call advertising selling shampoo brassieres Hawaiian Islands Aegean islands coffee beans Dove soap it sells the skin of automobiles and the smooth hairless bodies attached to NordicTrack and nautilus machines all these images are varieties of softcore porn do you have that distinction softcore hardcore porn romantic sensuous fuzzy arousing and the God here or diamond of the soft core is less hermaphrodite us the freak or Priapus the prick then their lovely brother eros his inflammatory sexuality a seductive sexuality his otherworldly attraction his constant courting of the soul this eternal we need troubadour tempting psyche to swoon with pleasure follow me come with me fly with me I will give you voluptuousness you recall their child I suppose that's the local loop toss aphrodite's granddaughter though I can't imagine she likes to be a granny and never mentions this descendant of hers in that way anyway that child of psyche and eros was called will loop tosses nor Hall mentioned earlier and the definition of that in the Stade Oxford English Dictionary is voluptuousness of pertaining to derived from resting in or characterized by gratification of the senses especially in a refined or luxurious manner marked by indulgence in sensuous pleasures that's precisely what consumerism offers volume toss indulgence in sensuous pleasures so Aphrodite banned from our secular civilization returns right into its very heart not only via her son Priapus and his arousing porn but through the appeal of consumerism its softcore aura that makes us want desire reach out for the Greek word for reaching out for our exes stretching of the fingers anorexia without appetite stretching of the fingers appetite related to pet RA to seek to go for it petition seeking begging and to petulance the feeling when you don't get what you beg for inside that word appetite the shopping drive of consumerism is Patera the wing of the bird our stretched hands our bird's wings also as homologs to the struck to the actual structure of the bird's wing is the human hand our reach of desire is the wing of a bird there's a spirit in our yearning all I'm saying now very simply is that Aphrodite's pink badness runs the world Subrosa in the disguise of The Consumerist economy shopping is the number one leisure activity of Americans after TV which is also shopping she keeps the whole world in desire and out there shopping lured by the soft sex cell of softcore porn and it takes all the Puritan power of denial to refuse her no longer in the straight-laced way of the Methodists no dancing no bare legs no cosmetics but now no more catalogs no more TV I won't watch I won't go shopping just say no to shopping since softcore belongs to Aphrodite and arrows of course it appeals to psyche psyche Apuleius says serves in the temple of venus our psyches are caught in the amor & psyche tale just by letting ourselves be lured remember the difference between Aphrodite or Venus and eros is that eros is the drive that makes you desire but Aphrodite is what makes something light up so that you wanted she's the touch of beauty she's not active she radiates from within something so that eros goes for it I want to defend the softcore particularly because the priapic proponents of hardcore laugh at it put it down they want the real thing hardcore they want organ grinding crotch shots hard ass hard-ons no romance no chiaroscuro no suggestion no ambiguity no fuzzy soft pink orange titillations more the level of the brain ass than the cooing turtle dog more a joke and a jab than a gasp and a moan hardcore may have many gods Saturn and sadism as Tom Moore writes pans masturbation and rape child and the hero the Virgin and the nymphets hardcore may have many gods in it Saturn and fade ISM Pan's masturbation and rape the child in the hero the Virgin and the nymphets but the hardest core of all today is the reverse side of Christian repression Satanism child porn covering over the priapic privates covering it over again we're back to that covering again is the fear of a spark that Andre Malraux says that leaps from one person to another after they avea the art object the possibility that you as an onlooker watching could be aroused yourself your erotic imagination stirred has led to endless censorship one of the most famous being that by Pope Paul the fourth censoring Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel chapel Lobell wrote about these fig leaves and veils so acidly and so well that i want to quote this little passage I'm sorry it's in English I don't didn't get the French for this so I'll read it slowly progress says he would have given his fortune to know the name the age the address profession and face of the gentleman who invented for the statues of the Museum of not those fig leaves made of tin that looked like devices designed to discourage onanism flow bears talking about the museum and Nault have been outfitted with these shameful metal drawers that sparkle like pots and pans one can see that this work was long premeditated and that was executed with loving care the edges are scalloped and they are affixed with screws fixed with screws to the members of these poor plaster figures now flaking away with pain in these times as flow there of rampant folly amid the common stupidity which surrounds us what a joy it is to find if only for the sake of diversion at least one truly outstanding idiocy one gigantic stupidity see he's the ass has come in here but now it's not in terms of the figure it's the stupidity with which we react in our censorship well he goes on for quite a while about that I think we can read the covering of the privates with less irony and even more twists than flow bear because pre AAPIs is both covered and exposed present and absent both absence makes the heart grow fonder is more intriguing as for instance the most important of all cover-ups of genitals in our culture the naked Jesus of the crucifixion those veils and bits of fabric and artfully placed screens of other figures between us and his genitals are not simply to be read as literal censorship of his literal sexuality that is to ban sex from the minds of his devotees these covers serve as a soft core gesture on the part of a very sophisticated church to fascinate the worshippers of this holy object this all butt-naked God to bind us to him erratically passionately arouse idli just by that very fold of cloth that branch or limb or leaf or arm closing off the literal and opening into the suggestive the implied the imagination Jesus on the cross walking with it descending from it dead beside it laid out in his mother's arms that determining image of our culture's religious consciousness is a softcore exemplar par excellence priapic in its presence and its absence both this god of wingless tormented love all new but for what is cloaked and didn't Jesus ride an ass on Palm Sunday softcore brings in eros softcore adds a glow to the secularization of sex the functionalism the everydayness with a pink hope a flash of beauty a desire for wings softcore porn is far more significant than hardcore because it is more a symptom it both denies and yet offers what the psyche wants it is as Freud said of symptoms a compromise softcore invites the souls longing but only tantalizes it with expectations and imaginations of fulfillment on a faraway Shore with a faraway lover unknown unseen like a moor in the night in a faraway dream paid for by your MasterCard if we truly understand the nature of this figure the the eros aspect this brother of Priapus this style of Aphrodite's pink madness we would know that he is the god of the Far Away the transporting one one of whose manifestations is in the form of yearning or pothos longing because he had eros had one form of him eros which was immediate present desire and another form was the desire for the absent which never goes away and is never fulfilled and one long as always for more a longing for what is not real here hard now sure known red but away soft edged unknown rosy and of imagination remember that eros in another tale is parented by one of his parents is called emptiness or neediness always wanting something more that isn't here the light of eros at dawn and dusk softens the brutal and banal day of facts with the sweet impossibilities of images and the dominant desire in all softcore porn the great temptation of softcore romance is the sacral ization of sex sex turned to mystery redeemed from the secular by Aphrodite's harris as one seeks the unknown encounter the stranger the eyes across the room the nape of a neck a leg the glint on hair fall that catches the breath and releases the pink madness the yearning for a first time clasped breathless bodies in a new place with a new person in a new way absence become presence pothos become him arose in sacred space even if a room in a motel softcore porn is thus not an idealization of sex and therefore as Freudians would say a defense against the real thing rather softcore is its pothos aspect the romantic platonic desire clothed or unclothed in pink to suffuse imagination with an erotic tinge to give wings a free soul that reminds and calls - more - farther - other - better a wondrous lifting not for this world and reminiscent of another or filling this world with the radiance of another filling this world with the radiance of another world which was always the main purpose of Aphrodite and the main significance of her smile thank you