Panic Pornography

 "To my mind art exists in the realm of contemplation, and is bound by some sort of imaginative transposition. The moment art becomes an incentive to action it loses its true character. This is my objection to painting with a communist program and it would also apply to pornography."

Kenneth Clark testimony to The Longford Committee on Pornography.

“Pornography is a judgmental term used by those who remain closed to eroticism... These culturally underprivileged people – among them possibly so-called art experts and prosecuting attorneys – perceive sexuality as a threat even when it occurs in an aesthetically-tempered format. Even the observation that a work has offended or violated the viewpoints of many still does not make it pornographic. Art is dangerous! Works of art can offend and injure the feelings of others; they do not always make viewers happy. After all, is it not the duty of art to annoy and to stir things up?”

Hans-Jurgen Dopp, 1000 Erotic Works of Genius, Parkstone International: Singapore, 2008, P.8.

 

“It will never be possible to raise the perception of pornographic works of art to Immanuel Kant’s level of the aesthetic distance of “disinterested pleasure.” For pictures of sex not only refer to sexuality, but are themselves eroticization... There are hardly any examples of revolutionary works of art or philosophical concepts that have failed to provoke fear, rejection, hatred and multiple forms of repression. Self-censorship of extreme or violent pornographic material should restrict itself to two points, independently of the question of artistic quality. The first is the potential damage to viewers. Within these bounds of acceptability, everything can be left to the dictates of untrammeled pleasure, both in theory and in practice.”

Juri Steiner, Thomas Koerfer, Stripped Bare: The Body Revealed in Contemporary Art, 2004, P188-189.

Everywhere the old world is vanishing, and I am a part of it. Today in 2020, there is nothing shocking or transgressive about pornography or male nudity when we have things like Naked Attraction on mainstream TV in the UK and Ireland. It is as though we have gone from a sanitised world, censored and idealised, by rank hypocrites, eunuchs, frigid housewives, dried up spinsters, and nuns - who railed against sex, the evils of men, and the appalling choices of young women - to a pornified world shaped by sexual freaks, nymphomaniacs, and psychotic sexual thugs. 

Today, nobody gives a dam what transgressive artists draw or paint. Painting, sculpture, and drawing have long since been replaced as the social mediums and definers of reality in the West, by photography, cinema, TV, and now social media. It is only if their transgressive artistic efforts are given a platform on TV or social media that anyone gets offended – but even then, the rage is usually directed at the TV producers or social media platforms for giving such work the oxygen of publicity. Afterall, transgressive art can only become transgressive it is exposed to the public!

So, my obsession with porn is dated and irrelevant, as are my many arguments with Feminism. But in many ways, I was proved right! Today’s youth have come to terms with porn, in a way that their elders were never able to do. And porn today is frankly something everyone with a smart phone can make, and a shocking number of people do. In fact, today porn and the fantasy of flesh, has replaced much of the real transgressions of the flesh. It is the victory of the image over the act, of representation over lived experience, and fantasy over the flesh. Yet, time and time again, periods of debauchery have been followed by periods of puritan censorship. And issues of sexuality are rarely resolved one way or the other. 

              

From the age of fifteen to nineteen, I desperately struggled to find my artistic identity, plundering both artistic, literary, and philosophical ideas - which accumulated in a pantheon of artistic rebels and intellectual transgressives who inspired me. After undergoing several stylistic and philosophical changes, I emerged in 1993 as a manic transgressive pornographer against society, the art world, liberated women, and macho men – a vulgar dandy. The intensity and vastness of my artist output and megalomaniacal ambition pushed aside my existential, sexual, mental, and social anxieties from my mind and gave me a mission. But the combination of my misanthropy, pornographic source material, and expressive and outsider artistic influences made my art very unpalatable to people. I believed that I was glorifying and making beautiful - marginalized porn images. Yet although my pornographic art was explicit, and obscene, it was not in a way that hedonistic viewers of porn would have appreciated. My pornographic artworks had a voyeuristic trauma, phallic failure and torment, gynophobia, and explosive psychosis that made them very unsettling. My porn paintings were Fine Art debased by porn, and gutted of all civilised values, but it was also porn psychologically exposed and pushed towards self-critique, self-hatred, and nihilism.  

                

Without a father or male role model, I grew up surrounded by women, and dominated by my mother, I had a pathological but ambivalent fixation on my mother and fear of women. Growing up, watching my mother swing violently in and out of raving insanity, and repeatedly physically and verbally attacked by her – I became like a cowering dog watching her from a distance in terror. This has made me fatally withdrawn, passive, voyeuristic, anxious, and paranoid - especially regarding women. My overly feminine identification became a problem as I approached manhood and could not live up to the expectations of being a man. I was extremely good at being a boy in distress getting women to help me, and mother me, but I could not be the kind of real man that women found sexually desirable. Also because of my mother, I did not see women as maternal, caring, empathic, nurturing, and kind-hearted. Instead, I saw many of them as psychotic and abusive monsters. I was fundamentally afraid of women, and they only raised tormenting doubts about my sexuality.

                

Moreover, my relationship to porn was very conflicted, anxious, and indeed life-threatening. People assume that there is only one response to pornography. A dim-witted man looks at porn, instantly gets a hard-on, masturbates, cums, and stops watching. But in my experience looking at porn can be far more complex. Of course, I can feel lust, but I can also feel shame, self-loathing, disgust, boredom, apathy, anguish, misogyny, misanthropy, or suicidal. Those who fatuously claimed that I merely wanted to shock, were wrong. There are so many easier ways I could have shocked people without having to develop my craft and skill, and work for decades on my art. Like Sigmund Freud, radical-Feminists, and the Christian far-right, as a transgressive pornographer, I believed that sex was at the heart of everything, and it was a very serious and important matter. In this way, I was the mirror image of the female puritans I loathed. And I had nothing but contempt for those that treated sex just as a dirty joke.  Believe it or not, I was very pro-Feminist in my youth, and I loathed macho thugs and their crude sexism and the women who could not resist them and who were often as vulgar and disgusting as the men.  

                  

So, what was I rebelling against in my pornographic paintings? The representation of life fed to me on my totally censored TV throughout my young life! I knew all I was being presented with was a censored, sanitised, and idealised version of life on TV, and I vowed to paint what TV would not show me! Naïve and inexperienced, I did not understand why people lied about love, sex, relationships, and porn and found cunning ways to talk around them. I vowed to paint the obscene truth about the relationship between men and women, male desire and all those aspects of feminity that TV deemed unacceptable, misogynistic, and anti-Feminist. Puritan Irish state TV, dominated by a geriatric mindset, went out of its way to avoid giving any platform to beautiful young Irish women, never mind sexy ones. Irish puritan fears of getting caught naked even extended to the net curtains on many Irish homes which made it impossible to see the owners and my mother and I also had net curtains on our windows. And in the late 1980s in Ireland, it was also fashionable for many Irish alterative girls (the kind I loved) to have short, bobbed hair, and dress like Tomboys, wearing big baggy woollen jumpers and jeans and Doc Martin boots. So, I had frankly no idea what an Irish girl’s body might look like. In addition, I was repulsed by slutty Irish girls in short dresses with low cleaves and felt totally intimidated by them - and avoided them like the plague. Moreover, since I was terrified to look at any girls up close - I was only familiar with them from a safe but very idealised distance. 

                  

Growing up in a chronically repressed country that censored nearly all aspects of life, I became obsessed with obscene truth and reality. Which is why I have always looked askant at culture on TV with its inane gameshows, talk shows, dramas, and even so-called ‘reality’ shows. Everything on TV is staged, edited, and censored to provide entertainment, education and promote the propaganda and social norms of the élite. Yet, worse than the fakery of TV culture, is the way it is often presented to us as though it was actual real life! In addition, actual life that is not fit to be aired on TV, because it is too politically incorrect, pessimistic, misanthropic, insane, depressing, sexist, racist, violent, or sexual is often talked about as though it was subhuman and beyond discussion. It is as though TV culture has turned the whole world into a theatre for middle-class overeducated lovies who think that anything that is not fit for their theatre is a lie! But TV culture has little or nothing to do with real life, unless you think life exists on the soundstages of TV studios made to sell advertising and ruled by laws against, slander, discrimination, sexism, racism, obscenity, and violence. As well as endless projects to increase equality and representations of women, minorities, and the agenda of Feminists! People always talk about the sin of breaking the fourth wall, in other words looking into the camera and addressing the audience, but TV presenters, plastered in make-up, live their life doing that like zombies. No, the real fourth wall on TV, is calling out the whole sham of the world as seen on TV! In real life, one can wander the whole world, but at your peril. Everywhere you go you will have to be careful what you say and do. In comparison, the TV world is safe from direct confrontation or threat, but your whole experience has been curated like a theme park and you are being subtly manipulated to buy products, agree with world views, and ultimately to conform. 

The history of civilization is presented as the story of humanity. But in fact, it is mostly just propaganda for the best aspects of humanity. The male sexual animal can be beastly, violent, and depraved. The female sexual animal can be shockingly uncivilized, submissive, and masochistic. With both, the sex act stripes away the façade of reason, civility, manners, and good character. As such, sex is naturally an affront to the religious, political, social, and humanitarian. Pornography creates an alternative history of humanity, full of animalistic lust, abuse of power and a complete disregard for the laws and morals of civil society. But do not be fooled, most conventional pornography is also an artform. In other words, conventional pornography like civilisation is an illusion. Its narrative is mostly fantasy based drama, physically acted out by paid porn stars. Just as civilisation serves up fantasies of truth, beauty, morality, and justice - pornography serves up sexual fantasies of insatiable debauchery, amorality, criminality, and a return to animal instincts. Yet, if many of the narratives in conventional porn were real, then we would be dealing with the documentation of crimes by criminals. For example, in S & M porn, contrary to what naïve viewers believe, the one in power is the submissive who signals what they can and cannot tolerate. If it was any other way, we would be dealing with assault and rape, and a life behind bars for the sadist. Sadly, this conventional pornographic industry now must compete with amateur porn, reality porn and random mobile camera phone footage made by ordinary people, that has none of the oversights and regulations of the traditional porn industry. In this new, often very real porn, there is little attempt made to create a traditional porn narrative. Instead, the attraction of such reality porn is its genuineness, illicitness, and danger. It can include people having sex with strippers, people with respectable jobs doing webcam sex, men and women masturbating in public places, or people having sex in university or work. Its only regulation it seems, is the way those that make it, can end up being sued, kicked out of college or work, getting arrested or jailed. Such reality porn is as amoral as life itself and is the most unique documentation of immorality in human history. Imagine for example, if there had been smart phones in the prehistoric caves, Greek forums, Roman villas, Viking villages, the palace of Versailles, saloons in the wild west, the streets of Victorian Britain, the brothels of Vienna and Paris in the twentieth century, or New York in the 1950s? How then would we regard the nature of human existence and the truth, beauty, and justice of civilisation? Would we not talk about ‘fake civilisation’? I believe that even though there have been many technological and social changes - the human animal remains constant. All that has changed is the way that we can now catch so many more sexual, racist, and abusive acts on camera. So, I am convinced that we do not know even a tenth of the sexual activity that went on in previous societies - no matter how puritan and virtuous they might have claimed to be in public. 

              

Growing up in a totally censored world, and totally ignorant about women and sex, I believed all the humanitarian lies about women and sex fed to me by my family, teachers, religious leaders, and government-controlled media. Symbols of virtue, family values and domesticity, I was told women were not interested in sex and wanted only to be loved. But now I know that women have almost as many sexual partners as men, and often pick the fittest looking men to date because they may be better in bed! And they leave men who do not continue to sexually satisfy them! I was told that women were naturally monogamous, but now I know that almost as many women are unfaithful as men, but they are better liars and do not get caught as often! Worse still, women often cheat with men they have a romantic attachment to, unlike men who usually only have one-night stands with meaningless women they just want fuck. I was told that women did not really care how big a man’s penis was. But now I know that many women (not all, but many) love big cocks and hunt them out. I was told that women did not have fetishes or interest in rough or kinky sex, now I know that they do and are also happy to indulge most men’s too! And so on. Basically, before getting the internet in 2004, I lived in a world of lies about sexuality and women because while I could watch commercial porn, I knew it as a totally unrealistic depiction of sex made by tiny minority of sexual freaks more concerned with making money. It was amateur and homemade porn, webcams and selfies that exposed the real sexual nature of many women to me in a way that commercial porn never did. Constantly in the twenty-tens, boys were blamed for making girls take selfies, but boys could not share porn images if girls did not take them and send them!

             

When I became a teenager, I was totally perplexed by the sudden power women’s bodies had over me. Their bodies were sending me signals and like a drone I was drawn to them. As I began to learn that women had the power to accept or reject my advances - they become tyrannical figures of lust and rejection. And traumatised by my abuse at the hands of my mother, women were only safe for me on the pages of a porn magazine or in a porn video. Even then, I was often traumatically triggered by the women I had seen in porn. My interest in erotic art stretches back to my youth. Because of my traumatic childhood, I turned to masturbation for the nurturing I was denied in life. As early as twelve-years-old, I looked with lust at the nudes of Cranach, Titian, Correggio, Ingres, Courbet, Renoir, Klimt, and Modigliani. I took getting turned on by art to a new level! Quite apart from the erotic thrill I got from looking at female nudes, I also cherished them as comforting examples of femininity that eased my loneliness and lovelessness. But it was only when I was sixteen that I started buying books devoted to erotic/pornographic art. I can confess that these erotic drawings provided my teenage self with much needed masturbatory release! However, I can also admit that even at sixteen I recognized the difference between crass erotica and porn and sophisticated art. As Henry Miller observed: “… The most important thing, it goes without saying, is that the artist be an artist. Just as a good pornographic novel depends on the writer’s ability to write, so it is with a painting or piece of sculpture. Even in “obscene” works of art we look for the touch of the master. The work of a hack leaves us cold or derisive.” (Henry Miller, Introduction to Erotic Art of the Masters). Even I, as a compulsive masturbator and creator of erotic and pornographic images, must admit that such art works are wearying when seen on mass or when exposed to for a long period of time. Apart from the work of the likes of Picasso and Schiele, I have simply never had the same compulsion to look again and again at an erotic artwork (no matter how great it is) in the way that I have returned time and again to paintings by even minor masters in other genres like portraiture, landscape, or abstraction. I am repulsed more by versions of erotica informed by illustration than by specific subjects of erotica. Such work is too basic, too schematic, and too obvious to interest me. Erotic art made by genuine artistic masters may be less immediately arousing but offers more to contemplate. If illustrated erotica has any value, it is as a crude proof of misogyny and the crass simplicity of some men’s appreciation of women with their grossly overinflated pneumatic breasts and camp exaggerated appearance. 

           

As a young boy, apart from seeing a half dozen Page-Three type photographs of topless women and a furtive and all too quick glimpse of a Penthouse magazine, my knowledge of female anatomy, or the look of sex was non-existent. I had no sisters whom I could learn about female nature, few female friends, and no older boys who could pass on pornographic images to me. Staying up late at night to watch movies with sex scenes was my only source of sexual information. But of course, this too was far from the gynaecological detail I required. I had to be content with suggestive plots, a glimpse of breast or a flash of a pubic mound.  I was like a befuddled astronomer seeking to map the dark side of the moon, driven with a compulsive need to see, understand, and thus end my fear of women and bewildered sexual ignorance. It was only when I was fifteen, that I had the courage married to desperation, to buy books on erotic photographs from the early twentieth century and erotic drawings of the masters. It was this early dependency on artistic interpretations of the sexualized body, that shaped my strange view of them. For example, I noticed that most erotic artists drew the vulva and erect penis in what even I recognized as a naïve and simplistic manner, because they constantly idealised the figure, and did not draw from life. I also recognized that most erotic depictions of sex lacked the heightened realist skills that my desire demanded. Most erotic artists were in fact not very skilled or talented and their work often looked slap-dash and rushed. 

