Occasional pornographer Tony Comstock of Kōan of Silence asks
...if porn’s so great, how come after more than 40 years of (relatively) legal status, there’s still not much that’s worth defending on anything more than principle?
Porn’s changed dramatically since 1970, dramatically for the better even. And for the most part our attitudes towards porn have changed as well. But in terms of end result I’m not going to quibble much.
I’m aware that it’s no more reasonable to expect one genre of media to change the national conversation any more than any other… but for all the hoopla since Deep Throat changed the conversation about women’s role in sex and Last Tango in Paris won an Academy Award what’s porn done for our sex lives that, say, fast food hasn’t done for our diets?
It could have done more. And possibly might. And someday still might. But for various reasons ranging from the narrow-mindedness of its purveyors to the small mindedness of its critics to the, um, single-mindedness of its consumers it…
hasn’t.
I’ve been thinking about
Submitted by Thaddeus (not verified) on Tue, 2010-07-13 07:54.I’ve been thinking about this.
When “Deepthroat” and “Last Tango” came out, Hollywood couldn’t deal with anything like sex in its regular movies. Now it can. What that means is, if you have a story and it needs a good sex scene, you can get away with slipping it in (pun intended) as long as you don’t do open beaver shots or whatever. In other words, as long as you don’t approach the “hydraulic model” of most porn.
What this means is that porn actually HAS gotten better because alot of what used to be called porn is now mainstream cinema. Much of what we now watch on T.V. and in the theater would have been classified as porn back in 1950. And for the most of us, it’s as sexually titilating as we want it to be. I know for a fact that the sex scene in “Name of the Rose” makes my day way more than “Two Girls, One Cup”.
Porn, by definition, is the stuff that most people feel is obscene and has no redeeming social value. So what is considered porn is ALWAYS going to be crap (literally in the case of 2g1c). If you’ve got a good story and it requires sex, it’s not porn. And if your story requires that you zoom in on the chaka-na-buchaka, then you’re not making a film, you’re making fetish fuel. This isn’t specific to sex, btw: a film which revolved around eating – say “Babbette’s Feast” – which lingered long and lovingly over chewing, complete with down-the-throat shots, would also be fetish fuel.
And fetish fuel is by definition porn: no redeeming social value and most people find it disgusting.
So I think you’re wishing for the impossible, Fig. If it’s good, it by definition can’t be porn and vice-versa.
I, for one, however think porn serves a great purpose: it allows us to have the sex scene in “The Name of the Rose” and Sharon Stone’s pussy shot in “Basic Instinct” because it offers a relatively clear-cut view of what is obscene and of no redeeming value. Porn thus allows us to have real sex flicks, some of which are quite good, actually.
So porn, in the final analysis, has improved good sex films by making them possible. It demystifies sex and makes two people humping in bed look bland. This gives us better, more realistic treatment of sex in regular films.
[I agree with nearly
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-07-13 10:23.[I agree with nearly everything you say, particularly about the migration of sex scenes from blue movies to mainstream ones. And it might be a personal quirk but I still think the best movie sex scene is the one between Sarah Connor and that guy from the future — it’s not explicit at all but it’s wonderfully evocative. As far as explicit enactments go the scenes in Two Girls and a Guy are… vivid, as are the ones in Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling, Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. And those are great. The quibble, though, is with your assertion that porn is by-definition anything with no redeeming social value. And that that, instead of, say, laziness, greed, or lack of creativity, is responsible for most of it being crap. Instead I think it goes both ways — some people in porn really are doing good work on the one hand, and on the other hand, despite much bigger budgets and a lot more social acceptance most mainstream productions are also crap. (Transformers II anyone?)
Thanks, Thadeus,
fl
I’d say to be porn it has to
Submitted by Thaddeus (not verified) on Tue, 2010-07-13 10:48.I’d say to be porn it has to be crap AND found obscene by the majority. That’s where Transformers II fails the porn definition. A lot of what Hollywood produces is crap, but the masses don’t find it obscene at all. Just being obscene alone or just being crap doesn’t make it porn.
I’d say the folks doing good work in porn can easily escape the “no redeeming social value” part of the definition, too.
I think that the fundamental
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Thu, 2010-07-15 07:17.I think that the fundamental problem (analogizing into video from my experience with written) is that most people don’t want porn that’s well-written and well-acted, they want porn that presses their erotic buttons well enough for them to get off. Several times while reading porn I’ve found myself skipping over the porn to get back to the next bit of interesting plot.
Also because it’s really difficult to come up with plots that involve large amounts of non-extraneous sex. (I am speaking from experience here.) Fuck or die, sex pollen, corrupting the virgin, sex slaves, exploring a kink, one-night-stand that becomes more, body image issues… um… that’s about all I can think of…