To Consider… The idealized fantasy of love and sex
Ideal conceptions of love, romance and sex are shaped by popular cultural forms of media and their content: movies, books, newspaper, television and others. Think of a movie such as The Notebook and the way it influences our image of the ideal romance: an assortment of passion and intense but playful love in an idyllic setting punctuated by a tasteful scene of love-making.
This montage of love teaches the viewer how to desire and what to desire. The goal of a romantic relationship becomes the successful reproduction or reenactment of the idealized scene. The technical term for such a reenactment is called mimesis. Mimesis can also be seen in the popular fantasy of the perfect marriage: the woman is a beautiful princess marrying her Prince Charming and life ends happily ever after (think Cinderella).
If you’ve ever watched any of the wedding shows currently running on any number of TV networks, you’ll realize just how much the Cinderella fantasy dominates modern weddings.
If these ideal depictions of love and romance reveal something about the fantasies that drive our understanding of love, then we have a problem. Romantic movies must stop at a certain point of representation in order to keep the movie viewer in the fictional world it creates; this fictional world is what narratologists call the diegetic world. The Notebook shows the budding romance, and then the love-making scene, but it sanitizes and idealizes sex by concealing the act under sheets. This concealing act shows us that it’s not just what a movie shows that is important, it’s what it doesn’t show: in order for the viewer to become involved in the romantic reality that the movie creates then there are certain things that must be excluded. Explicit sex, as shown in pornography, is one of these things that must be excluded.
Pornography, as a genre, is supposed to reveal all that there is to reveal, to offer up to the viewer’s eyes the full-deal: sex unbridled in its rawest form. When somebody views pornography they don’t watch it for the engaging and well-written narrative – just like someone doesn’t watch The Notebook or Cinderella for the graphic sex scenes – rather people view pornography for the raw and idealized way it depicts sex.
In pornography, the shoddy narratives and bad acting simply serve as a pretext for graphic sex. We can see some parallels here with the technique of the romantic movie. For a viewer to accept the fictional world of porn it must fit into the viewer’s expectations of what porn is, just like a romance movie must fit into a viewer’s expectations of a romance movie for it to be successful.
In both pornography and romantic movies like The Notebook, we are placed within a certain fictional reality. The goal here is to let the viewer become involved in that fictional reality and then feel a certain sense of satisfaction upon completion of the movie.
In this very formal sense, both pornography and romance movies are masturbatory. People watch both of them with the same goal in mind: to “get-off.” But with each view of a movie, we take with us a little bit of the fictional reality that the movie creates and we attempt to create that fiction in our own lives, through mimetic reenactment, so we can “get-off” outside the movie experience in the same way we do inside the movie experience.
This is manifested in many relationships: when the initial burst of passion dies, the relationship dies because the relationship no longer reflects the idealized romantic fantasy. In the same way, couples run into major problems when the guy (and the girl, too) take cues from the pornographic experience and start to treat life as an endless pretext for sex. The ultimate point here is that neither the romantic fantasy, nor the pornographic fantasy “work” when placed within the context of an actual relationship.
The reason those fantasies don’t “work” in actual relationships is because we are not viewers of reality; we are embodied participants of reality. While media and other narratives will inevitably have their influence on us we must never fall into the belief that popular depictions of love that we view in movies are the way things could be, or should be. We must never assume that love is as easy as a montage, or that sex could, and should, be like pornography depicts it.
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