Hardcore porn and narrative censorship
example ·
retold in 9 talks
Full-feature hardcore pornography requires a minimal narrative (the plumber fixes a hole, housewife mentions another hole) that is ostentatiously stupid, signaling to the viewer that emotional identification is prohibited while visual gratification proceeds.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 8
“the housewife is alone, the plumberer fixes the hole which was leaking in the bathroom and then the wife said, 'By I have another hole, can you also fix that hole'”
“Hardcore pornography is probably the most tightly controlled genre that you can imagine.”
“I have another hole to be fixed can you also… it's so embarrassing”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Catherine Breillat3Ingmar Bergman3Alejandro González Iñárritu2Hal Foster2Dean MacCannell2Wolf Biermann2Stanley Kubrick2David Lynch3
alongside works
Every retelling 8
Full-feature hardcore pornography requires a minimal narrative (the plumber fixes a hole, housewife mentions another hole) that is ostentatiously stupid, signaling to the viewer that emotional identification is prohibited while visual gratification proceeds., illustrating ideology operates even in permissive genres,two-level spectator
Hardcore pornography is the most tightly controlled genre, if the story engages you, you cannot see everything; if you see everything, the story must be ridiculously stupid; Gonzo eliminates story but adds the injunction of no emotional identification., illustrating ideology,censorship,Big Other
Classic porn setup: plumber fixes a hole in the kitchen; housewife says she has another hole to be fixed. Žižek cites this as evidence that pornography must be comedy, any serious narrative collapses when explicit sex is shown., illustrating pornography as genre,comedy and censorship,ideology
A classic hardcore pornography narrative: the plumber tells the housewife he fixed the hole in the kitchen; she says she has another hole to fix. Žižek uses this to argue that such absurd narratives are not mere stupidity but a structural de-realisation., illustrating de-realization,Verfremdungseffekt / estrangement,pornography as ultra-censored genre
The archetypal porn story (plumber fixes the kitchen leak, then the housewife has 'another hole to fix') is so embarrassingly stupid that it provokes a mix of disgust and involuntary amusement, illustrating the structural function of the idiotic narrative as censorship., illustrating invisible censorship,pornographic narrative stupidity as structural necessity
Pornography crosses one threshold (showing everything) but imposes another, you cannot be emotionally engaged. The absurd housewife/plumber narratives signal a structural censorship: explicit show requires emotional distance., illustrating fantasy and the Real,fetishist disavowal,pornography