Goofus And Gallant Styles in Porn
(an essay of the performance, first performed at the 8th Annual Transmodern Festival, Baltimore, MD, April 2011, as part of the performance series "Antidote to Apocalypse", curated by Carly Ptak)
"Goofus & Gallant: First appearing in Highlights [Magazine] in 1948. . . the strip features two contrasting boys,
Goofus and Gallant.
In each cartoon, it is shown how each boy would respond to the same
situation. Goofus
chooses an irresponsible path, while Gallant is
kinder. Goofus and Gallant's primary function is to teach children
basic social skills."
from Wikipedia, "Goofus and Gallant"
There was a point in my life when I realized that unconditional love for every living thing was a feeling I wanted to achieve.
I learned this from the death of my childhood cat, who was himself a very loving and trusting animal. My father cried more at his death than at the death of his own mother, because, as he put it, the cat was unconditionally loving. I should add that this sweet little beast was loved in turn by everyone who met him.
As soon as I realized that I aspired towards this trait that my old pet had mastered, I immediately understood the difficulty of doing so--how can I love the boss who fired me for not liking jazz music? How can I love the people who broke into our house and stole so many things? How can I love killers and fiends and the people that followed me in the night in Egypt?
Eventually, I realized that you can love someone in the abstract, at perhaps a very long arm's length--as long as you preserve your emotional and physical safety and, most importantly, work hardest to love yourself. I find it easier to love myself (and thus, others) if I am really, really, really nice, and prioritize sex. It's important to establish boundaries of comfort and safety in both these things, but they are inseparable in my goal to learn to love unconditionally--I can't just be nice and not prioritize sex, because I will be denying a strong part of myself and I will feel like I'm wasting my time, but I can't prioritize sex and not be nice, or I will just end up being a jerk to myself and others.
Like many people, I can get so busy and run-down by daily life that concentrating on sex can be difficult--I may may be distracted by concerns of the moment, and an orgasm will seem unreachable, on some distant horizon of my mind--so, like many people, I sometimes enjoy pornography to help me achieve orgasm. There is no shame in looking at pictures of people having sex--in fact, it often gives me a more sensitive and accepting perspective towards my own body.
That being said, I try and shy away from current mainstream porn. The reason for this is that I understand the power of mind control in any mainstream media, and I understand how heterosexuals are specifically susceptible to mind control through porn. To be heterosexual in dominant American culture (and almost every other culture in the world) is to not have to come out of the closet and make your sexual identity known, to not have to fear repercussions or punishment for your sexual orientation, to enjoy a world which (mostly) caters to the sexual needs and whims of those who share your sexuality, and simply, to not have to call your sexual orientation--and effectually, your sexuality--into question. Being queer necessitates going through an integral questioning process of your sexuality to find an often self-defined identity in a world in which you are not the status quo. Straight people enjoy the privilege of not having to do this, although many straight people do question aspects of their sexuality. Still, sexual introspection and questioning is not a fundamental element of the heterosexual identity.
Thus, mainstream porn produced within the capitalist pornographic industry with the intention of being viewed by heterosexual people can be an extremely useful agent for assholes to tell heterosexuals how they should have sex. Many heterosexuals who enjoy heterosexual porn regularly will not look at the trends in mainstream porn skeptically because they are not used to forming their own individual sexual identity--so they may accept breast implants, bald pussy, and ass-to-mouth as normal, just as getting married, being monogamous, and reproducing is normal. Of course, there are immeasurable numbers of heterosexual people who are exceptions to this process of thought, but many people like to follow the path of least resistance, and accept what they are told is sexy as being sexy.
(I should also say here that I see nothing wrong with breast implants, bald pussy, and ass-to-mouth--I just see something strange with the promotion of the belief that these things are the sexual status quo through pornographic representation. They seem so much more specialized in reality to be portrayed so heavily in mainstream pornographic media. See my essay, "Ass-To-Mouth Vision Quest" for more on this.)
So, I would like to stray from a theoretical model here and make a personal confession--I was victim of the mind control of mainstream porn from the late 1990s and early 2000s, and acquired a negative sexual self-image as a result. Anyone who has ever felt a distinct dislike for their body knows how hard it can be to feel sexy in that mind state--so of course, these feelings of self-grossed-outed-ness got in the way of my sexual priorities. This is where porn as an agent of healing worked for me, and I'd like to share with you some pornographic information that helped me learn stop worrying about my body and love my sex.
