1.

“…What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.”

– Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”

2.

“It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you…To have seen these strangers’ faces in orgasm—that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it.”

– David Foster Wallace, “Big Red Son”

3.

“In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.”

– J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash

4.

“In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”

– Anais Nin, introduction to Tropic of Cancer

5.

“Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.”

– Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

6.

“By contrast, pornography is the opposite, in that it makes into a commodity that which is obscene, makes the unusual consumable, which is the truly scandalous aspect of porno… Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking.”

– Michael Haneke, interview with Kinoeye

7.

“Consuming pornography does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn. Much like eating McDonalds every day will accustom you to food that (although enjoyable) is essentially not food, pornography conditions the consumer to being satisfied with an impression of extreme sex rather than the real.”

– Virginie Despentes

8.

“There was something of the assembly line in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material that the nude tan man was extremely keen to process with his tool. First the material’s colorful fabric casing was removed, then the material was placed on its knees and the semiskilled worker fitted his tool into its mouth, then the material was placed on its back while the worker orally calibrated it, then the worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously processed it with his tool.”

– Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

9.

“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today’s children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

– Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

10.

“Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.”

– Alan Moore, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom

11.

“Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.”

– George Steiner, “Night Words”

12.

“There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, ‘You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there’s simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we’ll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.’”

– Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

13.

“Our relationships to porn remain complicated and incredibly simple. Porn has proliferated and taken so many hits. It prevails and continues to be one of the many pop culture meters that is both affected by what people want and determines what people want. It is the ultimate representation of human sexuality and the biggest way in which we incorrectly interpret human sexuality. Porn is us.”

– Dylan Ryan, interview with The Rumpus

14.

“The viewer sits with his shrivel dick in hand, anointed by his own squalid bodily unctions, every bit so blessed by the sacrament of sleaze as is the saintly slit onscreen.”

– Christian Shapiro, “Satori & Pornography”