Can Alain de Botton even read?
I ask because this de Botton has out-parodied himself again by announcing that he was launching a porn website free of "stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation."
The real problem with current pornography is that it's so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.
Which is what leads me to the question, can Alain de Botton read? Because literary pornography is deeply embedded in questions about the world, about why people have sex, about awkward sex, about contexual sex, about great sex, about sensible, moral, kind and ambitious sex.
What have been doing for the past twenty years if not writing sex that marries the characters to their ethics, allows them to embrace their virtues even while having sex? Fuck me, if The Journal Entries didn't ultimately evolve into a pornography in which characters expressed, even during sex, their highest principles, then all of that writing has been for naught.
I'm sure I'm not alone in that assessment.
p.s. What the fuck is wrong with "earnestness" in pornography?