Customer Reviews

The Jaguar and the Anteater: Pornography Degree Zero

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This is a thorough and often illuminating analysis of the increasing prevalence of pornography in modern culture. Arcand was a professor for many years and clearly knows how to communicate, pulling out many examples from anthropological records when they serve to highlight a point. His deepest insight, for which the title is a metaphor, is that late 20th/early 21st century Western culture increasingly allows instinctual lust rather than the socially-constructed rules of modesty to control sexual decisions--and this is occurring precisely in the same way that 19th-century Western culture allowed instinctual greed to control economic decision-making.

Arcand sees pornography and masturbation, being minimal sorts of sexuality, as encouraging a kind of inactive solitude within participants. He is by no means advocating censorship of any kind, but rather indirectly voices his admiration for the annual festival of the Xerente tribe in Brazil, which chooses a more spontaneous, more social lifestyle over the protection and control that minimal living brings.