On the difference between erotica and porn

Over at Club Troppo, have a look at comments #16 through #19 on this thread. Yobbo opines that if his post of the Japanese girl sucking on the octopus tentacle doesn't get a look-in in Troppo's Best Blog Posts of 2006 then the game's crook. Fyodor replies that this footage reminds him of the 'infinitely classier' egg yolk scene in the 1985 movie Tampopo. Yobbo comes back to say the egg yolk scene is gross.

Not having seen either, I checked them both out. (The clips, that is, not Yobbo and Fyodor.) They certainly have something in common: they are both about Japanese people chowing down on raw protein as part of a sexual spectacle. But that is where the resemblance ends.

The Japanese girl sucking on the octopus tentacle is, well, a Japanese girl sucking on an octopus tentacle. She also gnaws, bites and slobbers on it. The raw tentacle is large, shiny, pink and tumescent, with grey suckers. It appears to be a bit slimy. The girl is 'dressed' in a pomo hodgepodge of received-opinion porn-style attire including shiny black PVC gloves (which do nothing for her grip on the recalcitrant mollusc) and some kind of rabbit ears, or are they kitten?

She appears to be underage. She has a bad haircut and a little-girl voice. The scene constructs her as the object of the gaze, indulging in a deliberate arousal of autoerotic response in the viewer, who is constructed as solitary and male, and to whom, via the camera, she coos occasionally when she comes up for air.

It's low-grade, harshly-lit amateur footage with nothing happening in it except for this simulated rock-a-bye-baby-style fellatio on a bit of under-prepared sushi. No sexual tension or release is visible on the part of either the girl or the octopus-fragment, but then, it's not their sexual gratification that's being served.

It is incredibly boring.

The clip from Tampopo is a brilliantly shot scene of a beautiful and sophisticated couple sexually besotted with each other, and the focus of the scene is the two-way flow of their mutual desire. In both shot and plot they seem to be equals and the scene is about both of them. As they pass with astonishing delicacy an unbroken raw egg yolk back and forth from mouth to mouth without ever breaking the fragile sac holding it together, a process we see in closeup, there is clearly a lot going on below the waist and out of shot.

The erotic charge is to do with the violent contrast between containment and abandonment, with the finely wrought gentleness and precision of the egg exchange during the increasing sexual chaos we can't quite see -- but can deduce from what we can see. Then she whimpers; the egg yolk breaks in her mouth and dribbles down her chin as she slumps half-fainting against the table.

This is a story. There's some narrative drive in the sexual exchange, and some narrative mystery in the nature of their relationship. The egg yolk is profoundly sensual and suggestive, a testicle-shaped food with a silky, delicate skin, something whose explosion will be messy and irreversible. The mouth-to-mouth exchange is suggestive of great intimacy and great precision between the partners.

It is disturbing and beautiful. It is also ... Well, go and have a look. Make your night.