Porn's Dirty, Dangerous Secret

Ed. Note: AlterNet has run a series of articles on the frequently ignored role of pornography in contemporary society. At the bottom of Robert Jensen's article you can find links to more stories addressing the many questions that pornography poses.

There are a finite number of ways that human bodies can be placed together sexually, and as one pornography industry veteran lamented to me at the annual trade show, "they've all been shot." He sighed, pondering the challenge of creating a sexually explicit film that is unique, and mused, "After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?"

His question was offered rhetorically, but I asked: How many?

Probably four, he said; simultaneous oral, vaginal, and double-anal penetration was realistic. Another producer later in the day told me he had once worked on a film that included a double-anal/double-vag scene -- a woman being penetrated by four men at once. He said the director had a special harness made to hold the woman for that scene. In contemporary mass-marketed heterosexual pornography, it's unexceptional to see a standard DP (industry slang for "double penetration," with two men entering a woman vaginally and anally at the same time) with oral penetration.

Whatever the number, theoretical or routine, the discussion reminds us that pornography is relentlessly intense, pushing our sexual boundaries both physically and psychically. And, pornography also is incredibly repetitive and boring.

Pornographers know all this, of course, and it keeps them on edge.

These days there are about 13,000 pornographic films released each year, compared with about 600 from Hollywood. Not surprisingly, a common concern at the Adult Entertainment Expo each time I attended (in 2005, 2006, and 2008) was that the desperate struggle by directors to distinguish their films from all the others was leading to a kind of "sexual gymnastics." Lexington Steele, one of the most successful contemporary pornography performers and producers, put it bluntly: "A lot of gonzo is becoming circus acts."

"Gonzo" is the pornographic genre that rejects plot, character, or dialogue, offering straightforward explicit sex. Gonzo films are distinguished from "features," which to some degree mimic the structure of a traditional Hollywood film. According to the top trade magazine: "Gonzo, non-feature fare is the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it's less expensive to produce than plot-oriented features, but just as importantly, is the fare of choice for the solo stroking consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get off on the good stuff, then, if they really wanna catch some acting, plot and dialog, pop in the latest Netflix disc." ["The Directors," Adult Video News, August 2005, p. 54.]

In that description is considerable insight into why pornography (1) has always been boring and (2) will continue to become more brutal.

The industry works from the assumption that the men who consume the vast majority of commercial heterosexual pornography are not really human beings with hearts, minds and souls. In the porn world, a man is a kind of sexual robot in search of nothing more than the stimulation of pleasure circuits. In that world, the goal is to reduce human sexuality to the production of an erection and orgasm as quickly as possible -- get it up and get it off, efficiently. Pornography assumes not that a man has a penis but that a man is nothing more than a penis.

The pornographer faces one serious obstacle in all this: Men are human beings. No matter how emotionally deformed by the toxic conception of masculinity that is dominant in a patriarchal culture such as the United States, we are human beings with hearts, minds and souls.

No matter how much men try to cut themselves off from the emotional component of sex, that component never withers completely, and therein lies the potential problem for pornographers. When all emotion is drained from sex it becomes repetitive and uninteresting -- in a word, boring, even to men who are watching solely to facilitate masturbation. Because the novelty of seeing sex on the screen eventually wears off, pornographers who want to expand (or even just maintain) market share and profit need to give their products an emotional edge of some kind.