Past-peak performances: triple lutz, triple penetration

Can any of you folks still watch competitive figure skating? Even before the whole Tonya Harding thing I wasn't able to hold the thread thanks to "color commentary" from announcers like Dick Buttons who'd turn what I thought were perfectly lovely, often breath-taking performances into sloppy, bitter failures. There was always something like "well, that was an ok double whatzits but that's going to cost her the momentum she needs to complete her triple-whimmidingie... see... right there... she only did a double. Terrible. Simply terrible."

It never seemed to matter what else happened in the performance -- the choreography, the grace, the creativity -- nothin but miss the Lutz or Axel du jour, in whatever multiple is considered unachievable anyway, and you're a loser who had no business even putting on skates. Similarly when a skater can nail one of those things the commentators would announce the skater's a star, even if you think everything else about his or her performance was... well... kind of uninspiring.

In comments to a previous post Blue Gal of Blue Gal in a Red State said

I posted yesterday a little funny about my site stats and the fact that I've gotten hits from "triple penetration gal" web searches.

A male friend of mine wanted to know what triple pen was, so I told him. He was disgusted and I told him "nah, don't be. To my mind it's just that some guys like to watch other men and this is a way to do it without 'teh gayness' entering the equation."

I do think, as I said in my post, that triple pen is quite unfair to the woman in question, whose breathing is interfered with, with all the other going on. Seriously.

Then I got into the whole tangent of women doing that for porn, which brings up the issue of getting paid for something that makes us uncomfortable, like working IT helpdesk for money doesn't make one uncomfortable.

Don't get me wrong here, because I'm pretty sure there are plenty of women in the world who in reality or in fantasy find triple (simultaneous vaginal, anal, and oral) penetration is the bee's knees, but I'd like to suggest that it's disproportionate representation in pornography bears a striking resemblance to the emphasis put on triple jumps for women, or quadruples for men. The value lies not in how well it's done, nor how graceful it looks, nor how nice it might feel, but how difficult it is to accomplish.

The more I think about it the more parallels I notice, by the way.

In figure skating (and even more so in gymnastics) you'll see the competitors sort of pause between jumps or flips and hastily throw their hands around or strike awkward poses before tackling the next maneuver. Such antics are evidently called "creative expression," and can be worth up to, well, a tiny percentage of the total score. You see the same thing in industrial porn too, only there it's called "plot" or, sometimes, "foreplay." In both instances you get points, but not enough to put a lot of effort into.

Another thing: while I've never been directly involved in athletic competitions I had a number of roommates and friends who played football, or soccer, who were hard-core climbers, who were hard-core dancers, and their post-workout or post-performance conversations with friends were heavily mixed with discussions of injuries, surgeries, and legal or illegal, physical or mental hacks they employed to get an edge or recover from a defeat that were, taken as a whole, somewhere between gruesome and shocking. (For instance a roommate's rugby-playing younger brother talked about getting together with teammates and diving head-first into dumpsters full of beer bottles "to unwind" after a game.) Contrast that to the equally gruesome and shocking snippets of conversation recorded by former porn star Kami Andrews on Sam Sugar's SugarBank last month and... there's really not much contrast at all!

Anyway, this gets back to the last bit on Blue Gal's post: getting paid for something that makes us uncomfortable. Blue Gal's commenters mention working in IT but I think it's more productive to narrow the field down to getting paid for something that makes us uncomfortable for the benefit of spectators.

In that context "triple pen" porn fits rather nicely. Or, rather, unpleasantly. Yes, yes, porn involves body parts that are less-frequently used in competition (though see also this.) And yes, I agree that it's, um, peculiar that in porn it's mostly women who are asked to subject themselves to the most extreme activities and that that more than hints at misogyny.

And finally no, I'm not trying to say that it's ok to perform in porn if it's ok to perform in figure skating. More like the opposite. As I've mentioned elsewhere we too-often let our squeamishness about sex where pay is involved, and our irritation with sexism, blind us to more fundamental issues that porn, prostitution, and other forms of sex work have in common with those other forms of body-expending work. (See also coal mining, meat packing, fishing, sweatshop pieceworking, and migrant farmworking.)

Past a certain point one has to ask one's self what, exactly, is the benefit to the audience when nothing matters any more but the number of Lutz's on the ice, pile-ups skirted on the track, or cocks in the ass?

I dunno, but for whatever reason I'm not really drawn to that sort of thing either in figure skating or porn and so I rarely watch either. And *that's* a comparison I'm perfectly comfortable drawing.