This excellent blog by my friend Dave got me thinking about what he terms ‘emotional porn’. It’s one of those things that now my eyes are open I have started seeing evidence of it everywhere. Including when I’m least expecting it…
Owen got given some book tokens as a present when he left his last workplace so yesterday we went to Borders to spend them. It was about 6 o clock and eerily quiet which made for some good, if slightly unnerving browsing. Now, I’m not much of a fan of Borders. Not just because it is a huge corporate brand that is pushing the independent bookstores of York out of business, but also because it is often hugely crowded and I tend to find it hard to track down the things I need on the rare occasions I do shop there. It is just too damn big! The vouchers, though, were only redeemable in the Borders franchise, so that’s where we went.
Now we both are guilty of this, but Owen in particular takes hours and hours and hours to spend money. Mostly because we don’t have a lot of it and so when we get some spare we like to be careful that we are spending it wisely. Bear in mind that he has had these vouchers since February and he has been pondering over what to spend them on ever since. It’s actually quite a fun process; that ten pound note that your Nan sends you in the post for your birthday opens up a huge world of possibilities to be deliberated and chewed over during long strolls down the river and lingering coffee breaks. It’s more fun anyway, in our minds, to really give these things some serious thought rather than simply spending it on what ever shiny thing catches your eye- soon to be forgotten about. The Jowen method makes a little go a long way, it makes the anticipation almost as fun as the event and from an ethical and frugal point of view it makes you remember the value of money. It means that whatever you end up with, you know yes I really wanted this. When I have ten pounds to spend, I often think about the implications of the note in my hand; ‘Owen would have to work two whole hours to earn this, so is X really worth that? In five years will I still be valuing this, or at least its memory? I picture Owen’s aching back, his tired eyes and throbbing head, then think ‘Do I need to spend this?’ My antidote to advertising has always been the power of careful thought and a deliberate harnessing of my imagination. But anyway, I am digressing miles from what I was supposed to be talking about. Back to the story…
When Owen finally felt mentally prepared to actually go to the shop and wrestle with the big decision of what to purchase, he warned me when we got there (with that look in his eyes) that it could take ‘some time’. Sigh. So we agreed to meet up an hour later and see how he’d got on. In the meantime I went round the shop. I spent most of my time in philosophy and religion, but also swung by gender studies, erotic fiction, and the cookbook section. In the space of fifty five minutes, I went from Socrates to Jamie Oliver and back again. Then, on my way back to the DVD section to meet O, I noticed the psychology wall. Now, it’s been a while since I last browsed a well stocked psychology section and I have my reasons for that. But something caught my eye. One whole subsection, wall to floor, was covered in a particular kind of book.
You would know the kind if you saw it. They are always white, usually with a blurred picture of a child hunched over looking scared or teary. They have a jagged font and a punchy title. Quite eye catching, really. The craze was started by an autobiography called ‘A Child called It’ and by the looks of it there have now been literally hundreds of spin offs and copycats. I had no idea there was such a market for these hundreds of tales detailing bleak, graphic, horrific abuse. Yet I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This trend is nothing new. We have always, as a nation, been a bit obsessed by the neglected child. In terms of literary history look at David Copperfield, Oliver Twist or the recent spate of gritty nostalgic biographies inspired by Angela’s Ashes. Even modern day Children’s heroes like Tracey beaker and Harry Potter are renowned for their hard lives and the books don’t skirt around issues of abuse, hardship and neglect. The books I read yesterday, though, take the obsession to another level. I looked at the wall to ceiling display and felt profoundly nauseous. There was something not quite right about all this, not right at all.
I read the back of one of the books. There was one of the most graphic descriptions of child abuse I have ever read. It was a boy having his face pushed in the fire and branded with a poker. Then I read another one, it was a creepy description of a girl about to be raped by her father. I read another; it was the story of a five year old child having their hand smashed with a hammer. I probably read about ten of these dust jackets, each to design to shock and horrify, and… titillate? Surely not. As I read the covers, I became aware of a sort of competitiveness that was going on between the books. There was a definite vying for top dog. Each was trying to be the most shocking, the most horrific, the most stomach turning. I got the distinct impression that the authors and publishers were appealing to a certain audience; the people who were reading these books were enjoying the shock.
