Question 2: Everything I Know I Learned from Porn
"What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." — D. H. Lawrence
"You cannot look at a pornographic picture without learning more about human nature." — Norman Mailer
In question one, John and his girlfriend, Tricia, suggest porn is one of life's great pleasures, Rufus feels it is a simple sexual aide for personal gratification, and Ian seems to see it as an erotic liability. Could you all please elaborate on the benefits of pornography (if you believe there are any)? Can it teach you about technique, intimacy, love? Can it provoke thought and feeling, or are its effects purely physical? Can it broaden one's sexual horizons, or does porn more often than not narrow one's image of sexuality?
For the record, I've never suggested porn is only an erotic liability. But the consumption of porn is a deceptively multi-faceted pastime with implications that may affect/enlighten other areas of one's personal life. Therefore its use is worth governing, or tracking, if for no other reason than to gain further insight into what drives you. I don't see the merit, for the purposes of this type of public discussion, in benign-izing it. I just don't believe that porn is benign. And in the name of diplomacy, an argument can be made that, in the very act of "boiling down" porn's essence in the various ways I have heard each of you guys doing it, you are in fact demonstrating how you define its role in your own lives — how you personally govern or track it, in an un- or conscious way — rather than having it sort of take its own course.
John, I view your relationship to porn differently. I don't pretend that of all the subjects in Pornstar, you and I gained any serious, sustained intimacy. But of the ones with whom I believe I did, witnessing the central role that porn and all things porn related played in their lives, I never had the sense it was a choice they actually made, so much as a host of wildly unchecked impulses taking over their entire existences (not unlike the most recklessly promiscuous stages in my own life). It's saddening to experience, and also to witness in someone you care about, and I guess I feel it's important that I voice my cautionary observations in any serious discussion about porn.
To the rest of Question #2, I can't condemn porn for narrowing ideas about sexual ideals. Although the studios with the largest advertising budgets definitely project a very narrow, uniform image of what defines "hot," this uniform porn identity truly is a tiny percentage of what is actually playing in your local living rooms.
In terms of the learning curve, sure, I bet there are examples of how techniques have been disseminated through the watching of porn — and there may even be something therapeutic about the casual treatment of historically hush-hush behavior — but I still think a close friend of mine hit it on the nose with his ultimately populist mantra:
Everybody fucks hard.
With a good set of ears, and a decent heart, you can probably learn more about what will rock the one you love by listening to them than you will ever learn by copying anything a porn star may be doing to get his or her partner to the end of the scene.
Matt Labash (Q2: #3 of 12)
I have a question of my own: Is it me, or does Norman Mailer seem to have fashioned an ungodly number of porn quotes? It's good to see Norm tackle the Big Issues.
To the question(s) at hand: Can porn provoke thought? Can it teach us about love? Can it trim our hedges, get rid of our dishpan hands, do the hokey pokey and turn itself around? The answer to all these questions and more, in my estimation is: No. I mean, porn certainly provokes some thought — if laughter and an aesthetic appreciation of watching people humiliate themselves is thought. I've certainly seen the porn beast gussied up and passed off as worthy of scholarship, which, of course, is complete nonsense. A year and a half ago, I covered the World Pornography Conference, where noble-savage porn stars freely mixed with elbow-patched professors pretending that they had discovered a new "discipline," which I thought was a nifty way of devising a plan to get their universities to subsidize their consumption of stroke material. There is perhaps nothing that I've ever experienced as a reporter as inherently amusing as watching a roomful of tenured academics, earnestly tugging their chins, as Bill "Papa Bear" Margold, porn star extraordinaire, explained how he once ate his own ejaculate off a Ritz cracker. Hold on to that recipe Bill, I feel a porn-star cookbook coming on, so to speak. (Porn stars love to say "so to speak.") My point is this, while reactions to porn cannot be categorically summarized, I believe it does not involve thought, but involves the absence of thought — of forgetting yourself, transforming yourself into a peeping Tom, and watching others completely give themselves over to the basest animal behavior. I say animal behavior because it does not represent love, or even sex, as most of us know it. It involves two strangers — the man usually with a bad haircut and flabby A-cups, the woman usually with hard eye-makeup and black and blue marks on her inner thighs — rutting each other in some drafty warehouse in the Valley for cash. Even when I try to suffer through porn without tittering, it is less of an entertainment or aphrodisiac than it is a schadenfreudic riddle: What causes people to rut for money in front of a camera to a bad soundtrack? What causes Buddhist monks to set themselves aflame? What causes a panel of "experts" to talk about their first masturbatory experience on Nerve.com? There are no answers, only more questions.
Rufus Griscom (Q2: #4 of 12)
Alright Matt, if Ian is a scuffed-up moralist, you are a moralist in dire need of some scuffing. What good is this morality of yours? It seems that you've used up your capacity for sympathy on pasty overpaid milquetoasts sobbing over the mean mean capital gains taxes. Women who strip to make a few bucks are "human ashtrays"? Matt, is it really that confusing to you that some people would rather get paid to strip or have sex in front of a camera than write stories for the Weekly Standard about the possible costs to taxpayers of the latest regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration? (Mr. Labash's most recent journalistic proffering.) You and other defenders of the great American wallet may find this sort of thing more relevant to humanity than Freud, women's studies and the attempt to understand pornography, but keep your magazine's circulation in mind (nothing a painfully honest cover story about your first JC Penny masturbation experience wouldn't help, if you get over your shyness . . . Hey, this is fun).
Ian, I think this position of yours — that our attempts to explain porn are in fact really attempts to control its pernicious (or at least "non-benign") effect on our lives — may be a case of what our buddy Sig would call projection: it's dangerous if you're afraid of it; if you're neither afraid of it nor enthralled by it, there is nothing to control.
As I've said, I think porn is pretty harmless stuff — if anything it probably tends to let the air out of people's more elaborate fantasies, thus returning them to the more intimate nuances of the procreative act.
It can be bizarrely disorienting watching porn — the vice-gripped eyelids, gaping craws, staccato rump slapping, and then the spooky suspicion that we all kinda look like that. It's humbling in a healthy kind of way — it deflates the romance of the act, sure, and that encourages a more sober, realistic relationship to sex, as opposed to the more widespread childish, emotional one that results in foolish legislation and social opprobrium.
And, come on, sometime it's kind of a turn on, which ain't all bad.
Ian, you really think everybody fucks hard? All of our esteemed panelists, even?
Matt Labash (Q2: #5 of 12)
Down, Rufus. Listen, I don't want to get in a pissing match with you for two reasons: a) I'm quite fond of some of your editors, including the one that asked me to do this because he reads — gasp! — the Weekly Standard, and b) I'm a big fan of your back-up work with Chaka Khan in the late '70s (same Rufus, no?). Maybe you could give us a few pointers on marketing strategies. We were thinking about piling out of a van naked on 60 Minutes II, streaking through the streets of New York and saying "Come on, we're naked. For God's sake, take a card!" Then we kicked ourselves when we found out that, well, you already did that. Who's desperate for circulation?
Ian Gittler (Q2: #6 of 12)
All of them? Sure I do, Rufus. Whatever the sex experts want you to believe, no one segment of our culture has the exclusive rights to hot sex. But if Matt fucks one tenth as hard as he talks, then porn stars aren't the only ones with bruised inner thighs.
And yes, Rufus, porn can be fun to watch, use, see. Please, I'm with you there. I don't view any of my positions — dry as they may often sound — as precluding that fact. If dirty pictures weren't hot — and I mean to me personally — I wouldn't be part of this discussion talking about them. The fact that this stuff can be powerful is what makes it interesting, and worth examining.
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