Although it might sound surprising, I loathed much of the softcore porn and smutty TV of the 1970s and 1980s. Because it was not only exploitive of women, but also exploitive of the prurient interest of men of the lowest common denominator. Such trash did not have the courage to be hardcore or rebellious, it merely traded on smutty clichés, and was embarrassingly basic and uninventive. 

When at eighteen I finally saw my first pornographic images in American hard-core magazines (vulva’s splayed open, intercourse, blowjobs, men eating women out, and sometimes female sodomy) it was like snorting a long fat line of cocaine. Often, I felt degraded by my voyeurism. But I had so little self-confidence, and I feared women so much, that I was condemned to spending my youth, masturbating to porn because it was safe, distant, and anonymous. With my mental health, I could not deal with the risks of real romance or physical sexual embrace. I could not deal with the overwhelming, uncontrollable, and frightening feelings of chaotic human engagement. So, I could not benefit from the possibilities of romance, sex, or love because they caused me intense emotional distress. A lot of the high from porn was from the trill of the forbidden. Seeing the freaks of porn, also made me feel less alone and less ashamed of my lust. But now as a middle-aged man, porn for me now is a habitual and rather jaded experience. I have seen every age, shape and type of woman have sex now and realise they all do it and many really enjoy it, despite what the Catholic church and Feminism taught me.

From my teenage years, I made up for the dearth of soft or hardcore porn in Ireland, by becoming a student of; written erotica; visual erotica; anti-porn Feminism, and pro-porn Feminism; psychology, psychoanalysis, sexology, psychiatry and sociology; Trash TV like Donahue, Sally, Ricki Lake, The Jenny Jones Show and The Jerry Spring Show; erotic writers like the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Walter”, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller and Anaїs Nin; anthologies of male and female sexual fantasies; academic pornographic theory; Feminist and gender studies; sex surveys and behavioural studies. Later, in my twenties and beyond, I consumed; pornographic magazines, videos, books, and DVDs; Reality TV like The Real World, Ibiza Uncovered, Big Brother, Love Island, First Dates, and Temptation Island; documentaries on dating, love, sex, gender, and the porn industry; internet porn and videos of webcam girls; and finally, I listened to podcasts on sex by women and watched YouTube videos by women on sexuality. 

             

Seeing documentaries like Ibiza Uncovered in 1998 shocked me far more than any of the porn I had ever watched. Seeing the behaviour of British girls (and some of them Irish) in Ibiza disgusted me. Frankly, the prostitutes in Amsterdam had more class and sophistication that these young drunken women. Unlike me, these girls had not gone to the great cities of Europe to study fine art and culture. Instead, they had gone to those places where they were guaranteed to find men even more animalistic and psychotic than themselves. I also watched Dream Girls: Real Adventures which featured America sluts on Spring Break. In fact, I became a collector of images and videos which featured the sexual debauchery of ordinary young women, and which flew in the face of ancient delusions of female virtue, Christian purity and radical-Feminist anti-male and anti-sex propaganda. But the more porn and Reality TV I watched, the more suspicious and fearful of women I became. 

             

Growing up, watching network TV I had thought that the way women acted flirtishly or sexually turned on, was unbelievable, slightly ridiculous, or totally bizarre. Only much later as an adult and watching reality TV and amateur porn, did I realise that that was the way real women acted when aroused. They were submissive, teasing, playful, gyrating, girly, and rubbed their bodies and pouted their lips. Though I realised that it looked far more natural when a woman did it subconsciously, and when really turned on, compared to the exaggerated caricature of horny women in TV dramas and comedies.

One of my biggest fetishes is seeing amateur good girls gone bad. The trouble was, that before webcams in the noughties and then OnlyFans in the twenty-tens, there were few normal, good girls who would ever have been shown on camera having sex for money or for free. Virtually all the so called amateur, normal, ordinary, good girls being talked into sex in commercial porn in the 1990s were porn actresses starting out in the industry who were already sluts, and more than willing to whore themselves for money. One of the troubles with porn stars was that by their second gangbang most porn stars looked dead around the eyes and soulless. And seeing them triple penetrated by studs with ten-inch cocks only left me thinking “yes, well they would do that wouldn’t they!” And I would quickly move on to something else. So, I preferred amateur porn stars because they brought a freshness, spontaneity, and realness that porn stars lacked. The seduction of a good girl has been the subject of literature for centuries like in cynical works like Les Lasions Dangerous and a constant subject of pornographic literature like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine whose tragic naivety and belief in the goodness of mankind was constantly used against her. The moment when as a man you get a woman to have sex with you is one of the greatest highs in life. But once it is done, the thrill disappears. Likewise, in porn, the attraction you might have to a girl at her first audition is soon gone after you see her in video after video, doing more and more extreme things. Once a woman gets fucked in porn, she just becomes yet another whore, whose sexual permissiveness provides little room for drama. 

             

By 2009, my familiarity with amateur porn on the internet, gave me a whole new vision of wild sexuality as part of a debauched life, not as the commercial product of a company, even if most ‘amateur’ porn was made by porn stars at home or amateurs trying to make money or become porn stars. While the sex in professional porn was physically real (if you did not count Viagra or Cialis pills and TriMix-gel, to get and keep the men hard, lubricants, anaesthetics, or pain killers to aid the women with anal sex, recreational drugs to relax both, and editing to make average sex look thrilling) virtually none of the narrative or emotions was real. So, even when I had been forced to watch professional porn in the days before the internet, I had searched for those unconscious moments of real spontaneous desire in the porn stars. So, one of the attractions of amateur porn was seeing people act naturally and sometimes find moments of sexual bliss. Still, much of this self-produced, reality porn was terribly shot, darkly lit and awkward. It was often notable to me how few women in real life moaned and screamed the way porn stars did unless the man really knew how to fuck or had a big cock (or they were like many of the wild women I had been with), perhaps because much of the time they were trying not to be overheard by others. I also noted how often many of the men struggled to get or maintain erections or came within a minute or two. Often the sex looked very uninteresting and perfunctory, of no real pleasure to either the man or woman. But amateur porn gave a fascinating window on the sex lives of ghetto, working-class and even rich people as well as unintentionally giving a voyeur like me a window into their homes and lifestyle. In fact, I often found such amateur porn videos so boring or so badly shot, that I spent more time observing their fashion sense, looking at the décor in the rooms they were fucking in, stressing out about the mess of their homes, or looking at the ‘art’ on their walls. And if they had books in their rooms, I would end up reading the titles – mostly to my great disappointment. If such videos had a thrill to them, it was the thrill of the invisible dark matter of reality captured for the first time in history. 

             

At the same time, I became fascinated by webcam girls, especially the types of young women I had rarely seen in porn and who looked too cute for porn. Not the make-up plastered, fake tanned, Botoxed, bleach blonde, fake titted, tattoo covered, overacting, gynaecological acrobats (obvious porn stars) I was sick to death of seeing in porn and did nothing for me. I loved seeing cute, nerdy, alterative, or girl-next-door types, that I had had spent my life seeing in the streets, but rarely had the courage to approach. The kind of young women that were way out of my league! These modern-day Juliet cam-girls, who had lost all faith in modesty and chastity, waited by the windows of their chatrooms, while an army of perverts pretending to be Romeo’s paid for their attention and the revelation of their most intimate flowers. Moreover, I became so intoxicated by their spectacle that I stilled these brief flickering flowers on videos, to paint them before they vanished, into the archives of time. Perhaps the most fascinating webcam novelty was the cam girls’ use of OhMiBod remote controlled vibrating sex toys, which allowed the viewer to tip the girls and thus set off the vibrators inside their vaginas. So, the cam-girls would be simultaneously cumming from sexual stimulation and monetary gain and the ‘male gaze’ was automatically turned into female financial empowerment. 

               

Although the stripping and masturbating of these cam girls was what got the most attention. The real way many of these girls established and maintained their clients, was through talking, befriending, and even making clients fall in love with them. The web courtesan required two fundamental skills, the first was compassion for their customer, the second was an ability to learn their customers interest and hobbies and show a genuine interest in them. As such the web courtesan could become an object of lust, a friend, and an agony aunt to the customer. So, while the format may have looked like a peepshow, it was also a way to interact with a neo-courtesan who was interesting and cultivated, except instead of being connoisseurs of art and students of the Classics, these neo-courtesans were fans of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, DC and Marvel comics and Cosplay. So, while traditional Feminists might have condemned webcam girls, they were often intelligent, creative women, who used camming to make the kind of money that would be impossible in most jobs and their clients were not all perverted abusers of women, many of them were lonely and isolated men looking for love in the wrong place, and it was the camgirls who were exploiting their loneliness. 

So, sometimes I would find a cam girl so achingly beautiful, adorable, smart, funny, and sexy that my heart would almost break, and I could not even think about sex anymore. Or I would feel depressed seeing the kind of alpha-male, alterative, studs they had as boyfriends. The kind of good-looking cool guys, I had watched girls throwing themselves at my whole life. The very idea that stunningly beautiful girls I dreamed about, who were cultured, artistic and intelligent were base whores who longed for an alpha male to make them submit to his desire, made me feel sick to the stomach. It meant that all my childish dreams of romance and love had been for nothing. Every now and then, while looking through recordings of webcam girls I would stop in my tracks and listen to some beautiful young woman chat about her life, and fall head over heels in love with her, even though I was old enough to be her father, and I would wonder where young women like that had been when I was young. 

            

My youthful version of pornographic Neo-Expressionism was a proto-Black-Pill-Incel  or proto-Alt-Right response to second wave feminism, and its politization of the personal, gender, and sexuality, and the sexual excesses of contemporary women. There was as much loathing as desire in my early porn paintings. I never belonged to the happy band of the sexually uninhibited. I was crippled by morbid timidity, self-consciousness, shame, naivety, self-loathing, terrible anxiety, and fear of intimacy. I was disgusted, and terrified of the frightening people who lived their sexuality out in the open in contemporary Western society. For me, in keeping with my Expressionist forefathers, life was all about mental anguish, existential pain, loneliness, sexual longing, and fear of madness and death. So, I used porn as a vehicle to express my psychological, sexual, and existential pain in the most powerful way possible. I had desperate and self-loathing complexes about my attractiveness, masculinity, and potency. So, my artworks frequently expressed my masculine anxiety, body-hating, fear of impotency, and masochistic relationship to women. From my teenage years, I felt the overpowering need to avoid all contact with women, because they only increased my anxiety and caused me fully blown panic attacks. So, I avoided being around them, or even looking at them in the face.

              

Thus, my pornographic obsession caused me great distress and led me to constantly make confessions in my artworks, and in my early twenties increased my suicidal thoughts, and contributed to my attempts to take my life. Despite all the porn I looked at and painted in my early twenties, I had no desire or capacity to have casual sex with women, and the only sex I had was with prostitutes, and even with them, I frequently failed to gain an erection or have an orgasm, or I had sex with them feeling petrified, detached, and disassociated. When I masturbated, I constantly felt anxious and shameful, and when I made my pornographic artworks, I often felt intensely guilty afterwards, and quickly hid them away in portfolios or quickly turned them against the wall.   

              

My obsessively compulsive fascination with porn, and making artworks from it, had nothing to do with the usual hedonistic use of porn, normal sexual fantasies, or love for sex, because for me, women, sex, and porn were often a cause of intense fear, blind panic, and great shame. My Pure O pornographic obsession turned sex from something that others cherish - into a twisted nightmare for me. In fact, I often found my pornographic obsession immoral, and felt repelled by the thought of acting upon anything in the porn I looked at or painted. My artistic pornographic obsession was unwanted and distressing, and provoked in me great anxiety, shame, and self-loathing. My obsession with looking at porn and making confessional pornographic artworks, were frequently involuntary, repetitive, and unwelcome. I used porn at my happiest, but even more at my most distressed and depressed. But my frequent attempts to suppress or neutralize my obsession with porn and especially making pornographic artworks, never lasted for long, in fact it made my obsession with porn more severe, because I only gave it more attention and fuelled it. And even when I stopped making pornographic artworks, I could not escape my history as a pornographic painter and its accompanying disgrace. During my few exhibitions of my pornographic art, I felt mortified and ashamed by own art, terrified about having to talk to people about it, and I just wanted my exhibition to end as soon as possible.

              

Most of my youth, I was considered a crazy pornographer, no one had the slightest regard for my work, and they had nothing but contempt and suspicion of me. In my twenties and thirties, I was repeatedly told in relation to my pornographic paintings, and in particular my pornographic photomontages, “anyone could do that”. So why don’t they, I wondered?  Why do people make repressed, sublimated, abstracted products that register nothing of their real identity or fixations? Why are so many people afraid of cameras? Why do so few people write? Why do so few make anything of any real human importance to anyone including themselves? Cult or commodity, the traditional artwork is nothing more than a mask, an idol, and a product, its only real purpose being financial exchange and pretentious decoration. It takes courage even insanity to say something truthful in art! It is not just the obscenity of my art that shocks people – it is its terrible freedom. Yes, my art is pornographic, that is precisely its greatness! By pornographic, I mean the skilful, passionate, and truthful representation of the so-called obscene and the ruthless analysis of human behaviour. 

I would like to just quote Will Durant at this point; “Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual…For custom rises out of the people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group…custom remains to the end the force behind law.” (The Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935, P. 26-27.) I think this quote is very important in relation to the arts, and the difference between stylistic outrage and transgressive outrage. For, while it seems that the art world can tolerate all kinds of wacky gimmicks and stylistic assaults, it cannot act with such cold objectivity, towards art that deals with human failings, customs, or sexuality. The former is merely a challenge to aesthetic law and fashion, the latter is a challenge to fundamental social morality and good taste. For example, the so-called radical artistic revolution of Impressionism which gave birth to Modernism, happened while photographic pornography including nudes and hardcore fucking became widely created and distributed, often in the same districts that the poor bohemian, painters lived. Seen from that perceptive, the colourful daubing of canvases seems paltry in comparison. Though sex acts were played out in pornographic photographs of the late nineteenth century, they were very rarely represented in artworks or visual culture. So, the function of traditional art is the sublimation of lust, egotism, and rage, into beautifully reasoned works of art. But 70% of my work is about the exact opposite. I aim to de-sublimate myself!

          

The only thing that both pornographers and Feminists agree upon, is the effect of pornography on the male viewer which they both assume is sexual excitement, raging hard-ons and explosive ejaculations. But as a user of porn for decades, I can say they are both wrong as far as I am concerned. Apart from fitful lust, porn for me can also arouse intense feelings of boredom, loneliness, inadequacy, impotence, shame, misanthropy, misogyny, self-loathing, and suicidal despair. I also have complete double standards, I love to watch people in porn, but I want absolutely nothing to do with them in real life, and I find decadent people and slutty women disgusting and terrifying. I do not want to date any girl who has fucked as many people as me - never mind one who does orgies or gangbangs. That said I would defend their right to live their life as they wish, and I would never slut-shame them.  

          

As a producer of pornographic images, I do not conform to the stereotype of the male porn star. I am not an alpha male, I do not have a ripped muscular body, I am not handsome with a chiselled jawline and firm chin, I am not massively hung, and I am not a sexual acrobat. Moreover, I have not slept with many women and although I had sex with many prostitutes in Amsterdam and had a few one-night stands, I often found them lonely and sad experiences. In fact, as a middle-aged man, I have been in two monogamous relationships one after the other since late 1996, and I have not had sex since early 2011. Nor am I seeking to encourage promiscuity or the use of pornography. Rather I seek to analyse the nature of my desire as a voyeur. I work from 'found' pornographic images (in magazines, on video, or later on the internet), I do not make pornographic photographic or video images myself. Although my pornographic work is autobiographical in the sense that it records my pathological state at the time of making it, my therapeutic working through of psycho-sexual trauma and my history of voyeurism, it does not document my actual sex life. The exceptions were some quick sketches of myself with prostitutes, nudes of my lovers Edward, Helen, and Carol, and much later depiction of myself as a young man in Amsterdam with prostitutes made from memory. Moreover, I have no desire to prettify or idealize women in my art. 

