Thoughts on Watching Porn

A male acquaintance recently asked me for kinky porn recommendations. After I rattled off a few titles, he thanked me and then sighed sadly. "Your boyfriend's lucky," he said. "I wish my girlfriend would watch porn with me."

Well, Max does think he's lucky, but actually, I'm a terrible person to watch porn with. For one thing, my personal sex life usually looks better to me than the video. And I've been in the sex industry so long that I'm rarely able to achieve the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy pornography. I get bored and start critiquing the production values--not exactly an erotic experience for anyone watching with me.

My latest non-erotic porn session was watching the slasher-porn video Forced Entry. FE is by Extreme Associates, the folks currently being prosecuted in federal court on obscenity charges for five of their videos, including FE. So, from a fuck-you-John-Ashcroft standpoint, I'm glad I bought the tape. But Jesus, I hated the video itself. Not because it's violent, though; rather, because writer/director Lizzy Borden has made the terrible mistake of giving her porn video a plot and having porn performers try to act. I don't know if she's watched A Clockwork Orange once too often and fancies herself an auteur, or if the plot is just a nod to the "artistic or political value" clause of the Supreme Court's yardstick of what's obscene and what isn't. But the result is terrible.

The plot revolves around a serial killer who rapes and murders three female victims before being killed himself by a vigilante mob. Thus, the woman in each vignette must cry, act frightened, and beg for mercy while she is purportedly beaten and raped, and the guy playing the murderer has to act nasty and menacing. None of them are particularly successful in their roles, and hey, who can blame them? They aren't actors, for god's sake, they're porn performers. The best part was the "bloopers" bit tacked on at the end, with the cast and crew laughing at various screw-ups.

FE's sexualized faux violence has horrified media types from PBS to Salon, and I'm not surprised John "Oliver Cromwell" Ashcroft is trying to suspend Extreme Associates' First Amendment rights. Hence my disappointment--I thought anything that aroused this much press hysteria would have to be entertaining, but it really wasn't. So, unlike everyone who hates FE because it's graphic porn ultraviolence, I just hated it because it didn't turn me on.

matisse@thestranger.com