When anti-porn activist Gail Dines visited Australia recently, the airwaves vibrated with furious debate. Feminists, cultural theorists, politicians and pro-porn lobbyists came out of their cubicles to gnaw again on that juicy old bone, ‘the protection of the innocents – also known as ‘kids today, and what’s best for them’.
The thesis outlined in Dines’s book Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality is that those of us raised in the print-based culture of the 1970s and earlier have little idea of what we’re up against when it comes to raising kids with a healthy, respectful approach to sex and sexuality. As Dines herself jokes, the era of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines was the Good Old Days. Let’s call it the ‘fluffy bunny-tail period’ of porn, when boys kept tatty magazines under their mattresses, or guiltily discovered granddad’s treasured antique girly pics in the back shed. By contrast, according to Dines, today’s ubiquitous and hugely profitable online porn industry is dominated by visual material that’s blatantly degrading, violent and brutal, especially towards women. Not to mention the fact that it’s accessible to any child capable of a four-letter Google search. Of primary concern to Dines is that the visual and aesthetic codes of porn have infiltrated mainstream culture, and that they’re shaping our ideas of what’s beautiful, sexy, permissible and ‘normal’.
Take pubes, for instance. Teenagers, who would once have balked at medically required examinations and Pap tests, now spread their legs for Brazilians and ‘back, crack and sack’ waxes. Alongside Dines’ more urgent points, there’s been a minor surge of women (and some men) bemoaning the disappearance of the ‘full bush’. As Jane Cafarella wrote in a recent piece in the Age, older women lament that there may be many young men today who have never even seen a woman in her natural state. Artist and blogger Lily Mae Martin responded directly to the article with a visual essay – a photograph of her own lower body, clad in bikini bottoms, with a generous sprinkle of pubes sprouting from the sides of the fabric, and a red banner slashed across the top, reading ‘There is nothing wrong with my body’.
The disappearance of pubes may be a superficial concern. There’s a long history of art and fashion eradicating pubic hair, but of course fashion can be serious. Especially when it hurts, when it becomes an ‘essential expense’, and when it’s derived from the pornography industry.
For Dines, there are many other indications of the pornification of our culture. She talks about porn stars like Jenna Jameson, who are now idolised by little girls and Oprah Winfrey alike; about young men who consider anal sex with their girlfriends to be part of a generally accepted repertoire – without realising that the average working life of a porn star in the US is three months due to the brutality of anal sex. For a porn actress, ‘the biggest health problem is your anus dropping out from anal prolapse’, though of course there’s also the risk of gonorrhea in your eyes because of the common porn practice of ejaculating over a woman’s face.
If you listen long enough to Dines, it’s a little bit scary, especially if you’re a parent hoping to raise a kid who enjoys sex and is treated kindly and lovingly by those who enjoy it with them.
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But then censorship is scary, too. As a fan of free speech and a self-styled libertarian (going so far as to have occasional libertine tendencies), I hate to be told what I can or can’t watch. I’m a film reviewer and screen journalist, so I’m sometimes required to watch material that’s confronting, explicit or shocking, and I pride myself on being able to watch what needs to be written about. I’m not immune to tears, and think of myself as gentle-hearted, but I rarely suffer a nightmare or emotional after-shock. Yet these recent debates brought to mind Impaled, a 38-minute documentary ‘porn’ film by Larry Clark; a film that’s seared into memory and continues to disturb, even four years after I first winced at the reality it presented.
Take this scene: Daniel, a 21-year-old man – blue-eyed and beautiful yet still a bit spotty – looks directly into the lens. He’s shy and softly spoken, but brave. After all, he’s just had sex with a 40-yearold porn actress in front of a film crew, so there’s not much to hide. He’s reflecting upon his experience earlier that afternoon. ‘The anal was tighter than pussy,’ he remembers. Then adds, ‘Yeah, I was a little grossed out sometimes, because of the shit coming out on my dick. Kinda sick. Those are the kinds of things I don’t think about before I do it. But it was still a good experience. I’m glad I did it.’ He looks like he’s trying to convince himself.
This is one of the final scenes of Impaled, Clark’s contribution to the seven-part collection of short films compiled as Destricted, a collaboration around the theme of art and pornography with pieces made by leading art and film practitioners, including Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé and Marina Abramovic. Made in 2006, Destricted screened at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in September 2007, and of the seven films, Clark’s contribution was the strongest, the most visceral, and the most controversial.