              

I am not a family man, so I do not have to suggest I am respectable.  I am not a politician, so I do not have to pretend that I can end social injustice. I am not a religious man, so I do not have to delude people that there is a God, a universal moral order and that people are essentially good. I am an outcast artist; all I have to do is honestly express my existence through my craft and intelligent response to the world I see around me especially in the bombardment of media that engulfs us. Fundamentally, I still believe that almost any subject is valid for art, but whether it is good art depends on the skill, originality and understanding of the artist. Moreover, I believe that pornography can be made with a moral agenda as Angela Carter suggested in ‘The Sadeian Woman’ (1979): "The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he enters the realms of true obscenity as he describes it."

           

In the past, when I told strangers I met in Dublin in the 1990s and 2000s, that I painted pornographic paintings, their responses quickly polarized. There were some who supported me, there were some who were indifferent, and there were many who were instantly shocked, repelled or verbally hostile. I knew many homosexual deviants, heterosexual perverts, misogynists, and sleazebags as well as female sluts and while some expressed admiration for my work, many of them wanted nothing to do with it. Their sexuality was unconscious, secretive, and unspoken and worked under the rule of “don’t ask don’t tell”. The last thing they wanted was an art that held up a mirror to them or implicated them socially. Women often liked me, before I started talking, or showed them my art. For me to tell women I painted pornographic images was often as disgusting, as a woman telling a man she was a prostitute. Women often became guarded when I told them what I painted, assuming I was a predator, and I was going to sexually harass them. Some people haughtily proclaimed that they did not see the point of pornography and quickly declared that they preferred the real thing. The suggestion being that only deviants and losers would need such stimulation. Others became irate about the social conditions of those 'driven' into pornography and the way pornography ‘demeaned’ and ‘degraded’ women. Finally, there were those who bluntly declared that pornography could never be art. These arguments formed the social cant of the public in Dublin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, I was an outcast and my interest in pornography was not social, religious, or political, it was profoundly personal, confessional, artistic, and philosophical. I believed pornography could not only be art, but it could also be great art! I had no time for the knowing game of 'shock-art' in which somebody tried to be shocking and someone else tried to be unshockable. I was not interested in cunningly gauging the framework of art and stepping slightly outside it to mock indignation.

            

When I am reading a book, I want to be having sex, but when I am having sex - I want to be reading a book. When I am looking at porn, I want to have sex, but when I am having sex, I want to be looking at porn. Sometimes painting porn was my way not to have sex, of purging myself briefly of desire. Because of my mother’s abuse of me and being verbally taunted and humiliated by girls early in secondary school, my teenage fantasies were overwhelmingly masochistic, in which I was a passive victim of domineering, malicious and spiteful women. In my youthful fantasies, which owed more to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Eric Stanton and Robert Crumb than the Marquis de Sade, voraciously charming women with voluptuous bodies dominated and humiliated me. In my fantasies, I was nearly always a shrinking victim, physically, emotionally, and sexually controlled and forced into submission. Subconsciously, I was trying to imagine myself in the worst possible situation to master my fear of it. When I applied to NCAD in the spring of 1993, and included my recent nude self-portraits and pornography paintings, my submission was rejected, and they told my mother that my work was "the most violent and pornographic they had ever seen". At the time, I was perplexed, because most of the violence in my work was directed toward myself and I did not think that mattered. However, I now realise that my work was also violent toward the silence of authoritarian repression and censorship, and the limits of artistic language. Like Picasso’s late erotic paintings, my work cursed at Fine Art.   

            

Perversely, even though I am a man, I have always been more threatened by female sexual hedonism, and more jealous of it than male excess. Growing up without virtually any male role models, I never really saw the point of men unless they were a great painter, musician or intellectual. After I turned eighteen, the fact, that most girls my age had lost their virginity made me feel far more suicidal than any stories of other men, who I had no interest in competing with for alpha-male status. But if I could not even be as sexually successful as girls my own age or younger, I could barely hold my head up high. So, sexually confident women have always sacred me and made me feel inferior.              

            

Picasso started fucking at about fourteen, he said, “I didn’t wait for the age of reason before beginning. Anyway, if we were to wait for this age of reason, maybe reason would stop us ever starting.” I on the other hand waited far too long. On an early drawing Picasso wrote, “When you want to fuck, then fuck.” But I have rarely been able to fuck whenever I want to fuck, because of my chronic shyness, self-loathing, and crippling anxiety. Actual sex with women is a touchy subject for me. 

Ever since I was twenty-one and in Amsterdam, I realised I was not comfortable in my skin with women. The first two times with prostitutes, I failed to get an erection and it was not until my eighteenth time with a prostitute that I had an orgasm! The difficulties I had with enjoying sex, were partly a result of my chronic shyness and anxiety, low self-esteem, morbid depression, fear of women, and the numbing effects of anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medication. At the time, I did not realise it, but I was often disassociated when having sex with people – looking at myself having sex from a distance. This was a result of my childhood trauma which I had tried to cope with by disassociating. Later, with both men and women I again failed to have an orgasm, until I met Helen Black, and even then, in a seven-and-a-half-year relationship with her, I only came a couple of dozen times. My sex with men was an utter aberration and I never had an orgasm with any man. Though I am romantically attracted to some men, I am not gay, I am not sexually attracted to men, and I do not fantasise about gay sex. However, at the time I was so lonely and fearful of women that sex with men was the only way I could feel loved. I had a happy sexual relationship with my second girlfriend Carol, until my mother died in early 2009 and my whole world fell apart, and I had a nervous breakdown. So, I have not had sex since early 2011, and I am happier watching porn. When having sex with women, I was often more concerned with giving pleasure to the woman and making her have an orgasm, since I knew it was so hard for me to come. In fact, I found it hilariously ironic, after watching so many women on TV talk shows in the late 1980s complaining that men were selfish in bed, did not sexually satisfy them, and they rarely had orgasms with men - that I hardly ever came with women, but they came multiple times! Conventional missionary sex bored me, I was far more interested in having the woman being on top (I was also lazy), I loved giving cunnilingus and receiving fellatio even more, though I found 69 could be too intense. I preferred being in charge in bed because I could control events and I enjoyed giving mild forms of discipline and rough sex – but I did not enjoy receiving it. When having sex, my look towards a woman, had been said to be a cross between fear and anger.          

                 

I always suffered from problems with erections, having orgasms, and matching the high sex drive of women I was with. It was a raw subject for me. I would have loved to be able to get an erection on demand, come exactly when I wanted to, and have sex all day, every day. But I just could not. It was not that I preferred pornography to sex. It was just that with porn I never had performance anxiety, I did not have to worry about not getting an erection, or not coming, or not wanting to have sex, because it was just a porn video and it was not going to judge me, make me do anything I do not want to do or humiliate me. I suppose it is hard for a woman to understand this. But my performance anxiety was as big an issue of self-esteem for me, as a woman's weight, beauty and desirability would have been for her. It had absolutely nothing to do with the woman I was with, or how beautiful or sexy she was, it was all in my fucked up and frightened head. That is why it was the intimacy, and shared special moments in a relationship that I cherished over any sexual activity. Moreover, while I can now live without sex in a relationship, I could never live without the kisses and cuddles, which soothe my soul, and form the true bonds of love.

             

I write so much about my Priapus like enjoyment of looking at porn and my use of porn as an emotional painkiller. But at my most bewildered, depressed, and anxious if I try to look at porn to ease my pain, it often fails to cure me. And I am left despairing at my failure as a man and the disconnect between my intellectual will to gain an erection, masturbate and cum, and my penis’s total refusal to play along. Suddenly the women in porn turn from objects to be used and abused by my voyeuristic lust, into frightening, castrating Medusas, mocking my impotence, and revelling in their sexuality at my expense. It is at times like that, that I am left to confront the abyss of my misery, without hope, and even as a voyeur, I am useless to an exhibitionistic porn actress in a porn video. Or alternatively I look through porn videos and feel absolutely nothing as though a switch has been flicked and my sex drive shut off. At times like this looking at porn is as boring as looking at a blank wall. I mention this, because it seems to me that one cannot talk about porn without talking about the ennui and alienation it can at times provoke, and how the spectre of impotence fuels phallic mania. 

             

People who know nothing about art, from psychologists to politicians, think that what someone paints, is a sublimated wish for what they want to do in real life. Time and time again, painters have been accused of being potential rapists and murderers on the basis of what they paint. But anyone who knows anything about art, and being an artist, knows that this is absurd. Art has nothing to do with real life. Even art at its most realistic is still a fiction, and an abstraction of reality. Painters live life removed from the world of action and reality. They make an art of contemplation and inaction. Moreover, plenty of the most tyrannical, brutal, and murderous people in history have commissioned art that only showed them as beautiful, wise, benevolent, and blessed. Truly evil people are not stupid enough to commission art that records their atrocities! Practical people, have no concept of daydreaming, fantasy, illusion, or abstraction that is why they have no conception of what it means to be an artist. And even if an artist makes art about a wish for action, it is still only a wish for action on a piece of paper or canvas. It has nothing to do with real life. At worst it is a thought crime. But the very notion of a thought crime is totalitarian because it denies the right to free expression, free speech, and a private life. 

               

Unlike my more extrovert heroes like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Kurt Cobain, or so many other troubled young men, I rarely acted out my rage in public, or in acts of thuggery, vandalism, or violence. Instead, I internalised all my anguish, and laser-focused it into my artworks. So, I simply to do accept the childish notion of ‘monkey see monkey do’, I may paint a lot of pornographic pictures, but I am much more than what I watch or paint, and I have little desire to act out most of what I watch or paint. And frankly I now have little ability to. In the past, I have disappointed many arty sluts, who thought I was like the rugged alpha male predators I painted in my porn paintings. But the earth-shattering difference between reality and porn, or reality and art, also seemed to be beyond the many repressed intellectuals I met in the past in Dublin, who lived in an aesthetic and moral cloud cuckoo land they grandly called Fine Art but was as unreal as Disney Land! 

           

Frankly, my use of porn for masturbation and my use of porn for art are completely different. When I watch porn for pleasure, I seek novelty, sensation, and erotic frenzy. But when I turn porn into artworks, I aim to freeze the porn, and turn it into an object that has little or nothing to do with its original function. I aim to turn the porn, into a therapeutic battleground and philosophical problem. But in both cases I have no desire to participate in the sex or get involved with the women in porn. 

           

Until photography, the erotic was a central theme in Western and Eastern art, streaching back into the mists of time. It was photography and later, stag films, pornographic movies and videos and todays internet porn, that abolished arts role of erotic manipulator. In fact most of the poses, settings and props of early erotic photography was a pastiche of Salon oil paintings. Many artists in history have in periods of boredom, idleness, or erotic fever, scribbled erotic imaginings in their sketchbooks, copulating couples, debauched threesomes, lesbian fumbling, and fevered orgies. However, these works have usually been ruthlessly destroyed by their relatives or executors - fearful that their discovery would damage the artist's posthumous reputation. The prudish art critic John Ruskin's destruction of most of Turner’s erotic drawings, is just the most famous example of this. So maybe the only difference between me and other artists - was the honesty, courage, and recklessness with which I exhibited my private lusts in public. 

            

Many men’s sexual desire is a dark continent, and until the age of mass pornography there was little to culturally record fully its perverted and demonic nature. But even though we now live in a world glutted with images that prove just how evil some male desire can be, we have very little to connect it emotionally or intellectually with real men. Apart from coarse and immature jokes about sex, men reveal little about their sexual desires. In the 19th Century, it was women who were seen as pathological by psychoanalysts like Freud, but it is now the male condition that is seen as pathologically in crisis. Control of one’s intellect, emotions, and desire, is the hallmark of male public identity. Men idolize impersonal dead things like the achievements of businessmen, politicians, media celebrities, sports figures, academics, and artists. To do anything to an elite level requires total focus, perseverance, obsessive labour, risk-taking and an unquenchable desire to be the best regardless of the personal cost. Even 'sensitive' male artists live their lives in competition with contemporary art stars, dead Old Masters, and the weight of the Canon. 

             

Men seem to deal with emotional problems by refusing to speak about it, ignoring it or going around it. Women are more vocal and seek cooperation and help. Many men are emotionless robots, capable of deluging you with trivial facts, but unable to say how they feel about their relationship with their fathers, mothers, or partners. Most men would rather die at their own hands, than admit to others that they are not living up to the alpha male ideal, cannot cope, and need help. Moreover, men know that most women want and desire strong winners not pathetic losers. It is this that is at the heart of the epidemic of male suicides, which outstrips female suicides by up to fourfold. To be a man who thinks he is worthless, and a failure is one thing, but to confess these feelings to others, is almost worse than the crisis itself. For many men, the pain of self-loathing, is nothing in comparison to the shame of admitting to others that they feel emasculated, and the fear of humiliation that might result from such a confession. And deep down, men know that many women, find weak men pathetic and sexually unattractive. 

             

Women threaten male self-control in the figure of the prostitute who arouses desire and disgust and the needy victim who similarly arouses pity and loathing. Women's sexuality is a constant threat to male self-control. And today’s independent, liberated women who psychotically mimic the worst kinds of behaviour of the worst kinds of men, only make matters worse. So, men often punish women socially, religiously, and politically for arousing male desire, which is so easily swayed by the effects of feminine beauty and sexuality, and women are often blamed for arousing men's 'uncontrollable' sexuality. The battle of the sexes is as old as civilization. Men still dominate society, but in personal matters, I am convinced women hold most of the cards. Writing about the bewitching power of women over men, Simone de Beauvoir said: “… she is all than man desires and all that he does not attain… she is the temptation of unconquered Nature, counter to all goodness. She incarnates all moral values, from good to evil, and their opposites… he expects her also to be his audience and critic and to confirm him in his sense of being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and laughter. He projects upon her what he desires and what he fears, what he loves and what he hates… She is All, that is, on the plane of the inessential; she is all the Other.” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, London: Picador Classics, 1988, P. 229.) Women strike some men as a more powerful and biologically rooted and authentic vision of life, one that has no need to compete and conquer like male identity. Men live their lives not only in fear of women but of each other. They spend their lives competing with fellow students, co-workers, or the lives of media celebrities. Men are not only fearful of the femininity of women but also the femininity within themselves. And why would they not, when many women are sexually repulsed by emotional and weak men and deliberately go for ultra-manly men and bad boys. Men who are too emotional or feminine are ridiculed as pussies, wimps, fags, queers, Nancy boys, and mother's boys, and are often told by women to ‘man-up’.  Men are nagged by a constant sense of inadequacy, feeling they need the latest hi-tech gadgets and biggest cars not only to entice women but also to prove a point to other men.               

In the distorted ‘reasoning’ of Catholicism, women were divided into temptresses and whores or virgins beyond human touch and there was no middle ground. Both poles were impossible. But because of men’s fear of women, and emotional complexity, they had to divide women in such black and white terms. Though it should also be mentioned that in early militaristic societies, the male equivalent of a Madonna was a warrior, and the male equivalent of a whore was a coward. But the whole Christian view of sex was inherently warped, unrealistic and a desperate attempt to repress human sexuality and pagan philosophy. The churches attack on independent women began with the witch trials of the fifteenth century in which something like 40,000 women were killed over the course of two hundred and fifty years mainly in Germany. However, Feminists have greatly exaggerated the numbers of deaths, and the misogyny, and ignored the fact that many women were denounced by other women. In Catholicism, God was not a sexual being, because sex was evil and dirty. And there was a divide in old art between the good women clothed and with halos and the bad women naked and the playthings of men. But there was a paradox in this, because if all women were like the virgin Mary, then there would be no human race! There had to be procreation, and the satisfaction of male lust - so perfection had to be corruptible. Thus, rape was often sanitized and trivialised in art and women depicted as sweet innocents who do not really mind being raped. Thus, Western men split women up into Madonna/whore, saint/sinner, wife/slut but the split was never resolved one way or the other. Female identity being so complex, any woman on a given day could be seen by a man to be one or the other. In fact, new research suggests, that if measured at the right time of the month (when women are in mid-ovulation) that women’s sex drive is as strong if not stronger than men. So, the language used by men and women to denigrate sexual women is often animalistic like bitch, whore, cunt, pussy, snatch, gash, beaver, and slash. And the language of sex is also often violent, like hammer, bang, poke, and screw. This contempt for women, stems back to the boy's first break with his mother and the irrational world of emotional femininity, in favour of the impersonal and powerful male public sphere of the father. But this contempt for sluts is also based on the masculine fear that some women are man-eaters with sexual appetites that no single man can fulfil. 

