J.G. Ballard on Sex & Porn

J.G. Ballard author of Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Empire of the Sun and many others offers his take on sex and pornography:

“Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. (…) He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.” -Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition

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