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The pornographic plays on the explicit, on realistic or hyper-realistic representation; it leaves no room for distance nor does it live in distance. The erotic, on the other hand, is all about the allusive, the implicit, and is often consumed and lived precisely in distance.

We are not going through a good time. As I look around me, I often feel immersed in something deeper than just bad taste: a lack of meaning, a colorless stain spreading through the soul, a hemorrhage of the human involving culture, art and mass media, flooding the way we build and speak, the way we dress and entertain ourselves, the way we manage our leisure time, our relationship with nature and the landscape.


In a society such as ours today, governed by what clichés call a "crisis of values" and in which everything appears consumeristically exaggerated, the exhaustion of ideals, the cheap ambitions, and the emptiness of ideas are manifesting themselves earlier and earlier and becoming extinct later and later.
We live in an increasingly drive-driven reality, dense with affections, identifications, desires, psychological and hormonal sexual pleasures, but also laden with fears, anxieties, disappointments, in which arises the urgency to experience one's body by cutting out the incidental and capricious hindrance of emotions, feelings, affection, hastily dropping inhibitory brakes to follow the new myths--exhibitionism, beauty, physical form, appearing, counting, narcissism. Thus arises a kind of race for the exhibition of intimacy, the publicizing of interiority achieved by indiscreetly breaking into the discreet part of the community to obtain confidential confidences, "live" emotions, through the morbid gaze of shamelessness, applauded as a show of sincerity.More and more sick emotional patterns and aesthetic forms such as the grotesque, the shocking, the horrifying, the obscene are spreading. Forgetting beauty, aesthetics in the Greek meaning of aìsthesis i.e. sensation, that which travels the road from the sensible to the beautiful, means forcing it to express itself in increasingly unconscious, neurotic, extreme, perverse forms. Diseducation in aesthetics is tantamount to complicity with ugliness, which is violence inflicted on the soul. And violence and diseducation can be, in the long run, an unsustainable cost in building a future society.An extremely clear example of this conflict, which moreover easily becomes a metaphor for the way we experience emotions, feelings and passions, can be found in the relationship between pornography and eroticism. Anaïs Nin, a well-known exponent of women's erotic literature, writes: "Sex loses all power when it becomes explicit, mechanical, repeated, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.It becomes a bore not to mix it with emotion, appetite, desire, lust, chance, whims, personal ties, and deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, and intensity. Microscopic examination of sexual activity, to the exclusion of the aspects that are the fuel that ignites it (intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional components), strips sex of its surprising structure, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. The world of sensation in this way withers, starves. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion: sex does not thrive in monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be watered with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, all the spices of fear, trips abroad, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasy, music, dance, opium, wine." Certainly, if there is something that steals people's dreams, that immobilizes their erotic imagination by crystallizing fantasy and creativity, it is pornography, with its always the same scripts, with those repetitive scenes that, after a short time disappoint expectations by forcing, often compulsively, the search, moreover in vain, for new scenarios and new situations. After all, the etymology of the term, from the Greek porneia, prostitution and gràphein, writing, representation, refers us to sex without feelings, that of casual, impersonal, often violent encounters. The protagonists all look alike and all do more or less the same things. All homogenized to its most primitive and immediate value, all reduced to the simple exaggeratedly explicit depiction of erotic subjects and obscene facts, for commercial purposes for those who produce, voluptuary for those who consume. However, I fear that the uncritical condemnation of pornography may also conceal a moralistic defense, a subtle fear of one's own desires. In pornography something that is part of the collective imagination is exaggerated, in a sometimes ridiculous and grotesque way. In other words, if one finds a certain situation exciting without absolutely allowing it to happen in reality because it might become in some way negative for one's identity, for one's values, for one's morals, it is easy to pour it into pornography.Pornography has the ability to express what people do not have the courage to express because no one has the shamelessness to fully narrate the multiplicity and complexity of one's deepest and most intimate sexual desires. Because the body, under the pressure of the drives that inhabit it and emerge through sexual desire, loses its organization and turns into a disorganized body made up of independent organs that replace one another. This staging of the carnal body has its own specificity: it cannot be enjoyed with detachment but in turn produces a symbolized vision. Pornography produces in the viewer's body the experience it enacts. Therefore, for better or worse, it leaves no one indifferent. And there is more. Wanting to do some petty psychoanalysis, pornography is reminiscent of perversion: it plays on the repetition of the symptom, it is a mechanical compulsion to repeat, it considers the other, but ultimately also the subject himself, as an object and therefore, ultimately, it reassures. But beware, pornography is a liar despite its apparent hyperrealism because it offers us only one aspect, genital and districted, not integrated with more complex content through an aesthetic, harmonious process. Apparently it says everything but in reality it says nothing, it does not communicate. It never succeeds in producing beauty. It is inevitable. Beauty is articulate, complex, sinuous. Eroticism, on the other hand, initiates a narrative process, reveals something, induces the desire to reveal more, frees the imagination. Eroticism, when it works, is just that. Opening horizons of fantasy and spaces of imagination. Before in the body, desire and passion lie in the mind, in the soul. They are play and invention, lucid pursuit of the transformation of physical pleasure into a pleasure to be enjoyed with the senses before the organs. Eroticism should not only amuse and intrigue us, but also arouse our fantasies and curiosity, suggest alternative paths, make us question our previous choices or preferences, propose more appealing ways and places. It should awaken our attention, not distract it, and thus open up new possibilities for our knowledge. Moreover, this argument is not new since Plato already reasoned about Eros as an engine and drive toward knowledge. In fact, in the Symposium he described him, by the mouth of Diotima as a demon always restless and discontented. Eros, in Greek mythology was the god of love, originally imagined as a symbol of the internal cohesion of the universe and as an attractive force that drives the elements of nature to unite with each other. Because of its characteristic of being the unifying principle of the manifold, Plato made it an allegory of dialectics, that is, of that mental path that ascends the different degrees of knowledge starting from the sensible and arriving at the Idea. Here the discourse would take us far so let us return to the central theme of these brief reflections by pointing out how the line between eroticism and pornography is drawn, however, mainly in the eyes of the beholder and responds fundamentally to subjective evaluations. Today society has become extremely tolerant of the functional use of the body and sexuality, especially, though not only, that of women. Images with explicit sexual content stuff serious magazines, family shows, advertisements, video games, not to mention Internet sites that can be reached by minors without any hindrance or adult control. There was truth in the feminist movement's harsh criticism of pornography, which was not wrongly seen as one of the instruments of women's oppression in society, for its reduction of women to mere sexual objects, lacking the capacity for thought and desire or, even, with thoughts and desires that are not women's own but belong substantially to the male imagination. Indeed, pornography catalyzes the masculine belief that women are always willing to be penetrated, insulted, humiliated to satisfy their instincts. Women's true desires, however, are far removed from the false world of pornography and are instead identified with the seductive atmospheres of eroticism. Prohibiting pornography, however, is unthinkable. Partly because it would risk mythologizing it more than it already is and partly because what is considered pornographic today might, at other times, be judged differently. How many times have our predecessors censored or even considered destroying the Michelangelo nudes in the Sistine Chapel because they were deemed obscene rather than a sublime artistic expression?

The Dreamer