When I, as a writer, examined the language, it was written to hook, to thrill, to entice. Of course these are books; commercial entities and the publishers need to sell copies. So there’s got to be some kind of emotional worm dangling as bait. But I think it goes deeper than that. All the while, I was just thinking to myself, this phenomenon is pornographic. Emotionally pornographic. People are getting big kicks out of this shit and not the legendary men in long coats who hide behind school bus shelters but middle aged women who knit jumpers for jumble sales and middle class students who read this stuff on the bus on the way to college. Maybe, I thought, trying to be generous, these books are serving a purpose in educating us about the horrors of child abuse. This is such a taboo that maybe I’m reacting to it in a funny way, maybe I’m seeing it as pornographic when it is just a highly charged emotional subject, one of the highest charged in this society and consequently I’m not being fair. After all, abuse is emotive. Hence the emotional packaging, right? Or maybe the intended readers of these books are the many millions of people who have lived through abuse themselves and reading such graphic descriptions might be, in the long run, cathartic and healing. They might help you to come to terms with the deep wounds and long lasting scars, safe in the knowledge that there are others who have been to hell and back.
I tried to be fair, I really did.
But none of my theories rang true. The display just seemed more and more horrific the more I looked at it. It stank of profiteering, not healing; it was one flea ridden cash cow right there in the middle of the bookshop. And people were lapping it up. Even at such a quiet time at least four or five people came and picked up one of these books in the time I was browsing. They were not reacting to these stories with solemnity and reflection on the evils of abuse and pedophilia, but responded to them like the soulless commodities they were; flicking through, reading the juicy bits, occasionally raising eyebrows, putting them down again.
Then, as I was turning away, one woman reader tutted to herself and shook her head.
And I just thought; 'that just bloody well sums it up, doesn’t it?' Yes, I accept that people read these books for a variety of reasons, but I believe many buy them to gain themselves a hollow victory. Through reading the hardback highs and lows of some poor bastard’s misfortune they attempt to salvage some posititivity about their own lives. People read these so they can be assured of their own morality and so called happiness. They think ‘Thank god my life is so much better than that. True my daughter may hate me and my husband drinks a bottle of wine a night and we hardly speak to each other. I may hate my life, but God, I never poked his eyes out with a nail gun and even though when my baby girl kept me up for two years straight I wanted to throw her out the window because I was so exhausted, I never did. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person.’
So we fall into the trap that the ruling parties and state apparatus (of which major publishing houses are a part) have set for us. We read, devour (and maybe collect) this emotional pornography rather than facing our own problems or examining the genuine injustices in the world and the systems and attitudes that make abuse such a common place thing in our society. We think poor sod and like the woman in the bookshop we shake our heads and say that’s terrible, maybe rant about it to our friends later. Maybe, in rare cases, we go and give ten quid to the NSPCC. We do this not out of a state of genuine compassion and empathy, but simply to make ourselves feel better, maybe even to make us feel something. After all, as any psychiatrist in the world will tell you; a lot of people go through life feeling emotionally numb and these books which use language so skillfully to drum up deep emotions are almost like drugs to some of us. That is why when I went on Amazon to examine some of these books again, I noticed in the reviews a trend; there are a lot of people out there who are reading a lot of these books. There are people who are ‘into’ the child abuse genre. These people are not sick or depraved; it is much more complex than that. They are just the extreme end of people who are addicted to this widespread emotional pornography and they need help.
