It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus. To watch Peter North try to get a cigar lit and to have that sight backlit by memories of his artilleryesque ejaculations. 13 To have seen these strangers’ faces in orgasm — that most unguarded and purely neural of expressions, the one so vulnerable that for centuries you basically had to marry a person to get to see it. 14 This weirdness may account for some of the complex emotional intercourse taking place between the performers and fans at the Adult CES. The patrons may leer and elbow one another at a distance, but by the time the men get to the front of the line and face the living incarnation of their VCR’s fantasy-babe, most of them turn into quivering goggle-eyed schoolboys, sheepish and salivaless and damp. The same thing evidently happens at the hundreds of strip clubs all over the country where porn starlets appear as Featured Dancers (for five figures a week, according to Filth) and do photos and autographs after the show:
“Most of these guys become incredibly nervous when I come up to them,” veteran starlet Shane has explained. “I’ll put my arms around a guy and his whole body will be trembling. They pretty much do whatever I tell them to do.” The whole industry, now, has this oddly reversed equation — the consumers are the ones who seem ashamed or shy, while the performers are cocky and smooth and 100 percent pro.
It is no longer the 1980s, and the Meese Commission mentality that led to a major crackdown on video porn is long gone. Federal task forces and PTA outrage are now focused on the Internet and kiddie porn. But today’s adult industry is still hypersensitive about what it perceives as fascist attacks on its First Amendment freedoms. A specially prepared trailer now runs before many higher-end adult videos, right between the legal disclaimer on the product’s compliance with or exemption from 18 U.S.C § 2257 and ads for phone services like 900-666-FUCK. Against shots of flowing flags and the Lincoln Memorial, a voiceover says stuff like:
Censorship goes against our Bill of Rights and the founding principles of this country. It is an attempt on the part of the government to legislate morality and to stifle free expression. 15 This new, “legal” morality is dangerous to all Americans. Vote for those who believe in limiting government intrusion into your personal affairs. Vote against government control of your life and home. Vote against censorship. Only you, the People, can keep the American ideal intact.
These trailers always say they’re sponsored by either the Adult Video Association or something called the Free Speech Coalition. Both organizations (and the extent to which the two are separate is unclear) are basically industry PACs. Porn, in other words, has taken the political lessons of the ’80s to heart; it is now a hard-lobbying political force no less than GM or RJR Nabisco.
Feminists of all different stripe oppose the adult industry for reasons having to do with pornography’s putative effects on women. Their arguments are well-known and in some respects persuasive. But certain antiporn arguments in the 1990s are now centered on adult entertainment’s alleged effects on the men who consume it. Some “masculists” believe that a lot of men get addicted to video porn in a way that causes grievous psychic harm. Example: An essayist named David Mura has a little book called A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction, which is a bit New Agey but interesting in places, e.g.:
At the essence of pornography is the image of flesh used as a drug, a way of numbing psychic pain. But this drug lasts only as long as the man stares at the image…. In pornographic perception, each gesture, each word, each image, is read first and foremost through sexuality. Love or tenderness, pity or compassion, become subsumed by, and are made subservient to, a “greater” deity, a more powerful force…. The addict to pornography desires to be blinded, to live in a dream. Those in the thrall of pornography try to eliminate from their consciousness the world outside pornography, and this includes everything from their family and friends or last Sunday’s sermon to the political situation in the Middle East. In engaging in such elimination the viewer reduces himself. He becomes stupid.
This kind of stuff might sound a little out-there, maybe, until one observes the eerie similarity between the eyes of males in strip clubs or stroke parlors and the eyes of people in their fifth hour of pumping silver dollars into the slot machines of the Sands’ casino, or maybe until one’s seen firsthand the odd kind of shock on the faces of CES patrons seeing performers now “in the flesh,” complete with chewing gum and chin-pimples and all the human stuff you never see — never want to see — in films.
Maybe just a little bit more here on the whole scene at the Adult CES, which is a lot more of a rub-elbows-type venue than the stylized Awards ceremony is going to end up being…. Mr. Harold Hecuba is deep in conversation with a marginal porn producer about one of his performers’ being sidelined with something called a “prolapsed sphincter,” which condition yr. corresps. decline to follow up on in any way. We are standing just west of a staff writer for Digital Horizons who’s dropped by to scope out the legendary scene in here again this year and is telling two presumed other tech writers that being around porn people always makes him feel like he’s been somehow astrally projected onto a cocktail napkin. It is also roughly now that Ms. Jasmin St. Claire is making an appearance at the Impressive Media booth in order to spell the starlet behind the counter, who is limping to the booth’s rear area; she (i.e., the limping starlet) has (reportedly) had to be sprayed with silicon to fit into her pants. The crowd at the Impressive Media venue immediately starts to enlarge. Jasmin St. Claire is wearing a red vinyl jacket-and-miniskirt ensemble. A porn starlet entering any kind of room or area has a distinctive energy about her — you turn your head to look even if you don’t seem to want to. It’s like watching a figure from a pinball machine illustration or high-concept comic book step out into 3-D and head your way. It turns out really to be possible to feel as though your eyeballs are protruding slightly from their sockets. What makes the whole thing so weird is that Jasmin St. Claire isn’t even all that pretty, at least not today. Her hair is dyed black in that cheap unreal Goth way, and she is so incredibly heavily made up that she looks like a crow. (She is also somewhat knock-kneed, plus of course has the requisite Howitzer-grade bust.) Ms. St. Claire is being escorted to the Impressive booth by two large men whose expressions are describable only as mug-shottish. This is another thing about porn starlets — they’re never alone. They’re always accompanied by at least one and sometimes as many as four flinty-eyed males. The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.
FYI, Ms. Jasmin St. Claire’s cult-celebrity status at the ’98 CES stems from her having broken the “World Gang Bang Record” 16 by taking on 300 men in a row in Amazing Pictures’ 1996 World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2. Since most of these 300 men were amateur porn-fans who’d had only to fill out an application and produce an HIV all-clear from the DPH, she now enjoys an almost legendary populist appeal—“the People’s Porn Star”—and an enormous serpentine line of fans with cameras and autographable memorabilia has formed at the Impressive booth, which line Ms. St. Claire appears for the moment to be ignoring, because she and H. Hecuba, having exchanged double-cheek kisses, are now deep into some kind of tête-à-tête above the sockless Docksiders of the unconscious bald kid, who’s (the kid has) evidently been carried or trundled by pranksters unknown from the XPlor counter (right next door) to this one. Dick Filth — after your correspondents have remarked on how it’s kind of heartwarming that everyone in the porn industry all seem to be friends, even critics and performers — dishes an involved anecdote about how Jasmin St. Claire apparently once actually tried to strangle Harold Hecuba at an industry soirée a couple years ago, an anecdote which, if you’re interested, appears as FN 17 just below. Twenty feet away, over at XPlor, Mr. Farrel Timlake has meanwhile produced what is alleged to be the prototype and world’s only authorized Kenny® Action Figure from the upcoming South Park merchandising line — fourteen inches tall, kind of heavy for a doll, w/ hood up and face obscured (not unlike F. Timlake’s own hood and face) — and is entertaining some of the IM crowd’s spillover by manipulating the doll’s limbs to simulate its “tok[ing] a bone.”