Sasha Grey
Porn!...is Not Allowed?
Pornocalypse Now
by Douglas Haddow
(Excerpt)
Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. Just as the war on terror mainstreamed the notion of war without actual war, the pornography industry has successfully popularized sex without sex. [...]
And so it began. My virgin eyes were submerged into an ocean of luma-chroma sex acts and the outrageous poetics of consumerist eros: turgid hard-ons mechanically harpooning seeping vaginal canals and gracefully spraying sperm streams atop mountainous titties with their omnipresent nipple peaks. [...]
But the tasseography of the news ticker was of no interest, the television had become redundant and outdated. I was 14 and a friend had just gotten a 14.4 US Robotics dial-up modem – our ticket to unchecked informational freedom and, more importantly, thousands of pictures of naked women.
In tune with my demographic dropping its collective nutsack, pornography transformed from a primarily physical medium into a limitless stream of easily accessible imagery. Production costs bottomed out, profits exploded and a booming transnational porno industry came into its own.
The mass appeal of Deep Throat-era sex cinema hits was resurrected in the form of downloadable masturbation resources. Only now, rather than experiencing sex media in a gender-inclusive mainstream setting, Internet pornography catered primarily to the individual male’s niche desires. Jerk-off fantasies were the dominant leitmotifs of the early Internet – its raison d’être. The Internet was, and still is, for porn. In the ever-expanding webiverse, pornographic imagery supplied the perfect vacuum in which blogs, social networking and YouTube could come into existence. Buoyed by this exponential growth and the backing of media conglomerates like News Corp, the production of hard-core video increased by 700 percent from 1992 to 2005, with worldwide revenues clocking in at nearly $100 billion. Porn had officially arrived, and its enviable profit margins forced “legit” mass media to gradually conform to the aesthetic of its fleshy contours.
It was as if the white noise of consumerism had turned a shade of hot pink. All of a sudden the leader of the free world was evoking Peter North via René Magritte à la “this is not a blow job.” Soon after, the world gasped as two giant metal phalluses penetrated the twin monoliths of capitalist civilization. A blockbuster snuff film to ring in the new century, the “I can’t look but I must” sensation of the 9/11 tape loop would go on to serve as the stylistic precursor for 2 Girls 1 Cup. [...]
A Wisconsin-born, cowboy hat-wearing opportunist, Max Hardcore took advantage of the mid ’90s amateur boom and has steadily pushed the limit ever since. His work foreshadows the style of video (no plot and little pretense) that now dominates Internet upload sites: an increasingly violent performance style dubbed “abuse porn.” [...]
I continue to surf, looking for a video that features Sasha Grey, who should be calling me for an interview at any moment. Grey, 21, is the porno industry’s public relations wet dream come true. She has already performed in over 100 adult films and stars in Steven Soderbergh’s arthouse feature The Girlfriend Experience. She’s slated to be the “next Jenna Jameson,” and might be the first porn star to successfully convert her adult video (AV) celebrity into a legit acting career. What interests me about Grey is that she represents a notable shift in the pornographic ideal – she doesn’t project the typical persona that we’ve come to accept as the standard AV schtick. She’s young and calculated and delivers performances that are provocatively masculine. A quick Google reveals that her personal brand is rooted in the alternative. She’s done an American Apparel advertising campaign, promotes herself as a quasi-postfeminist intellectual and frequently name-drops the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The first video that pops up is titled Sasha Grey Anal. I click play figuring it will provide a good warm-up for our phoner. It starts with a close-up of Grey’s lips and she is directly addressing the viewer:
“I want to be your sex slave, I want you to hurt me, I want you to make me cry. I’ll do anything, anything at all, whatever you want, I’m such a fucking whore, I need to train, I need to be broken, I want you to fucking hurt me.”
A couple of minutes later some dude is holding the camera and staring down at Grey, who is staring up at us while giving one of her trademark ‘throat fuck’ blowjobs. She sounds like she’s choking, and the dude starts to drag her by the hair with his cock still in her mouth.
Then the phone rings, not in the video, but in my apartment. It’s her, the real Sasha Grey, as opposed to the porno-world Sasha Grey flickering on my laptop.
“What does the word pornographic mean to you?”
“To me it’s not just people having sexual encounters, or pictures of people having sex in magazines. More than half of the news we see on television today is pornographic because it’s not real news. It’s pure junk for the mind…They are manipulating the audience to feel a certain way. It’s all encompassing. American Idol is pornographic, completely exploiting people’s talent or lack of talent for television ratings.”
On screen, Sasha is gagging on a dildo that the dude has just pulled out of her ass. “Choke yourself on it” he says. I skip ahead a few minutes and Sasha is presenting to the viewer a rather apt existential dilemma:
“Is that what you fucking want? You want this filthy whore’s tight little asshole?"
The real Sasha Grey says in my left ear:
“… I think we’re still very repressed, especially in America. It comes back to what does pornography mean. In Europe there are more films that have to do with sexuality than violence and here in America it is the opposite. And I think we can sell sex all day on television, in magazines and on billboards but when it comes down to it people are still afraid to talk about their sexuality …”
“So are we lacking an important dialogue?”
