I was initially wary of this book \u2014 Chris Kraus’s introduction claims the narrative’s discourse to be \u201cpure Sade, minus Sade’s irony” \u2014 and so, faced with reading as masochism, I gingerly tucked into Pornocracy<\/em><\/a>. I found the translation by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit viscerally beautiful \u2014 poetic prose and detached almost scientific observation commingle in a formaldehyde of precision and imagination \u2014 like a rose and a kidney sharing the same embalming jar.<\/p>\n The plot \u2014 what there is of it \u2014 concerns a women who visits a gay club and picks up a man to accompany her home in order to have him observe her sex. But this is no Jilly Cooper novel \u2014 this is Catherine Breillat, auteur of notorious films such as Une vraie jeune fille<\/em> (A Real Young Girl<\/em>), Tapage nocturne<\/em> (Nocturnal Uproar<\/em>), 36 Fillette<\/em> (Virgin<\/em>) Sale comme un ange<\/em> (Dirty Like an Angel<\/em>), \u00c3\u20ac ma s\u00c5\u201cur!<\/em> (Fat Girl<\/em>), Anatomie de l’enfer<\/em> (Anatomy of Hell<\/em>) and Une vieille ma\u00c3\u00aetresse<\/em> (The Last Mistress<\/em>) \u2014 films that have been labelled erotic and pornographic, artistic and trashy.<\/p>\n I could get all Lacanian here and talk about lack and the mirror stage or invoke Barthes’ discourse of desire but that would be moving toward the realm of the academic essay, whereas this is a book review \u2014 I’ve already fallen into the trap of playing with narrative voyeurism, textual masturbation, and critical narcissism. Did you notice? Do we really only see a text in reference to the other? I don’t want to write a dry, humourless analysis; I’ll try this as a straight review, shunning the help of structuralists, poststructuralists, and new historicists alike, and inject a hint of mirth, a sprinkling of the jocular. What you want to know is: is it any good? Let’s have a look.<\/p>\n The man the unnamed woman picks up in the bar is the most beautiful there, an ephebe. There is an interesting image of the men jostling for position like so many spermatozoa \u2014 the enclosed bar as the uterus, the woman as the egg. The men only recognize each other in the narcissism of similarity and difference \u2014 the woman (the egg layer) \u2014 is invisible, a means to an end: what the men are after is gemination not germination. The woman is absence incarnate \u2014 her female sex (the thing itself) infolding her like some gynaecological M\u00c3\u00b6bius strip. The woman observes the men not observing her \u2014 and we have the omniscient narrator observing the first-person narrator observing the narrative. So far, so postmodern.<\/p>\n The dialogue reads like a conversation between students of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault with lines like, \u201cIt’s the result of the occlusion of masculine compliance” and \u201cmoved as you are by the play of menses on your dehiscent member,” not something you’re likely to find in an Elmore Leonard novel. The Borges quote from Tl\u00c3\u00b6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius <\/em>is then invoked that \u201cmirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men” and Breillat forces the reader to look into her menstrual mirror \u2014 the man\/reader who does not see the woman\/narrative is the only one who can truly see her (the woman\/author) as he (as reader) is the voyeuristic other. I can hear the chuckles building.<\/p>\n The woman asks the man to observe her sex \u2014 look don’t touch \u2014 because he is impartial (as a gay man). At this point, I guess you’re wondering how come this \u201creview” reads like an essay when I said it wouldn’t. Pornocracy<\/em> is so full of ideas that it is hard to analyze it without assuming the language of the text \u2014 almost as if the text worked on the principle of a mirror \u2014 a two-dimensional surface (fiction) reflecting a three-dimensional world (philosophy) \u2013 the text as auto-erotic and auto-critical. I’ll try again \u2014 plot, character, theme.<\/p>\n The man arrives and is taken to the bedroom, the bed has white sheets and there is a large armchair. The man complains about the travel, asks for more money, sits down. The woman begins to undress. The writing here is precise, methodical, as if the words have been layered onto the page with a scalpel; then, like small bombs forming theoretical, anti-Freudian craters, come \u201cecholess lasciviousness” \u201csplit beings” \u201cindecency of within”. This is followed by an anti-Aristotelian negation of either\/or: \u201c[F]or all expectation is by definition always deception” and do you know why all this is, dear reader? Because \u201c[N]o member can hope to reach the size of the son it begets”. Be patient.