Via Figleaf (who quoted me again; aw shucks), everyone should read this post by Tony Comstock (who makes some of the best porn there is, in my opinion) about the myths surrounding the porn industry and how it’s damn hard to get actual numbers while everybody’s busy losing their shit because of ZOMG teh s3x!!1! Also there’s a lesson in there (again) about why you can’t trust mainstream media. Anyway, Tony Comstock always has interesting and insightful things to say about the business of porn; this is no exception.
Porn’s supposed to be this mult-billion dollar a year business, so big and dangerous there’s an entire department at the DOJ devoted to it; and it churns out thousands and thousands of titles each year, seeming to serve every nitch fetish, but it can’t seem to serve the wide-spread and basic desire that many people have to see a well-crafted depiction of two people who really seem to be enjoying having sex with each other.People know in their gut something’s not right. People know there’s a disconnect. People know that what they want to see isn’t some specialized nitch, it’s a basic human desire. Yet it goes unserved. Why? To me the answer is quite simple.
The restrictions on the distribution of erotic images (as in you won’t be able to find MATT AND KHYM at Walmart, Blockbuster, etc.) has restricted the business to making money in a very few, and not especially lucrative ways. Porn margins are razor thin, and the result is that “the industry” vastly overserves niche sexual interest markets, where issues of production quality, or even simple honesty in packaging will be overlooked, while it vastly underserves sexual interest with broader appeal, but much higher expectations.
As an aside, have you noticed that the people who like to go on and on about Porn the Monolith™ and why it’s sooooo horrible, have either 1) not seen much porn at all, or 2) seen only a very specific, generally shitty subset of porn.
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3 Responses to "Talking back to the NY Times"
Actually, my experience has been the other way around, Amber. There are a great many people in the rank and file thinking of pornography as a horrible thing who are, themselves, some of its biggest consumers. It may be that they gravitate to some of these particular niches for reasons that Comstock suggests, resulting in the pastors and preachers getting caught with the gigabytes of child pornography. Which is to say that the pursuit of the unusual and the abnormal in sexuality has a lot to do with the allure of violating the taboo. It’s rather not the sexual activity itself that produces jouissance, but transgression. And, in our contemporary time, the most transgressive act today is molesting children.
Yeah. That’s kind of what I was getting at with (2). But I didn’t explicitly address the hypocrites who write ream after ream about how awful it all is, only to sneak away to the sex shop on “the wrong side of the tracks” (that goes back to my classism argument) under cover of night. (Like the lovely abortion protesters who covertly bring their pregnant teenage daughter to the clinic on a Tuesday afternoon, only to be back with the picketers on Saturday… but it’s different because her daughter isn’t “that kind of girl.”)
I think I may have mentioned that kind of hypocrisy in one of my drunkblogging posts, though… not that those were the most articulate things ever.
Overwhelmingly, porn is much more interesting to talk about than it is to watch.