When pornographers editorialize...

The mysterious Sam Sugar, he of SugarBank, inventor of Sugasm, and sometime-consultant and, other-times, would-be advisor to industrial pornographers, has been growing more and more impatient with the industry lately, with results both intelligent and, even better, highly entertaining.

I mentioned his assessment of the mainstream-pornographic movie Shortbus the other day. In the face of reviewers saying Shortbus can't be porn because it's about more than simple arousal Sam said

Who said arousal was simple? Arousal is porn's only task and most of it fails to clear the hurdle. If Shortbus is capable of arousing audiences and making them think that doesn't mean it's not porn. It mean's it's good porn.

He said that here.

Then New Year's Eve he weighed in on somebody's photoset of a naked woman draped all over with video-game equipment.

Is there anything sexier than a woman naked but for vacuum formed plastic toys?

Of course there is, we've all seen naked people and I doubt anyone's ever said - "That vulva would look better with a joypad covering it". Besides, if you look at stuff like this for long enough you'll program a fetish and find yourself getting wood every time you walk through the toy department. Explain that to your cellmates.

He said that here.

And then today he takes a dig at industrial porn's standard approach to advertising with a link to a Subaru ad from 1973. It's title? "The Subaru GL Coupe. Like a spirited woman who yearns to be tamed!"

While many wonder about the manner in which porn's marketed, and it's assumptions about how we perceive women, it's worth remembering that in 1973 'women taming' wasn't even considered funny.

Are we moving forward or back?

He said that here, and posts the Subaru ad with its accompanying Austin-Powers-era photo, here.

So. A few years ago I heard, I'm pretty sure, the magician Penn Jellette talking about his early years as a writer for Las-Vegas-style magicians. He said he'd sold a bunch of jokes to somebody back in the Nixon/Ford era to use as between-trick patter and was shocked the guy was still telling them word-for-word during (I think) the Clinton administration! He said he wasn't sure which was worse -- that the jokes still referred to Henry Kissinger as "Mr. Secretary" or that some people in the audiences still thought they were funny.

Around the same time, and maybe in the same interview, Jellette expressed frustration that so many magicians still wear tuxedos and even top hats. He said that *when magicians first got big* they wore tuxedos and top hats because *that's what their audience wore!* In other words the original purpose of the tux wasn't to signify "I'm a magician" but to say "I might look ordinary but I'm about to blow your mind." He said the fact that tuxes are now just *costumes* subtracts rather than adds to the coolness of stage magic. (He and Teller conspicuously wear contemporary business or club suits.)

Anyway, you get the same sort of resonance from too many pornographers -- they had a big, big year back in, like 1972 or 1974 with Deep Throat, and the Marilyn Chambers movies, and whatever everybody was wearing back then, saying back then, and trying to *emulate* back then is... 33 years later... pretty much exactly the same schtick they're trying to emulate now. Ok, except with the game-boy girls and Seymour Butts pornographers who've adopted the slightly less dated looks of "Wayne's World" and "Roger and Me"-era Michael Moore. Oh, and maybe Steve Martin ~ca "The Jerk" ("dis isn't a fancy drink -- there's no paper umbrella in it! Where's our paper umbrellas?!?"

Anyway, at the dawn of this new year of our infant millennium, let's cross our fingers for Sam's vision of a porn industry that reflects the interests of today's more educated, more progressive, and more sophisticated demographics. (But let's not hold our breaths.)