Riff: ‘As Long as You’re Watching People Have Sex, You Could Be Learning Something’

Illustration by Tom Gauld

Once, 15 years ago, I spent three strange days hanging around the Sheraton hotel in Universal City — which is not so much a city as a mostly unincorporated area in Los Angeles County that houses Universal Studios and its attendant theme park — reporting on an event that billed itself as an academic conference on the First Amendment and pornography. I was there on assignment for a magazine that was introducing a section on education, and the hook was that the conference was being sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State, Northridge, and something called the Free Speech Coalition, which I later learned was the lobbying arm of the adult-entertainment industry.

Having never attended an academic conference, I didn't know what to expect, but the mix yielded some highly amusing juxtapositions, some bordering on parody. Panels on Victorian pornography and erotic vases from Ancient Greece were presented alongside topics too out there to even try to euphemize. My job, as I remember, was to soak in the ambience, filter it through my disbelief and report back in arch tones. In other words, the article would write itself.

No doubt my experience of the conference was also filtered through an unholy trifecta of inexperience, selective focus and confirmation bias, but I was pretty quickly struck by how hostile to inquiry (for an event co-sponsored by a research center) the conference seemed to be. To be honest, I don't recall attending any panels on Victorian pornography or Ancient Greek vases, and maybe if I had, then my one-sided experience would have been mitigated.

Instead, over the next few days I found myself absorbing one unrelenting, expertly media-trained "celebratory" paean to commodified sex-positivity after another, and feeling more and more depressed by the hour. The conference's best-known attendants seemed to respond to all but the most ingratiating questions by swiftly shaming the interlocutor. The porn stars stuck to their talking points and stayed on message. "Liking sex" was the preferred euphemism for making or consuming porn. Conversely, harboring even the slightest ambivalence about porn meant that you categorically "hated sex" and were out to ruin it for everyone else.

A dominant narrative soon emerged at the conference, in which pornography — and not the Victorian kind with the bloomers and the spankings or whatever — was presented as a bastion of orgiastic disinhibition; a filthy fun-times Arcadia from which sprang nothing but joy and empowerment and marriage and children and unicorns.

Like all good stories, this one had a villain: "the girlfriend." A sex-hating, man-foiling human barricade whose cruel, withholding ways sent armies of disconsolate men into the tender embrace of their "favorite" porn stars daily. I was taken aback. I was a girlfriend! I mean, I wasn't that girlfriend. But the more this version of reality was reified throughout the event, the sadder, the more isolated, the more diminished I became. The worst thing about it was how overwhelming the experience was, and how deviant it made me feel.

I was reminded of this recently while watching the new Showtime series "Masters of Sex," which also dwells on a sexual milieu so oppressively canonical and intolerant as to seem almost religious: the 1950s. Set in the famously inhibited middle of America in the famously clamped-down American midcentury, "Masters of Sex" follows the researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose landmark 1966 book, "Human Sexual Response," tore down barriers and helped pave the way for the sexual revolution — all of which will presumably come later in the series. For now, the characters are still stuck in the mid-'50s, when Masters (Michael Sheen), a hormone-replacement-therapy specialist, hired Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), a thrice-divorced former nightclub singer and mother of two, as his secretary. Together they led the charge to bring sex out of the Middle Ages.

"Masters of Sex" is a contemporary show about retro attitudes that we can look back on now from the safety of more enlightened times. It also has the problem/advantage of depicting a prudish time on-screen while existing in the context of the most relentlessly unprudish media landscape ever. This predicament presents an interesting artistic challenge to its creators: How do you make a fresh, interesting and surprising show about sex in an era when it's hard to find anything anywhere that isn't, on some level, about sex? And how do you convey what it was like to be alive at a time when sex was still taboo without ascribing attitudes we find distasteful today (excessive inhibition, sexism, homophobia) to characters we're meant to care about and identify with?

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Riff: ‘As Long as You’re Watching People Have Sex, You Could Be Learning Something’

Dengan url

http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/11/riff-aas-long-as-youare-watching-people.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Riff: ‘As Long as You’re Watching People Have Sex, You Could Be Learning Something’

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Riff: ‘As Long as You’re Watching People Have Sex, You Could Be Learning Something’

sebagai sumbernya