This image is from the 1980 Anthony Spinelli film, "Talk Dirty To Me." Unfortunately, I couldn't find the scene online, so I'll summarize it: from left to right, Sharon Kane and Dorothy LeMay are waiting for their male friends to return from a beer run, and Sharon Kane begins to brush her pubic hair upward and outward from her labia to achieve a "fuller, bushier" look because her partner likes it that way, as she explains it to LeMay. If you do an unrestricted Google Video search on "Candida Royalle" and 1976, the video from which this images comes should be one of the top three results:
This link might work for that scene, which for me, illustrates the same concept as the scene from "Talk Dirty to Me". It is a scene of Candida Royalle and John Seeman, from Gerald Graystone's 1976 "Love Secrets". Both these scenes are exemplary to me because they helped me see pubic hair as sexy. The porn I saw growing up in the 1990s and 2000s featured actors and actresses with predominantly bald pussies and cocks, and I wasted a lot of money trying to achieve that look, which of course, only looked incongruous with my zaftig body--after all, a full bush separates a little girl from a woman, so is a woman who removes her full bush trying to look like a little girl? Despite this, though, my young mind imprinted less pubic hair as being more sexually appealing to most people--and I heard enough people calling pubic hair "gross" to assume that mine was no exception to that rule. The natural had become unnaturally unappealing, a signifier of an unkempt genital region, as if sex wasn't messy. (Perhaps the same people who were behind the no-pubes-as-normal movement are also behind the you-can't-have-sex-during-your-period-movement?)
Initially, it seemed that most women and girls only removed some of their pubic hair--for example, just the part that hangs out the bikini, and maybe what's on the lips, and what's around the asshole. What was left was just a patch of fur, representing adulthood, signaling to your partner that this is what you can grow--a microcosm of the raw natural sexual energy which is your potential. Of course, though, over time that scrap got smaller and smaller in porn, until before you knew it, your friend's asexual sister was getting a Brazilian every 6 weeks. It's of no consequence that she was not actually interested in sex. . . she was just keeping up with the status quo!
One other thing I also like very much about the scene from "Love Secrets" above is the simple presence of John Seeman. Seeman is not the type of man you would see in porn these days--he's balding, bespectacled, mundane. . . the type of man to do your taxes. He looks like the way many of our future husbands may look 15 years along the marriage. He's real. I forget sometimes how male representations in mainstream heterosexual porn can be very damaging on the male heterosexual psyche as well, so it's good to see men that look like people I know, and to understand that these men can be legitimate sexual entities. (I also should mention that Candida Royalle went on to found the pornographic production company, Femme Productions, which focuses on porn made for women and couples, and shies away
from the theatrics of mainstream porn in favor of more realistic portrayals of sexuality. She rules.)
Concerns with male representation in heterosexual porn leads me to another screenshot from "Talk Dirty To Me", this time featuring John Leslie and Jesie St. James:
The invention of Viagra revolutionized the porn industry, for it allowed men to act over long periods of time without losing their boners between takes--and it certainly helped many men with sex in general. However, it is not always necessary for young people to be on Viagra, and seeing
only rock hard boners in porn leads one to misunderstand the idiosyncrasies of their own or their future partners' cocks. I think of Annie Sprinkle's "Soft Cock Manifesto" (which can be viewed here)--she opines, "I think people today, young people especially, seem to think that if your penis is not fully hard and throbbing for 4 hours, that you just have a dysfunction." It's nice to see a boner built from scratch, for mens' penises are the crucibles of their emotions: if a man isn't comfortable, or is tired, threatened, overwhelmed, or distracted, an erection does not come to him easy. It behooves him (and his partner) to acknowledge, understand, and communicate these feelings if they want to have sex--the communication itself being an act of intimacy and love. That is where mainstream porn's unshifting representation of only the rock-hard cock lets down men--it so often neglects to depict the trust and compassion that sometimes goes into achieving said rock-hard cock.
When I was preparing the performance that designed and necessitated this essay (also titled "Goofus and Gallant Styles in Porn), I realized maybe a week before I was due to perform that I had not included any scenes featuring people of color. 'What's wrong with me,' I thought. . . because surely I don't have as limited scope of what I think is sexy as to forget people who aren't white? Maybe it's me unintentionally being closed-minded--but more likely, it could be that people of color are marginalized in, like so many other things, porn. Here is my test to find out the truth: do an unrestricted Google image/video search on "porn". What color are the skins of the people in the images you see? Also, so often when people of color are represented in porn, it's through the specialized focus of fetishization, which once again implies that people of color exist outside of the western mainstream notion of normalcy--"normal" porn is white porn. No one has to do a search on "hot white tail".
