The Internet is for porn
Even before the whole Screech sex tape story broke Wednesday, I was thinking about porn. "How's that different from most days?" you might ask. Well, I'd just read an interesting review of a movie called "Destricted," an anthology film were seven artists were asked to, basically, come up with smut films. They being artistes of course, they came up with "meditations" on smut.
You can read the entire review here but my interest lies in the Larry Clark segment called "Impaled." Clark auditioned young men, 19 to 23, for a role in his porn film, he chose one of them and then they both selected a woman to be the guy’s partner for the scene. Here’s the real interesting bit from the review:
"What was, for generations past, at best a furtive magazine hidden under a mattress, is for (this generation) a nonstop video, utterly explicit and ubiquitous as incandescent light. As a result, they've taken the conventions of the genre as givens: Anal sex is standard fare, for example, and so are threesomes, stark forms of dominance and submission, and ejaculating on a woman's face... All the performers, male and female, shave their genitalia, because porn stars shave. 'Impaled' is like some licentious modern update of 'Don Quixote,' or 'Madame Bovary,' in which ordinary characters indulge in fantastic tales with such abandon that they lose the power to tell the representation from real life, and then act out a tragicomedy that's both harsh and touching."
It's an interesting observation. If I was growing up today, how would I be shaped by all the stuff that's out there? And, if I may be a little presumptuous, how will our children be shaped by growing up in a culture where the expression "show us your tits" can be used ironically?
Porn to run
My first exposure to pornography came when I was 13, my father was about to open a video rental store and we had some of the movies at home. Some of those movies were adult and being a child I naturally wanted to know what the adults were hiding.
Showing that even then I was a pretentious poseur, out of classic hardcore titles like "Lust in Space" and "On Golden Blonde," I chose an artsy-fartsy softcore Swedish romp. Unfortunately, this masterpiece of erotica showed exactly ONE naked pair of breasts, ONE strip club scene and TOO MANY fake copulation scenes to be funny.
Well, now it's funny, but that was beside the point to my 13-year-old self. The good thing was I didn't know any better and was delighted by my discovery.
Although that was my first brush with porn, it was not my first brush with material of a sexual nature. As I said, I wanted to know what the adults were hiding, so any time I was home alone I would search my parents' bedroom to see what I could find. On one of those gross violations of privacy I came upon this book, a tome I would learn to call master.
I assume, as I have never asked my Mom about it, that it was a wedding gift from some well-meaning aunt. It was part of a three-book set, one was on motherhood, one was on health and the other was on doing the nasty, oh, yeah... or so I thought. The book was actually a comprehensive look at sex through the ages, from prehistoric cave bopping to Disco-era screwing. It talked about sex in art, sexual development, Freud, the orgasm curve for
men and women, sexual pathologies (here's the illustration for zoophilia) and pretty much everything I wanted to know about sex except what I wanted to know. It taught me the words but not the music.
Like many of us, my parents never really had any kind of "sex talk" with me -- which was frankly rather irresponsible on their part -- but then again, maybe they knew what kind of kid they had and assumed they could probably hold off until I was 30.
Baby, it's a wild world
My growing up was rather innocent as you can see. I just never hung out with a fast crowd or any clergy, so my sexual education had a relaxed pace to it. Also, I don't know who our porn supplier was at the video store, but he had a sweet tooth for the classics. Even though it was the early '90s I still got to enjoy the more innocent '70s porn. It's hard to see women as objects when they take pity on a guy like Ron Jeremy.
Kids today don’t have it so easy.
I won't get into our adolescently oversexed popular culture, this is a porn post after all, but I can sympathize sometimes with conservatives that take a look at what's on television, music, film and just want to block everything out. Here's an Alan Moore quote I've been dying to use:
Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!
Moore is all for pornography as an outlet for a society's pent up sexual energy, but only if it's out in the open -- if the "connection between arousal and shame" is severed. I agree with that, and as we see pop culture feed off porn you would think that we were on our way. But I feel like we're fucking it up as usual. Having Paris Hilton become more popular because she has a sex tape does not make us more accepting of sex in society, it makes us more accepting of worthless monsters like Hilton.
I don't know. I'm getting off message. It's almost 4 a.m. and I have the sinking sensation that if I keep this up I'll start screaming about the children, and how someone should please think of them. There's just so much ugliness in pornography now. I'm sure this has been with us since the beginning of time, maybe they used to call it a "filthy Plato" instead of a "dirty Sanchez," but now it's just so out there. If you want it you can have it; if you need it you can buy it; if you never even thought about it, there's someone that will show it to you anyway.
Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't understand. Maybe, like most things, it will correct itself eventually. Or maybe I just hate modern porn. Those shinny, gleaming mannequins -- those false creatures -- with their fake joy, their hollow screams, their plastic ecstasy. I'm afraid some of us will think that's normal. I'm afraid some of us already do.
To end on a light note, here's a link to a George W. Bush butt plug for your enjoyment. It's part of the Rick Santorum line, collect them all kids!
