P-rivate O-bservations of R-eproductive N-uances

The Who--"Pictures Of Lily" (mp3)

I've been thinking about porn lately. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, but not like that. I've never been much of a porn guy, really. Maybe a few glances back before the school had a firewall and all that. But, no, I've been thinking about porn more as a sociologist than as a practicioner. And not pornography. Porn.

Just think about the term for a second. "Pornography" calls to mind the Supreme Court ("I can't define it, but I know what it is when I see it"), guys with mustaches peering through peepholes, federal agents raiding warehouses, Larry Flynt instead of Hugh Hefner, Ted Bundy. Yep, pornography= serial killers. Remember? Ted Bundy telling James Dobson that pornography was the reason he became a serial killer? Bullshit, I say. But the Conservative Christians bought Bundy's pre-execution joke hook, line, and sinker.

But back to "porn." You shorten the term and render it almost harmless. Imagine saying "Honey, I'll be right back. I'm just going to run out for some pornography." It sounds sordid. It would be a tough sell. But when my wife comes home and says, "There's a guy in my office who looks at porn all the time," well, I might think he's a creeper, but somehow it falls within the boundaries. I'm guessing we all know someone where we work who looks at porn all the time. But we don't think of him as looking at "pornographic materials."

In its own strange way, porn has become acceptable. I found this out when talking with a teacher friend who was relaying a conversation he'd had with students about porn. "Porn," they said, "is a social activity in the dorm. A bunch of us will get together and watch porn on somebody's computer. I mean, Mr. ________ , we don't get erections or anything."

Like it was no big deal.

And maybe it isn't to our younger generations. They have such easy accessibility to porn through the Internet, sites that are free (though that doesn't seem to be a factor), movies that are easy to download. Some of them have portable hard drives that are full of it. There aren't many guys in a high school dorm who don't know who Ron Jeremy is; there aren't many courses I teaches where a movie called Pirates doesn't come up. And the boys are unembarassed, unapologetic, unfazed.

There's a funny scene in the old Woody Allen movie, Bananas, made back in the 70's, where Woody's character wants to buy a pornographic magazine, so in order to do so, at the store he also grabs six or seven other legitimate, intellectual magazines to cover his sordid purchase. He hides the mag in the middle of the others. But the checkout clerk, unable to find a price, yells across the store as Woody stands at the register with an old woman customer next to him, "Hey, Joe! How much for a copy of Orgasm?"

I'm not sure that scene would even be funny today. I was watching a TV series about a couple of detectives the other night, and one of the characters discovers a major secret about another character simply because he entered his room looking for porn. No big deal.

My own thoughts of porn take me back to college, when some fraternity had a bunch of us over during rush for hot dogs, beer, and two movies called Pig Love and Woman's Best Friend. And, yes, the titles do give away the plot in both cases: woman with pig and woman with German Shepherd.

I'm hoping that movies like this would still be considered objectionable today, but I'm pretty confident that the general concept of porn is not. While we might like to make some enlightened argument about the objectification of women or to demonstrate an awareness that many, if not all women, appearing in porn films have likely been sexually abused, my guess is that today's young (or old) viewers don't put a whole lot of stock in that. It isn't that they would argue that it isn't true; it's just that they don't care. Porn in name and concept is no longer to be taken that seriously, and if you try to push for that, you'll get a lot of rolled eyes or blank stares.

It may be that in today's world, porn takes the place of that talk that your father was supposed to have with you about the birds and the bees. That would certainly be a whole lot easier for him, wouldn't it? But there is at least one drawback to that approach: he has no control over what is said or learned.

When I was getting to know my new class last week, one of my students said that his favorite actor was Ron Jeremy. I teased him about that, suggesting (in a homophobic boys' school) that most guys would identify their favorite actress, not actor. But, that's part of what porn is about--the super appendages or mammaries of those in the films and an amazement at what they can do.

Like it or not, porn has become something of a mainstay in our society. I'm not one to be too critical of our society and the way things are going because even if I see a rut I think we'll find a way out of it, and so I'm not willing to point at the accessibility of porn as a negative benchmark. But I do wonder about what porn does to one's understanding of sexuality. I mean, it does come from Hollywood, after all, just a different kind of Hollywood, maybe not even located there in Burbank, but still an outlook that advocates a kind of behavior and performance that many mere mortals can only aspire to, even though they probably shouldn't. And it separates that sexual performance from all the other aspects of a relationship.

Porn, like so many things in modern America, is simply too easy, too immediate, too superficial to be taken very seriously. But that is probably its greatest danger as well. It just sits out there, waiting for us, and we no longer have the inclination to evaluate it. We just take it in.

The Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B is available at Itunes.