The Book of Pigs: Moctezuma Johnson's smutpunk art of fucking

12/13/2018

It's poetry, collage art, pornographic images, and a treatise on the mystery of the perfect sexual experience

I'll give away the secret to perfect fucking: it's in a pig mask. I haven't ruined The Book of Pigs for you in anyway because the secret is repeated on every page, sometimes with repetitive images and poems.

I should not like this book: it celebrates women wearing pig masks while being penetrated. The text exults the experience of being a woman in a mask and having the ultimate sexual experience. For the man, the woman becomes an animal without personality, feelings, or character. His treatment of her is no different than a farmer would treat a pig on a farm. There is also a strong element of Race Play, focusing on Asian women. The point of The Book of Pigs is to divorce women from their humanity and render them a sow to be mated with.

If it's so terrible, why do I like it so much?

Because of quotes like these.

A brief look through this book can give one a fast, bad impression of what it's really about. Yes, it is about the degradation of women, but the degradation is a fetish. Not only is it a fetish, it's a comical fetish. Johnson slathers his very objectionable sexual philosophy in so much play and fun, it made me wonder several times if he was just fucking with me. The comedy and playfulness of the book is the epitome of the smutpunk genre.

What is smutpunk? Johnson takes a moment to give us a brief description---as he seems to do in all of his works.

And, as in all his works, Johnson himself rears his head (phrasing) and includes autobiographical pieces, as well as posing a profound, painful, revealing question that has offers no answer: in very tiny type at the top of one page is, "Is MJ a pig? Maybe. Maybe not."

Is he a pig as in does he wear a pig mask? Is he a pig for wanting women to wear pig masks? Most importantly, does he have the self-consciousness to stand outside of his own objectionable sexual desires and question his own morality? That is a yes.

What may get lost or ignored in this book are the multiple collage images. They are psychedelic, rowdy, screaming creations. Each one, always incorporating the pig mask image, as well as pornographic images, these creations are vibrant displays and celebrations of the kind of sexual experience Johnson is working to create. Our western world is so supersaturated with images, film, and sounds of sex that an orgasm has become a cliche. It is always achieved the same way, with tongue or genitals or hands, it is always vanilla, and it never brings with it hyperreal, mind expanding experience. This is what smutpunk is creating. This is what The Book of Pigs is about: creating an orgasm so profound you forget you're a human being with problems, a trivial life, surrounded by boring people. This is about shedding our identities because they are crippling our bodies. We think too much, and that is destroying sex.

I end this with one last quote. When I read Johnson's work, I usually find a phrase or poem that makes my insides go tingly. The first line of this, "I bite her more, feeling her fuck rise" is just perfect. This tiny poem with it's strange word couplings, absence of clarifying punctuation, reads as fucking. This is what fucking, and fucking with great pleasure, is like. It's animal dominance and submission, it's taking sensual pleasure in primitive cum, it's a stuttering description of a present fucking event that cannot be adequately described in language. And it's pretty great.