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Natasha Vargas-Cooper delves into the universe of Twlight
fan-fiction, where Bella and Edward generally exchange more than
longing looks. We get some heavy breathing and if not bodice-ripping,
definitely thong-ripping ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Samantha, I, too, saw the Washington Post story on how an adult-movie screening on the University of Maryland campus was canceled after Senator Harris suggested a budget amendment could strip the public university of nearly $500 million in funding. Sure, Harris' hysteria over porn on campus is silly at best—I don't know how truly "dangerous" pornography is to the culture at large—but what struck me as inappropriate is how an adult-production company is generating free publicity for its movie by trotting it out before its target demographic and pretending the experience is educational by coupling the screenings with safe-sex speakers or academics droning on about "gender and sexuality."
You say: "Still, the public viewing would at least get people in a room together, talking about sex and maybe—hopefully—even dipping into the sort of difficult, analytical discussion of sexuality and exploitation that colleges should promote." Personally, I doubt it. Porn rarely leads to analytical discussions of anything, much less sex. Instead, it looks to me like the colleges are getting snookered by publicists who have found their perfect mark in porn-happy academics.
Hilariously, the Planned Parenthood speaker who would have spoken on safe-sex practices would be doing so in the context of a movie in which none of the adult performers were using condoms. Way to set an example. In the end, porn is little more than smoke and mirrors.
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The University of Maryland caved to pressure Thursday and decided not to screen a big-budget porno flick that's been making the rounds on college campuses. The plan had been to show Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, a $10 million transformation of Pirates of the Caribbean from G to XXX, in the student union on Saturday. But administrators backed down after State Sen. Andrew Harris proposed a budget amendment this week that any public university that screened a pornographic film would lose state funding. For UMD, that would mean a loss of about $424 million for next year, according to the Washington Post. Harris' argument:
"Occasional viewing of porn is more dangerous than occasionally lighting up a cigarette. If the movie is being shown for educational reasons, someone should be presenting the dangers too. Porn breaks up lives."
That seems extreme to say the least. Like many of the colleges that have already screened the film, UMD planned to tack on to the screening an educational portion: a talk by a Planned Parenthood rep on safe sex. If Harris' problem is that he'd rather the post-porno discussion focus more specifically on the porn industry, I'm with him—a generic "safe sex" talk seems not quite up to the task of helping students unpack the money shots they just witnessed. Still, the public viewing would at least get people in a room together, talking about sex and maybe—hopefully—even dipping into the sort of difficult, analytical discussion of sexuality and exploitation that colleges should promote.
Other colleges have gone through with screening the film. At UCLA in December, religious student groups protested by holding a prayer vigil outside the theater, but about 650 students stayed for the discussion portion after the screening. At UC-Davis, the biggest hitch in showing the film this week was that there wasn't room in the 500-seat theater for all the students who wanted to watch. A speaker from the campus Gender and Sexuality Commission spoke before the movie. Better that than students watching porn in their dorm rooms, no?
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TMZ reports the San Fernando Valley-based adult production company Vivid Entertainment has offered Nadya Suleman $1 million to star in an adult movie. Taken at face value, this story is all kinds of wrong. How the story of a freak-mother has twisted itself into a tale of a would-be MILF? OctoMILF? is beyond the scope of my limited brain capacity. Whatever those parties involved or not involved have in mind, I know I do not want to see it. What the story does testify to truly is that the adult movie industry is suffering mightily during this recession if these are the lengths it has to go to to get attention these days. Once upon a time, XXX was outre. After a while, it went mainstream. Now, I guess it's just passe. For some reason, the conflation of OctoMom and pornography brings to my mind the ancient Japanese tradition of tentacle erotica and The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which a woman finds herself in the erotic embrace of an octopus. I suppose these United States really have been pornified, when starring in an adult movie is the punch line to the new American Dream.
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On my blog, I wrote at length about what Obama's attorney general pick may mean to the adult movie industry. I've been writing about the sex business for over a decade now, and while every previous presidential election has seen some discussion around obscenity, this one was remarkable for its total lack thereof. As Declan McCullagh opined on CNET, Eric Holder is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to free speech. A decade ago, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, he pushed U.S. attorneys to prosecute pornographers, although the Clinton administration took a mostly hands-off approach toward obscenity prosecutions. Interestingly, Clinton's leave 'em alone attitude toward the adult industry spawned one of the most dramatic changes in the business, as the largely unchecked business of making porn movies became increasingly more extreme. These days, most liberals believe the less government intervention the better when it comes to free speech, but in Porn Valley, "anything goes" isn't always the best answer when it comes to the hardcore day-to-day lives of adult performers.
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I have always marvelled at Christie Hefner. Because of her, it was possible to believe (perhaps for way too long) in Hef's vision of porn as a "lifestyle," something for the pretty girl next door who's won the lottery. And if you read and loved Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, as I did, you would have in your head the image of Hef as an American pioneer of a sort, instead of the cartoon he later became. Christie was always unabashed about presiding over his empire: She claimed to be a feminist and a businesswoman and an intellectual and not see the contradictions. In that way, she was from the '80s superwoman age of feminism. Now that she's gone, porn is just back to its dismal, daily grind.
