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Bosh
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Taehan Mingook
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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to quote True Porn Clerk Stories:
http://66.250.47.168/mb/showthread....20&pagenumber=1
I was putting away porn tags, when suddenly I looked up and came face-to-face with the box for **** Pigs 5. I can still see the box. There was, of course, a woman on it, offering up her orifices for the pleasure of anyone who wanted a look. She seemed friendly, almost shy. And she was being called a **** pig.
"Good Lord," I thought, "What HAPPENED to me? I'm about to turn 30 and I'm on my knees in a basement restocking incredibly degrading porn."
This time around I will be about to turn 31 and I will be on my knees in a basement stocking incredibly degrading porn. At least I can laugh about it. Sometimes I have to pull my lips into a rictus grin, peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth and punch myself in the solar plexus, but a laugh is a laugh.
I've gotten numb to a lot of it over the past year - and some of it I do find genuinely hilarious - but I am still, sometimes, conflicted about the really degrading porn. The **** Pig stuff.
It took a long time for me to even admit to myself that porn can be degrading. I'm a sex-positive, first amendment feminist. I've been through the progressive arguments: lesbians enjoy it too, the woman giving the blow job is in control of the sex act, and what if they come for your porn first. I got them, I believed them, I was willing to defend to my death (or at least to my jailing) the right to produce porn, assuming all the actors truly consent. (No, I would never watch Deep Throat. Last time I checked, porn produced at gunpoint is rape on film.)
As is so often the case, I had those lofty ideals before I really had any experience with porn other than as an abstract concept. Working with porn on a regular basis, while it has expanded my whatever-floats-your-boat tolerance, has led me to conclude that yes, sometimes porn is degrading. Indeed, sometimes it's meant to be degrading. That's the whole point.
Take, for example, the Guttermouth series, the latest example of which arrived last week and triggered my current case of porn clerk malaise. In a way, it was satisfyingly cyclical moment - Guttermouth also refers to its stars, still young enough to look happy and proud on the box, as "**** pigs". They look about 19. They look sweet. They're posing in bikinis and looking right at the camera, hoping you will like them. **** pigs. The box copy is what's really revolting. It's over the top, but I don't think it's meant to be funny. There are short fake cast bios of all the girls, in the same happy tone of theater bios before the actors grow up and get hip and cynical. One of them is called a dumb slut, another a worthless ****. I'm fairly certain there was more on the other two, but it was just too depressing to keep reading.
This is the one porn impulse that I honestly don't get. (Oh, all right. I don't get peeing on each other or hurting each other, but I think I understand intellectually how one might get there.) I don't understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge ****. It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time.
Much as I hate to say it, it seems to be a straight guy thing.
There's definitely a Captain Kirk-style exploration up and down the imaginary social ladder in both the straight and gay sections. In addition to the dozens of variations on (oddly - or sadly) still taboo interracial pairings, we have More Dirty Debutantes and White Trash Whore on the straight side, Straight off the Street and The Other Side of Aspen on the gay side. You can **** rich or **** poor on either side of the invisible barrier between the straight and gay sections. But you can only **** lesser in straight.
I think it's because there's not enough otherness in gay porn. There's still bondage and S&M stuff, plenty of dominance and submission, but even the most submissive sub is still a man just like the dom, just like the viewer. How much separation can there be?
On the straight side, it's different. One of the Extreme Penetrations boxes shows a woman, legs spread and sticking straight up, with some sort of funnel or bowl shoved into her vagina. It actually has pretzels in it. Rocco's Animal Trainer series, I'm told, traditionally ends with Rocco ****ing a woman up the ass while he shoves her head into a toilet and flushes.
Some straight porn does seem to be made in sort of a happy, fun spirit: women are beautiful and fun to look at, sex is fun and good to have. Whee! And then there's Guttermouth.
Is it fear? Is it anger? Is it such an unfamiliarity in dealing with women that they don't even seem like real people? Or is it, as I'm prone to suspect on difficult days, that some people are just complete shitheads? I don't know.
What I learned in Women's Studies is that porn is not necessarily degrading. What I've learned at the video store is that sometimes it is.
My position on porn hasn't really changed. I would still defend to my death the right to produce it. I just sometimes wish they wouldn't.
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21-08-2002 06:55
. 
maybe I'm doing something wrong
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