Tell Me You Love Me, but, Please, for the Love of God, Don't Have Sex in Front of Me

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.

The Unporny Valley V

"I think a little part of it lives in each and everyone of us. I mean, porn. For example, mine is sometimes visible, it is very subtle but is there if you dig a little bit more on appearances. I believe everyone has it, obviously, in a different level. I consider mine as a 'healthy' level. I can go on with a responsible/adult life and live with it. Maybe most of the people is here too, maybe, I don't know, I'm just supposing, I'm just giving you this thought. When I wrote the previous message, I tried to say something, I tried really hard to be clear but instead of being it I wrote what you posted. A strange message, I accept it. By the way, I didn't expect you to do that (post it) but given the nature of the message I thought if I had a blog and received that kind of message I would have done the same thing. Anyway, I still feel it was very kind of you and I took it as a courtesy to what I tried to say; I guess you also felt my admiration to you and your blog (I hope you did, but if not, this is a good time to feel it). Ok, I don't want to miss the point. The point is I that I also wanted to say that I believe we all have a part of it, whether we accept it or not. We can not escape to it, it is a part of us, but the only thing we can do to live with it it's to accept it, nothing else works. I agree when you talk about dissociation. We all do this too, as I said it before, in a different level, but we all do. Have you ever said a lie so many times that you end up believing it? Of course, we all have done that. But, if we wouldn't have been raised in fear boxes we wouldn't have to do this, don't you think? it would be a natural thing, we wouldn't have to be surprised or shocked, we wouldn't have the limit of our eyes to deal with the real/unreal matter. We'd be more humans, or another kind of humans, open minded, call it what you want, you know what I'm saying. And maybe if we all could accept this, porn wouldn't even have to exist the way it does now. Maybe. What a crossroad, right? And we are all in it."

The Unporny Valley IV

Of course, "The Unporny Valley" (I, II, III) exists only in my mind. I've been writing about porn for a long time, and I've learned that being in Porn Valley requires a certain kind of dissociation. Sometimes, what you see is more than your eyes can believe. At a certain point, it becomes too real. And that is when I descended into the Unporny Valley in my head. Not long ago, a porn star told me the story of her life. The girl was very pretty, but the story of her life was not. So the next time you see her in a porn movie, who are you going to believe? Your eyes or my words?

The Unporny Valley III

On Monday, I introduced "The Unporny Valley." On Tuesday, I wrote about the Unporny Valley in reality. Today, the Unporny Valley is an idea. In order for porn to do its job--arouse--the porn consumer must temporarily suspend belief that porn's subject--a porn star--is a human being. Porn stars are screens upon which viewers project their fantasies with impunity and without guilt. As adult director DCypher has pointed out to me, a porn star is a simulacrum of a person. What happens when a porn star becomes "too real"? Desire turns into distance--and viewers descend into the Unporny Valley. Online, porn stars are breaking down the fourth wall between Porn Valley and mainstream America. Take, for example, Ashley Blue's blog, where she exposes the real Oriana Small behind the sex star. One day, porn will be nothing but pixels, and porn stars will be nothing more than avatars. In future porn, porn stars will work like phone sex operators, and the porn industry will be a far less dirty business. Until then, the Unporny Valley is Porn Valley's reality.

The Unporny Valley II

Yesterday, I wrote about "The Unporny Valley." Sunday night, I had created the graph in a matter of minutes as a kind of a joke. I used to make comics, but I hadn't done anything like that in a long time, and this was a way of getting back into that. Mostly, the graph wasn't supposed to be "real," per se. It was intended as a kind of fantastical way of looking at the uncanny in a different way. And, the graph was incorrect. For example, furries move. (Unless you believe the only good furry is a dead furry.) And, as Xeni pointed out, humanoid sex dolls don't. (Not yet, anyway.) As for zombie bukkake, it turns out JWZ is a fan. The idea behind "The Unporny Valley," though, is real. Until recently, I was working on a nonfiction book proposal about porn. I'm interested in what happens behind the scenes on the set of an adult movie. What happens when the camera isn't looking? As I worked on my proposal, I couldn't help but sense there was something, well, off. There was something about it that was somehow disconcerting. The book would reveal what it's really like in Porn Valley. Was that what people really wanted? What happens in the Unporny Valley isn't very pretty. Maybe people don't want to know. Maybe it's too much to bear.

The Unporny Valley

A few months ago, I came across the concept of the Uncanny Valley. Probably, it was this post on the New York Times of the blogosphere, Boing Boing. What's the Uncanny Valley? In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori discovered that people like robots who look human--up to a point. If the 'bot becomes too lifelike, people will respond with revulsion rather than empathy. This dip on the robot/human empathy chart is what became known as "The Uncanny Valley." The idea stuck in my head, probably because the post included a photo of a man in bed with a sex doll. Last week I read this post by COOP. Recently, he's been taking photographs of porn stars. He wrote about being on the set of a porn movie. He didn't shoot the sex: "I was more fascinated by what was happening when the camera was turned off. I found these casual unguarded moments far more intimate and interesting, and I did my best to capture it on film." He wasn't as interested in the porn as what happens in between. That, too, is the space in which I am interested. There's Porn Valley, a place on no map. There's porn, the elephant in America's bedroom. And then, there is something else. Perhaps, I thought, that is "The Unporny Valley." Porn's reality is...uncanny.