BY: THE PLAID ZEBRA
The camera leers above dead eyes and smeared makeup, as her fake eyelashes barely cling on. She grimaces and resumes a neutral expression while the self-proclaimed “anal king”—and most hated man in the industry—Max Hardcore violently grabs her neck and tips up his cowboy hat to reveal a Cheshire-cat smile stretching from cheek to cheek. He spits on her face and it appears her mind is on some far off beach somewhere—anywhere but in that grimy studio apartment in Mission Hills. “This is one fucked-out stupid cunt!” Max yells. It’s like watching a slow motion car accident; I can’t take anymore and quickly close the window. Who the fuck likes this shit?
Human Toilet Bowls, Altered Assholes, Crackwhores Of America, and Adventures of The Fart Bitches are just a few titles of some porn movies that have been recently floating around the web. Due to video sharing websites such as Pornhub.com and RedTube.com, millions of women are posting amateur videos in hopes of becoming the next Sasha Grey. The reality of the industry today is not the pale ass of Ron Jeremy that your parents so lovingly reminisce.
The Internet has taken porn mainstream and legitimized and popularized many fetishes along the way. “It makes it more available, it makes it more socially acceptable, it makes people feel less alone with their particular fetish because they may not have had the ability to access a particular fetish in the past, and it makes people put more energy into the fetish than they would have otherwise,” says sex therapist Rob Peach.
One of the more disturbing fetishes is called gonzo porn. It features too-close-for-comfort perspectives of hardcore performances, such as double anal penetration, throat gagging, and golden showers. Now, misogyny in porn is nothing new, but Gonzo Porn is male chauvinism on testosterone pills.
Unlike Hollywood Pornland’s feature films such as Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, gonzo does not focus on plot lines or characterization. Instead, it attempts to place the viewer directly in the scene through a first-person perspective. In reference to gonzo journalism, this style of porn has no separation between camera and performers. Because of this, it tends to use fewer full body shots and favours more close-ups. The camera work usually revolves around tight shots of genitalia. By showing female bodies without heads, we are objectifying the actress and thus losing all potential for intimacy.
The actors in gonzo porn are fucking without bothering themselves to tell us why and how they ended up naked. There are no badly written scripts, just candid speech. The most context given is the odd on-camera exchange of money. It is raw sex impregnated with violence. But without context, sex is just mechanical piston pumping.
Researchers at the University of Missouri surveyed married heterosexual couples and found that men’s use of porn was associated with lower levels of sexual intimacy for both men and their partners. New wave porn is creating entire generations that do not understand that mental intimacy is the most vital part of sexuality.
“Pleasure and pain are the same thing right?” said adult-film producer John Stagliano in a Guardian Interview. He goes on to say that vaginal sex is bullshit, anal is the new reality, and that fisting and double penetrations are the new norm. Watching Max Hardcore spread open a girl’s asshole with a speculum and urinate into it, you have to wonder how dehumanizing someone has become popular. Yet promotion and demand for extreme content like Hardcore continues to grow.
Every time you watch one of these videos, you are strengthening synapses between neuropathways, which can be compared to treading down the tall grass of an open field to create a dirt walkway. In a research article titled Decreased Reward Sensitivity and Increased Expectation Sensitivity, psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow writes how high but brief bursts of dopamine play a key role in reward expectation and affect how humans process and store information. So, although you may be grossed out when first watching a Max Hardcore video, if you watch it again, subconsciously you will be creating muscle memory and reflexive reactions, which allow cravings to get stronger. People are normalizing sadomasochistic practices. Pretty soon, softcore porn just won’t be enough.
There are certain feminists who are sex-positive on the issue of gonzo porn, saying that it is merely a natural part of sexual liberation and empowers women to take control of their sexuality. But a woman getting spit on by a man who thinks her name is “cunt” does not sound like an empowered woman taking control of her sexuality.
Professor Gail Dines of the University of Massachusetts writes, “Feminists don’t see more sex or better orgasms as the answer to women’s oppression. We need to overthrow the systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism and in their place put a world based on equality, justice, and dignity for all.”
I take this not as a call for the death of porn, but for the rise of ethical porn, where camera angles focus on intimacy and not objectification, where gender is depicted as equal, and where degradation is replaced with respect for a woman’s temple.
Anti-sex doctrines damage a free representation of humanity, just as the Catholic Church’s anti-gay doctrine damages its representation of an all-loving God. The criticism of gonzo porn has nothing to do with religious austerity or some anti-porn social norm; there is nothing more innocent than a gentle sin. Gonzo porn removes intimacy and humiliates sexual partners, thus reducing sex to a mere game of power (as Oscar Wilde would have us believe). Sex should be uplifting, not guilt-inducing. You should not feel shameful when walking away from the computer screen. An act of sex is supposed to be mutually vulnerable. Love demands sacrifice. It is the only method of nature that keeps humans from living entirely self-centered lives. The sexual violence of gonzo porn abuses the only thing that can save us from ourselves.
