Porn: A Thought Nugget

I am not fundamentally opposed to pornography. I am not even opposed to it in practice. I think the notion that women shouldn't or wouldn't do porn if given the option betrays a fundamentally sexist attitude that robs women of the power of true consent. Women are not always objectified; in the industry they have far more choosing power than their male counterparts. I take umbrage with the concept that to use one's body for money is somehow more onerous than the sort of objectification millions of people endure every day when no one cares about their brain, their degrees, their skills, their ambition. Wage slaves are used, the whole lot of them, but unlike female porn stars they have no behind-the-scenes agency, they are not celebrated or trophied, and no aspect of their self-ness praised, and they certainly cannot name their price.

In terms of humanity imbued through popular, straight porn, the odd-men-out are just that - men. Whereas women, however dollish and fake, are trundled up like pigs on slaughterhouse chains, the men are even less human. In pop-porn, men are large penises emanating from the corners of pages and screens. They have few faces, no names, no eye contact. They serve only to venerate the almighty vagina with their plentiful and generic members. They are props, literally. Unless they have some special talent or attribute, heterosexual male porn stars take the pay they get and shuffle off into the cold unknown.

It is no odd surprise to me that the same sort of extremist, so-called feminism that would rob women of consent also robs women of dissent. It creates a rigid dogma which admits no growth and allows into its language only the false dichotomy of militance or treason. I know the world of pornography is rife with horror stories of unwitting girls trying to make a buck. But I object when this strain of feminism allows no room in its stiff and brittle paradigm for the women who want to be porn stars, who enjoy it, who feel no personal loss, who retain their autonomy, who like the sweet bucks they pull down but who ultimately have pursued this path as a means of sexual exploration.

But there is something that bothers me about porn, something I can't quite describe. I have thought about it off and on for several months. This isn't conservatism at work here, and it isn't hard-core feminism either. No doubt that almost all porn is packaged for men, bought by men, consumed by men. Porn is a male-centric product, but it's not inherent misogyny. Women as vendors and men as consumers equates a symbiotic relationship when women enter willingly into the cycle. To say that men have the only power in this relationship is to fall back on old memes where men are the only arbiters of power - this is false.

But I still couldn't decide what I didn't like about porn. Yeah, women look stupid in it, but so do men.

It occurred to me that the real problem of porn has been masked because we insist on seeing it as a gender issue. Maybe it isn't.

The problem is that all of the porn I've ever seen (and I'll go out on a limb here to admit that I've seen a lot) is trite, and banal, and stupid.

Maybe this issue is balder to me because it's still a novelty in my life. I had no interest in porn until I came into contact with a boy, which makes sense, because porn is targeted to him and not me. But I kept watching, kept looking, firstly to identify with him but secondly because I was trying to ferret out that feeling I had, the feeling of being intellectually pie-faced and completely unimpressed.

The people in porn look like morons. I don't relate to the women, and the men are completely unappealing. Even as the "subject", I'd bet the typical male porn star serves as a poor proxy to the millions of lonely boys imagining themselves in his place. He looks like a dull crayon, a coke-fried frat boy, a sad aging divorce', a greasy good-for-nothing-log-lump. And the women!

Why this need to have their mouths hanging open like anorexic zombies, eyes glazed-over and half-shut, their legs flayed out like dead chickens? I know they aren't as stupid as they look. Consider trendsetter Sasha Grey, or Jenna Jameson's graceful parlay into mainstream TV and entrepreneurship, or Stormy Daniels's bid for the U.S. Senate. I think even listing examples is trite. There are just as many dummies in porn as there are in any other sector, just as many smarties too.

What I detest is the aesthetic of stupidity. Magazine design looks like something out of Idiocracy, all bubble-gum fonts and stars and primary colors. Videos are laughable, crappy DV-quality, poorly placed mics, unimaginative lighting, zero effort.

In part, this is commercialism at work. Low overhead = no change in demand = more profit.

But I think perhaps that women's issues are a red-herring. It's a culture issue. Maybe it's closer to the truth to say that porn makes itself stupid out of self-defense. A sexually stifling culture lies all about us, so for porn to protect itself, it must inoculate itself by falling submissively into those patterns. Porn becomes the expected, it fills out the convenient stereotypes handed down by those who would judge it. We are living in a world still obsessed with the Madonna-Whore complex. Women who are sexually open must be whores, and whores must be idiots, as well as everyone who supports the whoring.

Stupid sex is easy, it's so easy. We have so many prototypes in place, and we always have. It's the same thing when Marilyn Monroe had to play dumb blonde to be a sexpot. It's the same thing when the Conservative Right believes so strongly the homosexuality is wrong because they are all promiscuous bastards, yet fights so hard to prevent those promiscuous bastards from getting married. Intertwining the separate realms of sexuality and idiocy is the opposition's way of keeping porn condemnable. And yet, I know that this mantra of stupidity can't be the whole story. Lots of people are in to porn, and not all of them are apes. I'm not asking for the moon here, I'm just asking for porn stars who don't look like they've all just recently suffered concussions.

This problem isn't confined to porn. Several counter-culture movements shield themselves beneath a veil of easy irrelevance. Indy movies were, for a while, chalked with empty angst. Cynicism reigns supreme, nihilism the only - and the unrealistic - solution to cultural boredom. So dense that they can easily be dismissed. So crass and tactlessly manufactured that audiences may cop out by calling it recreational slumming.

The problem with porn being this way is that it bleeds into real sex. The boys who were raised on this stuff often don't know how to differentiate it from life. Genuine physical connections are swapped out for poorly imitated porn fantasies which are - in themselves - just simulation. We have been robbed, once again, of original experience, only this time it's harmful and degrading and guilt-ridden. At best it it pale and sickly. This is the legacy handed down from, yes, our puritanical founders who see the only alternative to abstinence and holy marital procreation as soulless, brainless debauchery. We have lost our vocabulary for it, lost our ownership. This is one of the few areas where I agree with Andrea Dworkin. But unlike her I think porn can be reclaimed, or claimed for the first time. Pornographers, stop dicking around and do your job.


.