I got Mr Myrrh a subscription to the Sunday New York Times as a Valentine's Day present, just in time to read a magazine article by Chris Offutt, detailing his father's career as a pornographer. I will probably never be as prolific as Mr Offut V, and I'm fine with that, after reading about how removed he was from his family, but I'm very impressed by his output and his construction technique; impressed but also put off, because it seemed almost soulless. Of course, I wasn't there; I can't possibly know what he was thinking or feeling when assembling his binder full of descriptions of body parts and sex, or whether he felt a certain sense of accomplishment when he struck out a passage he'd finally come around to using in a story. It could be I'm accruing my own set of scenes and scenery with the shorts I share on my blog, and the process, for me, is neither dry nor reminiscent of an industrial approach to writing.
Once I'd finished the article I found myself wondering—I often find myself wondering—if it was a warning which applied to me. Am I at risk of alienating my family by focusing on writing porn? Unlike Mr Offut V, I'm writing during an era in which it's nearly impossible to make a living writing erotica, and I'm not diving into it in the hopes of paying for my children's dental work. I can choose to limit the time I spend on it and, even if I choose to spend quite a bit of time on it, I can choose to be aware of what others need in their relationships with me, I can choose to be fully present when I'm not writing.
As I thought about it, I found the fact that he was writing porn to be a separate issue from his relationship with his son. His son is sad that, over time, he lost his relationship with his father, and he blames that, not necessarily on the books, but on his father's obsession with sex, his juvenile jokes about it, his inability to behave appropriately around his kids. But children become alienated from their parents for a variety of reasons and, while it's easy to blame specific parental quirks, most of the time it's because we feel our parents do not really see us as we are, as we change and grow, and that we require the relationships to change and grow in response.
While Mr Offutt V's uncomfortable sex-oriented sense of humor doesn't necessarily hold up as the sole source of intergenerational alienation, it does, along with other details, point to the very strong possibility that, while Mr Offutt V argued that he was choosing to write porn for economic reasons, he was actually choosing to monetize his passions.
We usually applaud people who do that. We encourage people to do what they love and insist that the money will follow. But, of course, the money only follows if they can reach a certain level of output; this was true even before the advent of the internet. There are countless stories of people reaching that level at the expense of health and relationships. As a society, we deplore this loss, but we keep telling the story. As an economy, we really don't care about the personal losses, the gaps between generations as we scramble to balance our personal interests and our children's needs.
Chris Offutt didn't lose his dad to porn but to the very common human trait of obsession coupled with, of all the irony, a Puritanical work ethic harnessed to our capitalist, market economy. Adult children everywhere will read his story and find themselves thinking, "My dad was totally like that, except it was accounting," or, "Both parents were lawyers and I was a latchkey kid." Sorry, kids, your parents had lives outside of raising you. That's true whether you grew up in a capitalist economy or any other type, whether your parents had a superhero porn fetish or were into model trains.
So, yes, it must be quite delicious to some people to scapegoat Mr Offutt's father's chosen genre, but the salacious details of porn are a red herring. Most of us obsess over something to the point of ignoring, even damaging, our closest relationships. Some of us, like Mr Offutt V, reach that point in our efforts to make a living on our passions, and some of us reach that point without the help of financial incentives. It's not the particular object of one's obsession that's the problem, but the plotting out and acting on the obsession to the exclusion of one's beloveds.
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