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Disco Dolls in Hot Skin
I CAN REMEMBER THE FIRST PORN I EVER SAW.
Growing up pre-Internet as I did, the first thing I came across that might have been porn was scrambled cable television stuff that I accidentally got peeks of while channel surfing for heavy metal videos and episodes of My So-Called Life. I say “might have been” because you could always see just enough to know there was something naked going on but never enough to know exactly what. Given what I now know about adult content and different distribution modes and models today, the snow and squiggles I saw back in the day were probably nothing more than some very lovely softcore.
That was the end, until I began my undergraduate days at UCLA. I am one of those individuals—both blessed and cursed—who began college right when computers were busy transforming society, in 1995. But things were still in flux back then. So even though students had the opportunity to “attend” virtual office hours (you weren’t really attending anything—it just meant a chat room) and everyone technically had an e-mail address, you could survive pretty easily without the World Wide Web. I didn’t have my own computer the entire time I was an undergrad, and my Internet experiences were limited to surfing around at the medical library where I worked.
The library had a few employees-only terminals behind the circulation desk and about twenty or so machines with Internet access for patrons’ use in the main lobby (quite a novelty at the time). Back then, infectious pop-up windows plagued Internet users. A browsing novice would get one, then another, then another and another, until about a million windows were open, and the screen was frozen solid. This happened with websites of all types, but it happened particularly often with porn. I still wonder if this was because porn sites were more enthusiastic about their pop-ups or if it was because people were just looking at them more frequently. It may have been a combination of both.
Anyway, I would occasionally come upon coworkers looking at porn stills behind the desk, but we all knew enough to avoid locking up the terminals. The patrons, though? Not so much. At least once per shift, some pissed-off medical student or sheepish-looking health professional would need help with the public computers. All of the terminals had been locked up, you see, and rendered unusable by pop-ups. And, more often than not, the pop-ups were from porn sites. One of the library employees would then have to go around to each machine, restarting and resetting them one at a time. Patrons would practically fight over the computers as they opened back up, eager to do whatever they had come to the library for in the first place. And in many instances, that would start the pop-up cycle all over again.
It always made me laugh. Porn—how silly!
The truth is, though, I was scared to death of porn when I was in college (I never really thought about it much before that), but not because I actually knew anything about things that were considered pornographic. I was scared to death of porn because I was scared to death of the socially constructed idea of it.
Porn was this mysterious ick that I had never truly seen or experienced. And I wasn’t about to go looking into it: The channels were all scrambled, and there was always a coworker around. Besides, as a(n alleged) nice young lady, I wasn’t supposed to be looking at that stuff in the first place. So I never got a true taste of the actual products porn produced. And I definitely didn’t know anyone who would ever condescend to work in such an industry, so there was no one I could ask. At least, no one who actually knew anything.
Back then, my information about porn came from the mainstream media. And in the mainstream news, no discernable distinction was ever made between prostitutes (who were all law-breaking, drugged-out street hookers), exotic dancers (the sleazy and scandalous counterparts of sleazy and scandalous musicians), and porn performers, who apparently were an amalgamation of strippers and the lowest class of working girl. The term “sex work” hadn’t yet made it into my university’s lexicon, at least not in the classes I was taking, and all you ever heard about was depravity. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the point in life where I understood that “depravity” wasn’t universal. So really, what I was afraid of was some intangible, unsubstantiated representation that I’d somehow come to associate with porn. And even though I’d never actually seen any adult content, I was mortified by it.
Case in point: One time, when I was about twenty years old, some friends and I went to watch Disco Dolls in Hot Skin (also known as Blonde Emmanuelle), a groovy 3D porno from what’s known as porn’s golden era—1975 to 1983—that was being shown at a movie theater on Sunset Boulevard. Let’s be clear: This was no sticky, red-light Pussycat Theater. This mainstream movie house was located in a high-profile, high-rent shopping center alongside a Crunch gym, a Virgin Megastore, and a Wolfgang Puck Café—all late-nineties legit. And though I can’t tell you what in the world drew me to this event, I can tell you that it was 100 percent my idea to go. I was the instigator; everyone else just came along.
I remember being nervous as soon as we parked the car. Me and my silly ideas. Me and my big mouth! We bought our tickets and posed for a picture wearing our goofy 3D glasses in front of a Hot Skin film poster displayed outside the theatre. One of the film’s stars was in attendance. (I want to say it was Bill Margold, though I can’t recall for sure. I had no idea who he was at the time.) He gave a little talk before the reel started. I don’t recollect much of what he said, though I do remember him mentioning something about his penis having always been his best friend. The theater was packed, and by now I felt nauseous. When the picture finally started, everyone (else) cheered.
