Our Modern Eyes are Jaded
Our Modern Eyes are Jaded:
Pornography and the Line of Obscenity
The visual cortex is the largest and busiest part of the brain. There’s no doubt Homo Sapiens is an animal that relies heavily on sight. We take it for granted, living as we do surrounded by the rich visuals of the reality we have constructed, that to see is EVERYTHING. But, while the "food of the eye" has arguably never been saltier or contained so many empty calories, its ravenous appetite is as old as the species. Needless to say, the importance of our Sense of Sight could not have evolved overnight.
Long before there was even a dream of photography, from the time we lived in caves, to the building of the pyramids, to the castles of Versailles, there’s been a lot for humans to see in the world — more than enough to justify the evolution of our magnificent Human Eye. I only make this point so heavy-handedly because I know many people tend to think nothing was ever better in all of history than 5 minutes ago. I also don’t wish to be contradicted later in this essay, when I am making my larger point, when I say: The Eye is an old dog. He knows many wonderful tricks. He can tell a friend from a foe at a glance. He can climb a tree in duress. The eye IS everything and ALL that is true — but it knows nothing new. The advent of photography in the mid 19th century changed everything — meaning that it changed truth in a fundamental way, very much more so than any other representational art had until then. Try to imagine what it must have been like for humans when there simply were no visual “duplicates” in the world. Whatever your eyes saw, you knew you were seeing it because it was there. There was never any occasion to disregard something you were looking at because it “wasn’t really happening”. Accordingly, the human Sight Organ, the human mind, and a very long history of human societies were all firmly rooted in the concept of seeing is believing. And because believing is the gateway to emotion, our eyes ruled our entire Experience. What humans developed was a finely-tuned collaboration between the eyes and the deepest subconscious. It makes sense that evolution would have taken its sweet time wiring up our eyes to the most reflexive, most powerful parts of the brain, when you remember that shaving even a few milliseconds from a response-time often made the difference between death and survival for early humans. The link is very effective. But the penalty is we are subject to what may now be outmoded associations between what we see and what it means. What we see can make us hate, make us lust, make us physically more powerful, make us able to run faster and longer. But, images that fill our field of vision in this era of cinema and video games and Virtual Reality and Simulated Violence and ubiquitous porn may be convincing our subconscious they are real. What photography introduced that was so important, and unlike anything else yet in the visual arts, was what every photograph contains: an inescapable basis in a prior reality. And motion pictures and video have amended that slightly but meaningfully to: an inescapable basis in an “alternative” reality. Whether it’s simply footage from a different time and a different place, a “live feed” from somewhere else at that same time, or a completely convincing fabrication, using state-of-the-art special effects and CGI — in all these cases we know that what we’re seeing isn’t “real” – not in the old sense of real.The point of this long set-up is to permit me to make now the following assertion without fear of rational contradiction: While we may think we know it isn’t real when it isn’t, large, important, influential parts of our brain are not so sure the image is an “illusion” — in fact,they believe it real. I am becoming convinced that a great gap exists between Human Psycho-Physiology (specifically, the sense of sight) and Technology (specifically, visual media and display technologies). You can’t just pick at that thread, either, without unraveling the whole sweater — which includes such hot topic questions as “Do video games make children kill?” But I want to make a narrow point. Sex. Porn. Let’s think about what modern porn must do to the Old Brain. If 75% of the brain is involved in sight, I would say 95% of that part is involved in sex. Makes me wonder how common it was for people to see other people having sex at different times in history. In the cave, we’d all guess OFTEN. But how ’bout in 1122, or in 1575, or in 1808, or in 1971? Unless you lived in Rome or during a time of much pillaging and raping, you probably didn’t see all that much.
Even when free of the conservative influence and shame of religion, we know that humans seek privacy (or at least distance from the main group) when they couple. Of course, the advent and persistent presence of organized religion had certainly been pushing sex even further into the closet, so to speak. But, let’s not get distracted by the relationship between religion and sex.
What we’re talking about here is visual commonness. And what we know of history and human nature tells us that the sight of other people having sex was NOT common before the arrival of porn.
Here again, the conversation may take many forks. But I want to skip quickly ahead to offer the following proof…-
GIVEN: In humans, the sense of sight is closely tied to the subconscious, to the reactive mind and to emotional truth. The arrival of visual mediums (particularly life-like video) is fairly recent in the span of human history. We are living in a lag-period, so to speak, during which our brains are still somewhat confused and against themselves divided, for all the FALSE REALITIES that pervade our environment.
PROVEN: Because it is necessary for humans to reject many, many images from the functional scope of “reality”, the modern brain has had to develop a filter of some sort. The goal of the filter would be to remove on the basis of a qualitative difference. But, we also know that there ain’t ever been a filter of any kind made by anybody that removed just qualitative without removing quantitative, and vice versa. In this example, it means “low intensity” visuals were the first to get filtered out, even though they were not false reproductions, even though they were IN reality. To compensate for a higher “noise floor” as it were, the visuals start getting more and more intense, at least if they are to have the same reaction as before — just like all drugs of addiction.
Before you know it, human beings are realistically exploding in 3D and FIVE Enormous Black Cocks have been successfully forced into a petite 18-year old’s anus. Why? Because our eyes are jaded. The censors flip out. The mob cries for more and more. The lines get moved, erased, drawn again. We are clearly not in Kansas any more, as regards the visual sanctity of either sex or of life. And there’s no sign of slowing down.
Even if they get rid of porn as it exists today, they’ll just get larger live bugs for the big-titted reality show contestants to eat on prime time TV.
The deepest parts of our brains have just begun to react to these very, very, very new technologies. I’m not usually one to suggest the putting on of brakes. But, if the hardcore extremities of the porn spectrum are just a reaction to the higher visual noise floor of modern times, do we owe that material the same respect, the same protection under 1st Amendment? Or is some porn over the line of Obscenity?2HP
October 4th, 2006 at 12:18 am
[…] The visual cortex is the largest and busiest part of the brain. There’s no doubt Homo Sapiens is an animal that relies heavily on sight. We take it for granted, living as we do surrounded by the rich visuals of the reality we have constructed, that to see is EVERYTHING. But, while the “food of the eye” has arguably never been saltier or contained so many empty calories, its ravenous appetite is as old as the species. Needless to say, the importance of our Sense of Sight could not have evolved overnight… @ […]