Rethinking Pornhub’s Role in the Literary Zeitgeist
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Andrew Maynard
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“Is it like the old Playboy magazine; you have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?” —Justice Alito
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When the internet told me what Justice Alito had said, my first response was What’s a Gore Vidal? This inquiry pinballed into a New York Times in-memoriam article where a Mr. Epstein was quoted: “I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist.” A hyper-specific, postmortem drubbing from which new questions emerged. Like why was Jeffrey Epstein being a total dick to a dead writer? And what kind of writer provoked a child sexual abuser to question his aptitude for longform fiction in an obituary? A few more clicks to discover the quote was from Jason Epstein, Vidal’s former editor at Random House. This was not a smutty jab but rather a deferential reverence for Vidal’s capacity for the literary essay.
I digress to mourn the life that Jason Epstein used to live. A life where he could be quoted by last name only without the combustible risk of being noxiously misidentified. Maybe I’m just sensitive because I have an Aunt Karen who has never fussed about anything trivial, and I know a gentle man named Phil whose grandkids have called him P Diddy for over a decade. Phil is not the victim I should be centering, but he is the one I know, unlike Gore Vidal, whose works I have still not read. But I did Google Gore Vidal again and it turns out he had a public feud with Truman Capote, whom I have read and who I once learned from an episode of Radiolab is at least partially responsible for the mass proliferation of a false narrative about Stockholm syndrome, where women’s narratives were manipulated to make the senseless make sense. But this is not new. And I learned Gore Vidal was a public intellectual who took serious exception to the ideas of William F. Buckley, a political commentator I only know because I used to show my students a debate between him and the public intellectual and essayist James Baldwin.
Who in this day and age do we consider a public intellectual? Anyone? Roxane Gay? Ta-nehisi Coates? Joe Rogan? Elon fucking Musk? Or has the title eroded into official defunctness? Are there any essayists we care enough about to follow their feuds with one another? I don’t mean the habitual sexual misconduct allegations that command our attention and news cycle for a half hour at a time but rather ordinary people caring enough about modern writers to feel invested in their banal friendships and quarrels. Maybe I’m just dull, or simply farsighted, but it can feel quite grim living in this future that would be assumed to have progressed from a past where a bunch of men who slept with other men expressed bold, complex ideas that were essential threads in the cultural tapestry of America, where pictures of naked women were once sandwiched between nuanced ideological discourse. Can we go back? Not to all of it, of course, but to the part where our ideas and bodies could reveal something new on the page for a mass audience?
What if Alito’s question was actually meant to chart a path forward? What if the question that tickled the full spectrum of the literary and the I-have-a-special-VPN-for-Pornhub types was actually a solution masked in political irony? Because I imagine that in all sincerity a Buckley essay in Playboy was a draw to men like Alito. I’m not going to pretend Alito skipped the titties on his way to the essay, because I bet he appreciated both, and I think that’s beautiful. And there is an obvious connection that can be artfully traced with a charcoal pencil between the vulnerability of the essay and literal nakedness for anyone who has read Philip Lopate’s “Portrait of My Body.” What if we morphed Alito’s smart-assery into actionable policy? What if we took him seriously? What if porn was paired with a curated essay? What if everyone who watched videos of faux step siblings banging was also asked to read Tony Earley’s “Somehow Form a Family.” What if the people who seek whips and ball gags had to mull over “Pain Scale” by Eula Biss. Do we not think this would make the world a better place? Do we not think the marriage of literature and pornography might be more effective in the internet age than six-inch regulatory hurdles? Because kids are not going to stop watching porn, but they certainly might stop caring about the power of human-generated ideas, the thrill of deducing your experience and world until all that’s left connects in a way that enables a stranger to see a reflection of their world in the waters of yours. Because ideas and language are like rocks that, when flung at the proper trajectory and velocity, can skip from an Alito joke to my sweet Aunt Karen to the death of the public intellectual, and the circles of each jump do not become one another but instead overlap forming the slightest of venn diagrams that insist there are connections in even the most disparate of places while blurring the rest of the world. And I’ll go ahead and say it: I support Phil’s decision to be called whatever he pleases and I would like to recognize the name of the co-founder of The New York Review of Books instead of the creep who hanged in prison. And again I have not read Gore Vidal. And we’ll give Alito the benefit of the doubt and say he probably has a rudimentary working knowledge of Pornhub. And in this age of access and internet and opportunity there is time for us to transform all of this. Perhaps on the same site.
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Andrew Maynard has still not read Gore Vidal. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash Frog, Complete Sentence, HAD, DIAGRAM, Mud Season Review, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. He has completed a novel that is hiding in plain sight in the inboxes of playing-hard-to-get literary agents. If you’re looking for another Essay Daily piece to read, consider this one. If you’re looking to represent or publish a gripping, full-bodied narrative about moving slowly in the desert, press reply to my query and I’ll send you the manuscript!
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