I learned this morning that my grandmother, the last remaining of my grandparents, died last night. June Simpson had suffered the loss of a son, her husband and Alzheimer’s. Yet throughout she was a faithful and loving woman who brought a sense of joy to everyone who knew her. She was 93.

I say and I think she’d agree, hold on but not to tight, lest we forget to enjoy it while it lasts.

When it can’t be done, do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist.

Don’t covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.

Both make for very insightful reading at a time when ingenuity will trump convention.

Thanks to Chase Jarvis for putting me onto the book.

But the article got me thinking in a larger sense about photography, film and pop culture. Eberstadt states that pornography is as ubiquitous and unremarkable in public as tobacco once was. And while she’s really talking about Internet pornography, artists like Jock Sturges have even been accused of being mere pornographers. While Sturges is a whole new can of worms, it’s obvious that porn is so prevalent I’d say that it’s even become a pastiche of sorts. Consider the “foodporn” work of Jing Quek or some of the work of Terry Richardson both of which have adapted the style (and in Terry’s case, often times the subject matter) of pornography into their work.

©Jing Quek

©Jing Quek

According to Eberstadt, it is quite possible that one day we’d find that pornography would slowly be marginalized and pushed to the fringe in much the same way that smoking has after the Surgeon General’s 1964 “Report on Smoking and Health”. For that to happen, Eberstadt says, the “consensus about the harmlessness of Internet pornography” would have to erode.

As an undergraduate, I studied with professor Rae Langton (now of MIT) at the University of Edinburgh, who has written a very powerful book about how pornography not only subordinates, but silences women. The work is based in part on the theories of John Langshaw Austin, who theorized that speech is more than just an utterance of words; speech is a type of action. I was so drawn to this unique approach that I wrote my thesis on the subject.

If Langton’s work has set the stage and provided the philosophical pretext for an argument that could erode the consensus of pornography’s harmlessness, then is it conceivable that one day pornography would recede back to the fringe? Does it follow that porn-as-art-as-pop-culture would then also disappear from the mainstream? Given its prevalence, it’s hard to imagine, but certainly not altogether impossible.