Porn

Around my house we refer to reading ads for houses we would never actually want to live in as "real estate porn." Then there's catalogs for stuff we frankly find appalling in a voyeuristic sense (gold-plated doggy dishes...). The root of "pornography" (Wikipedia: The word derives from the Greek πορνογραφία (pornographia), which derives from the Greek words πόρνη (pornē, "prostitute"), γράφω (graphō, "to write or record"), and the suffix -ία (-ia, meaning "state of", "property of", or "place of"), thus meaning "a place to record prostitutes".) has to do with prostitution, the selling of that which should not (in most conventional moral codes) be sold.

Frankly I find sexual pornography and such really really weird. Never understood the appeal except for the obvious: a source of stimulus. It looks from here like a kind of dead end of expression.

But it occurs to me that some of the early discussion about the experience of scale in cartography may have some bearing here, in terms of the size of the group one is working within. What I mean is, the social context of porn is not that of a long-term monogamous relationship, but of a larger social group. The characters typically do not know each other well, but are not totally anonymous (that would be rape). They are interacting sexually within a larger but identifiable social context.

[The following is probably all deeply covered in Sociology 101 textbooks, but I took Anthropology 101 instead, so I'm making it up out of whole cloth]

I'm going to theorize a scale of social interaction, starting at "nucleus," which is long-term partnerships of 2-5 people, or maybe a couple more (Well, actually we should start with "personal" where the social group is one). The next step up would be "clan" or "team", for groups of 6-20, which work together for a year or three. Next would be "village" or "congregation," groups of 30-200 centered around a physical location but with widely varying sensibilities, but with no members (unless there is a professional leader) actually knowing everyone in the group. Somewhere on up the scale is "nation," a group of 100,000 or more where the members share some basic common cultural facet of identity but little common social activity. Still further up the scale would be "species" and "planet."

The point is, scale determines what kind of interaction is expected. And a lot of this expectation is culturally driven: I expect sex to be at the nucleus level, and it seems alien to me when it is part of a clan structure or (as with porn) at the village level, with no intimacy and no deep knowledge between the partners. But certainly there are those for whom this is satisfying.

Cartography is about the experience of space at (minimally) a village level, more likely a national or planet level. What I and Steven and Margaret and Mike have been talking about is using the language of cartography at clan or nucleus level. But the social expectations surrounding this sort of land-talk are going to be as big as the porn divide. Steven's experience in trying to talk from an arts/experiential point of view to cartographers over the long haul has, I think been alien in this way, but I see his point of view slowly making its way into the sensibility of the cartographic community.

In religious terms, I think something similar goes on in the difference between individual mystical experience, small-group worship, and large-scale corporate worship. If we've grown into one scale of experience, it requires a difficult sort of open-mindedness to accept the validity of experience at another scale, particularly a scale that is orders of magnitude different.

I admit to bringing porn into the discussion partly for shock value, but I think the visceral discomfort many of us feel around porn is precisely the sort of conceptual dislocation we've run into here, in talking about the grid, and in talking in general about cartography.