As a society we need to learn to face our own genuine emotions, even when they are dark and scary. We need to learn to stop demonizing people and seeing the world in such black and white bipolar terms. Whilst this attitude may temporarily give us an ego boost, the I’m a good person effect, it doesn’t get to the root of the matter and leaves us genuinely unsatisfied. Emotions are deep, complex things. Pornography, by its very nature is surface based and fantastical. That is why emotional pornography is seductive, but ultimately is an empty promise. It never really grapples with the heart of the problem and is designed to always leave you wanting more: the next thrill, the next drama, the next more graphic book. It distorts the deepest truths of human existence and turns deep suffering into a simple commodity, to be sold as fixes to us, the numb dumb masses. We are junkies, plain and simple and as long as we are hooked on this shit, believing the lies, we will never know true compassion, or wisdom. To be happy both as a society and as individuals we need to kick the habit of emotional porn and start to wrestle with the huge complex grey areas of our existence. Human experience is rich in depth and intensity, encompassing a huge rang of emotions. How sad then that most of our focus is on the negative ones, such as sadness, anger, jealousy and endless, endless craving. We must learn to renounce this pornographic quick fix, see it for the trap that it is and settle for the real deal. We must come to terms with our own feelings and not be afraid to express our genuine thoughts. Just as a sexual pornography addict must learn how to enjoy genuine flesh on flesh contact again we also have to learn how to connect. Authentic emotions expressed within connected communities of interdependent people is the way out of this sad situation. Most of all, we must learn to face ourselves; otherwise if we’re not careful our inner lives will be reduced to the emotional equivalent of an unfulfilling and lonely mess in a tissue.
Owen got given some book tokens as a present when he left his last workplace so yesterday we went to Borders to spend them. It was about 6 o clock and eerily quiet which made for some good, if slightly unnerving browsing. Now, I’m not much of a fan of Borders. Not just because it is a huge corporate brand that is pushing the independent bookstores of York out of business, but also because it is often hugely crowded and I tend to find it hard to track down the things I need on the rare occasions I do shop there. It is just too damn big! The vouchers, though, were only redeemable in the Borders franchise, so that’s where we went.
Now we both are guilty of this, but Owen in particular takes hours and hours and hours to spend money. Mostly because we don’t have a lot of it and so when we get some spare we like to be careful that we are spending it wisely. Bear in mind that he has had these vouchers since February and he has been pondering over what to spend them on ever since. It’s actually quite a fun process; that ten pound note that your Nan sends you in the post for your birthday opens up a huge world of possibilities to be deliberated and chewed over during long strolls down the river and lingering coffee breaks. It’s more fun anyway, in our minds, to really give these things some serious thought rather than simply spending it on what ever shiny thing catches your eye- soon to be forgotten about. The Jowen method makes a little go a long way, it makes the anticipation almost as fun as the event and from an ethical and frugal point of view it makes you remember the value of money. It means that whatever you end up with, you know yes I really wanted this. When I have ten pounds to spend, I often think about the implications of the note in my hand; ‘Owen would have to work two whole hours to earn this, so is X really worth that? In five years will I still be valuing this, or at least its memory? I picture Owen’s aching back, his tired eyes and throbbing head, then think ‘Do I need to spend this?’ My antidote to advertising has always been the power of careful thought and a deliberate harnessing of my imagination. But anyway, I am digressing miles from what I was supposed to be talking about. Back to the story…
When Owen finally felt mentally prepared to actually go to the shop and wrestle with the big decision of what to purchase, he warned me when we got there (with that look in his eyes) that it could take ‘some time’. Sigh. So we agreed to meet up an hour later and see how he’d got on. In the meantime I went round the shop. I spent most of my time in philosophy and religion, but also swung by gender studies, erotic fiction, and the cookbook section. In the space of fifty five minutes, I went from Socrates to Jamie Oliver and back again. Then, on my way back to the DVD section to meet O, I noticed the psychology wall. Now, it’s been a while since I last browsed a well stocked psychology section and I have my reasons for that. But something caught my eye. One whole subsection, wall to floor, was covered in a particular kind of book.
You would know the kind if you saw it. They are always white, usually with a blurred picture of a child hunched over looking scared or teary. They have a jagged font and a punchy title. Quite eye catching, really. The craze was started by an autobiography called ‘A Child called It’ and by the looks of it there have now been literally hundreds of spin offs and copycats. I had no idea there was such a market for these hundreds of tales detailing bleak, graphic, horrific abuse. Yet I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This trend is nothing new. We have always, as a nation, been a bit obsessed by the neglected child. In terms of literary history look at David Copperfield, Oliver Twist or the recent spate of gritty nostalgic biographies inspired by Angela’s Ashes. Even modern day Children’s heroes like Tracey beaker and Harry Potter are renowned for their hard lives and the books don’t skirt around issues of abuse, hardship and neglect. The books I read yesterday, though, take the obsession to another level. I looked at the wall to ceiling display and felt profoundly nauseous. There was something not quite right about all this, not right at all.
