Most of what's written about porn focuses either on the morality/politics of porn, or on porn as a site of sexual pleasure. You've managed to produce some of the most thoughtful analysis on porn, yet avoid either position. You've also managed to stay interested in pornography when it's a topic most writers approach like a one night stand. Do you have a sense of what about porn makes it such a rich topic for you? And do you experience "porn fatigue" ever.
Next year, I will have been writing about pornography for a decade. So, I would imagine there is something in there for me. I'm not sure I understand why, how, or what, but I do understand it better than I used to, I think. I think I'm very concerned with the issue of truth--and sites where one thing is being claimed and another thing is being shown are extremely compelling to me. I am in pursuit of the real, but I am transfixed by the surreal, and it's places and moments when those things combine that are most intriguing to me. I do suffer from something I've come to call "porn blindness," where I look at pornography, and I don't "see" it. If you've seen enough porn or been on enough adult movie sets, you don't see the sex as shocking, but routine. It's a rather disconcerting condition of sorts.
I'm curious to know what you think of the new batch of writers who are making money off porn without getting their hands dirty. Have you read Female Chauvinist Pigs (by Ariel Levy) or Pornified (by Pamela Paul)?
That was my primary complaint with Levy's work. She was focused on examining the ways "raunch culture" had transformed how women view and represent themselves. Obviously, the cultural endeavor to become a "girl gone wild" is, at least in part, due to the mainstreaming of pornography. But Levy didn't, wouldn't, or couldn't go to Porn Valley. I thought that was a bit of a dodge. I'd be curious to know why that was the case. As for Pornified, and, to a certain degree, with Levy, I think both of them approach the topic of porn with an interest in finding what they want to find--women are dressing like whores because pop culture made them do it! Men are frustrated in their relationships with women because porn made them that way! That's like a mystery where you are told the killer at the outset. I'm more interested in presenting the information and letting readers draw their own conclusions about pornography.
I like to think of you as something of a porn cognoscente, but after an entirely different fashion than the "porn historians" who make their way onto Entertainment Tonight and AVN red carpets. You have this way of imbuing the porn you write and talk about with a beauty or an artistic weight that is always surprising. You seem to deal with it so delicately, which also feels like a contradiction as porn appears to be so bombastic. Is there beauty in mainstream porn? Is there beauty in bukakke?
There's a short story I very much like called "The Most Dangerous Game," written by Richard Connell in 1924. It's about a man who falls overboard and washes up on an island where he meets a man who, as it turns out, is hunting humans. I think, in what I do, I am hunting humans. But I am also looking most specifically for those moments of beauty, especially in the midst of what looks like "the horror, the horror," when people behave as if they are insane. Is there beauty in bukkake? I don't know. But maybe. Because it is human. The people who do these things are human beings, always, even when they act inhumanely. And that is our humanity, too.
