by Rex Breathes rexbreathes@hotmail.comI don’t know what it is about porno movies these days. In spite of digital technology, surgically enhanced cleavage and the multi-billion dollar bonanza producers have to feed on and work with, 99% of all videos are safely rehashing the same old ground. Given the money and talent available to create a product that might feed the big head as well as the little head, why is so much swill dumped into the porno trough by companies shouting, “Sooey!” Are they afraid to waste creative efforts on an audience with their dick in one hand and the remote in the other?
Sex has far more to do with raw emotions and mental hijinks (and kinks and twists and perversions) than it does with bodies, positions and come shots. Here is an industry with the opportunity to explore the dark side of the human psyche, the outer limits of thinking and feeling and all of the taboos without compromises or apologies. So where’s the real taboo video?
In the seventies, young porn was just learning to walk free under the Miller Supreme Court ruling, thereby escaping the clutches of the mob; And that brave new porn had a lot more to say about American taboos. For example, I remember a scene from a 70’s’s porn movie where a man walked into a bedroom where his adult sister was nude except for a pair of black, over the elbow gloves. They had a little ritual they performed together. They both knew it all to well. He would stand in front of the dresser mirror while his sister would kneel behind him, hidden from his view in the mirror by his body. Suddenly, her black gloved hand emerged between his thighs and began caressing his rock hard penis. As she knelt behind him, she continued to work him into a frenzy. The camera switched from her view, crouching behind him, to his view of only her black gloved, disembodied hand, stroking his maddening erection. After he came in a shuddering climax, he left his sister to collapse on the bed, first smelling her gloved hand then masturbating herself to a sudden orgasm.
Adults who have sex with their fathers and mothers and siblings, although lightyears away from normal, acceptable and moral, is a practice I’ve heard mentioned many times. I know a man who had two different wives who both had consensual sex with a parent, while married to him; one had sex with her mother, the other had sex with her father. The great writer Anais Nin had a sexual affair with her father when she was an adult. Many lovers share fantasies of an incestual nature where the woman may play the role of mother or daughter or little girl and the man will play the corresponding role. Or maybe she’s a teacher, or he’s an uncle or she’s a sister, or he’s a police officer or a professor and on and on. If the most explicit artistic medium cannot explore the underlying emotions and thinking, visually, of societal taboos, then who or what can? I remember reading a mainstream, library novel, as an adolescent, which made graphic mention of the sexual relationship between a father and daughter in a white trash, hard drinking, southern family. Given the covert and overt incest happening in my family at that time, it gave me the only relief from the feeling that I was absolutely alone.
Many other subjects are ignored as well, for safety sake and guaranteeing that the lowest common denominator is served. Like voyeurism. Many men, and some women, are aroused by the thought of watching their partner having sex with someone else. (See Snicker LaBarr’s column this month.) Yet I rarely see that psychologically and emotionally charged theme explored in porn, even though porn is a voyeuristic medium. Jealousy, anger, latent homosexual feelings or simply a new found appreciation of your lover’s sexuality are all emotions that could be given graphic illumination. Why shouldn’t we be seeing older women seducing eighteen-year-old boys shooting off endless loads like sky rockets? Or the man who’s having a thing on the side with his girlfriend’s brother or sister when the girlfriend walks in on them and...
Because it won’t appeal to the masses holding their dick in one hand and the remote in the other.
(Thanks to Taboo Video for being there when everyone else has gone to be moon.)