Measure for Measure and the Drama of Pornography

Abstract

In its illumination of the relation that exists between power and sexuality Measure for Measure provides a vision of the pornographic mind. Pornography, like most forms of eroticism, exists within the individual mind as it relates to a sexual object outside itself. Unlike most forms of eroticism, pornography is contingent upon the outside object being ultimately submissive to the originating, conceptualizing self. That is, pornography takes its form from the idea of total control of an imagined other. Thus pornography, like many forms of eroticism is fantastic, since it depends upon the submission of the ‘other’ to the originating self in a wholly impossible way. The other becomes merely a compliant element of the self, losing its individuality, its independence, its identity entirely in the initiating mind. In this sense, it is unreal. Thus while, conceivably, pornographic desires may be physically enacted, they can never be wholly satisfying because that element of absorption into the initiating self can never be complete or demonstrable. It is surely this factor of the pornographic mind being ultimately insatiable that accounts for the varieties and degrees of debasement that constitutes pornography. For the debasement is the purest form of the attempt to demonstrate and assert the existence and the extent of control of the originating mind over that other.