Her name was Phoebe. Looking back on that moment, in some respects, I was a little short. 5 feet 2 inches, to be precise. This inconvenience was remedied with two of my eighth-grade textbooks, stacked neatly under my desk chair. But I wasn't ashamed, because she was a mere six inches high. And every inch of her was totally smokin' hot.
Was she real? Did it matter? She was, I suppose, nothing more than a fortunate gathering of flickering computer pixels and sound waves. On the other hand (the left), she was my every desire.
You may not have watched porn when you were a kid. If you didn't, you were missing out, not necessarily on sex (maybe while I was waiting for downloads to complete, you were getting boned), but in any event you were missing out developing some truly useful secret agent skills.
Watching porn when you're a kid is a lesson in stealth. You start thinking about sight lines. Can my parents see the computer screen if they walk in? Escape routes are critical. How quickly can I minimize the movie player? Finding just the right volume is essential. I can't watch this on mute; the moaning is half the fun. Maybe I'll turn it down real low. But can I reach for the mute button in time? It's all about being one step ahead of the enemy. If I wear headphones, will I hear my mom coming up the stairs? It's a clandestine operation worthy of Jack Bauer's talents.
Looking at the kind of porn available on secret university porn-sharing networks, I'm a little disappointed. Things haven't changed much since I was a kid. Phoebe is still there, as is the same cast of characters — if not exactly the same people, the same tricks, the same sex positions.
Is the mainstream pornographic landscape — reflected in what's being traded now over the networks — so banal, so unchanging? Pornographers frequently think of their work as art. Other art forms change rapidly. Tastes shift, they take on complexities and simplicities, warp, become ironic reflections of themselves, rise and die.
People ask little of porn, except that it reflects back at us what we already find sexy. We find the unfamiliar unappealing. Perhaps the narrowness of mainstream pornography is the problem.
If I may speak freely ... Porn viewers of the world: you are subject to a tyranny of monolithic tastes!
Liberation is possible. I speak of democracy — a democracy for porn.
As you are by now no doubt sick of hearing, we are witnessing the rise of Web sites for the free, person-to-person exchange of media. You can share videos on YouTube, Google Video and Hopkins' own J-Stream. You can share photos on Facebook and Flickr. The most ground-breaking aspect of these Web sites is that the exchange is relatively unrestricted. There are no arbiters of taste deciding what qualifies for YouTube. And this is turning the production and consumption of art into something more democratic. Nothing stands between the artists and the audience.
All hail the arrival of the social porn site! The most popular is modeled after YouTube and is naturally dubbed PornoTube.
If you're of age, you can watchfree erotic videos and photos created by other visitors — the seductions and pleasures of average Janes and Joes. And if you're so inclined, you can upload your own work.
Sites like PornoTube — XTube, yuvutu and LubeYourTube are in the same genre — they give attention to those more obscure kinds of porn that might be harder to come by (pardon the pun). The original problem wasn't that minority-kink porn was non-existent, or even out of the reach of Google, but the much more trenchant problem of being ousted out of the marketing race. PornoTube, by contrast,is purely meritocratic — it gives porn of all kinds the same chance to succeed.
PornoTube also smudges the boundary between the pornography and the viewer. The people who bring you this porno are not, as you used to assume, part of some vast triple-X empire, a multimillion-dollar screw factory, masterminded by a cigar-chewing pilgarlic who paces through his alabaster-`n-brick mansion in Beverly Hills, talking loudly at his associates through his fat moustache, laughing with porn stars, drunk on his own pomp.
The new pornographer is the same kind of normal human being as the viewer — people from your college, those girls from your high school, that dude and his kinky boyfriend down the road and millions of real Hot, Horny and Lonely Housewives.
Best of all: you can finally have an audience for all of those self-produced pornos you have kicking around in the attic.
And the porn you'll find (if you avoid the commercial videos) is real, not the simulacra you might be used to. Real humans, real sex, real sweat, blood and tears. The moaning is real. The screaming is real. The tits are real, sometimes.
So, ahem, it would seem I've worked myself into a difficult corner here. Am I then going to advocate that eighth-graders should also become pornographers? No. There is the obvious moral issue. (And besides, would they even know the first thing about lighting?)
But I do think that if eighth-graders are going to be looking at porn — and they'll always find it, in spite of preventative technological measures — the porn they see, which shapes how they see sex, should be realistic, featuring normal humans, men with realistic stamina levels, women with realistic dimensions and who actually have orgasms. Hopefully the state of porn, and human sexuality, will be healthier for it.
