Author: Andrew Sullivan

The confession box, in which Roman Catholics admit their sins to a priest, often separated by a screen or lattice, was an innovation of the 16th century Church. In an interview about his new book, The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, John Cornwell describes the impact it had on Western understandings of the self:

Confession in the box had an amazing shaping effect on the way that people thought about themselves. It helped foster a very private, and very modern, sense of interiority and guilt, and even new ways of articulating ideas about the body and sexuality. There’s a new focus on the idea of intention, too…. You go into the dark box, deep into your disembodied soul, and consider the degrees of intentionality in your actions. The emphasis is on the private rather than the public nature of sin.

He also highlights its connection to a more nefarious development – the Catholic sex abuse scandal:

Many priests in the wake of the scandal have admitted to using it as a way of grooming and testing children for their vulnerability.

This is something that the great John Jay Report, on pedophile priests, which was done in the US in the early part of the last decade, missed out on. They didn’t see the importance of confession. That’s why I think my book is important in an investigatory sense. I’m bringing that out. The statistics in the report show that a third of all of the crimes of abuse occurred in a confessional setting. … The interesting thing is that from the late 1950s, when all of this started to rise, to the mid 1980s—this was the period in which priests were going outside the box. So you get confession as something that takes place in the privacy of a priest’s room, or in the sacristy, or in his car. But something else happens that is very important: Many priests squared the circle of their offending lives and their pastoral lives by going to confession themselves. There you have the morally weak aspect of confession: this belief that you can commit terrible sins and then go and get them washed away…. There was a case in Australia not so long ago when a priest on trial admitted that he had confessed to sexually attacking children 1,500 times. He’d confessed it 1,500 times!

(Photo through screen of a confession box by Angie Chung)

Psychologist David Ley recently published a paper on the topic:

If there is so little empirical evidence for porn addiction, why has it become such a popular and widespread concept?

We put forth three reasons. One is that it is an easy answer. It is an easy answer and an easy scapegoat in a society and a media that applies the concept of addiction to any overuse of anything. Secondly, it is a cultural control of sexuality, and particularly the forms of sexuality that are now widely available and difficult to control due to modern technology. There is the old saying “don’t give away the milk away for free because nobody will buy the cow” as a way of controlling sexuality. Well, porn, and Internet porn in particular, doesn’t just give away milk, it puts it in a high-speed faucet right in your room. That is concerning to society, to people in relationships, because it represents a significant loss of control of sexual expression and experience.

Lastly, and this is one of the ones that is gonna be controversial, there is a large, lucrative industry that experiences tremendous secondary gain from the promulgation of this concept. As part of this paper we had a grad student call porn addiction facilities around the country and get an idea of the cost — and the costs were extraordinary. The average was $675 a day. These facilities were recommending or requiring stays anywhere between 15 and 90 days. Insurance doesn’t pay for this; it is cash only. The other thing that is really troubling is that there is no data to show that these very expensive programs generate positive results. There is an industry — and unfortunately I count the media in that as well, because the media makes lots and lots of hay by touting the issue ofporn addiction, and even by raising the controversy of “is it real or not?” There is a lot of money to be made in keeping this thing alive.

A NSFW video demonstrates virtual sex:

When Brian Merchant got a visit from Japanese sex toy company Tenga, he found their robot-assisted virtual sex program “more creepy than erotic”:

Ugh. In terms of function, it was pretty accurate; the robotic sex arm synched up with the virtual sex arm on screen.

“The physical dimensions of the Tenga were narrow, which matched the avatar I was virtua-bangin’,” [Merchant’s colleague Dan] Stuckey said. “I wonder if you’re stuck with the same controller though. What if you’re interested in someone else?”

Still, it’s not hard to imagine a future where someone puts all the pieces together and this kind of thing works seamlessly.

Meanwhile, Daniel Engber is disappointed with “the failed promise of 3-D porn”:

“The main problem is there aren’t a lot of 3-D TVs out there. That’s the biggest hold-back,” [adult-industry reporter and erotic 3-D photographer Mark] Kernes argues. But there are other problems, too.