           

Boys at first grow up in awe, then in conflict with their fathers, until finding some middle ground. Many young men desperately seek the approval of their fathers – to prove themselves their equal. Men rarely admit defeat, rarely confess to failure, and rarely say sorry. Some men are driven by a ruthless desire to dominate other men and women and control power. Many men, in all kinds of fields from ballet to boxing, have an inbuilt irrational desire to be the best. To be winners at all costs. To be powerful, respected, and desired. Weakness is for losers.

           

When I was young, women were put off by how intensely needy, sensitive, and feminine I was. To them I was just a mummies boy. Lost in the delusional world of Fine Art and High Literature, I had a pathetically naïve and idealistic vision of women. My inability to perform with women and my sexual frustration were brought on by my self-destructive and self-defeating personality, insane oedipal conflicts, conflicted and morbid personality, hypomania, anxiety, and hardwired view of women as threatening. I was terrified of sexually demanding women. I constantly sabotaged my chance with girls, because of my fear of getting hurt. Yet, paradoxically the more I fled from women – the greater their hold on my imagination became. Artistically, I hero worshiped Picasso who was an alpha male winner, but I also felt dominated and humiliated by his oeuvre and famously copious macho sex life! Because I was a weak, omega, pathetic loser who had been so abused as a child by his mother, that I had no self-esteem - I got off on masochistic fantasies of being humiliated, abused, and emotionally destroyed by women. However, like many people, in reality, I could switch between being masochistic and sadistic, submissive and dominant. And I found I felt better about myself being in charge in bed than being a victim of someone else’s whims. 

             

In fact, the sexually submissive and masochistic male is a turn off to most women apart from the very few into kink, and those rare few paid handsomely to service such needs. The masochistic male that cringes towards women is virtually useless in terms of desirability, procreation, or protection. Most women want the man to play the dominant role in sex. Women are turned off by men who give off a submissive attitude toward sex. Only a tiny minority of girls want to be dominant in bed! The girl will be thinking, “can I let myself go in bed, or am I going to have to be the one to guide him and mother him?” If she senses this, it is not going to work. Women are repulsed by a man getting off on feeling inferior and being humiliated and degraded. They want their men to be strong, able, confident, and masterful. It is not just about sex, it is the whole embodiment of the man, his character, persona and what he represents. A man must believe he is a ten out of ten, even if he knows it is not true. Because if he does not have confidence in himself girls will see though him - and reject him. Most girls are repelled by men who do not have the confidence to look them in the eye and initiate things. Women wonder if the man is going to be the masterful man of their fantasies or is he going to make them live out his fantasy of submission which they never fantasize about! Most women do not want to be the aggressive one, or the seductive femme fatale. They want the man to be a strong, confident and take charge. They do not want a man who is scared or frightened of women’s sexuality or fantasies! Controversially, many women even today, are put off by men who are too feminist or asks for too much consent. Because, they cannot have the dreams they had of being taken by a strong confident male. The feminist man can ruin sex, by thinking the woman she is more of a feminist than she is. In other words, he does not allow the woman to be sexual without losing face. But most girls and young woman are so passive and afraid of being slut-shamed, that they need a way to say that they were both swept away by it all. So, if the man demands enthusiastic and literal consent at every stage, he might force some women to say no because she does not want to admit that she is a slut. Many girls and young woman do not feel comfortable being a fully sexually empowered woman. Because that makes them seem look like a slut! So, many women are not comfortable with a man even asking, “can I kiss you”. I personally know this because, I always asked every girl I kissed if I could beforehand, long before MeToo#, and they would laugh and look at me like I was weird. “Just do it!” they would reply. Even today, many girls and young woman have romantic fantasies, and so if the man is too prudish and Woke about everything it can killed the sexual mood when all they want is dirty sex! In addition, many women are sexually unattracted to men who do not realise accept and realise their raw masculinity, or put themselves down, or men who feel ashamed of their sexuality. Finally, women are naturally put off by men who are too emotionally unstable, angry, volatile or have too much pent-up hatred of women to be safe alone with. That is why when alpha males exude a calm confidence it is so attractive to women. 

By the way, when talking about an alpha male, I am not talking about the traditional notion of the alpha male from the 1950s who was a great provider and intellectual. Because women can earn their own living today and they are sick to death of men telling them what they think! Nor am I talking about the alpha male that excels in a particular field, I am talking about the sexual alpha male that excels in the game of sex, though he may also be an alpha male in other fields too. The sexual alpha male may or may not have a ripped muscular body, but he does know how to use women and discard them at will, without the guilt that afflicts other men, and in fact he may verge on the sociopathic. In art, Picasso, Schiele, and Basquiat were all artistic and sexual alpha males but there were plenty of completely talentless artists who were masters of seduction and domination and plenty of talented artists like van Gogh and Pollock, who were so consumed by their art and tragic doubt that they were never successful lovers. So, while many women are celebrated for being bitches in the boardroom and daddy’s little submissive princess in the bedroom, there is no respected equivalent of powerful men who are subs in the bedroom celebrated in popular culture. In fact, sub men are constantly denigrated by both men and women. Frankly, there are far more women in love with locked up thug prisoners with a violent crime record as long as their arm, than women in love with submissive men and sissies. Moreover, it seems that most idealistic cults end up with one dominant sociopathic man possessing all the women and controlling all the men! Even self-declared Feminists want their men to be masterful and dominant in the bedroom! I cannot count the number of dating shows I have watched over the years, and frankly it has now become tedious, how often women reject nice men and run them down as mummies boys or boring wimps and openly say they want a bad boy. These women characterise any man who is sensitive as little bitch. They want a man in control of his emotions, strong, and powerful – so they can be emotional monsters. Of course, it does not help the cause of Feminism when so many women collude with misogyny and expose the reactionary nature of their sexual desire. But they are not just victims of our culture, they are victims of their biology! The cocky swagger of confident men attracts women, because it is a signal that they might be good in bed. While women constantly make beta males jump through hoops for their attention, with alpha males, women can become shockingly submissive, and almost swoon in a desire to be ravished. Depressive men on the other hand, are often plagued by self-doubt and impotence, and women rightly assume they would have to mother them, which is a huge sexual turn off. The fact that highly confident men are often just himbos and fuckboys, and often highly intelligent men are melancholy, only seems to reinforce the fact that most women today judge men on looks not intelligence or character, and women are as shallow as the men they bitch about being sexist pigs. It took me a lifetime to realised that 80% of the bitching and moaning of women about ‘men’, was really only about the few alpha males they were sexually attracted to, but who treated them like shit. And they often continued to stay with these assholes even when they cheated or abused them because the sex was so hot, raw and exciting.

            

But a passive, submissive and masochistic man cannot turn himself into an alpha male bull. It would be like a kitten trying to act like a wolf. It just does not work. Sexually the submissive and masochistic male is the lowest of the low. Submissive and masochistic women can still have a biological/social purpose, in fact they might even be of greater value because they are so compliant socially and sexually. Depressed girls sitting alone in nightclub, will not be alone for long. Their main problem is to avoid being used by predatory men preying upon their vulnerability. But depressive men on their own are shunned as losers and weirdos. Most women are naturally sexually submissive. There are very few lifestyle Femdoms, and most professional Femdoms are in it for the money, not because they get off on sexually humiliating and abusing men. Women are naturally passive and submissive because they are nurturers and care givers, are socialised to repress their own sexual desires, and they find being submissive easier than sub men, because they do not have such a big ego to overcome. If you are a submissive female in our patriarchal society, it is encouraged and considered more desirable and socially acceptable than an aggressive woman. But if you are a submissive man - you are garbage in the eyes of society! 

          

The sight of women attempting to adopt the role of sadists is often comical and the sight of masochistic men pitiful. Most women in BDSM community are sexually submissive and most men dominant. In general, most women’s sexual fantasies are submissive and often involve being ravished, forced, or even raped. In nine separate surveys, published between 1973-2008, 31-57% of women admitted having rape fantasies at least once a month. (The Nature of Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Analysis of Prevalence, Frequency and Contents, Jenny Bivona & Joseph Critelli, The Journal of Sex Research, 2009.) In fact, recent research suggests that many Feminist women who are very concerned with issues of consent in their college or workplace during the day, have become more and more interested in submissive and rape roleplay in their private sex lives precisely because they find it so taboo. Sade for all his evil in real life and writing, is still a cult figure, even for many highly intelligent women, who are attracted to dangerous men and risky sex. While the dangerous Sade still explains a lot about the human jungle and the cruelty of sex, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch the father of male masochism, by comparison is comical and pathetic, and almost unknown apart from inspiring the band The Velvet Underground. Although Leopold von Sacher is largely culturally and socially irrelevant, he is just as artistically and philosophically interesting as Sade.

           

Just as bad for women, is the impotent man who is virtually useless in heterosexual sex. Men must act and women react, so God help the poor man incapable of acting his part in courtship and sex. Heterosexual sex is dominated by the erect hard penis which if it fails - the whole show is usually cancelled. Despite male concerns with their penis size, most women are happy with their partner’s penis size. Women complain far more often of it hurting because the penis is too big, than they complain that they don’t feel filled up enough, and the penis is too small. Also, the male obsession with size seems oblivious to the function of the clitoris and that some of the strongest female orgasms come from just being kissed on the mouth and fingered on the clitoris at the same time. But despite the attempts of Feminists to get men to perform more oral sex, many women still do not like men going down on them, because they are self-conscious, find it too intense, think they are dirty down there, or think they have ugly vaginas. Moreover, if they think a man is just giving them head because he cannot get hard it is a real turn off. And despite radical-Feminist critiques of penetrative sex, most women still like the feeling of being filled up by a cock and its special intimacy. Most importantly, the erect penis is not just for penetrating things! For a woman, it is a blatant signal beacon of her beauty and desirability to the man! Which is why many women also dislike the idea that their man must take Viagra to have sex with them, because he might as well be faking it with them, and they have no proof of their sexiness. So, women often take male impotence very personally despite usually pretending to the man that it does not matter. And while women are constantly demanding that their problems like period pains and tampons are destigmatised - they are quite happy to stigmatise men for issues like impotency. Amongst their female friends, they mock men who cannot get a hard on, or stay hard. And they cackle and confess that there is nothing worse than a shrivelled dick in their mouth or a guy who loses his erection every time they change position! Women maybe be less kinky than men and have far more vanilla tastes when it comes to sex, but that also means that they really want a man that can fuck them fantastically in the conventional sense. Which brings us back to why so many women are attracted to confident braggadocios alpha males, even if they are assholes and cheaters, it is because they almost guarantee great sex! Women may not want to have sex with as many random people as men, but they dream of dark monogamy, and a stud who will fuck them continuously until the day they die! Just listened to almost any song by a female singer today to confirm this. 

             

So, as a sexually passive and sometime submissive and masochistic man, who has repeatedly suffered from erectile issues mainly due to my depression and anxiety, I can suggest from personal experience that for a man there is no other option in life other than to be the dominant aggressor even if it does not come naturally. Because I have walked the city streets of numerus cities, haunted art galleries all over Europe and America, and sat alone in nightclubs in many capitals, desperately waiting for a girl to make the first move, and it has only ever happened a few times, and usually the girls were insane and or drunk, and were in mid-ovulation or just about to have their period so they were gagging for cock. 

             

In politics, business, religion, sport, and public life it is mostly men who hold centre stage, wives, girlfriends, and family members exist only as props for male power. Men shun altruistic and caring professions like nursing and tend towards impersonal occupations like banking. But in the world of media, glamour, fashion, and pornography it is women who hold sway and men are mere mannequins in the background. Famously, fashion modelling and porn, are the only professions in which women are paid more than men! In heterosexual pornography, male faces and male identities are almost invisible because it disturbs the male viewer to see a vulnerable naked male and potentially turns the imagery homosexual. While every part of the female body is displayed and worshiped by the camera, the male actors are reduced to walking dildos, present merely to take the place of the male voyeur in his imagination. Nobody gives a dam about the man behind the ten-inch cock!

             

Much of male fantasy is caught up in scenarios of sadism, domination, bondage, flagellation, and rape, in which male authority is unthreatened and women are "put in their place”. Thus, men feel ashamed when exposed to exhibitions like mine, as it reveals to the light of day the truly demonic and politically incorrect nature of male desire. Before Micheal Hutchence died in late 1997, I had never heard of people masturbating while committing auto-asphyxiation or people choking partners during sex. But then I began to notice the choking of girls more in more in porn. At first, when I saw videos of Roccio Siffredi roughing up women, I thought it was quite sexy, purely because of its novelty. But quite quickly, I got sick to death of the treatment of women in Siffredi’s porn videos and frankly his whole sleazy persona, even if the violence in his videos had been agreed upon and greatly stylised. Later, other porn stars took it to even more extremes of hate. Yet, the videos also became more unrealistic and like some horrific circus act. Knowing that some women in particular, loved these videos and even more violent ‘consensual non consent’ rape videos also frankly sadden me, because my instinct (believe it or not) was to care for and protect women. And I thought women deserved better - and should want it too. So, frankly I could not bring myself to watch most of these videos - though I did observe their depressingly increasing popularity online. Yet, as I have suggested above the uber-masculine sexual domination of women in porn is also an unintentional revelation of what some women secretly want in their men! But they are even more loath to admit it!          

             

Meanwhile, men are obsessed with their erectile function and size of their members, and apart from porn, penis enlargement gimmicks are one of the most common form of spam on the net. It is well known that of a hundred men who apply to become porn stars, only one or two can gain an erection, keep it rock hard for over twenty minutes, constantly change awkward positions and cum on demand, while in front of the cameraman and surrounded by onlookers. And usually, the older the man is, the worse his erectile disfunction becomes. Moreover, even amongst those men who do get work in the porn industry, there is an elite who are constantly used because they are so reliable. Meanwhile, in porn videos the camera quickly pans away from the embarrassing sight of a male porn star struggling to gain an erection, and quickly pans back when the member is magically erect again (aided by Viagra or Cialis pills or TriMix-gel, or finally made erect by frantic desperate masturbation). Moreover, the much fetishized ‘money-shot’ (because the actor only gets paid if he ejaculates) when the man ejaculates on the woman, is often left to the very end, and often involves the male actor having to go off stage to concentrate and masturbate until he is ready and then he comes back to ejaculate. But in the video, it is cut to look like it all happened spontaneously. And sometimes, the main actor cannot cum, and another actor’s cock has to be used to shoot the cum-shot. And in photo-shoots it is common to fake ejaculate with things like liquid soap. Since the noughties, the abuse of tablets and injections for virility by male porn stars in porn has become so endemic, that some male actors are becoming unable to orgasm or impotent - and forced to retire.                

In the late 1970s, radical-Feminism tried to cut the cord between women’s sexuality and their own responsibility for it - by turning all the blame for sex onto men. It was like flowers blaming bumble bees for their bloom display. The convenient fact that most cinema, TV, and porn at the time, had been directed by men, allowed Feminists to claim that women had been grossly misrepresented and libelled by men’s representation of them. But the age of the smart phone has shown that most of the Feminist preaching about the misrepresentation of women was rubbish. Now, just think of the sex lives of all the women in the entire course of human history, that was never recorded! Moreover, have Feminist seen the way many women behave today as either amateur sluts, professional cam girls or porn stars? Frankly, the professional porn industry has never seen anything like what many real women are doing in their personal lives today and often for free! And the women who make much of this stuff are some of the most highly educated women in human history, some even have higher qualifications and earn more than men, they often identify as Feminists, and they are often adamant in their vocal denial of other Feminists’ views on how they should live their lives. I am sorry Ms Feminist; I refuse to take responsibility, for what women I do not know and have never met in real life, in places in the world I have never even been, decide to upload to the internet! And the ten seconds to a few minutes I might watch them adds up to nothing compared to how they live their lives! Moreover, I have not even paid for porn since about 2007! Growing up as a student of human history, I thought the rank hypocrisy of Victorian society and in particular Victorian men, could never be repeated. But the schizophrenic, hysterical, hypocrisy of today’s Western Feminist women reaches extremes never witnessed before in human history.

