David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

EXERCISE: Use at least eight (8) of the prenominate adult-industry terms in a well-formed English sentence.

SAMPLE SOLUTION: “After a kind of long wait for wood, a B-girl fluffed the rookie woodman into a state where he could take part in a DP SS whose frequent beams required maximum wood, and after a shaky start the SS ended up a spectacular double-facial in which the starlet really displayed her professionalism by managing to stay enthusiastic even though some of the skeet went in her right eye.” (back to text)

19 The female performers seem, in truth, not just uncommunicative but downright surly. How much of this is tradeshow fatigue and how much is the stony demeanor of Insiders toward all Outsiders is anyone’s guess. The actresses are all in post-CES mufti — baggy jeans and cotton halters and big fuzzy slippers, etc. Without their makeup and appurtenances, Savage and Dane look even prettier; the B-girls do not. They all spend most of the time on the suite’s long vinyl couch watching a syndicated Seinfeld triple-header. (back to text)

20 (especially their bottoms, it seems, in the Gonzos of Max, Buttman, Mr. Ben Dover, and “Butt Row’s” J. Silvera) (back to text)

21 So let’s observe that whereas traditional, quote-unquote dramatic porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualization of real life (viz. by creating a kind of alternative real world in which everyone from secretaries to firemen to dental hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse), Gonzo videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualization of actual real life (by, for instance, combining real footage of babes on the Cannes beach with scripted footage of seduction and explicit sex). Gonzo thus obviously seems like the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in Docudramas, COPS, Real-Life Adventures of 3rd-Shift Trauma Surgeons, etc. (back to text)

22 This is not a rumor. It is documented as fact. No theories on this phenomenon or on the civilian females’ possible motives/susceptibilities will even be attempted here — the relevant questions are just too huge and stupefying. (back to text)

23 Max is here referring not only to Silvera and Byron and the rest of the Gonzo-come-latelies, but to directors like Gregory Dark and Rob Black, who are the spearheads of a certain other hot ’90s genre called (by Dick Filth, in print) “Bizarro-Sleaze.” Gregory Dark’s recent Snakepit and The Shocking Truth do things like seat a starlet in an interview chair and then have an off-camera inquisitor ask her, e.g., whether she thinks she’s a slut and whether she thinks she’s eventually going to go to hell for her insatiable sluttiness and how she felt about the sexual attentions of her piggish stepfather, which example then segues into an SS where four men dressed stepfatherishly in bowties and cardigans and all with plastic pig-snouts strapped onto their faces gang-bang her into a stupor. Whereas Mr. Rob Black — compared to whom Gregory Dark is Frank Capra — offers entertainment like gang bangs of paraplegic women, women being made to eat Ritz crackers that have been skeeted on, and men taking turns spitting in women’s faces.*

Your correspondents elect here to submit an opinion. Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and maybe masturbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated. Whether Bizarro-Sleaze might conceivably help armchair misogynists “work out” some of their anger at females is irrelevant. Catharsis is not these films’ intent. Their intent is to capitalize on a market-demand that quite clearly exists — these directors’ products, like Max Hardcore’s, are near-constant presences in Adult Video News’ s Top Sellers and Renters lists.

Dark’s and Black’s movies are vile. They are meant to be. And the truth is that in-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn’s been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more “mainstream” — meaning more widely available, more acceptable, more lucrative, more chic: Boogie Nights — it has become also more “extreme,” and not just on the Bizarro margins. In nearly all hetero porn now there is a new emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women. In certain respects, this extremism may simply be porn’s tracing Hollywood entertainment’s own arc: It’s hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw in the last decade. So maybe. And yet there’s something else.

The psychodynamics of porn seem always to have involved a certain real degree of shame, self-loathing, perception of “sin,” etc. This has held both on the performing end — “I’m a nasty girl,” “I’m a little fuckhole” — and on the consumption end — recall, or get someone to tell you about, the embarrassment of being seen at the ticket window of an adult theater, or the haunted faces of trenchcoated men in Times Square, Boston’s Combat Zone, SF’s Tenderloin. We note, though, that the faces of today’s fans at the Adult CES seem different, the affect more complex. An observer gets the odd sense that the average fan here feels slightly ashamed of being slightly ashamed of his enthusiasm for porn, since the performers and directors now appear to have abandoned shame in favor of the steely-eyed exultation that always attends success in the great US market. Wherever else it is, porn is no longer in the shadows and slums. As Max’s scarlet-clad crewman put it, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen. ” †

The thing to recognize is that the adult industry’s new respectability creates a paradox. The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of un acceptability that’s so essential to its appeal. As should be evident, the industry’s already gone pretty far; and with reenacted child abuse and barely disguised gang rapes now selling briskly, it is not hard to see where porn is eventually going to have to go in order to retain its edge of disrepute. Whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-’90s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film. It’s also clear — w/ all moral and cultural issues totally aside — that this is an extremely dangerous direction for the adult-film industry to have to keep moving in. It seems only a matter of time before another conservative pol sees in mainstream porn an outrage sufficient to hang his public ambitions on. The AVA, after all, is not the only powerful lobby with an interest in social norms. At this point, anyway, porn’s own internal contradictions (e.g., constantly offending mainstream values —> the billions of $ that attend mainstream popularity) look to be the industry’s most dangerous enemy. (back to text)

24 (Here yr. corresps.’ suspicion that the AVNA statuettes are bought in bulk, possibly hot, feels somehow confirmed.) (back to text)

25…and of the ubiquitous smolder that’s so much a part of ’90s commercial culture. Mr. H. Hecuba, for instance, during one of the marathon screenings of Award-nominated videos referenced above in FN 3, pointed out that the relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about that joke. (back to text)

26 Hecuba and Filth, being both familiar with Max and financially independent of him, elect to remain in the suite under the beady and seemingly lidless eye of the Production Asst. (who, by the way, is not wearing a fire-colored MAXWORLD jumpsuit but has evidently been promised one if he completes his probationary employment period in good standing). (back to text)