Exploring Our Hidden Fantasies and Taboos

When we think about those days, I think there is a sort of discrete social element to porn you had to know where to get it, you had to create a network of sharing, and you had to find a safe space to consume it in. Because of the conditions needed for watching a pron film - space and discretion, you might have had to share the experience. And however covert, this was a social process of discovering.

When something is taboo there is a lot of baggage to contend with before we can start asking the really interesting questions. Taboo is, in the way we are talking about it today, a hurdle and apprehension, something that keeps us from communicating honestly and openly. And it can lead to us censuring ourselves.

Now days, I think most of us consume our porn all by our selves, with the rare exception of a festival like this or Cinekink in the States or the Porn Film Fest in Berlin - places that ask of the audience to consider the art of the sex film, not just it's utility.

So what does this solitary, anti social experience mean for our fantasy lives? I think, how we consume porn has changed our relationship to it. And because it's ubiquity it's much easier to treat it purely as a tool, a trigger and not much more. And as triggers, I don't think we really... If you are just going to something as a trigger, I don't think it needs to be of a particularly good quality. I think you just need a provocative framework that kind of does it for you... And I'm just talking from a personal experience.

In addition to the provocative framework, the trigger, I now look at this fantasy as a way for me to sort of take my temperature. How I fantasize tells me about how I'm feeling about myself and how I feel in the world at any given point. And I think this kind of increase sits alongside things like dream interpretation or psycho analysis, you know, places where you go in your life to discover new things about yourself.

And I find that in my own fiction writing the more I pay attention to my erotic fantasies, who features in them, the power dynamics in play and so on, the more I sensitive I am to why I'm writing what I'm writing. And this certainly does not exclusively apply to when I'm writing about the topic of sex but also how I'm writing and thinking about people and the dynamics of relationships in the world.

Our Taboos they mediate the access we have to ourselves, and so in order to understand ourselves we really have to learn to understand them.

By investigating our taboos rather than turning away from them, we might find keys to parts of ourselves we didn't know were locked. We don't have to fling the doors open, but it's good to know what's inside.

At Viva Erotica our audience may not be masturbating in the cinema but they are hopefully finding themselves in dialog and discovering keys that unlock the possibility of being shameless and being free.

I would argue that we have to allow our erotic desire to become intricate part of the body of stories we tell about ourselves, or else, I think we are at risk of loosing out on really interesting personal insights and sources of inspiration.