                

Time and time again, I have seen videos of wet t-shirt contests and been astonished by the abandoned gyrating of most women who have no problem stripping, writhing, grimacing, and gurning in front of the camera and the contrast between them and the cowed fear and shame of most men who are dragged up and undressed by such girls. Usually, the men become embarrassed wreaks trying to look sexy and feebly struggling to produce an erection or desperately hide their impotent manhood in fear. But for the women there is no such fear of failure to perform. Once women have abandoned their morals, there is no off switch to their provocation! I am remined of the famous English comedic film The Full Monty about a group of men who become male strippers, but their penises were never shown! Because the male penis in all its vulnerable flaccid frailty and fitful pride until recently could not be shown. Another strange artistic proof of the failure of male potency was when the Russian anarchist art group Voina staged an orgy in 2008 in front of members of the press. It was called "Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!" and staged in the Timiryazev State Biology Museum in Moscow. But it was the most pathetic charade of an orgy I have ever seen. The men were a laughable collection of skinny nerds and fat nerds and they tried to ride the girls tightly so that no one could see that they could not gain an erection. It was a well-known old-school porno soft-core trick. I doubt if any of the four men was ever hard and if they were - they could not sustain their erections. Meanwhile, their stunningly beautiful arty female partners waited patiently for the anarchy to begin! But it never did. But in the Liberal Western art world they were hailed as geniuses and the spin off female Punk band Pussy Riot who had not a musical note in their heads were also uncritically praised by a Western media that delighted in any protests against Vladimir Putin even if it came from artistic charlatans.   

            

Meanwhile, I have seen so many webcam shows, with a girl and her boyfriend or groups of girls and their boyfriends and often the girls gyrate and masturbate for half an hour and then get their boyfriends hard, suck their boyfriends cock for ten minutes and then get fucked for another five to twenty minutes after which their boyfriends cum and go away. Then the girls spend another hour and a half masturbating alone! Then there are also the many cam shows with groups of girls who fuck themselves and each other with vibrators, double ended dildos, and strap-ons, for four even five hours non-stop! The point is, that female sexual stamina, not to mention gluttony, can far outstrip men’s. Moreover, whether they really cum, or do not, is beside the point. Because even women find it almost impossible to tell for sure if another woman is cumming. (Though there are a lot of visual clues that signal if a woman is really into it or is even having an orgasm. Like red flushing around the face, neck or chest, super erect nipples, soaking wet and wide-open pussies, spasms, legs shaking or twitching, eyes rolling in the back of the head, and being barely able to speak.) But the uncertainty about solipsistic female pleasure, allows women to fake it even when they are not into it and still get paid! So, much is made of women’s ability to fake orgasm with men, and it is taken as a slur against men’s sexual inadequacy and gullibility. But it could also be highlighted as just one of the many ways that women lie to men. And not enough attention is made of men’s inability to fake orgasm! And their resulting brutal sexual honesty! The worst cam shows are often those in which women are with a man or couple of men who cannot get hard. The women look bored and dejected, but they try to pretend that it does not matter, while the men look embarrassed and humiliated. So, the men slink off and never come back. Or go away wank to porn or pop a pill and return with a hard penis. Or the men do not return, and the women masturbate with vibrators cumming again and again. 

              

I have also seen countless gang bang videos and watched one woman easily satisfy half a dozen men and even dozens of men in larger gangbangs. And at the end, all the men cum! On the other hand, I have seen many reverse-gangbangs where one man fucks half a dozen, or a dozen women, and mostly it just does not work! One woman at a time a has a few minutes of fun, while most of the rest sit around moaning theatrically and trying to look interested but looking bored out of their mind. Women are sexually greedy, they want a mega-stud all to themselves who will fuck them from when they meet to the day they die! But they are also perfectly able to enjoy gangbangs and swinging in ways many men in reality often find difficult. And time and time again, it is reported in the swinging community that while the man initially suggests swinging, it is often the woman who becomes intoxicated by it! And some men who try swinging, quickly find they cannot compete with the other alpha males - and become impotent amid an orgy that their wife is revelling within. 

             

So, the reason behind the visceral sexual hatred of many men for some women is born out of abject fear of insatiable multi-orgasmic whores and manipulative actresses, and all the other women who have power over men because of men’s hardwired drive for sex with them. Men are often disgusted by their own weakness and passivity when faced by female sexuality. The seeming ease with which a man, however authoritative or creative or important they may be, can be aroused and tormented by female beauty and sexuality threatens male self-control, and their emotionless reduction of the world to dead impersonal objects to be conquered. And the spectre of impotence threatens their power even more. Thus, porn facilitates male lust, and at the same time grants the male voyeur distance, from the complexity of a real relationship with a woman. In some respects, porn can be seen as an escape from real women (just as romance novels for women can be seen as an escape from real men) I know in my case it was. Moreover, after decades of Feminist diatribes, bitchy rants against men and #MeToo – many men get the idea that women do not like men, and that male sexuality is disgusting to women, or other men think to hell with real women!   

            

Most of the people I have known in the world, have been through the television, media, and internet, and most of my lovers have been women in porn, there is nothing unique about this, it is part of our Post-Modern condition. We have all become voyeurs whether people want to admit it or not. On the internet, in publishing and in the media, sex sells. However, in a contemporary art world almost devoid of any aesthetic or social meaning except monetary value, my pornographic work is virtually worthless. In fact, I have made far less money from my pornographic paintings than the porn-stars I depict, while receiving just as much hostility from society. However, as a youth I did not make art for financial gain, if I did, I would have worked in other kitsch genres like landscape, still life, bland decorative abstraction, mindless conceptual one-liners, or fashionable pop imagery. Despite society’s insatiable appetite for pornography, despite nearly every man watching porn and up to 40% of women also watching porn, society is ferociously hypocritical in its condemnation of porn and banishment of it from public art galleries. The last thing people want is to have their faces rubbed in the source of their deepest shame. The rank hypocrisy of even other artists regarding pornography is galling to me. I know both male and female artists and intellectuals who use porn, yet also shamelessly publicly condemn it and those that use it!

           

Throughout my life and career as a pornographic painter, I have been astonished by peoples glib and smart-arsed opinions about sex. I was accused of being an adolescent painter because I was honest about my sexual desires, anxieties, and fears, but frankly I see now, that in some ways I am very mature, and far too honest for my own good, and the world is full of supposed adults who have a smutty adolescents’ conception of sex. Their lack of honesty, personal confession, and intellectual understanding of the complexities of sexuality is astonishing, as is their childish need to make a joke of sex, to trot out politically correct slogans or rant hypocritically about the religious or Feminist immorality of sex or porn. Both men and women can be astonishing liars when it comes to sex, and masters of talking around the subject without revealing their true feelings. And it seems that the more socially respectable, obsessed with status and desperate for social or political power they are, the greater the politically correct rubbish they speak on the matter. However, in another way I was very naïve in my pursuit of truth about sex, because the more you know about sex the more contentious and problematic it becomes. People laugh about sex and death because they are terrifying and unfathomable. Growing up, watching highbrow discussions about sex on TV shows in Ireland and England, they always seemed to have only found frigid young women who did not enjoy or frankly want sex. These so called open and honest talk shows, were nothing but morality show trials. The reality was that girls’ power was in their secrecy, and they were so ashamed of their sexuality, and fearful of being slut shamed and stigmatised, they could only talk about the problems and disappointments of sex. Meanwhile, on the news, if the story was not about rape, abuse, or the degradation of women, it seemed sex was never mentioned. Just for once it would have been nice to read a breaking headline like, “breaking news, women love having sex with men!” Or “news flash, women love the cock!” But old news is no news! 

             

Only in recent years in the West and even Ireland, has there been any honest discussion about porn if only because its use has become so rampant and has even begun to supplant real intimacy. But generally, even only a few years ago, there was no honest discussion around porn. When porn was discussed, people had only seen porn by accident, or had a friend who watched it, or only seen it for research purposes! Such public debates on sex, manufactured moral puritan consensus, because hardly anyone would be stupid enough to admit to immoral or possibly criminal activity and even deviants would rarely admit publicly that they were deviants. Time and time again, puritans have relied on shaming people into silence and then filled the vacuum with moral pieties. But of course, people masturbate to porn, they just do not mention it in polite society. The unsophisticated view of porn as being only about abused and blameless women and predatory men, took no consideration of the 25-40% of women who used porn, the use of porn by men to actually avoid or substitute real relations with women or the wild amoral nature of many porn stars who were making tragic adult choices in a free society. Nor was there any discussion of the trauma inflicted on the male voyeur by porn and since it was impossible to criticise women, no blame was levelled at female porn stars for their provocations and wanton behaviour.

            

Moreover, when contemporary female artists like Betty Tomkins, Marlena Dumas, Sue Williams, Cecile Brown, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe, Rita Ackermann, and Irish female artists like Genieve Figgis painted porn they were lauded for their honesty, bravery, and courage! While Bad Girl painters were hailed for triumphing over censorship and triumphing over disapproval – I was deplored! I was castigated as a psycho and pervert! What made it worse, is that apart from Betty Tomkins who painted porn before me, all the others painted porn after me. These Bad Girl painters of porn avoided the typical charges of sexism aimed at men, by claiming they were empowered Feminist heroines celebrating female sexuality, and they were part of a Laddette culture that claimed women could be as yobbish and sexually vile as men. It was all pure hypocrisy of a new kind. But the main reason such female entryism succeeded is that they painted porn without any of the aggressive visual lust of a man or his psycho-sexual trauma and turned it into a pretty, superficial, flaccid void. By dismantling the predatory ‘male gaze’ in porn they effectively turned it into a lifeless morass of estranged bodies. Because they were not actually painting their own desires and fears, they were merely ironically mimicking and pastiching the desire of men, which they clearly did not even understand! Porn for men, is interactive in a way it never is for most women. When men look at porn, because their sexuality is aggressive, they conceptually imagine themselves fucking the women on screen. For a man, a porn video is like a kind of sexual first-person-shooter. But when the vast majority of women look at porn, because their sexuality is passive, they can only think that they are looking at strange people having sex and whom they have too much empathy for and so often feel guilty for objectifying. So, it would have been far more interesting if these Bad Girl painters had confessed to their own sexual desires and made them manifest. But we are still waiting for a female artist to credibly describe her love and lust for men and depict her sexual desire. Artistic women are still just the critics of sex not its creators.  

           

Aggressive, grandiose, and pornographic paintings like mine can be fatiguing and depressing when seen on mass, making the viewer desperate to have done with it all and move on to something lighter and more entertaining. I have witnessed some women flee from my shows in panic and some men wander through my exhibitions with self-loathing or seething with anger at the work and me. If they do not use porn, they feel guilty and enraged for being part of a culture that produces such images. If they do use such images, they feel ashamed for being so weak as to seek out and pay for such degrading and politically incorrect images of women and men. Moreover, they are threatened by my 'phallic' images of powerful male erections or carnal women, most of which they know they can never live up to.             

            

In his appreciation of Felicien Rops, Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote: “there are no really obscene people except those who are chaste.”  And it is an irony of my pornographic art that when I started making it, I was a timid, sexually inhibited virgin who had never even been kissed. The thought of rendering myself vulnerable towards a girl and risking her rejection or humiliation, rendered me virtually paralytic with fear. Far more than my fear of sex was my fear of romantic failure. I ached for love, but sex was how I framed my longing. My desire for love exposed me to the tribunal of womanhood. So, I preferred to make an art of my impotence and despair and create a self-loathing circle of contempt for myself, womanhood and the world. If I could not be a great lover, I would become a great misanthropic eunuch and prophet of doom. I was so shy and self-loathing, that I could not bear to look women straight in the eyes, only in painting could I stare into the eyes of harlots. Part of me wanted to join it these orgies, but the idea of such a crowd of people also struck me as hellish. Being with people only made me more aware of my difference, solitude, and alienation. So, there was little eroticism in my frightened and frightening early pornography and only a desperate fear of female sexuality that verged on being proto-Black-Pill-Incel. In my pornographic art, my passion turned to repulsion and nausea which passed into the very facture of the work itself, into its very flesh so to speak.             

The one major subject my paintings should have represented was my childhood abuse at the hands of my mentally deranged and domineering mother - whose looming presence I never shook off. However, these memories were so raw, hurtful, and uncontainable by art, that I was only able to visualize them partly in 2008. And if you think my porn paintings are bad, you would be horrified by any paintings I made depicting what had happened to me as a child at the hands of my mother! So, porn became a surrogate for the feelings of fear, anger, awe, disgust, and lust for women, I had grown up to view at a primal level as objects of abject terror. In fact, the women and porn stars in my paintings are far less emotionally torn than I am in my self-portraits. Their sexuality is natural and overpowering – mine is conflicted, shameful and self-loathing.   

             

Between 1992-1995, I looked at all kinds of examples of Dutch and American pornography, I was turned on by some, disgusted by others, and bewildered by many. But I recorded all these sensational and bizarre images in my porn paintings. Yet, by middle-age, I was far surer of what did, and did not turn me on, and my range of pornographic images became far tamer and more conventional. My porn paintings were appropriated 'ready-mades', cropped, simplified, expressively distorted, and re-interpreted by me. The images did not represent my own fantasies, instead, they represented the mainstream commercial fantasies of the hardcore pornography industry. However, as expressive paintings they did represent my own real emotions in relation to images of sex. My pornographic paintings were frequently painted with great care and technical sophistication, a total rebuke to those who dismissed them as adolescent, puerile or merely provocative. The main activities shown in my pornographic paintings were two men with one woman, two women with one man, orgies, fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy, and urology (water-sports). I picked my pornographic images, for the beauty of the actresses, the sexiness of the sexual act depicted, the compositional quality of the form and finally the psychological impact of the image. I was particularly fond of depicting women giving blowjobs, because it combined the cock with the face of a woman - which I found by far the sexiest part of a woman. I loved the contrast of a female portrait - with a transgressive blowjob. I made far fewer images of cunnilingus, firstly because they were so rare in porn, because they were so hard to light and shoot, and secondly because it emphasized the man’s face which I had little interest in, and in fact, I often changed the man’s face to mine. The rarest subject in my art was the so-called meat-shot or close-up of intercourse, because I found it totally undramatic. I felt that a picture had to show the female face to have true erotic power. 

            

From the age of two, I have been a daily masturbator, so sexually based imagery quickly took hold of me. As an abused and neglected child, I had few things to comfort me, but one of them was masturbation. From the age of at least ten, I used erotica as an emotional painkiller. Later I would hunt obsessively for erotic stimulation in bookshops where I purchased books on ancient erotic drawings and early twentieth century erotic photographs, as well as erotic novels by the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, Georges Bataille, and Anaïs Nin. I also voraciously read the shocking sexual fantasies of ordinary women in Nancy Friday's compilations My Secret Garden and Women on Top, which included fantasies about lesbian sex, sex with famous people, group sex, sex with dogs and horses, rape, S&M, domination, bondage, and all manner of female submissive stories. At night, I would go to my local video shop and rent erotic thrillers - to which I would again guiltily masturbate. Later, I went to Amsterdam and haunted the porn shops, pornographic video booths, cinemas, and the brothels. I was trying to ease my depression, loneliness, and fear of women with the quick and easy fix of pornography and prostitution. However, pornography was never a simple form of hedonism for me. It was always tinged with guilt, shame, loneliness, and self-disgust. Wandering around porn shops in Las Vegas, Paris, Amsterdam, London and later even in Dublin - I felt a victim to my sexual compulsions. But I also found some solace, in the fact, that there were many other sexual freaks like me in the world. Moreover, I idolised the beauty and sexiness of porn stars. Yet, at other times, I was traumatically triggered. Like when I saw French porn for the first time in Pigalle in Paris in 1990. Throughout my teenage years, I had dreamed of a beautiful arty French girl who would save me from my suicidal loneliness and alienation. But seeing French girls in porn shattered all my teenage dreams of a French dream girl. Or maybe just turned it into a nightmare! These were not the French girls of my romantic adolescent daydreams, they were beautiful, but they did not act beautifully! They acted like base animals! I knew these girls would eat me alive, and I could never compete for their love! Because I was an impotent loser and they obviously loved macho thugs! I was so traumatised, that I did not even buy any of the magazines I had looked at.                 