The film itself is grainy in my memory. It’s a classic—playful and silly—and the plot didn’t make much sense. But maybe that’s because I didn’t give it the opportunity to unfold. Though I tried to act rowdy and bold with my buddies, I squirmed around uncomfortably at the first hint of sex. And then I remember someone being chased through what I remember being some sort of house party. The pursuer and the pursued ran through a kitchen, and in that kitchen, while those people were dashing by, a man was banging some woman from behind. And, for some odd reason, he was pushing her face into a bowl of soup.
That’s what I remember, and that’s when I stood up and left.
I stormed out of the theater and sat on a planter, shaken. The horror of that poor woman being violated and humiliated while people just run by! How degrading to be pushed into soup! I can remember thinking something along those lines. I had vaguely noted the film’s carefree tone, its campy slapstick, and any number of what-the-heck-is-the-point-of-this-silliness 3D porno moments. But those elements slipped further and further away as my indignation grew. I seethed over what was being reframed in my mind as a brutal and “depraved” culinary drown-fuck. The disconnect between my intense reaction and the content itself was something I didn’t recognize at the time.
What happened? What prompted me to insist on going to see a film, only to huff my way out partway through? I can only speculate that, because I was so afraid of the “depraved” images that had been pre-planted in my head, I couldn’t separate what I was actually seeing from what I’d been conditioned to experience.
This line of thinking didn’t magically go away when I went to graduate school.
When I was working on my master’s degree at CSUN, obsessing over every bit of adult-industry-related biographical material I could get my hands on, I got sucked into anti-porn rhetoric. I believed, for example, the hype about Deep Throat and Linda Lovelace—that hers was a tragic case of a life leveled by pornography and her involvement therein (versus a case of a woman severely impacted by a horrifically abusive spouse). Consequently, even though I hadn’t actually watched the film, I remember being mortified by its mere existence.
Because that’s what every feminist scholar, budding or otherwise, was supposed to feel.
When my day of reckoning finally came and I finally sat down to view that infamous movie, I was already well into my PhD program at UT. By this point, I knew quite a bit mor
e about porn, but I had also been living with these “truths” about Deep Throat for years. I was prepared for horror. (Honestly, I didn’t even want to watch the film, but I felt like I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t.) I braced myself for the atrocities I’d been reading about for so long: a graphic showcasing of a woman’s abused body, horrible bruises, and body-punishing sex.
What I saw instead was a lighthearted, albeit somewhat problematic and confusing, comedy, which amounted to a big lesson in the rules of perception.
There are several key, commonly discussed scenes in Deep Throat—Linda’s infamous poolside chat with her girlfriend is one. But as I watched that scene, rather than seeing the physical evidence of a severely abused woman, which had been described in multiple books and articles I’d read, I saw one or two bruises on Linda’s legs that looked like mild versions of what I get kickboxing at the gym or walking into my coffee table during the middle of the night. Granted, I have no idea how Linda got those faint bruises; however, what I saw did not match the intensity of the descriptions I had read. At all.
I also saw some depictions in the film that scholars and media pundits cite today when discussing the allegedly “extreme” or somehow newfangled sex shown in more contemporary porn. For example, folks talk about anal sex in today’s content as if it’s some recently developed or newly depicted sex act, but there’s an anal scene in Deep Throat. And sex toys. Anal sex and sex toys in a movie that was released to the public in 1972, and people talk about these things nowadays as if they’re new developments in porn?
In the end, I was almost disappointed to find that everything I’d heard about Deep Throat was actually embellished hype. In fact, I’m almost certain that most people who talk about the film have never even watched it. And for those who have, it’s an excellent lesson in the ways in which one fixed thing—like a film or a bit of text—can be perceived differently by different people. Basically, I was faced with another Disco Dolls situation, a clash between “see” and “supposed to see.” But something very different happened with Deep Throat: I didn’t storm out. I kept watching.
The point of all of this, from Deep Throat to Disco Dolls, is that there are many larger social structures and strictures shaping the ways in which we, as self-regulating and thinking individuals, perceive the world. This includes multiple messages from myriad sources shaping how we’re supposed to see certain things. I finally started to figure this out when I was in my mid-twenties; but on that one particular night when I was still a wee undergraduate, I continued to sit on that planter outside the theater, mortified by what I was supposed to have just seen. Eventually, my friends joined me. They were all grumbling about not getting to watch the rest of the movie.
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Watching Porn for Science
FOR A WHILE, MY ENCOUNTERS WITH PORN CONTINUED to be limited and sporadic. Even while I was doing my preliminary investigating during my master’s program, I never actually sat down and tried to familiarize myself with the adult industry’s scope of current offerings. And it wasn’t until I was beginning the second year of my doctoral program at UT that it dawned on me that this was weird. If I wanted to figure out what was so mind-bending about porn and include some consideration of adult content in my actual work, I should at least familiarize myself with a good contemporary selection, right?