<\/p>\n The woman’s sex is \u201cabominably frizzy,” \u201cpernicious,” \u201cMephitic,” the mons pubis like a \u201cplucked chicken” its skin \u201clike that of frogs” yet without the decency \u201cto be green”. I must admit to getting confused when, after \u201cswampy” and \u201csecretions” I saw the words \u201cdemoniac seal” and then the analogy between a woman’s sex and a bird’s beak and maggots and sperm and God and Satan. What Catherine Breillat does here is unsettle the reader into observing theory not plot, ideas not action, analysis not character; what she also does is throw idea upon idea without linking them. Without deeper analysis, the narrative becomes the mirror of her thoughts, not their crucible.<\/p>\n After a long preamble about penises and sight, the woman and man have a drink of whisky. OK. This has to loosen things up a tad. But, no, the woman recollects playing doctors with local boys when she was a young girl and there is talk of a \u201cwhitish unutterable serosity” a \u201cpruritis of a perpetual unction” (sounds like an order of nuns) and a \u201cgluey cavern” \u2014 I’m not going to be able to watch Art Attack<\/a> in the same way after that image. Their first night is concluded: \u201cThe horror of the Nothing which is the imprescriptible Everything” looms before them still. The sea equals feminine sex, the buildings equal masculine sex; the man draws on the woman’s genitals with lipstick and then \u201ctakes her” while she sleeps, discharging both semen and tears. Will they both be up at the crack of dawn?<\/p>\n The days pass and the couple have impartial and indifferent sex, and this is where the only real form of pornography enters the narrative. The rule is one of \u201cinexpressive professionalism,” the look one sees on the faces of porn stars when not faking cries and groans. The narrative also has that feel, as if Breillat is pretending to write fiction while all the time riffing with theories, extemporizing half-digested philosophies.<\/p>\n I have to ask here who the \u201cwe” are who do not talk about female genitalia or pretend it’s not there? Is it the omniscient narrator, the reader, the woman, the man, women, men, you and I? I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with the implicit Catholic guilt of the text or its seemingly explicit conservatism \u2014 strange in an avant-garde, supposedly transgressive text, but then, like the M\u00c3\u00b6bius strip I mentioned earlier, you go all the way round and end up on the reverse plane to where you began \u2014 see Communism and Fascism. Then follows a passage on bodily fluids that, though reading like something D.H. Lawrence might have hidden in his top drawer, would have surely made the Nottingham miner’s son blush and run a finger around the neck of his starched collar out of embarrassment. Disgusted, confused, or intrigued by the woman’s menses, the man goes to the garden, returns with a fork handle (no Two Ronnies<\/a> jokes, please) and plunges the haft into the woman’s vagina.<\/p>\n The third day \u2014 after being crucified on the fork handle, we are told that \u201cWomen are in God’s image” and that men try to restrain women by imposing chastity and imprisoning them. Apparently, all men fear women’s periods, we are disgusted by them, we treat the vagina as a wound. And I didn’t know this but man devised the tampon and its applicator as a symbol of our hatred of all women. Breillat argues that man has inscribed onto woman a disgust of and for her own body. Touching her own genitals, or inserting objects into her vagina, is somehow anathema to our (man’s) ideas of the feminine, and so the tampon and its application creates a false impression (for men) of virginity. A cursory scan of certain adult websites will unveil pictures and videos of women masturbating and inserting bottles, courgettes, and baseball bats into their vaginas. False impressions? You can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, but to know what I mean, you’d have to spend more time on the aforementioned websites.<\/p>\n![\"breillatjpg.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/breillatjpg.jpg\")
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![\"stevefinbuzzwords.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/stevefinbuzzwords.jpg\")
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Apparently, all men fear women’s periods, we are disgusted by them, we treat the vagina as a wound. Breillat argues that man has inscribed onto woman a disgust of and for her own body. Touching her own genitals, or inserting objects into her vagina, is somehow anathema to our (man’s) ideas of the feminine, and so the tampon and its application creates a false impression (for men) of virginity. A cursory scan of certain adult websites will unveil pictures and videos of women masturbating and inserting bottles, courgettes, and baseball bats into their vaginas. False impressions? You can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, but to know what I mean, you’d have to spend more time on the aforementioned websites.<\/p>\n