For one thing, the studios had convinced themselves that 3-D DVDs could not be ripped and spread online. Having lost half its business to freebie websites since 2005, executives sought safe harbor in a new video format. But content pirates were not deterred. “The way it was sold to me is that you can’t torrent a 3-D movie,” says porn journalist Gram Ponante, “and of course that’s not true.” Shooting on This Ain’t Avatar took a full week, more than twice the time it takes to shoot most conventional sex films, but the movie sold just 6,000 units, Ponante says, barely enough to make back its production costs. (Ten years ago, the best-selling porn films would sell about 60,000.)

The same occurred in mainstream soft-core. In 2010 Piranha 3D made a $60 million profit on topless ultra-gore and a dismembered penis flying off the screen. The sequel,Piranha 3DD, was released in 2012 and grossed just $375,000 in the U.S. An erotic import from China, 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, got lots of credulous press in 2011 for being the “world’s first ever 3-D porn film” (it wasn’t), but failed to sell that many tickets. And last week saw the release in theaters and streaming video of the latest tent-pole 3-D smut: Nurse 3D, the story of a man-killing, girl-kissing, clothes-not-wearing serial killer whose exploits are somehow neither sexy nor fun.

Tristano, an experimental novel based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, was way ahead of its time:

First published in Italy in 1966, it has only been in the last decade that digital technology has made it possible for Tristano to be printed as its author Nanni Balestrini intended. Each of its ten chapters has fifteen pairs of paragraphs, arranged differently by an algorithm in each published copy. These are numbered on their covers by Verso Books, who have issued four thousand of its possible 109,027,350,432,000 variations in English for the first time.

In his foreword, Umberto Eco – a member of Italy’s Neoavanguardia movement with Balestrini and others, founded in 1963 – suggests that “originality and creativity are nothing more than the chance handling of a combination”. … Eco suggests several ways to approach Tristano: by reading a single copy and treating it as “unique, unrepeatable and unchangeable”; or “considering it to be the best … possible” version; or by reading several and comparing the outcomes.

Lizzy Davies elaborates on the project:

The first versions were published in Italy in 2007, and subsequently in Germany. Before the English-language editions, 10,000 copies were in circulation. Each has 10 chapters with 20 of a possible 30 paragraphs in different orders, with the paragraphs within the chapters also shuffled. “And from these two rules,” says Balestrini, “comes this number of millions, millions, millions of possible copies.”

When it was published in 1966, Tristano – named in an ironic homage to the hero of the Tristan and Iseult legend – was already an experimental hodgepodge. Needless to say, its digitally-reordered descendants are not novels- let alone love stories- in any traditional sense. Verso describe the book, in fact, as a “radical assault on the novel”; for Balestrini, it is a literary work- but also “a game” into the spirit of which the reader, if he is to appreciate it, must enter.

Holly Baxter wonders if the novel is “just an incredibly astute marketing ploy”:

At its core, as the foreword by Umberto Eco states, Tristano celebrates “an elevated number of possible outcomes”. Its beauty then is in the fact that, like a real life love story, you’ll never quite know what is going to happen. But is this romance, or is it just a kind of extension of the infinite monkey theory? In all honesty, I struggle to see this novel, which is also the anti-novel, as anything more than contrived.

Meanwhile, Brendan C. Byrne considers the novel in the context of other experimental literature:

Tristano is still, at least nominally, a novel, one where the voice and temporality can change not only every line but within every line. … It is tempting to compare Tristano to hypertext fiction, which seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence with Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories. And both do indeed seem to be interested in extracting and making visible the “rules” which govern modern and post-modern lit, breaking narrative down into its consituent elements. However, hypertext fictions places great value on “exploring” the possible sequences of these elements, while each iteration of Tristano is fixed, concrete. The computer has already explored; we merely have the path.