Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

the aspirational aesthetics of ‘gentlemen’s pornography’ 57
by offering a range of subversive, contradictory and empathetic
encounters. From the designed-to-attract cover to the lucrative back
page advertisement, the GQ reader may expect to feel confidence,
camaraderie, trust, lust, envy, greed, aggression, and control. Yet, in
the same way that ‘literary texts never “mean what they say”
because they are fiction’, 31 so too, glossy men's magazines create a
realistic (trustworthy?) fabrication, while benefiting from the ennobling
status of being artfully constructed. Like Manet's Luncheon on
the Grass (1863), they are realistic in style, imaginative in content,
and perceived to be aesthetically authored.
Intimately related to the question of reality or truth in aesthetic
composition is the gendering of aesthetics, and in particular the
notion that woman conventionally signifies abstractions such as
truth. 32 This notion has significant bearing to art historical philosophy
and in particular on Modernist aesthetic theory, which involves a
masculinisation of aesthetics, as opposed to the so-called feminised
(empathetic or emotionalised) aesthetic response of the spectator. In
so far as this feminising of response is related to the level of empathy
or sensational emotion that the viewer may experience in looking at
an artwork, the feminine, according to Rampley functions as a
metonym of truth. 33 Accordingly, feminine presence in visual media
impacts on viewers' perception of the relationship between art and
truth. Pornography utilises a so-called ‘feminised’ (loud, hysterical,
uncontrolled, messy) aesthetic to heighten the sense of reality
(truth), and therefore the sensationalism with which the images are
received. GQ, on the other hand, opts for a so-called masculinised
(weighty, controlled, reticent, cognitive) aesthetic that, like
Luncheon on the Grass, places the feminine, as a symbol of truth,
within the framework of the masculine.
For Barthes, 34 photography is about affect, ‘the “pathos” of which,
from the first glance, [a photograph] consists’. Spectators thus
explore photography, ‘not as a question (a theme) but as a wound’. 35
The man-made image cannot be created independently from man's
desire, repulsion, nostalgia or euphoria, and for this reason it
frequently invokes empathy. The varying degrees to which
photographs may affect or excite viewers, accounts for the difference
between conventional pornography and gentlemen's pornography.
Conventional pornography, according to Barthes, is unary: 36 ‘it
emphatically transforms 'reality' without doubling it, without making
31 T Eagleton ‘Text, ideology, realism’ in EW Said (ed) Literature and society (1980)
155.
32
M Rampley Nietzsche, aesthetics and modernity (2000) 190-214.
33 Rampley (n 33 above).
34 R Barthes Camera lucida reflections on photography trans R Howard (1984) 21.
35
Barthes (n 34 above) 21.
36 As above, 41.