I remembered a scene from the 1999 Danish porn movie, "Pink Prison"--which itself is a noteworthy movie because it was directed by Lisbeth Lynghøft for the film company Puzzy Power, which is a subsidiary of Lars Von Trier's company, Zentropia. Puzzy Power, a company making
porn for female consumers, put out a manifesto in 1998 which eradicated my suspicions that their porn wouldn't have any actual real fucking because of its intended audience, like so much other supposed "female"-friendly porn. "Indications are that the general lack of interest shown by women in sexually explicit movies is not so much because they are put off by seeing sex depicted graphically, but by the degrading situations that are inevitably associated with pornography," they write, gaining my confidence. You can read the whole manifesto here; it is excellent.
From "Pink Prison", I specifically remembered a salient scene between protagonist Katya Kean and Mr. Marcus. Kean plays a photo-journalist who breaks into a notorious men's prison to interview the warden, and along the way, she meets the prison chef, Mr. Marcus, and they have extremely playful sex. Some stills are here:
I love that he is using a condom. Such a good choice--it's so rare that you see porn with condoms, so you can't help but ask yourself if your fantasies include safe sex/condom use. Mine often don't, which isn't helpful when I find myself in a situation that necessitates a condom and I'm trying to achieve orgasm (and being non-monogamous, this is any time there is someone new, because I put more than just my body at the risk for STI. If you really can't stand using a condom with someone you don't know very well, you better assume the person you're having sex with is your last partner ever, so you won't have to worry about potentially risking other people's health or lives by your sexual decisions.) I also love the energy between the two--light-hearted and satisfied and friendly. They smile. It's a treat.
These stills are from 2010's "Dangerous Curves", directed by Carlos Batts and written by April Flores. You can watch the trailer here.
The scene in "Dangerous Curves" which particularly interests me is the one between X Rae and Art Nuveau--actors married to each other. Their status is significant to me not because of any beliefs in the institution of marriage I may espouse, but rater because it represents a life-long commitment between two sexual partners--implying sexuality as a life-long practice, worthy of growth and refinement like any other skill. In one part of their scene, she mouths to him, "I love you". . . it's very sweet and kind and respectful. BBW (which stands for "big, beautiful woman") porn in general, which Batts and Flores are pioneering, is very loving and reverent of large women's bodies--and the women featured in this porn seem to enjoy the hell out of acting in it. These are women who have had to fight against the idea that bigger bodies are undesirable or worthless within so much of western culture--and they come out winning, being the beautiful women earning their pleasure with their self-confidence and belief that they are beautiful. Of course, this self-belief suggests love and beauty alone, and it's really great to see people reveling in that. I like to watch people enjoy themselves, after all.
If BBW porn can establish the 21st Century New Western Female Archetype of the overweight woman who believes in herself and her sexual validity so much that she radiates beauty in her self-confidence, and power in the ability to overcome cultural programming and mind control, then I want a porn-established 20th Century Western Female Archetype as well--another positive one, this one being the independent adult woman who is entitled to openly and comfortably express her sexuality by the authority of herself and her good ethical judgement. The embodiment of this archetype is Juliet Anderson, who is known mostly from her work in the 1970s and 1980s (which is why she is a 20th Century Archetype). A sufferer of Crohn's Disease, Anderson was in regular physical pain throughout her life, but she describes a way she managed pain in her "Masturbation Memoir" video on Youtube, here, where she states, "My first orgasm was with intercourse, and much to my surprise, I floated free of pain for the first time in my life." After traveling extensively, living and teaching English in Mexico, Japan, Greece and Finland, she got into porn at 39--which she claimed as "the last thing in the world that I ever expected would happen to me." She often played older independent women with professions, such as real estate agents and surgeons, and she once said in an interview here of her filmographic choices, "I don't take a part in a film unless I think that I'm going to have a great time, that I'm going to learn a lot, that I'm going to inspire my fellow workers, and that I'm going to turn on thousands and thousands of men and women."
Here's a scene with her, Carl Regal, and John Leslie from "Talk Dirty to Me"--be aware that she is 42 in this scene. For me, that fact alone makes me
look forward to aging. (If the link doesn't work, do an unrestricted Google Video search on "Juliet Anderson" and "stairs").
So why do I call this essay, "Goofus and Gallant Styles in Porn"? You can easily guess the "gallant styles", but what are the "goofus styles"? The Goofus Styles are not in any specific kind of porn, but rather, within myself and my internalizing of the aesthetics, values, and sexual dynamics of pornography (or any art, really) made with the intention of making a lot of money--as opposed to the pornography made with the intention of having fun, of portraying any sort of person looking any sort of way, doing what they do to have an orgasm, and of turning on "thousands and thousands of men and women."
Ann Everton, 2011