Writing about sexuality without sounding either trite or didactic is harder than it seems. Stuck as we are in dualistic frameworks of both sex and gender, it is a rare writer who manages not to polarize or moralize sexual subjects that are particularly rich or thorny. This task becomes gargantuan when the subject is pornography.
Few writers have cared to work their way around the simplistic arguments of porn's social benefits and social evils and reach into the heart of the matter, regardless of how messy that heart may be. As a result, with very few exceptions, discussion on pornography has degenerated into an endless string of narrow minded position papers and books saying the same thing in slightly different ways.
Over a span of almost ten years, author Susannah Breslin, has turned her back on the "porn debate" and delved deep into the heart of porn. Her writings have offered up some of the most thoughtful analysis while avoiding stale arguments, and along the way reminding us why the debate itself is petty and misguided. Equally admirable, she's managed to stay interested in pornography when it's a topic most writers approach like a one night stand. On her recently revived blog, The Reverse Cowgirl, she weaves an abstract narrative about art, pornography, beauty, and people.
Once a regular public commentator (appearing everywhere from Playboy and “Politically Incorrect” to CNN and Fox News) Breslin now mostly avoids the media, but generously agreed to this interview via email.
Your blog, The Reverse Cowgirl, was one of the most widely read and frequently linked source of unique sexual content among a certain kind of sexual elite. It managed to cover sometimes bizarre and often explicit sexual content, without ever feeling exactly sexually explicit itself. After a three year hiatus, you've brought it back. How do you think about The Reverse Cowgirl now?
In January, I read about a film called "Destricted" that was screening at Sundance. It's a series, and the first installment is a collection of seven shorts by Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noe, Larry Clark, and others. All the films are an attempt to reinvent, "re-see," or rethink what pornography is today. In the promotional materials for the movie, the producers referred to it as "the 'explicit chic' of the 21st century." I think the reality is that, these days, pornography is not particularly beautiful, for the most part. I think as porn becomes increasingly mainstream, some people are asking, well, how can we make pornography beautiful? You can see an effort, particularly on the web, by creative types to re-imagine what pornography looks like, so it's not bad lighting and awkward acting--it's something that's as beautiful as any another form of art. Charlie White does this well. The blog La Petite Claudine is another porno chic tracker. And that's what I'm trying to articulate and represent on The Reverse Cowgirl this time around: something that is beautiful, intriguing, and, in some way, pornographic. That may be gladiator stilettos, a performance art band called The Bukkakes, or an idoru on the Web.
Porn is one of the most searched for terms on the internet, some search tools show that porn is searched for twice as often as sex. Yet in mainstream discourse the two terms seem synonymous. Is it porn that fascinates you or sex in general?
I am interested in pornography--particularly Porn Valley and the adult movie industry. Sex is a physical act. Porn is a representation of sex created with the intent to invoke a prurient response in its viewer. Most specifically, I'm not particularly interested in porn in general, or porn movies especially, but I am very interested in the world, people, and mechanisms by which porn movies are created. In 1997, I found myself on the set of an adult movie for the first time, and it was a life changing experience. It was absolutely, utterly fascinating to me to see what people would do if they were allowed to do anything at all. It's like witnessing the human population run amok. As a porn starlet opined to me, one of the most compelling things about pornographic movies is that what is happening in them is happening, but, at the same time, it is not. It is real and unreal. I want to go behind the curtain, like Dorothy, and find the Wizard.
