New York Magazine Explores 'The Porn Flâneur'

LOS ANGELES—Finally, an excuse to mention Charles Baudelaire on AVN.com! While the influential French poet had no direct connection to pornography that we know of, he did explore themes of sex, lesbianism and "sacred and profane love"—contracting syphilis along the way—and his distinctive style of prose-poetry had a profound impact on succeeding generations of French poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and the boy genius Arthur Rimbaud, who himself wrote several poems whose utter beauty belied their explicit explorations of homosexual sex. But none of that is why we mention Baudelaire here. No, we are called to invoke the great poet by way of Maureen O'Connor's vivid piece for New York magazine, posted today to nymag.com, titled "The Porn Flâneur: What Baudelaire and LubeTube Have in Common," in which the author is reminded of "Baudelaire’s intellectual ideal of the flâneur, 'the passionate spectator,' who strolls down the boulevards of Paris, wandering from one sensory delight to another, a 'solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying," just as O'Connor herself traverses "a sexual landscape [of porn tube sites] that surprises as frequently as it arouses. "These websites," she continues, "don’t just give you the erotic materials you’ve requested to mainline but a vast array of pop-up penises, oozing animations, and oscillating breasts that multiply in cascading windows with each click. Every pixel of this is calibrated specifically to lure you down another path of escalating depravity or curious delights." In other words, it's a piece about the ubiquity and fanatical creativity of advertisements on tube sites hawking items as diverse as "dating websites, boner pills, casinos, and Hollywood movies," as well as adult websites. "Of course," she clarifies, "the village of ceaseless cybersmut is less 19th-century Paris than, say, 1980s Times Square on PCP. Even jaded consumers may be momentarily repulsed, and everyone, even prudes, may find themselves mesmerized with freakish curiosity—or uncomfortable arousal—or both. And though your curiosity is piqued, your actions are mostly passive; while the people on the screen perform extraordinary physical feats, the viewer may be immobile, registering approval or disgust with a click or flick of the wrist." Those ads, she seems to be saying, express as much about us as "the erotic entertainment we seek out on purpose" (the most searched-for porn term in America is 'MILF,' though Romania out-squicks us with 'mom and son'), explaining that "the map of our less directed eroticized wanderings is equally revealing. The porn flâneur takes pleasure in his or her stroll. This is Balzac’s 'gastronomy of the eye,' the opportunity 'to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies.'" Okay, the language may be somewhat strained,  but her point is that the "boulevard" of ads that line the page as we stroll passively through a never ending supply of porn tube sites —she mentions by way of example YouPorn, PornTube, LubeTube, WankTube, YouJizz, Spankwire, LobsterTube, MelonsTube, and LazyPornTube—sporting "an array of endlessly bouncing butts, never-ending orgasms, and pretty girls giggling and adjusting their tank tops for hours on end," are both fascinating in their own right and, more to the point, clandestinely effective to the accessible flâneur, who is, she adds, more likely to be "born after a certain date," as well as "consistently fluent in a vast lexicon of colorfully named sex acts that rarely occur in the wild: felching, sounding, skull­fucking, snowballing, the Rusty Trombone, the Donkey Punch, the Dirty Sanchez, the Puppies in the Tub. "But a more accurate predictor than age," she suggests "is, simply, the amount of time they’ve spent strolling NSFW corners of the internet. They’ve learned this language without trying, simply because it is there. They may not even recall the exact moment they ­discovered felching." The piece even takes an entertaining detour into the gay clown porn niche. Just another day of "pornographic wanderings" and musing over Baudelaire at New York magazine.