I don’t know quite how to begin, but here goes:
Well, the genie’s been out of the bottle for quite some time. And once the bottle’s been uncorked, look out. It’s really hard to put it back in.
I think, though, that the wide dissemination of porn really hit its stride during the 1980s to where now it is more pervasive and more accepted in American culture.
But is this a good thing or what?
In the thread, “Did age play a role in it?”, I asked near the end (with new additions in parentheses):
Look, I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale. I have no wish to join hands with the oppressors in order to stamp out porn or to keep guys from what makes them happy. Whatever that is.
Nor am I a prude. I went through the Seventies…been there, done almost everything.
But…hell, there’s a limit. Maybe it’s because I am a writer (and use the printed word to create the vision in the mind of a place, time and people. All my characters have no access to TV; movies and radio are in their infancy or about to be created at this point. Bellocq’s ‘dirty’ photos of whores in New Orleans bordellos, for example, seem rather tame today. Attraction, fantasy and coupling were certainly different then. So were societal mores. I could see these kinds of pictures in someone’s trunk in a cigar box. (Their secret, buried treasure trove.)
There were also very few photographs going around of black women that were highly sexualized and exploitative. They were out there, but you’ll find them in European or European American homes or collections. And if a black man even kept a white woman’s picture, scantily-clad or wearing nothing, if he could afford the cards, lord help him (if he was found out). I’ve read of blacks in the service being forced to take down photos of white actresses or showgirls in their lockers before Jim Crow and after Vietnam for fear of being beat up or brought up on trumped up charges or infractions and punished.
But that was about the size of men’s titillation at that time. Things are sure different now, although I wouldn’t like to see the porn that Japan puts on its late night TV. Porn to me is just a side dish, a change in the menu, not meant to be overused. It’s not breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s what scares me. <u>Is it supposed to be everywhere?</u>
And it still scares me. It ain’t–har, har–buried treasure any more.
I remember watching a 8 mm film of interracial sex with a white male “friend” (that’s what I’ll call him)–something that was supposed to help me get me in the mood.
It didn’t. I told him to turn it off after a few minutes and he only did it after I insisted on it several times. Because the woman was very obviously doing it for money, and she was no actress–that is, she wasn’t being coached. So she wsa simply moving very slowly and deliberately putting herself into positions. She did not look into the camera, she did not smile with ‘enjoyment.’ It was a film where she was responding to simple commands. It turned me off completely.
Yet the guy beside me thought it was a major cinematic find. I guess for the content, in the Seventies, it was. I couldn’t generate anything close to what propelled me to come over to his home for an afternoon together. I had to leave him, start all over again. Of course, he was ticked. But it was my mind and my body. I didn’t want to feel polluted.
And yet what really turns me on some days (one of my better fantasies) are my remembrances of one particular afternoon that we spent together, where he brought some mirrors into the mix. Narcissistic, yeah. But I saw myself giving and receiving. I saw him. It was a hellalot better than watching that film.
There was a point in my life where I thought that I would go see porn films since I was not in a relationship and the AIDS crisis had just begun. There was a women’s night where I found I could go for free without an escort in this little theatre in the Marina District of San Francisco. So I got to know who Ron Jeremy was. I liked some of the plots, and that helped my enjoyment. I got bored quick with the woman on woman action. Some of the interracial encounters were primo. The women looked as if they enjoyed things. There wasn’t any conspicuous consumption due to the low budget, although the music was thumping and the outfits were shiny. When I had enough, I left.
A couple of men realized that I was sitting there enjoying the programs along with all the other men and couples, and they tried to hit it off with me. I was horrified. This was before VCRs and I was not trawling for companionship. The guy at the stale popcorn stand who was the unofficial bouncer escorted me back and walked around the theatre and I wasn’t appraoched again that night. But I had to leave and get a cab for the second guy another night who was too insistent on horning in on my pleasure. Then, when it was possible, I got a VCR. But I didn’t get porn all that much and I still don’t.
Flash ahead to the era of the music video.
I don’t watch too many music videos. Again, it’s not just a generational thing, but more of a sexual thing. This is mostly eyecandy for guys ages 13-35. The bodies are perfect, probably too perfect. They’re not only selling records, they are also selling types of women to guys. They are seeing what they should be lookng for in a woman. Hence MTV and BET are promoting the commodification of women’s bodies in a way not seen in years. It all sells.
Add to this the ascendancy of the Repubs in the 1980s. They were going to reinforce sexual as well as racial culture <u>before</u> the so-called calamitous Sixties and Seventies. And it seemed that Americans yearned for this kind of reinforcement and less experimentation and critique. It as if it were all a bad dream, that era. Ripe for putdown and reevaluation.
I’m not going to say that mistakes weren’t made. They were. But that’s what happens when you decide (multiplied a few hundred thousand) to figure out what you want.
A couple of feminists I met in the 1980s even suggested the sexual revolution was more geared towards men rather than women, a premise that I have yet to agree with or prove for myself.
But mistakes have been made, for example, in making Sinatra and his Rat Pack another indicator of male sexuality, when we know where the flipside of that sexuality ultimately brought some of its promotors: alcoholism, excess and violence. I think that making certain aspects of hip-hop mores–hardness, hypermasculinity, one-sided sexual pleasure–accessible to the mainstream has made things worse as well. I think mistakes have been made allowing porn into advertising, where people–consumers–take it for granted.
I’ve also a member of a few black listserves. In one, a black man who described himself as a poet and educator talked about his affairs with former students until one of his children, a daughter (about the same age as the students) finally persuaded him to stop. Now, in the era of hip-hop and music videos, he’s angry because it appears he cannot partake in the phenomenon of older black males bringing young girls into bars to get them drunk and ultimately have sex with them. He blames the girls for being more knowledgeable and accessible, while he’s left with being a nice guy.
Sounds like Dole and his Viagra.
No, every man cannot be a playa, a superfly, or a cool cat. The question that I have is, what can a man be beyond all the smoke and pump-up?
I found old codger Robert Redford dancing with Kristin Scott Thomas in The Horse Whisperer and Sarah and Karl in Love Actually moving towards each other to Norah Jones’ “Turn Me On” more erotic than some of this trash consumed today. But maybe that is age, too.
One more thing. In the early 1980s, feminists sought to convene on issues of sex, porn and the erotic. They found it wasn’t going to be easy. The site where the conference was going to be held was taken away from the participants at the last moment. Death threats were phoned in. Feminists split into anti-porn and anti-anti-porn feminists. The 20th anniversary of the publication of Carole Vance’s landmark book, “Pleasure and Danger,” a collection of papers from the conference, passed last year. But a lot of people don’t hear about this information. Or that even a couple of black women contributed to the book, trying to make something rational out of a historyand culture that saw black women as mere objects and seuxal beings They just hear that feminists are trying to spoil their fun, not make them think.
Okay, I know that I am just throwing this out there. I know that some of it is barely connectable or makes sense. I’m sure I am going to be putdown. No, I am not. I’m different. I’m a grown-assed woman in my own way. I just think that Generation X, Y, Z and etc. resist critiquing phenomena that might be pleasurable in the short-run but dangerous in the long-run. They may be too fixated on machine-generated or artificial pleasure. To me, porn is no joke. It’s private, like the decision to have an abortion. It’s not for everyone to chew on, especially kids. We’ve had about 25 years of this, along with the technologial advances that make it more accessible.
What’s the limit? And where do we all go from here, even beyond the Pie Fight??