I know you’ve missed me. But the past couple weeks of my life have just been so hectic and this week was MCE Mid-Term week! So, I apologize for my late blogging. Today’s blog topic is on Katha Pollitt: Poet, Activist, and Porn Editor! Last Tuesday (October 21st), I attended Ms. Pollitt’s talk about her latest book, “Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories,” and political discussion sponsored by Babson’s History and Society Division. I sat in the audience with my good friend and classmate, Elana Hogan. The two of us whispered and giggled about our day’s events before Ms. Pollitt began. Now, to be perfectly honest, I really had no idea what this speaker had to do with our Media and Studies class. Perhaps because we had recently been discussing the effects of media and democracy, this acclaimed political columnist would give insight to how the next president would finally put some control over the power-hungry corporations. But to my surprise, she began by reading an excerpt from her new book—a quite explicit personal essay from her proofreading porn days. Let’s just say that the other members of the audience were equally surprised by the descriptive content she was narrating.
My first moment of epiphany occurred when she retold her editing process and the “claustrophobia” she felt when “forming sentences.” Her chore of reorganizing sentences so that nouns matched up with verbs (such as, does a vice tighten? Or does a vice clamp?) can steer us towards the idea of the power of sentences. In Tuesday’s class, we discussed how McLuhan believed that “the medium is the message.” We also determined that the basic unit of print media is one sentence and the basic unit of visual media (television) is the distilled image. Therefore, print media gives the reader more flexibility and more power to determine what the message is. In visual media, the message is formed by tools that attempt to make the viewer see a certain message (though there is no guarantee). To apply this to Pollitt, what kinds of experiences was she feeling when she was editing these “idiotic sentences”? What kinds of experiences do readers feel when they read these “idiotic sentences”? The difference between visual and textual porn is that textual porn allows the reader to be more imaginative. It makes the reader have to work harder because it is a mental process. And this becomes the power of sentences. If the pornographic text does what it should do (evoke emotions in the reader), the reader should want to “throw down the book and act it out.”
Continuing this idea of the power of sentences, textual porn is different than visual because the situational fantasy becomes individualized. If two people were to watch the same pornographic visual, they would only be able to see the characters on screen. However, if they read the same pornographic novel, the image of the characters would be different. To relate this to McLuhan, it is important to observe that one must be able to know how to read in order to get the message of print media. Therefore, this idea could argue against his “medium is the message” theory because if one cannot comprehend the medium, how can they know what the message is?
Lastly, I would like to conclude on the topic that the content of pornographic novels is also restricted by the larger corporations. While it seems more practical than the issues we have discussed in class (such as, there should be no stories about rape, racial slurs, [blank]phelia, etc) these “set of formal written guidelines” limit the diversity of content. This process parallels the topics discussed by McChesney in “The Problem of the Media.” Therefore, even though the power of print media allows individuals to be imaginative, their creative thoughts are restricted by the narrow range of content.