             

So, one cannot overestimate the degree to which my early pornographic works were a bitter proto-Black-Pill-Incel  critique of psychotic liberated female sexual debauchery which mimicked the worst kind of bad boys and created a frightening gender vertigo. Even when I painted girls in nightclubs, they became expressions of my anxiety and horror. My relationship with the feminine swung between obsession and uncontrollable lust on the one hand, and cowardly inhibition and violent repulsion on the other. Liberal Post-Feminist female liberation was of completely no use to me, because I could not cunningly play the games other people played, and I did not have the balls to seduce, never mind use women. So, I had to spend my life looking at women with other men. Seeing free-spirited sluts on TV, in nightclubs, or in porn, made my chest tighten, my heartbeat race and within seconds my lust could often turn to abject terror and petrified impotence. I feared I would be punished for my desire - just as my mother had viciously punished me so often in my youth for my sexual indiscretions. Or I feared my cowardice and impotence would be exposed by the provocations of sluts - and I would be humiliated and unmanned. So, seeing the flirtatious look of sluts on TV or in nightclubs - only made me want to nervously puke. I cursed my sexuality, weakness and the power women had over me. I watched them living a social and sexual life I could only dream of, and miserably saw the kind of brutes and louts they wanted. Plus, I knew that their thug boyfriends could beat the crap out of me with one hand tied behind their back. These sluts were wanted by men and admired by women. Their life one long social whirl (often paid for by men), indulgent pleasure and series of sexual encounters. Their boyfriends were loutish idiots, but they made these girls wet, in a way I did not even understand. All these girls talked about was love and caring and wanting sensitive guys, but they only wanted brutes with muscles, money, and power. And if I did meet these girls - I would be absolutely terrified of them and run away. Their longing for sex only exposing my inner masculine inadequacy and collapse. While they fearless fucked anyone they wanted to and lived out their fantasies - I cowered in fear in my bedroom. So, I hated myself and wanted to die. How could any girl ever possibly want someone like me? I was an absolutely zero. These beautiful girls would never love or want to fuck me. I felt like a pathetic, wimp and loser. Worst of all, they would lecture me on my painting of pornography and call me a sick weirdo. But all their talk of morality was bullshit! So, my mind became an erotic disaster zone of failure. I wanted to hide in my bedroom/studio and dissect women with my paint brush - until the power they had over me was neutralised, and the fear went away. I thought that only when I had understood the feminine monster - would I be free of their power. But the fear only grew because the more porn I watched the more my impotence dominated my life.                            

In our society the most important way we overcome loneliness is through a romantic connection. But for me in my youth that was not possible. So, my only cure for loneliness was through porn. And I used porn as a metaphor for all the aspects of love including desire, longing, ecstasy, fear, despair, jealousy, betrayal, and hatred. My use of porn was part of a depressive loop, starting from a position of isolation, loneliness, boredom, and depression I used porn as a painkiller, which could numb and distract me as well as give me a short moment of phallic power. Nevertheless, after my orgasm, I was plunged back into self-loathing, shame, loneliness, and isolation. Using pornography, I felt like a loser and sicko, unable to court real women, and forced to lust after victimized but also exhibitionistic, decadent, and lewd women who were fucked by alpha male pimps, thugs and professional porn studs. In the real world, I knew these streetwise women would eat me alive and leave me for dead. So perversely looking at so much porn often made me feel even more impotent and useless. Sometimes I could not understand how many women said one thing in public, acting as if they were high minded and sensitive, yet sex made them betray their finest beliefs and sentiments and revealed their animalistic attraction to brutish, powerful men and their visceral disgust of wimps, sissies and losers like me. In such a world, my only consolation was the role of voyeur. Thankfully, most of the time, in reproduction I could fantasize that they desired my nerdish nine-stone body and found my bespectacled, pimply face attractive. Moreover, in pornography, my performance anxiety was cured. In pornography, I was always hard and always came on time, I was always desirable to attractive women and they sought to give me pleasure. 

              

There was always a war in my life between my ascetic, hermitic, monk like life of painting and study, and my debauched sexual and drug escapades. The later were a release from the former. As Hans-Jurgen Dopp pointed out: “Erotic art, however, is not only a reflection of achieved sexual freedom; it can also be a by-product of the suppression and repression with which eroticism is burdened. It is even conceivable that the most passionate erotic works were created not in spite of, but rather because of, the cultural pressures on sexuality.” (Hans-Jurgen Dopp, 1000 Erotic Works of Genius, Parkstone International: Singapore, 2008, P.8.) My sexual freedom of the mind came at the cost of the self-internment and self-isolation of my body. So, I liked the idea of hermits, monks, prisoners, voyeurs, and pornographers who lived in cells – their only freedom through their mind. But the holy life was not for me. As a youth, I simply could not believe in God, and I had too many questions in my head and aches in my loins. 

           

Perversely, although I made erotic and pornographic art, I was influenced by hardly any erotic or pornographic art, because with a few exceptions like Schiele and Picasso I found such work kitsch, simplistic and technically sub-standard. However, seeing the work of Egon Schiele at the age of fifteen, convinced me that erotic art could be as heroic and powerful a genre as historical or religious art. My early explicit paintings and drawings (particularly those from 1989-1997) were created while I was in a pathological state, and in a fury against the censoring of the sexual aspect of existence by the Irish Republican State, Catholic church, Feminists, Socialists and ruling social elites in Ireland. But more importantly, growing up with virtually no male role models, I rebelled against the suffocating control of matriarchy. My interest in sex, reflected my primitive, uncultured attraction to the magic of the physical. Contemporary pornography, (1970`s-2020), became for me a natural medium for the contemplation of self, being and womankind.  My art recorded and documented in text and imagery the powerful affect women's bodies, and sexuality had on my life from childhood. My discovery of the female body passed through shame and humiliation, as I broke the plastic rules that were taught in academies of fine art and broke the moral rules that were taught in church. I became both the actor and voyeur, painter, and spectator in my porn paintings. In my female pornographic nudes, the subject was attacked, not observed. The women were sexually desired, not loved or spiritually comprehended. In my early proto-Black Pill-Incel  pornographic artworks from 1990-1993, I showed my lust transformed into abject terror in the face of demonic women - I feared would hurt me like my mother.

             

At sixteen, I produced a couple of images of myself as a transsexual. Tormented Lovers of late 1990, was perhaps the most important erotic painting I ever made. Because it explains so much about how I turned the erotic into a nightmare. I took a kitsch illustration in a sex manual, of a couple embracing side by side with the woman stroking the man’s cock, which was a happy hippie celebration of sex, and turned it into a demonic expression of my fear of women, fear of intimacy, and performance anxiety. Later, I started making images of men subserviently performing cunnilingus or being fucked from on top by powerful women. During 1991-1992, I made many images of women aggressively kissing men - which show even a kiss could trigger me and cause blind panic and gynophobia. Then I made proto-Black-Pill-Incel  images of male strippers being groped and leered at by debauched women. When I flirted with homosexual relationships, I produced several sexy male nudes. Then when I began sleeping with women, I produced more images of women performing fellatio on men. However, periodically, when I was at a low-ebb, I would produce images of women forcing men to lick their shoes, women pissing on men or women dominating men. 

              

One of my earliest works made in mid-1992, were a series of drawings of planned sculptures in which I presented a long, twisted penis pierced with pins. These works were a direct proto-Black-Pill-Incel  rebuke to a sculpture a female student in my sculpture class in Dun Laoghaire had made in 1990 of a naked woman writhing on top of a phallus. While she had sought to celebrate her independent, liberated heterosexual desire – I sought to mortify mine! Moreover, although most of my work was based upon pornographic magazines and video tapes featuring women who had chosen to become adult actresses – my real subject was the generally liberated women of Western Europe and America who now fucked as freely as men and behaved just as badly. Indeed, far from producing facile sexist images of women to be used, or macho exhortations to phallic power, I created an entirely negative vision of sexuality as a horror in which a gaze became a reason for panic, where desire turned into fear and where brazen female display could provoke in me suicidal self-loathing, self-mutilation, and even attempted suicide. I made the tragic erupt in pornographic images. So, often I turned impersonal commercial pornography made to be casually used for masturbation by men - into handmade pornographic records of my holy terror of women and self-loathing and impotent state of mind!

               

As Paul O’Kelly observed, my pornographic paintings had little in common with contemporary artists using sexual imagery like; Andy Warhol, Betty Tomkins, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, David Salle, Jeff Koons, The Chapman Brothers, Cecile Brown, Chantal Joffe, Andres Serrano, Thomas Ruff, or John Currin, for unlike them I was clearly involved and seduced by pornography and not distanced from, or ironic towards it. Many artists are more concerned with giving their Neo-Salon art some trendy shock value, than real transgression. They seek to depornographize pornography - whereas I aim to pathologize pornography! For all the supposed obscenity of the likes of Picasso and Warhol, their works never really transgressed the boundaries of acceptable liberal values. Unlike my contemporaries, I had lived an outcast's existence and I inhabited the world of pornography - I did not make a study of it. In fact, my paintings had far more in common with erotomaniac Expressionist and Surrealist artists like; Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hans Bellmer, and Francis Bacon. 

Of course, as a painter of second-hand porn, I could be accused of plagiarism and lack of formal consent, but I never actually directly exploited any real people in my art. Unlike photographers and artists like Diana Arbus, Larry Clark, Nan Golden, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe or Jeff Koons who had all exploited real people in their art. Besides there were plenty of other painters who appropriated soft or hardcore pornographic imagery as source material for their artworks including Betty Tomkins, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, R B Kitaj, David Salle, Marlene Dumas, Lisa Yuskavage, Cecile Brown, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe, and John Currin. The trouble with most pornographic art whether made by men or women, is the artists lack any real understanding or experience of their subject. They are tourists in porn, making academic observations, but never confessing to their own desires, conveying the depth and complexity of porn, or the thoughts and feelings that it inspires. 

            

Moreover, the problem with too many of my pornographic paintings, was that I was merely taking second-hand pornographic imagery, and just giving them a brutish expressive treatment, devoid of any real intellectual transformation of my own. I was appropriating other people’s sexuality and sex lives, without revealing anything about my own sexuality. 

            

My early porn paintings were about my crushing sense of shame! And I had no compassion or love for myself. I could not accept my sexuality. The greater the shame I felt about looking at and painting porn, paradoxically the greater the hold porn and my need to making porn paintings had on me. My vision of sex in the early 1990s was in keeping with the morbid, fin-de-siècle torments of Egon Schiele, guilt ridden and nihilistic. Ian O`Doherty in his cynical review of my ‘Twenty Years of Panic Art’ retrospective wrote: "… only an Irish artist could have produced an exhibition like this. Its attitude to sex is remote, distasteful and uniquely Irish… What we see is not, contrary to what some observers believe, demeaning to women. It is simply demeaning to sex. There is no joy in the work…" (Evening Herald 6th November 2000.) He was right. I was more interested in expressing the fears and frustrations of sexuality than romantic fantasies.  

             

Despite the expressionistic treatment of my pornographic paintings, they remained highly intellectual visions of sexuality. Thus, it comes as no surprise to learn just how deeply I studied erotic writers like the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. One of my first reviewers Ruth Herrington (TNT: Trinity News Two, December 6th 2000) keenly recognized my kinship with the latter and commented; "Susan Sontag describes Bataille’s work as "an erotics of agony"; Cypher might just be his visual counterpart. He has painted the erotics of agony….”

              

The visceral power of my early pornographic works came from the fact that I was almost discovering the pornographic body as I painted it. My early work was a flat-out confrontation of culture and its commercial, sexual, and social limitations. As a teenager I saw that art rarely dealt with the real fears, desires, lusts, perversions and inadequacies of the artist, his society or humankind in general. I vowed at thirteen, that I would become the most honest artist I could possibly be, and a huge part of this meant being honest about my sexual desires, my self-hatred, my egotism, and my intense dislike of social cant, cultural censorship and political hypocrisy.

          

From my youth, I was fascinated by genitalia, female genitals in particular. However, close ups of sexual organs are taboo in High Art, which maybe replete with erotic images but which depend for their erotic power as much by suggestion and sublimation as by what is revealed. Only in illicit erotic images made typically by cruder artists with more primitive motives does the depiction of genitals become paramount. Thus, my taking of pornographic imagery as source material, reflected again my Art Brut sensibilities, which revelled in macho extremes of imagery and emotion. As a young artist I was drawn to what Linda William's in her key book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible” described as 'the frenzy of the visible' on which she said the following; "The self-conscious control and surveillance normally exercised by the “properly” socialized woman over her appearance, and so evident in the soft core “turn on”, is precisely what the hard core wants to circumvent. Hard core desires assurance that it is witnessing not the voluntary performance of feminine pleasure, but its involuntary confession. The woman’s ability to fake the orgasm that a man can never fake (at least according to certain standards of evidence) seems to be at the root of all the genres attempts to solicit what it can never be sure of: the out of control confession of pleasure, a hard core ‘frenzy of the visible.’  The animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured… The unwilling victim’s eventual manifestation of pleasure are offered as the genres proof of a sincerity that under other conditions might seem less sure.” (Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible”, London: Pandora, 1990, P.50.  

            

Images paraded before me from badly made porno, in which I imagined I was playing the lead – as both actor and interrogator, victim and abuser, sinner and redeemer. To these illicit images, I added my own personal truth as a consumer of such material. My emotions propelled me to transcend what I saw. I used the image before me as an anecdote and pretext to support my expressiveness - and thus my soul was revealed through my heightened colour and intense mark making and brushwork. 

             

However, because of my almost autistic lack of understanding of people, never mind women, in most of my early artworks, I could not depict women in all their nakedness or in the round as people. I could not empathise with or understand their character. Early on, I really lacked any grasp of the psychology or personality of women. So, my early work was never a window into the personality of the porn stars I painted. I was also incredibly inattentive to women’s body language, and I could not capture the essence of women the way so many great painters of the past could. Instead, I imposed upon the mediated images of women I worked from my own psychological torment and alienation. There was far more of me in my early paintings of porn stars than of the real women. So, often in my porn paintings the nudity of the women seems unreal, repressed, and alienated. In fact, in many of my most extreme porn paintings, I was being overwhelmed as I painted by my abject fear of women, self-loathing, and traumatised impotency, all of which I was powerless to change or do anything about. 

         

I took the most traditional and moving subject, the female nude, and sullied it with models taken from glamour magazines, hardcore porn, and webcams. Most conventional nudes are restful and completive pieces that allow us to view the body of a woman philosophically. However, my early nudes - based mostly on hardcore pornography - were nothing of the sort, they represented the fear, shame, and guilt that the viewer can experience when confronted with female nudity and had their sexuality provoked. As such, my early work had more in common with the tradition of the Sheele na Gig but refashioned through the influence of pornography. Unlike traditional life-drawings, academic nudes or softcore porn, women in hardcore porn do not simply passively submit to the male gaze – they taunt and play with the voyeur challenging him with the power of their fecundity. As such, women in hardcore porn are aggressive actresses. So, in my porn paintings, it is unclear who is the subject and who is that actor. As much as I tried to control and constrain these female porn stars in my paintings – they continued to break free of my linear and painterly bounds. Never a real Feminist, my work nevertheless depicted the truly terrifying aspect of extreme female sexuality, and so, many heterosexual men found my work disturbing and threatening.

