Yesterday, I posted my response to last weekend's New York Times Magazine article about online kink purveyors Kink.com. At About.com, Cory Silverberg posted his response, taking issue with the author's depiction of the mainstreaming of porn. Jon Mooallem wrote: "[Porn] is an exceedingly conspicuous presence in the community but also thoroughly sealed off and opaque." Untrue, counters Silverberg. "With literally dozens of documentaries produced each year, airing on everything from HBO to ABC, and with more than half a dozen behind-the-scenes reality style programs currently airing or in production, it’s hard to imagine porn as sealed off or opaque. Finances aside (porn companies are largely privately owned and getting information on the business side of porn is notoriously difficult) I can think of few forms of entertainment that are as open to public scrutiny as pornography. Documents like the Meese Report on Pornography, television shows like Porno Valley, and movies like Boogie Nights, have all added to the mainstreaming of porn, while simultaneously exposing the various sides of the porn industry, and to a lesser extent the people engaged in it." I disagree. The mainstreaming of porn is real. The projected image of porn that has gone mainstream is not. Those three examples that Silverberg cites--the Meese Report, "Porno Valley," and "Boogie Nights"--are all misrepresentations of porn's reality. The Meese Report's conclusion that the effects of porn are harmful is generally considered questionable. "Porno Valley," a reality TV show about Vivid Video and the Vivid Girls, is a heavily edited slice of Porn Valley's elite. "Boogie Nights" conjures up the "golden age of porn"; it's a fiction of a fiction. Today, porn is the elephant in America's collective bedroom. The real Porn Valley remains unexplored and unexposed. The first porn movie set I was on was "Flashpoint." Seven porn stars were fucking on a firetruck in the middle of a parking lot. On the floor of the bathroom in a trailer lay the detritus the porn starlets had left behind. It was a pile of empty douche and enema bottles. Porn asks its stars to get fucked up the ass for a living, literally. In an abandoned building, I watched while Jenna Jameson and T. T. Boy had sex that night. T. T. Boy looked like a construction worker trying to run a jackhammer through cement. After the pop shot, the P.A. stepped forward because his job was handing T. T. Boy a paper towel. Not long ago, I came across a photo from the set of a porn movie. The girl in the picture is a porn star. Her eyes are red. Her mouth is agape. There is a dog bowl on her head. On it, someone has scrawled: STUPID WHORE. The real Porn Valley remains behind closed doors. The reality is too hardcore for reality TV--and America.
