ABSTRACT
For Lawrence, the pornographic is the mental in sexuality, or the mental imposed upon sexuality: The word arse is clean enough. There are few blue-eyed boys in Lawrence it is the black-and browneyed males who are his heroes, identified with an authentic and idealised image of Indian sexuality and sensibility, whilst the villains are predominantly blue-eyed females, often American women, modern flappers or suffragettes. The fact that visual representations of anal sexuality are still severely circumscribed by obscenity law in Britain, as gay pornographers, photographers and Safe Sex campaigners have discovered, is an index of the extremity of Lawrence's albeit heterosexual and verbal anal images. When men sodomise women in Lawrence, just as when women look at men, the differences of desire which usually characterise gender become blurred. Lawrence's contradictory project is to cleanse language of dirty implications, whilst still condemning genuine pornography which he would censor rigorously.