You can read the entire review here but my interest lies in the Larry Clark segment called "Impaled." Clark auditioned young men, 19 to 23, for a role in his porn film, he chose one of them and then they both selected a woman to be the guy’s partner for the scene. Here’s the real interesting bit from the review:
"What was, for generations past, at best a furtive magazine hidden under a mattress, is for (this generation) a nonstop video, utterly explicit and ubiquitous as incandescent light. As a result, they've taken the conventions of the genre as givens: Anal sex is standard fare, for example, and so are threesomes, stark forms of dominance and submission, and ejaculating on a woman's face... All the performers, male and female, shave their genitalia, because porn stars shave. 'Impaled' is like some licentious modern update of 'Don Quixote,' or 'Madame Bovary,' in which ordinary characters indulge in fantastic tales with such abandon that they lose the power to tell the representation from real life, and then act out a tragicomedy that's both harsh and touching."
It's an interesting observation. If I was growing up today, how would I be shaped by all the stuff that's out there? And, if I may be a little presumptuous, how will our children be shaped by growing up in a culture where the expression "show us your tits" can be used ironically?
Porn to run
My first exposure to pornography came when I was 13, my father was about to open a video rental store and we had some of the movies at home. Some of those movies were adult and being a child I naturally wanted to know what the adults were hiding.
Showing that even then I was a pretentious poseur, out of classic hardcore titles like "Lust in Space" and "On Golden Blonde," I chose an artsy-fartsy softcore Swedish romp. Unfortunately, this masterpiece of erotica showed exactly ONE naked pair of breasts, ONE strip club scene and TOO MANY fake copulation scenes to be funny.
Well, now it's funny, but that was beside the point to my 13-year-old self. The good thing was I didn't know any better and was delighted by my discovery.
Although that was my first brush with porn, it was not my first brush with material of a sexual nature. As I said, I wanted to know what the adults were hiding, so any time I was home alone I would search my parents' bedroom to see what I could find. On one of those gross violations of privacy I came upon this book, a tome I would learn to call master.
I assume, as I have never asked my Mom about it, that it was a wedding gift from some well-meaning aunt. It was part of a three-book set, one was on motherhood, one was on health and the other was on doing the nasty, oh, yeah... or so I thought. The book was actually a comprehensive look at sex through the ages, from prehistoric cave bopping to Disco-era screwing. It talked about sex in art, sexual development, Freud, the orgasm curve for
men and women, sexual pathologies (here's the illustration for zoophilia) and pretty much everything I wanted to know about sex except what I wanted to know. It taught me the words but not the music.
Like many of us, my parents never really had any kind of "sex talk" with me -- which was frankly rather irresponsible on their part -- but then again, maybe they knew what kind of kid they had and assumed they could probably hold off until I was 30.
Baby, it's a wild world
My growing up was rather innocent as you can see. I just never hung out with a fast crowd or any clergy, so my sexual education had a relaxed pace to it. Also, I don't know who our porn supplier was at the video store, but he had a sweet tooth for the classics. Even though it was the early '90s I still got to enjoy the more innocent '70s porn. It's hard to see women as objects when they take pity on a guy like Ron Jeremy.
Kids today don’t have it so easy.
I won't get into our adolescently oversexed popular culture, this is a porn post after all, but I can sympathize sometimes with conservatives that take a look at what's on television, music, film and just want to block everything out. Here's an Alan Moore quote I've been dying to use:
Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!
Moore is all for pornography as an outlet for a society's pent up sexual energy, but only if it's out in the open -- if the "connection between arousal and shame" is severed. I agree with that, and as we see pop culture feed off porn you would think that we were on our way. But I feel like we're fucking it up as usual. Having Paris Hilton become more popular because she has a sex tape does not make us more accepting of sex in society, it makes us more accepting of worthless monsters like Hilton.
I don't know. I'm getting off message. It's almost 4 a.m. and I have the sinking sensation that if I keep this up I'll start screaming about the children, and how someone should please think of them. There's just so much ugliness in pornography now. I'm sure this has been with us since the beginning of time, maybe they used to call it a "filthy Plato" instead of a "dirty Sanchez," but now it's just so out there. If you want it you can have it; if you need it you can buy it; if you never even thought about it, there's someone that will show it to you anyway.
Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't understand. Maybe, like most things, it will correct itself eventually. Or maybe I just hate modern porn. Those shinny, gleaming mannequins -- those false creatures -- with their fake joy, their hollow screams, their plastic ecstasy. I'm afraid some of us will think that's normal. I'm afraid some of us already do.
To end on a light note, here's a link to a George W. Bush butt plug for your enjoyment. It's part of the Rick Santorum line, collect them all kids!
posted by Wendy at 2:56 AM
1 Comments:
Good day. After reading your post, I just have one question: What is normal? The inconvenient of this question is, that from this little question we can derive many others. Who has the moral authority to say what's normal and what's not? If so, is abnormal bad? And another question: what does using "normal" say about who's using it? Normal, as moral (which is normal, minus an “n”) are very dangerous words to use, because most of the time, they’re used to sever the freedom of others. The problem I see with porn is not so much that it is out there, that in this day an age is so easy to have access to it. It’s the fact that we as society haven’t grown up, we still are that precocious 13 year old who, at times want to know and have all the sex we want, and that is ok to do so, but on the other hand, we do not dare to, because we haven’t build all the mental structures to experience it and we haven’t grown up from the ones that bind us to do so. As a result, we feel inadequate, because we don’t have what we need to express that part of our own self. It a fact, as you mention in the post, we haven’t severed the “connection between arousal and shame”. As long as we as society can’t see sex without all the cultural an intelecual baggage that we put into it, sex an every other expression that it derives will have a hard time. No pun intended
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