Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

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In her essay on Ellis’ hyperrealist aesthetics Frances Fortier asks the reader “Où
est l’insupportable? Dans la violence même ou dans le récit qui le banalise?” [“Wherein
lies the unacceptable? Within the violence itself or within the narrative that banalizes it?”
(translation mine)] (98). As mentioned in the first section of this chapter, society has
grown largely desensitized and the thresholds of tolerance for depictions of obscenity and
gore through the media and the entertainment industry have been destabilized. The
public at large overwhelmingly embraces this practice. What needs to be underscored is
that these depictions remain for the most part representations of a more or less “artistic”
nature. Thus, if one considers that the majority of society is less exposed to first-hand
violence—which remains debatable—it still yearns to indulge in representations of
violence to fulfill a repressed desire, an instinctual drive for violence. While some could
claim that these representations are cathartic, others object on the grounds that they
actually produce violence. If so, one could question the applicability of this paradigm to
representations of sexual acts as well. One would think that our society has considerably
evolved in this regard and become more permissive and tolerant, but how then can one
explain the success of the porn industry and its billion-dollar annual revenue as well as
the increasingly soft-porn turn of the mainstream film industry? One could argue that
this success stems largely, perhaps directly, from the fact that individuals are still unable
to fulfill their instinctual drive for sex and thus resort to consuming its various
representations. What occurs, then, is that through various consumer products of a visual
nature, society has promoted a scopophilic type of voyeurism as an acceptable way to
fulfill these instinctual drives by turning human nature into an object of curiosity and