“Definitely, It’s still embarrassing. If you try to speak with a Midwest housewife, or a young 20-something from the Midwest and say cunt or pussy she is going to freak out, even if you say vagina – for some of them, the word vagina is a disgusting, vile word. You have to say ‘down there.’ It’s really bizarre.”
The calm, thoughtful tone of her voice creates an unsettling sensual cocktail when mixed with the vacancy of her pixilated hazel eyes, an oasis of “the real” in a desert of unreality. [...]
The Sasha Grey brand is an ideal vehicle for the normalization of porn because she’s a willing industry activist who genuinely believes that the consumption of her videos promotes a positive understanding of sexual health.
But has our outlook on sex become so pornofied that we’re willing to accept 20 minutes of vacuous anal sex as sex-positive edutainment? Although porn has been embraced by feminists looking to shrug off the failures of the Dworkin era, the discussion that predominates current analysis of the medium tends to ignore the nature of the industry’s core demographic: males, aged 18-29.
If the average porn consumer – a male North American, Japanese or European 20-something – were to walk into a doctor’s office and receive a virility exam, the results would be abysmal. Due to our toxic living standards and the prevalence of untested chemicals in the social environment, the male gender has recently entered into rapid physiological and genetic decline.
In affluent, industrialized nations, the birth of males has dropped every year for the past 30 years. Genital defects, learning disabilities, autism, ADD and a variety of other afflictions have all skyrocketed in males while remaining comparatively low in females. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the male plight comes down to that which is essentially synonymous with the pornographic: sperm. The average Gen Y bro has a sperm count that is 50 percent lower than his father’s and, of the few spermazoids he does have, 85 percent of them are genetically damaged. According to Dr. Fernando Marina, fertility expert at Barcelona’s CEFER Reproduction Institute, if this trend continues, all men will be infertile within 60 years.
On a genetic level, the male gender is crumbling, which almost seems natural when one considers the fragmented state of modern masculinity. [...]
Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution. [...]
The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.
Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?
As our surroundings become inundated with pornographic imagery aimed at keeping us plugged into the feedback loop, it’s easy to get distracted from what’s going on beyond all the hot pink noise. It’s in this fog of fake fucking that man sleepwalks closer toward an abyss of genetic implosion, environmental destruction and total economic collapse.
But crisis can precipitate change, and what needs to occur now is the genesis of a new “masculinism” – a philosophy of man that embraces the achievements of feminism and strives to reconnect with the real.
Since the beginning of America’s recession, over 80 percent of those who’ve been laid off have been men. This ironic byproduct of pay inequality provides a couple of great opportunities: the chance for a radical shift in gender relations, and the chance for men to rediscover how to subsist outside of the tyranny of consumer ease.
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COMMENT [adbusters.org]
I found the article interesting. Only yesterday I was sitting with mostly male mates at a pub and we got on to discussing porn and strippers, as the proceeding night had seen some of us attend a buck’s night for another friend, which consisted of stippers, topless waitresses and porn all night. Let me tell you, I hate going to buck’s nights. Beer and boobs is not the penultimate or ultimate experience in my life…maybe I’m wrong and will have an epiphany watching Xporn at 2am?!
It turns out, every guy at the table, gets nothing from porn or strippers.
I personally find nothing more lonely and emasculating than ‘rubbing one out’ while watching some porn via my laptop. I’m not a prude, conservative or born again. It makes me feel sick, not liberated that I can find free porn on the internet. I used to think that it was great. If I were horny and needed some release but didn’t have anyone to help me. After some time I realised it made me feel even more alone than before. Even more isolated from humanity. How foolish I was to believe that I could find an intimate connection with a recording of people whom I don’t know, and watch them fuck each other? How did I get this idea in my head that it could be something worthwhile to do with my time?
At the moment I have a girlfriend, and I have noticed that some of my actions in the sack have been influenced by the porn I have watched on the web. I do not watch porn now. I just went online to read some more on Sasha Grey, fortunately I only lasted about 2 mins and found something more positive to do with my time like get back to studying for my MA.
I’m not sure who is worse off, guys or girls in this dilemma. We have created it equally (I think) as there needs to be at least 1 female in each video. Are they victims, part of the puzzle or equally involved? Instead of hipsters harping on about how bad the world is and shopping themselves into nirvana, we can as the sages say ‘cultivate the opposite virtue’. Hey, it could be fun to actually stand up and become who we are meant to, not conditioned by the veils of ignorance and media hype to consume. We have a choice, it’s basic and fundamental. Don’t forget that. You either tune in to porn or do something else with your very valuable but brief moment on this earth. Porn is not going away. But it doesn’t mean you have to watch it or engage with it. It’s a monster, just like the ones that used to hide in your closet or under your bed.
Good luck…to all of us!!!
Peace
People talk about how women are treated as a result of guys watching porn and expecting to be able to engage in degrading acts. But what is this doing to men? How are we supposed to feel and act when it seems most of the porn out there is violent in some way?
And when does it become violence (with a bit of sex) ? And not porn with violence?Someone sent me a link to ‘ultimate surrender’. I thought I had seen everything until I was watching women fight each other for the right to fuck the loser.
Wo, my head spins just wondering about what lies around the corner.