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For five years, I worked for Playboy Enterprises. I worked for the cable TV end of the business, but Playboy is like an octopus, its tentacles flailing everywhere, so we were all privy to the inner-workings of what was already a financially struggling company. On the inside, everybody knew the trouble was Hef. While he was proudly taking Viagra to support his love life, he had less to work with when it came to making savvy business decisions for one of the world's most recognized brands. Yesterday, his daughter Christie announced she would be stepping down from her position as Playboy's CEO, a job she's held for the last 20 years. Subscriptions are down, the stock is falling, and the outlook is grim. At this point, it's hard to know who or what's responsible for sending Playboy down the tubes: the rise of adult content on the Internet that rendered Playboy a soft-core throwback to bygone days; Hef's staunch refusal to let the Playboy aesthetic change from his original vision of it in the 50's; or self-described feminist Christie's inability to capitalize on a titillating brand that couldn't compete in today's market, amidst the Pink Tacos and the Hooters. Regardless, it looks like porn has won the sexual revolution that Playboy helped spawn.
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Nayeli, I'm with you in favor of adorable underthings. Definitely worth the money for the personal confidence and the occasional zing in the eyes of one's date. (Someone I dated briefly liked to call me a "smartypanties.")
And yet at the same time, like Lucy and Amaka, I feel sickened by the culturewide commodification of sexuality—of intimate life and personal worth, really—especially when it's aimed at children (by which I mean anyone under 20! I'm old) who are still developing a sense of self.
As the Rolling Stones knew well, all consumer advertising peddles one basic thing: dissatisfaction. We're constantly being sold the idea that we could be happy if ... if we just fixed X problem by buying Y product. Soft-porn merchant Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie & Fitch, is in the business of selling the belief that you should be sexier. Sure, they have a right to do it, and I even sometimes wear their underthings. But it is especially disgusting to peddle to young girls—and here I'm not targeting VS alone, but also MTV, Girls Gone Wild!, and the soft-core underage porn culture et al.—the feeling that she's really a ho in training, that her personal worth depends on arousing others' lust. That's selling the idea of being an object, not a subject—-a big difference, although sometimes hard to define.
There's a subtle line between liking to wear fancy panties ... and needing to see others drool over your bottom before you can feel worthwhile. One is powerful; the other's an eating disorder in waiting. One is finding power in enjoying yourself and your body in a mature and confident way ... and the other is a degraded manipulation of self by instincts out of whack and in thrall to others. Sometimes, of course, both are at work at once. Which is why we're having this discussion: figuring out which is which isn't so easy in the consumerized world in which we live.
There's a very odd overlap here between feminism, on the one hand, which wants women to take power without being pornified, and on the other, Christian activists who also want to resist the consumer culture's attempt to drag us around by our gonads and insecurities. At their best, both groups want to respect the individual as being more than just her body, as having a meaningful inner life. This resistance against personal degradation is also why feminists and Christian activists have a similarly uneasy alliance against sex trafficking.
I'll take any and all allies in standing up against personal commodification, whether "chosen" or forced. Christians talk about maintaining a meaningful inner life as having a relationship with God. The God-language can make some feminists gag, but I respect it—even though I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of God's self-appointed personal emissaries. Especially not when they think they know exactly what I should and shouldn't be doing with my smartypanties.
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The problem with being a judge who loves to shock is that you're a flashy barracuda in a school of plain tuna, and you risk careening off into the high seas that are the province of public officials who are just too out there for their own good. Such is my thought after reading that Judge Alex Kozinksi posted porn on a web site he thought was private, but wasn't. The material included "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," we learn from the LA Times. We can't judge for ourselves anymore, because the site has been wiped clean, but if Judge Kozinski says that he found the porn funny, I bet he did--and it was probably offensive, too. Herein lies the Kozinski challenge. He is a transgessor, a flouter of boundaries, a man of many appetites. When he wrote a week-long diary for Slate in 1996, he told us all about going to a lingerie and pajama party. ("The Location: Gatsby's Rendezvous by the Sea, 'the house that all of Malibu deems the scandalous haven of sleepless nights.'") When I profiled him in 2004, the art for the piece depicted him as a circus master--and he liked it enough to ask for a copy. Plenty of other examples could be inserted here, and Phil Carter (on Convictions) has plenty of company in appreciating Judge K's quirks. Lots of reporters and court watchers have urged him onward with our appreciation. And now that we know that among the many things he appreciates are women painted to look like cows, how can we go all schoolmarmish? I know, I know, judges are supposed to be beyond reproach, and this is the opposite of that. And yes being outed for semi-public porn-sharing while trying an obscenity case is pretty rich. It's the sort of plot twist Judge Kozinski would write into a screen play. Maybe that's the answer: Toss the bench and move to Hollywood.
(Cross-posted on Convictions.)