Holy hell. Not content with telling us how to work and how to be happy, Alain de Botton is now going to tell us how to have sex.
No, really. Behold this press release from the School of Life, which penetrated my inbox this morning:
Thanks to the internet, the modern world is awash with pornography. This pornography represents a threat not just to those who make it in terms of the exploitation involved, but also to those who consume it, in terms of the conflict it can set up between the values encoded in the porn and their responsibilities and values in the rest of their lives.
One solution is to ban porn. Another, and perhaps more creative solution now suggested by de Botton, is to create Better Porn.
There’s really nothing I can write that will adequately convey the gist of what’s happening quite as well as Alain himself can, so here goes:
We shouldn’t have to choose between being human and being sexual (the Ancient Greeks knew this very well). Ideally, porn would excite our lust in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life. No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation; it could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.
The real problem with current pornography is that it’s so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it. Yet it is possible to conceive of a version of pornography which wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue – a pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.
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Well, you can’t blame a fellow for trying. I would love to link you to more information, but unfortunately my Google of “Alain de Botton porn” came up empty.
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