The Blowfish Blog

The Pro Circuit: Expensive Porn: A Cautionary Tale

As I wrote last week in these hallowed (virtual) pages, when I started to review porn for a living I began accumulating huge amounts of the stuff. To say the least, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, for largely administrative reasons and the practical immutability of the time-space continuum.

After several years of virtually unlimited access to video porn, I found that my reaction to it has changed, and not for the better. I used to love porn — just going I was going to watch it later would lend my entire day an aroma of mystic sleaze. I obsessed over the concepts and theories of it, loved the very fact of the existence of the porn industry as a counterbalance to oppressive and suffocating cultural structures. But mostly, I just dug it, the positions, the bodies, the taboos, the goofy role playing, the bad acting, all of it. Most importantly, porn turned me on.

When I was reviewing porn aggressively, I brought to the task both my long history of teaching sex-positive fundamentals and my shameless and somewhat creepy love of unredeemed sleaze. This, as anyone who knows me well will understand, contributed to my immense feeling of superiority; in porn, non-performing, non-directing professionals — writers, reviewers, publicists, photographers that sort of thing — tend to fall into two categories: the overworked and harried pros who privately say (apologetically) that they never have time to watch porn any more, and the creepy dudes who watch it all the time. There are more of the latter than of the former, which is why it pleased me so to be making the effort to be current in the genre. Incidentally, I don’t say the guys who watch shitloads of porn are “creepy” because they watch porn, but because they’re creepy — one does not equal the other, they just happen to coexist with truly disturbing frequency.

When I was reviewing porn in earnest, every two weeks I’d glance at 100 DVD boxes, watch 30 DVDs, review ten or possibly twenty. I’d skip around and fast forward and roll my eyes a lot. The clichés of pornography became so common and predictable that they didn’t bug me any more; they became a soothing security blanket that wrapped my days in predictability, like reruns of “Matlock” or “Law and Order.” I wouldn’t really get turned on watching these DVDs — but the good moments definitely had an effect on me, and they’d stick with me, and turn me on at the most inopportune moments. I felt justified in writing about porn because I actually jacked off to it, and the idea that many other people in the field didn’t (any more) made me feel kinda like my shit didn’t stink. How are people supposed to create and evaluate and market quality product if they have no idea what kind of reaction it produces?

But as I watched more and more porn, I got more businesslike in my behavior, staring down the magical power of pornography like a sheriff at high noon. I couldn’t afford to get turned on by porn. The clichés actually made discs easier to write about. And the clichés exist for a reason — because they tend to turn people (usually men) on. The clichés were as arousing to me as the quality aspects, and infinitely more arousing than the “teaching moments,” which got me excited for a whole different reason. Something kind of good happened in there — it stopped being about watching porn because I wanted to produce reviews, and started being about a wider sense of industry trends, for which I developed an immense hunger.

Watching hundreds of porn discs, I never noticed a difference in my sexual response cycle; I was like a frog being boiled in milk. The stuff that hit my buttons still hit my buttons, but I didn’t really notice for a while that there was less and less of it. Seems like a pretty obvious equation — I was being desensitized, getting used to the stuff. It no longer produced an automatic response. The porn that punched my ticket showed up less and less often; hot scenes were few and far between. I started looking at porn with a weary sense of inevitability, rather than a feeling of mysticism.

That’s kind of a high price to pay — I used to really enjoy porn, and now most of the time I could care less.

I could say the loss of my sexual interest in porn is because now I think of it in industry terms, I evaluate it professionally; I could even say that I’m now beyond getting excited by porn because I’ve reached some new peace with explicit sexuality. All that would be total bullshit. For me, it’s a simple equation, and so obvious a caution that it almost seems silly to voice it, especially since will apply to very few people. (I mean, we are not talking a porn movie a week here . . . we are talking four and five and six hundred movies a year, you dig?)

So here it is: Watching way, way, way too much porn can be bad for your ability to watch way, way, way too much porn.

Oh, and your thumb — I think I’ve got RSI from hitting the fast-forward button.

Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and resides online at www.thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.