Pornographic romance

Kahn: “No great insight is required to see the movement toward the pornographic in the representations of romance, or the move toward romance in the genre of the pornographic. This is the great secret inside the romantic: romantic lovers are coconspirators in the pornographic moment. The internalization of the pornographic moment is central to the contemporary imagination of the romantic. This is not sexuality domesticated into family and children, but the claim of completion outside of time and language. This is just the claim of the pornographic. For however briefly lovers meet, the romance/pornographic engagement is a state to itself. It needs no direction from others; it sets itself in opposition to all others.”

Romantics protest: There’s only one beloved, while the pornographer has many. Kahn points out, though, that “if the romantic other appears without explanation, without cause in our ordinary experience, then there is no great distance between the pornographic and the romantic. Each makes a claim to meaning through the ‘stranger’ who appears as if from nowhere.”

Then this killer finish: “Whether that stranger is one or many is a matter of aesthetic choice within genre.”