I read the back of one of the books. There was one of the most graphic descriptions of child abuse I have ever read. It was a boy having his face pushed in the fire and branded with a poker. Then I read another one, it was a creepy description of a girl about to be raped by her father. I read another; it was the story of a five year old child having their hand smashed with a hammer. I probably read about ten of these dust jackets, each to design to shock and horrify, and… titillate? Surely not. As I read the covers, I became aware of a sort of competitiveness that was going on between the books. There was a definite vying for top dog. Each was trying to be the most shocking, the most horrific, the most stomach turning. I got the distinct impression that the authors and publishers were appealing to a certain audience; the people who were reading these books were enjoying the shock.
When I, as a writer, examined the language, it was written to hook, to thrill, to entice. Of course these are books; commercial entities and the publishers need to sell copies. So there’s got to be some kind of emotional worm dangling as bait. But I think it goes deeper than that. All the while, I was just thinking to myself, this phenomenon is pornographic. Emotionally pornographic. People are getting big kicks out of this shit and not the legendary men in long coats who hide behind school bus shelters but middle aged women who knit jumpers for jumble sales and middle class students who read this stuff on the bus on the way to college. Maybe, I thought, trying to be generous, these books are serving a purpose in educating us about the horrors of child abuse. This is such a taboo that maybe I’m reacting to it in a funny way, maybe I’m seeing it as pornographic when it is just a highly charged emotional subject, one of the highest charged in this society and consequently I’m not being fair. After all, abuse is emotive. Hence the emotional packaging, right? Or maybe the intended readers of these books are the many millions of people who have lived through abuse themselves and reading such graphic descriptions might be, in the long run, cathartic and healing. They might help you to come to terms with the deep wounds and long lasting scars, safe in the knowledge that there are others who have been to hell and back.
I tried to be fair, I really did.
But none of my theories rang true. The display just seemed more and more horrific the more I looked at it. It stank of profiteering, not healing; it was one flea ridden cash cow right there in the middle of the bookshop. And people were lapping it up. Even at such a quiet time at least four or five people came and picked up one of these books in the time I was browsing. They were not reacting to these stories with solemnity and reflection on the evils of abuse and pedophilia, but responded to them like the soulless commodities they were; flicking through, reading the juicy bits, occasionally raising eyebrows, putting them down again.
Then, as I was turning away, one woman reader tutted to herself and shook her head.
And I just thought; 'that just bloody well sums it up, doesn’t it?' Yes, I accept that people read these books for a variety of reasons, but I believe many buy them to gain themselves a hollow victory. Through reading the hardback highs and lows of some poor bastard’s misfortune they attempt to salvage some posititivity about their own lives. People read these so they can be assured of their own morality and so called happiness. They think ‘Thank god my life is so much better than that. True my daughter may hate me and my husband drinks a bottle of wine a night and we hardly speak to each other. I may hate my life, but God, I never poked his eyes out with a nail gun and even though when my baby girl kept me up for two years straight I wanted to throw her out the window because I was so exhausted, I never did. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person.’
So we fall into the trap that the ruling parties and state apparatus (of which major publishing houses are a part) have set for us. We read, devour (and maybe collect) this emotional pornography rather than facing our own problems or examining the genuine injustices in the world and the systems and attitudes that make abuse such a common place thing in our society. We think poor sod and like the woman in the bookshop we shake our heads and say that’s terrible, maybe rant about it to our friends later. Maybe, in rare cases, we go and give ten quid to the NSPCC. We do this not out of a state of genuine compassion and empathy, but simply to make ourselves feel better, maybe even to make us feel something. After all, as any psychiatrist in the world will tell you; a lot of people go through life feeling emotionally numb and these books which use language so skillfully to drum up deep emotions are almost like drugs to some of us. That is why when I went on Amazon to examine some of these books again, I noticed in the reviews a trend; there are a lot of people out there who are reading a lot of these books. There are people who are ‘into’ the child abuse genre. These people are not sick or depraved; it is much more complex than that. They are just the extreme end of people who are addicted to this widespread emotional pornography and they need help.
