Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

8: Autobiography and/as the Real

8 Autobiography and/as the Real Reality in Representational Forms and Practices The contemporary hunger for the real can be seen to manifest itself via the cultural visibility currently associated with reality-based forms of representation . With increasing frequency, it seems, we are incorporating the real into the sphere of entertainment for, as Misha Kavka remarks, the ongoing tabloidization of culture means that “information is increasingly harnessed for purposes of spectacle, and entertainment is more spectacular when based in actuality” (8). There are numerous important examples of this phenomenon from the realm of visual culture, not only in the form of those pornographic texts that emphasize “real sex,” but in the myriad subgenres of a still-booming reality television industry.1 The popularity of television talk shows is relevant here, for despite the heavily mediated nature of much of their content, their appeal can be seen to lie squarely in their claim to offer the viewer some kind of access to the real. As Linda Martín Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale note in their discussion of televised depictions of survivors of sexual abuse: In a culture where audience sensations are dulled by graphic depictions of violence (both real and fictional) on television and in which mass sensibilities have atrophied under conditions of late capitalism, these shows provide a moment in which real, raw, and intense feelings can be observed, and in some cases remembered. This emotional “shock value” is their use value as a media commodity. (211) 141 142 Beyond Explicit The contemporary preoccupation with authenticity feeds audience interest as TV shows of this kind give their viewers access to intense and moving stories of abuse that are, crucially, anchored in a historical and extra-textual reality. Within the realm of literary culture, meanwhile, various forms of life writing have come to the fore as a response to this same wave of contemporary interest in the authentic. As David Shields points out in relation to the habits of contemporary readers, the “illusion of reality—the idea that something really happened—is providing us with [a] thrill right now. We’re riveted by the (seeming) rawness of something that appears to be direct from the source” (82). Sam Leith, meanwhile, makes a similar point in his discussion of misery memoir, commenting, “The idea that you’re close to real suffering is the selling point, not the writing.” From these remarks, we can again detect something of an investment in the dual meanings of the real discussed in the previous chapter; the evidential qualities of life writing combined with a fixation on affecting states of intensity. These kinds of depictions of “real suffering” form the primary object of analysis here, as I explore the uncritical conflation of porn and misery memoir. Misery memoir is the name given to the literary subgenre that, according to one commentator, was initiated by Dave Pelzer’s best-selling A Child Called It in 1995 and that “reached its zenith (or nadir) in 2006” with the publication of Stuart Howarth’s memoir of abuse Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed (Flood). It has by all accounts proved hugely popular with readers in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with reports stating that “As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of [. . .] grinding childhood misery” (Addley). According to research cited in The Times in November 2008, at the height of their popularity misery memoirs accounted for as much as 9% of the British market, equating to £24 million in sales (Sanghera).2 It is notable, I think, that these books should often be described as “misery porn”; that is, in such a manner as to align them with pornography as a representational genre. Admittedly, many misery memoirs do touch on issues such as child abuse and sexual violence, but others stage little or no engagement with adult entertainment’s primary territory of depictions of eroticized bodies and genital contact. Memoirs of mental health problems, or substance abuse, or body image issues need not mention sexual acts at all; James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces features very little in the way of graphic sexual content, for example, despite a rather conventional boy-meets-girl subplot. And yet this kind of text finds itself 143 Autobiography and/as the Real receiving a descriptive suffix that positions it as a species of porn. Once...