             

In the brutal struggle for dominance in the sex war - I was a loser - so in my porn paintings, I detailed my unrequited lust for women and the anguish my failure as a man instilled in me. A misanthropic drop-out, I retreated from the world and women, and created an art and philosophy of impotence. My masochism was married to my nihilism and alienation from humanity and women became frightening symbols of my impotence and fear. Saturated in pornographic viewing, I ignored or minimized the real dangers, misery and exploitation involved in the industry and saw female porn stars as insatiable nymphomaniacs, cruel dominatrixes, and pagan goddesses of primal sexuality. Women were the source of my erotic celebration and also my unmitigated anguish. Wanting to express the darkness of sexuality, I turned their flesh into writhing mounds of clashing tones, colours, and brushstrokes. I saw that the great virtue of pornography was its non-verbal, anti-narrative, physical embodiment of women at their most carnal and almost Goddess like. Thus, in my porn paintings it is unclear who possess who. Am I a slave to these porn stars or are they slaves to me?

             

For years, porn was my only mode of connection with women, and I used masturbation as a form of self-comfort. Porn allowed me to satiate my sexual desire and loneliness without taking the risk of ever actually interacting with real women. So, for me porn was a metaphor for loneliness. Furthermore, by painting pornographic images of women, with mastery and transgressive courage, I tried to compensate for my fragile sense of masculinity. My youthful obsession with women, had made me weak and powerless in their presence, and they could accept or deny me at a whim. In revenge for their power over me – I tried to turn the tables by making them the victims of my art.

The extreme subjectivity, perversion, and anguish of my early work, alienated many of my viewers who could not comprehend or understand my experiences or artistic message and who saw no redeeming feature to my art. When I painted from pornographic photographs, I gave my paintings the attention and density normally reserved for painting from life. My pornographic paintings were not the kind of distanced intellectual efforts of Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans instead they were full blooded - as though the paintings had become a surrogate for actual sex. I made the viewer adopt the role of a morose voyeur - in a 'can't look but must look' dilemma of observation.

Because of my childhood, I was a pessimist, and believed the world was essentiality evil. I did not have the love for the world and spiritual depth of van Gogh. Moreover, I had no faith in art to change anything. For me, art was not a good enough substitute for the loss of God - and had become the human joke. Therefore, I was unable to turn my self-commentary into universal truths which everyone could have empathy with. My art like van Gogh's was a cry for help, however unlike the Dutchman, I had been unable to create art of universal appeal and comprehension, my life and personality was too perverse, too hostile, and too nihilistic. There was no reaching out to others in my work – instead, there was a scream of defiance. So, my work often descended into self-pity and self-indulgence. And my canvases dripped, with the dirtiest, and most pathological paints. I painted exactly what I wanted, without the slightest concern to please or to be understood. Each of my paintings was an experiment, the results of which were not known even to me in advance. 

As a youth I felt the professional lives and intellectual observations of most artists were worthless. My only concern was to record the state of my existence and in some way to comment upon the immoral and debauched lives of modern men and women. I believed in the concept of the modern artist written about by Susan Sontage, in her essay The Pornographic Imagination (1967): "His principal means of fascination is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be, not wanted. But however fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience, his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether something known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself. The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.”

The average person can understand the nature of my work very well. I am a radical ultra-Post-Modernist who drags life (or at least the sexualized and tormented body) into high art. My early work provoked real visceral reactions, that conceptual, video or instillation art could never hope to arouse, because fundamentally no one gave a dam about the inane trivial pursuit of contemporary art. In an art world, of kitsch chocolate box landscapes, mindless videos of mundane people, doing boring things, of blank abstract canvases, and pretentious installations of rubbish, I painted the naked human body. There was no anti-art in my early work, other than a rage at the pointlessness of what passed for significant statements by a worldwide collective of conceptual academics who could not draw for toffee, and commercial art stars who made virtually identical work, looked alike, dressed alike, and espoused the same Marxist and Liberal clichés.

When I was young, I used porn to purge myself of excessive sexual desire, as a middle-aged man I used porn to give me something to desire. After my mother’s death, I virtually stopped painting porn and produced fewer and fewer nudes. Yet, this attempt to curb my erotic art, only served to mentally tear me apart and make me feel fatally conflicted. And my work drenched in grief, trauma and madness was no more commercially appealing than my earlier work. Therefore, from 2012, I slowly reintroduced erotic imagery into my work and by 2015, I had fully returned to painting hardcore porn. My girlfriend Carol observed that I only painted porn at my most hopeless and depressed. 

Moreover, I have no illusions that my art is going to change society, the way I did as a youth. However, I still believe that sexual fantasies, erotica and pornography, like art and psychoanalysis are therapeutic. Pornography in my opinion, gives much need relief to many socially isolated men, aids married couples, and liberates intellectuals who seek to end hypocrisy and the poison of cultural lies about the body, gender, and desire.

             

Philosophically speaking it will come as no surprise that I am against the traditional Marxist and Feminist critique of pornography, popular culture, and the media in general. Fundamentally, the problem I had with the notion of the ‘male gaze’, was it put the cart before the horse. In claiming that the male gaze was a social construct derived from the ideology of patriarchy which shaped the movie industry, adverting, fashion, and porn, it denied the biological and animal nature of men and women and their hardwired conditioning to either look for sexual prey or exhibit for sexual attention. The left denied the animal nature of mankind, because it is unredeemable in the way society is, through the use of moral, religious and political manipulation and the force of law. The cunning Feminist notion of the ‘male gaze’ also transferred the blame for sex from women who acted up sexually, to the men who looked at them! This left-wing opinion in relation to art, was perfectly crystallized and expressed with verve by John Berger in his seminal book ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972.)  Personally, I find it an exasperating book, one that I disagree with on several levels. But here is how Berger interpreted the female nude in western oil painting: “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turn’s herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books, 1972, P.47.) Regarding a Gothic oil painting by Hans Memling of a naked woman in a landscape viewing herself with a hand-mirror Berger wrote: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books, 1972, P.51.) Finally, at the end of his chapter on the nude in western oil painting he concluded that: “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is deigned to flatter him.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books, 1972, P.64.) For Berger there was ‘nakedness’ when one was alone and oneself, and ‘nudity’ when one was objectified by another person. This was an absurdly purist idea, that completely failed to consider that we are born into a species, are gendered by biology, have sexual and aggressive drives hardwired into our brain, have subconscious sexual desires, and we are both the spectator and exhibitor of our own bodies, and the prurient and perverted observers of everyone else’s body whether we are male or female. Just try going out in the street and demanding that people do not look at you! 

              

I do believe that there are fundamental biological, hormonal, sexual, physical, psychological and behavioural differences between men and women. And they are not just some fiction, created by patriarchy, oil painting, and then repeated by adverting and cinema. I would stress that the difference between women who display and men who look and act, is true of human life as long as visual and written records have spoken of the dance of love and lust. Were women sex objects before the invention of oil paint? Of course they were! Because men did not turn women into sex objects nature did. Anyone who has known women, knows how desperately many of them strive to be considered beautiful not only by men, but also by their female peers, with whom they compete for social and sexual capital. So, John Berger was just being a typical lefty with a disgust for the reactionary conservatism of the body. Moreover, Berger’s rabid ideological reading of art was essentially philistine and nihilistic. Unlike Berger, I am not remotely interested in how the world should be or how people should act, nor do I want to compound utopia lies, I am only interested in the real human condition. But for decades Berger’s political slogans made male painters all around the world cringe, fearful of being complicit with: “… a ‘gaze’ that had operated as a macho, malevolent dictator, locking genders, classes and perhaps ethnicities into a long-term historical pathology – of which painting itself was merely a symptom.” (Julian Bell, What is Painting?, London: Thames & Hudson, 2017, P. 203.)

However, blaming oil painting for sexism, is like blaming cakes for obesity. Misogyny has existed in societies throughout history long before oil painting. The inconvenient truth Berger and all the other left-wing Feminists refused to acknowledge was that many women are exhibitionists and are turned on by men looking at them. Not only that, if they desire the man and want him to fuck her, they look directly at the man in a come-hither manner. In Vagina: A New Biography, Naomi Wolf has pointed out, it is in fact men, not women who do not like strong direct gazes, because they see it as threatening. But women long for long deep gazes, because it creates an intimate connection and bond with their potential lover, and is the prelude to any intimacy. And countless romantic scenes in films and romance novels involve the man gazing longingly at the woman. Female fantasises compiled by the likes of Nancy Friday just a year after than Berger’s Ways of Seeing, revealed that a lot of women fantasise about being watched by a man, ravished, kissed from head to toe, and told endlessly that they are beautiful and sexy. Thus, to upbraid male painters for expressing a fundamental truth about men and women is to my mind typical of the lunatic left and their desire to politically correct human nature into something they find more just. Male desire starts with sight, and it is inescapably hardwired into male biology. Women know this fully, and provoke it according to their own desires. As Brian Sewell observed: “Feminists demand the removal of the naked girl from the pages of the Daily Speculum and would have Madonna and her ilk burned at the stake, for these, they argue, reduce women to the level of sex objects – yet most women spend their lives striving to be sex objects, painting their faces, prinking their hair, pouting their lips and boosting the prominence of larger parts in such ways as to make them an inescapably obvious invitation to men. Moreover, they encourage their small daughters in such mimicry as invites the danger of an adult response.” (Brian Sewell, Pornography and Art, An Alphabet of Villains, London: Bloomsbury, 1995, P. 186.)

The notion of the ‘male-gaze’ also assumes that female beauty/desirability is a naïve, clueless and powerless state. Again, I strongly disagree. In evolutionary terms, life is the survival of the most beautiful and desirable, just as much as it is the survival of the fittest. As Camille Paglia pointed out: “I do not believe that a beautiful woman being looked at is “passive” beneath the “male gaze”. I feel that this is a distortion. It’s not correct. I’d rather think of it in terms of the Helen of Troy motif, that is, a woman in the glory of her sexuality.” (Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays, London: Viking, 1992, P. 289.) Female ‘passivity’ and ‘powerlessness’, is like the passivity of a famous art gallery, that just has to wait for an army of disempowered artists to humbly send in their submissions - most of which they dismissively reject! But like gallery owners when an important big selling artist walks in the door, just look at how women react when an alpha male approaches! A woman’s desirability is central to her sexuality and so all women have a love/hate relationship with the male gaze. But Berger’s views on the ‘male gaze’ (a phrase later popularized in 1975, by Feminist critic Laura Mulvey) was popular with the kind of bookish women who instantly forget their own sexual misdemeanours and liked any view of the world that blamed men and gave women the mantel of victimhood. The ‘male gaze’ was a simplistic, sophomoric, Feminist slogan that was easy to deliver but complicated and politically incorrect to contest. Which is why so many dumb and cowardly men just accepted it in debates. But it can be refuted! Frankly, the man who renounces being a predator in courtship will spend his life alone and witness countless men of the vilest sort mating with the same women who claim they dislike such sport. 

Time and time again in leftist cliché-ridden theory the oppressive male gaze is talked about. What is more interesting to me is the completely unspoken of provocative and even soliciting female gaze in reply. It is the provocative gaze in reply that challenges a man to make something of his desire if he is man enough! Time and time again, Berger assumes that the receiver of a returning female come hither gaze is a macho male (like him with his bevvy of female intellectual admirers) that can act on that gaze and not a timid or shy man turned to stone by it. Or to put it another way, so called female ‘passivity’ is reliant on conformist machismo. While confident men use their power, charisma, and self-confidence to use their ‘male gaze’ to objectify women. I experience no such power. I have heard it said that alpha males have super confidence and believe in their mind that they can have any woman, but I don’t think I can have any woman. I have never felt good enough for any girl, no matter how ordinary, and I have never felt remotely attractive enough to interest the kind of dream girls I fancied. Painfully shy, ill at ease in my skin, self-loathing and unable to make friends never mind chat up women, sexually liberated women glorying in their social and erotic desirability only make my own inadequacy more painfully real. For me to gaze upon almost any woman is to be filled with abject fear and panic, and I quickly avoid their gaze in reply. Their gaze seems to challenge me, and it is a challenge I am incapable of meeting. For me, their gaze in reply is a piercing challenge to my masculinity to act in a macho way I am totally incapable of doing. To me the female gaze is a taunt to my pathetic masculinity, making me shrink away in terror. So, only in porn am I able to return the gaze of women, who in real life would turn me to stone. The notion of ‘the male gaze’ was used to attack those sexist pigs that treated women like meat, but ironically the only men listening to them were kind of wimpy men like me who were already too sensitive, kind, and respectful towards women, and they actually needed to learn to be more predatory. In reality, women only wanted alpha males they were attracted to look at them! And the deeper an alpha male looked into their eyes the more they got turned on! 

Marxists like Berger are like fanatic Christians; they have a black and white view of the human condition that is impractical and unrealistic. (Yet, I would argue that there is more truth in the Christian view of sex than the Marxist.) Communism with all its control, coercion, censorship, and punishment could never solve the problem of human nature. Biology and subconscious drives remain unredeemable. Socialists can bemoan men gazing at women or women tarting themselves up to be looked at, but that will never change our fallen reality. The problem with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, as with most Marxist ideology, is that it is just full of embittered sanctimonious criticism. Berger weighs the value of an artist’s soul in relation to his Marxist notions of political correctness that is often indistinguishable from extreme Catholicism or Islam in its disgust for the body and the mucky realities of the marketplace and human relations. Personally, I loathe the kneejerk moral pontificating of Feminists and Socialists posing as art critics. It strikes me as the least interesting thing about an artwork, and the stupidest conversation point. More importantly, such moral critics usually do not have any deep love or understanding of art, and merely use it as a talking point to push their warped and fundamentally iconoclastic political agenda. 

Besides the myth of the male gaze was the kind of simplistic notion of beauty espoused in an age when men controlled the media and art. What it failed to take into account was the many forms of benign male gazes and the unrecorded malicious female gaze, that judged, compared and competed with other women and was meaner spirited, than simple male desire awash with testosterone and merely wanting to procreate. If men like to watch porn, many women conversely love gossip, and reading and even participating in horribly malicious bitching sessions on social media against other women. If a man can tell in a matter of seconds if he fancies a woman, a woman can find fault in another woman in just the same time, and often male desire is more generous than female misogyny.

Then there is the never acknowledged fact, that many nubile women revel auto-erotically in their own beauty and gaze narcissistically at their own forms. Also, there is the erotic female gaze that gets as much pleasure as men from looking at beautiful women, though this is not necessarily lesbian in nature but merely bi-curious. Then there is the outright lesbian gaze that desires other women and is in competition with men for its prize. 

The cliché of the male gaze also did not account for the sick and sour narcissistic female gaze that turned against itself. Thus, I think it is highly ironic that Feminism fought against the misogyny of the male gaze, yet when female artists like Maria Lessnig, Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville and Tracey Emin painted women, they produced frightful creatures, almost as debased as anything by George Grosz or Otto Dix at their most misogynistic and misanthropic.

Furthermore, there is the heterosexual erotic gaze of women, who enjoy looking at naked men, erect cocks, and porn. As early as My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday (1973), many of her female contributors admitted to checking men out and even ‘crotch watching’. Yet, in many ways, when I was growing up, men were the ‘mysterious’ sex that women were in the nineteenth century. The male body was like the invisible negative to the constantly exposing and exposed, universally visible female body in the media and porn from the 1970s-1990s. However, the 1980s saw the slow start of adverts like the Levi’s 501 and Diet Coke TV commercials where the tables were turned, and women gazed lustfully at hunky men. Meanwhile, male strippers like The Chippendales became an international craze. Their shows were huge sell out events, in which gangs of drunk and hysterical women would raucously cheer as men with bodybuilder physiques stripped and interacted with them. In the more tasteful male stripper shows, the men hid their modesty with thin G-strings - much to the annoyance of the women. However, in other shows men bared all - to the frenzied delight of the women. Such male stripping shows were seen as liberating for women - reversing as it did centuries old sexual roles. For the first time, emancipated women were able to ogle naked men, in the same way that men had historically ogled women. There were even lurid stories of these women betraying their boyfriends and husbands by cheating backstage with these sleazy hunks. By the noughties, videos of these kinds of women actually sucking-off male strippers - while their female friends ogled and cheered were all over the internet.