As a society we need to learn to face our own genuine emotions, even when they are dark and scary. We need to learn to stop demonizing people and seeing the world in such black and white bipolar terms. Whilst this attitude may temporarily give us an ego boost, the I’m a good person effect, it doesn’t get to the root of the matter and leaves us genuinely unsatisfied. Emotions are deep, complex things. Pornography, by its very nature is surface based and fantastical. That is why emotional pornography is seductive, but ultimately is an empty promise. It never really grapples with the heart of the problem and is designed to always leave you wanting more: the next thrill, the next drama, the next more graphic book. It distorts the deepest truths of human existence and turns deep suffering into a simple commodity, to be sold as fixes to us, the numb dumb masses. We are junkies, plain and simple and as long as we are hooked on this shit, believing the lies, we will never know true compassion, or wisdom. To be happy both as a society and as individuals we need to kick the habit of emotional porn and start to wrestle with the huge complex grey areas of our existence. Human experience is rich in depth and intensity, encompassing a huge rang of emotions. How sad then that most of our focus is on the negative ones, such as sadness, anger, jealousy and endless, endless craving. We must learn to renounce this pornographic quick fix, see it for the trap that it is and settle for the real deal. We must come to terms with our own feelings and not be afraid to express our genuine thoughts. Just as a sexual pornography addict must learn how to enjoy genuine flesh on flesh contact again we also have to learn how to connect. Authentic emotions expressed within connected communities of interdependent people is the way out of this sad situation. Most of all, we must learn to face ourselves; otherwise if we’re not careful our inner lives will be reduced to the emotional equivalent of an unfulfilling and lonely mess in a tissue.
2 comments:
I completely agree and am flattered to have coined a phrase :-)
It's weird, those books are a genre like any other. I have observed the same thing, people coming into the library and taking child abuse book after child abuse book out. And more and more keep coming because publishers know they will sell.
The people who seem to read these books are predominantly women. They seem to be either teenage girls, middle aged housewives or old aged pensioners.
It's a strange phenomenon. I mean, the books are written by people who are abused, and yet as you say they are written pornographically. And these peoples are making millions out of their abuse. It is likely that people may begin to manufacture abused lives to cash in (if they haven't already done so.) And in terms of Pelzer, well he had a trilogy to his books and the rest of his family, after seeing Dave's success have also written their accounts. How strange is that.
The other aspect that appeals to people when they read these books, apart from the "i am a good person" thing is the whole "any life can have a happy ending" because that is part of the way the books work.
They are cathartic. Terrible things happen that are very bad and then the hero/heroine finally gets through it all, learns to love again, and has a wonderful life. It is society playing out its fears but with the endings all being that the protagonist settles down into having a useful and productive existence within the excepted areas of society.
If the books maybe didn't have this third act filled with hope, maybe people might get angry, they might get affected, but instead they get their emotional porn fix and then have it all tied up in a big life affirming bow.
Ultimately these memoirs do not ring true, because they force into a narrative shape things which are not narrative and then sell them to people who have this desperate craving for emotion.
x
D
excellent point. I think as a general rule biographies are guilty of trying to give a neat narrative structure to something that is far more complex than that, and these are no exception, certainly.
You make a good point about the 'third act' being essential for the fix of emotional porn, and I am glad you picked up on it because I hadn't thought of it that way (I think it shines through that I have only ever read the backs of these books, rather than gone on a journey to read one of these in it's sickening entirety.)
I agree, I thought it was weird all the spin offs, with Pelzers brother getting in on the act and everything, that was one of the things that made me think 'hang on....is this really a good thing?' the most.
Emotional porn is a good phrase to have coined, you should be pleased :-) It makes a lot of sense to me, and like I say, I am seeing evidence of it all over the shop.
jx
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