THE GRAMMAR OF GLAMOUR, EROTICIZING THE ORDINARY Pornography traffics in the ordinary. There are few things more common in human life than sexual relations. Sex is, to the species, what food is to the individual: its continuation, the guarantor of its survival. And, as with food, a cult of the exotic surrounds sex: glamour is to sex what haute cuisine is to food. Pornography, though always available as a kind of literary junk food, has nosed its way into haute couture and popular culture as a chic frisson to glamorize the ordinary. As such, it constitutes a full-scale assault on intimacy, a marketing of the most spiritual of appetites, an invasion of wonder by advertising. Does the blatant commercialization of sex leave any room for wonder, for the “wonderful,” or will that word become, in regards to sex, as pejorative as “awful” now is in regards to worship?

Dennis Clark, Elizabeth Huntington Hall