hardcore pornography: a love story

I used to have kind of a problem with porn stars.

The people who came of age in the mid- to late nineties, before the Internet became a common utility and the advent of commonly available broadband, are also the last generation for whom porn was a bizarre, illicit mystery. I had pretty ready access to my dad's stash of Playboys, because he handed them to me about ten minutes after I entered puberty, guided by some bizarre impulse that I hesitate to call wisdom--

--although to this day I think Playboy is a smarter, cleverer magazine than the world wants to give it credit for being, and I would hand a young man with Groin Questions a stack of Playboys without too many doubts in my mind, whereas I would use tripwires and land mines to keep the same young man away from Maxim or Stuff or FHM or their sordid ilk, because one magazine creates an aspiration towards a fictitious veneer of class and style and the other one churns out Axe-doused frat boys with the regularity of a metronome--

--but harder stuff, things that showed actual intercourse, were harder to come by. That was the stuff of the dark closet in the back of the local video store, where the lights didn't reach, casual access was blocked by a pair of swinging saloon doors, and you were fairly certain an alarm would go off if you went inside. Maybe somebody had salvaged a well-thumbed magazine with questionable design choices, where you would look at it with your friends when that was the last company you wanted to look at it in.

(Now as long as you can type "Redtube" you have all the full-color full-contact action your poor eyes can stand and can wank yourself into a shallow coma. I won't lie; the part of me that remembers being 15 is sort of angry about this. I would've failed high school due to being in a dehydration coma, sure, but I nearly did anyway.)

Part of the illicit nature, I think, lent itself to it being easy to think of the people in it as somehow damaged. There was more to it, naturally; growing up small-town American in the '90s conditions you to think of sex as dangerous and sex workers as, if not criminals, crime-adjacent. Whoever these people were in these books, these anonymous naked figures, it was easy to assume that this was not how they'd pictured their lives going. If possible, you didn't think about who they were at all. You spent most of a given day back then--you probably still do, if you're in high school--being reminded about how every single action you undertook in the course of your life would daisy-chain (ha) into your future, so it was easy to think that, whatever paths these people had taken in life, they must've fucked up if they were taking shots in the mouth from Steven St. Croix as a job.

Then the Internet showed up. Asia Carrera was first, of course; I remember discovering her website back in 1998 or 1999 and being amazed that, aside from her proclivity for getting her tits out, she seemed amazingly like she might be a normal, nerdy human being. (A human porn star and a female nerd! Double points!) It cracked the wall. Maybe these people weren't necessarily all products of specific damage; maybe they were people, with strengths and weaknesses, who had come to this brand of work of their own free will, and/or stayed in it out of genuine interest. It's an obvious conclusion, but taking time to reach it is part of why it's kinda fucked up.

Nowadays I check out Stoya's blog fairly often, because she's a gifted writer and not necessarily because she's very good at her day job (Stoya looks like she's having fun in her work, which I appreciate greatly; one of my major problems with modern erotica and pornography is that bizarre tendency to denigrate the performer); both Kayden Kross and James Deen have reasonably entertaining blogs; and I just found out about D&D With Porn Stars, which I'm going to be visiting on the regular in the future.

(I found out about it due to the whole thing with Brandon Morse, which is rapidly convincing me of what may become a new personal truism; if you can't shut up about being a libertarian and/or objectivist long enough to keep it out of your Twitter bio, you may be an irredeemable douchebag. I want to steal Brandon Morse's lunch money and all I know of him is how he chose to react to this.)

I go through a cycle a lot of the time when I read an interview with a porn star, or stumble across their blog; I'm first surprised by how articulate they are, and then ashamed by the surprise. In the end, it's positive; in a world where this occupation didn't exist, it'd be invented almost immediately. It's an attitude that you have to work to get over, I think, and I'm struggling with it to this day.

high school II: this time, it's personal

I think I'm getting tired of nerds.

I'm Old now, which is part of it. When I was a kid I always thought of 36 as the cut-off date at which point a man was Old, and now here I am, somehow, despite the sneaking suspicion I would be killed in some kind of hilarious accident before now ("Local Man Fires Cake Frosting Up Nostril, Fills Brain Cavity with Chocolatey Goodness"). I am Old and I have little patience with certain forms of stupidity.

There's a particular kind of reflexive cynicism that characterizes nerds, and I'm often as guilty of it as anyone else. You lash out. You try to hurt something you love before it can hurt you, because you're absolutely sure it will. It, like half the other things nerds do, is a defense mechanism.

It's exhausting, now that I am Old. There's a reinforcement cycle at work on the Internet, spurred on by snark, bloggers, and people like Yahtzee, where you attain status by seeming the most reflexively dismissive. If you accentuate the negative as hard as possible, you win a prize, whether it's by hipster-style appealing to the past ("I liked this better when it was called [x]"), ignoring whatever doesn't suit your prearranged narrative ("These two panels I read out of context on Tumblr prove the entire comic book is the product of a diseased mind"), or making up "rules" out of whole cloth that fiction is supposed to always follow ("Got No Legs Boy is a street-level hero, so any storyline that puts him in space is obviously going to lead to a bad comic").

I sometimes have fantasies of writing a short book, or a few articles, about rediscovering the capacity for critical thought, because it's shocking how many people who would otherwise consider themselves intelligent are incredibly bad at it. I don't know where I'd start or where I'd pull out the authority I need to make it work, which is most of what's stopping me.

Still, it's one more toxic behavior that needs to be confronted, or it's just going to get dystopian. Imagine a fedora stomping on a human face... forever.