Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

depend on the individual, on his or her moral and aesthetic conscience” and that
accordingly, pornography may appear in both popular literature as well as serious
literature (686).
149
Assuming that Ellis’ American Psycho belongs to the latter category, the task at
hand, then, is to determine whether the scenes depicting sexual acts are pornographic
with regard to the framework enunciated above. In his essay, “Extremes and Radicalism
in the Postmodern and the Popular: A Study of Transgression in Bret Easton Ellis’
American Psycho,” Ben Walker considers similar criteria for distinguishing between
pornography and sexually explicit material in literature:
[A] criteria for differentiating between these two categories may be
found in the tendency of the latter to highlight the problematics of
the sexual act, the mechanical imperfections of the human body, by
including deflating techniques, humour, all emphasizing the human
emotion involved. In contrast pornography is used to obtain
climax, it strives for a perfection, a seriousness, an absolute. Here,
American Psycho would seem to fit the latter description,
everything is ‘perfected’ in Patrick Bateman’s male pornographic
gaze.
Thus, according to Walker, the novel contains material that the reader would most
probably consider pornographic, as is illustrated in the following passage, where
Bateman is having intercourse in his apartment with two prostitutes to whom he assigns
the names “Christie” and “Sabrina” respectively:
I pull my cock out of Christie’s ass and force Sabrina to suck on it
before I push it back into Christie’s ass and after a couple of
minutes of fucking it I start coming and at the same time Sabrina
lifts her mouth off my balls and just before I explode into
Christie’s cunt, she spreads my ass cheeks open and forces her
tongue up into my asshole which spasms around it and because of
this my orgasm prolongs itself and then Sabrina removes her
tongue and starts moaning that she’s coming too because after