Milow and demonic coitus

I was driving somewhere the other day, listening to the radio. On the radio there was a simple acoustic rock song with lyrics quite obviously about masturbating to porn. That's enough to make any guy uncomfortable. I made a note of the name, Milow, flashing on the car radio.

When I got home I googled the guy. Milow's a Belgian artist and apparently the song I heard is a cover of a rather uninspiring 50 Cent original, featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, called "Ayo Technology". It's similar to Alanis Morrisette's version of the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps", in that it's a subversive parody, taking an upbeat song, slowing and mellowing it down and thus focusing attention on the lyrics in a new, more melancholy way.

(A really interesting illustration of the effect that changing the music has, compare these two: Chocolade Haas (Chocolate Bunny) and the Death Metal Remix - the first one is melancholy while the second one is evil. And very funny.)

What Milow does is take what is a rather dirty celebration of wanking to porn and exposes the control of women that is inherit in it, the loneliness and the ultimately unfulfilled desires that it inevitably leads to. I want to post the video here too, because it illustrates the point well. It has a guy (that's Milow, I presume) playing guitar and singing in front of a row of hot ladies led by an especially beautiful golden girl. He's transfixed by them, but as they come closer things start going wrong for him. (Spoiler coming up.) I was initially puzzled, but at the end of the video it's apparent that somehow Milow has drowned in what appears to be lubrication. The lube is important, I think, because it's in a way the epitome of porn: It's both "dirty" (because it's primarily associated with anal sex) and because it's a synthetic simulation of something natural - if you've had sex or seen Monty Python's Meaning of Life, you'll know what I mean (2:27, if haven't). Porn is dirty and porn is a synthetic, mechanical simulation of something natural. In a real sense, porn kills - in that it is dependent on alienation to work. Very appropriate, then, the drowning in lubrication.

This reminds me of what Karl Barth said in Church Dogmatics 3/4, p. 133:

Coitus without coexistence is demonic.

Coexistence is Barth's motif for marriage and, following that, sex. He defines co-existence some pages later, on p. 187, in this way, simultaneously highly poetically and utterly practically:

[Entering marriage] ‘In all seriousness’ means experiencing all this in the succession of unforeseeably many days of twenty-four hours and unforeseeably many years of fifty-two weeks, with the intimacy of an everyday and everynight companionship which discloses everything on both sides, in which each very soon gets to know the other with terrifying exactitude, and in which the greatest thing can become astonishingly small and the smallest thing astonishingly great…to have become a collective, a We, a pair, and to live as such, not merely outwardly, but inwardly as the only possible basis of the outward, and not merely in the life of mutual relations, but in the thinking, willing, and feeling of both participants upon which these relations must rest if they are to be tenable.

In this union, sex, the "everynight companionship", takes place.

The demonic, the self-absorbed and self-obsessed, can never enter into such a union or relationship. The demonic can never deny itself and, in supreme irony, loses itself, that which it holds most dearly, precisely because of that. And in many cases, it loses itself "crazy faces" in front of technology.

Here Milow's rather racy video:

(It's going to be fun to see how many hits this post will get, with tags such as "porn" and "sex" - and to see how much my spam count will go up.)