Porn-Anti-Porn

Porn-Anti-Porn is one hundred and ten docufictions that hold the body in pain and the body in pleasure inside the same frame, the texts brief, erotic, anti-erotic, fiercely funny, fired at the reader from opposing directions. The title states the contradiction the book refuses to resolve. Pornography and its repudiation are kept in one room, and Jaffe declines to choose between them.

Docufiction was the form Harold Jaffe spent four decades developing: short prose that takes news reports, court records, and other documentary source material and treats it with minimal but pointed intervention, a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology. At one hundred and ten pieces this is one of his largest applications of the method, sex as the site where capital and morality are most openly at war.

The argument is in the hyphen of the title. Jaffe writes from both sides of it at once and declines the resolution the culture keeps demanding.