Question 1: answers continued . . .
John, you scamp. The Nerve editors are obviously playing favorites here because they didn't tell me that our girlfriends could pinch-hit. Here I am slugging out three missives to get paid in Buttman videos, and you have Ms. Devereaux polishing off your dispatches, so to speak. I'm assuming of course that this is porn actress Trish Devereaux, star of Buttman's Toy Stories, in which, I'm told, Trish gets a refreshing facial. (Nothing like a hot blast of love ick to open up those pores.) I think I speak for the panel when I say, "Welcome Trish." And yes John, I admit, my expertise on pornography pales in the face of Trish's. I find it doubtful however that you're much "better off" because there's so much more of the world you enjoy. It's only fair to tell the audience that doesn't read the porn trades that — correct me if I'm wrong — both you and Trish have tested HIV positive, and one presumes you didn't catch it from a toilet seat. I'm not making light of your misfortune, but this is a health issue for me too, as I'm afraid I'll yak if I hear one more porn star wax rhapsodic about how life's carnival is passing all us squares by. You and Trish, more than anyone, know the downsides of such a business.
Except maybe for Ian. Here, I plug the guy's book and he can't even spell my name right. That hurts, Ian. Still, you're alright with me. Cut through the world-weary artist schtick, the womyn's studies platitudes and Freudian cultspeak, and you seem to me to be a scuffed-up moralist at heart. We're much closer than you think. However, I can't quite digest your notions that all "evaluating" precludes intimacy. You make it sound as if any aesthetic judgment of women cripples one's capacity to regard them as equals rather than objects. Cosmetic calculus, unfortunately, is what we are all hardwired to employ. It's an ugly byproduct of sensory perception, without which, we'd all be bumping into walls and rendered rudderless in what your pal Sigmund called the "genital" stage of our psychosexual journey. You may be correct that it's a fool's errand to attempt to distinguish various degrees of pornography on taste grounds, though it's not quite right to suggest all porn is created equal. For instance I doubt seriously that you'd say there's not a dime's worth of difference between a little soft-focus after-hours Showtime and watching, say, a six-year-old get fisted by her dirty uncle. Of course to do so, you'd be "evaluating," even (God forbid) passing judgment, thus rendering the six-year-old unequal.
As for flesh and blood considerations, nearly any human transaction you have involves leveling judgments about the person you come into contact with. Therefore, I could rightly be expected to assume things about someone shaking it in my face for a thong-ful of fifties. Not only am I choosing to evaluate, but the objectified is choosing to present and reveal something of themselves to the objectifier (God, I hate that word) through their actions. This is not a one-way transaction. Your whole theory seems not only impractical but suspect from a guy who, according to my reading, told the Independent of London just last December that "I like dirty pictures. It's not something I like about myself, but I am attracted to the knowledge that there is unhappiness there." I guess being attracted to somebody who's a human ashtray is more noble than being attracted to her just because she's sorta pretty. I know it's corny to do oppo research on a roundtable mate, but sometimes one feels obliged to go the extra mile, just to level the playing field since I'm unable to benefit from the wisdom of Tricia Devereaux. Does anyone know if Wendy Whoppers is a strong speller? Maybe I'll give her a call.
Jerry Stahl (Q1: #12 of 13)
Jeez, Mister Buttman, I didn't say I didn't like the stuff. Just that I don't think it's exactly cutting edge, on any level. Porn's kind of a vanilla thing — reliable, satisfying, but not particularly adventurous. Unless, of course, you're the guy making it. And even then, I don't know. I remember, way back when porn was still shot on actual film, hanging on the set of Night Dreams and Caf? Flesh, watching my friend and co-writer/director, Rinse Dream, march the players through the obligatory mayo shots. And I mean, those people were bored, man. Working up a good bucket o' splooge, hot as it might have seemed to the viewers, was basically what the actors and actresses did between crossword puzzles and sitting around discussing the merits of, say, retreads over new tires. About as sizzling to all involved as watching Meet the Press.
