When look at this masterwork by Ernesto P Cline-emax, the first thing I had to look at was the overriding metaphor of porn. Clearly, he isn’t talking about actual porn here. Taking it at its face value would make the whole work some idiotic, misogynistic, sex-negative, buy-in on the worst myths about geek culture. An incel screed of the lowest order, if you will. And that isn’t even getting to the homophobia or transphobia (i’m not even sure which it would read as, since it is so confused) held in the “dungeons and drag-queens” line. But there is no way the genius behind such a marvelous critique of the capitalization of consumerist geek culture as Ready Player One could write something so pedestrian.
No, porn is being used here as a metaphor. So let’s look at porn. I mean, not literally. Unless you wanna. If you wanna, then I guess I’m down.
No?
Okay, then let’s look at what porn is: a stand-in for us at our most vulnerable. We all desperately crave sex and we all desperately fear what it brings out in us. We all desperately fear our own hidden desires. But porn allows us to place those desires on others while we watch them do what we are too afraid to. Porn is our honesty in a funhouse mirror.
Porn is us as we really are, twisted just enough to allow us to pretend that it is someone else.
And what does Ernest say about the porn he sees? He says that it doesn’t satisfy him. That it is made for someone else. Someone who doesn’t like the things he likes. Someone who is desperately into surface and artifice. That whole “attempt to look the way they have been told to look” bit says so much towards this. What he sees is not him.
If we follow the metaphor of what porn is here, then we see that Cline is telling us something about himself. The reality of him, of his desires and hopes and most intimate self is not what he wants it to be. At the very least, it is not what he wants to present to the world. And what he sees disgusts him.
What he sees is fake. A performance build to please others. What follows is that performance: the oh-so faux-feminist cries that looks don’t matter, while stating only the exact opposite of what he is watching as really erotic. Hell, his performative self doesn’t even want to fuck bodies. It wants to fuck minds, man. It wants to be fucked by minds because that is clearly the more publicly feminist approach.A big fat MENSA mind, still wearing their weird clothes because nakedness isn’t the point to someone like his projected self.
Even the clumsiness of the attempted inclusiveness reflects this performance. The subsumed personal “I” represented here doesn’t really know anything about other sexual orientations beyond the periodic catgirl-on-catgirl and far more frequent sorority pillow fight searches that clog his pornhub history. Clearly, this subsumed self cannot picture masturbation without titties being involved so they assume even gay men must only want to jack it to drag queens.
Finally, it ends with the same sense of commodification. The belief… nay… the knowledge that this public persona is a thing to be sold, a pathway to riches untold. It even adds in the willingness to exploit the commodities so lionized by this twisted, lying public persona in the same way that his actual desires are marketed to him.
Now, it would be easy enough to fall into the trap of assuming that, by placing “nerd” in the title (next to the arrogance implied by “auteur”), that the narrator of this poem is Nerd Culture itself. Thereby making the poem a critique of nerd culture instead of a look at the author himself. However, that misdirection is where the true genius of this poem lies. The “I” here is clearly too personal to be anyone else but the author and the disgust is non-metaphorically aimed at the funhouse mirror version he has made himself into.
“Nerd Porn Auteur,” in the end, shows Ernesto P Cline-emax’s understanding that he has turned himself into the self-mutilated lie, buffed shiny with puffy pseudo-intellectual collagen and the stitched surgery of feigned feminism and limited “I’m totally cool with teh gayz as long as they don’t work out” vocabulary because he can’t truly imagine that he could find acceptance (in the strictly capitalist expressed method of C.R.E.A.M.) in true earnestness.
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