Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Photobucket ImageSince I clicked the link I shouldn’t feel too foolish… even after reading The Beautiful Kind’s intro…

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. A fppp?? (female pterodactyl pterodactyl pterodactyl)

She said it here.

... but what actually struck me about the video clip behind the link was the sounds. Two things about it actually.

First, I’ve had sex with… ok, a lot of people. And been in enough thin-walls situations to be pretty familiar with the sounds at least as many other people make during sex. Enough to say that with a margin of error of around two percent only one percent of women perpetually moan with a pleading, baby-like whine the way… roughly 100% of all women in porn seem to.

It’s not that people don’t make sounds when they have sex. But, seriously, even when people moan and groan they almost never, really, seriously, almost never moan the way it’s so consistently represented in porn.

Second, while I tend to be pretty non-vocal during sex (the same paralysis that causes “O” face affects my vocal chords as well) I’ve overheard enough others having sex to know men are overall about as vocal as women. You can hear one of the three “pterodactyls” in TBKs clip moaning slightly but there’s nary a… well… peep from the other two. He (which ever one, they’re all wearing masks) actually sounds like… most people actually sound.

True, unlike actual sex porn sex is acting. And it seems even sillier to expect higher standards for enacted sex sounds than they’re held for any other kind of acting. And, again based on the actual activities in porn as opposed to what it ostensibly represents, what other continuous sort of sounds would you make while doing what amounts to step aerobics for seven to twenty-minute stretches?

And also, true, even if not everybody moans the way women do in porn it’s fine that some people do.

And finally, also true, if you’ve been a reader for a while you’ll remember I complain about this porn trope fairly often, so it’s reasonable to ask “how come it’s bad to moan but ok to whine?”

Eh. When you have an option to represent a vast array of sexual interest and activity from orientation to inclination, costume to dialog, position to location, and so on the choice to represent one element with a consistency that’s nigh unto boilerplate suggests something else is going on. That something else is wanted in the representation.

I don’t know if it’s the producers, the consumers, the actors, or what but after a while I keep thinking about that Steve Martin movie where the character insists that the quality of a drink is indicated by whether or not it has a little paper parasol in it. And once I started thinking about parasols when I listen to that monotonous, ubiquitous sound of porn I can think of nothing else. Except maybe that our popular understanding of sex, and perhaps even our experience of it, is very, very impoverished.