By ALBERTO FERRERAS
Photos by Alfonso Corona
When I’m bored at a party, I pick a stranger in the crowd, I approach him/her with a broad smile, and extending my hand I say:
“You look terribly familiar. Have you ever done porn?”
You should try this line. It’s fun, and it’s a hell of an icebreaker.
Pornography –however- is nothing to laugh about.
Some report that it’s a 10 billion dollar a year industry – but I suspect that it’s way more than that. Many were surprised recently when a particularly conservative cable company decided to show uncensored hardcore porn on demand. Charging $10 a pop –so to speak- they knew that it might be questionable from a moral point of view, but not from a business point of view, and morality is something that most people keep out of business nowadays.
But let’s stop talking about money and let’s talk about the fun side of porn: the making of.
Recently, I had dinner with three porn legends: Vanessa Del Rio, Candida Royalle and Veronica Vera. Vanessa –now in her fifties manages her own adult website and is the motif of an upcoming volume by Taschen. Candida is an accomplished film director, and designs her own line of sex toys; meanwhile Ms. Vera educates cross-dressers in her “Finishing School for Boys who want to be Girls.”
These three ladies should have a monument –not just because their figures are certainly statuesque - but also because they have the balls and the bravery that you only find in history books. That night, sitting at a booth and drinking dirty martinis, I dropped the question that
was on everybody’s minds.
“Whatever happened to good old porn?”
“It’s over,” said Vanessa. “People just do it for money.
Back then we were rebellious. We were making a social statement.”
She’s right. They defied society’s rules and accepted a stigma that younger generations cannot even imagine.
When I saw Paris Hilton’s popularity skyrocketing after her adult-film debut, I knew that the world had irreversibly changed.
In these days everybody is a porn star -or everybody wants to be one- and no one has to suffer the shame that tormented Linda Lovelace until her final days. Now –in one hand- you have porn moguls like Jenna Jameson or Rocco Siffreddi, who have the mainstream appeal of any American idol contestant. In the other hand you have any Joe Blow -or Jane Blow- posting homemade kink on the web. Now all you need to be a porn star is a digital camera and an e-mail account.
I personally think that porn is no big deal. As a matter of fact porno movies and action films are
pretty much the same. The plots are always irrelevant, and the lame dialogue is just an excuse to separate scenes of people getting blown –or blown up. The appeal of both genres is watching people doing things that you wouldn’t want to do. It’s exciting to watch Bruce Willis fall off the roof of a skyscraper, but you wouldn’t try that unless you’re hopelessly insane. The same thing happens with porn: every time I try to mimic an adult movie stunt I end up on the chiropractor
table.
“Porn sex” is hard on your back, bad for your knees and burns your eyes.
So it doesn’t matter if you enjoy watching people falling off high risers -or sitting on them: at the end of the day someone –with the proper training- did it, so you don’t have to. The ancient
Greeks called it a “catharsis”: it’s allowing your feelings to surface by identifying with the protagonists of the show.
The interesting thing is that in porn, we’re attracted to opposites: women like gay porn, men like lesbian porn, gays like straight porn, and lesbians… okay, I’m not sure what lesbians like, but the point is that we look for people doing things that we can’t do or we don’t dare doing because we are afraid of it’s moral consequences. Sex –most people think- is dirty and we rather see someone else doing it rather than putting ourselves in that position –which is often not the “missionary” one.
I believe that if sex was such a despicable activity God would have chosen another way for the human race to reproduce. And if God only wanted us to have sex for reproduction, he/she wouldn’t have made it pleasurable. Sex is –and should be seen- as something completely natural,
like walking or breathing. Porn should be boring. Watching videos of people having sex
should be like watching videos of people eating, or filing their taxes. But then, why do we get
turned on by the Playboy Channel and not by the Food Network?
The answer is easy: porn is hot because it’s dirty. And porn is dirty because people of conservative morals have told us so. Could they be the same people who make millions of dollars
selling it on “pay per view”?
