ABSTRACT
Porn imagery could be considered one of the post-modern stages where grace winks, and immediately disappears, under its consumerist degeneration, similarly to what happens in many forms of art as well. Contemporary porn could be seen as the desacralised, technological, and consumerist counterpart of the so-called “sacred prostitution”, a ritual institution in the honour of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, passion, fertility, and warfare, as portrayed by Nancy Qualls-Corbett in a book of hers. Lovemaking is obviously no more a ritual to call upon the goddess of sex and love, as sexuality as such is no more honoured as a form of holy knowing. Men’s acknowledgement of the numinosity of porn women’s sexuality is destined to collapse miserably in the inconvenient case their female partners would embody it in their own lives. The haunting quality of porn experiences can entail the need of dissociation and its own rooting as a structural element of the psyche of female performers.
