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While this may make the sex seem cold and mechanical, to the viewer, the actual enjoyment of the performers is a non-issue. The on-screen penetration represents his or her own surrogate sexual experience. Another example of a self-perpetuating convention is the "money shot," or external ejaculation, which was important in the "old days" both to signal male completion to the viewer and, in the days before the Pill, as a form of birth control. But ever since the Mitchell Brothers' psychedelic fountains of semen in Behind the Green Door, the image of a man ejaculating on a woman's face or breasts has become a fetish in its own right — and viewers consider it erotic because they've been conditioned to. Having established the grammar of the language, producers became afraid to create anything new for fear of jeopardizing their profits.
With the ready availability of pornography having shaped a generation's perception of the erotic, life has come to imitate art. The variety of sex acts that partners request of each other has grown — thanks to the confluence of porno chic and pro-sex feminism, these days everything goes, just so long as everybody gets off. And women's fashion has changed to follow male desire, as well. The much-ballyhooed taste for radical pubic grooming is a good case study, but perhaps the most pervasive example is female bisexuality — or, more properly, pseudo-bisexuality. Ani DiFranco and k.d. lang's best efforts aside, lesbian sex has become more accepted not because of increased tolerance of homosexuality in general, but because seeing two women together is a male fantasy that's spread beyond pornography and swinger's clubs to beer commercials and daytime television. Ironically, by having sex with both genders, a woman increases her perceived desirability as a mate — just so long, of course, as she remains "feminine." The erotic and the commercial have become inextricably intertwined.
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Statistics (2005–2006):
Percentage of men who admit to looking at porn at work: 20
Percentage of women who admit to looking at porn at work: 13
Millions of Americans who regularly visit internet porn sites: 40
Percentage of men belonging to the evangelical, anti-porn Promise Keeper movement, who looked at porn in the last week: 53
Ratio of male to female porn-viewers: 3:1
Percentage of all porn sites hosted in the U.S.: 89
Average age of first exposure to online porn: 11
Percentage of eight- to sixteen-year-olds who have seen hardcore pornography online: 90
Statistics taken from this page.
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As we saw last month, attempts to stop porn based on a human-rights argument stopped cold in the '80s. So the new, old prudes reverted to a tactic as old as Comstockery itself: using the power of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Rob Zicari and Janet Romano, of California-based pornography company Extreme Associates, pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute obscenity on March 11 of this year, after federal investigators ordered tapes depicting real vomit and simulated necrophilia, rape, and child molestation and had them delivered to the conservative Western District of Pennsylvania. Similarly, Lester Little, a.k.a. Max Hardcore, was found guilty last year in Central Florida of using the mail and computers to distribute porn featuring fisting, puke, and pee.
The producers pushed the edge of good taste and what is permissible in civil society, then dared the government to do something about it. They also made the mistake of adhering to the old-fashioned producer/distributor business model. Both the porn producers and the new Comstocks are behind the curve. The internet is the first mass-communication tool in which the flow of information goes both ways. Sites like YouPorn and PornoTube turn users into producers. Having brought the tenets of pornography into their erotic lives, the viewers turn around and make themselves into product. Furthermore, as alterna-porn/user-community sites such as SuicideGirls and BlueBlood make clear, online do-it-yourself erotica often takes a significantly different attitude from the lowest-common-denominator aesthetics common to the San Fernando Valley and, in doing so, reclaims the genre from banality.
So, is there a middle ground between the commercial producers who market to the lowest common denominator and their flood of do-it-yourself imitators? Yes. The proliferation of sex-positive sites, staffed by a generation of men and women who've internalized pro-sex feminism, refutes both the Comstocks and the gonzo pornographers. These sites bring to the online anarchy that same, added value that print publishing's always given: an editorial direction and sense of discernment. As elitist as it sounds, for there to be such a thing as good taste and bad taste, someone needs to function as an arbiter. And so, we come full circle — from the old print magazines, driven by their founders' own personal and sometimes eccentric visions, to the radical democracy of unfettered online porn, to once again realizing the value of a gatekeeper. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Ken Mondschein is a Ph.D candidate at Fordham University and the author of A History of Single Life. |
©2009 Ken Mondschein and hooksexup.com
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