So sometime in 2005, I decided it was time to really start watching porn.
But where to begin? Obvious and basic seemed to be the answer. Armed only with the same painfully slow dial-up Internet service, I looked on the Adult Video News (AVN) charts for the then-hot adult title. Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre was a screwball take on the slasher film genre featuring some big-deal performers from a major production studio. Sweet! I didn’t want to wait for a DVD to come in the mail, and this was well before the days of easy video on demand (at least to my knowledge, and the computer/Internet setup I had then probably couldn’t have handled VOD anyway), so I decided I was going to have to purchase a copy in a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Me in a sex shop? This would be a first.
I hopped in my car and headed down a Central Texas highway. There were a series of adult stores nearby, and one of them was bound to have the title I was looking for. I pulled into the first parking lot and immediately had to take a few deep breaths. I was getting nervous, and this was starting to look like the beginning of my own power tool massacre. Imagine:
An ordinarily bold young blonde, now totally out of her element, pulls into a dirt lot filled with beat-up trucks. One buzzing streetlight is shining on the porch entryway, and a couple of dudes are scurrying into and out of the building. She creeps up, hesitates at the door, and then says “Fuck it. . . .”
Inside, there’s a bored-looking counter clerk off to the left and a few old-school wooden racks holding a paltry number of DVDs and VHS tapes in the middle of the room. No one seems to care about the content of these racks. All the action is in the back, where three or four guys are waiting for their turn to enter one of a series of doors along the back wall—booths. (As in booths to watch a few minutes of porn and jerk off in. I had no idea how rare these establishments were at the time.) Feeling like the wolves were sufficiently distracted, our cautious yet adventurous heroine makes a beeline for the clerk. No longer bored, he’s visibly puzzled by her presence.
“Do you guys have Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre?” she asks. “Because I’d like to buy a copy.”
The clerk takes half a moment to recover from what is apparently the most bizarre question he’s ever heard, before he says, “Ehhh, no. We don’t sell movies here.”
And then, I swear on my skills as a sociologist and an ethnographer, he looked directly in my eyes and said: “You should probably get out of here.”
So I left really quickly, throwing up dirt in the parking lot as I sped out of the driveway. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, but I calmed down as I made my way down the road. I was still on a mission.
The next stop was exactly the opposite of the first sticky-stereotype establishment. In fact, if a chain-grocery emporium were to transform into a sex shop, it would’ve been this store. Imagine a fenced mega parking lot behind a huge modern building gushing light into the Texas night, a security-type person at the door checking IDs before customers were permitted to walk through some sort of metal detector/theft deterrent barrier, and fluorescent bulbs glaring over endless aisles packed with what looked like a billion DVD cases.
I sauntered up to the front door, flashed my ID, and attempted to look casual, while I hid my face from people who weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention to me. I began searching for something like a new-release wall, or perhaps a sign with the production studio’s name on it . . . you know, like the ones that are suspended from the ceiling in the supermarket for canned vegetables and sports drinks. But a near collision with a young couple on the dildo aisle (this place was full service) and a cheery, fresh-faced young man asking if I needed any help sent me scurrying back into the night.
As I quickly made my way out of the parking lot (no time to linger—the security cameras were on me), I felt like a failure. Apparently I was afraid of porn stores. This might be a problem given my chosen area of study. But hope was not totally lost. There was still one store left on that stretch of road.
From the outside, my third stop looked like an indie video store. On the inside, it looked exactly the same: medium-size, slightly shabby, smelling like sexy oil and patchouli. There was a small turnstile security gate by the counter at the front door. A friendly, slightly stoned-seeming clerk checked my ID and said to let her (her!) know if I needed anything. I did half a lap before I found the “sports drinks” sign I’d been looking for earlier. Right beneath it, illuminated by rays of light shining down from the porn research gods, was Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre. I laughed out loud. I almost cried. I picked up the box with two hands and carried it to the counter like a proud child.
“I would like to buy this,”
I said to the clerk.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s a three-disc set, it’s kind of expensive. You could just rent it.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
Minutes later, I did a little skip to my car. My pride was restored; it had only cost $39.95 (plus tax). I still have the receipt.
It’s amusing now for me to think about a time in life when I wasn’t absolutely steeped in adult content and felt uncomfortable in an adult store. But I was once both. And today, as the years have passed and I’m able to look at porn more critically (read: with a little less emotional spasticity), I wonder how the heck it is that people can make any sense of adult content as a media form and/or a film genre. Even if someone has seen enough systematically sampled porn to be considered an “expert,” sex and gender issues have widely variable meanings. Thus, what’s “extreme” or “sexy” or acceptable or whatever is also widely variable. I really wonder about this when researchers come to conclusions about the nature of adult content as a whole based on a few conveniently selected films (which they may or may not have watched themselves) or on a small collection of scenes.
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