Am I the only person who exists or who has ever existed?

Are other people figments of my imagination?

Is there no universe outside myself?

Did the universe begin when I began?

Will the universe end when I end?

Is all I think I am?

Porn is like Hollywood. Studios hire actors with body types that conform to a particular ideal. The majority of films reproduce stereotypical views about how men and women should interact sexually.

Teenagers need help in understanding female pleasure matters. It isn’t an easy concept to sell in popular culture. Girls are encouraged to see fellatio as a way to avoid pregnancy and win popularity.

Does this label sell a design? Am I deceiving you?

You’ve joined this course because you want to be seen with it. Don’t you long to drop me in conversation?

The gob stops at parties.

“What’re you in?”

“Sopism, actually. I’m trying to reach a state of purpose”.

“Who’re you under?”

The camp idol himself. Here, he comes. Can you feel the palpitation? It’s me again. It must be all that mental exertion.

We agree that sexually explicit materials can be academically relevant in sociology, gender studies and human sexuality courses.

To be relevant to today’s generation, sex education should cover a lot more ground than things like contraception, sexually transmitted infections and sexual consent.

As well as having the ‘no means no’ talk, we need to have the ‘yes means yes’ talk.

We should understand that porn shows sex manufactured for the camera, not sex in real life.

Advertising works on the same principle. Both porn and ads draw us into a fantasy world.

Commercials for cars look sexy, seem bigger than they really are, and promise immediate gratification. Porn does the same.

The bourgeois text. Chaos costs too much. Stay linear and logical. Above all, anecdotal. We don’t expect much passion. It’s feeble, self-centred, superfluous and vain.

I’m only watching my favourite video again, aren’t I? The one where the postscript artist demolishes previous texts.

You know what I mean, don’t you? I’m painting my portrait, proving my point. Can you read me?

The writer Andrew Simpson committed suicide on January 25th last year. His wife, Catherine, came home to find that he’d hanged himself in the garage of their house, in Shaftesbury, Dorset.

For many months, Simpson had been in a deep depression. This is an extract from an interview with The Avant-Gardist a month before he died:

Everything in my own experience supports my deep belief that I’m the absolute centre of the universe. The realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.

Think about it. There’s no experience I’ve had that I’m not the absolute centre of. The world as I experience it is there in front of me, on my TV or my computer screen.

Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to me somehow, but my own are so immediate, urgent, real.

I’m deeply absorbed in myself. I see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

How many worths make it while?

I’d feel awful if you said I was dull by comparison. It means you’ve missed my role in life.

I’m here to sharpen perception. But not as myself.

You don’t expect me to be, do you? As head of artificial insemination.

Advertising promotes attitudes and lifestyles which praise acquisition and consumption, diminishing other values.

What’s the point of national and international brand name advertising? It’s abstract and self-contained, relatively timeless and exists in a copywriter’s imagination.

Ads represent a hyper-realism. It’s intensified fiction, purged of everything negative.

There’s no listlessness, boredom or stress. These are edited out of this realism. Ads focus on life’s momentary rush of meaning and jouissance.

The abundance of signs and symbols in advertising has meant reality itself vanishes in the information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world.

Ads have shaped and altered authentic experience to the point that “reality” is recognized only when it is re-produced in simulation.

Truth and reality are mediated and interpreted to an extent that culture can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy.

This blurring of mediated experience and reality makes everything appear to be on the surface, absolutely superficial.

Daily life becomes a series of mirrors, reproductions and simulations. Meaning is empty of content. A kind of abstract art now represents reality.

Simulation, abstraction, and hyper-reality now define contemporary life.

“I should think so, too!”

In future, he promised.

“I thought you weren’t going to entertain that sort of thing again”.

Don’t note. Listen.

I don’t want you to see what I’m thinking.

We freely associated [by post]. This contains [the spoken promiscuity]. I want to nail [the difference between].

Western ideology has little to do with truth. It’s about emotion, rhetoric, advertising and propaganda.

The mass media perpetuates the myth of consumerism as a priority of front-line capitalism.

As we settle into our nightly routine of television viewing, corporate profiteers are quick to substitute the lure of material luxury and consumer gratification for the fading spirit.

Media advertising sells an image. One that replaces emptiness with consumer fulfillment.

Self-awareness and self-worth have been distorted. The individual personality identifies with advertising fantasies and consumer ideals.

Who we are merges with roles and images portrayed in the media. We’re losing our ability to act independently of capitalist justifications.

Freedom is defined for us. Choice is reduced to brand names. We sacrifice self-knowledge for consumerism. The borrow-buy cycle has become a secular religion.