Khrushchev in love

In between obsessing over how nineteenth-century Russian serfs lived and reading about slave raids on the Crimea, I’ve been thinking lately about MacKinnon’s argument that porn, supposedly unlike other films, is real, that “what you see is what she got”, as she so eloquently puts it. It makes me wonder if she had ever actually watched porn. Because, I mean, “she” (of course, to MacKinnon, the one who gets it is always a she) didn’t get the triply repeated cumshot, or the shot-over-a-couple-days-but-edited-together long sex scene, or, for that matter the awful music or dubbed grunts, which “she” may also not have made. And certainly “she” didn’t get what we see any more than the actor who does their own stunts gets what we see. Which is just to say, film, porn or not, follows certain pseudo-linguistic and aesthetic conventions that let us weave together a scenario out of a bunch of still frames and a soundtrack spliced together. The actual porn happens, in a meaningful sense, in our heads, not on the screen. It also maybe doesn’t make sense that she would equate porn with reality there while at other times insisting that the images porn presents of women are in fact false. Are they real or not? Did “she” “get it” or was she framed?