by Pietro Adamo
In the twentieth century many historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have emphasized the relationship between sexuality and politics, giving in the meantime a new sense—much more political—to pornography and its historical developments. But pornography, especially after its almost worldwide legal legitimation (between Sixties and Eighties), seems to present a singular antinomy: on the one hand the various pornographic practices—writing, movies, live performances, photos—seem to enforce a liberationist ideology, aimed against traditional ways of looking to sexuality, family, power and genre relationship; on the other hand, the same hard core practices seems to stage sex in a peculiar way, historically given (from Pietro Aretino forward), established on the male perspective, which looks at the female body in a unavoidable objectifying way. This antinomy stands particularly out if we look to pornographers who try to give hard core a specific political veneer: it is the case of the two major political pornographers of the last decades, both Italians, Mario Salieri and Silvio Bandinelli, who have tried—both unsuccessfully, but in a different way—to propose a right (or at least a traditional) pornography and a left pornography (in Bandinelli’s case, much more explicit and declared as leftist).