Which is no surprise really, as Larry Clark’s entire career, from his raw photography collections (Tulsa in 1971 and Teenage Lust in 1983) to feature films like Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002), has been built along the dangerously thin razor’s edge dividing truth-telling and obscenity; art and exploitation of the very young. You often feel a bit wrong watching a Larry Clark film, even as, like Daniel the young porn initiate, you’re ‘glad you did it’ because it exposes truths and realities that deserve consideration.
Clark’s 40-year career has been one of making unsettling portraits of tarnished innocence and ruined adolescence. When he began, he was one of the adolescents himself, taking photos of his amphetamine-injecting contemporaries, their sex lives and their crime lives. Now in his 60s, he’s still mining the theme of corrupted youth, even as he risks accusations of being a dirty old man wanting to film young people without their clothes on. Yet Clark’s work has always been artistically interesting, intelligent and probing. Yes, his subjects are young, often looking considerably younger than they really are. But there are moments of great beauty and sound narrative control. There’s also something about the unflinching gaze of Clark’s camera – and its desire to make a social comment on what it sees – that redeems his work from its worst critics and makes it into a kind of valuable, though subjective and problematic, anthropology.
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The premise of Impaled is shocking in itself. First of all, advertise for young men (very young, but legal) who want to be in a film having sex with a porn star. Film the interview process and select the lucky candidate. Then let this fortunate fellow interview porn actresses, and make his fantasy come true. All in front of the camera. Clark has said in media interviews that the film started with a question: what effect does pornography have on young people? And how has the advent of video technology and readily accessible internet porn shaped sexual expectations and behaviours? However unscientific Clark’s methodology may be, there is no question that his candidates in Impaled respond with candour. In fact, they are so honest and vulnerable it almost hurts to watch. Their answers are complex and varied enough to suggest Clark isn’t editing to a strictly preconceived script.
First up, Clark explains the project to his subjects. He’s not making a real porno, although the successful applicant will be ‘having sex with a real hot porno girl’. He first asks them to talk about their early experiences with pornography, and they all seem intimately familiar with it – the names of famous porn stars and video brands on the tips of their tongues.
One smooth and handsome boy, of Indian heritage, confesses that he first starting watching porn when he was seven or eight, in hotel rooms, while his parents were out on business. He didn’t let his younger brother watch it because he was ‘too young’. ‘The first time I ejaculated, I was watching a porn with this Asian girl [in it], really hot,’ the boy remembers. ‘It got me off, just seeing her spread-eagled. She was so tiny and the guy was so big. It was like he broke her in half. You know how you always hear that.’
Daniel, the eventually successful candidate, remembers being about 14 when he first watched porn and says his mum is ‘pretty open about it. Her and my step-dad watch porn, so I get their hand-me-down porn.’ He smiles.
There’s another young man, already balding, with a deep Southern accent and a diamond earring in one ear. ‘I have a bunch of TVs in my car,’ he drawls, ‘and I love to just put on porn and wind down the windows and drive down the street and let everyone else watch too.’ The camera lingers, intrigued by his bravado, though he just looks silly.
Clark asks the boys to strip, and there’s no hesitation about letting the camera hone in close on their genitalia, even as the boys squirm and express some insecurity about the size of their penises. (Clark reassures them that they’re normal.) Almost without exception they have trimmed or shaved pubic hair and glabrously smooth chests, a fact which fascinates Clark and he interrogates further. They all mention the fact that this is what they see in porn, and thus it’s what they think is normal – for both men and women. ‘I wouldn’t eat out a girl who wasn’t shaved,’ says one boy. ‘That wouldn’t turn me on.’
Then Clark moves on to sexual techniques and the consensus seems to be clear: pulling out is in. As the smoothie puts it, ‘I was raised on porn and I’ve seen guys pull out. It’s a big thing. It’s the money shot. So it’s ingrained in me. I gotta do that or else I’m not doing it right. You gotta show her what you’re made of, I think. Some girls don’t like it, but I don’t care, I’m having my way with her.’ Others talk about the pleasure they gain in ‘jerking off over her face’. While some talk of making the girl happy, and being turned on if she’s turned on, other common modes of sex play include rough sex – hair pulling, biting, soft choking.
