A couple of years ago I was studying in London. My research for an assignment (books and other people's thoughts upon David Lynch) led me to various bookshops, especially the second-hand ones in the area of Waterloo tube station. Actually a friend of mine worked in one of them, so it was a good excuse to go and say 'hi' and to feel the delight of 'researching' at the same time. I had my hands on a number of books during that period, most of them didn't retain the words David Lynch in them. But it's amazing what's being published these days and the amount of books which quickly end up in the shelves of a second-hand bookshop with '50 % price cut' stickers covering the front page. When people entered my friend's shop we usually stopped chatting and I would resign to the shelves. On a busy afternoon I looked in books that I would probably never see again. There was one book which I kept reading bits in for some curious reasons over a longer period of days. Of course, today I have completely forgotten the title and the author of the book. It was a tiny book filed under Sexuality. (As far as I recall the book was from the early 1970s).

English science of the untamed instinct. In sober and very formal manners the English scientist described his main focus of his research project. He wanted to know why so many men are attracted to porn, some might even say addicted.

The best thing about scientific books is that you often can read the hypothesis in the very beginning of the book and then its conclusion on the very last pages. The case was that the English professor had collected a group of men which he was studying via interviews and discussion groups. He wanted to draw reliable facts about modern men's consumption of pornography and even cure these 'fallen' men. I really don't know about the scientific reliability of his conclusion and whether any of his 'rabbits' were cured. But the reading of the last chapter of the book stunned me.

Men who are users and consumers and dreamers of pornographic material are trapped with a desire for posing nude; to be looked at and to feel 'sexy'. According to the professor many Western men have a supressed need for posing and demonstrating the physical 'outlook' of the bodies (because Western societies are getting more and more uniformed? I remember attending a degree show at the Chelsea School of Art. One girl had been sowing weird clothes and had put this big banner up saying: I've been living inside my clothes for years. I thought: "So very true").

The urge for a pose now or then is an exibisionists dream of to be seen. It's about being a male, but being a magnetic field for sexual direct attraction at the same time (still normal courtesy of nude web/movie/mag/black/white/asian girls). It's about dressing up and spreading legs to get your fellow man's full attention. And what other imagery genre allows the human being to fake demonstrations of 'bodyhood' and sexuality, if not porn-world? Art-world? Well, Jeff Koons? Art??? The French, German and American avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s? Perhaps….

When men were in contact with the image of a nude slut in a porn mag, the English professor claimed, they were actually seeing and 'feeling' suppressed sides of 'themselves' more than dribbling over the sight of the dirty female represented on the paper. They simply wanted to enact the bodily positions of the model, rather than actually fantasizing about a real intimate situation with 'her'.

I also remember reading about how the professor instructed the men from his group to dress up and allow themselves to assimilate positions of porn models.(a thumb in the mouth, a bare shoulder, a finger on the nibble, wearing a torn t-shirt, wearing nothing but shoes and all the rest of the clichés.). This was a part of the recipe for breaking the vicious circle of porn consumption on a daily basis.

Like many scientific projects, the English professor took the data from his closed circle of men and turned it into a theory of 'why men love to look at porn in general'. Of course this theory had to be linked to the more advanced theory of 'why the mind works in perculiar ways': The gaze of desire, the Other, the subconsciousness and the whole lot of complicated terms and tools to describe what the hell is going on with us.

So all the porn-loving men are exhibitionists or what? Well, in many cultures, especially in the Western World, the exhibitionists have turned themselves into a hard-working labour force. The female actors of porn-world who are working for a globally ever-growing (so it seems) industry pumping out commodity products that undoubtly hit browsers in Iran, Thailand and whereever-you-are, right now.

Only a few male posers (in 'positions' who now are almost 'trademarked' by the industry) are getting paid for the special type of acting. The rest of the us, according to the professor, have to feed our mind with new poses of other people's posing manoeuvres (90 % Otherness, i.e. women) to expand their imagination of how to dress up and pose in front of somebody else's eye (before we give away our money to see what they have seen).

This is why I often think--while my modem is blinking on the XXX pages--"The root directory of a military technology is a poser's dream".

And then I feel really sick and after a couple of pics of mud-wrestling chinese teens I turn off my monitor and go to bed thinking:

What about the male photographers who are taking some new pictures, right now. What about the male web master who is uploading a new dozens of thumbnails, right now…

What are they dreaming of?

Who is enslaved by who?

Who are they posing for?

Copyright © 2000 Jacob Ørsted Nielsen All Rights Reserved

Jacob Ørsted Nielsen is a 27-year-old Danish poet and DJ. You can catch a glimpse of one of his favourite computer occupations at www.bravenewmedia.org/nasty.htm