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American Sex Ed<br />
Porn as Sexual Disinformation<br />
Violet Blue<br />
I perched on the edge of a king-sized four-poster bed in a<br />
rented mansion on Mulholland Drive. The combination of<br />
bright, hot studio lights, the glare of cameras, crew, and director,<br />
and the windows shut tight to keep out external sound<br />
conspired to make the air thick, humid, and stifling. On my<br />
right, the male performer’s exposed, sweaty, disappointingly<br />
flaccid crotch smelled like feet. Between us sat a naked, nineteen-year-old<br />
woman wearing nothing except clear, plastic,<br />
six-inch heels and LA-trendy, skunk-striped, frosted blonde<br />
hair.<br />
After I described the oral sex technique I wanted them to<br />
perform for the camera, she leaned over and whispered to<br />
me in a soft, candy-baby voice. “Hey, I just started my period<br />
and I stuffed a buncha toilet paper up there, so will you tell<br />
me if it shows?”<br />
To me, the greatest mystery of sex<br />
remained how something so hot<br />
and arousing in fantasy could have<br />
absolutely nothing in common with<br />
actual sex once put onscreen.<br />
Like everything she’d said to me that afternoon, this request<br />
filled me with dismay and terror. I nodded yes.<br />
Porn has always struck me as the kind of genre that in the<br />
right circumstances could produce a film so powerful and culturally<br />
relevant that it could change the way the world views<br />
sex and independent filmmaking. Free of the rules and taboos<br />
placed on mainstream media, and with no ratings system to<br />
worry its pretty little head, I always thought porn would be<br />
the birthplace of the next Bertolucci. As a professional porn<br />
reviewer, a female pro-porn pundit (and porn-lover), I started<br />
my porn-watching career by placing a great deal of faith in<br />
the human capacity to create, to make art, to break the rules<br />
of sex foisted upon us proles, who are just waiting for the<br />
chance to break free of the shackles of oppression that bind<br />
us in our boring little sexual cages.<br />
Faced with an exciting question, porn proved to me over the<br />
course of eight years and over a thousand films that it could<br />
only respond in the dullest possible way. To me, the greatest<br />
mystery of sex remained how something so hot and arousing<br />
in fantasy could have absolutely nothing in common with<br />
actual sex once put onscreen. I certainly express physical enthusiasm<br />
every once in a while for a stocky cock and a greedy<br />
mouth, but while screening the latest copy of Beverly Hills<br />
9021-Ho or The Sopornos #6, I’d often find myself thinking<br />
that I should rent some hot porn so I can jack<br />
off, completely forgetting that I’m watching<br />
porn at that moment.<br />
Porn, known for Mafia ties (graft and menswear),<br />
check fraud, and fluorescent lighting,<br />
took my hopes and dreams of cinema verité<br />
fucking alfresco and turned it into my own personal<br />
freakish experiment of boredom. By my third professional<br />
review, each film looked more and more like it was<br />
made by someone desperate to create time capsules of 1981.<br />
Somehow, somewhere, someone made a rule that all porn<br />
videos must contain six or seven sex scenes, and that each<br />
sex scene must repeat the same sex positions, duration, and<br />
execution. It took me half an hour and two double-A batteries<br />
to figure out the Mad Libs-inspired formula, then gaze<br />
over to consider the date of my next pedicure. I had a sneaking<br />
suspicion that Rain Man was running the porn industry,<br />
148 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS <strong>WRONG</strong>
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