To the Max [Katha Pollitt]

On October 21, 2008 I got a chance to listen to Ms. Katha Pollitt talked about her newest book of essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories and share her perspective about the upcoming election. One of the essays in her book that she read to the audience was “Memoir of a Shy Pornographer.” I actually ended up buying her book and getting her signature on it. This essay is very interesting not only because it is about pornography (which nobody really write about) but also because it provide a rather unique and original perspective of looking at porn. What is even more remarkable is that, this perspective is arguable perfectly analogous with how McKibbin view the media. Though this is hard to believe, Politt and McKibbin, through their own way of looking at such medium, are able to show why one can only learns very little from watching today’s media.

Both McKibben and Pollitts agrees that one of the dangers of television is that it alters perception of reality since it only presents what society deem to be fun and exciting. Accompanied by the speeding up today’s society, when one only watches television, one expected it to be full of fun and excitement. Even when one watches sport, one expect to see something extraordinary; this is why highlight receives such enormous attention from sport viewer. This however, as McKibben argues, alters the perception of reality. Because of this mindset, when one actually go to a stadium to watch such and such sport, one might claim that game to be “boring” or “dull,” not realizing that what one watched on television is just a selection of reality. One example McKibben uses is the nature film. Similar to sport highlights, nature documentaries “are as absurdly action-packed as the soap operas, where a life’s worth of divorce, adultery, and sudden death are crammed into a week’s worth of watching.” (McKibben 77)

Correspondingly Pollitts argues that pornography is basically a fantasy, something taken to the extreme. One of the main thing Pollits mentions is that “a man could read porn his whole life and never learn a thing about real women: how to talk to them, what they linked, where, if the clitoris was not actually located in their throat, the damn thing was.” (Pollitts 96) This, analogous to McKibben’s argument, proves that media show viewers the extreme of things and viewer actually believe that to be the reality. Therefore this makes viewer raises the norm, and what used to be considered as normal is now considered as less than normal or boring. What is even more concerning is that for many individual pornography is where they are first exposed to sex, some even regard pornography as their sexual education. But as Pollits mentions, pornography is “clearly a fantasy, something some odd duck of a writer dreamed up out of his head.” (Pollitts 94)

As much as it is hard to believe, one cannot learn reality from watching television. As it is proven by both authors, what television show is simply a selection of reality, attempt not to show reality but to attract viewer; the main point of pornography is to keep people reading (or watching). Knowing this, it is questionable how much of the upcoming presidential election will be entertainment rather than actual political issues. No matter how it turns out, the best the individual viewer could do is to be aware of such illusions.