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I am all for it!

It seems that Alain de Botton, who I might add is a weapons grade plonker of the first order, has finally come up with a good idea.

As his next project, the philosopher and founder of The School of Life is aiming to revolutionise pornography. Driven by the way society has been saturated by explicit images and videos, de Botton is asking ‘what next for porn?’. The writer intends to meet with leaders in porn and the arts in order to bring about a better kind of pornography.

Well I am all for anything that leads to better products. And perhaps he will use this opportunity to point out to these “leaders in porn” that boob implants are to porn what McDonald’s is to fine dining.

21 comments to I am all for it!

  • So here’s the thing Alain. If you have some new ideas that you think will improve pornography, the thing to do is to produce some and put it out in the market.

    The thing not to do is have a bleedin’ committee meeting to decide on ‘a better type of porn’.

  • Gareth

    Sounds like someone is making a BBC3 documentary.

    I wonder if any of the leaders in porn will turn him into a parody character called Alan or Elaine de Bottom…

    I’m sure some media types have tried this before.(A couple?) Started with high minded ideals about empowerment and safe sex but couldn’t maintain it I vaguely recall.

  • If you want to improve porn, then virtual pornography is the way to go.

    Sick and tired of the usual pneumatic platinum blondes with shaved vejays and tattoos?

    With virtual porn you feed in photo’s of whomever you want, state what you want to see (bj’s, straight, anal, blah, blah, blah) and you get a tailored virtual movie involving those characters you feed in with digitally stitched faces, etc. and the rest of the bits matched tones from the nearest available.

    Sure, it would require a lot of complex image processing and you’d have to have a mosaic of sexual activities to work from, but that would be the way to go.

    The only downside to this is that it would be very easy to create a passable sex tape for your favourite celebrity (or not) – Celine Dion and Justin Bieber porn anyone?

    Equally, there would be no real barriers to creating artificial child pornography or other such things, which are illegal in most places.

  • RAB

    leaders in porn and the arts…

    Hmm that will be interesting.

    Bloody brilliant painter that Rubens Dud. Uncanny how those tits follow you round the room.

    Scary Pete!

  • Valerie

    “Can’t polish a turd” comes to mind.

  • llamas

    O, great – designed by committee. Probably by a government committee, if this unrecondite statist gets his way.

    How do you suppose that’s going to turn out? Hideously expensive, incredibly late and completely ineffective. But it will be done by union staff, and in complete compliance with all regulations regarding equal opportunity, working conditions, working-time directives and health-and-safety restrictions.

    Won’t that be fun.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Alisa

    Celine Dion and Justin Bieber porn anyone?

    Someone take the keyboard away from this man!

  • PeterT

    Sick and tired of the usual pneumatic platinum blondes with shaved vejays and tattoos?

    Not yet.

  • veryretired

    Congratulations. This is truly one of the most bizarre threads I have ever seen.

    Besides, the future of porn is inter-active virtual reality.

  • Someone take the keyboard away from this man!

    Apologies Alisa – one of the problems of batting for the other team is you never know where to draw the line.

    🙂

  • J.M. Heinrichs

    There is some good news today.

    Cheers

  • bgates

    “Can’t polish a turd” comes to mind.

    “Polish girl pooping big turd outdoor” is the name of a video on notonlyporn.net.

  • Mike James

    I hereby declare my intention to improve pornography, my witnesses to this selfless declaration being the company here present.

    For too long a time have we tolerated shoddy, inaccurate, sloppy pornography; If Western civilization is to continue and flower, this must stop, and I am certain that some of the people reading this share my desire. And believe me, I know desire.

    So, to business. All reading this are invited to help my urgent pornography improvement project with a “helping hand” (“helping hand” is metaphorical. Helping hands are thick on the ground where I’m at) to include the following:

    Airline tickets

    Gym membership (personal trainer would be most efficient)

    Per Diem (should have listed that one first)

    Certain drugs, (the fruit of Western Civilization which I know we all hope to save through the agency of me), to handle any rogue outbreaks of erectile dysfunction

    Certain drugs to handle the consequences of erectile function

    Charm, looks, and anything else belonging to the miscellaneous slushpile of the fascinating, intricate process of the very important process of creating relevant, uplifting pornography.

    We can win this.

  • Alisa

    Yes we can!

    And you even posted before J.M. Heinrichs did, VR.

  • Laird

    John Galt, clearly you have given this a lot of thought. That’s a bit troubling . . .

  • It’s not an effective idea. There is already more porn out there than one person could watch/read in the entire rest of their life. A committee could not improve on that.

    What the world really needs is a good classification and cross-referencing system so people can find just the right porn for them. THAT is the job for a committee.

  • @Laird:

    John Galt, clearly you have given this a lot of thought. That’s a bit troubling . . .

    Not really, pretty much gave up watching porn several years ago as it was all the same old stereotypes (people and ‘plots’)

    When the concept of ‘make better porn’ came up here on Samizdata the solution was immediately obvious. How you achieve it though is another matter.

  • Celine Dion and Justin Bieber porn anyone?

    It wouldn’t be her heart going on and on…

  • Paul Marks

    And this is the moron the BBC present as an “intellectual”.

    “But his books sell”.

    His books sell (if they do) because the BBC (and so on – the education system and the government regulated media) push them.

    However, the ability of the BBC (and so on) books is in decline. People are starting to dispute the “ownership” of the subsidised eilte over the culture.

  • If someone had wanted to make Mr Botton’s variety of porn, they would have done. That’s what “Rule 34” is all about. If you can think of something, there’s probably been porn made about it.

    The reasons for this are that porn is fairly cheap to make. If you’re not fussy about star names, you can make a scene for a few thousand dollars. It’s the sort of money where people will take a risk on making movies for particular tastes. Some people make their own porn using digital cameras and post it on the net.

    And there really is a wide variety, everything from the utterly misogynistic to porn made by women that is aimed at women.

  • If ‘better porn’ involves hobbits, well, we’ve already covered that topic here.