The Pornographic Interview

I was reading the October issue of Vice magazine recently and happened upon a section that consisted of a series of interviews, titled "People Who Just Had Sex With Each Other a Couple of Minutes Ago". The content of each of the interviews doesn't stray far from what you might expect it to be initially: Two consenting adults relaying play-by-play events of their most intimate moments, in Q&A format. I thought immediately of Sontag's piece and thought that the section might be considered a very poor piece of pornographic literature, due to its mechanical descriptions of sex, without any literary devices. And then I realized that they were interviews, and very few, if any, interviews could be considered literature. I had erred in labeling it. But then I began thinking about the section in terms of interviews. Could a pornographic interview qualify as a truly good interview? A good interview is expected to be insightful and informative. Certainly the interviews in Vice said a lot about the individuals and their preferences. For example, certain fetishes, like biting, were detailed in one of the interviews. I thought this qualified as insightful to the most extreme degree, because rarely would most people divulge deep psychological passions to an interviewer. I began to think that Sontag might agree that it could be a good interview, but then I began to question whether the interviews were even pornographic. Sexual excitement should have no place in the purpose of journalism. Yet it is difficult to respond to such vividly erotic descriptions in a wholly academic way, without excitement.

From the Pornographic Imagination: "The physical sensations involuntarily produced in someone reading the book carry with them something that touches upon the reader's whole experience of his humanity-and his limits as a personality and as a body." Reading this partly led me to believe that the interviews did in fact fulfill its purpose as an insightful interview...even if a lot of the insight gained is from the reader's response.