It would be more disturbing if these boys didn’t look so babyish as they mouth these words. Then again, Clark’s feature films have shown that even the most angelic-looking teenagers with barely a bit of bum-fluff can be capable of evil. (Think of the despicable teenage lothario Telly in Kids, ‘popping the cherries’ of 13-year-olds and spreading HIV as he goes.)
Clark goes on to ask the candidates about the fantasies they’d like to fulfill with the porn star, if they happen to be chosen. These are fairly predictable. Threesomes – ‘I’ve been really looking forward to that. Come close a couple of times but … stuff fell through.’ Older women – ‘at least 10 or 15 years older’ – and anal intercourse. This is big on the fantasy list. ‘I wanna fuck her in the ass and do it doggy style,’ says one.
Daniel, the chosen one, eventually gets his wish to try anal for the first time, and as mentioned already, the reality was dirty and educational. The fact that despite his considerable sexual experience he has not yet found a willing girl to do this with suggests that it’s still a borderline practice. And this is supported when Clark interviews porn actresses, some of whom consider it ‘sacred’ or something best kept ‘for home’.
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Impaled gives about a third of its run-time to the sex act itself, and it’s the least erotic scene you can imagine, taking place on an apple-green leather-look couch against a lurid yellow wall. The style is bleakly naturalistic, complete with sneakers and socks left on feet. It’s interesting that Daniel forgoes a long line of perky and buxom 23-year-olds, and chooses instead the somewhat worn and scrawny 40-year-old, Nancy. It probably has something to do with her manner – giggly, flirty, cuddly and pretending to be ‘horny all the time’, as well as being genuinely interested in him.
She’s also prepared to do anal, though you can see the fear in her face. She mentions a bad ‘tearing’ accident that now means she needs ‘a bit of tender love and care and a lot of lube’. During the act itself, she mouths to the director that she needs lube, and her moans of simulated pleasure are indistinguishable from pain. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, come in my ass,’ she begs, as if hoping it will soon be over. Our final view of Nancy shows her after the act, kneeling on the floor, naked except for her sports shoes, wiping the floo.r. She catches the camera and holds up the Spray‘n’Wipe bottle with a coquettish smile. It’s one of the saddest scenes of the film.
Clark has said that he was ‘shocked and amazed’ by what he learned in the making of the film. Shocked at the early age these kids had started watching porn; shocked at their removal of pubic hair (he remembers dying to grow it when he was a boy); and shocked at the mechanical nature of the sex. ‘There’s no mystery. You fuck, you pull out, and you come on the girl – that’s the way to have sex,’ he told a journalist. ‘It’s shocking to me. I had no idea, I swear to God. But it makes sense, if kids see that, they think that’s the way to do it.’ Almost as if they’re acting unthinkingly to a very limited script.
Perhaps this is disingenuous of Clark to confess to being shocked. After all, he’s the guy who gave us the most famously shocking photos and films about the lost innocence of America’s teens. But if you look back now at his films, like Bully (based on a true story and reportedly very accurate) and Kids, sex was still a somewhat transcendent experience, often related to love and sensual pleasure, and a way for teens to connect in a world where families and society offered no connection. The betrayal of this ideal was part of their tragedy. And yes, the naked girls in Larry Clark’s films also had natural bushes. But those films were 15-odd years ago.
Conclusions? I have none. I’m wary of drawing too many inferences from this memorable, educational and disturbing film, but it certainly suggested that porn has an impact on the way kids have sex these days. Hearing Gail Dines speak on the radio recently made me remember the initial impact of Impaled and to watch it again, closely. Then it prompted me to curiously Google ‘Porn’ to see how easy it might be for my own kid to get somewhere scary or violent. The answer: too easy. The first links that came up were of the genus typified by ‘Annie gets an interracial anal’ and ‘College slut gangbanged by three’. A bit of fun, all in the name of fantasy? All’s fair between consenting adults? Perhaps. But I will be installing my Net Nanny pronto, and I’ll be making sure there’s some beautifully sexy, gentle, romantic and strange foreign films on the DVD shelf, available when the time comes for such curiosity to be satiated. Such are the fantasies of the libertarian parent.
