The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Porn in Public: Immersion Pods and Erotic Media

In the United States and elsewhere, porn is becoming more widely accepted and yet space to watch it comes at a premium. Much has been made of the financial aspects of the sub-prime loan crisis, the rise in fuel prices, and a generalized financial pinch we’re all supposed to be feeling — but for city dwellers, space has always been a challenge. I don’t even want to think about what my first apartment in San Francisco, a block or so from the premium Lake Street district, would cost now — $1500 a month? $1800? Surely at least three times what I paid for it. As prices skyrocket, that extra bedroom is increasingly out of most people’s reach.

Meanwhile, media is getting ever more portable. In the pre-videotape era, say, up to the early 1980s, TV was the be-all, end-all of personalized movin’-picture entertainment. As today, you wanted your media when you wanted it, how you wanted it, which meant you were welcome to change the channel or turn off the television. Because there were so few stations, for many even middle-class families it didn’t make sense to have a television in every room, so families and friends often watched TV together.

Once videotape entered the mix, not only could you watch (sort of) whatever you wanted (sort of) whenever you wanted it, but you could also watch hardcore porno, which network stations never seemed to broadcast, much to my personal chagrin. Previously, motion-picture porn had been limited to film loops; magazines and books were personalized in their way, but the pictures didn’t move. And while much is made of how porn has “always” been available, it was a lot harder to get in the VHS era, and the more esoteric your desire, the less likely you were to find it on the shelves at your local sleaze shop or even accessible by photocopied mail order catalog.

Fast-forward to the late naughties, and video technology has become so portable it’s almost terrifying to a Luddite like me. As recently as two years ago, commuting on public transit saw me staring out at a sea of paperback books and newspapers; nowadays, it’s all iPod, baby. And it’s not just audio players that are in evidence — increasingly, people are watching videos on their mobile devices. How many of those people, tucked into a back corner of the bus on their long commute home, are watching porn, and while we’re at it how many of the ones who are texting their thumbs off are trading saucy messages or, perhaps even more likely, trying to secure their next dose of booty?

A recent NPR story on the Japanese trend of immersion pods, which the Japanese just call “internet cafés” or “manga cafés,” got me thinking about this topic. The story is a long interview with New York Times Magazine writer Victoria Heffernan, who visited an “internet café” in Japan that features cubicles outfitted with easy chair or couch, Xbox, Playstation, computer and high-speed internet. There’s a quick-and-dirty, and fairly hysterical, treatment of the same topic at BBC.com. The story features much theorizing on the nature of fantasy vs. reality in Japan, where there’s a whole culture of internet-famous celebrities who, by most people’s reckoning, have pretty much no life, or at least no “real” life. While these faux celebrities are widely known by members of their extended social circle on the net, they’re not famous by a longshot — but when virtual worlds are real worlds, who needs to be “really” famous?

The same could be said about porn, which is enabled by the same technology. If it’s not “real” sex, who cares? It’s on-demand, it’s polymorphously perverse, and its intimacies are limited and easily controlled — all the things that real-life sexual interactions aren’t.

While the NPR story made no mention of porn, a quick search gets me a Flickr post that tells a sordid, sexy story — the Tokyo pods feature free porn, supposedly. Free porn in public? Only in Japan, maybe — except that in the United States and elsewhere, porn is increasingly viewed on laptops or mobile devices, and the debate on porn in hotel room on-demand video systems wouldn’t have a crusade against it if it wasn’t overridingly popular.

All of this increasing mobility challenges at least two pieces of conventional wisdom about porn. First, though the home video revolution is what enabled the porn revolution, porn’s just as productive, if not moreso, to enjoy away from home. Is that because people like to enjoy porn away from their partner? Probably at least partially; though porn pundits love to encourage you to share, it’s also not always easy to sync up your porn consumption to that of an partner. Tastes differ, even — or especially — the tastes of intimates. What’s more, one of the chief uses of porn is to explore things that are uncomfortable or impossible in a relationship, so the rise in porno variation almost guarantees that many people in relationships will be able to find porn that wouldn’t comfortably fit their interactions with their partners, even if that relationship is to some degree porn-positive.

Secondly, if people are enjoying porn in public, whether on the bus or in internet cafés, they’re almost certainly not wanking to it — at least not at the time, all the time. The idea that porn exists primarily to induce people to masturbate is a time-honored one, held by both porn producers and sex theorists. But there’s clearly so much more to porn. It’s part of a fantasy life that allows people to become engaged and live an adventure; though many times the explicit sexuality in porn does induce the consumer to diddle, at other times it’s an abstract fantasy that’s more like escaping into a Hollywood movie than it is like getting down to business.

As porn gets increasingly mobile and home space comes in increasingly short supply, the compelling fantasy portrayed in porn is likely to become an increasingly important part not just of many people’s sex lives, but of the fantasy life the Japanese do so well.

Thomas Roche is a widely published fiction writer, essayist, anthologist and blogger. He can be found at thomasroche.com and Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 at 12:00 am 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.