Shortbus to Seatac
A pair of friends, a married couple, recently told us they were returning to New Orleans for a vacation, and since I’m not tied to a schedule, I offered them a ride to the airport. While we were scooting along I-5 on the way to SeaTac, one of them asked me about progress on the new book. (“It’s about storytelling in the digital age,” I reflexively blurt when asked what it’s about. From that point, eyes either light up or glaze over, which is an unerring indicator of whether there’s any interest in taking the conversation any further.)
I mentioned that one of my volunteer readers insists the most marketable aspect of the book, which explores the American psyche through the stories we tell each other, is that I’ll address pornography as a legitimate storytelling vehicle. “Really,” remarked the missus, who seemed startled by the notion that I would ennoble porn by discussing it alongside news gathering, punditry and fiction writing. She volunteered that she and many in her circle equate pornography with psychological warfare between the sexes. In their view, sexually-charged imagery in words and pictures perpetuate misogyny, objectification and the kind of subjugation that women have been struggling against since time immemorial.
I’d heard these opinions expressed before, although it’s been some time since I’d seriously considered them. Surely in the new millennium things were different. HBO now airs its Real Sex series in prime time. Brittney, Paris, and Lindsey flaunt their sexuality with impunity. Without ever realizing it, I long ago accepted the notion that Burt Reynolds appearing wearing nothing but a smile in Cosmopolitan and the debut of Playgirl magazine in the ‘70s meant that by now women were well on their way to claiming porn as an enterprise in which they had an equal stake. Neither straight nor lesbian erotica cannot be made without them, and that intrinsically provides them the power to say if and how it should be made.
Maybe my being gay is at the root of this myopia. Or perhaps it’s my assumption that most fellas believe no one does porn under duress these days, certainly not men. We surmise that gay guys do porn because they can trade on their looks (implicit in this logic is that smarts are not their most exploitable attribute, anyway), and that they find it so easy and lucrative that some heterosexuals go “gay for pay” in order to set themselves up financially. Sure, there’ll be some explaining to do when the kids find them in compromising situations on the internet, but those dirty movies daddy did back in the day helped to start your college fund, junior.
So, as sometimes happens in new friendships, the deeper the conversation went (with its built-in time limit ending at passenger drop-off), the more aware we became of entering unexplored and not altogether comfortable territory. I conceded that Triple-X porn, which depicts couples or more en flagrante delicto, might appeal more to males, who some believe are more likely to be stimulated visually, while women are supposedly more attracted to characters and storylines. The old locker room joke springs to mind: “Women need a reason for sex; men only need a place.”
My friend’s husband chimed in, “I think that’s true in the most general way,” he said. “the pure visual stimulation is much of it, for guys. But for both sexes, some of the thrill of porn must be in creating some kind of ideal this-never-happens-in-real-life kind of situation. That’s why,” he theorized, “no matter how hot the actors, you rarely see really steamy sex between two married characters, which is a shame.”
For some men, I think the thrill of porn is in creating some kind of ideal, this-never-happens-in-real-life, kind of situation.”
Clearly then, these possibilities would include physically unattainable beauties in improbable circumstances doing things you’d be unlikely to risk in real life, now that you’re no longer a carefree college dude on a four-day bender.
“Alright,” she said, trying to steer the subject back to a higher plane, “and how does this relate to storytelling, exactly?”
“Well, you know how Carl Jung conceived this constellation of archetypes — the hero, the wise advisor, and the rest,” I began. “What’s fascinating to me is the notion that some porn impresario in Studio City has some idea of what’s going to appeal to a white-collar office worker on his lunch break, and that the same thing that he finds erotic is going to resonate with some Wal-Mart employee in Akron or someone who writes computer code in Seattle or Hong Kong.”
For women– and I commit this to text only as a humble opening gambit — I wonder whether this equates with the erotica in romance novels and the so-called “chick flicks” we men are always trying to gnaw off a limb to avoid. Is this at the nexus of what we find arousing as men and women? Are males drawn first to what feels good physically, then willing to appreciate an emotional connection if one develops? . Conversely, is it imperative that women connect emotionally first, and only allow themselves to enter into a full embrace of their sexual selves once trust is established? I believe the stories we use to titillate each other provide something of an answer.
The men in romance novels fall into psychological stereotypes in much the same way that women fall into physical stereotypes for men. The men are often stoic, wounded, in need of taming or healing from a past where they were either abused or had to rely on baser instincts for survival. They require something neither brain nor brawn can provide — civilization.
At this point, though, I’m really certain of only two things: One, the subject carries a walloping emotional charge, and two, I have a lot of research ahead of me. Assumptions about women and sexuality are undergoing increasing scrutiny — largely because earlier studies have been done with built-in flaws and biases.
In 2006, a Northwestern University study shattered many long-held notions. In the study, conducted with electrodes attached to parts of the participants’ skulls to measure brain activity, researchers discovered what they had long suspected about men: That heterosexual males responded to visual images of women and gay men responded as expected to corresponding male depictions. By contrast, both heterosexual and lesbian women were discovered to be aroused by both male and female erotica, suggesting a bisexual pattern of arousal. Could this be, as I theorize, because men are more focused on body parts and women more on personality?
J. Michael Bailey professor and chair of psychology at Northwestern and the study’s senior researcher, won’t go that far. But he does say, “these findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s brains and have important implications for understanding how sexual orientation development differs between men and women.”
It’s murky territory, because women have barely begun to express their sexual proclivities in public. In the words of Massey University senior lecturer Dr. Michelle Mars in New Zealand, “The culturally inscribed idea that women enact a more subdued sexuality proscribes the very idea of women’s porno-pleasures and should make it difficult for me as a researcher to find informed research participants. In fact it is extremely easy to find women happy to talk frankly about what they like . . . The talk of sexual preferences, sexual scenarios and pleasures that are not captured within the pornographic genre is fascinating. I have found in previous research projects that when people speak on a subject that is considered marginal it often unleashes a torrent of information on and around the topic. The suppression of women’s sexuality silences the actively desiring woman, making it difficult for her to voice dissatisfaction without entering the marginalized realm of the slut.”
That’s at least part of the challenge John Cameron Mitchell issues in his 2006 film, Shortbus. The script was developed in workshops with a meticulously chosen cast of performers, straight and gay, and follows a group of contemporary New Yorkers as they wade through a variety of unsimulated sexual encounters — all depicted with unapologetic specificity — in order to establish an emotional connection with one another, and ultimately, themselves. Mitchell challenges his audience to reconsider what they consider pornographic, and while all this sex is presented graphically, none fits easily into what we conveniently label “gratuitous.”
(Let’s save for another time an entire discussion on whether Shortbus is nearly as pornographic as, say, the Hostel or Saw series. Similarly, it’s an open question as to whether the graphic nature of a film can be ameliorated by it’s good intentions, as in the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan.)
As humans, we’ve been telling stories about sex almost since we got lucky for the first time, and most of us were reading about it for some time before that. It makes sense then that any book about storytelling needs to address sex, and that we should admit that humans will never stop wanting to tell and hear stories about their sexual exploits.
So among my missions: Let’s hear it for, and from, the sluts of the world. It’s going to be an interesting journey to explore what we find erotically stimulating, as well as what ignites our creative minds in fiction and what binds us together as a society in the world of news gathering.