Time and time again, when school girls and women are asked on news programs or talk shows about porn, they declare their disgust with it, and their disappointment in boys and men. Yet, up to a third of them also use porn. Since the 1970s women have been viciously politically divided, between an unholy collation between anti-porn Radical Feminists and Christian Fundamentalist women versus sex-positive Feminists. And the anti-porn brigade seemed far more credible simply because few men never mind women, wanted to publicly admit to using porn or support it. Yet, most women are somewhere in-between these two extremes. According to various surveys from the early 1990’s (when VHS tapes allowed women to safely consume porn in their house if they had the courage to rent or buy them in video shops) about 30% of consumers in Australia, 33 % in Copenhagen and 40% in the United States were women. And the American magazine Redbook which surveyed 26,000 women in America concluded that nearly half of all women watched pornography. But these women were often considered unrepresentative of normal women, or the methods of surveying them was questioned. Since at least 2014, there has been an explosion not only in the availability of porn on the internet which broadband and streaming has made easy to view, there has also been a massive increase in the ways internet companies can track porn usage by women. Today in the internet age when women do not even have to risk going outside to buy porn, the figures for women who watch porn are roughly the same ranging from 25% to 56%, but younger women watch far more porn than older women. And in sacred Ireland the land of saints and scholars, according to Google Analytics, between 2014-2017, 26% of Irish users of PornHub were pious Irish women, 65% of them aged between 18 and 35! Moreover, of those women that do watch porn, many watch more porn than the average man. Most women like to watch lesbian porn, because it is generally more gentle and non-violent. Though many real lesbians dislike real lesbian porn because it gives a distorted image of their sexuality. Many women like interracial sex, and some are more likely than most men to watch rough sex, gangbang, and double penetration videos. They are attracted to the darkness of extreme hardcore, but they would never admit that they are turned on by misogynistic, female submissive, or non-consensual porn. Many of them these women are life’s bad girls, who refuse to obey religious, moral, or Feminist dictates on porn and their desires are rarely politically correct. But even these women, are far less likely than most men, to admit to their pornography use, because they fear being slut shamed by the greater number of women who say they are repulsed by porn. So, women who do use porn, are not only ashamed by their politically incorrect desire, they are also made to feel like traitors to Feminism. Moreover, many women who use porn, are now just like men in their habituated boredom with erotic images due to constant porn use. So, Feminist attempts to make ethical porn has been a disaster. Few men are attracted to it, and even most women find it a worthy turnoff, and most women do no care enough about porn to pay for ethical porn. Moreover, many female porn users are seeking more and more extreme porn to excite them. And if women use vibrators they are often becoming totally desensitised to normal stimulation! Which is why so many cam-girls end up using huge electric Hitachi Magic Wands! There is even a small but growing number of women who must seek treatment for porn addiction.

For all the left-wing Feminist attempts to end the objectification of women for over fifty-three years, one only has to look at popular culture from women’s magazines to Hollywood movies to MTV to ENews, to Girls Gone Wild or PornHub to see that it has been a dismal failure! All that has changed is women’s own enthusiastic participation in their own objectification and their cynical marketing and commercialization of their own bodies. Empowered women today are bigger whores than those of Babylon! Except that, after dildoing their asses, they talk about Girl Power, female empowerment, and their Feminist credentials! And if you criticise them, they then also claim victimhood! Societies never rid themselves of debauchery, they just find new, deliciously complex forms of hypocrisy to hide it! 

              

Because most traditional painters had been men and most TV producers and advertising executives were also men, left-wing utopians like Berger and Feminists in the 1970s could claim that they produced a false image of women. But this claim was thoroughly destroyed when social media in the noughties allowed women to create their own images of themselves and in doing so, they created images of femininity even more immoral, nasty, gross, depraved, sexualised and frankly misogynistic. With selfies, celebrities and wannabe porn stars, could take the camera off photographers and porn directors and take control of it themselves. So ironically, the greatest explosion of porn in world, was not created by men, it was mostly created by young and middle-aged millennial women armed with their mobile phones, who from the noughties onward, took titillating selfies of themselves or with their friends posing salaciously for Facebook, Tinder or other social networking or dating sites. Many of these selfies were provocative photographs, full of sexual exposure, aimed to incite men! They were not just innocent communication! Inspired by Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian millennial women sought to monetise their sexuality and it is doubtful if many of them could have told you the difference between first, second, third or fourth wave Feminism! Most of it was pretty soft-core fare, ranging from duck-face poses, to shots with their tongues out, showing their cleavage or posing on the toilet taking a piss. But others included dressing up like sluts, kissing men and women in nightclubs, stripping, and some included scenes of masturbation and hardcore sex. Notable in most of the photographs of women in their own homes - was the total absence of any books, magazines or any signs of creativity or culture. And then there is the other huge reason girls constantly post selfies and nudes – to compete with other girls for male attention! Even though it is politically incorrect to admit it in public, many women want to be objectified, prized, and valued for their beauty, femininity, and sexuality. But it has always been exceedingly difficult even impossible for women to admit this socially. So, in romance novels and films, the role of objectifier is usually given to the evil alpha male, who allows the woman to innocently be objectified, sexualised, seduced or forced and all the blame is put on him. 

           

The main reason some women like sexting is, that they get turned on by arousing an attractive man or men who are really sexually attracted to them. Many of these women are very sexual people. And shock horror - women like to receive compliments! Sexting works on the basis of call and response and women can stop the process anytime they like. But many continue regardless of religious sanctions, Feminist diatribes, or the risk of men hurting them by leaking the images or shaming them online

            

Rather than blame women for this behaviour or just taking it with a pinch of salt, Feminists blamed men for coercing women into taking these photographs! But the looks of sheer excitement, titillation, and provocation in many of these photographs gave the lie to this claim as did the sheer landslide of such images. The sordid anti-religious, anti-Marxist, anti-Feminist truth behind most of these photographs was the delight many young women around the world took in their own beauty and power over men. Yet again, Feminist’s had blamed bumblebees for the display of flowers. While some of these images may have been coerced, many more were enthusiastically taken by women who disregarded centuries of religious prohibitions and decades of Marxist moralising and Feminist diatribes. Though the fact that their images often become widely circulated was often due to unscrupulous men seeking to slut-shame them. Yet, if women did not lie constantly about their gender, sexuality, and their sex lives, then maybe men would not take such delight in exposing them. There was of course, the more serious cases of revenge porn in which ex-boyfriends exposed sex tapes of their former girlfriends but those were actually small in number, in comparison to the vast number of pornographic images and videos made by women and their female friends to titillate each other and attract the attention of men or in full partnership with their boyfriends. Feminist also are completely silent on the issue of all the spiteful gossip sites online, run and populated mostly by women, that trade in rumour, lies and black propaganda and are far more morally suspect than most porn because these gossip mongers do not have any cooperation or consent from their victims.  

             

So, with the age of the selfie, all the hackneyed and politically correct notions of the ‘male gaze’ and men forcing women into porn was exposed as a total fraud. What Facebook, Tinder, Vine, Snapchat and countless other dating and social media sites proved was the biologically inborn need of many women to attract male attention, their professional flirting, and that they were shockingly unconcerned for Feminist propriety, and well versed in the many ways a woman can dress and pose to attract male attention. Moreover, they proved the Feminist theory of female victimhood was a lie, that only applied to those loser women who took themselves too seriously, had low self-esteem or had bad experiences after flirting with debauchery. The only women going around in a low crouch weighed down by the world were barren geriatrics, while the arrogant self-confidence of youthful women had to be seen to be believed! And if you want to see real suffering, just look at the sea of disposable homeless men in the streets who never had the chance to be paid for being beautiful or sell their bodies for money. On the other hand, the neediness of even beautiful women to be told constantly that they were beautiful was also something else! If one of the virtues of pornography had been the revelation of the sexual nature of some women, then the virtue of social media porn was that an even larger number of ordinary women’s sexuality was revealed in all its political incorrectness. Andrea Dworkin and other radical-Feminist of the late 1970s and early 1980s would have called these women traitors to the sisterhood and collaborators in heterosexual sex! But millennial women would not have had a clue who they were and would have thought their ideas insane.

           

What this new social media imagery also proved was that most sexist images of women previously made by men had still been created with the naïve idealism of ivory tower pornographers, deluded by old fashioned notions of a women’s dignity and gentility. Today you are only ever a couple of clicks away on the internet from women picking their noses, belching, farting, flashing, mooning, twerking, masturbating, squirting to orgasm, farting, shitting, getting drunk, taking drugs, ranting like lunatics, bitching about other women, or begging for money. Meanwhile, commercial female porn from the sex guides and stories in women’s magazines, to Harlequin romance novels, to Nancy Friday’s compilation of women’s sexual fantasies, to Sex in the City, to Girls, to Fifty Shades of Grey, and countless erotic memoires achieve not only blockbuster success but also the kind of unquestioning acceptance male porn can only dream of attaining. The dominance of narrative in romance and erotica made by women gives women the slow build-up of expectation, conflict, crazy soap opera relationships, and dramatic union that really turns women on in a way that much visual male porn does not. Yet, while, women love to laugh at the absurdity of porn narratives, the plots of female romance novels are equally absurd with their tales of super rich and powerful alpha males who are like wild stallions that the heroine tames, and they live happily ever after! While porn merely suggests that all women from the young to the old, and the ugly to the stunningly beautiful, want to and will fuck any man they see, romance novels depict alpha males of absurd perfection with power, money, rugged good looks, muscle bound bodies, superior intelligence, quick wits, massive dicks, sexual stamina for hours, an ability to fuck in every position in the Kama Sutra, and indulge the heroine in any perversion she fancies in and novels of the Marquis de Sade! Compounding absurdity upon absurdity, we also learn that this alpha male God, despite his arrogance and cruelty, is deep down, incredibly misunderstood, sensitive, caring, creative, and looking to settle down for the rest of his life with our heroine! Oh, and he will spend the rest of his life resisting the advances of every other woman and he will never cheat on our heroine! 

             

Despite the fact that Feminist attempts to make ethical porn has been mostly a commercial failure. I do think it is interesting in its sexual and romantic greed. Female porn conflates romance and porn. It usually features cute naturally beautiful women with normal bodies, but the men are all still mostly alternative alpha males with suspiciously athletic, muscular bodies and large dicks. But in female porn the man’s body and character is far more eroticized. Such porn creates more realistic and funny stories, and feature more romantic and natural sex, often as part of an explicit female fantasy, or normal couples sex life. They contain scenes of real oral and vaginal sex, but the camera does not myopically focus entirely on the genitals the way hardcore porn does. Nor does female porn have the same obsession with men cumming on the faces of women. And the female porn stars were given enough time and clitoral stimulation to have “real orgasms”. Though as I have pointed out before, short of attaching a woman to a lie detector and putting sensors in her vagina, one can never been truly certain of the female climax, the way we can with the male orgasm. Personally, I often found such porn could be more hurtful to my ego than traditional porn, because it made me feel like a failure not only as fucker and possessor of a slightly above average sized penis, but also as a male idol and lover. Female porn also exposed the reactionary nature of female romantic lust with its obsession with alpha males, and confused lovemaking with voyeuristic porn. It was like female porn producers wanted their porn to have everything from hip sexy couples, hard sex, real intimacy, and love. But from a male perspective, such porn seemed a far great betrayal of a man by his female partner looking at such films, than traditional porn looked at by a man was to his partner. Because male porn clearly separated sex and love, whereas female porn confused the two. The same confusion could be seen in the way middle-aged, ugly, fat, and horrible white women went to Africa and third-world countries and had sex with poor men there, who constantly told the women they were so beautiful, and they loved them! Before these men (who would tell any old woman she is a goddess and literally fuck anything) fucked these desperate women three times a night with their big dicks. In fact, the men were just man-whores in a confused and dishonest transaction, where gifts and the promise of Western visas and marriage were held up to the men, by these middle-aged Western women, who were in many ways worse than traditional Johns, because they lacked even self-awareness of their moral degeneracy.

             

Thus, the utopian, Marxist view of how the world should be is just a fantasy. I am more concerned in how the world is and how people really behave. Which is why one of my hobbies, was charting the changing face of female voyeurism from women looking at male strippers in the early 1990s, to women watching men jerk off on Omegle. What webchat forums prove, time and time again, is that lots of women are often mesmerised by a hard cock and they often love even more to look at really big cocks! And are flattered if they cum for them! The number of women who are shocked, repulsed and traumatised by cocks are in the minority not the majority as radical-Feminists would have you believe! Though interestingly, I have noted that women can be indifferent or repulsed by a penis when they are not horny - but become totally fixated on it when they are horny and gag for it once it is hard.

            

After over a century of Feminist ranting, many women are still dreaming endlessly about their wedding day, doing everything in their power to get male attention and approval, craving the male gaze, chasing bad boys, often secretly enjoying catcalling, loving romantic comedies, gyrating instinctively to sexist rap music and getting off to BDSM and rape fantasies. Undermining the fanatical idealism of Feminist calls for more equal relations between the sexes, is the biological imperative of reproduction and survival of the fittest, which means that even Feminists want alpha males, strong enough to win their love, protect them and help rear their children. The omega male may be sensitive, caring and politically right on, but he simply does not excite most women. The omega male is an evolutionary irrelevance. Feminism may have countless grievances with macho men, but that does not mean the vast majority of women do not desire them or can stop desiring them. Thus, many Feminists are amazons in public and slaves in the bedroom and they claim to admire sensitive and caring men but often fantasize about players, predators, and brutes. 

             

I have often been called a misogynist, but as a student of art, theory, and porn I have seen real misogynists and I feel no connection to them. True misogynists in my experience never reveal their own weakness in relation to women, or dependence upon them, and they create fictions of power that disguise real inadequacy. Ironically, radical Feminists are their warped mirror image, for they fall for misogynist propaganda, and mirror it with tales of female victimhood as unrealistic. According to misogynistic perverts’ women always want it, but according to Feminists they never want it. Both are intellectually absurd positions! The complex truth about female sexual desire, is that it is dependent upon what time of a woman’s cycle it is, how old they are, if they are feeling good or bad about themselves, if they are in or out of a relationship, how desirable the male is, what she stands to gain from it, and if they are drunk, insane or both. Life is simply not as black and white as misogynist pornographers or angry Feminist claim. It may seem an insignificant grammatical point, but it is actually important to note, just how often misogynists say, “women are” and Feminists say, “men are”, whereas far more intelligent and scholarly writers say things like “some women, many men, a few women, exceptional men, perverse women, etc”. Because the hyperbole, exaggerations and stereotyping of fanatical misogynists and Feminists is what most discredits their observations.

Believe it or not, I have never had the low contempt many men have for women, and I have been shocked and disgusted by men like that. Far from hating women, I have idolised them as goddesses for much of my life. Why would I paint so many thousands of paintings of women if I hated them? Yes, I have many issues with Feminism, but at least I have spent time studying it, and again, I do not have the low dismissive attitude towards it that so many men have. I believe that men have achieved all the greatest things in civilization, but they are like individual skyscrapers in an arid desert. Men achieve great things, but as human beings they are frequently barren. It is women who build society, and it is women who are stronger than men. Personally, I may be very talented as an artist and well-read, but I can barely cope with life, and if I did not have the love and support of many women in my life - I would be dead by now.

The war of the sexes, and the dating game, are battlefields of competing strategies. The minute a man writes a book on tricks to get laid by countless women, a woman writes a book of counterstrategies that neutralise the man’s tricks and gets him to commit. And many men who start out as players simply grow up, become fatigued and settle down. So, the dating world is like a series of wargames, but with only pyrrhic victories for either side Neither men nor women will ever win the battle of the sexes, because there is too much collaborating with the enemy, and we are too dependent upon each other. But there is also no end to the battle of the sexes, and no solution except to muddle through life in all its complex web of lies, hypocrisy and compromise.