But don't get me wrong — when porn works, it works. Just that, given a choice, I think flesh-and-blood trumps two-dimensional any time. Hotter, for me, on a visual level, is the sort of accidental porn. Like, say, the erstwhile Tammy Faye Baker's eyelashes. The way she used to squirm in her seat when Jim baby was pitching for Jesus-bucks. Now that's some hot porno. And there's a lot of it out there. It's just, you know, the notion that somebody's working real hard to help flip my switch always sort of undercuts the heat of commercial product.
Here's the truth, as I see it: Everybody loves the porn in their head (i.e., cranium, not lick-and-suck), the images projected on an individual's own brainpan, culled from whatever demented, nasty, sweet-ass, fondly remembered events in their own life. That's the real mother lode, so to speak. I think it's a fine and noble thing to make porn your life, if that's what you're into. It's gotta be more fun than accounting. But, for that reason, watching porn movies, for yours truly, is like somebody watching somebody work. Hot, yeah, but who woudn't rather do the job themselves?
Ian Gittler (Q1: #13 of 13)
I've turned to porn more frequently in periods of my life where the sex is more frequent. Rufus, that porn serves as a stand-in for actual physical contact, if it was ever true, is an outdated notion. I concede my youth may have been atypical in that girls were basically waiting impatiently for me to get with it and start touching them long before I was even sure that that's what I wanted to do. But most current research I've seen points to a remarkably casual availability of sex in the social strata of pre-teen and teen American youth.
Frontline aired a documentary recently that chronicled with chilling, and at times heartbreaking candor, the sex lives of twelve- to seventeen-year-old girls and boys in Conyers, Georgia. Amazing stuff. Truly extraordinary. Graphic. If anything, kids at this point in history may be tending toward skipping the porn altogether and using the real thing to fuel their desensitization and perpetuate their deep-seeded, extensively investigated — and usually parentally instilled — feelings of isolation, unworthiness and despair.
Porn isn't simple. It's often silly, just as often vile. But it's always, on some level, a reflection of where we are at as a culture. What does a wave of pissing and whipping pictorials in newsstand (Penthouse, Hustler, etc.) porno mags tell us? That having been saturated with faux-underage scenarios, this is what the market now demands. More caffeine. As I assure my friends prior to their reading my book: Don't worry, the knowledge that porn is a more tangled web of contradictions than most would want to know about will not get in the way of your continued enjoyment of dirty stuff. Sick, right? But for those of you who don't know, I was the last guy to accept how unhappy a disproportionate percentage of the sex workers I spent time with were. Every step of the way, any average Joe who heard I was doing a book about porn stars would invariably lean in close, grinning, a glint in his eye, and confide, "Those chicks are totally fucked up, right?" waiting for confirmation that his vision of a destitute, junky chick in it against her will — a vision that obviously fueled so many of his hardcore jack-off fantasies — would not be debunked by some gloss job about how good the money is. Yep, they're fucked up. But dude, please wait until I leave the room before you whip it out. Then of course, satisfied, they'd all ask about Ron Jeremy.
Programmed taste. One of porn's true merits is the fact that its stars have come in a far greater range of sizes, shapes, and weights than the stars of the mainstream worlds of movies, music and fashion. There wouldn't be porn movies with fat people in them if someone, a ton of people actually, weren't interested in viewing them. As far as what I personally think is hot or not: as I evolve it has less and less to do with visuals and surfaces and veneers, and more to do with how a woman sees herself and projects that sense of self. I don't feel programmed, and don't think I am. I don't relate at all to this idea of a legion of robot-Joes who wait for the cover of Esquire to tell them who or what to think is sexy. What's cool about growing up in that regard is, among other things, it opens up the palette of fantasy in unexpected and pleasing ways.
We're being paid by the word, right?
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