Tonight, I was over at a friend's house. Scrolling through the cable channels, I discovered HBO's newest I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Porn dramatic series, "Tell Me You Love Me." When the show debuted, it caused a stink among TV critics who were aghast at all the seemingly real sex on the show. After all, this is a show about a sex therapist, a series of couples who are her patients, and their sex lives. According to the reviews I'd read, there was about to be a whole lot of shockingly real simulated intercourse happening, fake intercourse so real that my jaw would gape open, pseudo-intercourse so pseudo-raw that I would think of HBO as not not-TV, but a new porn channel airing not-porn porn. On the TV screen, a glum couple disrobed. They began rolling around on a bed. For a brief moment in time, there was a flash of the woman's crotch in shadow, so in shadow one would have had to use TiVo to revisit the moment to make sure it was a real vagina, and not not-vagina vagina. The man climbed on top of the woman where he delivered a few desperate humps. The camera devoted far more airtime to the man's butt than it had the woman's crotch. In the end, nobody felt better, myself included. Perhaps sex on TV and in the movies has its own kind of Uncanny Valley. That is, maybe part of what makes pornography appealing to us is its unreality. Porn stars are plastic versions of us for a reason. By becoming iconic, they disappear as human beings. In porn, we can slip inside them, be them, if but for a moment. The unhappily humping couple on "Tell Me You Love Me" was too real. And that's the moment we fall into the Unporny Valley.
