Bright Lights, Big Titties
_ Pornography: the collective subconscious of America. _
by Shelton Hull
Robert Zicari and Janet Romano of Pittsburgh, PA have run afoul of the government. The couple, who work under the names Rob Black and Lizzie Borden, are going to be prosecuted for selling pornographic materials across state lines, materials that depict scenes of sexual violence and mock-murder. Although their crimes are confined to violations of interstate commerce laws, it’s significant that they are the first people to be prosecuted for anything related to pornography during the Bush “43” era, after a lengthy interregnum in which the industry has come closer to the “mainstream” of American culture than it ever has before.
If pornography walks a thin line between simple stylized misogyny and a more complex exaltation of the female form (or, rather it itself is the line), then surely nothing in our world functions as a more explicit depiction of American capitalism. To watch a flick like, say, “Seven the Hard Way” is to know exactly what people will do for money (anything, everything), and even that stuff could be considered tame and prudish compared to what the Napolitanos release through their Extreme Associates company.
“I don’t shoot the lovey-dovey porno… This is for people who watch porno all the time, and they’re sick of the husband and wife making love with candles,” Borden told PBS in February of 2002, while directing one of the flicks for which she is now in trouble. “Sometimes, it makes you more horny when you’re getting hit. It makes you… more tingly down in your genital area.” I asked around, a little, and it seems that her statement is somewhat true, and not just among military wives and football groupies, either.
The “extreme” nature of today’s best-selling porn results in large part from the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe and the “globalization” craze that followed. Male American porn stars like John “Buttman” Stagliano and Lexington Steele went to Europe in search of fresh young girls who would debauch themselves for money, and they found them. They were, of course, ignorant of the pay scale, and thus their presence upended many of the basic industry protocols, which forced American starlets to get rougher and nastier to compete with the Euro girls. $1,500 buys a lot more today than in 1993 or ‘98.
Our mad chase for money under every rock has gone on for ten years, in defiance of nature and national sovereignty, and the near-standardization of acts like the DP– which I avoid describing, in deference to any young people who might be reading this– was evidence of the sickness of globalization long before the term maquiladora became commonplace, and every politician in the country could quote “2.7 million” manufacturing jobs lost.
We live now in a world with more people than there are resources to support them, even if “support” was anyone’s inclination beyond the radical left. Our world all but requires us to exploit and abuse each other in every arena of life: in the workplace, in the bedroom, even in the halls of power. Because in the end, it’s really all about power and the expression thereof, for better or for worse. The porn industry understands this, and by ignoring their lessons we put ourselves at risk of further victimization by external forces.
Parents let their teenage girls walk around wearing “Porn Star” t-shirts and all sorts of other scandalous shit like it’s some cute but benign affectation, like all those piercings and tattoos and the occasional stray forearm scar. But they mean it. The bottom line is that the bodies of American women are the single most vital non-technological force driving the global economy.
Remember, it is not the daughters of privilege who end up doing gang-bangs when they’re 19; Those girls come from the heartland, from small towns whose economies are in decline. They’ve seen their fathers emasculated over and over; they’ve seen what classical love has– or hasn’t– done for their mothers, who aged too fast. They’ve been raised on a diet of junk food and libertine values, raised to worship fiat money and the illusion of “freedom.” The process has been helped along by chickenshit liberals whose ineffectiveness in the public policy arena has driven them to embrace the only aspect of their platform that has any wide support right now, which is the notion that my generation is good for nothing but a quick, desultory hook-up. Popular culture is popular because it’s easy; ditto for today’s junior misses. And no one cares.
