So I finally read this. I don't really care about porn because porn is boring and utilitarian (and that utility is quite limited at that). Then why was I able to enjoy this? Because though it's pornographic, it's not really porn. Bataille uses that vocabulary to carry out something more ambitious and ambiguous. 
 The sex acts here rarely involve intercourse, instead enumerating some elaborate convergent alchemy. Blood, milk, semen, eggs, and urine are gradually converted into the eye, the eye, the eye, the eye, the eye. A specific eye, an obsessive object, staring from and in the face of death. 
 There's a lot here that could obviously be considered pathological, but the narrative itself exists alone and outside all judgement, which is also part of the weird fascination it exerts. Because Bataille manages to this convincing. And while nothing that occurs here is impossible, everything unfolds in such a suspension of the rules of ordinary life and action, that the narrative events ascend into a symbolic order existing well beyond strict reality. And to answer my original question again, I find such refined arcane symbolic orders to be highly enjoyable. This alchemical-symbolic order has such a degree of formal elegance that all the icky sex can barely even be described as icky anymore. It possesses something approaching a purity. 
 There's also a kind of theory here, of significant events and how their signs are branded upon us. The extra materials from later editions and essays in my City Lights copy expand upon that angle excellently. 
 Incidentally, there's a great Swiss film adapted vaguely from this, and the fact that it hits the tone exactly without any actual sex taking place speaks volumes about why both works succeed, I think.