Saving It For the Sideshow
Photo by Flickr user SpacePotato. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[This is more of me being a curmudgeon about critic's, *and producer's* narrow-minded and occasionally pig-headed definitions of pornography. (Sheesh, and people say John McCain's cranky! :-)) --fl]
When I was a kid growing up trying to listen to rock and roll under the shadow of Nashville, Tennessee, I'd get really sick and tired of the attitude of one of the local stations proclaiming "we play *both* kinds of music, country *and* western." It wasn't that I didn't like country music I just like *other kinds too.* So just to let you know, wherever else this post seems to ramble it's all about that same point: I like other kinds too.
Tony Comstock, an independent pornographer and author of The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films has been having a bit of a flame war with Australian art critic Alison Croggon over why, on the one hand, she and other Aussies are protesting a photographer accused of child porn when she and some of the exact same people stood by when Australian police broke up a showing of his (self-proclamed) porn film Damon and Hunter at the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Documentary Film Festival in 2006 and then having his Ashley and Kisha ordered removed from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2007.
Part of the problem, explains Croggon, is that while Comstock might not like it
"...the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice..."
I don't like it either. In fact, can I just hold my hand up and say that's the stupidest excellent explanation I've ever heard? I'll have more to say about this in a moment but first...
See... I'm just such a curmudgeon about porn. On the one hand I really want to enjoy it, and do enjoy some of it, but on the other hand so much of it just seems... achievement oriented, which is fine for professional sports, or maybe the Olympics, or even Johnny Knoxville, but it's like those Qigong demonstrations where martial artists pull buses with 100 people on it with their penises. Amazing, yes, and stuff you do with your sex organs too. But, sort of like pole vaulting or shot put it always *sounds* way more erotic than it turns out to be. Crab, grouse, gripe, mope, that's me.
Anyway, TBK of The Beautiful Kind, who unlike me is just *so* not a prude gets in the spirit of Teh Nastiness of porn with a brilliant new, even nastier-than-ass-to-mouth porn idea.
You know how they have A2M (ass to mouth) porn? It’s not really my thing, but I suppose the allure there is that the person is doing something sooo dirty.
That got me to thinking about other dirty things. I’ve heard that the kitchen sink is one of the filthiest places in a house, way more so than the toilet. So I want to come up with my own porn niche - KS - Kitchen Sink Porn.
Here’s a typical scene: a woman is standing there washing dishes in an ass-flattering dress, or maybe just panties and a bra, and a guy comes up behind her and grabs her roughly. She drops the plate she’s washing and it smashes dramatically. He rubs his crotch lewdly on her, and then he forces her head down and makes her lick the sink counter top. And then all around the metal. It will culminate with him bending her over and fucking her from behind, but she’ll have the kitchen sponge stuffed in her mouth. Ewww! And then he will cum on the counter and make her lick it up.
People will totally get off on that nasty shit.
By Croggon's definition kitchen-sink porn, since it's even less hygenic not to mention even more stereotypically lay-shit-on-hetero-women-but-not-hetero-men than ass-to-mouth porn aficionados ought to like it even more.
It's a hypothesis I'd dread to test, by the way. Because there's bound to be someone out there somewhere who's just dead sure that there's nothing wrong with (only women) sucking the juice out of cellulose sponges and that I should just lighten up.
If so then duely noted. But just to be clear I'm not objecting to people *doing* stuff like that (certainly not) or even getting their rocks off on it since none of us get to choose our (genuine, non-rubbernecker) kinks.
What *does* bug me though? The fact that so many producers seem to agree with *anti-porn activists* as to what constitutes "pornography!" That anyone out there actually *making* the stuff that "the *defining* essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice!"
I dunno. I guess that *if* that's going to be everybody's definition of "pornography" (I get the *very* strong impression this is indeed the definition some critics like, say, Robert Jensen uses) then I guess I'm against it too: since most people including lawmakers and law enforcers aren't as clued in to those subtle differences. And so they confuse salacious photos of naked people fucking, sucking, licking, masturbating, caressing softly or sharply, stroking, undressing, fondling, expressing, teaming up, going solo, inserting, rubbing, gasping, shuddering, quivering, jiggling, moaning, dripping, seeping, humping, drooling, and coming individually, in pairs, and in groups of all sizes, shapes, and persuasions without making anyone else feel bad with Jensen's and Croggon's (and "Max Hardcore's" by the way) definition. Which kind of sucks for the rest of us.
Clue: Tony Comstock makes porn. Red Shoe Diaries is porn. "Soft porn" is porn. "Erotica" is porn. Suicide Girls is porn. Fleshbot is porn. And, sorry, even romance novels are porn. Meanwhile, ironically, by the time you get to what Croggon and Max Hardcore are talking about? Even if the sideshow carnies are touching each other's pee-pees while they bit the heads of of chickens, if that's porn at all it's a *tiny, tiny* slice of it, not the whole shebang. Therefore claiming you like, or hate, "*both* kind of porn, sick *and* disgusting" just doesn't cut it. M'kay?
I maintain that porn is anything used to get someone off. So Victoria's Secret catalog is porn. Romance novels, porn.
On the flip side, I don't think the movie "Short Bus" was porn, because even tho it had tons of explicit sex scenes, I don't think anyone is going to sit around and masturbate to it. But I hope they learn a lot!
[I've always *thought* that was the prevaling interpretation. Alison Croggon and, for instance, the anti-porn activist Robert Jensen seem to think it's porn if and *only* if it's violent, coerced, or/and offensive. It explains their level of concern but tends to leave a lot of the rest of us scratching our heads. Thanks, TBK. --fl]