Joey Sarajevo has Sticky Fingers
A little while ago, America’s lucrative pornography industry in the grotty little smog-choked hellhole of San Fernando Valley ground to a halt after one of it’s key participants contracted HIV on a ‘shoot’ in Brazil. The mainstream media coverage was actually pretty extensive (presumably because, well, even people who don’t watch porn are prurient buggers when you come down to it) but one part in particular stuck in my mind and remains lodged there even today: a spokesman for a group called ‘Morality in the Media’ suggesting, with a straight face and in all apparent seriousness, that the outbreak was in some sense ‘Divine’ justice. I believe ‘what goes around comes around’ was the phrase actually used, which I’ll come back to a little later on.
Now, quivering ball of neuroses that I am, I’ve always had a slightly uneasy relationship with pornography, to the extent that I have several scrupulously followed rules about buying it. One, I can’t get porn and milk from the same shop, due to the ‘Rufus Is a Tit Man’-style Oedipal dread engendered by getting milk and sexual gratification from the same source. Two, I can’t buy porn from the same shop more than three times, since it’s on the third occasion they start eyeing you like you’re Ted fucking Bundy or something. Three, I can’t keep any single piece of porn for more than two weeks, as after that I start worrying that I’ll become to attached to the ‘models’ featured in it and will become one of those people who begin to believe their wanking predilections constitute a relationship with an actual person, rather than an image (bear in mind I once managed to sustain a crush on fictional lesbian rock singer Hopey from Love and Rockets for something like six months – hmm, maybe this is why I don’t have a girlfriend).
Moreover, whilst I do admire a friend who has the sheer brass neck to use (and I think use is the right word here) pornography and real-live women to create ersatz group sex – especially his frankly inspired choice of black-and-white photography since ‘it’s easier to convince a bird that it’s art if it’s not in colour’ – I’ve always found the whole experience to be slightly troubling. The only two magazines I’m able to approach with anything resembling a clear conscience are Razzle and Club International. Why, I hear you ask? Because the girls in the former look like they’re a bit dirty and quite like the idea of being in porn, whilst the girls in the latter look like real bitches, so I don’t feel bad about objectifying them.
The whole thing can be even more problematic once you start to consider just who finds the images and narrative of certain types of porn erotic. Fiesta, for example (beyond the sheer horror of the ‘something for the ladies page’- like I need to see a picture of a spot-welder from Doncaster’s flaccid cock as I’m ‘relaxing’) features pages and pages of stories detailing the experiences of men who watch their wives or girlfriends getting fucked by other people, always far better than the protagonist is able themselves. While that’s just faintly touching (I mean, what goes on in the head of the poor bastard who finds their own inadequacy a turn-on?) a quick glance through the ‘phone line subjects in the classified adds can make even a filthy little bastard like me a little queasy.
I’m losing focus here slightly, so perhaps a little anecdote might help explain just what I’m driving at:
My friend Commie Dave once found himself in his flatmate’s room whilst his flatmate was away, mainly because he’d broken the door down to have a bit of a crafty butcher’s. One of the first things he found was a selection of very, very odd pornography – Hairy and Horny, which featured women who hadn’t shaved for so long they looked like they were wearing the P.A.G.A.N. trousers from the Dan Ackroyd version of Dragnet, was one of the least disturbing. He then made two rather more horrifying discoveries: his missing kitchen-roll holder, which he had always considered rather phallic, lubed up with Vaseline and ass-juice down the side of the bed, and his flatmate’s diary, which contained the following entry:
“March 15th: Went to (the Student’s) Union . Got pissed. Fucked bitch.”
This was especially weird, since the ‘Fucked Bitch’ part DEFINITELY DIDN’T HAPPEN.
From this, it’s easy to see that this guy’s whole conception of sex was not actually of an intimate experience between two people, but of something he did for himself with the help of someone else – in short, he viewed sex and pornography as one and the same thing. To him, it didn’t matter whether or not a person wanted to have sex with HIM, just that they wanted to have sex with SOMEONE and were too depressed/horny/drunk (take your pick, but he was pretty ugly so it’s more likely to be the latter) to care who. Which, to be honest, is not a million miles away from what I can only presume goes on in the mind of a rapist.
But whoa there, horsy, I ain’t on some big crusade here – as I say, I do find that whole aspect of porn troubling, but on the other hand you can’t really it’s the FAULT of pornography or pornographers that a lot of men are fucked-up sexually. Moreover, I’m fully aware that for most people, porn is only erotic BECAUSE it’s transparently unrealistic (just as I’d never actually want to witness Chow-Yun Fat blow a guy’s head off for real). I guess what I’m trying to get at is that Puritan dullards like Morality in the Media don’t realise the moral problems raised by porn are really moral problems out there in the real world in spite of it, and that they wouldn’t go away if there was to be no more porn at all ever. To suggest that pornography is in some sense responsible for the spread of AIDS (which I think was their implication) would be laughable if it wasn’t so disgusting.
One final thought: a legendary second-hand shop near where I live has recently closed. Now, the place was pretty seedy (I always imagined that, out back, it was actually a ruined Aztec temple like the Titty Twister in From Dusk Till Dawn) and also used to run some pretty deviant little sex parties – a friend of a friend was once chained to a wall there and had his balls painfully stretched by a variety of outlandish implements, or so I’m told. Now, Tesco have been allowed to open a mini-market in it, despite the fact the road it’s on already has two newsagent-cum-grocery stores. Ask yourself, what’s more immoral – a bunch of consenting adults having sex which each other, or a near-monopoly organisation being allowed to (potentially) squeeze two hard-working families out of a living?
Morality and the Media would doubtless have a quick answer to that one, so here’s a second: is it San Fernando Valley or the Religious Right who are responsible for getting the most cunts on our TV screens?
I’ll leave you to make up your own minds on that.